by Ben Watt
I leaned on the window ledge in the sitting room and watched a full number 13 double-decker bus, its lights glowing like a storm lantern in the gathering dusk, the windows misted, pull clear of the crossroads and disappear north towards Swiss Cottage, and I waited for them to arrive.
Shortly before five, the bell rang.
It was dark outside. As Roly brought them up in the lift, I ran round adjusting cushions, turning on table lamps, dimming the down-lights a little, muting the television and putting on some background jazz. It felt like a first date.
‘I thought we were back at the hotel in Oxford until Roly told us where we were,’ my mum said with a tight laugh, as we all greeted each other in the doorway.
They followed each other into the flat, my dad cautiously steadying himself on the door frame and watching where he put his feet, my mum overdoing the silent face of childish excitement at me, while pretending to tiptoe.
I showed them round.
‘Do you like it?’ I said, unable not to ask, as we finally settled in the sitting room after a brief tour, coats shed.
They looked tired and disorientated.
‘Tom?’ my mum said, as though she sensed I was expecting the final word on the matter, and it was his opinion that I was seeking.
My dad cleared his throat and looked round the room. He was out of breath. His face was chalky. He went to speak, then glanced at my mum, before dropping his head slightly and waving his hand in a limp surrender.
‘Not now, darling,’ my mum said, coming to his aid. ‘It’s been a long day. Ask us again in a day or two. I think we might as well be in Timbuktu.’
‘Now what?’ I said to Roly on the way down in the lift.
‘Give it time,’ he said.
I remembered us having a puppy once when I was young; that feeling when it was shut in the kitchen overnight for the first time, and I could sense it behind the door; and how I didn’t know what it would make of the night; or what would have happened when we opened the door again in the morning.
I had that feeling as I drove home.
Chapter 4
Three weeks after they moved in I invited my mum and dad up for Christmas lunch at our house; it was only five minutes away by car. Apart from a couple of scares with the unfamiliar waste-disposal unit and the immersion heater, things had gone uneventfully, if a little cautiously; or at least they hadn’t told me otherwise. I collected them around eleven, wheeling my dad down in his shiny new wheelchair that I’d bought especially for their new life in London. The tyre-treads were still clean and supple, the footplates gleaming. As the flat door closed their breath was caught in the draught. A flurry of brackish sweetness. Burnt sugar.
We stood waiting for the lift. In the blunt sodium light of the lobby my dad looked terrible. His cheeks were criss-crossed under the skin with tiny broken crimson threads. His nose was blotchy and purple, and the skin on his forehead was red and desiccated as if he’d just brutishly rubbed his face with a bone-dry flannel. Perhaps he had. I looked at his clothes. Nothing smart. It wasn’t like him. He’d pulled on a drab green fleece. I saw a smudge of mustard. My mum looked tired. Her dark grey hair was swept back off her forehead accentuating her sharp high cheekbones, her skin pale, but soft and sallow, her face fixed but watchful like a crow. She wore small turquoise studs in her ears, and was wrapped in a big brown woollen cardigan-coat that fell in folds like thick protective wings.
She roused herself. ‘So clever, the wheelchair, Tom,’ she said, enunciating each syllable so that he could hear her. I pictured her delivering it from a stage to the back of the upper circle. It was as though she wasn’t related to him, a local church volunteer doing a good deed on Christmas Day for one of the old people.
‘Yes. Clever,’ he said.
‘Fits easily in the lift, doesn’t it?’
‘Doesn’t it.’ He seemed to be used to this style of conversation. Efficient answers. Keep things moving. Did I sense a hint of embarrassment?
‘So useful the way the wheels come off for the car,’ she went on loudly.
‘What’s that?’
‘The wheels – the way they come off. Very useful.’
‘Very useful. Marvellous.’
We pushed open the glass doors and headed for the road.
‘Ooh, it’s quite brisk out, isn’t it?’
‘Brisk it is, Romany,’ he said, his voice masterfully both dry and cheerful.
They were quiet on the journey. An estate car laden with presents pulled up alongside us at the traffic lights. My indicator silently winked, amber reflections in the silver gift-wrap on the parcel shelf.
At the house they parked themselves on the sofa amidst the Christmas tears and tantrums and torn wrapping-paper – our twin girls, Jean and Alfie, were nearly four years old. Blake, their little brother, was only nine months. My dad blinked and smiled and cupped his hand behind his ear every time someone spoke to him. My mum took Blake cautiously on her knee for a few minutes as though it were all new to her, before handing him back, a look of quiet relief on her face. I wondered if they both had terrible hangovers.
At lunch someone generously filled my dad’s fat wine glass with a full-bodied red. St-Estèphe. 14%. There was little I could do from the other end of the table. ‘Stop worrying,’ I said to myself. ‘It’s Christmas.’ People were laughing. Someone blew on a kazoo. My mum jumped. I saw my dad swallow a mouthful then reach out through the hubbub and, with maximum concentration, pour another slug to top it up. Here comes trouble, I thought. Half an hour later, he went to stand up. His legs buckled and I saw him make a grab for the edge of the table. I was picking up a small rubber band and reading an abandoned Christmas motto when it happened. Why do the Christmas elves wear seat belts? For Elf and Safety. And as I finished it I saw his knees as they crumpled like a detonated wall. I caught him just in time and got him back into his chair. How long can this go on? I thought. And what’s it like when I’m not there?
They lasted another half an hour in which time my mum managed a black coffee and my dad ate a handful of Quality Streets before I ushered them back to the car and drove them home.
Twenty minutes later as my mum said goodbye and went to close the door of their new flat I wanted to push it open again and remonstrate, or shout at them, or take a deep breath and sit down and talk calmly like someone from Social Services, but I did none of those things and just let her close it and stood silently in the cold corridor.
As a fifteen-year-old, alone in our old flat where I grew up, I would wait for them to come home from the pub on a school night, hearing the tyres approach on the road around ten, the car turning into the drive and stopping in the car-port, a stumble on the step, the key in the Yale lock, the heavy footsteps up the stairs to the flat, the overcompensation in their greeting, the fat-tongued words, their slight air of hostility as though they feared I would be censorious.
My mum wasn’t a natural drinker. In fact, in the years with Ken, pubs were not in her social orbit at all; parties, dinners with theatrical friends, intellectuals and writers were more her thing, but to my dad socialising meant the pub and it always had done. Once they were married, my dad’s choices dictated how they spent most of their leisure time, and pubs were top of the list.
Facing the village green and the graceful sweep of Barnes Pond with its curving white fence and green draping willows and swans, the Sun Inn was their favourite haunt as a drinking couple in the late sixties. I can remember being taken down on summer evenings – my earliest pub memory. I wasn’t allowed inside, of course. Instead I was escorted through the gravel car park and the gate in the wall to the small empty silent wooden pavilion of the crown bowls club that backed on to the pub. I was given a Coke with a straw and a bag of roast-chicken-flavoured crisps, and cajoled into playing darts with perhaps another boy who might have been left loitering in there too, or – if the place was empty, which it usually was – I’d talk my dad into a quick game before he exited to drink in the bar with my mum and
their current loose circle of drinking friends. I liked the darts: the wire mesh that separated the numbers; the little doors that folded back on which you could write the score in chalk; ‘B’ for Ben, ‘D’ for Dad. And I liked the smell of the old trestle tables, the earwigs, the mildew and the woodworm, the folded-up deckchairs stacked in the corner and the canvas bowls bags. It felt lived-in and oddly homely. After I got bored – if I was on my own – I ignored the Keep Off signs and tiptoed out under the pale urban stars on to the sumptuous, supple, yielding grass of the brick-walled bowls lawn, as flat as a snooker table. It was like walking on gentle springs, the turf so pliable and plump with dewy, sap-filled life. I walked right out into the middle, my heart thumping, and lay down on my back and stared up at the sky, listening to the distant muffled laughter from the pub. And on a clear night, I breathed in the cool, spotless air, and watch the winking red and white lights of the planes flying over south-west London into Heathrow, the TV aerials on the tops of neighbouring houses, the glow from the windows, other families passing through rooms, and I was aware that I didn’t really like this part of my parents’ life.
Not long after that Christmas, in January 2002, I fixed my mum and dad up with appointments with a new local doctor. It felt as if I was taking two vintage cars for a long-overdue MOT. Safety and roadworthiness were top of the list. I was worried about them in the new flat. ‘It’s still all a bit of a dream, dear,’ my mum had said. ‘Some days we have to remind ourselves where we are.’
My dad tried to keep it light and witty with the doctor, but she was more concerned with his shallow breathing and inability to use his inhaler properly, telling him flatly he must go back to using his spacer, which I know he thought made him look foolish. He grimaced quickly at me. She examined his ‘frozen shoulder’ and advocated physiotherapy and a steroid jab from a specialist. He nodded approvingly at me at the word ‘specialist’. Pulling out his blood results, she said they showed enlarged red cells which were affecting his vitamin uptake. She also remarked that his blood pressure was a little high, and that the most likely cause of both was ‘too much alcohol’. He pulled a serious face. She asked him to cut back. He nodded grimly. She finished by telling him to take regular aspirin, add some B12 and folic acid to his diet, and use the sleeping tablets – that he was swallowing like sweets – only when completely necessary, before remarking that his kidney and liver functions were ‘on balance, satisfactory’. At this, he turned to me and beamed triumphantly.
As for my mum, the doctor linked her stories of recent gastric upsets to the powerful Vioxx painkillers she was taking for her rheumatism. The doctor suggested different medication, lined up a possible endoscopy, promised to monitor her eyesight, proposed additional calcium supplements, then finished by recommending a reduction in alcohol for her as well. It was all briskly unspectacular, and perhaps not the dressing-down I’d been expecting.
My mum and dad were ecstatic with the results. In the run-up to the check-ups, they’d feared what my mum had referred to more than once as an enforced ‘booze embargo’. In fact, when I popped round to chat it all through with them the next day they seemed positively elated. Their faces seemed to be saying a little too smugly, ‘No scolding allowed; doctor’s note,’ and they were each celebrating with a large brandy and a fresh slab of Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel.
I took my dad to have his shoulder looked at. The specialist diagnosed a badly torn rotator cuff in the joint, but as he inserted the needle for the anti-inflammatory injection, he was more than surprised when blood spurted back up the syringe.
‘Well, I wasn’t expecting that. You must have had a nasty fall, Mr Watt,’ he said, stepping back, blood on his cuff.
‘Must I?’ said my dad, blinking at him like a cartoon mole.
‘When did it happen?’
‘When did what happen?’
‘The fall. Or could you have torn it in some other way? Would have needed some force for blood to still be in the joint like that.’
My dad looked at me and sucked his bottom lip in and gently shook his head.
‘He has no memory of how he did it,’ I said. I had an image of him tumbling down the stairs in Oxford or slipping in the shower and not telling anyone. Or just not telling me.
An operation to fix the tear was discussed. My dad said he couldn’t face it. Instead we settled on management and painkillers.
Back home I looked at all their appointments in the diary, and each one stood out like incontrovertible evidence of a new era of attempted control and reassurance. I was wearing the captain’s armband now. Everything seemed part of the new plan: dynamic London; the fresh start; the compact flat; health checks; the wheelchair for my dad; a tube station for my mum. In spite of all the setbacks over the years – the repeated patterns of behaviour, the knowledge that very few old dogs learn new tricks – I was full of hope that all of it would help them turn a splendid corner, reanimated and inspired. I thought I could will it to happen.
On Sundays, during those first few weeks, I drove to Marks & Spencer in Camden and filled up an extra bag of food shopping for them – mainly ready-meals, some fruit and chocolate treats. I kept the fridge well stocked. Most weekends I had one of the kids with me. We’d park and take the lift up to the flat with the shopping, exchanging a couple of words with the porters. I discovered that the block was largely international lettings. The man in the flat opposite was Japanese, although my parents had barely seen him. Arab families passed us in the lobby. There was little eye contact from anyone and it started to bother me there was not much sense of community. It was the opposite of what I’d hoped, and I felt stupid for not thinking how the city might isolate them.
I warmed to the porters though. Jim, who was English, quieter and older, in – I guessed – his late fifties, had wiry white hair and apple cheeks, and a wobbling eye affected by nystagmus. Often poring over his newspaper, he seemed slightly unguarded and easily startled – perhaps not ideal attributes for a security porter. Luis – his shorter, swarthy partner – was younger and Portuguese, maybe mid-thirties, and with his tie loosened I’m sure reckoned himself as a dead spit for a young Al Pacino on his Saturday night off. We talked mainly about football and the weather. They seemed to be keeping an eye out for my mum and dad. ‘They are like a lord and a lady,’ said Luis. It helped that my mum was inclined to tip them from time to time.
Up in the flat my mum always left something out for the kids to play with – a stuffed toy (‘Why does Granny have a hippopotamus?’), a wind-up yapping crocodile (‘Does she play with it too?’), a tin piggy bank, some Tupperware. My dad would be in his armchair in his pyjamas like a clapped-out Hugh Hefner with a ‘pre-lunch brandy’, which I imagined followed the ‘post-breakfast brandy’, and possibly even a small ‘pre-breakfast brandy’. I ringed odd exhibitions and new plays in the newspaper and asked my mum to ‘have a think about it’, imagining she could manage a trip up to town. I copied out the telephone numbers of her oldest London friends and left them in big print on a piece of paper by the phone. ‘Don’t tell me off if I don’t call them,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a battle some days.’
In the kitchen I’d again try to show her how to work the dishwasher and the washer-dryer, but I could see her struggling with it all; they were different to the models they’d had in Oxford, which in themselves had probably taken several years to master. I looked at her and wondered if our memory, like an old notebook, must just fill up one day, leaving no room for new entries or instructions, no matter how clearly they are relayed. And I wondered if arbitrary pages, loosened by age, must then just start to fall out and go missing, and if – in the effort to keep going – we start making new assumptions to compensate, hazarding a guess, hoping no one will notice. Perhaps my mum was already cutting her losses, narrowing her options, mercifully using her remaining presence of mind to minimise risk, to avoid things that might be dangerous. Hot oil. That knife. But what about without presence of mind – when presence of mind is no longer the
re? When I thought of that, I worried I was asking too much of her, with all my painstaking guidance and tutelage in a new unfamiliar kitchen, so instead I hid the poultry shears and the modern vegetable peeler and wrote short cuts on pieces of paper and taped them to the control panels and the detergent-dispenser drawer of the dishwasher and the washer-dryer; but several weeks later I noticed neither machine had been used.
‘I just use a bucket and rinse out a few smalls,’ she said.
‘What about the dishwasher, Mum?’
‘Which one is that?’
I watched her shuffling around the small kitchen, misplacing a spoon, scribbling a note to herself and underlining it, peering shortsightedly at a letter from a utility company, or a circular that had landed alarmingly on the mat. I saw how control over all of it would slowly start to elude her.
And an image came to me of myself as a boy of eight lying awake in my room on a Saturday morning, safe under my candy-striped sheet and blankets, listening to the scuffling footfall of the pigeons on the flat roof above and the rustle of the leaves in the copper beech tree at the back, watching the corona of sunlight dance round the outline of the thin rough fabric curtains of my bedroom, listening to the sound of the water tank refilling, and knowing she’d be downstairs in the kitchen getting the day ready, purposeful and absorbed. And I saw myself getting up and going downstairs, across the bumpy linoleum landing, down the thinning red-patterned runner, past the painted woodchip wallpaper over which I ran my fingers, under the high skylight at the turn in the stairs where the water leaked every winter into saucepans and spread-out newspapers below, past the closed door to my mum and dad’s bedroom at the foot of the stairs, with its humorous cardboard No Molestar sign snitched from a Mexican hotel hanging on the doorknob, and into the kitchen where she’d be quietly bustling. I could see myself taking my new copies of my Saturday football mags – Shoot and Scorcher – into the sitting room and lying on the floor to leaf through the pages, and my mum bringing me in some toast and jam (‘Nice and quiet, please, darling, the house is asleep’) and me looking up out through the window into an overcast sky and wondering why my dad got up so late and never wanted to talk to anyone for ages.
