by Ben Watt
In the mirror he could see two container lorries on his inside, and found he had only one arm to operate a manual car travelling at almost eighty miles per hour in the outside lane of a three-lane motorway. Instinctively he steadied the wheel with his knees and, using his left hand and the clutch, managed to swerve over two lanes of busy traffic and on to the hard shoulder, where he braked and stopped in a hail of flying grit. He sat in a daze for a few moments. Coaches and lorries thundered by. The car shuddered in the side-draught. He remembered staring at the litter and the dandelions along the crash-barrier. After a while – he couldn’t recall how long – some feeling came back into his right arm. He restarted the car and drove gingerly home, where he made an appointment to see his doctor.
Unfiltered Turkish tobacco had been one of his pleasures for fifty years. In the week running up to the scare in the car he had been persuaded to give up cigarettes and try nicotine patches, after his doctor had finally succeeded in scaring him with phrases like ‘onset of smoke-related asthma’ and ‘loss of cognitive functioning’; but it was never going to be easy. I remembered other occasions when he’d tried giving up: one time, in the seventies, he grew a beard to ‘feel different’, hoping it might help the transition, but it just left him quiet and morose, as though he was being forced to wear a costume and the real him was hiding inside it; a small creature in a hedge. He shaved it off within days. On another, he took up chewing gum, but it made my mum laugh as soon as she saw his jaw start moving.
At the appointment he told his doctor that on the day his arm dropped from the steering wheel he had felt his craving returning, so had tried ‘doubling the dose’ by wearing an extra patch. The doctor checked him over. It was clear he’d had a shock. In the end he doctor stopped short of using the word ‘stroke’ and instead told my parents (in language that wouldn’t frighten the living daylights out of them) that he had simply ‘given his nervous system a bit of a jolt’, and that the unexpected extra release of nicotine had momentarily affected his driving. Even after they told me, I still thought stroke, or at least a mini one.
The whole episode explained why he looked so sober and clear-eyed in the photograph taken that October day on Hampstead Heath. He’d been on the wagon and off the fags for several weeks in the run-up. The ‘loss of cognitive functioning’, however, first flagged by his doctor, had started to shadow him.
Over the next couple of years, he started to find his morning crossword puzzles harder and he put off morning walks; getting showered, dressed and climbing one flight of stairs seemed difficult enough. Eventually in the late autumn of 1996 he went in for a scan and he was told the main carotid artery in his neck leading to his brain was ‘all furred up like a kettle’.
‘What next then? Viakal?’ he’d asked the specialist drily.
‘Well, we need to take it out of your neck, pop it on the table, descale it with a little wire brush and pop it back,’ came the reply. (Every major procedure is treated like a tummy-ache by the British medical profession.)
‘And if you don’t?’ my dad asked.
‘A scaly piece could detach itself, get lodged in the artery, and potentially block blood-flow to the old brain. And we don’t want that, do we?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’
He was booked into the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. We all knew that the procedure itself – an endarterectomy – was risky. The chance of a ‘scaly piece’ breaking off during the operation and triggering a major stroke had been mentioned, but we tried not to talk about it in the days running up to it.
I drove up with Tracey on the day. We were trying to play it all down a bit to keep my mum upbeat; it helped that we’d both been in hospitals before.
When we got word things had gone well and he was on his way back from the operating room, I went out into the hall to meet him. I’d forgotten how wide hospital beds are. Porters and nurses were pushing him along the corridor. On the outsize bed he looked old but seemed no bigger than a boy – a silicone model by Ron Mueck. His head was rolled to one side on the pillow, his eyes lolling under the effects of the anaesthetic. A square of gauze was secured around the side of his neck. His throat and eye-socket were purple and yellow with bruising, the colours of freshly cut irises. His hair was rumpled and sweaty. He looked like a featherweight ferried from the ring by his trainers after a colossal beating. I slipped alongside the moving bed and bent down so he could see me, and touched his arm. He opened his eyes. They were soft and glazed. He smiled weakly. Apparently he had said to the anaesthetist at the pre-med, ‘If you turn me into a cabbage, have the decency to turn off the heat and pull out the plug, there’s a good chap.’
He made a great recovery. The new year of 1997 was met with ‘elation’ according to my mum – not a word you would commonly associate with either of them. She wrote in a fax of 4 January: ‘Dad in buoyant mood. Had his stitches out. Got a bear sticker for being brave, then flirted with receptionists.’ That sounded like the old dad – masculine charm mixed with a boyish need for being looked after.
The fax machine was a new present that I’d given to my mum a couple of weeks before for Christmas 1996. She was seventy-two. I bought it in the hope it would help us keep in touch while I was away on tour, as she used to worry every time I boarded a plane, and a trip to Australia and Japan was looming. I wasn’t wrong. For the next two years until it broke – possibly from the sheer volume of traffic – she sent me more than a hundred and fifty faxes. It was more than four times the number of letters she had sent me in my entire life.
At the beginning, in early 1997, they came through at the rate of two or three a week. If we were away, she would often track down where we were staying. I checked into a hotel with Tracey in Sydney to be told a fax was waiting for us in the hotel’s business centre. We had been expecting an urgent message detailing the complex promotional schedule over the next four days concerning our new album, and asked for it to be sent up to our room. A bellman arrived. ‘Your schedule, sir.’ The cover page was written in thick black felt-tip pen: Fax for Ben Watt. Everything But The Girl. Welcome to Sydney! To await arrival! This page plus 2 from Mrs R. Watt, Oxford (England). It began: ‘Sorry to have missed your call but Dad nodded off early while watching the Italian Football . . .’
Reading back through them, I am struck by the transparency of her feelings. They read almost like a live unmediated blog feed of her life at the time. There are jokes (‘Main excitement here is our plumbing. We are being “rodded” right under the house. Number One stoppage but responding to treatment. Send me a fax sometime even if it is just to say HELLO’) and strings of quick-fire news bulletins: the latest birdlife outside their window (‘grebe in residency’); films she intends to go to without my dad, and reviews of ones she’s seen (‘Saw Wings of a Dove last night and felt, tho’ beautifully shot, it would probably have been better left as a Henry James novel’); reactions to actors’ performances on TV (‘Jacobi was riveting’); descriptions of her new hairstyle (‘On a good day Dad says I look like [the saxophonist] Peter King’); reports of visits from other members of the family; commentaries on little trips out of town on her own. All of them are delivered with a likeable, indefatigable immediacy. ‘Tom and I love each other to death,’ she wrote in one high-spirited and unusually perky fax of that year. ‘Our relationship is built on a huge reservoir of love and affection, and at least once a day we tell each other so.’ I really hoped so.
Yet in the background she also methodically outlines the slow decline of my dad in the wake of his endarterectomy; the momentary euphoria she reported when he first got home from the operation is soon replaced by plaintive requests to ‘call him sometime’ and the careful itemising of his forgetfulness, lapses into depression, and worsening breathing problems. In all of it, she rarely holds back from saying what she’s feeling. She could dash off a page of despondency on her way out to the shops (‘Dad is no longer the dozy man who says he is quite content. I have never seen him this depressed before
– unsatisfied with his life, and with us’) only for the opposite to arrive a few days later (‘Dad starts every day by announcing how well he feels’) and as a result I lashed out on a couple of occasions – under pressure and often away from home – admonishing her for expecting me to follow and respond to every little rise and fall. She wrote wounded and prostrate apologies by return. It was often impossible to keep up with, but perhaps, with hindsight, all the noise was her way of saying that she wasn’t coping at all, and she was fearful of the future, and what would happen to them.
She left home for a weekend in Cumbria in 1997 to attend a special Romany Society meeting in honour of her father. She said Tom had seemed happy to let her go, and was even fine on the phone when she called twice from motorway service stations on the way back, but on her return at eight o’clock on the Sunday evening – after a six-hour car journey trapped in the back of someone else’s car – he ‘snapped’ (as the doctor later said) and subjected her to a corrosive self-pitying attack about leaving him alone, the pointlessness of her journey, the vacuous eulogising of her father’s memory, and the futility of being a socialist in a world gone mad. He then slammed the door and disappeared to his bed. He stayed there all the next day too. It was only after an emergency home visit from his doctor and a subsequent consultation with a psychiatrist to which he willingly agreed that he managed to right himself, and he fully apologised, and they stumbled on.
The doctors laid the blame on his delayed reaction to his worsening health, and we were encouraged to sympathise – and of course we did – but I remembered the way he had gone at my mum that night she got back from Rome in 1971, and it sounded as if it was exactly the same. The same depressed man. Still stuck. Still threatened. Twenty-six years later. Unable to get past himself. Now also troubled by ill health. It seemed as if they would just muddle on from crisis to crisis in ever decreasing circles.
In one of her last faxes on Valentine’s Day 1999 before the machine broke and was never repaired, she wrote:
I have just given Tom my Valentine present – Sixteen solid milk chocolate figures and a solid milk chocolate winning goal. It’s called ‘Football Fever’ and costs 99p from M&S. He has offered me lunch at Waterperry. It was today forty-one years ago that I received an anonymous Valentine and took the envelope to Brian and Elspet’s to check the writing! Heigh ho. All love xxxx. NO reply needed!
Chapter 31
I stepped down from the carriage on to the platform at Paddington and realised the last bit was now out of my hands. I pictured them in the new care home near Bristol. Someone else was looking in on them, putting new name tags on their laundry, wiping the custard off the table. The uneaten tray would be cleared away unconditionally. A new doctor would reassess their tablets. A new hairdresser would do their hair. And Roly, with all his courteous, muted fondness, would be there to usher them through the next doorway. Old age is a series of halting-places. From this flat to that room. From that room to this smaller room. From that chair to that bed. Furniture is slowly consolidated and sold off, possessions shrink, until the world – more than ever before – retreats, and we live inside our own head, where we increasingly become an unreliable witness to everything we’ve ever done. A life finally imagined.
I thought all of that on the platform walking to the barrier and I just wanted to get back on the train and travel back up the line and put my arms round both of them, and stay until it got dark, beyond the visiting hours, beyond the moment when all the trivial catching up is done, into the moments when you can just sit there quietly not speaking, just content to be in someone else’s presence who knows you, and you know them. But that stuff is so hard to get to. Life in all its awkwardness drops like a fallen tree across the track.
And even if I had pushed it, and made it happen – insisted on travelling, insisted on staying, insisted on being affectionate – there would still have been a moment when I would have had to get up and walk out and shut the door on them, and slip back into my own life. In the end, as in hospitals, the final visitors have to go home, and there will still be hours left in the day – and in the night – and the ones we leave behind have to get on with it. Each on their own.
It was six months before I went back. I went with Blake; he was three and a half. It was a warm late-summer’s day. We caught the same train, passed through the same stations, looked out over the same fields, the embankments invaded with dense thickets of lilac buddleia, the canal boats and launches and the swollen river at Tilehurst, the sewage works, the railway workers in their orange jackets trudging, sheep and cattle unmoved near the line.
I took photos of us to show we were enjoying ourselves. Blake had had his hair cropped close for the summer – a little suedehead – and, after putting his fingers in his ears and sticking his tongue out for the camera, he sat back reflectively and silently watched the fields pass by, his favourite bear under his nose. I sat and watched with him for a bit: the open bags of aggregate, rusting unused rails in the long grass, the copses on the hilltops, the paddocks with the pony jumps and pole fences, wildflowers in the cuttings, barbed wire around the superstore, the steaming cooling towers, a Union Jack in a cottage garden, skips and pallets in the business park, cartwheeling wind turbines. Everywhere the light was hitting the green undulating land bright and clear beyond the sealed windows of our carriage. And all the while, I couldn’t shake off a feeling of dread and sadness that this journey would be the one I would be making and remaking from now until I didn’t have to make it any more.
At the care home, my mum and dad were surprised to see us. Roly had warned them twice and someone had looked in to remind them earlier in the morning, but when I pushed the door open to my dad’s room he was dozing on his bed and my mum was at the window, her arms splayed across the sill, her face pressed to the glass as though she might be estimating how high it was to jump.
‘Mum . . .’
I saw her start, then turn stiffly. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me. Ben. I’ve brought Blake to see you too.’
My dad lifted his head off the pillow. ‘Who’s there?’ he said.
‘Oh, goodness, you startled me,’ my mum said. ‘I thought you were coming tomorrow.’
I could feel Blake push in close to my leg and take the fold of my jeans in his hand. ‘Didn’t Roly tell you? Well, never mind. We’re here now. Brought you some chocolate truffles.’
Within five minutes I had helped my dad up and over to his chair, and we were all seated in a group. Blake spoke in a clear small piping voice.
‘Is that your real hair?’
‘What’s left of it,’ my dad said.
‘Are you old?’
‘Yes. Too old.’
On the table was a framed photograph. A crisp blue-swept day. My dad in a wheelchair in an Everything But The Girl baseball cap; it looked as though it had been put on his head by someone else, but he was beaming straightforwardly into the lens. My mum was on the handles behind, no hat, shoulders back, tight-lipped and withdrawn. Weston-super-Mare’s iron promenade railings and wide sandy beach rolled out behind. Roly had warned me they might be going. It seemed implausible, as though they had been Photoshopped on to the background and had never really been.
‘How was it?’ I asked them, gesturing to the photograph.
‘Ludicrous,’ my dad said.
Fifteen minutes later he had chosen to climb back on to his bed while the rest of us went down to the garden. Clouds had drifted in from the west and the sun was gone. An autumnal coldness was in the air.
‘Chase me,’ Blake cried, spying a small ornamental rose garden surrounded by a tall yew hedge.
‘I think Granny is too tired to chase you.’
‘Chase me!’ He darted towards the roses.
As if responding to a challenge, my mum unlinked her arm from mine and padded towards the hedge.
‘You OK, Mum?’ I said. ‘You don’t need to.’
She walked on heedless. ‘I’ll catch you! I’ll catch
you, I will!’ she said loudly. It sounded almost stentorian.
‘Granny’s chasing me!’
And I had an image of myself in the garden in Barnes – a little boy. The rockery rose up at the back. I could run up the steps past the low firs to the poplars along the back wall and hide behind the trunk of the one by the compost heap, and I saw Nunu in a straw bucket hat creakily clambering up towards me to find me, and me counting out loud to ten and thinking she was too slow, and it would be more fun if it was my dad and he was roaring like a lion.
My mum picked her way along the back of the hedge then appeared in the archway on the opposite side of the rose garden unexpectedly. ‘I can see you!’ she cried abrasively. She had lifted her arms up and had crooked all her fingers into claws and contorted her face into an awful grimace.
Blake squealed. He hadn’t seen her. He span round. ‘No! Not that. Not that! Not a monster, Granny.’
The game was spoiled.
Never quite the appropriate gesture or response: how many times had I said that to myself about her over the years? Too much this. Too much that. Too much effort. Too little effort.
‘Is the old man still up there?’ Blake said, his face still damp with tears, as we were walking back.
‘Yes, the old man is still up there,’ I said. ‘He’s my daddy, you know.’
‘Oh,’ said Blake, not raising his head.
The three of us slipped back into the lobby, into the miasma of ammonia and cooking oil and air fresheners. I helped my mum up the stairs, her body all squidgy and heavy under my hands.
‘Don’t let me keep you,’ she said as we made it back to the room. This was her way of saying she’d had enough already, however brief a visit might have been. It was as if returning to her own thoughts were more preferable and less exerting than having to share them with other people.
