Romany and Tom (25 page)

‘He was in a taxi,’ she said nervously.

‘A
what
?’ I was hearing words I wasn’t expecting to hear. I was expecting to hear ‘ambulance’ and ‘fall’ and ‘A&E’, and instead I was hearing ‘bottles’ and ‘clinking’ and ‘taxi’.

‘It seems he hailed the first taxi and took it along to Waitrose,’ she went on. (The
first
taxi?) ‘And it seems he bought some alcohol and then got a return taxi from the rank outside the shop back here.’

I let the information sink in. I had to hand it to him. That was style. Right there.
Right fucking there
. ‘Where are the bottles?’ It was all I could think of saying. I was picturing him pouring one down his throat right at that moment, up in his room, unattended.

‘Here,’ she said, reaching down behind the desk. There was the sound of glass on glass. ‘We had to confiscate them. Obviously.’ She dangled the bag in front of her.

‘Where is he now?’

‘Like I said. Safely up in his room. You can go up if you like,’ she said, putting the bag down again.

Safely
? ‘How did he get out?’ I said. I could feel my brow scrunching up.

‘He was in the lobby for half an hour at lunchtime today. He was very sociable. Up by the door. Quite chatty. We think he watched a couple of people coming and going and memorised the code.’

Memorised the code
? He couldn’t even remember where we
were
last week. ‘
How
did he memorise it?’

‘Perhaps “copied” is a better word, or he might have been hovering and slipped out while the door was briefly open.’

‘Why didn’t anyone
stop
him?’

‘He must have picked his moment when a back was turned. Some of our residents
are
allowed out,’ she said, raising her eyebrows, as if to say
it’s not a prison
. ‘We encourage residents to exercise choice and maintain independence, and they are free to journey out alone if they feel able to do so. Of course, in this instance, it was . . .’

‘OK, OK,’ I said, butting in. ‘I get it. I will speak to someone properly about all this. I’m going up to see him now.’

I took the stairs instead of the lift. Someone was coming down with a hoist and a couple of bed-rails. I flattened myself against the wall to let them pass and flicked them a quick smile. Up on the landing I passed a bucket and some carpet shampoo. I knocked on my dad’s door.

He answered almost immediately. ‘Come in.’

I pushed the door open. He’d been standing at the window and was turning towards me. The words were coming out of my mouth almost as soon as I had stepped into the room. ‘What
have
you been up to? Have you
any
idea of the fuss you’ve caused?’

A look of boyish innocence and mild incomprehension was on his face. His jacket was on the back of the chair beside the small built-in desk. He was wearing a loose oatmeal sleeveless cardigan over an ironed blue shirt. His moustache had gone. Who had shaved it off for him? The beard at the bottom remained. He looked like an Amish Mennonite sympathiser.

‘What are you saying?’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see you.’ He edged towards the chair to sit down, coughing.

I sat on the bed. ‘How on earth did you get the taxi?’

‘What? The . . . ? Oh that.’ He eased himself on to the chair. ‘Nice driver. Waived the fare. Jazz fan.’

I could hear his chest wheezing quietly. ‘How did you
stop
it?’

‘He was right there outside,’ he said. ‘Did you order it for me? Very kind of you. I left the bottles with the concierge. Said they’d stow them. Very accommodating they are here, you know.’

‘You can’t do it again, Dad. You realise that, don’t you? You could have fallen, or got hit by a bus, or anything. They called me. I drove straight here. Everyone’s been in a panic.’

‘Really?’ A look of genuine surprise was on his face.

‘Where did you get the money?’

‘Not sure. You mother gave me forty quid, I think. Is she all right?’ He looked at me expectantly.

‘Yes, she’ll be OK.’ I didn’t want to tell him everything yet. ‘Not the easiest of operations. But she’ll be fine.’

‘Oh, good. Tough, she is, that Romany. Like her mother. Though not as miserable. Tell her I asked after her, won’t you?’ He coughed a little.

I could feel the moment losing its heat, my reprimands losing their urgency. On the one hand, I was agitated, too involved, wearied by the random demands of keeping them safe, keeping them out of trouble, but on the other I realised I was silently cheering him on, willing him not to give up, actually
helping
him into the taxi,
paying
the fare.

‘Is it hot in here?’ he said. I could hear him wheezing harder now.

I looked at him. He suddenly seemed paler. He eyes were blinking hard. His hand was gripping the edge of the chair. His nails perfectly clean.

‘Help me on to the bed . . . there’s a good . . . chap.’

I jumped up and slipped a hand under his armpit and lifted him to his feet. I turned him round and got him over to the bed and sat him down. He swivelled and lay back with a grunt. I cupped my hand under his bony ankles and helped them up on to the covers. The backs of his legs felt tight like piano wire. His head was on the pillow now, his eyes closed. He was taking shallow breaths in and out through his nose and mouth. He coughed with his mouth shut. There was no rattle, just a compacted, compressed noise, like air trapped in a creaky harmonium, his whole ribcage lifting and subsiding. It was a dense fibrous sound.

There was a knock at the door. It opened simultaneously, and a carer was into the room all in one movement. She saw me and rolled her eyes. In a second, she seemed to have control. ‘Been overdoing it again this afternoon, I hear, Tommy,’ she said loudly and directly. ‘I’ve got your
inhalers
here. You left them downstairs again. Shall I give you a puff now? And a blast of oxygen, yes?’

My dad nodded but was waving me away insistently at the same time.

I got up and stepped away from the bed as the nurse bent down to help him up, and then I backed away, loitered for a moment, then retreated from the room, and shut the door. I stood in the quiet corridor and stared at the bucket and the carpet shampoo bottle still at the top of the stairs. Through the fire door came another woman. She had a plastic basket of laundry under one arm.

As she got to me she said, ‘You with Mr Watt?’

‘I am. I’ll be back in with him in a minute. The carer is with him.’

‘Give him these for me, there’s a love.’

She handed me three pairs of underpants, neatly folded.

I took them and nodded, and she turned to go.

As the fire door closed behind her, I looked down at the underpants in my hand. Each one had a new name tag with ‘Tommy Watt’ written on it. I remembered that evening hour in hospitals – ‘handover’ – when one shift of nurses goes home and passes a patient’s relevant notes on to the incoming night shift. I thought of the uncomfortable adjustment I felt as the patient, the new faces to get used to, the worry something would get lost or misunderstood, but having to trust the process, to let the moment go. His underpants weighed barely anything in my hand, and in a moment I would give them to a stranger.

My dad’s door opened. It was the carer. She came out into the corridor and closed the door behind her. ‘He’s all right,’ she said, under her breath. ‘He said he wants a kip now. Long afternoon, what with one thing and another. He asked me to tell you that he’ll see you tomorrow.’

I nodded. ‘Understandable. Can I give you these?’ I held out the underpants.

‘Of course.’ She took them from me, and turned to go.

‘Superman will always need his underpants,’ I said.

She stopped, looked back at me over her shoulder and smiled, and then I watched her disappear through the swing doors.

Chapter 25

When I was sixteen I made my own escape. On a moped. A red Puch Maxi. It was a special birthday present from my mum and dad topped up by weeks of savings from me. During the week I used it to ride to school and back. It had a top speed of twenty-eight miles per hour. I would scoff at the headwind that whipped down off the river.

On week nights, if I’d done all my homework, sometimes I was allowed to use it to go to gigs. I’d leave the tense atmosphere at home and head out across Hammersmith Bridge to the Nashville in West Kensington on the corner of the Cromwell Road and North End Road, and park unknowingly opposite the old Alvic Studios where I was to record my first EP, ‘Summer Into Winter’, with Robert Wyatt three years later.

Over the next eighteen months I’d stand on my own at the back and watch new bands like Magazine, Black Slate and The Pretenders. I witnessed a thrilling Factory Records triple bill topped by Joy Division, with A Certain Ratio and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in support, for which – to general amazement – OMD’s bassist Andy McCluskey wore era-defying flares and a crocheted patchwork waistcoat. I saw Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers at Hammersmith Odeon – their tiny equipment lost on the enormous apron stage – fully mesmerised by their apparent guileless honesty. At the end of the show Richman got all the house lights turned on and beckoned the entire crowd down to the front for an impromptu question-and-answer session while he swung his legs over the edge of the press pit like a gawky schoolboy. It was another world opening before my eyes.

I got my first proper girlfriend too. Her family lived on the outer edge of Wimbledon in a small end-of-terrace Edwardian house with a pebble-dash extension. Everyone ate breakfast together in the modest dining room – early-evening meals too, sometimes. It was simple hearty home cooking with everyone talking equally and expressing opinions. Her father was a small thin Oxford-educated Yorkshireman with neat grey parted hair and a stiff back who worked for the civil service; he squinted from behind thick corrective glasses and enjoyed putting everyone right at the dinner table in an exacting – often pedantic – but good-humoured way. He played vinyl pressings of Bach on a meticulously assembled high-end hi-fi system, wore open-toed sandals and woollen trousers in hot weather, and in spite of his poor eyesight, took his own black-and-white photographs of church architecture and then painstakingly developed them in the downstairs bathroom, where the windows were taped up with black bin-liners. He voted Conservative. My dad had told me all Tories were toffs and racketeers, but I found that I liked him, and it made me realise people might not be how you first judge them. Her mother was a teacher from rural Essex: broad-shouldered; a mop of short brown hair; also short-sighted, but with a gentle face that took an interest in everything you told her. She cooked up saucepans of food that filled the house with steam, and tended to plants in a lean-to add-on glazed porch that cluttered up the front door. Late at night we’d often find her on her own in the sitting room, the house in darkness, curled up in an armchair with a single spotlight, wearing a candlewick dressing gown, flushed from a hot bath, reading the latest volume of something like Seamus Heaney, her face myopically pressed against the pages. They took a bath together in the evenings – one of their great pleasures. I pictured their bodies crammed into the foaming frothing tub – him, small and wiry; her, all big and fleshy. And I expected, as an adolescent, to find it repellent, but I thought it was touching, and it made me sad that I could never imagine my parents doing the same, although I imagined they must have done once. A long time ago.

I think I had looked to get away from home as early as twelve. I made friends with a boy, Andrew, from school. His father was a script-writer called Dick Clement, who had written – among other things – something successful for television called
The Likely Lads
with a collaborator called Ian La Frenais, although it meant nothing to me at the time. The family lived in a rambling two-storey detached house in Petersham. It had a pan-tiled roof with higgledy-piggledy dormer windows and sat in big grounds with old tumbledown stables, a little fruit garden, chickens and a wide lawn giving way to a copse. I was told Charles Dickens once lived there. The garden was overlooked by a wrought-iron ground-floor verandah entwined with wisteria. Sometimes I’d crush one of its big hanging pale purple blooms in my hand and wonder why we didn’t have such graceful flowers in our garden. They had Dalmatians and things I had never seen before: bean bags; duvets; bagels for breakfast; fibre-optic lamps. They took a holiday in California. They went to lunch on the King’s Road. They drove a big white French Citroën DS Safari estate. It was a world away from our flat.

I’d play football all day long with Andrew on the huge lawn. He had proper metal goalposts with orange nylon netting; at home I just used a couple of cricket stumps. We’d play for hours, one in goal, one out on the lawn – long matches as imaginary teams. One of us would commentate the whole time as though it were
Match of the Day
: ‘We’re approaching the eighty-ninth minute. Hollins through to Garland. He’s round one man. He’s round two! He cuts inside. Here comes Hutchinson! He shoots! WHAT A SAVE!’

Dick and Ian often used to write in the house. Ian turned up in his vintage Bentley – it was said he slept in it – and entered through the tall wooden gates and parked right by the back door, which struck me as showy and a bit daring. They’d lock the doors to the kitchen for a couple of hours in the afternoon and we’d hear their muffled voices laughing and talking. One afternoon Dick called us in from the garden and asked us to sit down and watch something; he wanted to know our reaction to what they had just written and filmed. It was the first ever episode of
Porridge
with Ronnie Barker as the prison inmate, Fletcher. We thought it was funny and he was very happy we got the jokes. Dick had a kind face, and never spoke down to me. He was younger than my parents. Confident. At the end of the weekend he would often drive me home across Richmond Park in the big white Citroën estate with its brown, hole-punched, tan leather trim and hydraulic suspension. I envied all of it. We’d climb up the hill out of Petersham (‘That’s Tommy Steele’s house’) and into the park, the sun dissolving behind the trees, cruising past glimpses of red deer, and across its two thousand acres and out the other side to Roehampton Lane.