11
28
th
November.
I went to London yesterday to see Dad. Those last three words are redundant. Why else do I go to London now? Gone are the days when I would travel down on business, expenses paid, to attend a committee meeting or examine a PhD, or to meet a publisher, paying my own fare but getting a bibulous free lunch, with time to spare afterwards to catch a film, see an exhibition, or browse in the Charing Cross Road bookshops before taking the train back home. Nowadays, burrowing underground at King’s Cross, hurtling through the dark wormholes of the Tube, and surfacing again beneath the girdered vault of London Bridge station, I don’t even
see
the West End. The last time I saw it in fact was on July 7th last year when I arrived in London in mid-morning to find the terminus seething with bewildered travellers and the whole city paralysed by what was at first reported as a massive power failure of the Underground, and later as four coordinated bomb attacks. All public transport was suspended. There was no way of either getting across London to see Dad or returning home. I queued for half an hour for a public phone - for once I wished I possessed a mobile, though people who had them were complaining bitterly to each other that the system was overloaded and that they couldn’t get a connection - and having called both Dad and Fred to assure them I was safe, I went for a long walk in an eerily quiet central London.
There were plenty of pedestrians about, especially in the afternoon as offices and shops closed and their employees began their long treks home on foot to far-flung suburbs, but the roads were empty of traffic, apart from the occasional police car or ambulance racing by with lights flashing and sirens redundantly wailing. At that stage nobody knew the extent or nature of the explosions, but there was a general assumption that they were the work of Al Qaeda or some similar group and that the long-awaited sequel to New York’s 9/11 had finally come to London.There was no panic but a stoical, phlegmatic, Blitz-like mood on the streets. An angry, red-faced drunk in a filthy raincoat shouted ‘Fucking Arabs!’ in Leicester Square, but nobody took much notice of him. In John Lewis, the last department store to stay open on Oxford Street, I bought a silver rollerball pen for Fred’s birthday on the almost deserted ground floor with the exclusive assistance of three sales staff. One mentioned that she had been up to the sports department and bought a pair of trainers in which to walk home to her flat in Chiswick. It stuck in my mind as an eminently sensible, pragmatic reaction to the emergency.
All the theatres and big cinemas closed down in the course of the day but the Curzon Soho was open and I passed a couple of hours agreeably there watching an Argentine film,
Bonbon el Perro
, an engaging art-house comedy set in Patagonia, perfect escapist entertainment for the occasion, and subtitled to boot. I found an Italian trattoria in Dean Street defiantly open for business where I had a decent early supper, and walked back up Tottenham Court Road and along the Euston Road to King’s Cross, where a skeleton mainline service had resumed. I was leg-weary but curiously content. It had been a kind of unexpected holiday, a reprieve from the tedious duty of visiting Dad, but most of all I had enjoyed the unaccustomed urban quiet. Paradoxically, being deaf doesn’t make quietness any less attractive, but rather the reverse. Aural experience is made up of quiet, sounds and noise. Quiet is neutral, the stand-by state. Sounds are meaningful, they carry information or they give aesthetic pleasure. Noise is meaningless and ugly. Being deaf converts so much sound into noise that you would rather have quiet - hence the pleasure of walking those traffic-free streets. Terror had temporarily pedestrianised the whole of central London.
Later, as the full horror of the bombings was reported - the terrific force of explosions in the packed, tunnel-trapped rush-hour trains, the darkness, the smoke, the screams, the panic, the severed limbs - my reaction seemed in retrospect frivolous and self-indulgent. For some months, like many others, I avoided using the Tube in London, taking expensive cabs instead; but after a while, again like many others, I returned to it. Irrational, really: the more time that passes without serious incident, the more likely it is that there will be another one, since the underlying causes, Islamist fanaticism, alienated British Muslims, the provocations of Palestine/Israel, Iraq, etc., remain. How can the Tube system ever be made secure? The suicide bomber will always get through. So you place your trust in the enormous odds against being in the wrong carriage of the wrong train at the wrong time. I read recently about a victim of the bomb on the Piccadilly Line train on the 7
th
of July, who happened to be reading her own account, just published in a magazine, of how she had been raped and nearly murdered in July 2002, exactly three years earlier, when Germaine Lindsay, aka Abdullah Shaheed Jamal, blew himself to bits in the same carriage and scarred her for life. What are the odds against that happening, I wonder?
I am late getting to Lime Avenue, but it doesn’t matter because Dad has forgotten I am coming. I have to bang the door-knocker for about five minutes before he opens it, keeping the door on the chain. He stares at me through the gap.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to see you, Dad. We arranged it last Sunday, on the phone.’
‘Oh yes,’ he says quickly, trying to conceal his memory lapse. He shuts the door to remove the chain and opens it wide. ‘Well, come in, then,’ he says tetchily, as if I have been keeping him waiting. He looks more like a down-and-out than ever, his dirt-encrusted tubular tweed trousers drooping on one side where a button securing his braces has come off, and he hasn’t shaved. He leads me into the living room. There is an ominous heap of papers on the open flap of the bureau. ‘I’ve been looking for those savings certificates, but I can’t seem to find them.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you use that filing system I gave you?’ More than a year ago I gave him a cardboard box file with divided compartments labelled ‘Bills’, ‘Bank’, ‘Savings Certificates’, etc., but it stands unused on the floor in a corner of the room, empty apart from a few fliers offering discounts on double glazing and garden furniture.
‘I couldn’t get on with it,’ he says, closing the flap of the bureau and sending a small avalanche of papers sliding into its interior, his preferred filing system. ‘Will you have a cup of coffee?’
‘I’ll make it myself.’
‘Yes, make it yourself, I don’t know how much to put in.’ He means how much of his instant coffee, an economy brand called ‘Instant Coffee’, best taken black with a little sugar. He follows me into the kitchen, which is in a dispiriting state of dirt and disorder. ‘Will you have a cup?’ I ask, searching for one that isn’t cracked or chipped or covered in grease.
‘No thanks, coffee goes right through me.’
‘The usual place for lunch?’
He looks worried. ‘Well I’ve got a bit of cold scrag of lamb left from the weekend, but it’s not enough for two.’
‘No, do you want to go to Sainsbury’s for lunch?’ I say, raising my voice. His face lights up with relief, and he bares his false teeth in a smile. ‘Yeah, that would be nice.’
‘Well, go and have a shave and get changed.’ While he is upstairs I put on a very dirty floral apron that is hanging behind the door, and a pair of yellow rubber gloves, and try to clean up the kitchen a bit, beginning with a stack of soiled dishes on the draining board which I realise belatedly have already been washed up, but not so that you would notice.Then I tackle the work surfaces with a scrubbing brush and some cleaning fluid I find under the sink. I notice a new burn mark next to the stove. I don’t hear Dad coming down the stairs.
‘Have you seen my brown suede shoes, dear?’ he says from the kitchen doorway, behind my back. I turn round, startled by this mode of address, and see his expression change from enquiry to surprise and then disappointment. He is shaven and fully dressed apart from his feet, which are in thick woollen socks. ‘I thought you were Norma,’ he says. ‘In that apron. And the gloves.’
‘Sorry, Dad,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean to . . .’
‘You haven’t seen her, have you?’
‘Mum?’ He nods. ‘Mum’s dead, Dad,’ I say gently. ‘She died thirteen years ago.’
‘Did she? Yes, of course she did. Course she did . . . But I hear her, you know, moving about upstairs when I’m down here. I hear the floorboards creaking. And when I’m upstairs I hear her in the kitchen, washing up.’ He doesn’t appear to regard these experiences as unusual or disturbing - on the contrary, they seem to have relieved his loneliness. I am moved as well as worried by his account.
We take a minicab down to Sainsbury’s. We both have fish and chips with peas in the cafeteria, and when he has finished his pudding, apple pie and ice cream, and seems to be in a good mood, I float the idea of his moving into a residential care home somewhere near us. Immediately the corners of his mouth turn down and he shakes his head emphatically. ‘No, son. Thanks, but no thanks.’
I take out of my pocket a brochure for the most attractive-looking of the homes I have contacted in the last week or so and show it to him, pointing out the pictures of bright, well-furnished bed-sitting rooms with en suite bathrooms, the comfortable lounge, and the dining room with separate tables. ‘You have your main meals cooked for you, but there’s a little hotplate and kettle in the room so you can make your own breakfast and snacks.’
‘How much is all that going to cost?’
‘Never mind that now,’ I say. ‘You could afford it, and if necessary, I’ll make up the difference.’
He looks at the brochure as if trying and failing to imagine himself inhabiting the place it pictured. ‘No, son, it wouldn’t suit me. I like my own home. I know where everything is . . .’
‘You don’t, Dad,’ I say, rather unkindly. ‘You don’t know where your savings certificates are, or your suede shoes. You can’t find anything when you need it.’
‘That’s because I’ve got such a lot of gear. What would I do with all my things in a poky little place like that?’ He prods a picture of a bed-sitting room in the brochure.
‘Well, you’d have to get rid of most of them, obviously.’
‘You mean - chuck ’em away?’ he says indignantly.
‘Sell them, give them to charity, whatever you like. You could take a few bits of furniture that you’re attached to.’
‘Oh, thanks very much!’
I pause for a moment, thinking that I am handling the conversation badly, getting drawn into trivial side issues and antagonising the old man at the same time. ‘I’m worried about you, Dad,’ I say. ‘You might have an accident one day.’
‘What kind of accident?’ he demands.
‘You’ve had some accidents in the kitchen lately, haven’t you? Things burning, I mean.’ His sulky silence is a confession of guilt. ‘You’re not as fit as you used to be.You might fall down the stairs.’
‘How did you know about that?’ he says.
I pounce: ‘You mean you
have
fallen down the stairs? When?’
He looks away shiftily. ‘The other day. It was dark. I thought I was at the bottom, but there was one more step.’
‘That’s because you won’t keep the light on in the hall,’ I say. ‘It’s a false economy.’
‘I didn’t hurt myself, just a bit of a bruise on my hip.’
‘You could’ve hurt yourself badly. Suppose you’d broken your hip - you wouldn’t have been able to get to the phone.’
‘Are you trying to frighten me?’ he whimpers. ‘It’s as bad as watching
Casualty
, listening to you.’ He has an aversion to hospital soaps. I remember him saying once,‘The people who watch
Casualty
must want their flesh crept.’
‘I’m only trying to be realistic, Dad,’ I say. ‘You’re getting to the point where you can’t look after yourself safely any more. Now’s the time to move into sheltered accommodation, before it’s too late. All I ask is that you have a look at this place, when you come up to stay with us at Christmas.’
He shook his head again. ‘Well, I’ll look, son, to please you. But I’m not moving anywhere. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself up north.’
‘It’s not that far north, Dad.’
‘It’s all the same to me. I can’t understand people in your shops when they speak to me. I don’t know the bus routes. I wouldn’t be able to go to Greenwich in the summer and watch the big ships on the river at high tide. And she wouldn’t come there.’ He pushes the brochure across the tabletop towards me. I don’t need to ask whom he meant by ‘she’.
‘All right, Dad,’ I say with a sigh. ‘We’ll drop the subject for now. But think about it.’
When we get up to leave a middle-aged woman at a nearby table smiles at me sympathetically, and as we pass she says, ‘They can be very stubborn at that age, can’t they?’ I notice people at other tables looking at us with interest and amusement, and realise that Dad and I have been talking at the tops of our voices. Leaving the cafeteria feels like walking off a stage.
30
th
November.
I had my first lip-reading class today. The experience evoked dim memories of my first day at primary school, which I joined halfway through the school year because of illness: there was the same sense of being a new boy, uncertain and self-conscious, in a group that was already bonded and familiar with the routine. As Bethany Brooks had intimated in advance, most of the participants, about fifteen of them in all, have been coming regularly for years. They are mostly women, middle-aged or elderly. Bethany herself, known as ‘Beth’, is a buxom, motherly lady of about fifty, I would say, with fluffy white hair, and a round, rosy-cheeked face, who looks like a farmer’s wife in a child’s reading book. She introduced me to the group as ‘Desmond’, and they all smiled and nodded. Everyone is addressed by their first names. ‘Desmond is a retired teacher,’ she said. That was how I had described myself in our correspondence, not wishing to pull rank as a Professor of Linguistics. It was a wise move.