British Winters

by Andrew Turner

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Ale and the Ailing

  As promised I pick up Hannah from mum’s to take her to see Jonathan. This involves slipping out of Barry’s in the early hours of the morning, something I regret doing after he has been so kind to me. I did leave him a note that conveyed my feelings of gratitude and left my mobile phone number so he could get in touch with me, if there were any need to.

  At my mother’s I am dragged into the back garden, and out of the earshot of Hannah, so mother can elaborate on her Christmas evening phone message.

  “I just don’t get it, Noel.”

  “I lied because I didn’t want this conversation.”

  “I know that. What I don’t understand is why you are turning your back on your grandfather.”

  “Oh, that’s a bit harsh. I’m not turning my back on him; I just haven’t had a chance.”

  “When you were a kid, I couldn’t keep you away from their house and now that he needs you, you can’t find the time?”

  “He doesn’t need me.”

  “He needs all of us right now. He’s terrified of what is happening to him.”

  “So am I, ok? I don’t want to see him like that.”

  “Oh, Noel, none of us do but we have to be strong for him.”

  Mum pulls me close and holds me as though I were openly sobbing, which I am not. When talking about emotions we talk of heart; having heart, broken heart, a man who has no heart. The heart is just an organ with the purpose of pumping blood around the body and has little, in fact nothing to do with any feelings of love and loss of love. When a person sees or comes close to someone they claim to love they talk of flutters in the heart - they aren’t flutters; it’s the heart speeding up because you are stimulated. And yet here I am in my mother’s arms dry-eyed with the pain and the sorrow; it’s in my chest - it is an aching of the heart.

  “Are you ok, Noel?” Hannah has crept up on us.

  “Me? I am super ok, just wanted a hug.”

  “I don’t think you should be too happy. We are going to see my friend in the hospital, you know?”

  “But he’s sad, right? So we need to bring him some happiness.”

  Hannah is contented with the logic of my statement and we put on our happy faces. Hannah demands to put on her bright yellow coat with sparkles; it’s her happy coat. Mum tries to explain that it is not waterproof and Hannah says, “No, but my ‘Hello Kitty’ umbrella is.”

  We take the bus to the hospital; Hannah informs me that this is a good environmental step. This is down to her seeing a poster of a cartoon car and taxi; the poster has depicted them as grumpy and sinister characters but they are not alone. The poster also has a cartoon bus on it and he is all happy, clean cut and shiny. At the bottom of the poster there is some writing that Hannah cannot remember but she does recall the word environment, so buses must be good for the environment. Seems airtight to me, but it doesn’t stop me from hating buses, even happy shiny cartoon ones. Buses are public transport in its lowest form. A bus is cattle transport; your only chance of a seat is if your stop is at the beginning of the route. Luckily for us ours is. By the next stop all the seats, which really only have the capacity for an adult and a child or perhaps a midget, are gone. An elderly woman stands at the front of the bus; she stands by a seated mother and her eight or nine-year-old son. The mother tells the boy to stop fidgeting, and then accidentally makes eye contact with the OAP. The mother smiles a guilty smile and looks away. The OAP remains standing. I could offer her my seat. I want to offer her my seat, but I’m way at the back of the bus. It seems somehow a break in the social norms to head to the front of a bus and offer a stranger a seat at the back. Odd how this act of social kindness would turn me into an abnormal spectacle, with whispers of ‘Look at the weirdo’. A weirdo for going beyond the norm of only helping someone if it is of little effort to oneself. She remains standing and I remain seated. The following stop turns the bus’ comfort down a level; all those sitting on the aisle seats, more perched than sitting, now have to budge up to the stranger next to them as the aisle itself becomes clogged up with more cattle. Another stop and we are at capacity; the journey continues on; the doors keep opening at every stop and more and more people come aboard. Elbows in the faces of those who are seated, in this socially distant world; strangers on a bus are close enough to feel hot breath on the back of their necks. I see the imprint of a thin, model looking, black girl being created in the giant gut of the guy behind her. She’s in a nurse’s uniform so, like us, she’s got a few more stops to go. My natural reaction is to feel bad for her; the poor girl is being engulfed into the gut of another. What about him? He’s not some perve trying to grope some hot young thing with his fat tentacles; he’s an innocent commuter being squashed from all directions. He probably has human shaped indents on all side. Yeah, sod the stick figured nurse, let all sympathy go out to the poor ol’ fat guy. The guy that gets the brunt of all the evil looks; looks that say, ‘You, you are the reason for the congestion’. How unfair to blame the big guy; he’s not the one in his little protective cockpit; he’s not the guy stopping to let another few willing bovine squeeze themselves in.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  I grab Hannah and stand giving my seat to the big guy. Hannah sits next to him perched on the edge of the seat. An abnormal spectacle; whispers of ‘Look at the weirdo’ circulate the bus.

  Now standing and feeling boxed in, my crowd claustrophobia is making me feverish. Is it claustrophobia or agoraphobia? It is the closeness of the crowding I dislike. The tight, oxygen draining proximity, that’s claustrophobia, right? Though I have heard ‘crowd fear’ is agoraphobia. Whatever it is, I don’t like it and I regret my momentary slide into kindness. The good emotional state that follows an act of kindness is always short-lived and the repercussions only come into focus afterwards.

  Hannah has been chatting away to me since I got up; I haven’t caught a word until I hear her say, “Do people who don’t believe in heaven still go there?”

  “What? Erm, yes. Because God… loves everyone.” Seems an ok standard response to give a child.

  “But wouldn’t he be mad that they didn’t believe in him?”

  “No, because all that matters is that you lived a good life. Good deeds should be done out of love not out of the hope of reward or the fear of punishment. And it’s love that gets you into heaven.” Let the record show that my recent good deed was not out of love, it was out of stupidity.

  “Come on, Hannah, our stop is coming up.”

  Getting off the bus will be a task and a half. Knowing our stop, the hospital, was only three stops away I get Hannah up so we can start our journey to the front. By the time the bus grinds to a halt we have made it to the front of the bus; its concertina doors burst open and Hannah pops out onto the cracked and uneven pavement of the bus stop. I, on the other hand, have gotten a little held back. Somehow, I managed to get my hand caught in someone else’s pocket, as I made my final dash for the doors. Hannah frowns at me from the bus shelter and I hear the door mechanism starting to close. I spring into action, and not unlike a certain Dr Jones, I spin out of danger before being crushed to death or maybe just getting a little bruised. Opening the hand that had been trapped in a stranger’s pocket I find a hard mint candy. I think twice before popping it into my mouth but each time I think, ‘It’s still wrapped.’ When looking at the other passengers who got off at our stop I don’t see the hot nurse. I guess she didn’t think ahead; must have tried to get off the bus after it stopped - amateur mistake. Looks like she’s going to be late for work; that’ll teach her for hating on the big guy.

  “Was that dangerous?”

  “Err, ye…no.”

  “No?”

  “Well if we’d have crashed we were too tightly packed in to have gone flying through windows or anything. Safer than a seatbelt.”

  Hannah looks at me. This time, she knows the logic is all wrong but she doesn’t have the words to question it. M
akes me happy to see her not buying into my nonsense; she’s going to be a real bright spark, this one.

  Hospitals - if TV teaches us anything it’s that everyone dislikes hospitals. Guaranteed within seconds of entering a hospital, someone in your group will say, “Oh, I hate hospitals.”

  Oh yeah, everybody does, except all the doctors and nurses working in them and porters and other staff who earn a living out of these churches of fear. Oh, and of course, the millions of patients cured of ailment every year; bones healed, lives saved in these infirmaries of fright. Why do people assume these places, built to cure you, are the places you are most likely to get a deadly disease? People eat crap, smoke like chimneys, drink like fishes and fuck like whores without a care, but don’t make them go to the hospital. No, that’s where folks go to die. I guess the MRSA scares don’t help things; people going in for surgery and coming out with an incurable disease! However, it isn’t incurable - I know people who’ve had it and now don’t have it. It’s a fear out of ignorance; antibiotics don’t kill it and that’s all us regular folks know.

  “Oww, Doctor, my ear hurts, give me a pill.”

  “Oh, please, Doctor, it’s my toe; the nail’s all black, give me a pill.”

  “I don’t want your opinion, Doctor, I just want the easy-to-take magic pill that cures all ills.”

  All you hear is: dirty wards; germ factories; the modern NHS is like a death camp. I’m not overstating, I’ve heard this spoken. Yeah, there have been deaths; deaths going all the way back to the start; unfair deaths: the ambulance being a few minutes late; a doctor not quite on his or her game, missing something on a scan; a surgeon having a momentary spasm in his hand; a doctor trying his best but not being quite good enough. People die and there are fingers to point but don’t let’s get hysterical, people. We’re lucky to live at a time and in a country where we all have some place to go when we’re sick. Day in, day out, people are fighting to keep other people alive and, in a place like that, sometimes they are going to lose but not until after a bloody good fight.

  Jonathan is fighting deep inside his mind; his hidden consciousness fighting with every twitch of an eye beneath closed lids. Jonathan fights in his room of foil balloons, cards and cuddly toys. What will he think if he wakes? Hannah takes her place by his side and begins waffling on about Christmas Day.

  “And I got a set of fairy wings. They look like butterfly wings, but they’re not. It said fairy wings on the packet.”

  “And then he puked on Noel, he did the same thing last year but just onto the kitchen floor, not onto anybody.”

  She rambles on, a flood of anecdotes, no thought to whether he can hear her words. She brightens into a big smile as she tells him how much everyone loved watching the play on DVD, everyone but me. The premier must have taken place after I had escaped.

  Hannah is my link to the world; as I pull away from it, as I give up on it, she plunges head first into life. She dives right into the good, into the bad, looking deep into the eyes of anything she doesn’t understand and with every push forward she makes, without knowing it, she is pulling me back to the world, making me a part of it all again.

  “Hey, Hannah Banana, I’m going to get a drink, you ok here?”

  She nods and continues her unpunctuated tale of Christmas. The corridors of the hospital are large and seemingly endless; the floors are thick marble looking linoleum; the wall an off-white colour heading more towards peach rather than yellow. Damn it, I am lost. God, I hate hospitals; labyrinths where the end of the corridor looks the same as the beginning; signs that say this way to radiology, this way to physiotherapy, this way towards A and C. What about the way out or even the way to the café? I’d say most day-to-day visitors are looking for them. Ah, lifts! The silver beacons; lifts will take you to signs that’ll point you to the entrance and the entrance will have food.

  Modern day hospital cafés are out of place franchises if you ask me. A hospital café should look and operate like a school lunchroom; two options for mains and two options for puddings, mixed veg and always plenty of chips. However, they are not; they are metropolitan eateries with five different types of coffee, a full menu including a vegetarian option, cheesecake and carrot cake and gateau. In the past the sandwiches were cheese and onion or egg mayonnaise, maybe a ham and tomato if you’re lucky. Now it’s Hoisin duck wraps and Cajun chicken and full English breakfast on whole wheat. Do the friends and families of the sick really need all these choices? Is it a good thing? I guess it’s a comfort to eat the food of your choice rather then stuffing down mangy old sandwiches in between wiping away the tears. But don’t we come here to see the ailing, not to have a mushroom and ham tagliatelle and a slice of New York style vanilla cheesecake, washing it all down with a choco-mocha-frappuccino?

  “Yeah, can I have a large hot chocolate, please? Does it come with one of those chocolate waffle tube things?”

  “No, love, it’s a hospital not Starbucks.”

  “Right, can I just get a tea then?”

  “Herbal, green, lemon, Earl Grey, decaf or PG?”

  “PG is fine.”

  There is nothing quite as defiant and stupid looking than smoking outside a hospital and there are about sixteen of us doing just that. The smoke floats up, past the windows of wards filled of our future selves, choking on our ventilators; the fag ends stomped out on the floor above the mortuary where our future selves lie in refrigerated cupboards. The thought gives me chills and I light another cigarette. The nurse, from the bus, rushes past me and the other chain smokers queuing up for our iron lungs. She inhales as she passes by, the sign of a longing ex-user. It makes me nostalgic for all those seventies TV shows - back when all the doctors would puff away as they made their diagnoses.

  Back up in the ward Hannah is still going, a child’s anecdotes are a more interesting retelling of a somewhat bland event. I can see what she is doing; she’s trying to give him a reason to wake up, painting him a Technicolor vista of the world that awaits him. It’s all here, Jon, a path to walk, a life not yet begun, a story yet to be told. If each life is like a book then this little kid hasn’t even got past the first chapter. His heart monitor keeps beeping though; little Jonathan has got his finger still holding the page. Come on, Jon, don’t put the book down. You’re going be Hannah’s travelling partner; you’ll go on adventures; you’ll circle the globe by land, air and sea; meet the best and worst of humanity but never lose your way. Sounds like a good read, a better read than most, a better read than mine.

  “Come on, Hannah, I got to get you home.”

  “Ok,” she answers and then turns back to Jonathan. “I’ll come back soon and finish telling you how I got a new Samurai sword.” She leaves the room with her head looking back at him, not facing front until we are in the lift.

  On the way home the bus is fairly quiet; I notice the OAP from our journey here. She is sitting where the boy and his mother were seated, if this is the same bus. Hannah sits on my knee; she hasn’t done that in a while, not in public; she usually wants her own seat like a big girl. She doesn’t sob but tears roll down her cheeks. I hold her tight. I thought she wasn’t aware, like she really did just think he was sleeping. He’s her best friend and she has to see him hooked up to all those machines, with a tube up his nose. She wraps her arms around my neck.

  “He didn’t wake up for me, I thought…” She doesn’t finish her words, she just breaks down.

  After dropping Hannah off at my mum’s I head to my second home, The George. I don’t need a drink, I need Nails.

  “Nails, could you please pour me a…fuck.”

  “A fuck, is that a cocktail? I’ve heard of a Screaming Orgasm and a Sex on the Beach but not one just called Fuck.”

  “Ha, err… I quit drinking.”

  “Good, I’ll pour a double coke then.”

  “How about tea, a normal run-of-the-mill tea?”

  “That’s the only kind we do.”

  I tell Nails about Hannah’s melt
down and he says what I want to hear; that it’s not right. I need Nails, a salt of the earth guy, to tell me it’s just not right. I don’t want any of that, ‘She’s young, she’ll get over it’, or ‘Sometimes it’s good to learn these kinds of things about life’. I just want to hear that it’s wrong. Wrong that a little girl can love so much, in a world where she will lose everything and everyone at some point. But that’s life and life is fucking wrong. Why did man evolve into a creature that feels pain without a physical injury?

  “You ok, guys?” Mr Barsky asks.

  “Well, if it isn’t motor mouth.”

  “What?”

  “You told Deb about Jenny.”

  “No, I didn’t. I mean I did but not in the bitchy back-stabbing way you are implying.”

  “Bitchy and back-stabbing? Who the hell are we? The girls from Sex and the City?” Nails is thrown by Toby’s camp choice of words.

  “What?” Toby replies.

  “The blokey word is cunt, the correct word is traitorous.” I clear up all the confusion.

  “I saw her in town. She was upset, so I bought her a coffee.”

  “And then betrayed your oldest friend.”

  “She said you ended it and I said what because of Jenny? In surprise.”

  “Surprise?”

  “Yeah, I was surprised that you would throw away a good relationship for some teenage craving. I thought you were smarter than the average bloke.”

  “Firstly, I am equally as stupid as the average bloke, the only difference being when I do something bad or misguided I feel guilt and shame. Secondly, I broke up with Deb because it was a bad relationship that I only stayed in because I was too lazy to get off my arse and find a better situation. I know this may sound trite and a lie but I truly did it for her, so she could move on instead of wasting however long it would have taken her to figure out what a waste of space I am. And thirdly, why didn’t you warn me about the folly of chasing a teenage craving?” Shit, I just said what was in my head, I didn’t have time to process the words; they were out of my mouth almost before they entered my brain. They both just look at me. Nails, I could do with an icebreaker; actually I’d like a do over. Come on, Noel, just brush it off.

  “Maybe I’ll run into your Maths teacher, comment on your possible homosexual tendencies. In surprise.”

  “You think you’re a waste of space.” Please don’t do this, Toby. I don’t want to have it out, I don’t want to bond like men. I don’t want to talk about our feelings. It’s Christmas for God’s sake.

  “No, I just meant.”

  “You’re not alone, Noel.”

  “Oh, fuck off, Toby. I never said I was alone. I know I’m not alone, but I am a thirty-two-year-old guy who is still waiting for his purpose to come walking through the door and say, ‘Hey, Noel, stop your aimless wandering. This is the way to go’. Still waiting for some omnipotent being to call me on the phone and tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to be doing.”

  My phone does not ring but it does vibrate. It shimmies about on the bar where it had been placed as I drink my cup of tea.

  “Text message. I doubt it’s the answer I’m looking for,” I say to my two companions who look amazed at the coincidence of the situation.

  The text tells me I have two new voicemails. The first message is distorted; I can hear loud club music, a drunken voice weeping and shouting. The second message confirms my fears.

  “Hey, it’s Barry, I’m in the cells. She’s taken the boys, my boys and I’ve fallen. Help me up, Noel.”

  The night before he had appeared so strong, strong enough to show me my weakness, and wise enough to know his own. Now all I recall is a man living in a dead house of the past, not just offering to be my crutch but also asking me to be his. There is only one police station in our little town; just one little cop shop to leave a broken drunk of a man to dry out. The locals call it the Farmhouse because of its rural appearance and I’m sure the odd person comments on how it’s full of pigs. Walking to the front desk, which looks more like a post office window than a police station’s reception, I feel bad for Barry’s bad luck. God, the number of times I could have been dragged in here due to my drunk and disorderly behaviour, and poor old Barry after six months of clean living has one bad night and here he is in the clink. Couldn’t they see he was just a guy carrying a big weight on his weary shoulders? Couldn’t they have turned a blind eye to a momentary slip in a man’s judgement?

  “Hello, I’ve come to bail out Barry err… I don’t know his surname. Does that matter?”

  “Not tonight, he’s the only one we’ve got in the cells. There is no bail, but there is a fine.”

  “How much?”

  “Eighty pounds.”

  “For being drunk?”

  “For punching a police officer.”

  Ok, so maybe it wasn’t random bad luck. Joe Stummer fought the law and the law won. What chance did Barry have? They bring him out, shirt unbuttoned and ripped, his bare chest exposed, his hair dishevelled, unshaved, dry blood around his left nostril and lower lip, one shoe missing and smelling of BO and a brewery with a hint of piss. Every bit a classical drunk.

  “Jesus, Barry!”

  “Scotland, Noel, she took them to Scotland and I can’t do anything about it.”

  “I’m sorry, mate. Let’s get you home, somewhere warm.”

  He sobered up some, as we stood in the below zero December air. He held his shirt closed. I could see it wasn’t merely unbuttoned, it was buttonless.

  “Sorry about having to wait for a taxi. I don’t drive.”

  “It’s ok.”

  “Tried once, failed. Never tried again.”

  “It’s really ok.”

  “My grandad used to sit me in the driver’s seat when I was a kid, when the car was parked in the driveway, that is. He’d tell me what was what. I knew what everything was and how it worked, but when I finally got in front of the wheel for real I couldn’t control it. Too much power. I’d try to keep it straight but I just kept veering off to one side. And God, there’s so much to do at the same time: eyes on the road and on your mirror; three pedals for two feet; two hands on the wheel at all times; now change gear; watch it, keep an eye on your speed.”

  “Think most people feel that way at first.”

  “Yeah.”

  In the taxi, Barry begs me not to take him home; he doesn’t want to walk into his childhood home in his present state. So I take him to the flat and I’m more than happy to do it; I feel none of the usual notions of narcosis that normally swim around my head. There are no nagging thoughts of the breaching of my fortress, no concern of letting in someone new. I would have thought alarm bells would have been ringing loud and clear; Barry’s not just a person, he’s a person with baggage. His presence complicates the life I’ve built or maybe haven’t built to avoid these kinds of complications. I’ve strived for a life without hassle at the cost of having no life. Yet, for some reason, I want him there, I want to help. I tell him to get into the shower and clean himself up. Not knowing his size I lay out some jogging pants with an elasticated waist for a time when either I or a gift giver thought I would do some sort of exercise, and the baggiest T-shirt I own.

  Whilst Barry showers, I check on John and the babies; all present and accounted for. John maybe some feral slut of a cat, but she’s doing a fairly good job at being a mum. There’s a present in the litter box for me and there’s piss on my bed. A stab in the dark, I’d say John is officially litter trained but the kittens are not. I make them a more practical bed in the corner of the room out of Deb’s pillow and the Christmas jumper. John jumps down off the bed to investigate. As she rubs her head on the neck of the jumper the little ones squirm clueless as to what is happening. I gently cradle them off the bed and into their new crèche. As I change the bed sheets, Barry, now washed and dressed, stands in the doorway of my bedroom.

  “Thanks for the clothes. Top’s a bit big but the joggy bottoms are fine.”
<
br />   I make him a coffee and make myself a tea. We sit and drink and he tells me of his ex-wife’s actions. During their divorce she had been awarded full custody of their two boys due to his heavy drinking. He sugar coats nothing, naming himself a monster; he tells me of how he beat his wife, and he goes into great detail about the awful things he’d called her; sadness always in his tone. But the tears start as he speaks of tearing apart the house while his boys slept in the room above.

  “At least I thought they were asleep, but how could they be? Shouting and cursing and smashing the place apart. What nightmares did I give to my boys?”

  It is horrifying and heartbreaking all at the same time. I know this tale though; I’ve lived this story but not from this side. Two brothers hearing a ruckus, two boys who stayed in their room, sounds becoming images in their minds. Dad was a fighter and a screamer and he liked to throw things around and I bet he hit a copper or two. I’ve befriended the father I’ve just renounced. Why don’t I grab him by the collar, drag him into the cold, dark, dampness of the outside and scream with all my blood and rage, “YOU DESERVE IT ALL!” and slam the door in his face? Because he’s not my monster under my bed; he’s just a burnt out soul, a marionette with his strings all tangled up, still trying to get to the end of the show. Also, he’s given me something my monster never did; full, uncensored remorse. Yeah, every now and then Dad would say he’d messed up, except it never came from a place of emotion; he never faced what he did, never came clean.

  He was a true monster and now that he is old and tired he wants a free pass; he wants the ones around him to do the forgetting and the forgiving. The past is the past, time to move on, that’s want he wants. But is it not his job to make amends? Rather than mine to forgive?

  “Barry, you haven’t lost your boys, not yet. Show them you care, and move up to Scotland to be close to them. Give it all up for them and ask for nothing in return. And don’t hit the bottle when they knock you back; just try harder. Ignore your ex-wife’s lack of faith in you; let her doubts be your strength. And promise me, that when they’re old enough you’ll confess it all, like you have confessed to me tonight. Let them see the guilt. And maybe they’ll see what I saw.”

  Barry nods, seeing something in me that he hadn’t before, but something he knew in his heart was always there.