The Man Who Didn't Go to Newcastle Page 3

  *

  I followed Adrian from class to class, also designated to the academic stream, until the ultimate – Class One – which was taught by a frightening gentleman, Mr Nielson. Mr Nielson seemed old despite his dark (probably dyed) hair. He produced all the school plays, conducted the choir, sweated a lot and spoke with a posh accent. Mr Nielson had a cupboard full of plimsolls (slippers), which he used to whack boys’ backsides, and a drawer full of rulers for smacking girls’ legs. He constantly taunted the most poised of the girls in my class by telling them they were conceited. I had no idea what conceited meant and although I could tell he wasn’t flattering them I longed to be categorised with the same label. On reflection I suspect he gained satisfaction from abusing both sexes. If he was around now he’d probably be locked up.

  Mr Nielson adored my brother, so I joined Class One already feeling a shadowy second best. I’d heard my father read Adrian’s report. For English Mr Nielson said Adrian had so many ideas that sometimes his thoughts outstripped his pen. I wondered if my thoughts would ever outstrip my pen, and feared they might not. I’d also heard Dad tell Adrian he could be anything he wanted to be. He’d passed the Eleven Plus to grammar school. He could go to Oxford or Cambridge. He could be Prime Minister. Although only ten, I realised Dad was being over-ambitious on Adrian’s behalf. But all the same I admired his sense of the infinite possibilities of life. Not that this ambitious streak had governed his own life. Dad sold brake linings for a living, although he sometimes mentioned a place at the London School of Economics which he’d had to sacrifice because of the war.

  *

  The Westbury train arrives on time at Paddington mainline where I disembark and scurry along the platform towards the steps leading to the Underground. As someone who left London in the eighties, returning to the smoke is a culture shock. London is home to a myriad of different nationalities who buzz around the platform in a cosmopolitan mix of fashions and races. Whenever I visit I feel excited by the atmosphere which is so different to Frome where I’ve lived for the past twenty-two years.

  From Paddington I take the tube to Tooting Broadway and reach Tooting High Street on the last lap of my journey. I stop off in Blackshaw Road to buy a Daily Mirror for Adrian (Ascot is on, so he’ll want it for the horse racing) and a sandwich for myself in a Sainsbury’s the size of an airport terminal. I queue at the checkout with all the London folk, but I feel a bit lost. Most people around me seem joyless, ground down by inner city life. No apple-cheeked Somerset types here. Outside the shop, people gather in groups for a communal smoke-in, flicking their cigs away before pushing off through the glass doors with their trolleys. Don’t these people realise what they are doing to their bodies? Don’t they value their hearts, the tissue inside their lungs?

  Adrian was a fifty-a-day man until he had the heart bypass. A couple of times when walking to East Putney tube he’d suffered debilitating chest pains and was in St George’s for tests on his heart when the doctor refused to let him leave the building – even though Adrian had private health insurance via his job as a statistician for BUPA, and would, given the choice, have plumped for The Wellington. He shot to the top of the list for an emergency triple bypass and remembers going out onto a balcony at St George’s for what he knew would be his last ever cigarette. Like a final kiss with a lover.

  Adrian began smoking at the age of twelve. On our annual holidays to Christchurch, near Bournemouth, where our grandparents lived, he often disappeared along the esplanade returning, I guess, several fags later for his Mivvi or 99. When I think back to those childhood years, the weeks we spent in Bournemouth – and there were many – shine like a burning sun reflected across the surface of the southern English sea. On holidays the barriers of puberty and growing up were mostly put aside. Adrian and I played in the sea and on the sand for hours. There were a couple of years when our grandparents had colour television and we didn’t. I would have been happy filling my bucket and swishing about on my rubber ring in the sea, but Adrian insisted we all packed up our stuff and went back to Grandma’s in time to watch Popeye or Huckleberry Hound. That was the year we discovered Huckleberry Hound had been blue all along.

  Whilst holidaying in Bournemouth, Adrian made friends with a girl called Sue who came from Essex and whose family rented a beach hut on our favourite stretch of beach in Branksome Chine. Sue was a blue-eyed, dark-haired beauty. She was petite, fourteen years old, and had a younger brother called Tim. When we went to see Thunderball at the Bournemouth Odeon, Sue and Tim tagged along. On reflection, it was probably Adrian’s idea to take Sue, and Tim and I were invited as decoys to fool the parents. I was just thirteen and Adrian was fourteen. I didn’t get James Bond, although I revelled in the excitement of the big screen, the Bond theme music and the Martini adverts. The cinema was huge and before the film had been on for more than about half an hour I realised I was bursting for the loo. But, sandwiched between Adrian and Tim, I was too shy to get up and squeeze past Tim, in order to get to the Ladies. Thunderball was an extremely long and uncomfortable film.

  When we left, whilst waiting for Sue and Tim’s parents to pick them up, Adrian snogged the face off Sue and then swore me to secrecy.

  ‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ he warned as he fed his threepenny bit into the phone to arrange for our parents to collect us. I wasn’t sure why not, and was a little miffed he’d presume I’d tell her anyway. He obviously saw me as a grass. Still, I probably would have told her the minute we’d got into the car.

  I wasn’t sure where I stood with Tim, especially as we were only thrust together because of our respective siblings’ mutual lust. Tim was brown-haired and more ordinary looking than his striking sister, but I liked him well enough. Later that August when Adrian was away camping with the Scouts, I found a letter in his room from Sue. One line jumped out at me. ‘Tell Ali Tim thought she was as beautiful as ever.’ I was shocked and a little put out since I hadn’t heard about this before. Tim thought me not only beautiful, but beautiful as ever implying previous favourable references to my looks in years gone by.

  I could hardly reproach Adrian for not passing on this piece of flattery since I knew I shouldn’t have read the letter in the first place, but I’d never heard myself referred to as beautiful before.

  *

  I arrive at St George’s at half-eleven and recall some of the layout following my visit here three years ago. Once inside, I sprint up a back staircase following signs to Rodney Smith Ward and pass several groups of young doctors coming down, but see no one else walking up. I reach Rodney Smith Ward with my heart dangerously close to explosion. What am I trying to prove? That I am healthy when so many other people in the building are not? I have to pause to get my breath back.

  Unlike the Victorian ward Adrian was in last time, this is a new part of the hospital and the main doors of the ward lead to a corridor with smaller rooms off it. I ask a nurse where I can find Adrian Tilbrook, and, having located his room, search for my brother in the six beds containing six equally poorly-looking, elderly men.

  An auxiliary with a hairdo worthy of any member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience is tending to one of these souls. She pulls the sheet up to his neck as if she can’t think of anything better to do. If this is the standard of care, I fear for my brother. I catch her eye and smile. She smiles back, a shining happy smile. Her name badge shows she’s called Lena.

  ‘Just poke him,’ Lena suggests once we’ve worked out which of the six corpse-like figures is Mr Tilbrook.

  Adrian is asleep, snoring and with tubes sticking into his nose the way patients have in Casualty. I don’t like to wake him – I never like waking anyone – so I ignore Lena’s advice and begin tidying his bedside table, which is cluttered with plastic cups and half-opened bags of sweets. With nothing left to organise I sit down in the chair next to his bed and wait. He’s still sleeping. I tuck into my Sainsbury’s grape, Brie and something else sandwich and try to compose myself.

  I quite like hospitals – the s
elf-containedness and the sense (however unfounded) of being looked after. But I’m shocked by the sight of my brother. He’s unrecognisable. He seems to have transmorphed into an old man. A thin old man asleep in a hospital bed with tubes stuck up his nose.

  As I chomp my way through my sandwich, I try to remember the last time I saw him. He certainly missed Christmas with us last year. In fact the last time I did see him was a few months ago when I came to the London Book Fair. He walked down the road from his flat to meet me at East Putney station. He seemed breathless, yet still offered to carry my bag for me, which was very heavy. Did I let him carry it? I wonder guiltily. I can’t remember now. Maybe I let him carry it a little way.

  Eventually Lena comes over and wakes him up.

  ‘Oh, Ali!’ he croaks when he realises I’m here.

  I’m so glad I came.

  *

  Adrian is wearing a cotton garment like a hairdresser’s cape (which is undone at the back), and what appear to be disposable paper pants. I ask him if he wants me to bring him some pyjamas but he says no.

  A young doctor with an Oxbridge accent arrives at the bedside and pulls the curtains around us. I take a deep breath and stab my fingernails into the palm of my hand again. So this is it – the reason I’ve travelled a hundred-and-fifty miles on three different trains halfway across the country. To support my brother while he’s told the results of the biopsy on his lung.

  However, the doctor has no fresh news. Contrary to the information I was given yesterday, the results of the biopsy haven’t come through. The doctor just repeats what I already know, and yet somehow makes everything sound perfectly fine.

  ‘There are lesions on the kidney and lung,’ he explains. ‘But we won’t have any concrete diagnosis until we get the test results.’

  For lesions I guess we are supposed to read tumours, although I don’t find the courage to ask.

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to know?’ the doctor says.

  ‘No, no. I’m fine with that,’ Adrian replies.

  I maintain the unhappy expression I’ve worn since he began talking.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve come all this way without hearing the results,’ the doctor says to me. ‘We will know soon. If it is cancer, and if the cancer has spread, then there is no treatment. And I do suspect it may have spread…’

  At last he’s used the C word. He shakes my hand, opens up the curtains and takes his leave. I feel confused.

  *

  Once we are alone again, Adrian perks up.

  ‘I’m very stoical about all this.’ He pounds a fist on his chest. ‘I’m not afraid of cancer in the way some other people practically fall over just at the mention of the word.’

  This might sound like bravado, but he shows no sign of breaking down. I almost sense he finds what’s happening to him rather interesting. Is he enjoying the attention his situation is generating? For how long has he needed some attention? He then pulls the tubes out of his nose as if they are nothing. What are they for anyway? Suddenly I feel protected and relieved that this isn’t turning out to be the ‘so many months to live’ scenario I’d been dreading. I finish off my sandwich and drink my juice. Lena returns with lunch. Adrian picks unenthusiastically at a congealed brown glob with the unlikely description of ‘beef stew’.

  When he’s finished eating he relates the saga of his illness to me from the first symptoms of breathlessness, to his final collapse on the street last week which brought him into St George’s. But I’ve heard this before. Surely it’s the same story he told me on the phone when I was out with the dog the other day. I let him carry on however, in the misguided belief that this is leading to some new revelation.

  It isn’t, though. The story remains the same…the washing up, the wine glass, the deep cut, which incidentally is still bandaged – he holds up his hand for me to inspect, telling me the doctors are considering an operation on the base of his thumb – the towel he used as a bandage, the blood seeping through said towel, the decision to take the bus to St George’s…

  As I listen to this story again, two things strike me about Adrian’s life. Firstly, he is alone. He has no one at home or nearby to worry about him, or to take him to Casualty in the middle of the night. Although his friends are very important to him, and vice versa, none of them are close at hand. Secondly, he and most other Londoners I know tend to rely on public transport to get around. So, although he has a car downstairs in his garage, and numerous taxi cab numbers pinned to his notice board, Adrian takes the bus to Tooting. Two buses, in fact.

  He pokes half-heartedly at his chocolate pudding topped with beige custard, and sighs.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get out of this place,’ he says with a sudden downturn of mood.

  ‘Don’t be so pessimistic!’ I reply, even though in my heart I fear he might be right. There is a chance he might not get out of this hospital alive.

  But we have to be optimistic. We have to look to the future. And in view of his living conditions – up lots of stairs in a flat where he lives alone – we discuss the options for when he comes out of hospital. He might be able to rent a more accessible flat in London, or he could move to Frome into the flat we jointly own there but is currently let to tenants. Or one of his ex-girlfriends might move in for a while to help him…

  After Lena has cleared away his lunch dishes, Adrian manages to haul himself out of bed and totter to the nearest toilet with the aid of a walking stick. When he comes back he eases himself down onto the bed.

  ‘I’ve decided on one thing,’ he says. ‘Before I get out of here I’m going to walk to the other toilet at the end of the corridor without a stick.’ Adrian is breathless. His legs are so thin, and pale. Little more than sticks themselves with white sports socks on the ends. I see now just how much weight he’s lost. But I admire him for this ambition. So very much. I’m touched by his determination to achieve something despite his predicament.

  We sit together for a few hours then I tell him I’ll have to get going.

  ‘Are you meeting Jeannette or anyone?’ he asks.

  His question reminds me I’m usually on a tight schedule, trying to fit in visits to all my London friends.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ I’m relieved I can honestly say I’m here only to see him today. There’s something in his expression which makes me realise, just this once, I must devote myself to him.

  ‘There’s a couple of things I’d like you to do for me, Ali, if you don’t mind. Can you go to the flat and get my paying-in book? It’s in the spare bedroom in the filing cabinet. I need to sort out my finances. I don’t suppose you could lend me a couple of grand?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I say. At this moment I feel so sorry for him, I’d do anything I could to help. Eventually we find the flat keys in his locker and I kiss him goodbye.

  Friday 22nd June 2007 – afternoon

  From St George’s I walk back towards Tooting savouring my freedom, at the same time feeling guilty that I can leave, whilst my brother is so hopelessly incarcerated. I arrive at Tooting Broadway and notice a Primark store nearby. My body involuntarily diverts towards its automatic doors.

  Five T-shirts, three skirts, a belt, three make-up bags and two overnight cases later I leave Primark a new woman. It’s amazing what parting with thirty-two-pounds-fifty can do for the morale.

  I approach the entrance of Tooting Broadway Underground station, the one made famous by the eighties’ sitcom, Citizen Smith. Wolfie Smith, power to the people and all that… I chundle down the creaky escalator laden with my Primark bags and feel a little wobbly at the thought of entering the bowels of the earth in such an unnatural way. In Somerset the closest I get to the bowels of the earth is looking down badgers’ setts. But gradually I feel myself slipping into the whole London thing. I spent most of the first half of my life in the capital, so it’s just a matter of easing my way back into the loop.

  I get off the Underground at East Putney intent on finding the short cut Adrian take
s from the tube to his flat. I cross over West Hill and turn the corner, relieved to see Leylands sprawling before me. The block is purpose built, tidily kept and with a large lawn at the back. Adrian has always been proud of his flat, or ‘the flat’, as Mum always called it. I don’t think she ever went there, or to any of the other flats he lived in, but Mum regularly asked me the same question about my brother.

  ‘How do you think Adrian is managing in the flat?’ The way the question was put showed she clearly doubted he was managing.

  ‘The same as anyone else manages,’ I’d reply, irked by her obsessive concern for my (at that time) healthy, wealthy and firmly unattached brother.

  ‘But he’s on his own. I do wish he’d get married or something. And I do worry about him. I mean what will happen when he gets old or is ill? Who will look after him? I won’t be around. He’ll have no one to look after him. All alone in the flat.’

  ‘But none of those is a good enough reason to get married,’ I pointed out, particularly as sometimes my brother’s do-as-you-please lifestyle seemed positively enviable to me as I spent night after night clearing up after my four children, cooking and changing nappies.

  *

  Some people think Adrian is gay. But if a man is unmarried or lives alone does that make him gay? Certainly not in his case.

  For the first few years of my life I believed I’d marry Adrian, until Mum dropped the bombshell one afternoon while my best friend, Barbara Barker, was round for tea.

  ‘When I’m married to Adrian,’ I mused over my sliced split tin and homemade blackcurrant jam, ‘I’m going to have a big house with a swing in the garden and…’

  ‘…you can’t marry Adrian, darling,’ Mum cut in calmly as she removed the tea cosy from the tarnished silver teapot she’d had as a wedding present and poured herself another cup. ‘Nobody can marry their brother.’