Romany and Tom (6 page)

Not long after that Christmas, in January 2002, I fixed my mum and dad up with appointments with a new local doctor. It felt as if I was taking two vintage cars for a long-overdue MOT. Safety and roadworthiness were top of the list. I was worried about them in the new flat. ‘It’s still all a bit of a dream, dear,’ my mum had said. ‘Some days we have to remind ourselves where we are.’

My dad tried to keep it light and witty with the doctor, but she was more concerned with his shallow breathing and inability to use his inhaler properly, telling him flatly he must go back to using his spacer, which I know he thought made him look foolish. He grimaced quickly at me. She examined his ‘frozen shoulder’ and advocated physiotherapy and a steroid jab from a specialist. He nodded approvingly at me at the word ‘specialist’. Pulling out his blood results, she said they showed enlarged red cells which were affecting his vitamin uptake. She also remarked that his blood pressure was a little high, and that the most likely cause of both was ‘too much alcohol’. He pulled a serious face. She asked him to cut back. He nodded grimly. She finished by telling him to take regular aspirin, add some B12 and folic acid to his diet, and use the sleeping tablets – that he was swallowing like sweets – only when completely necessary, before remarking that his kidney and liver functions were ‘on balance, satisfactory’. At this, he turned to me and beamed triumphantly.

As for my mum, the doctor linked her stories of recent gastric upsets to the powerful Vioxx painkillers she was taking for her rheumatism. The doctor suggested different medication, lined up a possible endoscopy, promised to monitor her eyesight, proposed additional calcium supplements, then finished by recommending a reduction in alcohol for her as well. It was all briskly unspectacular, and perhaps not the dressing-down I’d been expecting.

My mum and dad were ecstatic with the results. In the run-up to the check-ups, they’d feared what my mum had referred to more than once as an enforced ‘booze embargo’. In fact, when I popped round to chat it all through with them the next day they seemed positively elated. Their faces seemed to be saying a little too smugly, ‘No scolding allowed; doctor’s note,’ and they were each celebrating with a large brandy and a fresh slab of Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel.

I took my dad to have his shoulder looked at. The specialist diagnosed a badly torn rotator cuff in the joint, but as he inserted the needle for the anti-inflammatory injection, he was more than surprised when blood spurted back up the syringe.

‘Well, I wasn’t expecting
that
. You must have had a nasty fall, Mr Watt,’ he said, stepping back, blood on his cuff.

‘Must I?’ said my dad, blinking at him like a cartoon mole.

‘When did it happen?’

‘When did what happen?’

‘The fall. Or could you have torn it in some other way? Would have needed some force for blood to still be in the joint like that.’

My dad looked at me and sucked his bottom lip in and gently shook his head.

‘He has no memory of how he did it,’ I said. I had an image of him tumbling down the stairs in Oxford or slipping in the shower and not telling anyone. Or just not telling me.

An operation to fix the tear was discussed. My dad said he couldn’t face it. Instead we settled on management and painkillers.

Back home I looked at all their appointments in the diary, and each one stood out like incontrovertible evidence of a new era of attempted control and reassurance. I was wearing the captain’s armband now. Everything seemed part of the new plan: dynamic London; the fresh start; the compact flat; health checks; the wheelchair for my dad; a tube station for my mum. In spite of all the setbacks over the years – the repeated patterns of behaviour, the knowledge that very few old dogs learn new tricks – I was full of hope that all of it would help them turn a splendid corner, reanimated and inspired. I thought I could will it to happen.

On Sundays, during those first few weeks, I drove to Marks & Spencer in Camden and filled up an extra bag of food shopping for them – mainly ready-meals, some fruit and chocolate treats. I kept the fridge well stocked. Most weekends I had one of the kids with me. We’d park and take the lift up to the flat with the shopping, exchanging a couple of words with the porters. I discovered that the block was largely international lettings. The man in the flat opposite was Japanese, although my parents had barely seen him. Arab families passed us in the lobby. There was little eye contact from anyone and it started to bother me there was not much sense of community. It was the opposite of what I’d hoped, and I felt stupid for not thinking how the city might isolate them.

I warmed to the porters though. Jim, who was English, quieter and older, in – I guessed – his late fifties, had wiry white hair and apple cheeks, and a wobbling eye affected by nystagmus. Often poring over his newspaper, he seemed slightly unguarded and easily startled – perhaps not ideal attributes for a security porter. Luis – his shorter, swarthy partner – was younger and Portuguese, maybe mid-thirties, and with his tie loosened I’m sure reckoned himself as a dead spit for a young Al Pacino on his Saturday night off. We talked mainly about football and the weather. They seemed to be keeping an eye out for my mum and dad. ‘They are like a lord and a lady,’ said Luis. It helped that my mum was inclined to tip them from time to time.

Up in the flat my mum always left something out for the kids to play with – a stuffed toy (‘Why does Granny have a hippopotamus?’), a wind-up yapping crocodile (‘Does she play with it too?’), a tin piggy bank, some Tupperware. My dad would be in his armchair in his pyjamas like a clapped-out Hugh Hefner with a ‘pre-lunch brandy’, which I imagined followed the ‘post-breakfast brandy’, and possibly even a small ‘pre-breakfast brandy’. I ringed odd exhibitions and new plays in the newspaper and asked my mum to ‘have a think about it’, imagining she could manage a trip up to town. I copied out the telephone numbers of her oldest London friends and left them in big print on a piece of paper by the phone. ‘Don’t tell me off if I don’t call them,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a battle some days.’

In the kitchen I’d again try to show her how to work the dishwasher and the washer-dryer, but I could see her struggling with it all; they were different to the models they’d had in Oxford, which in themselves had probably taken several years to master. I looked at her and wondered if our memory, like an old notebook, must just fill up one day, leaving no room for new entries or instructions, no matter how clearly they are relayed. And I wondered if arbitrary pages, loosened by age, must then just start to fall out and go missing, and if – in the effort to keep going – we start making new assumptions to compensate, hazarding a guess, hoping no one will notice. Perhaps my mum was already cutting her losses, narrowing her options, mercifully using her remaining presence of mind to minimise risk, to avoid things that might be dangerous. Hot oil. That knife. But what about
without
presence of mind – when presence of mind is no longer there? When I thought of that, I worried I was asking too much of her, with all my painstaking guidance and tutelage in a new unfamiliar kitchen, so instead I hid the poultry shears and the modern vegetable peeler and wrote short cuts on pieces of paper and taped them to the control panels and the detergent-dispenser drawer of the dishwasher and the washer-dryer; but several weeks later I noticed neither machine had been used.

‘I just use a bucket and rinse out a few smalls,’ she said.

‘What about the dishwasher, Mum?’

‘Which one is that?’

I watched her shuffling around the small kitchen, misplacing a spoon, scribbling a note to herself and underlining it, peering shortsightedly at a letter from a utility company, or a circular that had landed alarmingly on the mat. I saw how control over all of it would slowly start to elude her.

And an image came to me of myself as a boy of eight lying awake in my room on a Saturday morning, safe under my candy-striped sheet and blankets, listening to the scuffling footfall of the pigeons on the flat roof above and the rustle of the leaves in the copper beech tree at the back, watching the corona of sunlight dance round the outline of the thin rough fabric curtains of my bedroom, listening to the sound of the water tank refilling, and knowing she’d be downstairs in the kitchen getting the day ready, purposeful and absorbed. And I saw myself getting up and going downstairs, across the bumpy linoleum landing, down the thinning red-patterned runner, past the painted woodchip wallpaper over which I ran my fingers, under the high skylight at the turn in the stairs where the water leaked every winter into saucepans and spread-out newspapers below, past the closed door to my mum and dad’s bedroom at the foot of the stairs, with its humorous cardboard
No Molestar
sign snitched from a Mexican hotel hanging on the doorknob, and into the kitchen where she’d be quietly bustling. I could see myself taking my new copies of my Saturday football mags –
Shoot
and
Scorcher
– into the sitting room and lying on the floor to leaf through the pages, and my mum bringing me in some toast and jam (‘Nice and quiet, please, darling, the house is asleep’) and me looking up out through the window into an overcast sky and wondering why my dad got up so late and never wanted to talk to anyone for ages.

Chapter 5

Back then my dad kept his piano in their bedroom but I didn’t often hear him play it. Or sometimes he would start playing it and then I’d hear him stop. In the afternoons he’d go in there to work and I might hear the key turn in the lock on the inside, and then the creak of the double bed as he lay down, and he seemed to stay in there a long time in silence. In the holidays or at weekends I might be down in the garden playing on my own and I would look up at his bedroom window and notice that the curtains weren’t drawn, which led me to believe he couldn’t have been asleep, and I used to wonder what he must be doing in there. I came to the conclusion that he must be doing a lot of thinking.

And then one day I came home from school on a clear late-autumn afternoon and there was a different atmosphere in the flat. I could hear notes from the piano as I came up the stairs to the flat door. I went into the kitchen. My mum was bright and her face looked like someone had turned a light on inside it. She was arranging a cup and saucer on a tea-tray. ‘Tea for the thirsty worker!’ she chimed. ‘You can pop your head round the door, but don’t stay long. So much to do!’

I gently pushed open the bedroom door. Behind it a black gate-leg table had been set up at right angles to the small brown upright piano. A fresh ream of manuscript had been cracked open. Black-and-red-striped dark 2B pencils lay ready in a row next to an eraser. There was a steel sharpener, a tuning fork and a long wooden ruler that was four times the length of the pocket one I took to school. More manuscript was propped up along the music rack on the piano and several double sheets were spread open across the top. My dad had the fingers of his right hand spread wide and he was holding down several notes at once. He lifted his hand, then keeping the same shape, played the notes again and I saw his right foot hold down the right-hand pedal underneath. He lifted his hand from the keys, grabbed a pencil, and as the sound kept ringing in the room he lightly whistled a few notes and wrote them on the stave.

‘Five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones. Was there ever a better sound?’ he said, still looking at what he was writing, but clearly for my benefit. Then he span round on his stool and grinned at me – a big grin, the pencil between his teeth – and I sensed my mum come in behind me with the tray of tea and she was grinning too.

That evening, after I’d done my homework, he took me to the Ship Inn at Mortlake to celebrate, though what we were celebrating I wasn’t quite sure. The pub sat right on the river’s edge in the shadow of the vast, brick, eight-storey Victorian maltings of the Watney’s brewery. The maltings scared me. It loomed like a blank hulk above the towpath, featureless and threatening. I wondered how much grain must be piled high inside, soaking in the monstrous vats of water. When the tide was out, the foreshore was an oozing mud-pit of stones and washed-up plastic debris, and if a mist had dropped low on to the water’s surface, as it often did in the cold dusk of an approaching winter night, I half expected to see a lighterman – or another river character I’d picked up from Dickens read aloud at school – sculling gently towards me, the rudder lines of his darkened boat slack in the turbid shallows. And yet, in spite of this, I got a thrill from being there, and loved the moment of expectation as we made the final turn in the car down Ship Lane, not knowing if the tide would be out, or in, and lapping at the very end of the road where we had to park, like a filthy tongue.

Looking back now, I know what it all meant. It was 1970. Work had been drying up for my dad since the mid-sixties; the work for modern composer-arrangers was in TV and pop, not in the thing he lived for – live ensemble jazz – and yet, just when it looked like it would never return, he had been offered the chance to revive the sound with his own new nine-piece band in nightly residency at the Dorchester in London. Everything seemed glamorous and important again.

In the fifties there were perhaps a hundred jazz big bands touring up and down the country, each sporting up to sixteen members – eight brass, five saxophones and a rhythm section; it was a unique and rich composite sound. But by the late fifties ballroom owners had realised that booking four or five young amateurs with electric guitars and amplification was a lot cheaper, and what’s more it brought the new sound with it – the sound of rock ’n’ roll. The big band age was dying. After a meteoric rise in the late fifties, the last notable event of any size that my dad had been involved with was a European Broadcasting Union concert at the Playhouse on Northumberland Avenue in London in 1966, where he’d directed an All-Star European big band including Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone and the Spanish tenor player Pedro Iturralde. The poster for it hung in the hallway at home when I was young. The names seemed exotic, weighty and serious, but my dad had wrinkled his nose when I’d asked him about it. It was as though it signified something disappointing.