To Tanya
Our Sunshine
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue: WHERE DO I BEGIN?
1: SUN SPORTS SUNDAYS
2: WATFORD BOYS
3. THE STOLEN SUZUKI
4: A GANG CALLED CRAZY
5: A NEW HEART
6: PRINCESS DI AND STEVE McMAHON AND PRINCESS DI AGAIN
7: GEORGE THE RABBIT
8: JOHNNY WATTS’ DAUGHTER GETS MARRIED
9: WHAT HAPPENED IN NUNEATON
10: DING DONG THE BELLS ARE GONNA CHIME
11: HE TOOK ONE THROUGH THE WINDOW
12: A DAY AND A LIFE AT HAREFIELD
13: VIRGIN TO JAPAN
14: THE ZEBRA ON MULHOLLAND DRIVE
15: SOUTH DAKOTA
16: THE BLOW-UP HEART BALLOON
17: DAYS, WEEKS, MAYBE MONTHS
18: THE EARTHQUAKE
19: THE WHITE LIGHT
20: JOYOUS GRIEF
Epilogue: THE HOUSE IN VAN NUYS
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
About the Author
Copyright
Vin has been in Los Angeles since September. I have been to visit him, but it’s not the same … I am counting the days away. The thought of his beautiful face and his lovely smell keep me going for a while, but I miss him so much.
It’s strange how you spend your whole life waiting for your special person to come along, then you find them and feel so happy, then end up living apart.
I just wish we could all just be together always.
Tanya Jones, 19 October 2000
Prologue:
WHERE DO I BEGIN?
This is not a love story I ever wanted to tell, because I hoped it would just go on and on, and never end, and never be a story – I thought it would always just be, and that we’d grow old together. I never wanted it to be a tale I told about the past, a middle-aged man sitting at the kitchen table as the California light fades, thinking about the coming night and how to get through it, and trying to explain to someone – to anyone – what it was like to live through something extraordinary, an amazing three decades that happened to me, three decades that are now over.
I don’t feel this way because the love story is over; I’ll always love Tanya Lamont, who became Tanya Jones, who was always just my beautiful Tans. No – the love I feel for her is present, and real, and will never fade. So, the feeling is there, and will always be there … but she is gone from this world and I’m left here. Her body finally failed her, failed all of us, and we’re left with photographs and memories and sometimes we sneak into her closet to smell her clothes, the scent she wore, though it’s fading, every day it’s fading fast.
I cling on to some things; like the last card she gave to me. Inside she’d written:
To my love Vin, something wonderful happens to me every day. It’s being with you. You are my morning sunshine the moment I wake. All my love, Tanya.
How do you live without that? If anyone can tell me, I’d happily listen. She wrote that card after we’d been together 27 years – and I’ve been hard to live with at times. But every day she still looked at me and saw something wonderful.
I sometimes tell people that I’m just waiting to be reunited with Tans. In one interview I said, ‘I’m going to get on with my life, I’m going to crash through it, but in terms of the universe, it would be the smallest dot, that’s how I look at it. Basically, I’ve got a few years to wait now until we’re back together.’
I suppose in some ways I’m just hanging around, half-living, until I get to see her again. Everyone tries to talk me out of it – ‘You’re not old, Vin,’ they say, ‘You’re healthy, you have lots of time left’, but it’s how I feel some days. I’m just waiting, kicking my heels, passing the time, keeping busy, hitting fucking golf balls into a sea of sadness. Grief is like that: a great, heavy weight, heavier than any element, so heavy it can sink through the table and the floor and through the basement of the house and down into the deep rock. And some days, it takes you with it. And it’s on those days that I tell people I’m just waiting to be reunited with Tanya Jones.
I was talking to a guy at the golf course the other day and he told me that his wife had passed away 14 years earlier. We both went quiet – it’s a horrible club to be part of, and no amount of ‘I’m sorry’s can make anyone feel better, not really. But I tried; I told him I was so sorry, just as he’d told me he was sorry when he learned about Tans.
I was just about to walk away when the guy stopped me and said, ‘It doesn’t get any easier, you know.’
Just like that. Nothing else, just that.
I said, ‘Sorry?’
‘You learn to live with it,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t get any easier. Sure, you learn to suspend the grief because it’s so heavy. That’s what you do. But no, mate. It doesn’t get any easier.’
So yeah, some days the light at the end of the tunnel is that it won’t be long until we’re together. No, I’m not an old man, not quite, and no, that’s not all I feel. There are days I look up and tell her what I’m up to, and try to make her laugh, or at least to put a smile on her face. The way I’m looking at it is this: she’s up there now, sitting there, looking down on us, so I try to be a good person. I know I have a reputation for some of the things I’ve done, but you’ve no idea how much I’ve changed. A lot of the time I try to do something good for people, and when I do good things, I feel her smiling. I know that smile – I lived with it for 27 years.
I know that smile.
I’m writing this book because I want people to understand what grief does, and maybe how to cope with it. I’m no expert – Tanya only died in the last year, and I’m still trying to find my way through the heavy, dark, painful rain that seems to fall every single day, even in sunny southern California. I hope I never become an expert to be honest; it’s too hard. But I’m learning to deal with it the best I can.
The nights are really tough, I’ll tell you that for nothing. I can keep myself busy through the days – I’m acting, and making movies, and doing deals, and appearances, and singing on The X Factor, and playing golf, and hanging out with Tans’ daughter, Kaley, and seeing my friends and family back in the UK.
Kaley is buying a house with her partner, and that’s been a great distraction. When Kaley moves into that house, I know I can look up and feel Tans’ loving smile – I know how she’s going to react; it was one of the things she most wanted at the end, for Kaley and her partner to be settled in their own place.
But the nights … that’s when the loneliness hits hardest. I think of all the times we’d snuggle down to watch the telly, holding hands, going over the day, laughing at something someone said – those secret moments that make a relationship. No one can ever know what happens between two people, not really, and no one can know because no one can truly understand what happens in those private, intimate moments – two friends lying next to each other, being honest, being vulnerable, being gentle, being happy. Not having that any more … the pain is like a fire you don’t want to touch, or even get too close to.
Twenty years ago, Tans wrote in a diary about how strange it is to spend your whole life waiting to meet someone special, and how when you do finally find them, you’re happy, but then you can end up living apart. She was talking about me spending time in the States when my acting career took off but I re-read those words now and think she might have had some kind of premonition.
In fact, we both faced the prospect of being apart all through our relationship. That’s because in 1987, Tanya’s heart had collapsed as she g
ave birth to Kaley which meant she’d had to have a heart transplant, so we were never sure how long she had to live.
But her heart was fine, right up to the end. It pumped, yes, but it was also full of love and laughter and kindness.
I think about her heart every morning when I wake up. I’m up every day at half past five; boom, let’s go. The first thing I do is make my bed – I get up and I make the bed – and I hadn’t done that in 27 years, I’m embarrassed to admit. I decided to do that because, just after we lost Tans, I happened to watch a graduation speech given at the University of Texas by a guy called William H. McRaven, who is a retired United States Navy four-star admiral – a tough fella who oversaw the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Phillips from the Somali pirates, and the killing of bin Laden. So, he’s not exactly a pussy cat, this fella, but with all that experience, what was the first thing he said? You might imagine it was something about being brave or standing up for what you believe in or whatever. Well, it wasn’t any of that – instead, it was, ‘If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.’ Because it doesn’t matter how bad your day is going to be, as McRaven put it, ‘If by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made.’ So, if it was good enough for the guy whose forces threw bin Laden into the North Arabian Sea, it was good enough for me.
As I’m doing my hospital corners, I have a little chat with Tans and make sure it’s alright. That’s how I start the day off: I make the bed, and I have a chat with her. Every single day. I say to her, ‘Let’s do this today, Tans,’ or, ‘I’m going to do that.’ I even check with her about my bed-making skills – I’ll say, ‘Is the bed alright? Hold on a minute. I didn’t do that bit like I should have!’ and I have a bit of a giggle with her. We laugh every day. And I’ve gotten really good at making a bed.
I have these conversations in my mind, mostly, but some days, I say these things out loud, into the air, where she is.
And then the day is on – I crash through it, keeping busy.
Tans keeps me strong, and the memory of her love has helped me realize important things, like you’ve got to keep getting out there for other people who are struggling. Whenever you think you’ve got a problem, there’s always someone around the corner in more trouble. That’s why you have to talk about what’s happening, and you have to turn to your friends. I’ve got an amazing group of pals, and they’re not celebrity friends, though I have some of those too. But my dearest are the people I grew up with around Watford, Hemel Hempstead, Bedmond, places like that. I’ve met great friends along the way as I’ve travelled to play football and to act and to do my businesses, but it’s that original group that I’ve found myself leaning on the most. They’re the people you turn to; they’re the ones that knew me before Tans, during Tans and will know me forever.
The hardest part to adjust to is that everybody’s life goes on. When you’re facing the biggest tragedy of your life, they’re still going to work, coming back from work, queuing up for Starbucks. The enormity of it all is so heavy. I keep opening the paper and putting on the TV and I can’t believe that she’s still not the lead item on every page, on every broadcast. That disconnect between the personal tragedy and the spinning earth is a really hard one to navigate. I keep thinking of that poem that John Hannah reads in Four Weddings and a Funeral (Tans loved it), the one that goes, ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’.
That’s exactly how it feels, when someone dies, someone you’ve lived with for half of your life. You can’t believe time continues; you can’t understand why people are just walking down the street doing their usual things. Sometimes I want to stop people as they pass and shake them awake and tell them that the worst possible thing has happened … and then I remember that it only feels that way to me, and Kaley, and Tans’ parents and brother, and her closest friends.
So somehow you have to turn these negatives into positives so you can move forward in life and not be swallowed up by the great whale that is grief. Tans told us before she died that she’d be waiting for us and I truly believe that; for me, that’s a great positive, a thought that I cling to. The idea that I’ll see her again is something so powerful that I find myself looking forward to it; not in a morbid way, but in a way that gives me a little spring in my step; just a little spring, but I’ll take it. I think that’s the best way to deal with it.
Tans said that the beautiful thing for her was waking up with me. I know there’s times I was a bugger, but Tans felt safe with me – whatever problems came up, I could deal with them; we dealt with them together.
Until a final meeting in a room in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where I couldn’t fix the problems any longer.
I realize our time on this planet – everyone’s time – is minute compared to the vast sweep of human history. We’re just a blip, a tiny accident of mathematics. Some brilliant scientist said that if you calculated the chances of your ancestors meeting and having kids, and then all the way down to your parents – and don’t forget they have to meet, and the right egg and the right sperm have to get together, and all that – well, the chances it’ll happen, expressed as a number, is basically zero. This doctor – Dr Ali Binazir – said:
[The chances of one person existing] is the probability of two million people getting together each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice and they all come up with the exact same number – for example, 550,343,279,001. A miracle is an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible. Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are.
Now, add on top of that the impossibility that is one Vinnie and one Tans, and they have to meet, and lose contact, and meet again, and lose contact, and end up moving in next door to each other, and get married … Well, I’m proud to say that we did live like it was a miracle.
But it wasn’t because of maths; it had nothing to do with science of DNA or any of that. It was just a miracle, a throw of a big dice that came up showing a six every single minute of every single day.
Tans spent hundreds of nights in hospital beds, but she never spent one on her own. Not one. I was there every single night. She was in intensive care a lot, but she never woke up to find me gone. That’s why I believe she’s with me now, all the time; she will never leave my side, so I never wake up alone, either.
Except, I wake up alone every day.
Someone asked me recently who was looking after me, now that Tans is gone.
I said, ‘The power of her love, that’s what looks after me.’
But for all the making of the beds and crashing through the days and keeping busy, deep down this is what it feels like: I’m underwater; I can’t tell if I’m a few inches below the surface, or five feet, or a thousand metres, or one hundred miles. It is not dark. There is sunlight streaming down, but I have no buoyancy and I can’t get myself to the air. I reach my hand up towards the light, but it never quite reaches; I never manage to break the surface.
I feel like the bed covers are 40 feet deep on top of me …
I guess this means I’m drowning. This is it, then. You can’t hear, you can’t have conversations – sound is all numbed out, muffled.
All the struggle and fame and fights and matches and films and drinks and premieres and interviews and Big Brother and X Factor and my childhood and nights in the cells and Aaron and Kaley and my mum and dad and Tans … all of it, slipping away as the water surrounds me. It doesn’t matter that I played football, it doesn’t matter that I got famous, it doesn’t matter that I was in a hundred movies, it doesn’t matter, none of it matters. I can’t breathe. I keep my hand up like a fucking useless Statue of Liberty, even though I’m alone and no one can help me and the water’s getting deeper and colder and I’m falling and I’m drowning …
And every time, every fucking time it happened, when I’d given up and the water was seeping into my lungs and I was falling further and further, it was then that a hand broke through the surface of the water
– was it a few feet above me, or miles, I couldn’t tell? – and reached down to grab me. The grip was firm, but kind; the hand first grasped my wrist so that I was safe, then it slipped into my hand, fingers entwined, the softest, most beautiful feeling you can imagine, soft skin but safe, making me safe, and the hand would pull, pulling me up towards the light, up towards air.
It was Tans. It was always Tans. My beautiful, sweet, funny, kind, tough, modest, loving Tanya. When I was at my lowest, or when I had totally fucked up again, or when things had gone so wrong and I’d let everyone down – when I was drowning, she’d always reach down to grab me, pulling me to safety.
You have no idea how it felt … or maybe you do. Maybe you’ve got someone in your life who pulls you out of the deepest waters. I hope you do. I did, for 27 amazing years. Tanya was my lifeguard when I got stupid and swam too deep, or when the black dog of anger threw me into rip tides of rage.
Now, though, when I reach up, no hand ever comes. I have to get out of this alone. I still stretch out my arm, up, up towards the light, hoping that someone will grab me and pull me above the surface. But no. The hand never comes, not anymore. I’m trying not to drown, here.
I’m really trying not to drown.
I’ve told a lot of people through the years that I think Tans was saved with her heart transplant in order to save me. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. What I mean is, there had to be a reason why she survived her heart collapsing, why they found a heart for her (in Germany, of all places), and there had to be a reason we ended up living next door to each other without knowing it – there had to be a reason for all the coincidences. Because it’s such a huge thing, this love we had. I’ve always believed in premonitions and I think there’s something out there that brought us together and kept us together for nearly three decades.
Even how we met – 40 years ago – was a fluke.
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SUN SPORTS SUNDAYS
Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya Page 1
