Kid Gloves (18 page)

This was fascinating and alarming. It made
psychological sense for stutterers to take control in this way. If there is a link between shame
and stuttering, what could be more empowering than seeking out the humiliation you have always
feared? I don't mean that shame is the origin of the behaviour but that it becomes an
inextricable part of it. Having provoked rejection under controlled conditions, you can come to
realize that it's not so unbearable, and take some of the pressure off a self-reinforcing
pattern.

On the other hand there were elements in the
programme reminiscent of minority politics, of twelve-step groups, and, most obviously, of
cults. To stop passing as fluent, to start insisting on your imperfect articulation, seemed to
be some sort of speech-therapy equivalent of coming out of the closet. Yet the notion of the
‘recovering stutterer', endorsed by McGuire, seemed to describe stuttering as an addiction. It
was hard to see that a stutterer who ‘relapses', when unable to consolidate the progress made
with the group, was in the same existential boat as the alcoholic unable to stay sober without
the safety net of the meetings and the emergency parachute of the sponsor. Did the stutterer
have to accept the fact of helplessness as a precondition for recovery?

I even thought there was something rather ominous
about the phrase ‘the road to freedom' – it seemed to say there was only one. Still, I enjoyed
having conversations on a subject so far outside my experience. Damon maintained direct eye
contact while he spoke, which was particularly disconcerting when he was telling me about the
unbroken eye contact which was a requirement of McGuire Programme meetings. It was only
when I was tactless enough to ask if the sessions were expensive that he
moved his gaze away.

One day he took a further step in his shy
boldness, asking me if I could recommend a gay bar for him to visit, since he was ‘bi-curious'.
Inevitably I had preened a bit about the way I could balance divergent impulses, filial, sexual,
paternal, as if I was Blondin coolly cooking an omelette on a rope above the Niagara Falls, when
my little balancing trick was only over the Serpentine. I pointed out that I wasn't much of a
bar-goer, and that he should consult a listings magazine, but he was very keen on a personal
recommendation. What he wanted was a bar that was 100 per cent gay, so that everyone in the
whole place except him had a fixed sexual identity. Only then could he satisfy his bi-curiosity
in safety, conceivably even setting his feet on another road to freedom.

Almost from his first visit I had encouraged
Damon not to be defined by the duties which brought him to the flat. I wanted to reward his
excellence as a carer, but the result was that his excellence was eaten away by the rewards I
devised for it.

There was the day when after Dad's shower was
finished Damon popped his head into the kitchen and asked, ‘Any chance of some fresh squeezed
orange juice?' There was every chance, as long as I got busy and squeezed some oranges. I might
not have been made uneasy by the request for juice, but I certainly was by his stipulation of
the process.

And there was the day when he popped into the
kitchen to ask a personal question before finishing his tasks. After about a minute I became
aware of the creaking noise as Dad shifted his weight on the Zimmer frame, and realized that
Damon had left him in the corridor leading to the bathroom. Having no momentum of his own, Dad
was waiting patiently for the resumption of cues. By this point the personal attention I had
given to Damon had more or less destroyed his professional performance.

Luckily the agency that employed Damon lost its
contract with Camden Council shortly afterwards, so I didn't need to deal with the problem I had
created.

One helper from the Care Alternatives roster who
stayed on to look after Dad in the evenings even after the agency lost the council's contract
was Bamie. Bamie, from Sierra Leone, wasn't tall but was certainly strongly built. Not only did
he think the British had done Sierra Leone a power of good, he claimed that this was the general
opinion of the inhabitants. Imperial guilt is such a reliable reflex, even in those born after
the days of Empire, that I would have suspected a joke if Bamie hadn't been so solemn and
insistent. In some impossible way we were the good guys, and anything that had gone wrong since
we left was a matter of local culpability casting no shadow on our collective honour. Whether he
meant to do it or not, Bamie was chipping away at a fundamental part of modern British identity.

One thing about Bamie which took a little getting
used to was that he called Dad ‘Dad'. At first it seemed possible that he had misunderstood and
thought that this was his client's name in the world, until he explained that in Sierra Leone it
is the polite way of referring to an older male person.

Though in his North Wales childhood an awareness
of racial diversity went no further than the admission that South Waleans might be human, Dad
soon became used to Bamie. But the first time this muscular black man, not only black but
somehow monumentally black, his skin tone very dark, his eyes flashing, used the form of address
‘Dad' while tucking him into bed, Dad's own eyes went very wide and he sent them wonderingly
over towards me, seeming to signal
Something I've forgotten?
I was able to reassure him
that his bloodline hadn't
taken a strange turn by saying, ‘Dad, you
remember Bamie, he comes to look after you …' Holly, though, never really got used to
being referred to in his darkly growling voice as ‘Aunty Olly', aunty being the respectful form
of address in Sierra Leone for female persons of whatever age.

Bamie was proud of his wife and toddler son, but
it was only in his dealings with Dad that I could see his tenderness. He was a Christian, much
involved in the activities of his church, yet to my eyes his strongest underlying characteristic
was anger. In conversation he was very big on Matthew 10:34 (‘I came not to send peace, but a
sword'), less mindful of Matthew 5:39 (turning the other cheek). It might be from a different
gospel or a different religion.

When his church went on pilgrimage to Walsingham,
it was Bamie who drove the bus. But on the way back into London after they had paid their homage
to the Virgin, Bamie came very close to an incident of road rage when another driver tried to
cut in ahead of him. What stayed with him from the day was not serenity.

I enjoyed discussing religion with Bamie in the
sitting-room of the Gray's Inn flat, while Dad turned his face from one of us to the other in
low-level surprise, though I had a definite feeling of playing with fire. Riding in the bus with
Bamie might well be exhilarating, trying to nose out into traffic ahead of him would certainly
not be.

I invited him to consider that he liked the bits
of Christ which were like himself, but had no time for the bits of Christ which were unlike
Bamie. Debate wasn't his natural element, but he maintained his position forcefully, with
quotation, repetition and the occasional rhetorical question.

Did I mention to Bamie during our chats that my
private life was not as standard as was implied by the occasional presence on the premises of
that miniature aunty, my daughter? I
did not. This was feeble, though I
could tell myself that I had no business preaching a gospel of sexual non-conformity if the
result might be to upset the crucial aspect of the arrangement, namely the smooth bond between
Dad and his carer. This was a truth but not a sufficient one. If Bamie was minded to take
Matthew 23:27 (‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees') as the text for a homily, I would need all
my debating skills. I could hardly deny I was a scribe when it was how I made my living. If he
decided I was a Pharisee into the bargain, hypocrite and whited sepulchre, things would not go
well for the household.

It made a great difference to me to know that Dad
was in Bamie's care, in his strong, scrupulous hands. Bamie worked a long shift, from three in
the afternoon to ten at night, which was when I would return after spending time
en
famille
. One evening he told me, ‘A lady came to see Dad and shouted at me.' I didn't need
to be told that this was Edith Wellwood, though in fact Edith ended up (to everyone's surprise
including perhaps her own) approving of Bamie. Her initial mistrust wasn't based on race but on
long experience of other people's unremitting incompetence. Confronted with such conscientious
skill she surrendered. Her only concession to contrariness was to insist on calling him Bamber,
as if his Sierra Leonean parents, great fans of
University Challenge
, had decided to
name him after the long-ago quizmaster.

When the school summer holidays came around I was
able to take a break, borrowing a converted barn in Normandy from a friend so as to spend two
weeks there with Holly and her mother. Set free of Dad-related routines I immediately devised
replacements. I would get up early for a shower, then cycle many kilometres to the bakery that
made the best brioches, wearing a clinging vibrant orange singlet which I was fairly convinced I
could get away with, though I knew better
than to look at my reflection in
shop windows
en route
in case the verdict went the other way. My timing was
sufficiently predictable that the plunger in the cafetière would just be beginning its descent
when I returned with the baked goods.

We made a day trip to Mont Saint-Michel during
which I carried Holly on my shoulders across the causeway for what seemed several hours, knowing
that there was absolutely nothing in Mont Saint-Michel to engage a six-year-old's attention when
we got there. The expedition was a failure even before the setbacks of crowded pricy restaurants
and smelly dustbins, the generally oppressive atmosphere of a historic spot gone rancid from
sheer picturesqueness. Tourists and supplies were being imported in order for one to consume the
other before the tourists traipsed off to fill the buses again and the dustbins were emptied at
last.

On the way home Holly fell asleep in the back of
the car and the drive back to the barn outside Gourbesville, through fog over unknown roads, was
oddly magical. In her brain memories of the day were being coded to record the stoical enjoyment
that makes family expeditions special, when people have fun on principle, whether they want to
or not. We adults listened to Mark Lamarr on some esoteric radio station, playing even more
esoteric rockabilly. I hadn't even known I didn't hate rockabilly. With that rapturous
winding-down of mood in a silence alive with twangs, the trip had to be classified all over
again, as a success. The fogbound afterglow backlit the whole day.

Between them my brothers had been looking after
Dad for that fortnight, and then I was back in harness. He seemed balanced in his static
decline, though of course decline is never static.

He began to have difficulty swallowing, coughing
and spluttering almost with every mouthful of tea or coffee. This was
diagnosed as ‘dysphagia', which my ghostly Greek A-level allowed me to identify as meaning
no more than ‘difficulty swallowing'. Not exactly a revelation. The solution was to add a
thickening agent to the liquid in the cup. In theory this was what Dad had always wanted, with
every drink promoted to the status of soup, but the coughing and choking didn't really go
away.

I was mortified when I found that Dad had a sore
on his heel. This wasn't a surprising development, considering how little encouragement his
blood was getting to circulate with any vigour. Dad was proud of the manly shape of his legs but
had never done anything either to earn or to maintain it. Even as a young man he didn't enjoy
walking as an activity. In his prime he would get into his cherished Jaguar on a Saturday
morning, then drive two hundred yards to John Brumfit, the tobacconist's in Holborn Bars, to buy
cigarettes.

When he had taken up ‘jogging' in the 1980s,
buying matching New Balance running shoes for himself and Sheila, he moved so slowly that I had
to discipline myself not to overtake him at a comfortable walking pace. In retirement he had
offered masterly passive resistance to any attempt at keeping him mobile.

Nevertheless I took the sore on his heel, this
site of necrosis, personally. I was mortified at the failure of care. This time ancient Greek
provided a more vivid etymology.
Nekros
means a corpse, and necrosis is a patch of
local death.

One day as I was changing the dressing on his
sore, Dad patted me on the back and murmured, ‘Dear Adam.' This was so unlike his usual style
that I bridled at it, saying something thoroughly ungracious like ‘What brought this on?'

His preferred manner was formal, a matter of
raising a glass to Sheila when she entered the room and saying, ‘You elegant fowl', the
endearment safely sourced from a nonsense poem.
After her car accident he
went through a phase of calling her ‘the salt of the earth', which I thought thoroughly
patronizing. When he started abbreviating the phrase to ‘s.o.e.' I would bare my teeth silently,
as if I had taken a mouthful of salt myself.

He didn't have a late-life nickname for me, which
was no loss if Nogood Boyo was the template. While I was looking after him he would sometimes
say that I was a ‘good guy', or ‘one of the good guys', in a tone of mild surprise, as if my
reputation had suggested otherwise.

I provide this context to explain my surly
response to an endearment, and Dad's surprising reaction to it. Instead of retreating from the
territory of intimacy and tenderness where he had spent so little time, even (to all appearance)
in his dealings with Sheila, Dad advanced further into it, replying, ‘I was just admiring the
lovely curve of your shoulder.' It has to be said that reflexive charm was part of his armoury,
but this didn't seem an armoured moment.