Romany and Tom (29 page)
Authors: Ben Watt
‘Up from London, are you?’
The minicab smelled of Richmond King Size. Lots of them. A glass air-freshener was attached to the air-flow vent on the dashboard sweetening the fag haze with a virulent blast of vanilla. I tried to adjust my position in the back seat so I couldn’t be seen directly in the rear-view mirror.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
I could half see his profile. Fishing waistcoat over a black T-shirt. Two indistinct old tattoos in smudged ink on his left forearm. A little bit of eczema on the line of his jawbone. His hair – no hairstyle to speak of, just vaguely cut round the ears – was flattened and smeary on the crown at the back. Straight out of bed and into the cab, I thought. He shuffled on his wooden-bead seat-cover so he could see me in the mirror with one eye again.
‘Just for the day?’
How could he tell?
‘Yes.’
‘What line of work are you in, then?’ He cornered the six-year-old Nissan Primera quickly out of the mini-roundabout at the top of the road from Bristol Parkway Station, and I had to stop myself from falling sideways on the back seat. I put my right hand out but the grey velour loose cover – a prerequisite for the leaking curry bags and slopping bottles of a Saturday night’s work in town – was badly fitted, and my hand kept moving as the fabric stretched. I had to grab the door handle with my left. As we straightened out, I reached for the seat belt behind me but it jammed in the mechanism and wouldn’t come out of the roller.
‘That one don’t work,’ he said, half over his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, I aren’t going to kill you.’ (When my boy, Blake, first heard a Bristol accent, aged five, he leaned over to me in the cab and whispered, ‘Is he a
pirate
?’)
‘No problem,’ I said, trying to stay detached.
His mobile rang in the cup holder. He reached out a thick hand and switched it off. ‘Only be my mum. I’ll call her back when I drop you off.’ He pulled a biro from a collection held on by several rubber bands around the sun visor above his head, and scribbled something on the memo pad that was fixed to the windscreen with a suction cup.
We drove a little further in silence.
‘You down on business, then?’ he said.
‘No. Visiting my mum and dad.’
‘Can’t remember the last time I went out on the A38 up towards Tockington. Live in the village, do they?’
‘No. In a care home. Residential. Up out of the village on the other side.’
‘I see. Nice and quiet, I bet.’
‘Yes, it is. My half-brother lives in the next village along, so he keeps an eye on them.’
‘That’s nice. You need your family around you.’ He gripped the dimples on his racing steering wheel cover, lifted himself up momentarily, reseated himself on his wooden beads, and scratched the tattoos on his forearm. ‘My mum’s on her own.
Hates
it. Gets lonely. Sometimes I’ll have her in the cab with me,’ he said, his voice brightening. ‘Most of the customers don’t mind. I have her in the front, up here in the passenger seat, of course. She’s not in the back with the customers. Although she
would
be if she had
her
way. She
loves
her talkin’, she does. Your mum a talker, is she?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Ah! The
strong, silent type
, I bet!’
‘Yes, you could say that.’
‘
Strong
and
moody
.’
‘Sounds like you know her.’
‘
Do
I?’ he said with a note of utter surprise in his voice. He stole a startled, puzzled glance at me over his shoulder.
‘Just a joke.’
He moved to catch my eye in the mirror. He was grinning. ‘Oh, I get it. That’s good, that is.’
He got up some speed on the Gloucester Road, then dropped down the side of Fernhill towards Tockington, the electricity pylons strung out down the valley above our heads, the cables like metal bunting heading west towards the Severn Estuary.
We drove through Tockington and up the hill towards Old Down.
At the care home, after I’d paid the fare, he handed me his business card. ‘In case you need to book me in advance, or want a ride back,’ he said. ‘Mobile’s on there. I’ve got to run a lady to the hairdresser’s at 12.15, but I’m free after that.’
‘OK. I might get a lift, but thanks anyway.’ I shook the card at him as if to underline my gratitude, got out and closed the door.
As he pulled away under the cluster of tall pines that flanked the driveway I looked at the card. It was like one of the ones you can print yourself at a motorway service station. Across the middle, partially covering an image of a Union Jack, in a smart italicised font, were the words
Pinewood Travel
, and below, in smaller print,
Local and Long Distance. Safe, Friendly, Reliable
. At the bottom it said
Karl
with a mobile number and
any time 24 hrs
in brackets. I put it in my back pocket.
My mum and dad looked well. All things considered. It was April 2004. Two months since they left London. Roly had organised all of it. (‘There’s a place very near me. Seems very good by all accounts. And a lot cheaper than London.’) They each had a single room on the first floor. They had their own furniture from the London flat – the bits that we could fit in, anyway. My mum had some of her pictures up on the walls, and their two armchairs were arranged in my dad’s room so they could sit together during the day.
‘This was the right move,’ my dad said. ‘Very clever of Roly to suggest it.’
One of the maintenance engineers had even screwed a small CD rack to the wall.
‘Are you using it, Dad?’ I said, pulling out a Bill Evans album.
‘I am. From time to time. If your mother can stand it.’ He nodded to the small portable boom-box on the side table.
I remembered when my mum had told me about sitting – at my dad’s insistence – in the front row with him at a packed and sweltering Ronnie Scott’s for a Buddy Rich gig back in the old days. In the middle of a tumultuous, deafening, thirteen-minute drum solo, Rich had dropped a stick. My mum had leaned over and whispered in my dad’s ear, ‘Does that mean he has to start
again
?’
We sat and chatted and ate chocolate biscuits. I could hear the crackle on my dad’s chest when he strained to reach the newspaper from the table beside him, but their eyes were gentle and their complexions good when compared with their first Christmas at the new flat in London. My mum’s red cotton blouse dropped straight down her chest; I tried not to keep looking.
‘Can I take your picture before I go?’ I asked.
‘If you must,’ she said, half joking.
As I raised the camera she held a hand up as if to say
just a moment
. She then peeled off her glasses, checked the rise on her swept-back hair and the gold sleepers in her ears, before dropping her shoulders back, pushing one slightly forward and staring straight down the barrel of the lens. While I focused, it felt as though she was taking me on – still the young actress of her mid-twenties, proud, self-aware, the audience watching – and I saw that it was
her
spotlight for a moment, not mine, and she looked strong, and I admired it. And an image came to me – a Sunday morning when I was little, creeping into their darkened bedroom, the air sour, winter light at the edges of the closed curtains, and slipping under the covers on my mum’s side, and backing into her warm body, feeling the rough skin on her feet against my legs, the weight of her sleepy arm across me, the sound of her thick breathing behind me, and feeling I was in the embrace of a big noble animal.
With my eye still on the viewfinder, I turned to my dad. Unflustered, he stayed sitting back in his chair but casually rested a loose fist against his cheek, his white quiff thinner but neatly combed, his goatee bushy and recently trimmed. Patches of dry skin on his face were softened by emollient. The back of his hand was brindled with a healing bruise. His nails were spotlessly clean. As usual. And as I looked at him, he gave me the same look he’d given me all those years ago when we threw pebbles against the empty bleach bottle at the Ship Inn: half affectionate; half sizing me up.
I held down the shutter-release button and clicked.
As I put the camera down I thought of the days in the summer holidays when he was decorating and sober. I saw us jumping into the car on an afternoon off and driving up to Palewell Common to play on the pitch and putt course. Parking on the grass. Collecting the clubs and the golf balls and the small coloured plastic tees and the paper score pads from the groundsman’s hut. Driving off the tee in the style of different TV personalities. ‘Do it in the style of Norman Wisdom, Dad!’ We’d stroll up the eighty-yard fairways, the crows calling in the elms, buttercups and daisies springing back through the mown grass. If one of us hooked a ball into Beverley Brook I’d watch my dad miraculously produce a spare from his pocket. ‘How did you
get
it?!’ We’d cross the footbridge for the back holes and both climb up the verge, and I’d watch a bit of amateur cricket over the fence in the Bank of England sports ground while my dad smoked a fag in the shade, and the people following us round the course got cross because we weren’t playing fast enough. After the final hole, he’d tot up the score cards and always say ‘Let’s call it draw’ even if one of us had walked it, and then we’d drop off the clubs and buy choc ices from the café in the nearby thirties park pavilion. ‘Call it a reward,’ he’d say, ‘for all our hard work.’
A little later, Roly arrived to give me a lift to the station. His battered hatchback saloon car was a tip. Although ordained as an Anglican priest back in 1978, he resigned his parish in south London in 1990 and trained at a circus school in Bristol, before embarking on a vocational second life as a touring professional clown telling stories from his slack rope with a Christian punchline. We’ve never talked about it much. There’s not a lot
to
say. It is so outside my frame of reference that I often don’t know where to start. I just tell myself it’s a question of belief, and leave it at that. But we get on. We chat mainly about football and the family, and can share a good joke and a pint, and I respect his choices. The back seats were laid flat and all the available floor space was covered in his paraphernalia: red metal frames, ropes, juggling rings, wooden crosses, greasepaint, a foot pump. The dashboard was coated in dust and dog hair. A cold coffee beaker and a half-eaten tub of mints sat by the gearstick. The LCD screen above the radio showed an insistent warning message about the engine. The footwell was home to an empty sandwich carton and a couple of chocolate wrappers.
‘They seem to be doing all right,’ I said, the hedgerow brushing the wing mirror on the narrow lane.
‘Yes, they’re settling in,’ he said. ‘Mum seems more relaxed, now there are other people to keep an eye on Tom.’
‘I worry about his chest.’
‘Of course. It’ll be the thing that
does
for him. A bad winter.’
‘And Mum?’
‘An ox. Like Nunu. She’s registered down here now, and they’ll keep giving her check-ups, but since the op there’s a fair chance she’ll be in the clear in terms of the cancer. Something else will have to get her when the time comes.’
We turned on to the A38 heading back to Stoke Gifford and the northern suburbs of Bristol.
‘Do they mix with the other residents at all?’
‘Did they ever! No, they stay in their room most of the time. Tom
has
to, really. There’s an outing to Weston-super-Mare soon. I’ll see if I can’t get him a wheelchair and get them to get out on the coach for the day.’
‘Thanks for doing this,’ I said.
‘It’s fine. You did your bit in London. Jennie’s near by now too. Only half an hour for her. We’ll get there.’
And I looked at the road up ahead and I realised that was the thing we were all steadying ourselves for: a time and a place somewhere up ahead. When and how it would come we didn’t know. Who first? In pain or in peace? Quick? Or drawn out? A future we cannot outrun.
We crested the hill and dropped down off the main road into Little Stoke and turned off by the Rolls-Royce factory – the old home of British Aerospace, where they built Concorde – the windows of the abandoned low-rise buildings on the opposite side of the road shattered with bricks and stones behind boundaries of wire fencing.
He dropped me off at Bristol Parkway Station. As we said our goodbyes and I crossed the road towards the entrance, I passed the minicab pick-up. A few drivers were out of their cabs, chatting and smoking. Near the front I saw Karl’s Nissan Primera. Next to him in the passenger seat was an elderly woman. They looked like they were sharing a good joke. His mum. It had to be.
As the train back to London picked up speed, passing flooded meadows and fields corrugated with rain, I found myself dwelling on the big move my mum and dad made in 1988 – leaving Barnes for Oxford – and how it had sounded surprising yet so seductive. They told me they’d bought a house on the river. I pictured episodes of
Inspector Morse
and
Brideshead Revisited
: quads and clock towers; cattle grazing on Christ Church Meadow; the punts and the boatyards; willows lolling over the Cherwell. I suppose it chimed with my enduring idealistic desire to see them miraculously lifted out of their fractious love-hate lives and transformed into well-rounded and contented members of the imaginary happy middle class. Uncomplicated, self-sufficient, loving parents with hobbies and interests. Abiding good health. Cast-iron independence. A state of grace perhaps. I daydreamed about a Strawberry Hill Gothic villa with French windows and a little river frontage, possibly a jetty. They’d certainly made a killing on the Barnes house – sold at the peak of the Thatcherite property boom. Was it too much to expect? Too fanciful?
