Romany and Tom Read online

  For Jennie

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Preface

  We only ever see the second half of our parents’ lives – the downhill part. The golden years we have to piece together. It’s hard to think of our parents as young – or maybe I mean young adults – when everything stretched out in front of them and was possible. The versions of them that we see and judge every day have been shaped by experiences they’ve had, but which we have never known: the times they were hurt; the days they won; the times they compromised. For so much of it, we were simply not there.

  So who are we to judge? Maybe we don’t know them at all. And yet they must be – or were – only ordinary people like ourselves. Or the ones, as their kids, we may become. We all walk on common ground.

  These days, in the age of infinite digital storage, an ordinary life is being documented every second of every day. Lofts and blanket drawers are stuffed full of video and audio cassettes, MiniDiscs, digital audio tapes, hard drives, smart cards and DVDs of all our unviewed photographs and eight-hour wedding receptions. Future generations will get sick of hearing about us.

  But the ones who came just before us have left fewer footprints: a handful of private letters in a hat box; a voice captured on a slowly oxidising crumbling reel to reel; three minutes of a single holiday on a tiny spool of Super 8. They are the disappearing generation. We need to read the things they will eventually throw away, to listen out for the offhand remark and the moments of lucidity. We might even learn something. About them. And ourselves.

  I tell this story from first-hand and second-hand experience: the moments I lived through; the handed-down stories; the photographs and the letters; the rummaging in the attic; a few public archives. It’s a true story, or as true as any of our own stories are.

  It is about my parents. And me.

  Chapter 1

  There he was. I watched him from the doorway. He was in the last of the beds on the left. It was a small ward, just a handful of people, and the air was tangy and sweet with the smell of ointment and iodine. He was sitting up, but collapsed into his pillows. Was he smaller than I remembered? Or was the bed just bigger? In his hands he held the mask of his nebuliser, although the tube had fallen out, and he was trying to fix it. His fingers looked pale, even from the door. Those matchwood fingers. Still perfectly shaped. Don’t wrinkle your brow. Is it so hard? A square peg for a round hole? He looked momentarily boyish. A nurse sped past me. People spoke and coughed. An alarm sounded elsewhere.

  I walked across the room and stood at the foot of his bed. He hadn’t seen me yet. I could hear his breathing now; it was a flimsy wheeze of air; a faint wind whistling through a crack in an upstairs door. His blue pyjama jacket was misbuttoned and stretched open. Beautiful curls of white chest hair showed against the sallow droop of old skin, all soft and furrowed and smooth. An image came to me of marram grass and sand dunes the colour of a lion’s mane; and I pictured empty motor-oil bottles on the tideline, a stretch of beach, salt rime, gulls squabbling by a barnacled breakwater strewn with kelp, blasted shards of bleached timber and the winter sea at Climping in West Sussex where we’d spent some of my childhood weekends in a borrowed cottage.

  His hair was ungroomed; that wasn’t like him. It had lost the pristine shape I’d known from all the years I’d watched him comb it, glossed with Vitalis hair tonic from the glass shelf in the bathroom, teased with the steel tines into the low quiff to meet the swept-back sideburns, once folded in with a flat palm, but now roughly cropped with a prison barber’s touch into little blunted badger-hair shaving brushes on either side of his head.

  ‘Hello, old son,’ I said.

  He looked up, surprised. ‘Ben!’ His hands dropped to the bedclothes. His small green eyes stopped straining and caught the light, watery and glistening. His face was childlike and thrilled. ‘What . . . how did you know I was here?’

  I felt a spark down in my stomach. I was thrilled he was thrilled. His white sheet was badly stained. Was it blood? ‘Roly told me,’ I said. ‘I wanted to come earlier in the week but I couldn’t, but I am here now. I came on the train.’ I made it sound as if I’d come as quickly as I could, which was a lie; I had in fact been putting it off; several days had passed since he had been admitted. It didn’t seem serious at the beginning, and I’d hoped if I left it a few days it would all blow over, and I wouldn’t have to confront anything. ‘Here, let me help you,’ I said. I sidled round the bed and took the parts of the mask from his hands and slipped the tube back into the collar, fitted the mask to his face and tightened the strap a little. ‘How are you then?’

  He tugged the mask down. ‘Oh Ben, Ben . . .’

  I could sense him groping for words, as if he first had to corner and take hold of each one. ‘You’re OK, though?’ I said.

  ‘You know what . . .’

  I let him pause.

  He swallowed and stared ahead and breathed with his lips open, before turning slightly and grabbing three mouthfuls of air to the side, as a swimmer might, head twisting above the waterline. Each pull was followed by a muffled wheeze. Then the words came: not bitter; no bleeding heart; just matter-of-fact. ‘I’m at the end of my tether.’

  In his voice I heard just a hint of the Glasgow accent he had shrugged off all those years ago when he left home – a fiery and ambitious teenage jazz musician called up by the wartime RAF – and it reminded me of his mother, Jean, my grandma, and how she visited three times a year from Scotland when I was a boy. She flew down on BEA. Her clothes smelled alien. Camphor and talcum powder. I pictured her twin-sets, her thick nylon stockings the colour of strong tea, the sugar-dusted travel sweets in her handbag, how she always spread her marmalade to the very outer edges of her toast; she never used butter; that was far too extravagant. I used to be anxious when she embraced me – the perfumes, the rough weave of her skirt, the powdery down on her face, the sloping shapelessness of her shoulders – but she had a soft button nose and uncomplaining eyes that seemed full of fortitude and kindness. To me anyway.

  I was looking at him. He resembled her so much now, and it struck me how the eloquence of his words had stopped me in my tracks – especially now – especially knowing how the naming of things eluded him, how sentences often had no endings, how faces and things passed through his head like streaks of light and shadow, momentarily recognisable, then gone; especially with him here, in this arbitrary part of England, not really anywhere near somewhere you could call his home, nearing the reckoning, an oxygen mask around his neck.

  I reached out and found myself
laughing and ran my hand across his fine tangled white hair. His scalp was scaly but vulnerable to the touch. There was a moment’s silence, and then he said, ‘And I’ve had enough of fatso over there.’

  The word made him splutter, and I listened to his chest list and heave like a laden ship. But he didn’t seem to care about being overheard; in fact everything he had said had been delivered in the same unstudied tone.

  My eyes flicked up to the bed opposite, where a woman – I guessed late twenties – was lounging absent-mindedly on the sheets. She seemed to be half in and half out of her bed. Her hair was hanging limply in coils around her face in a grown-out perm. She wore a tightly stretched apricot-coloured bed-jacket with the sleeves pulled up to her elbows, and tracky bottoms and compression stockings, and was eating a chocolate digestive from a half-finished torn packet lying on the bedclothes, while a man was sitting in the chair by the bedside, picking something from his ear and rubbing it on the knee of his jeans.

  I looked back at my dad and glared at him. So hard on the wrong kind of strangers. No change there. I glanced around the room. No one appeared to have taken offence. Relieved, I leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Well, it’s nice to see you, old man,’ I said. ‘Roly and Mum should be here soon too.’ I sat next to the bed and patted his leg through the blanket. It felt like a stick. He smiled at me, then I saw his shoulders relax and he rolled his head towards the window. After a few moments his eyes had closed and I could hear small jets of air being exhaled from his nose.

  I got up quietly and walked out into the lobby and tried to catch the eye of one of the nurses on the ward station; they seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact. A junior doctor in chinos was running his eye over a patient’s notes. The desk was a chaotic jumble of files, plastic cups, elastic bands, newspapers, specimen jars, biros.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said.

  One of the nurses looked up.

  I smiled and tried to seem genial yet experienced. ‘Any chance of some info on my dad? I’m his son. He’s “Tommy Watt”. End bed.’

  ‘His nurse’ll be along in a minute.’ She turned away and finished off a story she was sharing with a colleague.

  I loitered for a few moments, reading the washable white board on the wall: Week commencing: Monday 15 May 2006. Below it were the names of the patients in the different beds and basic instructions written in coloured marker pens. A female nurse appeared in a hurry in a disposable white plastic apron. She was clutching an aspiration kit and a clipboard. The woman on the desk nodded towards her as if to say, ‘That’s her.’ I stepped into her path.

  ‘I’m Tommy’s son,’ I said, gesturing to his bed. ‘How is he doing?’

  She stopped and looked at me and sighed heavily and a bit grumpily. ‘Oh, he’s not bad. A bad night. Still a fever.’ Her accent was strong. Filipino? ‘But his chest . . .’ She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘COAD. Very difficult.’

  ‘COAD?’

  ‘Chronic obstructive airways disease.’

  ‘Chronic ob . . . ‘ I started to repeat the words.

  She jumped in. ‘You know what emphysema is?’

  I nodded.

  ‘OK. So, that. And bad bronchitis. Together. Not good. Not good at all.’ She began to move away. ‘And he’s been shouting. Shouting at everyone. You tell him to be nice, will you?’

  I nodded.

  She smiled back thinly, and bustled off.

  I walked back to his bedside. His eyes were open again. For a moment I thought he might have forgotten I’d arrived and express fresh surprise, but he saw me and smiled. I ambled to the window and looked out at the small car park below and watched people coming and going. Two dusty minicabs were dropping off: a red Vauxhall Vectra; an old Orion with no hubcaps. I saw the supportive arm on an elbow, the cautious steps, the overnight bag. Two women were under the glass awning: the older one in leggings and wedge flip-flops; the younger in a dressing gown and podgy animal slippers.

  I heard soft footsteps and the rustle of clothes behind me and turned round. It was Roly, my half-brother. He had my mum on his arm. His cheeks were flushed, his blue eyes congenial, a collared shirt under a dark zip-neck fleece, loose softened jeans, casual cushion-soled shoes. One hand was slipped into his pocket and he wore his vicar’s smile – the one that looks part welcoming, part serene and insular, and if it could speak would say, ‘It’s a funny old life.’ I thought how he’d always had it, even before he was ordained and got his parish, when he was just the family peacemaker. Lately we’ve begun an unexpected alliance – having moved in different orbits for most of our lives, nearly nine years between us, him the older. When things changed for the worse with my mum and dad we took on the role of their guardians, assuming Power of Attorney, talking on the phone, moving their money around, cancelling out-of-date electrical appliance insurance, tracking down ancient standing orders, working out state allowances, getting things ready for the last bit. We’ve got on well. He lives in the neighbouring village to the care home in the countryside north of Bristol where they moved in 2004. A familiar face at a tricky time. Dependable. It has meant a lot.

  ‘All right?’ he said affably, unlinking arms.

  ‘Yes. Easy journey.’

  My mum, eighty-two, approached the bed in her familiar shuffling flat-footed walk. She was wearing a loose-peaked velvet baker boy cap and a limp shower-proof walking jacket. As she saw me she moved her mouth into the shape of a smile, her lips together and stretched wide, making her cheeks and the corners of her eyes crease deeply behind her gold-rimmed glasses. I went towards her and reached out to kiss her. She kept the smile frozen on her face and turned her cheek to greet me. I kissed the warm skin, and pressed her shoulders for a moment. She held the pose as though waiting for a photograph to be snapped.

  ‘Hello, Mum. How are you?

  ‘As good as can be expected, darling.’ Her voice was defensive. Slightly lugubrious.

  We settled around the bed.

  She took my dad’s hand and rubbed her thumb along the back of it in the same way she had done to me fourteen years earlier when I was in hospital in the Intensive Care Unit, and on her face was the same self-absorbed look I had seen all those years ago: half connected and involved; half ready to go home.

  My dad rolled his head to look at her and smiled. There was no detectable rancour. It appeared affectionate. She pulled a slow-motion rueful smile in return, dipping her head to one side then closing both eyes slowly and opening them again at him, as you might at a poorly child. But then a little murmur escaped from her closed mouth accompanied by a barely audible quick out-breath through the nose. I’ve heard it before; it says: ‘Well, look at me, who’d have thought I’d be here in this situation?’ And with it, the tiny moment of tenderness was compromised, and joined by an uneasiness, until it looked more like an evolved tolerance, and on her face was written a faint watermark of disappointment at how it had all turned out.

  What were they like when we were not here? Was there a secret language and code we never saw, the ones that all couples have? Perhaps they had nicknames for each other we’d yet to even hear. Did they deliberately hide affection from us, imagining that it was somehow inappropriate in front of the children – even now – even in front of children who were forty-three-and fifty-two-year old men with children of their own? Or was it just as I saw it then – difficult and altered?

  ‘Oh, look at your sheet. Did no one change it?’ she said, looking at the dark stain.

  ‘It’s coffee,’ he said.

  Relief. Not blood then.

  She stood and tugged at the sheet and thought about straightening it, but then looked uncomfortable and gave up.

  ‘Would anyone like to see some pictures of the kids?’ I said brightly.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said my dad enthusiastically, responding to the change in atmosphere.

  I reached into my bag and pulled out my laptop. ‘I have them on screen.’ I put the laptop at the
foot of the bed for a moment. ‘Let me hitch you up so you can see, Dad.’ I slipped my arms under his shoulders. The distance between his pyjamas and his body was further than I was expecting. His frame felt brittle. I remembered a day I had to pick up a dead blackbird from the lawn and how light it had seemed. He grimaced as I straightened him up. ‘There we go,’ I said.

  I picked up the laptop, flipped it open and sat it on his lap.

  ‘Is it a television?’ my mum said.

  ‘No, a computer, Mum, with photographs stored in it,’ I said.

  ‘Really. What will they think of next?’

  There was something odd in the tone of her voice. Was she joking? It was as though she had said it because that’s what she thought an eighty-two-year-old woman should say, or had said it like that for my dad’s benefit, and actually knew exactly what it was. Or perhaps it was just as it sounded: all a mystery. I thought how even now I still found her hard to read.

  I opened the folder with the photos in it and brought them up on to the screen. I chose a picture of Tracey to begin with.

  ‘Ahhhh . . .’ my dad said. ‘Tracey.’

  His voice lingered on her name for a moment. It is strange to think how fond of her he became. I can remember when I first took her home and thrust her into the domestic cauldron of my late teens. It would have been 1982. My dad, then fifty-six, cooked that night. Lamb and potatoes were ceremonially roasted to near-dehydration point in the oven. Vegetables – three kinds – were heavily boiled then coated in a thick cheese sauce in separate dishes. He had been in the kitchen, as was his routine, since 5.30, ‘preparing supper’. This meant some basic food preparation – in other words, peeling a few carrots – but was mainly an excuse for a string of large gin and tonics on his own to the accompaniment of jazz on the small red JVC radio-cassette player on the oak bureau. Zoot Sims, Toots Thielemans or Stan Getz were long-standing favourites. Wisps of introspective tenor saxophone and harmonica would drift under the kitchen door accompanied by the odd clanging saucepan lid. He could be a good cook but overcooked everything when he drank. By 7.30 he was usually well-oiled and ready for a confrontation. Just back from university for an end-of-term holiday we sat down for our first meal all together and he rounded on her at the narrow yellow-laminate kitchen table, and slurred a vintage opening salvo: ‘So, Tracey, how long have you been a socialist?’