The Man Who Didn't Go to Newcastle Page 7
By the time we get to Tooting High Street we are hungry and naively I plump for an Albanian burger bar where the girls choose burgers and I force down a hideously fat-soaked meal of ribs and chips. The ribs are like leftover, spat-out lamb gristle which has been marinated in lard and then put out in the rain for a week. This culinary experience is aggravated by the fact that the man serving doesn’t understand the word ‘glass’ when I request a drinking vessel for my can of Fanta. From looking around me, I suspect this restaurant is only frequented by friends and relations of the owner. I drink my Fanta from the can, having managed to secure the aid of two straws but feel quite ill after this meal, although the girls seem to cope with theirs. If I’m sick at least we’re heading for the right place.
We reach the hospital as dusk falls. The sky is a shimmering grey, promising the end to one of the few really hot summer days of the year. I’m exhausted and fearful of what we might find, especially as we don’t know which ward Adrian is in. I just can’t recall what Carole said.
‘Richmond Ward,’ Fran says with a click of her fingers.
‘Brilliant! You’re right,’ I say. And in Richmond Ward we find him.
*
The first thing I notice about Adrian is the oxygen mask he’s wearing – you can’t really miss it – and the fact that he looks so ill. Then I notice his hands. His fingers are a strange colour. A yellowy-brown, as if they’re nicotine stained. Although my brother used to be a heavy smoker – my God, isn’t smoking cigarettes the root of his problems? Damn Sir Walter Raleigh. Couldn’t he have been content with the potatoes? – I’m sure Adrian hasn’t had a cigarette since his last farewell puff on the balcony when he was admitted here for the heart bypass. On closer inspection I realise the discolouration on his hands is in fact…faeces. Despite all the signs around the hospital Beat the Bugs, Wash your hands before and after entering the Ward, etc., my brother is lying in a hospital bed with his hands covered in shit.
He’s semi-conscious and lifts a finger towards his right eye as if to rub it. I lunge towards him, grabbing his finger just in time. A male nurse, the only visible member of staff on the ward, is busy changing the bedding of another patient, so I clean Adrian’s hands for him with a paper towel I’ve dipped in water from a sink near his bed. It’s now almost ten pm and we aren’t supposed to stay too long. This is just an assessment ward. The nurse arrives at Adrian’s bed.
‘Are you going to wash my brother?’ I ask. ‘Only he appears to have…poo on his hands.’ Why doesn’t the English language have a comfortable word for the product of human defecation? Faeces sounds too pompous, poo too childish, shit too rude. The nurse seems harassed.
‘I’m going to wash him now,’ he replies, swishing the curtain around the bed. I get the hint but I’m reluctant to leave so soon.
‘Is it possible to speak to a doctor?’ I ask.
‘You can try the nurses’ station,’ he says pointing us towards the door.
*
Verity Jones is a registrar who I manage to find at the change of shift. She takes us into a meetings room off the ward where we can talk in private. During our conversation I discover she’s from Freshford near Bath. She’s pencil thin in black regulation trousers and her skin is flawless. She’s young and, although not necessarily pretty, she becomes attractive as soon as she starts speaking. I imagine her at a party with other medics, juggling plates of canapés and glasses of white.
‘How can I help you?’ she asks.
‘What I really want to know is what’s wrong with Adrian? How has he ended up here?’
She describes the effects of an irregular heartbeat which has been brought on by excessive alcohol consumption. She exudes passion for her job and is very generous with me.
‘After excessive drinking the heartbeat can go out of control. He’s here so we can treat this condition.’
‘In view of his situation I suppose he was just drowning his sorrows.’
Verity looks bemused. ‘What is his situation?’
‘He was only discharged from Rodney Smith Ward yesterday. Surely everything is in his medical notes.’
‘I haven’t had a chance to read his notes.’
‘My brother has cancer and has been given a terminal prognosis. He only has a year to live.’
‘Ah. I do apologise. I’m so sorry. I deal specifically with hearts,’ she explains. ‘Adrian was brought in with a heart problem and it’s my job to stabilize his heart. We don’t always have the time or opportunity to read every patient’s notes.’
‘He must have gone straight to the pub the minute he got home from here yesterday!’ I feel I should be disapproving since his actions have brought him back here.
‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ Verity goes on. ‘The sort of news he’s had is a huge amount to take in. You can’t blame him for behaving erratically. And if he’s alcohol dependent then he’s likely to turn to alcohol in a crisis.’
‘Alcohol dependent? Is he?’ I’m shocked. Alcohol dependent sounds like a down-and-out sitting on a park bench nursing a bottle of meths.
‘Yes he is. But the medical definition of alcohol dependency is quite low,’ she explains. ‘In other words you wouldn’t have to drink a huge amount to be clinically described as alcohol dependent.’
Despite the bleak news she’s giving me – that on top of all his other woes, my brother is, at least in the terminology of the NHS, an alcoholic – I like her. This young woman who’s crossed my path on this hot June night in the middle of St George’s Hospital in Tooting. Other people are trying to get hold of her if her bleeper is anything to go by, but she doesn’t attempt to terminate our conversation. Instead she skilfully leaves that to me, giving me a sense of my own importance. We are all important, Adrian, myself, Emily and Frances who are in the room with us. The situation we are in, matters. If not, then what is the point of her job? It’s Verity’s job to help.
At quarter past eleven, before leaving, we look back on Adrian. He’s asleep now and I watch him for a moment. He’s not the man he was. He’s frail, ill, vulnerable. But the tie of love outweighs everything. My brother is a kind and gentle man. A funny man, a clever man. An individual. A one off. But he’s lost his way. It’s my own eyes I have to wipe now.
‘Come on, Mum,’ Em says. ‘I think we ought to go. That nurse over there is giving us a funny look.’
Sunday 1st July 2007 – morning
I leave Emily asleep in her half of the bed we shared last night and re-launch myself into cleaning. The phone rings a few times. Stan from The Gardener’s rings to see how Adrian is. Bryony rings for an update and I tell her the details of how Adrian got discharged and then readmitted to St George’s within the space of twenty-four hours.
‘Silly boy,’ she says.
All morning the old Roger McGough poem keeps going through my head. Let me die a youngman’s death. Not a clean and inbetween the sheets…
*
At lunchtime Jeannette and Kyria arrive. They’ve brought an upright Hoover as I’m finding Adrian’s Henry hard going. I worked with Kyria and Jeannette when I was an Education Welfare Officer in the seventies and we’ve remained friends since.
One of the remits of the job of the Education Welfare Officer was, and still is as far as I know, to persuade disaffected children to attend school. When I started the job I was based in Peckham until I was transferred to Kensington. The areas were more similar than one might imagine. Both had families living in appalling conditions where the pervading smell was of rotting garbage and urine. These were homes, given my middle-class upbringing, I previously had no idea existed. During my time as an Education Welfare Officer I met parents who’d been imprisoned for murder and others with mental illnesses which could have put me at physical risk.
As Education Welfare Officers, once we’d employed all reasonable means to get the absentees back to school, if they still failed to attend, we were expected to begin court proceedings. The first family I took to court were the Chapmans, a
mother, father and two sons living in a ground-floor council flat in the Walworth Road area of Peckham.
The Chapmans were desperately hard up. Mr Chapman lost his job in the print when multiple sclerosis took hold. He’d sit hunched in a wheelchair – always welcoming me into his home – but anyone could see he was a beaten man. His wife was a small busy lady who’d offer me a cup of tea and maybe a biscuit. She could do nothing to get her two sullen teenage boys out of bed and into school.
I met her in the anteroom of the court on the day of their hearing. My role was an impossible mixture of persecutor and comforter. As I stood up before the magistrate and read out details of the meetings and conversations we’d had about school attendance I felt like a traitor. At the same time as grassing them up I was supposed to support and guide the family throughout their ordeal.
I’ll never forget the frightened form of Mrs Chapman as she greeted me at the court in Walworth. Looking smaller than ever outside the confines of her home, she sat in her best clothes, with a brown plastic handbag perched on her knee. It was probably her best bag that she’d taken out of the wardrobe and dusted down for this occasion. Not even an occasion to enjoy. For some reason it made me think of my mother’s crocodile skin handbag from Mappin and Webb which she kept wrapped in tissue paper. The Chapmans were fined. One of the boys had a couple of present marks in the register as a result, but not for long.
Another family that stuck in my mind were the Warlocks from Lakeside Road, the most deprived, impoverished and frightening area on my Kensington patch where at least one murder was known to have taken place in the past year. The Warlocks were a first generation West Indian family with five children who lived on the top floor of a dilapidated council house.
Mr Warlock was a dapper little man, a tad old for his role as father to such young children, who appeared worn down with the struggle of dealing with the authorities. His wife, who suffered from schizophrenia, was twice his height and easily three times his width. When Mrs Warlock spoke to me, which wasn’t often, she did so facing the wall in the dingy half-painted purple hallway of their Lakeside Road flat.
‘What you want, Missy?’ she’d mumble at the wall. I’d answer with my spiel about school attendance and how important it was for her children to be in school, quoting numbers of unexplained absences with the inevitable threat of prosecution. Of course, nothing I said had any impact on Mrs Warlock.
It was the Warlocks who contributed to my decision to leave the job. A case conference with Social Services agreed the four older children should be taken into care in order to get them into school. I could see they were a weird, unconventional family, but they were a family. I despaired at the way Social Services tried to impose their own middle-class values and didactic ethics onto people who had a right to be who they were. I may have been wrong, but some of the Local Authority homes were as dodgy, if not more so, than the family homes the children were coming from.
*
Today I’d imagined Kyria and Jeannette would drop the upright Hoover off and have a cup of tea and a chat, but they’ve come with their metaphorical working hats on and get stuck into cleaning my brother’s flat like regular Kim and Aggies. How did I get such brilliant friends? They even mop the balcony, although this elicits a torrent of complaints from the downstairs neighbour who says she’s getting flooded. Whoops. Oh well. At least Adrian has the most spotless balcony in the block.
While dusting the bookcase in his spare room I pick up a pack of photographs and notice some are of a holiday Adrian spent in Wales in the seventies with a group of friends. I remember this trip vividly, although mainly from the distress at being left out. Adrian was in his first year at Warwick University studying pure and applied maths. During the summer vac a big team of West Wickham-ites rented a cottage in Wales and just hung out. How I longed to go too. But I was still a schoolgirl and not part of their gang. The closest I got to being included was waving them off as Adrian drove away in the strange yellow van he’d acquired whilst in Leamington Spa. The van, rather oddly, had a bathroom tap fixed onto the front of the bonnet which at the time seemed ‘far out’ but on reflection, why would a van have a tap on the bonnet? Could it have been previously owned by a plumber? One careful owner. Faucet included. All I saw of the Welsh holiday were the photos Adrian brought back of the ‘team’ looking as wild as characters in Lord of The Flies, with their shirts open and bandanas tied around their long hair, making V signs at the camera.
Next I come across a photo of Den, one of Adrian’s old uni friends who I haven’t thought about for years although I send his family a card every Christmas. Maybe I should write to him now? Should I be letting people know what’s happening to Adrian?
The soft burr of Kyria still hoovering in the living room soothes me as I continue my cleaning. Propped against the skirting board is another photo which has been blown up and mounted on cardboard and shows Adrian, myself and Mac walking down a lane in London. It’s from a later era, a few years after the Welsh farmhouse trip.
In fact it’s a trip of a different kind. More the chemically induced variety. All three of us wear broad smiles which caused my mother to comment on the whole batch of photos we took that afternoon.
‘What lovely photos. You all look so happy. It’s so nice to see you enjoying the sights of London together in the sunshine. You spend much too much time sitting in darkened rooms listening to records.’ None of us liked to spoil the illusion by telling her we were high on hallucinogens at the time.
I only took acid once and the only person I would have considered taking it with was Adrian. The trip itself was good fun. I mistook an emergency exit door in the Tate Gallery for a work of art, which seemed hilarious. And we all had to be guided across the road by my (non-tripping) boyfriend, Bruce, in Piccadilly Circus – equally side-splitting. But as the drug began to wear off, when brightly coloured pavements stopped melting into each other and we’d tired of cracking up at the sight of a random ice cream van or shops selling gentlemen’s underwear, we went into a pub where Adrian started crying into his beer. We knew we were coming down. He’d taken acid before. He started talking about his future plans, saying he’d decided to buy a sports car, drive it round London, burn himself out. But another of his plans was to sever all ties with our parents.
‘I’m not going to see the folks any more,’ he said.
‘You’re not serious, are you? Surely,’ I challenged him. ‘They’d be devastated.’
Adrian seemed upset. Mac told me to back off. And so ended the trip. I didn’t see why Adrian wanted to break away from our parents but his relationship with them had always been a grey area for me. I never fully understood why he’d left home to board at St Christopher, and I’d never dared ask, since this seemed a taboo topic.
*
On the back of the photo of us tripping, which I’d mounted on cardboard and given Adrian as a Christmas present, is a little sticker showing a blonde child in a red cape carrying a basket. On the sticker I’ve written To Adrian, love from Ali and a hand written poem. Well, not a poem as such – it’s the lyrics from the third verse of “Brain Damage” from Dark Side of The Moon by Pink Floyd.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear.
And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.
What made me copy those words in 1973? How could I ever have guessed I’d be reading them thirty-two years later in such circumstances? They seem strangely pertinent now. Did Adrian shout and no one seemed to hear? Dark Side of the Moon remains one of his favourite albums to this day.
Sunday 1st July 2007 – afternoon
Kyria and Jeannette pack up their clean
ing gear and are off in a whirl of hugs and kisses, humping the Hoover down the steps back to Kyria’s car. Just before the girls and I leave, there’s a knock on the front door. It’s Adrian’s neighbour.
‘I’m Gary. From the flat upstairs,’ he says pointing upwards. ‘I just thought I’d come to check everything’s alright. I haven’t seen Adrian for a while.’
Gary is tall, camp and confident, with in-your-face glasses. I give him a brief summary of Adrian’s plight. I’m surprised at the amount he knows about Adrian as Adrian has never mentioned him.
‘I’m really sorry to hear about that,’ Gary says. ‘I’ve noticed him decline over the past couple of years. He used to be really fit and played a lot of tennis. But recently he’s been looking a bit stooped and not as smart. I wondered if he’d been drinking. Going to the pub too much…I think he might have been lonely.’
Gary’s words stab me. Lonely. Of course he was lonely. I have an image of myself surrounded by my family at home and Adrian alone in this flat, and I’m crushed. In amongst his paperwork I’ve come across a letter from a dating agency called Cavendish Avenues. How many solitary days and nights had he spent in this flat and how often had his loneliness driven him towards The Gardener’s Arms in search of company. How often had he then made the now seemingly sad and solitary walk home at closing time? Gary gives me his card and entreats me to ring him if I need anything. He says Mary in flat three has been worried about Adrian too. And yet I’d seen this block as being totally anonymous. But then, no one could live somewhere for twenty-two years and not know anyone. Even in London.
*
I lock up the flat and we return to the hospital – this time by cab. Adrian has been moved from the assessment ward back to Rodney Smith. When we arrive I have to try to compose myself, because he’s behaving so strangely – trying to get out of bed when he’s not strong enough to even stand up, let alone walk. He’s back in the same style hospital gown with no proper fastening at the back. My previously gorgeous brother seems to be turning into a bonkers old man. Emily appears to be on the verge of tears. Starting to feel tears burn my eyes too, I leave his bedside and walk around the corner to be alone.