Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  I told Tracey I still had to go to Bristol, so two days later I pulled myself together and took the train instead.

  ‘It’s not been good,’ said Roly, collecting me from the station. ‘Mum’s near silent. They’ve had to change the carpet. Tom can’t get to the bathroom quickly enough. He can’t see it coming. It was all over his slippers yesterday. The smell has been awful.’

  I looked out at the fields. First I saw an image of my parents forgetting the small, often comic, insignificant things, such as where they put the car keys or the name of that face on the television. Then must come bigger, more significant things: what day it is; how to work the cooker. Until finally must come the dangerous and demeaning things they didn’t think it was possible to forget, such as what thirst feels like, what being cold feels like, what needing a crap feels like. Can you just forget to drink? Forget to keep warm?

  At the care home I sat with my mum in the window of their room.

  ‘You needn’t stay long, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s all beyond comprehension.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘In there, I expect,’ she said, gesturing with her hand, her fingernails as grey as a winter sea.

  I got up and walked towards the doorway to a little darkened room. In the shadows I could see the bed. A shape was rolled away from me. I took two or three steps. The shape stirred. As my eyes adjusted I could see him lying on his back.

  ‘I heard you arrive,’ his voice said. ‘Sit me up.’

  I got him upright and swivelled him round. Wilting skin. Mismatched pyjamas. We sat on the edge of the bed side by side in the shadows, neither speaking for a moment. His breathing was laboured.

  ‘Happy birthday. Belatedly,’ I said, looking at the floor. ‘I didn’t know what to bring you. So I brought . . . myself . . . eventually.’ And as the words came out of my mouth so did an unexpected heavy breath, following the words out like a tremulous gust ushered by a closing door. And then there were lots of tears in my eyes, spilling over on to my cheeks and my shoulders were rising and falling, and I didn’t think I could stop easily. And I felt his arm come round my shoulders, and his other hand squeeze my forearm, and his head came close into me, as if he was about to tell me a secret, and he rested his cheek on my shoulder and his voice was saying quietly, ‘I know.’ And then again gently, ‘I know.’

  Christmas came and went, and then I had my breakdown.

  Chapter 33

  On 18 May 2006 I was sitting in a large dark ground-floor room in Harley Street crying at the unknown bald man in front of me. I’d tried to tell him all I knew: how I’d driven Tracey to think about leaving me; how I’d trampled all over the few days she’d set aside for recording her first solo record in twenty-five years; how I was unable to pick up a pencil or plug in a guitar; how I considered myself a false, inhibited parent; how I lacked any authenticity in my work; how violence and pain on the TV made me cry, especially the newsreel footage of that man trapped under a collapsed roof in Poland, his torso rising and falling like a hand-puppet; how I was shouting at the children all the time; how I couldn’t even face seeing them, the way I felt yesterday, and slipped out of the house when I heard them come home from school, and drove the car aimlessly in slow-moving heavy traffic, before pulling over on the side of a busy road and watching a set of traffic lights change over and over and over again, and closing my eyes and falling asleep for forty-five minutes to shut it all out while the mollifying rain drummed on the roof; how I felt I was never catching up; how I could not cope with the detritus of home life, the endless tidying, the clutter, the dishwasher, the loose socks, the sweeping, the fingermarks, the chipped paint; how I hated my bald patch, and the little bits of knobbly skin appearing on the backs of my hands; how I couldn’t taste or smell anything; how I’d been to see a counsellor recommended by a friend a few times and not liked her very much but learned new things that troubled me even more like somatising and resistance and adult child and narcissistic parents; how my father was in hospital on a nebuliser and couldn’t really breathe any more, and how I’d just been to visit him on the train; how I thought both my parents suffered from depression; how I had been unable to effect any change in their lives when I thought I’d be able to; how my uncle had killed himself although I barely knew him; how I’d been through bad periods before – going right back to the eighties – but got over them, although I’d twice been prescribed Venlafaxine and it’d calmed me down but left me feeling vacant and packed in cotton wool; how I knew it was all just a chemical imbalance in the brain, but it didn’t feel like that; how my half-sister had been in Long Grove Psychiatric Hospital; how I’d survived a life-threatening illness that I wasn’t expected to survive; how I still had flashbacks; how some days my black mood invaded the house like a fog; how I was having bad dreams that were making me sit up in the night and shout; how I was brimful of tears and as soft as a peeled egg; how I often felt I was lying at the bottom of the deepest barrel looking up to a tiny patch of grey sky; how Tracey was overwhelmed and frightened, and the other night didn’t know who or where we were any more.

  He made notes with a blue fountain pen while I talked. I had only stopped because the tears had made talking impossible. There were tissues sprouting from a square box on the table next to me. I was sitting in a wing chair. It was protective. He put the lid back on his pen and clicked it shut, and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Well, you’ll be pleased to hear the prognosis is very good,’ he said with a smile. ‘You have a recurrent depressive disorder. How serious? I’d say moderate to severe. You are extremely vulnerable. The shorter the gaps between episodes, the heavier the depression. Soon they will happen spontaneously without a trigger if untreated. You have a strong family history. To be honest, you probably should have been on anti-depressants twenty years ago.’

  I walked from his room that day into the undimmed London afternoon, clutching a prescription for tablets that were to leave me car-sick and somnolent for days, with the promise that when I’d taken them for a few weeks and settled down I could talk to someone properly, someone sympathetic he could recommend who would understand and help me get on top of it all.

  That night I wondered if the clouds hadn’t lifted a little, and I gave the kids the biggest hugs that left me wet-eyed over their tiny shoulders. Blake drew a picture of a lion, a tiger, a palm tree and a lizard with a massive tongue that curled round and round the page before ending in a speech bubble that said The End.

  ‘Were you five once?’ he said, apropos of nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Were you happy when you were five?’

  I felt myself start to cry. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Was Mummy five?’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘Did you know her then?’

  ‘No, we hadn’t met.’

  ‘How old was I?’

  ‘You weren’t born yet.’

  It was clearly another fact he thought he needed to take away and ponder. He blinked a couple of times.

  ‘Oh,’ he said thoughtfully, and I pictured him walking back from the rose garden after being chased by my mum with the same look on his face. And I could hear the girls laughing and playing in their room and I thought how they all thankfully still seemed so happy in spite of the chaos I had brought.

  Then Tracey got home from the studio and we sat and talked.

  Two days later I was woken early by the sound of the phone. As I reached for the receiver I glanced at the clock. It was 6.33 a.m. No good news ever arrives at 6.30 in the morning.

  ‘Ben, it’s Roly.’ He sounded different. Quavering. ‘The hospital just called. They said that Tom died in the night.’ He couldn’t quite pronounce the word ‘died’ properly. It came out with a squeak.

  ‘OK,’ I said. I felt in neutral. ‘What else did they say?’

  ‘It was a staff nurse. She just said, “Is that the Bain residence?” Not much else.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘They’
ve asked me to go down. Do you want to see him?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  That’s all I can remember of the conversation. Perhaps not much more was said. Just the bare facts for now. I said I’d call Jennie. Roly would tell our mum and his brothers. I hung up. Tracey had guessed, but I said it anyway, ‘My dad died last night,’ as if to make it real. She reached out to hold me and I leaned in for a moment awkwardly, but then rolled on to my back and closed my eyes. If I was aware of anything, I seemed to feel relief. Even though I’d been told to wait two weeks before I could expect any change, I wondered if the pills from the psychiatrist could be doing anything yet to dampen my reaction.

  I thought of my dad a few days earlier when I had last seen him: the gnomic face; the stick legs; the nebuliser; the coffee stain. It seemed like an outlying memory. Distant and still. And then a train of thought led me to the photograph of us all on the park bench on Hampstead Heath in the low orange October sunlight and I saw the someone I was going to miss, and I felt the first few confused tears trickle on to my cheeks.

  We lay there for about an hour watching the light at the window, exchanging a few words, and I couldn’t help thinking how the creaking scaffolding on the front of the house had kept me awake in the night; and how I’d lain there for a couple of hours between two and four, and at one point heard a strange noise downstairs like the sound of the letterbox slamming shut on its spring – even though there’d been no wind – and wondered if it had happened around the time he had died, and it was a message; but then I felt stupid because I’d never believed in ghosts.

  Blake and Alfie appeared – Jean was at a friend’s overnight – and got into bed next to us, and I told them what had happened.

  ‘Are you sad?’ Blake asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It was sad when Miss Steele at school died too.’

  ‘Yes. That was sad as well.’

  ‘Is Granny dead too?’

  ‘No, Granny is still alive.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There was a moment’s silence. I could smell Alfie’s hair, still so fresh and clean even after a night’s sleep.

  ‘Are you sure he is dead?’ Blake said. ‘He might wake up.’

  ‘They’re sure.’

  I went downstairs and made coffee and took it back to bed. Tracey cried a little bit. I went upstairs to call Jennie from my studio. She was in the village shop she now ran with her husband Eddie, near the north Somerset coast. Eddie was out on a delivery.

  ‘Hello, Jen,’ I said. ‘Bad news, I’m afrai . . .’

  The words were barely out of my mouth and I could hear her convulsing in tears and choking on her words at the other end of the phone. It seems it was on everyone’s mind. I gave her the simple facts I knew. She said she’d only been in to see him the day before and how distressing it had been: the oxygen; a little banana and some grapes to eat; the few words he had said were lost inside his mask. And then I heard her compose herself and say, ‘That’ll be one pound twenty, please,’ and I heard the till open and shut.

  I rang Roly back and said I would catch a train down in a couple of hours. He’d already been to the hospital and back and picked up a few belongings. He said they’d told him he’d died peacefully in his sleep. A little unexpectedly. His breathing had been shallow yesterday but they hadn’t been expecting him to die.

  I was at the care home by lunchtime. My mum was alone in her room. I sat close to her. Roly stood in the doorway already talking loudly about funeral arrangements. I wanted him to shut up. My dad had only been dead a few hours. It was impossible to tell what she was feeling. She seemed largely unmoved, no different to any other day.

  ‘It’s hard to know what I’m supposed to miss,’ she said a little sternly. ‘He has been away for so long.’

  Afterwards as we were walking to the car, I heard her voice calling us. She had come out of her room and was at the far end of the car park. ‘Roly, are you coming tomorrow?’ she shouted, projecting her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ he called back.

  She cupped her hands up to her mouth in the shape of a megaphone and called out matter-of-factly, ‘BRING ME SOME PAPER TISSUES.’

  Chapter 34

  In the small car Tracey was sitting in the back. I was driving, and my mum was in the front passenger seat. It had been a largely silent fifteen-minute ride from the care home. The lanes and dual-carriageways of South Gloucestershire slid by unremarkably. I kept to the speed limits; it felt oddly respectful to drive within the law; and a speeding ticket wouldn’t have looked good, not on this day of all days.

  I’ve watched as hearses and funeral cortèges with their back-seat sombre faces drive solemnly along city streets, turning heads and slowing traffic; it seems to be the only time such deathly speed is tolerated in the frantic tarmac-grab of city driving. It is as if, as passers-by, we recognise it as an attempt to bend time to our will, to slow it down, to stave off the final death-y part of death – the burial part, the cremation part, the sound-of-soil-on-wood part – to delay it a little longer, to tidy and formalise it into an orderly moment that happens at our own speed, in our own time, not randomly and unfairly. Yet here we were bowling unexceptionally along the A38 at forty-three miles per hour, no coffin up in front with Dad in flowers along the side, just a lorry with Peter Green Chilled printed on it slowing us down, making me think for rather too long about the potential for compilations of soothing early Fleetwood Mac tracks.

  ‘Where are we going again?’ my mum said, breaking the silence.

  ‘To Tom’s funeral, Mum.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said thoughtfully, her finger pressed to her lips, her eyes loosely on the road.

  It was the third time she’d asked the same question in the fifteen-minute journey. Of course the care home had warned me she was confused, that we should bear with her, that the week had taken its toll, and one lapse I would have understood, but three now startled me. It seemed unfair. And so quick. As if she’d been clinging to a ledge for so long and had now just let go. And I wondered if it felt like being stoned or drunk. Dreamlike and disconnected. I reached out with my left hand and squeezed her arm.

  ‘We’ll be there in a moment, Mum. All the family are coming.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To the funeral.’

  ‘How kind. How did they find out about it?’

  I kept it brief.

  Vaguely Dutch, and isolated in the surrounding fields, the huge steeply sloping tiled roofs of the modern crematorium buildings rose out of the sleepy landscape. Viewed from the approach, it was as if four giant Lego tents had been huddled together in a paddock beside the road. The place looked barely used. Roly had said it had only just opened. Spindly young trees needing twenty years of growth to achieve the right amount of dappled gravitas lined the approach road and car park. It could have been a new superstore. I hovered, deciding where to put the car. With those other cars over there, or was that for staff only? In this easy space right here, or is that too far away and looks like we want to make a quick getaway? I settled on something near the main pathway to the chapel to make it easier for my mum. I say ‘chapel’ although not in a religious sense. Roly, who had hand-picked the location from his weekly experiences in the local funeral game for its light and airy aspect, had made it clear – having spoken to the office – that the ceremony did not have to have a religious angle. We all knew it needed to be godless; my dad wouldn’t have had it any other way. I liked the way the website put it: The chapel can be altered to create a suitable environment for a service of any religion or belief. I presume atheism is still a belief. ‘We might make room for a prayer,’ Roly had added. ‘For Mum’s sake.’ Or perhaps because he couldn’t imagine it all going by without one.

  It was colder than I was expecting when I opened the door of the car. Winds were gusting across the empty beds and manicured hummocks of grass. The chill only accentuated the instinctive humble walk and cowed head of funeral attendance in t
he figures I could see approaching the building, as they hurried, not too disrespectfully, hands in pockets, shoulders forward. Rain was starting to spit. My mum was wearing her ‘best coat’ again – the same all-enveloping cream duvet that she wore to first visit flats in London five years earlier. Before it had seemed like a statement of flamboyance; today, it seemed like a comfort blanket. As though she were a shock victim being led from an explosion.

  It was a relief, once inside, that the chapel – in spite of the disappointing weather – was indeed as light and airy as Roly had promised. The imposing steeply tiled roofs on the outside were transformed into sharp white vaults on the inside, with a near vanishing point where the seam of glazing met the bright sky high up; quite heavenly for some, I’m sure, but enough to lift the sceptical heart too. The rest was blond and amber wood, flagstones, breeze-blocks and rough-cut stone pillars: part Scandinavian-modern; part Celtic barn. ‘If you don’t believe in God, what do you believe in?’ I once asked my dad. ‘Nature,’ he said. Exactly what he meant I’d never been sure. The here and now, the immutability of the seasons, perhaps. We come. We go. We flourish. We die. I looked around the room and wondered if it was OK on that basis for him. If he’d been attending someone else’s funeral in the same room, I could picture him running his hand over the stone pillars and leaning into me and whispering, ‘Nice job. Shame about the cross on the wall.’