Authors: Tony Parsons
‘Did you get red?’ he asked me, not turning round.
And I laughed. I saw it, but I didn’t quite believe it.
‘What are you doing?’
He carefully squirted blue ink over a stack of bagels. ‘All this stuff is past its sell-by date,’ he said, as if that was any kind of explanation. ‘But we can’t just throw away food.’ Squirt, squirt. A few almond croissants went to meet their maker. ‘People might take it out of the bins.’
I shook my head in disgust. ‘What? You mean hungry people? Poor people? Homeless people? People like that?’
‘Any kind of people. People who are not actually paying for the stuff.’
‘Yeah, that would be awful, wouldn’t it?’
‘I don’t make the rules.’ He gave a helpless shrug. ‘I know, Dad. It’s a complete waste. But what can I do? It’s company policy.’
‘You’re just obeying orders, right?’
He looked at me and sighed. There was blue paint on his hands.
‘Can’t you sell it at a knock-down price?’ I asked. ‘To customers? Or staff? Or just give it away?’
‘Who should we give it to, Dad?’
‘I don’t know. Some poor bugger who is starving in the
Third World. Some poor bugger who is hungry in Crouch End.’
‘Too complicated,’ he said, squirting blue ink on some chocolate muffins. ‘And probably a violation of health and safety rules. We’d get sued.’
‘It’s not complicated at all,’ I said. I picked up a bagel that he had missed and took a bite out of it. Tasted fine.
‘If you can’t sell this food, then let’s work out how we can get it to people who are hungry. I mean it, Rufus. This is madness.’
He wearily ran a hand across his forehead. ‘Just doing my job, Dad. What else can I do?’
‘Refuse to do it,’ I said. ‘Make a stand.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’m too busy making a living.’ He handed his spray can to a small girl in a Muslim headdress. ‘Finish this off for me, will you, Sophia?’
I watched him unrolling his shirt sleeves, putting on his jacket, taking his tie back out. I didn’t want to fight with him. I wanted anything but that. Still I needed him to tell me that he understood. This was all wrong.
‘A mad world, isn’t it?’ I said, as we went back out through the plastic flaps. ‘Half the planet going hungry, and the other half squirting raisin pancakes with blue ink.’
He didn’t look at me. ‘I just work here,’ he said.
Nancy and her son lived in a two-bedroom flat in Finsbury Park, one of those crumbling Victorian buildings where the welcome mat is hidden under takeaway menus, junk mail and letters for tenants long gone. Music seemed to be coming from a dozen places at once. The smell of yesterday’s kebab hung in the air. A tube train rattled from somewhere deep below the building. Lara had told me that Rufus was spending
more and more time here. It was as though he had already moved out.
As soon as Rufus let us into the first-floor flat it was clear that there was a problem with Nancy. She didn’t want to be kissed by Rufus and mumbled a reluctant hello to me, although she claimed my bottle of wine quick enough. She said she had been expecting us earlier and the takeaway pizza she’d had delivered was already cold. As she moved away with little Alfie buzzing around her bare legs, demanding pizza and attention, Rufus placed an apologetic kiss on the back of her head and I saw the swell of her belly.
Alfie was laughing with joy. And I could not take my eyes from my son, who was grinning at me, as pleased with himself as the cat who brings home a half-dead sparrow. I wanted to grab him and escape from Finsbury Park, run down the stairs and jump on the back of the first bus to anywhere, and reclaim his life, and spare him from the next fifty years.
But I didn’t.
I just looked at my boy and I wanted to weep.
Again my eyes drifted to his hair. He really seemed to be losing it, that thick yellow hair that had been shorn in the interests of company policy. His hairline was already receding faster than his dreams. Or perhaps he had different dreams now.
But it wasn’t possible. I was seeing things. I had to be. My son losing his hair, his older girlfriend getting pregnant. This couldn’t happen yet. It was all too soon. I was seeing into the future. This was how things would be, if I failed to act. Then a chicken nugget hit me right between the eyes. And I wondered why I hadn’t seen that coming.
Nancy, the homemaker, was in the coffin-sized kitchen, sawing up the takeaway pizza as her brat whined under her
feet. Beyond the prettiness, she was such an ordinary thing, such a graceless, short-tempered lump, and so totally unworthy of my smart, beautiful, funny, stupid boy.
‘You could have any woman you want,’ I said.
He was laying the cutlery on a miserable little table.
‘Don’t try to live your life through me,’ he said. ‘Just because you’ve messed up your own.’
‘Why not? Isn’t that what every parent does? Oh, Rufus – you could have had anyone…’
He looked up at me, a Disneyland knife and fork in his hand.
‘I want her,’ he said. ‘I want Nancy. Can’t you be happy for me?’
I glanced towards the kitchen.
‘Don’t think so,’ I said.
I took my place at the dining-room table, and it was like sinking into a shallow grave. Alfie joined us, his filthy fingers falling on the pizza like vultures on roadkill. More chicken nuggets flew through the air, as thick as arrows at Agincourt.
‘Oh, don’t you bloody start,’ Nancy told him.
It was her wisest advice. Don’t start. She staggered around the rickety table, glumly parcelling out the Texas BBQ pizza, the slices of pepperoni curled with time, and she glared at the child as if she was already weighed down by the next one. ‘Don’t start!’ she cried.
Too late, I thought.
The first thing you noticed about the prison were the women and children. Hordes of them. Teenage mums with babes in arms and middle-aged mums with teenagers hauled from school to pay a visit to their father. And then there were the
mums in the middle, neither young nor old, but already trailing children who were almost fully grown and ready to have children of their own. In their arms they carried packets of cigarettes and biscuits. The guards lumbered around them, as patient as shepherds.
I had been to prisons. Lots of them. But I had never had to join the queue before. I had never been processed. I had always been let inside with the wave of a card and a smile. I had never passed through all the checks, and felt the doors closing behind me, and time drag, and the walls closing in. By the time I made it to the visiting room, he was waiting for me, ready to talk, knowing long before me that we would only be doing this once.
‘We didn’t know our mum,’ he said. ‘She went. She walked. Too much for her. Never any money because our old man liked the horses. Another man, maybe. I don’t know. But our dad, he looked after us. All of us. Four boys and six girls with just our dad looking after us. That was unusual back then. Still is, I suppose. And then he died. Our dad. At thirty-nine. Heart attack. Just conked out in a betting shop, collecting his winnings. I used to think that was quite old. Not a bad innings. But as I get older, I see that it was no age at all.’ Then he laughed. ‘But you want to talk about Frank.’
He handed me a photograph. A good-looking young man giving the thumbs up. He looked like he was at a party, a bit drunk, but happy.
His brother grinned at me. Frank grinned at me.
We meet at last, I thought.
‘We were too young to look after ourselves. Frank was the oldest and he was only thirteen. And so we went into care. And I know you hear a lot of stories about care, and
I reckon most of them are true, but it wasn’t like that for us. Because we had each other. And we had my brother.’
‘Your brother,’ I said, ‘Frank – he did this incredible thing. He saved so many lives.’ I held up the photograph. ‘Can I keep this?’
‘No,’ he said, taking it back. I watched him slip it inside his shirt and waited. He looked around the visiting room and sighed.
‘Our dad was a smoker,’ he said. ‘And a drinker. And I reckon his diet tended towards the unhealthy end of British cuisine, know what I mean? And his heart was not so good. But – here’s the thing – they reckon he would have made it if there had been a donor. I don’t know. Maybe it’s true. That’s what my brother always said. But that’s why he had the card – the little blue card with the red heart.’
I wanted to know about Frank’s family. I thought perhaps I could help them in some way. Or at least tell them that I would always be grateful. And the brother told me there was a woman and a baby somewhere, but he wasn’t interested in that, or he didn’t care.
Yet he wanted me to understand.
‘My brother – he was a rogue. A thief. Frank was a very bad boy indeed. But he took care of us. And that would have been enough for me. But then he did this one good thing for other people, people he would never know, and it made up for all the bad stuff. He found it in himself – because of our old man, because of this father he had to honour – to do this one good thing for other people. My brother – he was a kid from care. People looked down on him all his life. We got free meals at school – any idea what that’s like?’ His hard eyes glittered at the memory of free school meals, and all the rest. ‘But he did this one
good thing – and that makes him a better man than you’ll ever be.’
I nodded, and smiled, and stood up. It was time to join the queue of women and children waiting to be let out. It was time to go home.
‘A better man than both of us,’ I said.
I was waiting for him when he came out of work.
I was loitering by the front doors of the supermarket, ignoring the dirty looks of the store detective, as a lorryload of cheap beer was being unloaded. Bloody cheek, I thought. I don’t want your gnats’-piss lager. I want my son back.
‘Dad,’ Rufus said, and I looked at his shabby suit and his thinning hair and I felt like crying. He looked older than me.
‘Here,’ I said, stuffing the envelope in his hand. ‘Just take it and go.’ I gave him a gentle shove. ‘Go tonight. Go now.’
He looked at the envelope in his hand. It said Flight Centre on the front, and there was a drawing of a jumbo taking off into the wild blue yonder. We stepped aside to let a pallet of poor boy’s brew pass by.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘A present,’ I said. ‘A ticket to Bangkok.’ He looked at me. ‘What’s in Bangkok?’
‘Everything,’ I said. ‘Travel. Adventure. Escape.’
‘Why would I want to escape?’
I looked at him to see if he was serious. When I saw that he was, I took him gently by the arm. We began walking to the tube station.
‘The flight is in three hours,’ I said, glancing at my watch. ‘You get the tube to Paddington and then the airport express to Heathrow.’
He stopped, that slow smile spreading across his face. I recognised that unhurried, measured grin. I had been looking at it all his life. He was still my boy. That’s why I couldn’t let him do it. That’s why I couldn’t let him throw it all away. I still recognised him as the child I had loved.
‘I’m not going to Bangkok,’ he said, not moving. ‘There’s nothing in Bangkok for me.’
He held out the Flight Centre envelope. I didn’t take it.
‘There’s life in Bangkok,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to stay in the city. Get a plane to one of the islands. Go up north.’ I began rummaging in my pockets for the remains of my money. ‘I don’t have much,’ I said.
‘I don’t want your money,’ he said, not smiling now. ‘And I don’t want to go to Bangkok or anywhere else. My life is here.’
He pressed the envelope against my chest. I could feel the scar throbbing angrily against it. I took the envelope.
‘What’s wrong with you people?’ I said. ‘I mean – really? What is wrong with you?’
‘Who are you talking about, Dad?’
‘Your mother. Your sister. You. It’s like you’re all – I don’t know – asleep or something.’
He was looking back at the lorry parked outside the supermarket. They were taking in the last of the gnats’-piss on
wooden pallets. Gin alley was stocked for another twenty-four hours. A diesel engine thundered into life.
‘You think I’m asleep, Dad?’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘Not you,’ I said. ‘I think you’re in a coma.’
He looked at me with the sting in his eyes. He was so easy to hurt, that boy. I didn’t know how he was going to last for thirty minutes in the life he was creating for himself, and it broke me up.
‘Just leave me alone,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘I mean it. Stay away from me.’
Then he was gone, and I called his name a couple of times but he didn’t look back. So I took a few quick paces and I threw the ticket to Bangkok at the back of his shabby suit with all my might. It fluttered unwanted into the grey North London gutter. Then I laughed out loud. I had offered him the chance to be in Bangkok tomorrow night with a cold Singha beer in his hand. And what had he chosen instead?
So stupid, I thought.
So stupid, the lot of you.
It was more like a cathedral than a swimming pool.
We stood at what would once have been the shallow end and stared down at the empty pool. The six lanes fell away gently and then suddenly steeply, like an ocean bed, until they would have been higher than a man at the deep end. There was a niche with a small bronze fountain at the shallow end, and on its tiles an engraving of a mermaid cavorting with a couple of dolphins. Winston crouched down and ran a loving hand along the edge of the mermaid’s face.
‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘White Sicilian marble, that is.’ He
stood up and nodded at the walls. ‘Them, too. Those Victorians knew what they were doing.’
The walls curved up to a ceiling full of skylights, and as the sun blazed through the glass and struck the white marble it made the old public baths look like a railway station in heaven. At the deep end, there was some kind of crest on the wall, and a lion and a unicorn held each other as if fighting, or dancing.
‘They built this place in the good old days,’ Winston said. ‘When someone thought the working man should have nice things too.’
A few men in hard hats brushed past us, carrying tools and speaking Polish. We watched them jump into the pool. One of them swung a sledgehammer, and struck the tile, as if testing it. It smashed with a sound like breaking glass. We could hear the rumble of demolition outside, voices raised above the drone of machines.
‘What are they doing with it?’ I said.
Winston laughed. ‘Luxury residential development,’ he said. ‘And without you and me, their cappuccino machines will be underwater by Christmas.’ He slapped me on the back. ‘Know how to find the plumbing ports for the main drain, do you?’
I nodded. ‘You showed me.’
Winston looked pleased. ‘Watch one, do one, teach one,’ he said. ‘Just like doctors.’
He climbed down the ladder into the pool and approached the men with their sledgehammers. The smashed tiles around their boots looked like broken teeth. Winston held up his hands and they stared at him.
‘Not until I say so, friend,’ he said, raising his voice as if it might help with translation.
I went to look for the plumbing ports to the main drain as the place began to fill. Men in suits. Women from the council with clipboards. More builders. They all wore hard hats, apart from us.
Suddenly there was a sound like gunfire and I looked up to see a large crack appear in the far wall. The crack split the crest with the lion and the unicorn down the middle, and they seemed to fall apart, the long dance over as the crack became wider, and then the wall abruptly caved in, kicking up a cloud of ancient dust and making everyone in the room take a step back, covering their faces against the grey cloud. Beyond the broken wall you could see a bulldozer, and daylight, and the men in their hard hats.
And we all stopped what we were doing and just stood watching as the marble wall came down and the new world came crashing in, and I could taste the grit in the back of my throat, and I could feel it in my eyes.
The woman who opened the door was clearly Larry’s mother.
Tall, on the heavy side, with a face that radiated concern and kindness. She stood in the doorway staring at me with my flowers in one hand and my bottle of wine in the other. The thoughtful guest who did not know that dinner had been cancelled. The kids looked over their grandmother’s shoulder, red-eyed from crying.
‘Someone should have called you,’ the old lady said.
Geoff and Paul were standing outside the ward.
We hugged each other awkwardly, the embrace of men who had nothing much in common apart from the man who was inside, lying in a hospital bed.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘They think it’s chronic rejection,’ Geoff said. ‘They don’t know yet.’
‘How long has it been for him?’
‘Five years,’ Paul said.
‘So,’ said Geoff. ‘It’s time.’
I went inside. In the dull light, I could see that Larry was sleeping. So was his wife. Molly was sitting by the bed, holding his hand. There was a plaster on his neck where they had inserted a catheter tube for his latest biopsy. He’d probably had dozens by now, all these procedures to remove another tiny piece of his heart. And now his body, and his borrowed heart, had just had enough.
Molly stirred and looked at me.
‘I’ll sit with him,’ I told her. ‘Go home to your kids for a while.’
And so I sat with my friend. Geoff and Paul joined me, but after an hour or so they drifted off. There is only so much bad tea you can drink, only so much hospital time you can kill. It was right that they went. I was the only one with nobody waiting for me.
Five years, I thought. Then it was time. The coronary arteries carrying blood around the new heart had been thickening and narrowing for years. Larry would have had regular angiography, X-ray examinations of the blood vessels, and he probably even had a good idea that this was about to happen. And Larry was a success story.
He had avoided the skin and lymph gland cancers that come as a side order with many transplants – the onion rings of heart-replacement surgery. He had lived with the drugs. He had even helped others. He had helped me.
What was happening to him now was just something
that was very possible after years of living with a borrowed heart. All the things that can go wrong, I thought. You can’t even think about all the things that can go wrong, else you would go nuts. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
I must have slept because I was suddenly jolted upright by the sound of his voice.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’ve had my time.’
‘Do you want me to give you a slap?’
He laughed. ‘Ever make one of those lists, George? One of those bucket lists?’
‘What’s a bucket list when it’s at home?’
‘A list of all the things you want to do,’ Larry said, ‘before you kick the bucket.’
‘Can’t say I did.’
‘Me neither.’ He was quiet for a bit. I suppose it was late now. We could hear those night sounds of a hospital outside his room. ‘The reason I never made one is that all the stuff I wanted was right in front of me.’ His big face was smiling. ‘You know, the ordinary stuff. To watch my kids grow up. To grow old with my wife. To be a family until my children had families of their own.’
‘No skydiving?’ I said. ‘No climbing Everest? You call that a bucket list?’
He laughed.
‘Enough for me,’ he said, and he arched his back, settled on the bed with a sigh, and I could sense the pain. I asked him if there was anything I could get him.
There was nothing I could get him.
‘Lara?’ he said. ‘The kids?’
‘All fine,’ I said.
And I saw now that I had let them all down. There were
no excuses. I hadn’t been enough of a father, enough of a husband, enough of a man. My wife. My son. My daughter. I had lost them all because I deserved to lose them. I had gone my own way. First as George the cop. And then as George the man in search of life. And it had left me alone. How could I deny that they were all better off without me?
‘Promise me you’ll enjoy every sandwich,’ he said, his eyes closed now.
‘As long as it doesn’t include hospital food,’ I said.
He smiled, and then after a while his breathing changed, and I knew he was sleeping. Not proper sleep. Medicated sleep. Hospital sleep. And I slept too, sitting in the chair by the side of his bed. Another poor imitation of sleep. Junk sleep. But it must have lasted for a few hours, because the next time I bolted awake it was almost morning, with the birds going barmy and light creeping into the room.
I looked at my friend’s face and it seemed set. I swallowed hard, stood up and looked more closely. His face had settled into an expression that I had never seen before, that I had never seen in life.
I reached for the metal box with the button to call the nurse and then suddenly he stirred, moaning from somewhere deep inside his medicated sleep, and I put down the metal box.
There was a dead man in that room. There was a man overwhelmed by the way his life had got away from him. There was a man so marinated in despair that it choked him.
But it wasn’t Larry.
I walked to the far end of the platform and stood with my back pressed against the wall. The first train would be here soon.
It was empty at that end apart from a middle-aged couple. The type of people who walk to the far end of the underground platform to escape the craziness of the city. And who can blame them? Certainly not me, I thought, as I pressed harder against the wall. They watched me out of the corner of their eye for a while and then, as unobtrusively as they could, began to move slowly back down the platform, away from me, and closer to the normal people, and closer to the yellow lights that picked out the destination of the next train.
BAKER STREET – ONE MINUTE, it said.
I took three easy steps and suddenly there I was, right at the edge of the platform, looking down at the furious movement among the black tracks. Rats, I thought, just as the rush of wind and noise came pouring out of the tunnel.
I looked into the darkness but I could see nothing. Yet the noise was getting louder, the wind stronger. My scar began to throb. I swallowed and lifted my gaze from the tracks to the advertising on the far side.
The Best a Man Can Get
, it said, and I realised I never knew what was actually being advertised these days.
The noise in my head got louder. The wind grew stronger. I sensed the awful movement down on the tracks.
And then the phone in my jeans began to vibrate. That was strange. That was impossible. I should have been beyond all signals down here.
And less than an hour later I was at the wheel of the Ford Capri. Trying to get the hang of the manual gearbox as I negotiated the traffic in Hackney.
My mum spotted him. ‘There he is,’ she said, the relief all clogged up with something else, and she began to call his name. And there he was. My father, still in his pyjamas and
dressing gown and slippers, standing outside a Victorian terrace where curious dark faces watched him from a crumbling bay window. I pulled the Capri up behind an overflowing skip and walked up to him.
‘Bertie’s in there,’ he said. ‘I want to see Bertie.’
It was the old house. He got that bit right. I remembered coming here as a kid. Until I was about five, and my grandmother died, and the council took it back.
This was the old neighbourhood, although I could not believe that the old neighbourhood really existed any more. But my dad thought differently. To him, this was still the old neighbourhood. But Bertie was the older brother who had died on a Normandy beach more than sixty years ago, and the faces at the window were laughing at my dad. They were only kids. They didn’t know any better. I would have laughed myself at that age.