V 02 - Domino Men, The (4 page)

On that particular Tuesday, however, I had Barbara with me.  She hadn’t brought any lunch so we had to go to a sandwich shop, where she blew an hour’s pay on a cheese baguette.

The riverbank bustled with London life.  We passed flocks of suits and clusters of tourists — the first group strutting with jaded impatience, the last ambling, filled with curiosity and exaggerated wonder.  We passed a homeless man juggling for pennies, a crocodile of schoolchildren on a daytrip and a shaven-headed young woman who hassled us for donations to charity.  There was a power walker who scurried feyly past, his head set at a comically quizzical tilt, a blind woman and her dog and a fat man in a bobble hat selling early editions of the
Evening Standard
and bellowing out its headline.  This was something about the Queen, I think, although I wasn’t moved to buy a copy.  At that time (my apologies) the royal family had never interested me all that much.

Barbara picked a bench close to the gigantic Ferris wheel of the Eye, and after some desultory attempts at small talk, we settled down in silence to watch its stately revolutions.

As she chomped through her baguette, I couldn’t help but notice that she persisted in sneaking little looks at me, shy, curious, sideways glances.

At last she came out with it.  “Do I recognize you?”

So that’s what it was.

I was spooning out the last of my yogurt.  “I’m not sure.  Do you?”

I let her flail about for an explanation.  “Did we go to school together?”

We did not.

“Do you know my father?”

How would I possibly know her dad?

“Did you used to go out with my friend Shareen?”

Actually, I’ve never been out with anybody, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

She chewed her lower lip.  “I’m stumped.”

I sighed.  “Don’t blame me.  Blame Grandpa.”

“Do you know,” she said, “I thought it was you?”

This happens from time to time.  I can usually tell when someone’s about to recognize me.  They tend to be the type who watched a lot of telly as kids, who were regularly dumped in front of it by their overworked parents before dinner.  I sometimes wonder if there might not be an entire generation who, in some weird Pavlovian way, are actually able to smell fish fingers and chips at the sight of me.

“What was it like?” Barbara asked.

“Oh, great fun,” I said.  “Mostly.”  I swallowed.  “By and large.”

“God, you must have had a riot.  Did you even go to school?”

“Course.  Mostly we filmed during the holidays.”

“Will you do the catchphrase for us again?”

“Do I have to?”

“Oh, go on.”

“Don’t blame me,” I said, and then, again, eager not to disappoint:  “Blame Grandpa.”

For two years, between 1986, when I was eight, and 1988, when I was ten, I played the part of “Little” Jim Cleaver, the wisecracking son in the BBC’s family sitcom
Worse Things Happen at Sea
.  That said, I’m a terrible actor and I freely admit that my casting was entirely down to nepotism.

It was Granddad’s show, you see.  He wrote all the scripts, his only major credit after twenty-odd years toiling in the Light Entertainment department of the BBC, something tossed to him as a favor by mates who wanted to give the old guy a break.  My catchphrase (actually, often my only line in an episode when they worked out that I couldn’t enunciate for toffee and was pathologically unable to emote) was:  “Don’t blame me.  Blame Grandpa” — this invariably delivered on my entrance, as I trotted through the door to the family home and onto the main set.  Although gales of prerecorded laughter followed on its heels, I never actually got the joke nor met anyone who did.

After two years of contrived coincidences, pratfalls, one-liners and painfully convoluted cases of mistaken identity, the show was mercifully cancelled and that was that.  Just as well, as it turned out.  There was no way I could have carried on.

I got ill, you see.  I needed to have some operations.

Most days, it all seems like a dream, like something which happened to someone else and not to me, but even now there are times, when I’m channel-hopping at two o’clock in the morning trying to find something worth watching, that I’ll catch a clip of it or an old episode running on some misbegotten cable channel.  And there’s a Lilliputian version of myself, wisecracking in falsetto.  “Don’t blame me,” he crows.  “Blame Grandpa!”

“You must get recognized loads.”

“Not loads, no.”

“Still acting?”

“I’m a civil servant now,” I said firmly.  “I’m a filing clerk.”  I made a big show of checking my watch.  “And it’s time to get back.”

At two o’clock we were sitting in another meeting room watching a man with a whiteboard talk absolute nonsense.

“Hello,” he said.  “I’m Philip Statham and I’m the safety officer for this department.”  There were only two of us in the room but he spoke as though he was delivering his address to a packed-out lecture hall.

Barbara was making dutiful notes.

Philip Statham, she wrote.  Safety Officer.

Statham sounded like a stand-up comic of the old school about to launch into the best loved part of his act, some creaky routine his audience could recite by heart.  “You might think,” he began, “that an office is a safe place to work.  You might think that just because you’re not dealing with anything more lethal than a stapler, a fax machine or a ring binder that nothing can happen.  You might even believe that accidents don’t happen here.  That somehow they don’t apply to you.”  He paused, for what I can only imagine he believed to be dramatic effect. “You know what?”  He sucked in a breath.  “It ain’t necessarily so.”  He tapped the whiteboard with his marker pen for emphasis.  “Accidents can happen.  Accidents do happen.  Every office is a potential death trap.  And over the course of the next two hours and a bit I’m going to be giving you just a couple of pointers on how to stay safe.”  He arched an eyebrow, flared his nostrils.  “On how to stay
alive
.”

We had sat through two videos and a PowerPoint presentation and were about to embark on something Statham ominously referred to as “a little bit of role play” when my mobile phone gave an epileptic shudder I my pocket.

“Sorry, Philip,” I said, thankful for the distraction.  “Got to take this.”

Statham glared as I scuttled gratefully into the corridor but when I saw the caller ID which flashed up on the screen, anything that was left of my good humor ebbed away.

“Mum?” I said.  “You mustn’t call me at work.”

“The old bastard’s dead.”

My heart clenched tight.  “What did you say?”

And she said it again, more firmly this time, not bothering to suppress the smirk.

“The old bastard’s dead.”

The first time I saw Granddad again I didn’t recognize him.  He had been with me for the whole of my life and I couldn’t pick him out in a room full of strangers.

Too cut-up and jittery to risk using my bicycle, I caught the 176 bus opposite the station and sat, anxious and impatient, as it edged its grudging way through the grimy streets of Waterloo, the tarmacked monotony of Elephant and Castle and the minatory neglect of Walworth and Camberwell Green.  Down by the river, surrounded by sightseers, gift shops and the eager bustle of commerce, it is easy to forget that the city has teeth, that it has a certain hunger.  Out here, it is scarcely possible to forget it.

At last we creaked to a stop, the brakes of the bus whinnying and wheezing like an old nag days from the glue factory, outside the sprawling, red-brick mass of St. Chad’s.  The entirety of my journey had been spent crammed next to a fat man in a Garfield T-shirt, who ate chicken from a cardboard box and listened to pop music unsociably loud.

I skittered through the big sliding doors at the front of the hospital before spending the next ten minutes wandering about looking lost.  Eventually a nurse took pity on me and directed me to the Machen Ward, a soporific antechamber at the rear of the fifth floor sealed off from the rest of the hospital by a thick glass door.  Inside, half a dozen elderly men lay stretched out on narrow beds, motionless, silent and still.  The room was filled with old-fashioned smells — bleach, soap, floor polish and, everywhere, the insidious odor of decay.

A few beds down, a nurse was wrangling a patient’s pillow into place and muttering something she presumably intended to sound soothing.

“Excuse me?” I said.

The woman turned her head to look at me but carried on with whatever it was she was doing.  “What?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Name?”  Her speech was clotted with an accent which sounded like it might be from Eastern Europe.

“His name’s Lamb.”

She glared scornfully at me, as though I’d just asked if the hospital had a bar.

“He’s my granddad,” I added, rather feebly.

“Behind you.”  She shot me another contemptuous look and bustled back to work.

Supine and oblivious to the world, the old bastard had aged about a hundred years since I’d seen him last.  Now he was all the things he’d never seemed before — frail and fragile, feeble and faded.  White hairs curled unchecked from his ears and nostrils and his skin was drawn tight around the bones of his face.  Tubes, wires and metallic lines snaked from his body, linked in some mysterious way to plastic pouches of liquid and a monitor which beeped officiously at intervals.

There was a large window behind his bed decorated, in a puny stab at festivity, with a single, balding strand of tinsel.  Thin winter sunlight played across his chest and lit up the dust which fell about him until it looked like confetti.

I found a chair, pulled it over to the bed, sat myself down and immediately started to wonder whether I should have brought grapes.  Flowers?  Chocolates?  Hard to see how he could appreciate any of them.

I tried talking.  Isn't that supposed to help?  I’m sure I’d read somewhere that chatting at though everything is perfectly normal is supposed to be good for people in his condition.

“Granddad?  It’s Henry.  I’m sorry I haven’t seen you in a while.  Work’s been hectic.  You know how it is before Christmas…”  But my voice sounded hollow and insincere and I stopped and sat awhile, not speaking, listening to the cold metronome of the machine.

Eventually, I heard someone walk up behind me.  From the clack of her high heels and the smell of the only perfume she ever wore, I knew who it was before she even opened her mouth.

“Poor old bastard,” she said.  “Even I feel sorry for him now.”

You’re probably surprised that she even bothered to turn up at all.  To be honest, I don’t fully understand it myself.  But then things always seemed so complicated between them.

Mum circled her big, meaty arms around my waist and pulled me close.  Caught unawares, squeezed anaconda-tight as a tsunami of scent broke over me, I was eight years old again and, for a second, felt almost happy.

We sat beside him in silence.  I held the old man’s hand whilst Mum produced a book of puzzles and set about working through a page of Sudoku with the single-minded pertinacity of Alan Turing squaring up to a fresh cipher from Berlin.  The quiet was broken only fitfully, by the beeps of Granddad’s machine, the rap-tap of my mother’s pen on paper, the occasional passing of a nurse and the distant echo of a telephone.  We saw no doctors, no one came to ask who we were or what we were doing and the other patients who shared his ward made no noise at all, not the slightest sound or whimper.  I’m not sure exactly what I’d expected — death rattles, I suppose, ragged breathing and delirium — but the business of mortality is quieter than you’d think.

We’d sat in the same miserable tableau for at least half an hour when something appeared in the window behind my granddad.  First a frond of red hair swaying in the breeze, then a squitty, pinched face, then a yellow safety jacket, a squirt of foam, the underside of a sponge puckering against the pane.

It looked miraculous, as though the man was levitating.  The illusion was shattered when the window cleaner peered through the glass, looked directly at my mother and winked.  Mum giggled, the sound of it grotesquely out of place here, like laughter in a morgue or a smirk at a cremation.

I gave the man my frostiest look but I’m afraid I saw Mum grin back.

As if in response to this pantomimed flirtation, the life support machine made a chirrup out of sequence, a squeak of distress, an electronic hiccup.  I was on my feet at once, the window cleaner forgotten, casting around for someone to help.  But almost immediately the machine returned to the same rhythm as before and Mum told me to stop flapping and sit back down again, all the while admiring the window cleaner from the corner of her eye.

She left a short while later, muttering something about meeting a friend for a drink.  Evidently I was not invited so I stayed and sat with Granddad, gripping his hand in mine until, eventually, the nurse returned, growled that visiting hours were over and motioned me toward the door.  I laid Granddad’s hand beside him on the bed and, feeling guilty but grateful, walked back into the light, the beeps of the machine still echoing in my ears.