by Hatch, Ben
And, before I answer, as if to confirm this, Charlie shouts at the top of his voice, ‘NUTTTTTTTTTTTERRRRRR.’
CHAPTER 19
Dad hated losing and hated even more losing to Buster or me. He never gave us a quarter, always put 100 per cent into every cricket ball delivery, every swing of his racquet, and every penalty kick he punted our way. It made beating him far more real and enjoyable, although for many years an awful lot less likely. It must have been the mid 1980s because Buster and I were spending most of our time perfecting our impressions of Percy and Baldrick from Blackadder and my sister wasn’t with us. Dad had decided, clearly forgetting he wasn’t very outdoorsy, that we’d spend a week in Scotland. He’d hired a log cabin in a wood near the small town of Lochgilphead in Argyll that might have been idyllic if it wasn’t for the rain and the mosquitoes.
I remember we tried walking the first day, got soaked trudging to the town’s war memorial and spent the next six days engrossed in a marathon Family Olympics. My dad could turn something as simple as buttering toast into a competition. It was his answer to any lull – Family Olympics. Events in these particular games included trivial pursuit, card games and various activities available at the Mid Argyll Sports Centre, such as badminton, table tennis, tennis and squash, where Dad, overweight, unfit and well into his forties, came so close to killing himself playing Buster, Mum had to bang on the glass: ‘Badge [short for ‘Badger’, her nickname for him because he worked like one], you’ll have a heart attack. For goodness’ sake – it’s just a game.’ I can picture it now – Buster shrugging apologetically at Mum, Dad red-faced, eyes ablaze, returning to his court position, crouching down (‘Eleven–seven. Your serve.’).
The final event was a round at the nine-hole municipal golf course. Dad had never played golf before, but with his natural aptitude for ball games unrealistically assumed he’d pick it up straightaway. He didn’t. We were on the eighth hole of what had been a miserable hour and a half and it had just started to rain again. The hole before, Buster had become the first of us to lift the ball more than a couple of inches off the ground. We’d humiliatingly daisy-cut our way round the entire course; nevertheless, the spirit of competition was alive and well, and we were still carefully keeping track of each other’s scorecards. (‘Dad, I think that was actually eleven on the last hole. Remember, you hit that tree.’) We’d each taken our fair share of air shots so it wasn’t that unusual when Dad missed the ball entirely trying to run it down a hill on to the green on his seventh shot. The second and third times he played and missed, Buster and I had to stop looking at each other. The fourth and fifth times this happened it became excruciating. On the failed sixth attempt, an enraged Dad, in slip-on shoes, the ground sleek with the fresh rain, fell over. He picked himself up very quickly, too quickly, and before setting his feet right took another, even mightier swipe. The force of his swing was such that he fell over again. Buster and I were openly pleading now, ‘Dad, come on. You’ll never hit it like that.’ As was Mum from the bushes, where she was still looking for his last lost ball. ‘Badge! Stop it. Badge! For goodness’ sake.’ For his final swing Dad resembled a polo player as he ran at the ball, windmilling his club. Eventually he kicked the ball down the slope in disgust, called it ‘a fucking stupid game’ and refused to play the final hole.
It wasn’t until later that night we dared bring it up and not until a day after this I reminded him, technically speaking, I’d won the Family Olympics and was entitled to my £5 reward. The episode entered family folklore as a synonym for sulking: ‘He’s Lochgilpheading.’
We’re in Edinburgh, staying at the five-star Balmoral Hotel in room 522, where J. K. Rowling finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This morning we’ve been spying on tourists buying tartan tea towels on the esplanade from the 150-year-old Camera Obscura periscope on Castlehill, and now we’re at Arthur’s Seat having a picnic, perched high above the city, when Pen calls.
‘Have you spoken to Dad?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Give him a ring.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Give him a ring.’
‘You sound pleased.’
She giggles. ‘Give him a ring.’
I call Dad.
‘Daddy-boy. What’s the news?’
‘Well, my son, I saw the oncologist this morning and now it’s probably the steroids so we’re not getting too carried away just yet, but – and I use the word but – my liver tests seem to have improved again.’
‘That’s excellent.’
‘By fifty per cent.’
‘That’s brilliant, Dad.’
I hear panting. ‘Dad, where are you?’
‘Walking round the garden, my son.’
‘That’s amazing!’
‘Fifth lap.’
‘Dad, I’m so pleased. How are you sleeping?’
‘OK.’
‘And the bag?’
‘Sore, but OK.’
‘What’s Gorhard said?’
‘He’s… surprised.’
I laugh.
‘And what’s he said about chemo?’
‘Still a way to go.’
‘But still.’
‘I know,’ he says.
‘From what it was before, Dad.’
‘I’m doing all right. And when am I seeing you next, my lovely boy?’
‘When we get to Lincolnshire in a couple of weeks. I’ll get the train down again.’
‘I shall look forward to it. Kisses to everyone please.’
‘And to Mary from me.’
And when I hang up and look down from the summit past the new Scottish Parliament building 250 feet below and the Palace of Holyroodhouse at the bottom of the Royal Mile, it seems impossible it could have gone any other way now. Nobody gets the better of my dad. He’ll wear down anyone and anything, even cancer. It’s also perfectly in sync with our charmed existence in Scotland. Our good luck had started the day we crossed the border and received our offer from the insurance assessor: £2,000. Exactly what I’d paid for the Astra three years earlier. We’d been expecting half this and to celebrate we immediately treated ourselves to a TomTom satnav that quickly cut mine and Dinah’s arguments down by half. From then on, whenever we were lost, instead of turning on each other, we united against Jane, the woman with the newsreader-like voice giving our directions. ‘Jane, you told Ben to cross the roundabout and take the second turning on the left. That’s an access road, you silly cow!’
We spent our first few days in the Borders mainly visiting ruined abbeys. Phoebe and Charlie aren’t that interested in lower niche corbels or lierne vaulting and Dinah and I couldn’t care less about delicate foliate tracery, yet all it took was one mildly interesting historical fact about an abbey (in the case of Melrose Abbey, that the embalmed heart of Robert the Bruce is buried there) and off we’d go, forgetting the abbey would be just the same as the last one. I’d take a few photos of the kids running through the cloisters, we’d hear its copycat history (burned down, rebuilt, burned down, rebuilt, burned down, dissolved) and back in the car we’d renew our vow.
‘No more abbeys!’
But a few miles on there’d be a sign for another one.
‘Dinah, we’re not going to Jedburgh Abbey.’
‘I know. I know. Although it does say here…’
‘Please, don’t tell me what it says there… OK, tell me what it says there.’
‘It’s where Alexander III married Yolande de Dreux in 1285.’
‘Dinah, you fool. You should never have told me that.’
We headed north, bypassing Glasgow and Edinburgh, and explored the Trossachs. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere more beautiful than the central Highlands on a sunny day. For days all we passed on either side of the road were breathtaking tree-topped mountain slopes perfectly reflected in crystal clear lochs. The weather, normally changeable in Scotland, was always warm and never wet. Or at least it always was whenever we stepped outside. If it
was raining when we set off, by the time we arrived at an attraction and stepped from the car it was magically dry. It happened so often we started taking it for granted. ‘OK,’ we’d shout to the clouds. ‘We’ll be inside for a bit now so fire away, guys.’ And often within minutes they would, right up until we stepped outside again. ‘It’s no fluke we didn’t bring coats,’ we began telling each other. ‘We don’t need coats.’ It was the same with traffic. The odds were we’d run into the odd jam. It didn’t happen. Not even entering major cities. Like the weather, bottlenecks magically disappeared when we came through and tightened up when we left.
We cruised lochs, scaled Munros. We climbed the Wallace Monument and at Doune Castle, the setting for the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we shouted from the ramparts in our best John Cleese voices, ‘I fart in your general direction,’ and that your mother was a hamster and your father stank of elderberries. We rolled into Perthshire and then up through the Highlands, where we clocked up our 5,000th mile of the trip, and along the Glen Coe pass, scene of the infamous MacDonald clan massacre, which we brought to life by listening to the gasp of pipe bands on the local Gaelic BBC radio station, the road sign warnings that thieves operated in the area, as we wound through this steep, desolately bleak road, conjuring up images of wild Scotsmen in kilts brandishing broadswords emerging from the heather on horseback.
In Fort William, at the end of the West Highland Way, we rode the Jacobite steam train to the fishing town of Mallaig, from where Bonnie Prince Charles fled to France dressed as a woman. Later we walked the Culloden battlefield. We dolphin-spotted in the Moray Firth at Chanonry Point. We rambled through forests, we windsurfed and fished. We ate Forfar bridies, tried haggis and Ecclefechan cake. And just outside Inverness, overlooking Loch Ness, we stood in the Grant Tower of Urquhart Castle looking for a break in the waters, irritating professional Nessie hunters who were nattering about plesiosaurs, Operation Deepscan and the Dinsdale film by loudly telling the kids, ‘Don’t be silly – they proved it was a giant sturgeon years ago.’
We returned to England via the north-western coast, where we toured the oil town of Aberdeen and the jam, jute and journalism city of Dundee. We played on the Old Course in St Andrews, saw the Burrell Collection and fell in love with Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow. And now here we are, on our last night in Scotland, at Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel.
We eat downstairs at Hadrian’s Brasserie, the Balmoral Hotel’s super-swanky Michelin-starred restaurant. It’s Phoebe’s favourite place we’ve stayed in and Dinah and I have already agreed when that conversation comes up about who’d look after your children if you both died in an accident, our answer has changed from my sister or brother, who’d accept Phoebe and Charlie as their own, to the Balmoral for their junior accessories. Waiting for us on check-in was a bag of toys, a bottle warmer, steriliser, a changing mat and a stack of different sized nappies that we felt like lying on the bed and flinging in the air like stolen money. For Phoebe there was a gift (The Gruffalo book) and, in the bathroom, a Balmoral plastic duck, children’s bubble bath, and her own fluffy white dressing gown with slippers. After dinner each night a bellhop has even been delivering her a complimentary banana split to have in the bath.
At the table three members of the staff management team, recently trained in making kids feel welcome, cluster around the children asking how Phoebe’s food is and if there’s enough of it, whether they have enough crayons, if the crayons are the right colours, what they’ve done today, whether they enjoyed what they did today and whether they know what they’ll be doing tomorrow, leaving Dinah and I to quietly enjoy super-chef Jeff
Bland’s traditional Scottish mixed grill. After dinner we put the kids to bed in their complimentary monogrammed pyjamas after reading them their complimentary reading books and then we come downstairs to the bar to drink the complimentary bottle of Prosecco left in our room.
In my twenties, whenever I met a girl I really liked what I always wanted to do was run off with her in a camper van. It was a recurring fantasy, this romantic image of freedom. Real life – falling in love, settling down, marriage, kids, a career – never seemed enough. I wanted something heightened. Desert island feelings, I used to call them, this urge to escape the real world. I wanted to run off with a girl I was in love with and spend all my time with her in a camper van. In my head we’d drive around playing hippyish music. We’d get into scrapes and fall hopelessly in love against some beautiful backdrop. Chatting over fires in the evening, we’d get to know each other. We’d do crazy things, too, like adopt emblematic pets of whatever country we were driving through – a Dalmatian in Croatia, a whooper swan in Finland. We’d be away for years, grow old together and never be bored.
In reality, the closest I came to recreating this was the weekend in a Premier Inn near the Tebay services I spent with my ex-girlfriend Julie on a 2-for-1 Easter mini-break deal during my second year at university. The element of travel: I drove us there from Sheffield in a hired Mazda 323.
But in a way what we’re doing now feels more like this than anything else I’ve ever done.
‘Even with the kids?’ asks Dinah.
‘Especially with the kids.’
‘Sort of an adult version?’ asks Dinah.
‘It’s a hire car not a camper van and we have kids rather than guitars. And we don’t listen to Joan Armatrading but Charlie’s Dig Dig Digging CD. But apart from that…’
‘It’s exactly the same,’ says Dinah.
We drink a toast to my dad. Then to Mary, who’s whipped him into shape. But eventually I swallow a yawn.
‘Am I boring you, love?’
Dinah yawns too.
‘I think we’re boring each other.’
‘Bed?’
But we don’t go straight to sleep upstairs. We find a DVD to watch. The Bone Collector is about a paraplegic NYPD forensic scientist. Denzel Washington plays the main character. The top man in his field, he’s been paralysed on the job and is worried his next seizure will leave him in a permanent vegetative state. He’s already arranged self-termination but agrees to defer it to help the department solve a horrific and baffling serial killer case. It’s scary, but also unintentionally funny in places. Dinah’s either snuggling up holding her hand over her face, or laughing, like when the killer turns off Denzel’s life-support systems towards the end shouting, ‘Which vegetable to do you fancy being – a carrot?’ He shuts off a monitor. ‘You’d like to be a carrot? What about a zucchini?’ He presses a button and more lights go off. ‘You wanna be a zucchini?’
When Dinah’s scared by a film she never acknowledges this is what’s frightened her. That just makes it worse. Before she turns over to go to sleep she says without referring to the movie, ‘Have you locked the door?’ She says it matter-of-factly, pretending it’s routine. It’s better if I play along with this because if she has to tell me she’s scared it makes her even more terrified and she’ll want to sleep with the light on. I tell her I’ve locked the door.
‘Better check it,’ she says.
I pretend to and come back to bed.
Our bed’s huge so we needn’t be anywhere near each other.
‘I’m going to sleep closer to you tonight,’ she says, moving to the middle of the bed. Every now and again her hand comes out to test I’m still within touching distance. The third time she does this, after tapping my knee a couple of times, she says: ‘It’s an urge. Touch your nose three times?’ ‘Don’t worry, there are no bone collectors in Edinburgh, love.’ ‘Touch your nose three times,’ she says, more insistently. I touch my nose three times. I don’t ask what it is about because I know what it’s about: Dinah’s worried I’m getting carried away with my dad’s good news.
CHAPTER 20
We’re in the Gateshead Metrocentre shopping for Phoebe’s very specific fourth birthday present wish list which includes:
A Hello Kitty lunch box (not a problem)
A jumbo set of pens (easy)
; And:
A medium-sized pink rabbit that can walk and talk and goes chut chut chut when it chews a carrot. Not a small pink rabbit that can walk and talk and goes chut chut chut when it chews a carrot. Not a large pink rabbit that can walk and talk and goes chut chut chut when it chews a carrot. A medium-sized one (more tricky).
This morning we were at the eleventh-century Alnwick Castle, the boyhood home of Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, immortalised by Shakespeare in Henry IV, although nowadays more famous as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films. We went on a magician-themed tour led by a guide with an impenetrable Geordie accent, who spoke in incredibly fast, short sentences like someone recovering from a near drowning who’s trying to tell rescue workers whereabouts other endangered swimmers might be. It began at the Lion Arch, where the forbidden forest started in the films, although I only found this out later because all I heard at the time was this: ‘Harry Potter ag ig ag aye. Aye cran oer toooer. Follow me to the courtyard now.’ There were around thirty Italian schoolchildren on the tour. Their teachers kept hoping in vain to make things clearer but gave up as we did at the inner bailey. ‘Quidditch aahe canne ig gannin. CGI special effects hoawn hwhol. Hagrid masks £15.50 in the gift shop.’
We’d crossed town afterwards and popped into Alnwick Gardens for a tour of their famous walled poison garden. ‘The purple flower is aconite; the only way to tell a victim had been poisoned with it in the nineteenth century was by tasting the victim’s vomit. It had a peculiar tang.’
‘Charlie, stay away from the aconite, please.’
We learned angel’s trumpet was the favourite poison of assassins (‘No spasms. No vomiting. Slip a tiny bit into their food and they just drift off to sleep and don’t wake up’), that the laurel plant releases cyanide gas. Henbane, meanwhile, emits so powerful a smell every year three or four kids pass out from it.
‘Charlie, put the henbane down, please.’
We learnt rosemary can give pregnant women miscarriages and finally that the leaves of the rhubarb plant, although common in gardens, contain oxalic acid, which is capable of inducing kidney failure, coma and ultimately death, if ingested.
