New Welsh Short Stories (6 page)

‘That's almost as many as you Dad!' I said and he flapped his hand in a broad, modest gesture, as if batting away an undeserved compliment.

Another section was headed FAMOUS PEOPLE BORN IN ZLÍN.

‘OK Dad,' I said, ‘which two famous people were born in Zlín?'

He sat thinking for a long time before he said, ‘Give me a clue,' and I said that we'd seen a play by this person when it opened quite a few years ago at the National Theatre. Again he sat thinking for a long time and then said, ‘Give up,' and I said, ‘Tom Stoppard. Who do you think the other one is?'

‘No idea.'

‘Shall I give you a clue?'

‘No – just tell me.'

He was sounding a little testy now – he hated losing any kind of game.

‘Ivana Trump,' I said.

‘Never heard of her in my life.'

He was amused though, and interested, when I told him I'd once written a short freelance piece for the
Evening Standard
about Ivana Trump's ambitions to set up an interior design business in New York. All I could remember now was something about a leather
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covered wall she'd installed in someone's dining room with a waterfall running down it.

‘Perhaps it had something to do with growing up in a shown that made toes?' suggested Dad.

Just outside the town itself we stopped for lunch and Dad tried out both names on the waiter and thought it was very funny when only Ivana Trump's produced an enthusiastic nodding, Stoppard's a look of blank unconcern, a shake of the head.

He was terribly disappointed though, when we got into Zlín – we both were – because the shoe museum was closed for renovation, its collection of shoes, including the famous royal riding boots and the elasticated slippers, packed away in storage and impossible to see. We were disappointed, too, about not seeing the Communist
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era shoes. Our guidebook spoke of them as if we would never see anything quite so frightening, anywhere, ever again, and now we could only speculate about what they might have looked like. We stood for a while outside the locked doors and then returned to the car to see what else Zlín might have to offer. ‘There's the factory,' I said, feeling quite hopeful, ‘and the shop,' but it was raining now and very cold. A quiet gloom had spread from the deserted museum and Dad seemed to have lost heart in the whole expedition. He was tired, he said; perhaps we should just go home.

A couple of weeks later I found him one Saturday morning in Norman Park wearing the wrong pair of shoes.

I'd arrived at his house as usual, and finding him gone I set off in the direction of Chatterton Road, tracking him down eventually by the flower beds in the park, and the first thing I saw, even before the new look of fear and bewilderment in his pale blue eyes, was that he was wearing his Downstairs shoes, and he never, ever, wore his Downstairs shoes anywhere except downstairs, not even upstairs.

Within days he was in hospital where they located a large malignant tumour on his brain which, almost overnight, had begun producing dementia
-
like symptoms before moving with catastrophic swiftness into a kind of electric storm where for a week he lay on his bed in the ward spouting gibberish and worse. ‘They lose their inhibitions,' one of the nurses confided to me in a loud whisper next to his bed, as if I hadn't noticed. Later, a different nurse, when she saw me in tears, brought me a cup of hot tea and said that sometimes, even with such a large tumour, the doctors could relieve a bit of pressure on the brain and they came back to themselves, at least for a little while.

And he had.

For a whole week he was practically himself again, frail and very deaf and half
-
blind as he'd been for the last few years, and still mangling some of his words – the day after his operation he asked me if I could get him a drop of semi
-
skilled milk for his tea. He was confused about which year it was, or which decade, but in spite of that he was himself. He knew who I was and what the two of us were to each other. He talked to me about music and books and then on that very last day when he was still waking up on and off for a few minutes at a time, he became suddenly gripped by anxiety about leaving me, as he put it, ‘by myself' and grew obsessively solicitous about my love life. It was the one thing that seemed to weigh upon his mind and he kept returning to it. He asked after a girl I'd brought home with me for a few days during the Christmas holidays when I was a student, whose name he couldn't remember. ‘The Scottish one with the red handbag,' he said. ‘What happened to her?'

‘I don't know, Dad. We lost touch. It's a long time ago now.'

‘Is it?'

‘Yes.'

‘You don't see her any more?'

‘No.'

‘Where's Helen?'

‘Helen's in America, Dad. We're divorced, remember? She married Dave Crater? The mathematician from King's? You used to call him Crave Data.' (Long before he started involuntarily mixing up his words Dad had been fond of a good spoonerism.)

‘Oh.' A pause. ‘Yes.' He sounded sad. Had I met anyone new recently, anyone nice?

‘I meet plenty of new people Dad. All the time. Just no one I really like.'

This wasn't quite true.

I hardly seemed to meet anyone new any more and when I did things never seemed to go anywhere. If Dad had been a bit more robust, if he hadn't worked himself up into quite such an anxious state, I might have told him now about my various failures; I might have pointed out that if you like someone, it helps if they like you back, and that hadn't happened in a while. Nothing since Helen had ever got off the ground – things always seemed to start fairly well and then for some reason I could never really put my finger on they fizzled out almost immediately. Perhaps I tried too hard, perhaps I came across as a bit desperate, and that put them off, or perhaps I just bored them. Obviously I'd been more boring than Crave Data and that had been deeply depressing and disturbing. Sitting with Dad now, I found myself wanting, for once, to talk to him about it, to confide in him and tell him how things really were. He was looking at me earnestly with his pale blue eyes, his fingers fidgeting with the edge of his blanket. ‘There've been one or two,' was all I said, but nothing that had worked out so far. ‘Maybe not everyone thinks I'm as great as you do, Dad!' I added jokily.

‘What about Ruth?' he said.

‘Ruth?'

He nodded and I searched my memory for possible Ruths. ‘Ruth Lind?'

Another nod. I didn't know what to say – Ruth Lind had been our neighbour in Newport, before we moved from Wales to England, when I was eleven. Back then she'd been a retired schoolteacher.

‘I think Ruth might be a bit old for me Dad.'

‘Oh.' He looked crestfallen. ‘Really? She seems young to me.'

For a while he was silent. Agitated though, fretful
.
He repeated what he'd said about not wanting to leave me by myself – that he wished he knew I was with someone. He said he didn't want to have to worry about me, which was an odd thing for him to suggest – that he'd worry about me when he was dead. He wasn't in the least bit religious and had never expressed any belief in the hereafter and I guessed that what he meant to say was that he was worried about me
now
, here in this world, before he left it. I let it go.

He tried to dredge up the name of another of my old girlfriends from the 1980s and suggested a couple more times that I might hook up with our Welsh neighbour Ruth Lind who by this time, I calculated, would be about a hundred and five.

I took his hand and gave it a squeeze and told him not to worry. ‘I'll be fine Dad. Honestly.'

He closed his eyes. The veined lids fluttered. The conversation had exhausted him. His head, on the pillow, looked heavy, a burden. He spoke my name, once,
Philip
. He fell asleep and later that evening, he died.

I wasn't fine.

I missed him dreadfully.

After his funeral I went back to work but I would sit at my desk unable to speak or do anything for hours at a time; when Saturday came round, I went down to his house.

Saturday had always been my day with him and it seemed impossible to stop doing the same thing now, even though he wasn't there any more – for as long as I could remember I'd taken the tube early on a Saturday morning from my flat in Shepherd's Bush to Victoria, and then the train down from Victoria and walked the last half mile from the station to his house; in the evenings I'd catch a late train back to town. I did the same thing now, except that instead of being with Dad all day, I spent the hours walking in the garden or sitting outside on the patio in one of his folding chairs, moping around the house, looking at stuff – his old Boy Scout diaries from the 1930s, his violin, his letters home to his parents and brother from Palestine after the war when he was a young soldier stationed out there, photographs (I found one of me with Ruth Lind taken in our back garden in Newport – me looking small and spotty, her looking tall and remarkably elegant in a tweed skirt and cardigan). At some point during the day I'd walk over to Chatterton Road to the shops to buy something to eat for lunch, then I'd come back. Sometimes I'd re
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read his Boy Scout diaries, his letters from Palestine. I told myself that soon I would start sorting everything into piles. Keep. Chuck. Charity Shop. House Clearance. But more often than not I'd go instead to the coat cupboard under the stairs and open the trapezoid door and stand there looking at all his different shoes lined up next to each other in their neat pairs: his stiff black London shoes, worn in the days when his eyesight was still good enough for him to come up to London on the train to see me and go to a concert or a museum; his smart brown Bromley High Street shoes; his Chatterton Road shoes, which were a retired pair of London shoes; his Downstairs shoes, which were a retired pair of Bromley High Street shoes; his hideously ugly Upstairs shoes which were a kind of geriatric sneaker from Clarks called a
Wayfarer
– tan
-
coloured nubuck with grey nylon webbing on each side, a wide stitched toe like a child's mitten. I'd look down at my own feet, enormous in their all
-
purpose size 11 loafers (my seven
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league boots he called them) and feel so far away from him, so separate and sad, that I'd sit down inside the shoe cupboard and close the door and cry.

Both inside and outside the shoe cupboard I thought a lot about the different stages of his decline: the brief reprieve near the end after his operation – the relative lucidity in the days before he died; the sudden onslaught of craziness before that, and how until the morning I found him in Norman Park wearing the wrong shoes, he'd never really been noticeably unwell; there'd been no signs that anything was amiss other than the slips in his speech, nothing beyond the hearing aids he'd had for a long time in both ears and the large thick
-
lensed magnifying glass the size of a ping
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pong bat he used to help him read his post, his bank statements, the cooking instructions on packets of food and anything else he needed to be able to see properly. It was ages since he'd given up reading books and the newspaper. In his last years his great pleasures were music, and the cover
-
to
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cover recordings of novels he brought home from the library, the volume knob on the sitting room hi
-
fi or the small CD player next to his bed turned up to maximum. For years I'd been addressing him in a kind of constant mid
-
level shout that seemed very loud to me but which he seemed to find very acceptable; when his cleaning lady came on Thursdays, he'd had to start leaving a key under the plant pot next to the front door because even with his hearing aids he could no longer hear her knock or ring him on his phone.

I thought a lot, too, about our last trip together, across Bohemia, the warm wind in the open windows, the lunch outside Zlín, Dad being so amused by the waiter who was a fan of Ivana Trump but not Tom Stoppard; his theory, expressed in a handful of mangled consonants, about Ivana and her leather waterfall – that it had something to do, perhaps, with coming from a town that made shoes.

At work I was becoming more and more useless. I couldn't bring myself to pick up the phone or speak to anyone. I couldn't write an email, or type a word. One Thursday morning my editor told me she was worried about me, that it might be a good idea for me at this point, to see a doctor. With a slightly harder edge to her voice she said that if I wasn't going to produce anything again today, I might as well go home.

I went down to Dad's. I footled about, walked round the garden, came back in, did nothing very much, spent a bit of time in the shoe cupboard, looked at things. More and more I found myself thinking about how
anxious Dad had been about leaving me by myself, and what he'd said on his final afternoon, that he would worry about me when he was dead and how I'd told him not to be anxious because I'd be fine. In the hall I sat down at the little telephone table near the front door and picked up his huge perspex magnifying glass. I recalled an occasion when he'd tried to make a phone call by speaking into the giant glass instead of into the telephone receiver – I'd found him with it pressed against his hearing aid, shouting into the long perspex handle that came down just below his chin,
Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?
and then inquiring eventually, in a thin uncertain voice into the void,
Is anyone there?