by Ben Graff
I go a couple of times a year with Darren, in the period after we have started working together. We will take off an afternoon and morning and usually watch mid-week Champions League games. We play pool and take our chances in Sam Platt’s, and tell each other how successful we are. It is not really the other we are trying to convince. We eat breakfast in the Red Café inside the stadium. One year we do a stadium tour. I take a picture of Darren standing at the dugout that will be used at his funeral. I will chat with other fans over lager, possible team selection, the obvious things, but Darren is usually quieter, more reflective; perhaps he subconsciously knows that his time is short, is using the moment to a better end, closing in on his own thoughts whilst he still can.
An alcoholic who hid it well; I didn’t know but some did. A group of us piece the whole thing back together in the days before his cremation. His drinking that had somehow morphed from pints with his friends to vodka alone, by the bottle. The lost job; no one was sure if this was because of his drinking, or a trigger to more of it. Likewise, whether he drank because he was depressed, or whether the drinking itself caused the depression. As with all questions in such circumstances, they came too late to make any difference.
There was the car accident he had when three times over the limit, the suspended jail sentence nobody knew about, his black Mazda sports car folded around a lamp post, stricken and useless like a beached ferry. Him unhurt, or at least so far as could be seen. Installing an IT system at the local library that was part of his community service, which he completed because he wanted to even though he did not have to.
A new job offer that was withdrawn because he did not tell his prospective employers about his criminal record, which showed up in the background check. They might still have hired him if he had told them. He said the offer had been dropped because they had decided to restructure, that there would be other job offers, but there weren’t.
A few weeks before he dies we eat together at his immaculate house.
“It’s going to be OK, Steff,” he tells me, and I have no reason to doubt it. He always called me Steff, as in Steffi Graf, the tennis player, just as in the group we had at that time he was nicknamed Boss, even though he wasn’t, that particular role being taken by the unusually named David David (or Dai Dai). While most of us were waiting for our lives to start, we spent a lot of time in the pubs and clubs and curry houses of Coventry, but this turned out to be Darren’s life.
I write Darren an email just before Christmas telling him to hang in there, that things will improve. He writes back and his mood has changed. He tells me that they’d better improve. No money, no job, he says. I cannot think what to say and do not reply, and the next I hear, he is dead, discovered by a mutual friend. We are both among those who carry his coffin, in the Bedford crematorium that none of us should be in that day.
The undertakers organised something from the club for his parents. A nice letter from Alex Ferguson, saying he had just heard of Darren’s death and that the thoughts of all associated with Manchester United are with them.
I don’t go to Old Trafford again for a long time. When I do, it is with my own children, the shadows of my father and of Darren visible to me, if to no one else.
Francesca is the keenest fan, and we first go together to watch them play Swansea. She is eight and wears a huge white England scarf that looks really cute and makes everybody smile. Given David Moyes is our manager, there is not much else to smile about, although we do win that day. Ryan Giggs is playing. A kid when I first watched him, veteran now. She is a Manchester United fan because I am. It is in her now and I am glad of it.
Another time, the two of us go with Annabelle to watch the Europa League quarter final against Anderlecht. Maddie is not interested and tells us that if she comes she will just be a real pain. It is agreed that at four it is too soon for Gabriella. When you are a bit taller, we tell her.
Annabelle asks me what it will be like. I ask what the biggest sports event she has been to before was and she says it was her school sports day.
“It probably won’t be anything like that,” I say.
There is security now to get close to the ground, which there never used to be. Everything is changing, the world has become less trusting, this the only way to try and keep people safe against the rage that now seems to course right through it. Perhaps the anger is no different to that all those years ago on 9/11, when planes flew into buildings and people held hands and threw themselves from burning infernos raging a hundred floors or more into the sky. It is a further ripple from that day.
In the face of that which appals, there is nothing for it but to cling to the banalities, and some of these have not changed so much. The fish and chips we buy are pretty dubious and part of mine is still frozen in globs of ice, swathed in fat.
We sit against a wall on one of the terraced streets that fringes the ground. Francesca shouts hello as a policeman on horseback rides past us. He smiles; how could he not? Everybody smiles when they meet Francesca. She has a natural way with people that neither I nor my father ever had. Tests have shown that she has a photographic memory for faces, and with her warmth and tendency to hug people I worry about her the least of all my children, which is still a lot. The whole world will always hug her back.
“You look very comfortable down there,” he grins as he rides on.
Finally we are in the stadium. Francesca is the old hand; all of this, new to Annabelle, who loves it.
“It’s so intense!” she exclaims, and asks me how old Paul Pogba is. I am not entirely sure that it is his then status as the world’s most expensive footballer that has piqued her attention.
“Very old,” I say.
The stadium is loud, and the game is intense. Ibrahimović and Rojo suffer bad injuries, but eventually we win in extra time.
“That was amazing,” says Annabelle as we make our way back to the hotel.
“Of course it was,” says Francesca.
On the way back to the hotel Francesca inevitably wants more food, so we go into a petrol station. Annabelle sits on the wall outside and when we return I am relieved to find that she has not been stolen. The queue had been longer than I had expected, but she does not look impressed to hear that I was worried for her. She tells me that she is more than old enough to sit on a wall for a few minutes in a brightly lit, well populated part of Manchester. I wonder if she will be as relaxed when it is her kid sat on a wall. Either way, I hope to be there to see it.
I am glad that they have enjoyed it, that this is something we have found that we have in common. But as ever, I am not wholly in the moment now that my minor panic has subsided, just as my father was not all those years before. I am thinking to the last game I watched with Darren. Of those who played that day only Rooney and Carrick are still at the club. He wouldn’t have known many of the other players.
Things change fast. The moment of togetherness in the stadium is just that. One day, not many years after I am gone, Manchester United will field a team full of players I have never heard of. Yet the memories last longer. I remember the times with my father and with Darren, and I hope that Annabelle and Francesca, and hopefully Maddie and Gabriella on future trips, will remember these things, even when the players have changed again and I am no longer here to recall.
Martin’s Journal – Joan
The story of Joan and her family I have turned into a novel that no one will ever publish, indeed no one will ever read, because it is handwritten in my illegible handwriting! Do I regret that it will never be read? It is hard to say. In some ways I would like the story to be remembered at a time when I am no longer capable of telling it, a time I fear is soon approaching. Yet there is also something in having written something that is known only to you and is not diluted through sharing.
But as I sit here now, so many years after both the events and even the secret novel, I have decided to give the outlines
of a story that is dramatic in its way and very personal to me. It is not exactly the case that it feels as if all of this could have happened yesterday, but it would be fair to say that it is still very real to me.
My treatment has been ongoing for a while now and I am well set in the rhythm of this place, which makes few demands on me, if truth be told. I feel tireder than I did at the start of all this, but I was always told that that was to be expected. Besides, thinking to some of these things from so long ago takes me out of myself somehow.
Joan was an amazingly beautiful girl who went to Oxford and completely captivated me. I remember her coming down with an MA. You could in those days convert your BA to an MA on payment of £5, which Joan did, and I could only admire her worldliness and a sense somehow that the world would open up for her in a way that it did not always seem to do for me.
Joan and I saw each other often enough over the years, but one summer holiday just before the war we became very close. We seemed to be able to talk to each other in a way that I hadn’t with anyone else. We had a connection, an understanding, or at least I thought we did. I could see the world that was before me and she was the only one in it. It is only when you look back at these things that you can spot warning signs, read things into interactions in hindsight that were invisible at the time, or at least not visible to you.
She always showed a lot of interest in the financial side of Holmes & Son and was very curious as to our income and how I saw our future business prospects. But in truth I was infatuated and would have been happy to talk to her about whatever she wanted. I saw it then as making plans; I only realised later that it was just part of the process through which she was determining whether or not she wanted to make plans. I never really thought then as to how the story of her father’s failure and her family’s poverty (however removed it actually was from the reality) might have affected her, might have had an impact on what she was looking for next.
I was oblivious to all of this, on the cusp, so I thought, of a momentous moment, the weekend when I fully expected that we would get engaged. We had arranged to meet in Shaftesbury, when I was there for the old school dinner and Joan was due to visit her mother at the hotel at the same time.
I cycled with an increasing sense of anticipation. This was our moment, our time, yet when I arrived at Sunridge there was a Rolls Royce in the car park and I started to feel uneasy without quite knowing why. I asked the receptionist for Miss Joan. “She is in the family’s private sitting room, sir. I will tell her you are here,” said the receptionist neutrally. When I think back to that moment I can still pick up on no hint of a warning in her tone.
Joan appeared, gave me a big kiss, then taking me by the hand, she led me into the sitting room. I will never forget the way she looked at me, even though that look is hard to describe. Affectionate but wary, as if she was somehow there but not entirely there, a plan going into effect that must have been thought through many times in her head but was now a reality being enacted.
When we entered, her father and mother were there, but also sitting on the sofa with them was a well-dressed elderly bloke (he was forty). He had an air about him, a sense of entitlement perhaps, but he did not look at me. Just the briefest of half nods and murmurs, they had clearly talked about me; he knew who I was even if I did not yet know who he was, except of course instinctively and in the only sense that mattered.
His face seemed to redden slightly and he studiously sipped at his tea, as if slightly unsure as to how exactly this would play out, but he knew the odds were very much in his favour.
After what seemed like forever, but probably wasn’t, Joan announced, “This is John,” and we finally shook hands, the least sincere handshake of my life. “My fiancé,” she said whilst I was still grasping his warm and clammy paw.
It surprises me in hindsight how I reacted to this news. I was offered a cup of coffee, which somewhat dazed I sat down and drank, doubtless engaging in polite small talk. Not that I can remember any of that now.
Storming out would not have been the done thing and I never considered it then, although looking back now I wished I had. John, it appeared, was a Harley Street lawyer, and the Rolls Royce outside, of course, was his.
As soon as possible, I made my excuses and left. Joan came with me to the door. I went from being stunned to angry, as none of this made any sense to me. It did not fit with what had gone between us before, was not part of any scenario I had hitherto envisaged. Yet here we were.
“How,” I demanded, “could you possibly marry that old man?”
“Don’t say anything, Martin,” Joan pleaded. “I can’t bear the thought of being poor, and John is a wealthy man. I love my poor father, but he is a hopeless failure; I am marrying a man who is a success!”
One last kiss and I was gone. Everything around me looked the same as I made my way back, but none of it was. I did not attend the wedding.
On their honeymoon Joan discovered the secret that John had carefully hidden from her: he was an alcoholic; and shortly after their wedding his glittering career crashed in ruins as he could no longer maintain the facade. He managed to get a job as an accountant in Bournemouth, but the police were on his trail and he was charged with drink driving! This was before the era of breathalysing, and evidence of erratic behaviour had to be given together with the conclusion of the police surgeon.
Given his fame as one of the country’s most famous barristers in his former career, the trial was reported in the national press. Many years later, following further press intrusion, he sued for libel, putting Joan in the witness box.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look at this beautiful young woman. The police would have you believe that my client was a habitual drunkard. I ask you, would this lovely lady remain happily married to such a man?” They won the case.
In spite of this, things remained very difficult for them. Joan’s life was far removed from the one she thought she was going to have, and I did feel for her from a distance. But that was all.
So Joan did break my heart, maybe, but not for long. For all of my anger and sense of disappointment at the time, I quickly realised that marriage between the two of us would have been a total disaster, and my lovely Anna was waiting just around the corner.
I saw Joan only once after that dramatic November day. Mary was about three years old, and we were staying nearby and dutifully called on her parents, Nell and Horan. It was Joan who answered the door. We had arrived in time for afternoon tea. At the table, Joan sat next to me, Anna and Mary were opposite. I noticed Joan, looking at Mary, her eyes filled with tears. Suddenly she put her hand over mine and squeezed it hard. “Oh, my darling Martin, isn’t she beautiful.” What thoughts were going through her mind, I can only guess. It was the last time we ever met.
I cannot say that I have thought about Joan much during the many happy years that followed with Anna, but as I sit here now convalescing I do find myself thinking back to days gone by and moments like this a little more. Not with a sense of regret, by no means, but with just a realisation of the role chance plays in all our lives. I was all set to embark on something that would not have ended well, was determined to that end, and it was only fate that saved me and brought me to Anna.
They have just been round with the tea trolley. There are a handful of us in the lounge, dozing, reading the paper, staring at the television. A young person would think us the most boring group on earth, no doubt, but I am sure my fellow patients could all tell their own stories about the loves of their youth and beyond. The roads we travel and those we don’t. I hope for them too that things turned out alright, but I have no way of knowing.
Bristol – 1994
During term time, I would sometimes come home at weekends, taking the train from Bristol Meads to Newport and then a second, shorter one to Ledbury; I was studying in the city where my father had been carved open a few months before.
I think he grew darker and more withdrawn in the period leading up to his first major health problems. Perhaps it was his age, latish forties, or my own, latish teens, but we particularly did not hit it off at this time. I found him easily irritated, seeming to misunderstand everything I was trying to do, generally unsupportive. He would probably have said the same about me. It was all the usual: Where are you going, where were you, why weren’t you here, are you planning on doing some work? – that’s all none of your business.
Then chest pains, inconclusive hospital tests, a big mow of the lawn the day before, back to the GP, a test on a treadmill.
“Please just sit down, Mr Graff. That’s right, try not to move too much. I’m just going to call an ambulance as your heart is barely working.”
Ambulance to Bristol, heart by-pass the following day, which was conducted by a surgeon later struck off in a scandal involving operations on children.
“Look after Mary if anything happens to me,” he had said to Mike and Janet. That night I had a friend round. It had been pre-arranged, which seemed like a good enough reason then but does not now. A girl who was into amateur dramatics and not renowned for her sensitivity, but even with him in hospital and about to go under the knife, I was still a slave to my hormones.
“What is she doing here?” Mum said, somewhat distraught. But after the girl had gone, there wasn’t much to say. We never usually struggled to talk to each other, but I couldn’t find the right words for what was happening. She worried about everything, so how could she not worry about this? It was beyond my experience and I had no reference point.
I kept thinking of the mower, that this was better than it might have been, but I wasn’t sure that the observation would help. I thought that if someone had told me my father was dead and then asked if I wanted a game of snooker in the garage, I would have said yes. I was disturbed by the thought, even if at another level I doubted it was true, not really.
