Romany and Tom
Authors: Ben Watt
For Jennie
Contents
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.
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.