Romany and Tom (32 page)

At the care home, my mum and dad were surprised to see us. Roly had warned them twice and someone had looked in to remind them earlier in the morning, but when I pushed the door open to my dad’s room he was dozing on his bed and my mum was at the window, her arms splayed across the sill, her face pressed to the glass as though she might be estimating how high it was to jump.

‘Mum . . .’

I saw her start, then turn stiffly. ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me. Ben. I’ve brought Blake to see you too.’

My dad lifted his head off the pillow. ‘Who’s there?’ he said.

‘Oh, goodness, you startled me,’ my mum said. ‘I thought you were coming tomorrow.’

I could feel Blake push in close to my leg and take the fold of my jeans in his hand. ‘Didn’t Roly tell you? Well, never mind. We’re here now. Brought you some chocolate truffles.’

Within five minutes I had helped my dad up and over to his chair, and we were all seated in a group. Blake spoke in a clear small piping voice.

‘Is that your real hair?’

‘What’s left of it,’ my dad said.

‘Are you old?’

‘Yes. Too old.’

On the table was a framed photograph. A crisp blue-swept day. My dad in a wheelchair in an Everything But The Girl baseball cap; it looked as though it had been put on his head by someone else, but he was beaming straightforwardly into the lens. My mum was on the handles behind, no hat, shoulders back, tight-lipped and withdrawn. Weston-super-Mare’s iron promenade railings and wide sandy beach rolled out behind. Roly had warned me they might be going. It seemed implausible, as though they had been Photoshopped on to the background and had never really been.

‘How was it?’ I asked them, gesturing to the photograph.

‘Ludicrous,’ my dad said.

Fifteen minutes later he had chosen to climb back on to his bed while the rest of us went down to the garden. Clouds had drifted in from the west and the sun was gone. An autumnal coldness was in the air.

‘Chase me,’ Blake cried, spying a small ornamental rose garden surrounded by a tall yew hedge.

‘I think Granny is too tired to chase you.’

‘Chase me!’ He darted towards the roses.

As if responding to a challenge, my mum unlinked her arm from mine and padded towards the hedge.

‘You OK, Mum?’ I said. ‘You don’t need to.’

She walked on heedless. ‘I’ll catch you! I’ll catch you, I
will
!’ she said loudly. It sounded almost stentorian.

‘Granny’s chasing me!’

And I had an image of myself in the garden in Barnes – a little boy. The rockery rose up at the back. I could run up the steps past the low firs to the poplars along the back wall and hide behind the trunk of the one by the compost heap, and I saw Nunu in a straw bucket hat creakily clambering up towards me to find me, and me counting out loud to ten and thinking she was too slow, and it would be more fun if it was my dad and he was roaring like a lion.

My mum picked her way along the back of the hedge then appeared in the archway on the opposite side of the rose garden unexpectedly. ‘I can
see
you!’ she cried abrasively. She had lifted her arms up and had crooked all her fingers into claws and contorted her face into an awful grimace.

Blake squealed. He hadn’t seen her. He span round. ‘No! Not
that
. Not
that
! Not a
monster
, Granny.’

The game was spoiled.

Never quite the appropriate gesture or response: how many times had I said that to myself about her over the years? Too much this. Too much that. Too much effort. Too little effort.

‘Is the old man still up there?’ Blake said, his face still damp with tears, as we were walking back.

‘Yes, the old man is still up there,’ I said. ‘He’s my daddy, you know.’

‘Oh,’ said Blake, not raising his head.

The three of us slipped back into the lobby, into the miasma of ammonia and cooking oil and air fresheners. I helped my mum up the stairs, her body all squidgy and heavy under my hands.

‘Don’t let me keep you,’ she said as we made it back to the room. This was her way of saying she’d had enough already, however brief a visit might have been. It was as if returning to her own thoughts were more preferable and less exerting than having to share them with other people.

‘We’re in no hurry, Mum.’

‘Oh. I thought you’d gone,’ my dad said from the bed, as we pushed the door open. ‘Did you miss the train?’

‘We were just down in the garden for a few minutes, Dad.’

‘
Were
you now. How very civil.’ He was still lying looking up at the ceiling, the back of his hand against his forehead, as though we’d caught him in the middle of a deep reflection on something.

‘They’re just leaving, Tom,’ said my mum loudly.

I looked at my watch. We had been there for thirty-nine minutes.

‘Thirty-nine,’ said Roly later, as he gave Blake and me a lift to the station. ‘That’s good going. They kicked Jennie out after twenty last week.’

In 2005 they moved into rooms together. The care home had a ground-floor suite for couples that gave them a small bedroom each and a shared sitting room overlooking the garden. Another halting-place, I thought. And my dad’s chest got a little worse. And my mum’s eyesight got a little worse. Roly would take my dad to the local memory clinic for pep talks on ‘functioning better’. (As opposed to getting better, perhaps.) I learned new words like ‘personhood’ and phrases like ‘empowerment through advocacy’. I started to think about having to officially take over all the important stuff – the paperwork, the bank accounts. It starts with the furniture, and ends with the bank accounts, I thought. The courses of antibiotics for chest infections came and went like vitamin supplements.

And I wanted to applaud and respect the wholehearted efforts of the care home – the emphasis on human dignity, the wry humour mixed with compassion – but every time I arrived I struggled with everything I saw although I tried not to show it. I’d slip along the corridors, mouthing the first names and last names on the residents’ nameplates on the doors, and glance uneasily into any rooms with the doors held open. A figure stationary in a chair. A shape in a bed with the curtains half drawn. A room with nobody there. And I hovered at the door to my mum and dad’s room not wanting to knock and push it open for fear of seeing stripped beds and their belongings gone and someone replacing the carpet.

One morning I woke from a dream in which all the residents were slumped in the chairs in the lounge, wearing white T-shirts with the words
I may have dementia, but I still have a life
and my dad was playing the piano for them but his fingers were splintering on the keys while my mum was loudly reciting from the poems of John Betjeman: ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! / It isn’t fit for humans now, / There isn’t grass to graze a cow. / Swarm over, Death!’ I lay in bed and wondered if I should be there with them, and got up and started looking up train times until I recognised it as the absentee’s guilt. In such moods I felt I could agree to anything that would ease their pain, as really I would be easing my own.

Yet somehow as I pushed the door to their room open each time it was like the volume in my head dropped, as if a car with bass bins pumping had finally moved off down the road, and a new quiet descended, everything muffled by the soft furnishings and the double-glazing, and in my head I heard the slow ticking of the pendulum of an imaginary clock, and there they were, my mother in the chair and my father on the bed, in a silent limbo. And I would open my mouth to speak, and our worlds would merge again.

‘Don’t rush,’ I’d say to myself. ‘Don’t rush. Go at their speed. Take your time.’

Chapter 32

In the half-light I knelt by the bed, the air vaporous with the smell of pine-needles, cinnamon and menthol in the high-ceilinged, cool, north-facing room. Nail scissors and an emptied Karvol capsule lay on the bedside table covered in stickers. Three sheets of folded tissue paper were stained with amber droplets next to a plastic beaker of water with a spout. Under the feet at the head of the bed two fat books lifted the frame off the floor a few inches:
Non-League Club Directory 2004
; Donna Tartt’s
The Little Friend.
Perfect choices in their matching heights. Behind me the summer-evening glow still edged the outer seams of the long curtains. The sound of a jetliner passed high across the house and garden.

Rolled away from me and close to sleep was Blake – four years old – his duvet pulled up under his chin. I could sense him quietly running the silk strip of his bear along his top lip.

‘Story?’ I whispered quietly, my head now resting on the pillow behind him, my knees still on the floor.

‘Mmm. But not the flying bed,’ he murmured.

‘No. Not the flying bed.’ (Not the bed that lifted off the floor and sailed out between his curtains into the night sky. Not even if it did return safely. I pictured him lying there worrying about it after I’d left:
Could my bed really fly? Would it? Uncontrollably? I might never come back.)

My face was inches from the back of his head. ‘When he was four . . .’ I said softly, beginning an imaginary story of the same imaginary boy, who lived an imaginary life in an imaginary house, as I had done almost every night that summer, half kneeling, half lying behind him in the soft shadowy light; I’d made up stories of tall trees and fields, boys and caterpillars, catapults, bikes, duping grown-ups, cheekiness and misrule, crossing busy roads and getting lost in crowded shops; a moment of danger, but a safe resolution; and an ending steeped in affection and protective tenderness. Always that.

When it was over, I lay there a little longer and heard his breathing lengthen and deepen, and smelled his freshly washed hair, and closed my own eyes, and wanted to follow him down the tunnel of sleep, away from my nagging melancholy and irritability. It was as if I could be him, not me. Wondrous. Charmed.

Did I have a memory of my dad putting me to bed? Not that I could remember. Only a memory of him standing silhouetted in the doorway ready to go out in a well-cut suit. It made me wonder whether I was lying there listening to my son sleep because my own dad hadn’t; not that it was probably expected of him back then; perhaps he did that thing that men do in movies when they look in on their sleeping kids in a moment of crisis, and it is supposed to signify immense love and trapped emotions. Yet still I asked myself why I needed these moments with Blake so badly, why I felt so entirely enveloped in them, as though I could swim through him and have everything about him – his clear skin, his small smooth feet, his unclouded blue eyes, his sense of fear and wonder – all around me, like the waters of a pool. Sometimes it felt as though I needed them more than he needed me – which of course I looked on as a flaw, a parental flaw in me – for as soon as the thought crystallised I sensed I was hovering above the bed, observing my own mawkish scene of great self-involvement below, and a voice was saying in my ear, ‘There is no place for self-regard in this. You signed the parents’ contract. No conditions.’ What did my dad feel when he stood silhouetted in the doorway? Perhaps he saw in me – tucked up warm and safe in flannelette sheets under a flat felt roof, a gentle night-light burning – an idealised image of
him
self as a little boy, watched from the landing by his own father. Or maybe it was more complicated than that.

I breathed in the comforting menthol air and felt the warmth of Blake’s body on my face until I was hit by that deep jolt of imminent sleep. My neck muscles loosened and I sensed my head go heavy on the pillow.

Twenty minutes must have passed. I woke to feel Tracey’s hand on my shoulder in the darkness. I stood up, heavy-lidded, slothful, and followed her out on to the landing into the bright light.

‘You all right?’ she said.

‘I don’t know.’

Looking back, I did know. I was running on fumes – the motor turning, the needle on zero. An accident waiting to happen. Each day I just felt wretched and withdrawn. Absent. A dark daydreamer. Often joyless and intolerant, I was forgetting appointments and errands, putting things off until the last moment, loitering distractedly in front of the family, there but not there. Falling asleep on the bed next to Blake seemed to be a kind of fragile narcotic escape.

Why so sad? Because back then I had been unable or unwilling to accept, and then act on, obvious patterns of depression in my own life, even though I’d been happy to point them out in others. Tracey could see them; she’d lived through most of them. For years she’d watched them bubble up like clouds over clear skies. I could bore you with all the perceived injustices and insecurities that have left me tearful and guilty, or paralysed and bleak, for days or months on end, but I have gradually learned it is better to see them as part of an injury I carry. Like a bad back. Debilitating but now generally treatable. How I have longed at times for more wry wisdom, an elegant stoicism, an indomitable black humour – such attributes fly in the face of dark days – but let’s just accept that we are all credulous and soft, encircled by the casual affectlessness and unkindnesses of real life, and it just gets to some of us more than others.