Authors: Ben Watt
‘Finches love the hedgerow and the crops,’ she said. ‘We might see linnets and buntings this week too.’
The old small church was at the top of the rise. I half looked at it, half hid my eyes. It was frightening and beautiful. We’d walked there once in winter when the track was as hard as bones, flecked with snow, and the fields were empty, in a huffling wind, and I wouldn’t look up. The bell-tower was black in my imagination. And then my mum had taken me to the graveyard wall and
made
me look, and when I opened my eyes the ground was a carpet of glistening frosted snowdrops and it was like something from a fairy story.
The cottage where we stayed smelled of woodsmoke and books. The front door opened directly into the small living room. There was no central heating. The downstairs was heated only by a small open fire. The staircase to the two bedrooms above and the short passage to the kitchen had latched doors to stop the draughts. When they creaked it made me want to hide my head under the bedclothes. The passage to the kitchen was piled high with old newspapers. Dried mud clung to the coir matting. At mealtimes we huddled round the kitchen table under a huge poster of a snowy owl with yellow shining eyes with yet more newspapers piled up beside us. Often it was so cold the steam from the food looked like smoke.
Two steps down from the kitchen was a bedroom with more books and pictures of clowns on the wall, and I wasn’t allowed to play in there, as the man who lived in the cottage most of the time had ‘his things’ in there.
Upstairs there was a bedroom for grown-ups above the sitting room with a double bed, and another room with bunk beds and orange nylon sleeping bags, where I slept beside a smelly paraffin heater. The cold bathroom had a dark cupboard full of cobwebs and a tank full of water that spluttered and groaned. I used to scare myself by opening it and leaning inside.
Outside the back door there were three small gardens, interlinked by high hedges with fat shiny leaves. It was all unkempt and overgrown and gave me itchy legs. There was a knotted and crinkly fruit tree that hurt my knees if I tried to climb it, and tall grasses grew at the back. (‘Don’t go in there. There are tigers.’)
If you scraped away the undergrowth you could find big iron rings embedded in the ground. My dad told me they were ‘Sinbad’s buried treasure’ and that he had landed at Climping and dragged his haul of jewels to the garden and buried it, but no one had had the strength to prise it out, and I tried not to believe him, but I wanted to, and it was only when my mum told me the place used to be a blacksmith’s forge and the rings were for the horses that I stopped looking at them, and was annoyed at my dad for lying to me.
In the furthest garden was an outbuilding, a small barn. Downstairs had been made into two bedrooms and my half-brothers sometimes slept in there. My eldest half-brother, Simon, was eighteen by then and had one of the rooms to himself and burned sandalwood joss sticks and played Roy Harper and Beach Boys records. He had cut out the face and shoulders of Roy Orbison from the front of a vinyl record sleeve and pinned it to the window ledge, and made a small hole where his mouth was and would dangle a lit joss stick from Roy Orbison’s lips. I thought it was a dangerous thing to do but also strange and lovely – like the altar at the end of a church where the cross stands. Simon used to walk across the fields on his own to the church some days and play songs on the organ when no one was there.
Above the bedrooms was a huge dark loft full of long strips and sheets of polystyrene; I never knew why they were up there. A rusted iron ladder was propped up outside against the gabled end, half hidden in an unruly thorny pyracantha bush. It scratched my legs, but I could get to the top and swing the loft door open, and turn round and sit in the doorway, and look out over the wheat field where I walked with my mum.
‘Who owns this cottage?’ I would say to her. I often asked the same question several times if I felt the answer I got the first time didn’t make sense, or to test whether I would get the same answer twice, and therefore it was more likely to be true.
‘Uncle Ken rents it from a nice man in the village.’
‘And who is “Uncle Ken” again?’
‘He is your brothers’ and sister’s father. And I was married to him once.’
‘Why aren’t you married to him now?’
‘Because I am married to your father.’
‘Is he your brother?’
‘No.’
‘Then why is he called
Uncle
Ken?’
‘We just call him that, darling.’
‘Why does Simon light joss sticks?’
‘It’s his room and he can do what he likes. Now run along.’
I think being unsure of Ken’s identity made the cottage even more special and secret.
We walked on slowly. The pavement was uneven. Padlocked to a lamp-post was a bicycle frame with no wheels. A police siren wailed near by and I felt my mum flinch. I filled the moments with chatter about the kids.
At the traffic lights she said suddenly, ‘Do you think I could have him back?’
I watched a plane disappear behind a cloud. For a moment I couldn’t think what she was talking about and then realised she meant my dad. ‘What makes you say that?’ I said.
‘He makes such a fuss now when I leave. I can’t bear it.’
I thought of them without me there at the care home: just a couple; still the little shifts in dominance; moments of beseeching; the things we do and the roles we play when we are sure no one is watching. ‘And how will you cope?’
‘Like I always have done, dear.’
We stood at the crossroads. I watched a car slow down, climb up on to the raised speed-table, then ease itself down the other side. I wondered how it was having to ask your children for help, knowing that some things can no longer be done without them – lifting things, organising things. Was it a little degrading, having to wait on the authorisation of someone who once relied on you so completely? As the traffic lights changed I asked myself if all this was easier in other people’s lives –
these
people, the ones in front of me in their cars criss-crossing in a matrix of dropping off, picking up, going home, leaving town. Was it the same for everyone? Life as a slow journey of negotiations. Back and forth. I pictured my mum and dad back at the flat. It was not much more than a year since they’d first moved in. I saw myself unpacking their things, making it nice, mapping it out, feeling I could make a difference. And suddenly I was conscious that I might make
no
difference, that I could help them
do
something but not influence its outcome, as if I had simply been invited in to view it all at close quarters, made to witness something, and it was going to unfold inexorably, whether I liked it or not, whatever I said, and it was something I just had to get through.
On a busy stretch of the Finchley Road, a few doors down from the Secrets table- and pole-dancing club, and the Thai Siam health and beauty bar, stands a large boarded-up sports bar called the 3one7. It was once a three-storey Victorian pub called the Carney Arms and at weekends – before it folded in the wake of an under-age drinking scandal – it doubled as a pre-club evening nightspot with DJs playing funky ‘sexy’ house music for buff lads on the pull, and girls on their way ‘up West’. There were pool tables and big-screen broadcasts, although during the week most of the sixteen satellite TV screens scattered around the venue were blank, the upstairs and basement roped off, and the clientele corralled on the ground floor in the mid-afternoons would change to companionless off-shift waiters on their way to the bookie’s and a few unaccompanied professional drinkers. It was here, on a January lunchtime in 2003, that my dad, accompanied by a blind man and a chef – both from the same care home where he was staying – escaped for a celebratory drink to mark the new year.
The exit doors at the care home needed a manually entered key-code before they would open on to a narrow brick driveway set back about ten feet from the pavement. My dad didn’t know the code and I don’t suppose the blind man did, but I’m sure the chef could do it in his sleep. The section of the Finchley Road outside the door is a ‘red route’: double red lines; no stopping at any time. The noise can be quite startling when it’s busy: four car lanes and two bus lanes of delivery lorries, skip-hire trucks, double-deckers, cars, coaches and white transits all jostling like jockeys in the final furlong for that extra yard of space.
The 3one7 is about two hundred yards away from the care home. It sounds near, but my dad, with his bad lungs, had been finding a short walk up and down the corridor was about enough most mornings; not only that, but the bar is situated on the other side of the road, across a box junction and a couple of pot-holes, where the pelican crossings need smart decision-making once the pedestrian signal flashes green.
By the time the three of them arrived, my dad was gulping for air. He made it through the front door, took a few tottering steps and then collapsed on the carpet.
You might have thought that at this point the chef – an employee at a care home, after all – would have realised how reckless he had been and sprinted back for help, but no; instead, he and a member of the bar staff propped my dad up against a fruit machine, and gave him a glass of whisky to revive him. The effect on his brain, already dangerously short of oxygen, must have been nothing short of psychedelic, but – more by luck than judgement – his heart didn’t stop, and they got him upright and seated on a bar stool. My dad, to his credit, composed himself and got his breath back. Everyone cracked a couple of jokes, and then, quite remarkably, they all got to the front door and somehow managed to walk back.
I suppose you have to have some sympathy for my dad. As a persistent drinker he must have found the enforced sobriety at the care home – unless you count the evening sherry – hard to bear. The drop in blood-alcohol levels must, at the very least, have brought on mild withdrawal symptoms and cravings, and with no emergency sugar substitutes readily to hand – the Coca-Cola, the bars of chocolate, the dried fruit – it must have all got too much, especially when a young companionable chef was rolling back the years before him.
Of course when I found out I confronted the care home and expressed my outrage in the strongest possible terms, and there were unstinting apologies, but apart from moving him somewhere else – which in itself would have been even more disruptive for him – I realised there was little else I could do; I had no legal charge over him; he was still a grown-up; the care home had adequate security measures in place on the front door, which were circumvented in extremely unusual circumstances; and I could no more control events than I could stop him going back to bed all day. Perhaps I should have insisted on the che
f
’s dismissal, but that seemed overly hysterical, and anyway I considered that was up to them.
When it all blew over I realised I actually secretly admired my dad for the sheer audacity of his escape; and it occurred to me that I had felt many things for him over the years – admiration, respect, anger, disdain – but overarching all of it was a long indecipherable allegiance.
‘So you tunnelled out then?’ I said to him a few days later. We were sitting in the lobby of the care home just inside the doors to the outside world.
‘What?’
‘You and the chef. The bid for freedom.’ I nodded towards the doors.
‘Do you know the chef as well?’ he said, looking at me as though we’d found a mutual acquaintance. ‘Nice fella.’
I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately avoiding the subject or had clean forgotten. ‘No, not personally,’ I said.
‘Good sense of humour.’
That was the stamp of approval. I remembered coming home from school one day and riding my bike down to the shed at the end of the alley and seeing a huge extendable ladder propped up against the back of the house. At the top of the ladder – which was flexing under the weight – and about six feet below the guttering, almost on the top rung, was a man. He must have been about thirty or forty feet off the ground. But what made me gasp was the fact that
another
man was standing on his shoulders and reaching up
over
the guttering. They seemed unfeasibly high – as if performing a reckless circus trick. My dad was at the bottom looking up. I’m not sure if he was meant to be helping to stabilise the ladder, but he was leaning on it nonchalantly with one hand, smoking. He saw me and gestured to the spectacle above. ‘That’ll be our Chris Kerrigan up there,’ he said. ‘Fine roofer. Good sense of humour.’
I smiled at him sitting there, his hands mottled and creased, planted on his knees, the rumble of traffic kept at bay by the glass doors. ‘Glad to hear it. You’re getting on all right then?’
‘You’ve got to get me out of here, Ben, you know,’ he said, turning to me.
‘Why?’
‘I’m not cut out for it.’
I tried to think of an answer. I knew if I answered firmly and logically he would accept it, as the deferral of power was in place, and I was now in charge, but before I could find the words he carried on.
‘They’ve asked me to play the piano, you know.’
It seemed unlikely. He hadn’t played for years. I looked at his stiff white fingers. Was he imagining it? Had he been telling jazz stories to impress them? ‘That’s nice of them,’ I said, for want of anything better to say.