We were at Fix Bar in the basement dancing to Busta and Ashanti when the message came through that my father was with the police. Romeo was drunk, so was his mother Tracy. Gillian and Romeo had been hugging and pledging their love for one another, ‘Family, we’re family, you’re like my son.’ They were in the house, the police. And father was much confused. And we should come, Gillian and I, yes even though it is two forty in the morning and I am having the time of my life.
My father is ninety-one. He insists on his castle with its empty rooms and baby ghosts. The kitchen bells still ring when he passes through its door. The wallpaper is curled in the familiar places and the garden is fallen. He knows these sunsets well, far out there beyond the dining room window, so much so that he no longer notices them. The whole sun of his life is setting. He is an expanse, a weather movement, an old symphony. Here is his waiting room of preference and who can argue with him? Those of us who have tried to persuade him that passing his last days in a sad communal residential is superior to perilous solipsistic luxury have given up.
So I left that party with my drunken sister Gillian and I am the one driving, being abstinent for my secret foetus. All the way between ‘the crisis is here’ and ‘I need another drink’ it was ‘Romeo the son I never had’ and ‘I need to see more of him’. Tracy is her best friend lately drifted. I used to follow them around when they were turning into women. When Gillian is drunk the seven-year age difference between us wanes and she is simple and unkempt. ‘Please don’t throw up,’ I say when her voice goes creamy and yawny coming off the roundabout, past the bungalow doctor’s surgery of our childhood, past the church we were harangued to enter by motherly shooing on Sundays to learn the tales of Christianity – we used to imagine that the stories were concocted by a bored shepherd dramatising his sheep. How she must be whirling in her grave, our mother, as we are passing by, these two unbelievers, still unbelievers, never yielding for a moment to her faith in paradise. Even now she haunts us. At dusk I hear her whispering, insulted, Where do you think I went?
The northern planes of London are chilly in the rains of April and the car has misted with our cooling body heat. We descend into the final hill and slide to a halt in the drizzle shining the leaves. All the way to the bottom of the street these trees, their branches angled in questions, the answers unfound. The house at first is a ripple. I wait. It always comes at me swimming, then solidifies, the smoke of yesterdays. The lights are on downstairs not upstairs. The porch has the remains of the religiosity of my mother in its stained glass, but beyond that she is gone. Jesus has left this place. The police are here instead, two of them, a woman and a man, standing in the hallway, while our father who art not in heaven is involved in a series of explanations about his panic alarm.
What a sight. His wiry head. His flapping forearms. His crumpled pyjamas. His apple-red mouth. When he sees us his face shows recognition without connection. ‘Ah, hello,’ he says, as if there were no calamity here, no cause for concern, no neighbours have been woken, no one has been interrupted, this is just an everyday middle-of-the-night and an ordinary visit from the crime-fighting public services. ‘Are you alright, Dad?’ Gillian says, a swell of emotion filling her voice. He looks so small, receding into the state of gnome, shrinking before our eyes. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ he says, his brows raised, looking up and out from his realm of discombobulation with a quiet quivering. ‘You?’
First there was forgetting. What is that curved thing called that you use to eat cereals, soup and mousse? And what is the larger thing called that holds them? Information slowed on its journey from sight to brain to mouth. We filled in blanks. There was more and more forgetting, and much of it was invisible, because unless you are with someone all the time you have no way of knowing the new things they have forgotten. Even our mother did not know. Indeed she too forgot. They would wake into days to be remembered for their forgetting. What can you do about this when you are out of the neighbourhood? What are the limits of the grown-up child’s responsibility for the regressing parent? Can we do enough? Can we be enough, from the distance of our selves, and all that we entail?
Both surrounding and following the forgetting were its ramifications. The drawing in of speech. Because my father could not remember the name for spoon, it came to a point when he would not mention spoons, or all the other things he had forgotten that week or month. When he also started forgetting some of the smaller words used to join sentences together, then conversation itself became fatiguing. He had long stopped working by then. So had my mother – she’d taught primary school art and he had worked in taxation. Together they would take the bus to the precinct on Tuesdays and go to Somerfield to buy oranges, Battenberg cake and other things they liked. Gillian had organised mobile phones but they were of little help, they only increased anxiety. Once, I called my father during one such visit to Somerfield and he couldn’t find the phone, it had travelled into a secret alcove in his pocket. The act of speaking into it remained peculiar to him. As far as he was concerned, talking on the telephone should take place in a house, an office, a municipal building, or in a telephone box. Anywhere else was uncivilised and impolite. When he eventually found the phone, he struggled to identify the green button in order to answer it. By the time I received his voice he was a shambles. ‘What? What?’ he shouted. ‘Can you come and change the ringing thing soon, I don’t like it. I have to go to the carrots now!’ and he was gone.
Another time, again before the deeper throes of the forgetting, I took them to a gallery. The sun was on the June road, my father next to me, my mother in the back seat. She had dressed for the occasion in her gold dress, with her black purse, while my father wore his house trousers and carried a Tesco carrier bag. They had never been much the pair, it struck me, but their marriage had been long, and every marriage is a learnt marriage, its own language, its own system, defined only by the two, who they are and what they need and what they can tolerate and what they cannot. They had made something of love, my parents, and only they could have made it, and when they were no longer here it would no longer exist. The tragedy and the functionality of this moved me, as they patiently studied the painting of the dancehall queen in silver shoes seated before a Pre-Raphaelite backdrop, and the short film of the waltzers in the African ball gowns with masks on their faces.
‘That one’s right mysterious,’ my father said. My mother, a late-life Open University student, delving at that time into art criticism, said that she liked the juxtaposition of the diasporic imagery with traditional Eurocentricity.
Afterwards we ate pastries in the cafe by the river. My father fought with his Danish. He was trying to open it neatly but it wouldn’t cooperate.
‘Just tear it open, Dad,’ I exclaimed.
But when a man is in his twilight years and he wants to eat a Danish in his own way, I reflected, trailing towards guilt, you have to just let him. He has earned it. He has earned the right to expect what he expects from the experience of patisserie.
‘That does annoy me,’ he said, ‘how people speak these days. We used to say “expect” instead of “anticipate”. Now everyone says “anticipate”.’
My mother pulled him up on this. ‘Don’t be so backward, Willis.’ Sitting there in gold, watching the room that way she always watched, with a silent relish. Her mind was full of pictures. She painted with her eyes. I believe when she was dying she formed a conduit of colour to take her to her lord and she was ready, at the final moment, to enter light. I will never forget the way her face lost its age. Part of him she took with her. He drew the house around him like a cloak.
Christmases from then on were thin and oblique. We watched TV, missing her. There were random questions, randomly answered.
‘What’s a bling?’ my father said.
‘A bling,’ Gillian said, ‘is something that shines.’
The panic alarm is around his neck. He’s supposed to wear it all the time and press it when he falls, needs, severely wants, or glimpses death. This is the most he will allow of caring. Actually he enjoys the little button attached to survival, that he has the power to control his safety. Once a month on the fifteenth Gillian calls him to remind him to test it, which involves pressing it, waiting for the voice from the panic centre to ask if he’s okay, saying yes he’s alright thank you, and saying goodbye. This he also enjoys, in fact Gillian enjoys it too, a common project of memory, a duty. She has always been the one to organise and get things done while I am considered lazier, but it is not true. I aim for the galaxy. I bring stars and dancehall queens. She is of the earth, pragmatic.
‘Well I don’t know,’ my father says for the fourth time. He wriggles his trembling fingers. He is pacing the linoleum with a strange twitch in his waist. He goes from the hallway to the dining room to the kitchen. Whenever someone speaks to him he stares up at them as if they were the final gates opening. His eyes are bling in a moss of age, dazed, dizzy, dwindling, the last of a soul. April is coming wetly through the broken porch windows and the porch floor is soaked. ‘Why don’t you sit down, Dad,’ I say. ‘It’s late. Aren’t you tired?’
‘But what are the police here for?’
‘They just came to check.’
‘Check what?’
‘That you’re okay.’
‘But I didn’t press the button.’
‘We’ll be off now anyway,’ says the policewoman, the cycle of the conversation having been repeated enough times to confirm that they are no longer needed. ‘Sorry about your window. You’ll be alright now, with your dad?’
Gillian has been searching window replacement companies on her phone, suddenly sober. She has an impressive capacity to adopt a veneer of cold yet friendly professionalism at any time of the day and in any mood or physical state; she becomes robotic, and you only notice this if you know her well. She says to the crime-fighters that yes we will be fine now and sees them out. My father watches them go, a look of adoration and profound respect on his face. After a time he finally does sit down in his armchair in the living room, and while I long for slumber (dawn is not far; my silent child usurps) he and Gillian proceed into a full-blown conversation of a meandering nature, touching on disjointed things, comments on a coming storm called Alex, they talk about the washing machine and the limescale in its soap dispenser. She asks if he is hungry, whether he would like a sandwich, cheese, is there any cheese? There is a definition of cheese and a reminder of its taste. He opts instead for biscuits. I place three ginger nuts by his side, find some old newspapers to lay on the wet floor, and then I slip away to go upstairs. Someone in this building has to lie down.
There are three bedrooms. Gillian and I shared a bunk bed until I was tossed into the box room so that her womanhood could spread out. The queen-size that replaced the bunk is still there by the window, the apricot curtains withering above, the once shiny covers in fade. When Gillian and Tracy were smoking Marlboros behind the hot water tank in the garden I used to lie on her bed and sometimes she would come back and find me there, asleep, and I would be woken by the smell of tobacco. I would dream different dreams there, those of another, adaptations. A woman in a red coat would walk towards me out of the bushes, about to tell me something. Tonight, as if no time had passed, she comes again. I have drifted into sleep on the old bed. There is a flicker of my mother on Hampstead Heath with her hair beehive high and the shawl around her shoulders; and my father, like a monster from the deep, a younger man not yet changed. From her strange foliage the woman in her long red coat steps forward, an urgency in her face, fierce with revelation. It’s then that Gillian wakes me, throwing open the door.
‘What are you doing, Gayle?’ she says. ‘Why are you lying down?’
‘I was tired.’
‘I’m tired too. So we should both just go to sleep?’
Her shadow is large and hulking on the wall behind her, a hint of red in it. She swings round and storms back out of the room. I start to get up. She returns and comes close to me. When she speaks again, her voice is unmistakable in its similarity to my father when he was very angry – the hot brief terrifying edge, the power to diminish. ‘Get downstairs and help me deal with this.’ Our history is inside us. I slam the door after her and the dark feathers of the dark past fall.
Here is another random question: how do you love a monster when they are no longer monstrous? What do you do with their monstrousness, when it is posed for mercy, when it has turned in on itself? This question kept appearing and remained in my mind whenever I was with the version of my father who had moss for eyes and trembled and fell. He fell in the hall and he fell on the stairs. I would sit with him in the living room, which was slowly emptying, the boxes mounting around us, the utter confusion of his life as it faced its next corner, and I would try to match the two halves of him, the one who was kind and trusting and the one in which a collective of misgivings collided, his tensions and plummets and furious depressions. His weakness, in the end, overpowered his monstrosity.
While my foetus grew – five months, six – we went to visit some residential options. We perused the rooms, square yards and corridors of metropolitan late-life preservation. There was a red-brick nursing home in a former military block in Finchley with marks on the walls and an industrial site backing onto the grounds. A cosy new-age complex not far from the river in Hammersmith, close to Gillian, with outdoor walkways and uniform front doors; the common room had a piano and there was an activity timetable on the noticeboard listing arts and crafts, herb gardening, amateur carpentry and bowling. A tall, calm-inducing woman showed us her hexagonal room with its kitchen-diner and individual patio. My father peered around these possible new corners, imagining himself in this alien kitchen and that little garden, fresh and churning, so different from his familiar wilderness. His expression, through these tours, was of genuine interest bordering on indifference. It was no longer his choice. His children, foremost the eldest, now had the power to decide his future.
‘Are you going to move?’ Gillian asked me.
‘Where to?’
‘If he’s in Hammersmith you could move closer, so we can both be near him.’
‘I thought the whole point was that he’ll be looked after where he lives.’
‘And does that mean we never see him again?’
‘Sometimes you can be so unreasonable,’ I said.
‘Fair. Just fair.’
Something had changed that night after Fix Bar. Some unconditional ease had been dislodged. We were losing each other. Perhaps it was simply the years, our highways parting, the mounting weight of our father between us, but it pained me that Gillian didn’t call as much, even after I told her about the pregnancy. She didn’t send messages at dawn that I would immediately answer if I was awake. This was a loneliness, a new soul growing with no other blood listener, no one outside who knew enough. I told the baby’s father that I missed my sister and he said I’d get her back. How do you know I’ll get her back? I asked, because he was always telling me something would turn out well when he had no grounds on which to base the claim; he had a positive leaning, which I had come to rely on though also ridiculed, leaving me split and dislocated. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘you’re all she’s got. A time comes when you remember that.’
We visited a glossy residential ‘village’ with a large entrance lobby and personal intercoms, woods, a swimming pool, a hairdresser and designer dementia-proof kitchens, which cost two thousand pounds a week. Although I knew that this was beyond the capacity of my father’s wallet – he had saved during his working years for an eventuality like this – I initiated lengthy and foolish discussions with Gillian about its suitability. It was a way of feeling closer to her, bonding us through joint consideration and common urgency. ‘Mum would like it,’ I said. ‘Mum would like the other one better,’ she said. ‘He’d like the woods, though? Imagine him sitting by the window looking out,’ I said. She, ‘It’s too expensive. The Hammersmith one’s best.’
The room they gave him was two doors down from the tall calm-inducing woman. The old house was emptied completely, with Romeo’s help. He found a van, we brought down boxes of textbooks and the camping gear from the attic, gone were the linen trunk, the oboes, the reams of ancient tinsel, the paintings, the extendable dining table and the library of Britannicas and the easel and Mum’s coats which had stayed in her wardrobe hanging with remnants of her outings – a crumbling tissue, a folded piece of paper saying ‘glass cleaner, whisk’. The gold dress went to a charity shop for a six-pound sale. The easel went with my father and lived in a corner, unused, he had no paint, no brushes, but he kept it anyway. It invoked pictures from a history he hardly recognised but wholly contained. When he left the house for the last time in the wings of spring I heard it murmur for its flesh. It watched him go with hollow eyes. It loved its monster, the broken cage of him, walking slowly to the gate.
The child had come silver-eyed into the bright. His arms were thick, his skin was hot and papery, he seemed angry. Perhaps all the children looked angry now when they arrived, sensing a treachery in the air, or that too much would be expected of them and too little had been left. Seasons were asunder. There was nervous blossom on winter trees. I intended to tell my child that he was enough in himself, that the world, not him, was wrong. I used to believe that if we all lived as if the world were right it would eventually stand up steady, but on this the child’s father disagreed. It takes more than that, he said, and naivety is dangerous. Me though, I refuse to raise a soldier.
Gillian had taken to spending more time with Romeo. They went to concerts, took walks. I ran into him one day in town by Marble Arch. He carried within him – white Parka, white smile – an insistence on resilience, a learned defence. He was two years from twenty and the shadows might come but he would fend them off. He asked after my father and I said I was going to see him tomorrow. ‘Tell him I said hello. He probably won’t remember me.’ ‘Oh, he remembers everything, in hidden places,’ I said. We hugged goodbye and he walked on towards Park Lane.
The next day was a Sunday. It was the start of November, an autumn gloom lifting towards a Christmas that this year would be homeless. The house had been sold. No more would we gather by the plastic tree and entertain an older time. Those sunsets now were someone else’s. Another family had moved in, their murky insides visible from the street. Their secrets, their private sagas, were taking possession of the rooms. Gillian arrived in a red coat, like the woman from the dream, emerging from the sycamore trees, a cluster of them by the river along the walkway leading to our father’s room. The loneliness was still between us, a familiar estrangement. It occurred to me that I would never have her back the way it was; the child was a new distance. She lifted him and kissed him, balanced him for a while in his grandfather’s crumpled lap. He was talkative that day, a late clarity hovered, but with foreboding.
‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Will you make a picture for mother? She gave me the – brushes. There’s a thing of water.’
The baby looked glazed and gave a misty smile, not quite into the old man’s face but past it, into the recent universe. The easel in the corner had acquired faint, haphazard strokes.
‘Bright as all, you are,’ he said. ‘You look like angels.’
We were not sure who the angels were, but his eyes were darker, the moss thickened. He told us he was going to take his bike into the fields in the morning and find the house where she lived, it had a red front door. They would eat plum cake. The pears were not ripe yet.
‘Who’s that you’re talking about, Dad?’ Gillian said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s Anna. You remember Anna.’
And he told us, his last audience, about the woman in the house with the red door and her pear tree in the back where the sunsets fell. His memories now were one world, meshed and exploded. We were colliding with one another across his great pictures. He looked small and alien in this clean new space. You take a root from its ground and plant it somewhere else, it doesn’t grow, if too much time has already passed, if the essence has reached too deep. He did not know how to navigate this place, with its piano and its tall neighbour who knocked on his door asking if he wanted to come to church, or to harvest chives.
‘He’s going to die,’ I said, back out by the trees, the river behind us.
‘Yes,’ Gillian said.
‘Each time he knows us less. And one day when he’s gone we’ll be the only ones.’
‘We’ll be free.’
Dusk was gathering around, calling its blue birds, making the river shift. Gillian trembled inside her coat and held on to me. We were children at sea in the bodies of women. We were standing at the beginning again, where anything could be revealed and probed and admitted.
‘I always felt like I should be someone else,’ she said, ‘someone better. He made me feel like that. I thought I’d done something wrong.’
‘You didn’t do anything,’ I said.
‘Neither did you.’
I saw my father dance once. Only once. It was at Gillian’s wedding. There was a great tune, the kind of tune that makes the old and the young rise up. My mother was dancing. Her headwrap made shapes against the lights. She was joyous, unleashed. My father got up and inched forward towards the floor. He started moving, stiffly clapping. He couldn’t dance for hell. He had no concept of beat, no swing, no rhythm or sense of time. It was like a wooden thing moving after a lifetime of restraint. But it was the fact of this dancing that I will never forget, which captured, for all to see, a dimension of him, a presence we had never known, which had never made its way to us, had been held from us all the time, unwitnessed.
Image © Hannah Borger Overbeck, Sycamore, 1915
