Romany and Tom (2 page)

‘Tell me.’

‘COAD. Very difficult.’

‘COAD?’

‘Chronic obstructive airways disease.’

‘Chronic ob . . . ‘ I started to repeat the words.

She jumped in. ‘You know what
emphysema
is?’

I nodded.

‘OK. So,
that. And
bad bronchitis. Together. Not good. Not good at all.’ She began to move away. ‘And he’s been shouting. Shouting at
everyone
. You tell him to be nice, will you?’

I nodded.

She smiled back thinly, and bustled off.

I walked back to his bedside. His eyes were open again. For a moment I thought he might have forgotten I’d arrived and express fresh surprise, but he saw me and smiled. I ambled to the window and looked out at the small car park below and watched people coming and going. Two dusty minicabs were dropping off: a red Vauxhall Vectra; an old Orion with no hubcaps. I saw the supportive arm on an elbow, the cautious steps, the overnight bag. Two women were under the glass awning: the older one in leggings and wedge flip-flops; the younger in a dressing gown and podgy animal slippers.

I heard soft footsteps and the rustle of clothes behind me and turned round. It was Roly, my half-brother. He had my mum on his arm. His cheeks were flushed, his blue eyes congenial, a collared shirt under a dark zip-neck fleece, loose softened jeans, casual cushion-soled shoes. One hand was slipped into his pocket and he wore his vicar’s smile – the one that looks part welcoming, part serene and insular, and if it could speak would say, ‘It’s a funny old life.’ I thought how he’d always had it, even before he was ordained and got his parish, when he was just the family peacemaker. Lately we’ve begun an unexpected alliance – having moved in different orbits for most of our lives, nearly nine years between us, him the older. When things changed for the worse with my mum and dad we took on the role of their guardians, assuming Power of Attorney, talking on the phone, moving their money around, cancelling out-of-date electrical appliance insurance, tracking down ancient standing orders, working out state allowances, getting things ready for the last bit. We’ve got on well. He lives in the neighbouring village to the care home in the countryside north of Bristol where they moved in 2004. A familiar face at a tricky time. Dependable. It has meant a lot.

‘All right?’ he said affably, unlinking arms.

‘Yes. Easy journey.’

My mum, eighty-two, approached the bed in her familiar shuffling flat-footed walk. She was wearing a loose-peaked velvet baker boy cap and a limp shower-proof walking jacket. As she saw me she moved her mouth into the shape of a smile, her lips together and stretched wide, making her cheeks and the corners of her eyes crease deeply behind her gold-rimmed glasses. I went towards her and reached out to kiss her. She kept the smile frozen on her face and turned her cheek to greet me. I kissed the warm skin, and pressed her shoulders for a moment. She held the pose as though waiting for a photograph to be snapped.

‘Hello, Mum. How are you?

‘As good as can be expected, darling.’ Her voice was defensive. Slightly lugubrious.

We settled around the bed.

She took my dad’s hand and rubbed her thumb along the back of it in the same way she had done to me fourteen years earlier when I was in hospital in the Intensive Care Unit, and on her face was the same self-absorbed look I had seen all those years ago: half connected and involved; half ready to go home.

My dad rolled his head to look at her and smiled. There was no detectable rancour. It appeared affectionate. She pulled a slow-motion rueful smile in return, dipping her head to one side then closing both eyes slowly and opening them again at him, as you might at a poorly child. But then a little murmur escaped from her closed mouth accompanied by a barely audible quick out-breath through the nose. I’ve heard it before; it says: ‘Well, look at me, who’d have thought I’d be here in
this
situation?’ And with it, the tiny moment of tenderness was compromised, and joined by an uneasiness, until it looked more like an evolved tolerance, and on her face was written a faint watermark of disappointment at how it had all turned out.

What were they like when we were not here? Was there a secret language and code we never saw, the ones that all couples have? Perhaps they had nicknames for each other we’d yet to even hear. Did they deliberately hide affection from us, imagining that it was somehow inappropriate in front of the children – even now – even in front of children who were forty-three-and fifty-two-year old men with children of their own? Or was it just as I saw it then – difficult and altered?

‘Oh, look at your sheet. Did no one change it?’ she said, looking at the dark stain.

‘It’s coffee,’ he said.

Relief. Not blood then.

She stood and tugged at the sheet and thought about straightening it, but then looked uncomfortable and gave up.

‘Would anyone like to see some pictures of the kids?’ I said brightly.

‘Oh yes,’ said my dad enthusiastically, responding to the change in atmosphere.

I reached into my bag and pulled out my laptop. ‘I have them on screen.’ I put the laptop at the foot of the bed for a moment. ‘Let me hitch you up so you can see, Dad.’ I slipped my arms under his shoulders. The distance between his pyjamas and his body was further than I was expecting. His frame felt brittle. I remembered a day I had to pick up a dead blackbird from the lawn and how light it had seemed. He grimaced as I straightened him up. ‘There we go,’ I said.

I picked up the laptop, flipped it open and sat it on his lap.

‘Is it a television?’ my mum said.

‘No, a computer, Mum, with photographs stored in it,’ I said.

‘
Really
. What
will
they think of next?’

There was something odd in the tone of her voice. Was she joking? It was as though she had said it because that’s what she thought an eighty-two-year-old woman should say, or had said it like that for my dad’s benefit, and actually knew exactly what it was. Or perhaps it was just as it sounded: all a mystery. I thought how even now I still found her hard to read.

I opened the folder with the photos in it and brought them up on to the screen. I chose a picture of Tracey to begin with.

‘Ahhhh . . .’ my dad said. ‘
Tracey
.’

His voice lingered on her name for a moment. It is strange to think how fond of her he became. I can remember when I first took her home and thrust her into the domestic cauldron of my late teens. It would have been 1982. My dad, then fifty-six, cooked that night. Lamb and potatoes were ceremonially roasted to near-dehydration point in the oven. Vegetables – three kinds – were heavily boiled then coated in a thick cheese sauce in separate dishes. He had been in the kitchen, as was his routine, since 5.30, ‘preparing supper’. This meant some basic food preparation – in other words, peeling a few carrots – but was mainly an excuse for a string of large gin and tonics on his own to the accompaniment of jazz on the small red JVC radio-cassette player on the oak bureau. Zoot Sims, Toots Thielemans or Stan Getz were long-standing favourites. Wisps of introspective tenor saxophone and harmonica would drift under the kitchen door accompanied by the odd clanging saucepan lid. He could be a good cook but overcooked everything when he drank. By 7.30 he was usually well-oiled and ready for a confrontation. Just back from university for an end-of-term holiday we sat down for our first meal all together and he rounded on her at the narrow yellow-laminate kitchen table, and slurred a vintage opening salvo: ‘So, Tracey, how long have you been a
socialist
?’

I looked up at my mum on the other side of the bed. Her grey teeth were misaligned. They looked different. ‘Oh, Mum, did something happen to your tooth, the front one?’ I said with concern in my voice, but she took it as a boxer takes an aggressive jab.

Her eyes flashed. ‘What do you
expect
? I am
old
, darling. Nothing
works
,’ she said, with affected affront. She looked at me coldly and pulling a face like an old crone, waggled the tooth at me with her index finger, as if she’d been braced for an attack of some kind and was getting in a quick retaliatory upper-cut.

I threw her a look of exasperation. She simply mimicked the look back at me.

I turned and caught Roly’s eye.

‘It was ever thus,’ his vicar’s face said equably.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want a scene. I took a slow breath, and absorbed the impact of the counter-punch silently, like a fighter swallowing down early punishment.

Turning to the laptop, I popped open a picture of Jean, my daughter. She is eight in the photograph, standing at the top of the battlements of Lulworth Castle, an iron weather-vane behind her and and a grey-green valley barrelling away to the sea beyond. She is wearing a pale blue shell jacket and is smiling without complication straight at the camera with a perfect unblemished face.

‘Who is that?’ my dad said.

If I have a regret it is that we had our children too late for my parents to enjoy them. They were in their early seventies – not old for some folk these days – but their frailty and inflexibility were already taking hold when the girls were born. I have pictures of them in the sunlit sitting room on the north London road where we lived at the time in which they are each holding one of the newborn twins swaddled up in hand-knitted cardigans and baby-grows. It is 1998. My dad looks well in the photograph – smart in the mustard corduroy shirt I’d bought him for his birthday; his hair and skin are good. He is smiling down at baby Jean, but on his face uncertainty is written among the warm creases of affection; it’s as if he is saying, ‘I am trying, but I won’t be able to deal with this.’ Was it just too late to put aside his own preoccupations? Had he simply forgotten how to cope? Or was he never going to be any good at it?

‘It’s Jean,’ I said, ‘in Dorset.’

‘One of the
twins
, darling,’ said my mum over-loudly.

‘Really,’ he said almost dreamily. ‘How marvellous.’

It was obvious he wasn’t sure who it was, or if he was, he had very few memories of her on which to draw. Bad health had made him more introspective. Grandchildren had slipped down the list of priorities. Apart from the occasional prompt from a framed photograph of a face in a pram on the sitting-room sideboard, they just hadn’t been on his mind much these past few years.

I clicked the mouse and up came a picture of Jean’s twin sister, Alfie. She is reaching both arms out towards the camera, her fingers outstretched, the pink tartan of her coat bunched on her shoulders, her face clear and mischievous.

‘And that’s Alfie, Dad.’

‘Ahhh.’ He paused. ‘So clever . . . So clever . . . this machine.’

I looked at him. He was no longer looking at the screen. He was running his finger along the edge of the laptop’s keyboard, diverted and seduced by the technology. I remembered him breaking an awkward early silence on a hospital visit to see me when I was ill with the news that his new Laguna-blue Mazda 323 had power-steering and anti-lock brakes.

Breezily I clicked through more: holiday snaps; landscapes; the kids in dressing-up costumes and new school uniforms; days out. Facts and faces blurred into one, but when we got to a close-up of my son Blake, five at the time, my dad spoke up.

‘There! Ahhh. The boy!’

He had a soft spot for Blake. In him, of all the children, it was as if he saw a glimmer of me. The young son. Unformed. A distant innocence. Is that too sentimental? In the photograph, Blake is standing reflectively on the deck of the small Brownsea Island Ferry, his hands on the white steel rail, squinting out across Poole Harbour on a salt-fresh spring day. He is wearing an orange Winnie-the-Pooh baseball cap that jumps out against the clear blue Dorset sky and the yellow wooden slats of the wheelhouse: a serious thoughtful face in cartoon colours. I thought of the day I visited the care home near Bristol when I went upstairs to find the two of them – my dad and Blake – lying on their backs side by side on the covers of my dad’s single bed, each with their little feet crossed identically at the ankle. Blake must have been nearly four. They were gazing up at the ceiling, picking out animal shapes in the swirls of Artex plaster, seventy-five years between them. They were, as Blake said on the train home that day, ‘being two mans together’.

I could sense my mum getting restless. She activated her speaking watch – her eyesight had been worsening – and the robotic voice announced that twenty minutes had passed. Roly had warned me this would be approaching her limit. I gently shut the lid on the laptop.

My dad’s eyes were closing again.

My mum let out a long sigh. ‘Is the car far, dear?’ she said to Roly.

‘No, not really. How are you doing?’ he said.

‘I think perhaps . . .’ She trailed off. My dad’s eyes were open again. ‘I think maybe we should, don’t you?’ she said.

‘As you wish,’ said Roly, unperturbed. ‘Shall I meet you downstairs?’

‘Yes, you fetch the car.’

Roly raised his eyebrows at me, and rolled his eyes quickly. I raised my hand as if to say, ‘It’s fine.’