Starting Over (5 page)

‘Checking what?’ I said into the pillow.

That made her laugh.

‘Checking it’s you,’ she said.

A few people stared at us as we walked into the Autumn Grove Care Home. An old lady in a chair who had just been taken for a Sunday afternoon wheel around the park. Her middle-aged son and his two teenage children. A porter I didn’t recognise.

Then the woman on reception smiled and said hello, and they all looked away. But we got that all the time. My wife and I were one of those couples that people take a second look at, without ever really knowing why. But I knew why.

It was because we didn’t seem to fit.

Lara was so small and pretty, and she still had that dancer’s grace, that ease in her own body. Whereas I was so big and lumbering and, well, not exactly ugly, but my nose has been broken twice – once by a Friday-night drunk who threw a traffic bollard in my face, and the other time while we were rolling around on the pavement as I arrested him. It gave my face a bent, damaged look, as though there were a lot of miles on my clock and I was likely to fail my MOT. Actually, now I think about it, ugly is exactly the word.

But Lara had retained some indefinable air from her dancing days. People once paid money to see this woman perform, to see her dance, to see her shine. She would be forty years old on her next birthday, and she was a working mother with two teenage children, but she still had that showbiz glamour. Whereas I was stolid. I wasn’t like the other men she had known. I wasn’t like the one she went out with before me. Her previous boyfriend. I wasn’t a dashing young suitor racing back from Stratford after playing the Prince to rave reviews. I was from a different West End – chasing after glue sniffers and bag snatchers and mouthy drunks waving around traffic bollards so that PC Keith Rooney could give them a slap and tell them to stop being naughty. I was a big, uncomplicated man with a broken hooter who had no fear of the physical world. And that was what she liked about me. That meat-and-potatoes dependability – something that might have put off other girls. Women, I mean. She knew I would never stop loving her. She knew that it wouldn’t even occur to me, that I would always be sort of grateful, because she was so clearly out of my league. Men, especially, looked at us. And the look they gave said,
Wow, if the bar is set so low…
And then I would stare at them and they would turn away. Because they noticed something about me. It wasn’t a cop thing. It wasn’t my size. It wasn’t even the fact that I tried to carry myself like my father. They sensed they were stepping on sacred ground. Because she was everything to me. And so they took a step back.

It might have been different if her parents hadn’t died in a car crash when she was twelve years old. They were on their way to pick her up from the airport after a school ski trip – seven days of laughter falling over on some French
mountain – on a road slick with rain, ploughing into the back of a lorry stopped in the fast lane with a flat tyre.

If they had lived…

But they didn’t.

And you never really appreciate the other side of glamour, the quiet comforts of home and family, until life has taken them all away from you.

‘Have you got my book?’ Lara’s grandmother said, as I helped her from her bed to her chair. When she said
book
she meant
magazine
, and by that she meant her favourite TV listings supplement.

‘Right here, Nan,’ Lara said, and she placed it on her lap, already opened at today’s page, with her selected TV programmes circled in red, like fences around her loneliness. Lara sat on the bed and smiled. ‘Anything good on this afternoon?’

‘
An American in Paris
,’ Nan said, her watery blue eyes gleaming behind her glasses.

Lara was interested. She wasn’t just being polite. ‘Gene Kelly and – who?’ she said.

‘Leslie Caron,’ said Nan, smoothing the TV listings page with her hands. ‘And music by Gershwin.’ She nodded emphatically. ‘I like him, Gershwin,’ she said, as if George Gershwin was a promising newcomer and her tip for the top.

Lara and Nan smiled at each other, their mouths almost watering at the thought of
An American in Paris
. It still mattered to my wife, the dancing. It never went away. The dancing never goes away. It had always been more than her livelihood. After she lost her first family, and before she got her second family, the dancing was her life. And she got that from Nan. She hadn’t just taken the young Lara to lessons

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and auditions, the way her mother had. Nan had shown Lara that you could get lost in it – just lose yourself in the dancing, if that was what you wanted, or needed. And for years, that was exactly what she needed.

Twice a week she went to see Nan in the Autumn Grove. Usually not with me. She felt it should have been more often. I watched Lara settling the old lady in front of the TV, getting her a drink, holding the glass as she took a tiny, sparrow-like sip, and I saw how much my wife loved her. It wasn’t just the normal love that you feel for a grandmother. Nan had done so much. She was one of those special grandparents who brings up two generations. Nan had not brought Lara up all the way, but as much as anyone. As much as her parents, she always said.

What happened to Lara’s mother and father is surprisingly common. I have met a few people who lost both their parents in a car crash. Married couples travel in cars together all the time, and sometimes they die together. So it wasn’t just Lara. Although for many years I think it felt as though it was just her. Still does, on her bad days. She once said to me, dry-eyed and thoughtful,
I don’t know what would have happened to me without my nan. She took me in. She loved me. She helped me on my way. She stopped me falling through the cracks.

Nan loved MGM musicals. Fred and Ginger putting on the Ritz. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds sparring. And when Lara went to live with her nan, it was the early eighties, the age of video rental. For the first time ever, you could watch
Singin’ in the Rain
or
West Side Story
or
Oklahoma!
whenever you felt like it.

And Nan and little Lara felt like it most of the time.

They loved Gene, Ginger, Fred, Debbie and the rest, but
they loved Cyd Charisse above all. They loved her dancing with Gene Kelly in the great Broadway dream sequence in
Singin’ in the Rain
– Kelly on his knees before Cyd the gangsters’ moll in her green dress – and they loved Cyd with Fred Astaire in
Bandwagon
, dancing in a seedy, smoky bar, doing the kind of dancing that starts fights.

Although she had done her childish ballet and tap, that was where the dancing really began for her, those wet Sunday afternoons watching MGM musicals with Nan. Those other Sundays, long ago, where the colours seemed brighter than real life. Better than real life. And as I watched Lara and her nan watching their film, I wondered if anything had changed. It felt to me as if the dancing still measured out her dreams.

‘One day I will dance the tango in Buenos Aires,’ she said, sitting on the arm of Nan’s chair, one arm lightly draped across the old lady’s thin shoulders, neither of them taking their eyes from Gene Kelly. ‘You can take lessons when you get down there. To BA, I mean. They call it BA. I looked it up on the Internet.’ She laughed, and glanced over at me. ‘That’s the final frontier for an MGM musical nut,’ she said. ‘Dancing the tango with your husband in some little
milonga
dance hall in Argentina, with the music and the crowd and the sweat, and all the colours better than the real world.’

Might be a bit tricky, I thought. I put on my dancing shoes during our courting days, but these days Lara had her work cut out getting me to dance at weddings.

When Lara went to place the order for Nan’s dinner, the old lady gestured for me to come closer. I thought she was going to tell me something about George Gershwin or Gene Kelly. But instead she hissed a warning in my ear.

‘Don’t get old,’ she told me.

My parents wore matching kit at their self-defence class. They were a couple of trim seventy-somethings in their Adidas tracksuits, red for her and black for him, their uniforms as shiny as an oil slick. Accompanied by around a dozen other pensioners, mostly women, they shuffled across the floor of the gym on the instructions of their trainer, their kindly faces frowning with feigned violence.

‘Dogs don’t know Kung Fu,’ the instructor told them. ‘Dogs don’t know Karate or Tae Kwon Do or boxing. Yet every dog can protect itself.’

The class smiled benignly at him. Their footwear was as white as their hair. It looked box fresh. It looked as though it would never get old. The instructor clenched his fists and his teeth.

‘What did he say, dear?’ one old lady asked my mother.

‘He said, “Dogs don’t know Kung Fu”, dear,’ said my mum, and she gave me a delighted smile. She was happy to see me. I didn’t see them enough. I was always too busy.

‘Dealing with the frontal bear hug,’ the instructor said, motioning my father to step forward, ‘you are gripped around the arms and the waist.’ He proceeded to embrace my father in a way that I had never embraced him. Perhaps my mum had never embraced him like that either.

‘First – knee your opponent in the testicles,’ said the instructor.

‘What’s that?’ said the old lady.

‘Testicles, dear,’ my mum said. ‘Knee your opponent in the testicles, dear.’

My dad gamely lifted his foot a few inches off the floor as he mimed crushing the instructor’s testicles.

‘Next,’ the instructor said, ‘with the inner edge of your shoe scrape his shin-bone from just below the knee to the ankle.’

My father traced the assault in slow motion.

‘Then – stamp on his foot,’ said the instructor, and – playing to the gallery, as always – my dad pretended to bring his heel down on the instructor’s foot.

The pensioners all chuckled. There was some mild applause. My mother beamed with amusement and pride. My dad looked very pleased with himself.

‘If he still hasn’t got the message,’ the instructor said, giving a little jerk of his head, ‘then smash your forehead as hard as you can against the bridge of his nose. And goodnight, Vienna. Okay, let’s try that in our pairs.’

I sat on a bench and watched my parents and their friends, marvelling at their vitality and bravery, but most of all stunned at their heartbreaking innocence and trust in the world.

How could they feel so certain of being attacked by just one person?

At the end of the class they came over to me. My mum kissed me and oohed and aahed over some recent pictures of the kids taken at home after I got out of the hospital, and she said she couldn’t believe how Rufus was turning into such a handsome young man and that Ruby, little Ruby, was practically a young lady already.

And my mum looked very hopeful when I said that we must have them round for Sunday lunch soon. But my dad saw right through me. My father, the retired policeman, always saw straight through me. He waited until my mum had gone off to the changing rooms.

‘Still not back at work, then?’ he said.

Sometimes I was down.

It was less a swing of mood – the heart doctor had told me to expect those – than a change of perception. I suddenly
got it. The fragility of all things. Especially me. And our boiler. I could hear it spluttering its guts out in the bathroom. It will need a plumber soon, I thought with a sigh that was silent and endless, and I wondered exactly when my life had shrunk to a list of domestic chores.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Lara said, putting her arm around me.

But I didn’t know where to start, or where to end, or what the middle should look like.

‘I might be up for a while,’ I said, and she took her arm away, and nodded, and soon I could hear her moving around in our bedroom. And then after a while I heard nothing, apart from the midnight hum of the fridge and the coughing and spluttering of the boiler on the blink.

The bottle of red wine was half gone by the time Rufus came home. He looked in a bad way. And he reeked of beer. Like something the cat had dragged in and washed in Special Brew. He looked at the AlcoHawk Pro sitting on the coffee table.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said, suddenly seeing it for the ludicrous bit of plastic it was. ‘I think we can skip that tonight.’

‘I don’t mind,’ he said, and he bent his ungainly frame to pick it up. He looked at the shiny grey device in his hand. And then he looked at me. ‘I didn’t drink anything,’ he said.

I smiled. ‘Right,’ I said. It was so blatantly untrue that I had to admire his front. ‘Just try to get some in your mouth next time.’

Then there was that sudden flare of outrage, the easy outrage that is the natural habitat of the teenage boy. ‘You don’t believe anything I say, do you?’ he said.

‘Volume lower,’ I said. ‘Your mother and sister are sleeping.’

‘Not a word of it,’ he said, shaking his head at the AlcoHawk. ‘Not a bloody word.’

I sighed. ‘But, Rufus,’ I said, shaking my head with wonder at his ability to stand there stinking like a brewery and lie to my face, ‘I can smell it.’

‘But I didn’t drink it,’ he said. ‘They
threw
it. They chucked beer at me, Dad.’

He had lost me. ‘They did what? Who are you talking about? Who are
they
?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, although I could tell it mattered more than anything.

And I looked at my son, this great gawky monster, this thin-skinned stranger, and I willed myself to see the mophaired boy he had once been, the boy I could hug and who would hug me back, and who would not pull away.

‘What happened to us, Rufus? We were mates, weren’t we? Do you remember when you were little? We went to the park. We went to the football. We went to Legoland. Remember Legoland?’

‘Legoland? Yeah, I was carsick. Puked all the way to Windsor.’

‘But you enjoyed yourself once you were there. Remember? Once we had cleaned you up a bit. What happened?’

He snorted, looked away. ‘Yeah, well. I grew up.’

Was that it? Was that all it was? Really? The gap that opens up between the father and the son as the years go by? Was it really only natural? I couldn’t believe it. I felt that somewhere along the line I had taken a wrong turn, and that’s why I had lost him.