Romany and Tom (24 page)

A couple of weeks later, the three of us were all set to return to Lindos where we had been in 1974. At the last minute my mum had to back out as an opportunity to interview Richard Burton again had come up unexpectedly. He was staying at the Dorchester for the release of a new blockbuster war movie,
The Wild Geese
, and there was a star-laden party to attend as well. With my dad’s decorating income intermittent and his royalties all but dried up, she needed the money. Instead of us pulling out of the holiday altogether it was agreed I would go with my dad. He teased me in the days running up to it. ‘A chance to dip the old wick,’ he leered quietly in the kitchen, the night before we left.

At Gatwick Airport the next morning we sat in the busy departures lounge waiting for our flight to be called. He said he needed cigarettes and I should wait for him to come back. He disappeared in the direction of the bar. A family sat down next to me with two teenage daughters. Five minutes later I saw him coming back. As he approached it was clear he had something in his hand; I thought it was a packet of cigarettes. When he was about ten feet away he tossed it at me like a Frisbee. I went to catch it but fumbled it and it bounced off my leg and landed in my lap. I looked down. It was a box of condoms. He was standing over me now. ‘You’ll be needing those,’ he said quietly, with a wink. I didn’t dare look round at the family next to me.

On the plane I wouldn’t talk to him. I wanted to go home. He tried to order me a beer from the air hostess. I didn’t like beer. ‘Please yourself,’ he said. Three miniatures of gin were lined up on the tray-table in front of him.

In Lindos, we had adjoining village rooms. He was matey during the day but encouraged me to ‘do my own thing’ after dark. The village was unthreatening. He said I could find him in the popular Socrates Bar. I would wander down to the village’s only discothèque and sit on the wall and watch a handful of people dancing to Wild Cherry’s ‘Play That Funky Music’ and Santana’s ‘Black Magic Woman’ on the tiny open-air dance floor, and thought how I was too young to impress anyone. Instead I hoped I might see one of Pink Floyd; it was said he owned one of the big captain’s houses in the village. I watched other families eating late in the restaurants and wished my mum was there.

Back at Socrates Bar I’d find my dad, garrulous, telling stories to whoever would listen. A photo of Jim Morrison hung above the cocktail mixers and bottles of spirits on the rear counter. People sat on upturned logs under the dark starry night sky. Wicker lanterns hung in the trees. I watched him try to dazzle everyone, seeking out people younger than himself. He’d give me the key and tell me to let myself into the room and promise he wouldn’t be long, but I’d be woken from sleep when I’d finally hear him blunder in. In the mornings he’d have an ouzo ‘to settle the stomach’ and then I’d watch him skip breakfast. There was something demeaning about it all. He was fifty-two. I threw the condoms away.

The days weren’t so bad. After he’d shrugged off his hangover, we’d make a few jokes and walk down to the quieter of the two beaches, and go snorkelling off the rocks among the sponges and black spiny sea urchins and the shoals of damsel fish, looking out for eels and rays, or pointing out the dogfish, both of us hovering wide-eyed on the surface of an astonishing translucent otherness; and for an hour or two we would be lifted out of our lives and exhilarated, communicating only in sign language. It felt easier.

Back home the following week the atmosphere was jumpy. Each day my dad tidied the house and did the shopping, but there was no work of his own to return to and he didn’t say much. I kept myself to myself. My mum was out at work. (‘I felt like the opposite of other people. I seemed to relax when I
left
home,’ she said, reflecting on it years later. ‘I’d tense up on the walk back across the common from the station after work, not knowing if I’d find him home or not.’)

The third night back she tried to tell him about the Richard Burton party she had attended while we were away in Lindos. He’d been skulking in the kitchen making some food for them. With the dishes stowed in the warming drawer he suddenly started up. I heard him from the sitting room. It began as a long monologue but it slowly turned into a tirade, sweeping up the multinationals, the CIA, the bourgeoisie, the Catholic Church, the Pope, and then inevitably her mother, her father, his stepchildren, her ex-husband, Richard Burton,
everything
into one huge desolate bonfire. It wasn’t the first time I had heard him sound off, but not for a while. My mum was in there with him. I knew he was never physically violent towards her but I didn’t hear her voice, and I could picture her in there not moving, absorbing it silently. Towards the end I went outside, not wanting to listen, and sat on the front wall, and then walked to the end of the road, and when I got back the car was gone and my mum was red-eyed in the silent flat and I didn’t know how to speak to her, let alone console her.

‘He told me I was an embarrassment to his friends,’ she said. ‘He called me a snob, not fit for the pub. A joke figure. That can’t be right, can it?’

I didn’t know what to say. I felt young and tongue-tied. I tried to be grown-up about it and my mum thanked me for listening (‘I don’t have anyone else to tell some days’) but I went up to my room and opened the window on to the garden, and listened to the wind in the tall copper beech and watched the string of planes in the cool night air with their beads of lights heading into Heathrow.

He tried it out on me a few times when I was growing up. He’d put a plate of food down in front of me in the evening and then start talking from the sink. It would start with good-natured if somewhat stern lessons in socialism and the Trade Union movement. But then one night – it must have been 1973 – after a couple of drinks he wound himself up about the death of the Chilean socialist leader, Salvador Allende. He said Nixon – whom I took to be the US president – and the CIA – who he said were like MI5 ‘only much worse’ – were behind an internal armed coup that had led to Allende’s death. He went into detail about a ‘fake suicide cover-up’ and the installation of a military junta (whatever that was), and he said I should know about it and not ‘take any shit from any teachers’ who told it otherwise. I was sitting at the table eating shepherd’s pie. I quite liked my teachers. I couldn’t imagine a Chilean military junta coming up in class. I felt like the lone member of a harangued congregation. When it was time for me to speak I said yes, I understood, and then asked if I could be allowed to go and watch
A Question of Sport
with David Vine.

In such moods, he struck me as a sullen cornered animal, and not like the dad who went to football with me or showed me chords or told funny stories. I’d hear him complain to my mum about my half-brothers and half-sister too. They were as good as grown-up, no longer malleable, one or two maybe even resentful. And in return I think he resented their youthfulness, their sloppy manners, their use of the flat as a hotel when it suited them.

Not long after the tirade against my mum – in part an effort to heal simmering family disaffection – a Christmas was planned at Ken’s new cottage in the countryside, out past Burford. Everyone assembled on Christmas Eve – my mum and dad, and me, and Simon, Toby, Roly, Jennie, who were all now in their twenties. It was an achievement getting everyone together. Ken was going to join us on Christmas morning. But as the evening wore on and alcohol began loosening everyone’s tongues, and the guards came down, and we were all cramped into the low-ceilinged cottage sitting room, the recriminations started.

It was late. I’d been sent to bed. I heard the arguing begin downstairs. I could hear my dad’s voice and Toby’s voice rising. And then Roly came upstairs and told me to go to sleep and it would all be all right, and silently climbed into his bed beyond me and pulled the covers up over him. And then there was shouting, and I crept out of my bed and sat at the top of the stairs and peeked through the banisters in my pyjamas to see my dad saying something disparaging about Ken and belittling his achievements as a father, and Toby standing up to him and then pulling back his arm and throwing a wild punch and my dad stumbling backwards, tripping over presents, grasping at something to keep his balance, but only finding the tree and pulling it down on top of him in a heap on the floor, the baubles tinkling and breaking. And then I watched as, without a word, he pushed the tree aside – the branches dislodging cards on the mantelpiece causing them to fall into the fireplace – and staggered to his feet with everyone just staring, and, reaching for his jacket while brushing shreds of tinsel from his hair, he opened the front door and – closing it behind him – blundered out into the cold night.

Toby’s face was smudged with tears. I heard the car engine start up, and watched Simon leap to his feet and fling the door open and rush out, slamming it shut. It was a treacherous night. The lanes were icy. My dad then drove all the way back to London with Simon beside him making sure he didn’t run the car off the road.

Chapter 24

With my mum in hospital again, my dad was back in the care home on the Finchley Road. I drove him there. He was very good about it. They gave him a room with a garden view. I think everyone thought – although no one likes to voice these things – that it might be for the last time. Living at the flat suddenly seemed impossible, and it was clear my mum would have to join him to convalesce after she was discharged. I couldn’t picture her going back home as though nothing had happened. She’d been through enough. Twice. Inside a year. Someone else needed to be in charge now. The next afternoon I started to think about how to sell the flat and what to do next. They’d barely been in it two years. And then the phone rang.

‘Mr Watt?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s the care home here. It’s about your father, Thomas.’

‘Tommy, yes, what is it?’

As I said it, something small boomed in my chest. I had an image of him at the bottom of a set of stairs, a big pool of blood under his head, or wheezing helplessly in the back of an ambulance, his hair dishevelled, a paramedic pulling up his upper lid and shining a light into his eye. Or just dead in his bed after an afternoon nap. An easy exit. Still warm. His arms across his chest, his little feet crossed. Not so bad in the end.

‘We think he’s . . .’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘ . . . escaped.’

I glanced round the room repeating the words to myself as I thought I might have misheard them, and a voice in my head shouted, ‘AGAIN?’ but I didn’t recognise the person on the end of the phone, and I stayed calm. ‘Right, OK. What do you mean?’ My heart was pounding. It was as if a mains switch had been flicked and a current of strong voltage was running down my arms and legs; it made me think of the time our burglar alarm went off in the middle of the night, and I had to bolt out of bed, groping for the light switch, still half-asleep in the dreadful cacophony. And then I could only picture the front doors to the care home. I could see them opening. Only ten feet from the road. I could see a National Express coach thundering recklessly along the bus lane.

‘We can’t find him. Not anywhere. We think . . .’

I cut her off. ‘Who
with
?’ I thought it must be the chef again.
Hadn’t they fired him yet?

‘On his own, we think,’ she said.

I saw the National Express coach bearing down. ‘
On his
. . . I’ll be right there.’

In the car, all the scenarios replayed themselves over and over again, each more gruesome than the last. And then I told myself to relax. It would be fine. He’d be in the wrong room, or chatting to the chef out the back, or even if he had got out he wouldn’t have got far; he couldn’t get more than twenty yards without gasping; he’d have found a bench or something; he would be taking some fresh air.
Fresh air? On the Finchley Road? Are you mad?
And I saw him engulfed in a cloud of diesel fumes, choking, dropping to his knees on the pavement, no one around, pitiless traffic careering by.

As I approached the care home in the car I started scanning the road, up and down the pavements. I discounted all the women. A black kid in a T-shirt almost down to his knees – no. A large man with a small fishing hat perched on his head, a shoulder bag across his chest in a sash – no. Two builders in rigger boots, one in a neon-yellow high-visibility vest – no. And then I found myself looking along the gutters.

I pulled into the drive of the care home and leapt from the car. Dashing round the front, I barged through the doors when they buzzed open. As I stopped in the lobby – my eyes trying to settle on someone with some information – I heard a female voice behind me say, ‘Mr Watt, it’s OK, he’s back.’ My first thought:
So he did escape; he really did; he wasn’t just in someone else’s room, or chatting to the kitchen staff; he was out there; on the street; in danger; you fucking idiots.

I span round. The receptionist was looking at me uncomfortably. ‘What?
When
?’ I blurted.

‘Just now. We heard the bottles,’ she said.

‘The
wha
t?
’

‘We heard the carrier bag. It was clinking as he came in. He’s safely up in his room now. With the . . .’

‘It was
clinking
as he
came in
,’ I said slowly, looking her in the eye. By repeating the sentence and accentuating the key words I thought I could wring some sense out of it.