By Benjamin Wal.
By the time he was thirty his teeth were loose, the back molars showing early signs of disintegration. Mum used to say to me: You’re lucky you’ve got my teeth. Around forty they started to drop out, evenly, one side and then the other. Soon after, he gave up smiling. Even with his dentures in—a rare concession—he refused to smile. It wasn’t only vanity. Mum died and he found he couldn’t work anymore. I tried to tell him he was depressed but he wasn’t having it. I sent him books about grief. We lost touch for a while. I was out on the road. I used to do the circuit as a singer, back in the late nineties. Nothing glamorous. Johnny Cash. Roy Orbison. When I say the circuit I mean seaside venues, a few city spots here and there, functions, birthdays, anniversaries, with the occasional wedding if it was an older couple. I still sing, the way most people sing when they’re alone, but these days I prefer to walk. Performing took something out of me that only walking can replenish. Father never came to see me. It was Mum who liked Cash and Orbison and all those men. Glen Campbell. Elvis, whom I resisted. I never wanted to be an impersonator, didn’t dress up or anything. It was all about the songs. Father never came to see me, but then I never invited him. Another thing Mum used to say: You’re lucky you’ve got my voice.
Finally, he chose Budapest. There was no telling him. He went with the cheapest, least convenient option, and because I had agreed to go along with him when he first raised the prospect—back when I suppose I didn’t believe it was a real possibility—any plans I might have had for the summer were ruined.
True to form, he refused to acknowledge the trouble.
“It’ll be a nice break for you,” he told me over the phone. “Lots to see in Budapest.”
“How long will we be away?”
“A week, give or take.”
I had set aside the days for an August walking tour up in the Lakes, though perhaps part of me knew it was bound never to happen. I hadn’t booked anywhere to stay. My usual place, in Coniston, was being renovated. And his teeth, long missing, were always there in spirit, I suppose, at the back of my mind, gnawing at the back of my skull. He never let me forget. “Might as well bite on a piece of chipboard,” he would say whenever I encouraged him to eat something, anything. Eggs, bananas, blueberries, mince, all the soft cheeses, soup—soup! Instead he drank smoothies of his own invention, slime-green and fibrous and leaving a grassy residue on his plastic beaker, which he never bothered to rinse properly.
In the flaying brightness of the airport I could see the change in his face. It had happened too slowly for me to notice on my weekly visits to the bungalow. Not just the collapsing apparatus of brow and cheek and chin, but the shiny yellow pallor.
“You need to eat something solid,” I said.
“With what? My gums are raw.”
“You look ever so thin.”
“So? Look around you. Gimme a medal. Fat arses everywhere.”
I sat him down at a table and got myself a panini and a latte. His knee—cracked in a tumble down the stairs two years ago—had long since healed, but he still brought his stick out with him. He held it across his lap and pressed down on it with his white, pebbly hands. A judging, canny expression covered his face. It occurred to me then, as I stood in the queue and observed him observing others, that in two years he hadn’t left the bungalow where he now lived to go any farther than the supermarket at the top of his road. And then it occurred to me—or both things occurred to me at roughly the same time—that I hadn’t been on a plane in a decade or more. Family holidays as a child had left me with mixed feelings about going abroad. Cloudless foreign sunshine, bars bedecked with Union Jacks, all that thrashing traffic in the swimming pools. An air of aggressive determination: to bask, to savour, to shut out the working world. Hard to recall any events, only backdrops. I’m not saying it was torture. But I never felt truly at ease unless I knew that, wherever I travelled, I could in theory walk back home, if I had to.
And so I predicted we would both be nervous on the plane, and I expected him to have a stiff drink or two at the very least—a steadying measure, as he would put it—once he had wedged himself into his seat by the window. But he refused a drink of any kind. He didn’t want to put himself through the upheaval of going to the toilet, he said. His lips tore open like Velcro when he spoke.
As the plane gathered speed on the runway, I locked eyes with a small boy sitting across from me. He didn’t seem to blink, or he blinked when I blinked, these big dumb doglike eyes, and I felt that I had to remain cool while he watched, even as the plane began to tip upwards and the force of it frightened me.
A few minutes before midnight we arrived in a state of exhaustion at our hotel, having navigated streets thick with jeering men. English accents had filled the air from all sides. Louts arm-in-arm singing, tunelessly. Father was unperturbed and made his way through the crowds, jabbing his stick ahead, while I tried to make sense of our route using the map on my phone. He knew his way around this kind of scene; he was at home among the rowdy and the inarticulate. I wanted them all arrested, jailed, pummelled, out of the way.
The hotel came with a belligerent recommendation from the clinic, and we were granted a patient discount of twenty percent. It was quiet when we arrived at reception. Which is not to say I was expecting a holiday atmosphere, just that some gentle socialising might have served as a distraction from Father’s concentrated, insistent presence. He was in pain—yes, he was always in pain. His grey eyes bore into me, bore the fact of his pain into me. There was no escaping it; we were sharing a room. The receptionist did something with her face when she handed me the key card, as if to silently remark on the peculiarity of our arrangement. Of course, it was Father’s idea to share. A money-saver.
“He’s very frail,” I told the receptionist. “His knee.”
She didn’t pay much attention to this, and father only tutted, dryly. I’ll admit the word was not an accident. I chose it the way a surgeon might choose a blade: frail. A clean, innocent cut. I liked to take these opportunities when I could. Much easier than speaking to him directly. Much easier than saying what was on my mind, giving voice to the extensive litany of objections I had logged over the decades—objections in response to insults many of which by now I had honestly forgotten, feeling only the impressions they left, the permanent grooves and twists in my habits and behaviours, the way my thoughts leaned in very particular directions no matter how firmly I willed them not to. I don’t know, maybe that was why I’d agreed to come, and why I submitted so easily to sharing a room. To air it all. A feat I had never attempted as an adult: a full week of my father at close range.
I didn’t sleep much the first night. Father’s snoring made me restless. His putrid breath, a third presence in the room, hung bodily in the air. I opened a window. Twice I went to the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. I sat up in bed and watched him sleeping on his back. The longer I looked the harder he was to recognise. There were three hours I couldn’t account for, so I must have slept too, and possibly dreamed.
The next morning, after walking him to the clinic and leaving him there, I had my first chance to explore the city. There was a market, just a few minutes away. It was bright and loud. I particularly enjoyed the fish, laid out on the ice in overlapping lines. They shone like treasure and their sea-smell cut through everything. I kept being drawn back to them. I wanted badly to buy something and cook it. Which is not to say I’m much of a chef. Chicken curry is the extent of my ability, though by now my version, after years of refinement, is near-perfect. I wouldn’t know what to do with a fish.
At noon I found a table outside a café and ordered a cream horn with my latte. The heat was stunning. I was already sick of it. On my phone I checked the weather in the Lake District and failed to resist a twinge of regret. The bustle and confusion were wearing on my patience. For me, holidays were about breathing clean air against unchanging, imperishable scenery. Alone, ideally.
Back at the hotel, I went up to my room for a quick shower and then set out for the clinic. Father was in the waiting area with a bleak look on his face.
“You’re late.”
“How do you feel?”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Try not to talk.”
“Waiting an hour.”
“Try not to dribble.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Smile for me.”
“Where’ve you been, I said.”
He had a new lisp and spoke through a crack in the corner of his mouth. The screws remained tightly hidden behind his lips. I stuck out my elbow for his hand but he shook his head and stood up unaided. When we got back to the hotel he locked himself in the bathroom and I realised with some relief that he would be staying there for the rest of the afternoon. Every quarter of an hour or so I’d knock on the door and ask how he was feeling, before going back to the bed with my phone and scrolling through God-knows-what, the way you do. The shower didn’t come on and there were no toilet sounds. I knew he was staring open-mouthed into the mirror, perhaps touching the screws, fingering his gums, waiting for the anaesthetic to wear off, for the pain to come roaring in. I put on the television and found an American news channel. It wasn’t long before I was asleep.
I had a favourite place to stay, up in Coniston. I even had a favourite room: first floor, on the corner, big brown beams, overlooking the pub garden from one window, facing the Old Man of Coniston from the other. You can see it from the bed, that noble fell, framed perfectly in a rectangle of glass. My kind of art. It can be the first thing you see in the morning, depending on how you arrange your body when you sleep. Last time I was there I spent a lot of time in that room. I was unwell, and so I stayed for a day longer than planned. Tammy, the owner, was nice about it and allowed me to keep my room at the same rate, despite the summer crowds. She took a liking to me. In the restaurant she made a special effort to be the one who brought me my scampi and chips. I entertained thoughts of asking her to join me for a ramble, or a boat ride across the lake, but didn’t want to give the wrong impression. Some friendly banter was fine, civilised, but much more than that would have been a strain. You get out of the habit.
This is what I dreamed about in the hotel bed. Just me waiting for my scampi and chips, chatting to Tammy. When I awoke I expected to see the Old Man facing me, but there was only a blank wall. Father was awake. His breathing jerked and stalled.
“Bugger me,” he said.
More and more I found myself in these situations with my father, these private, wretched intimacies. When we stopped speaking, shortly after his fall on the stairs, I thought we would continue that way until the end—until he was near death, I mean, when I would of course step in as the dutiful Only Son and attend to his last few weeks without complaint. But recently the space between us had contracted. His demands had become more frequent and, because I was what he described as “at a loose end”—by which he meant unmarried and unmortgaged—my own hopes for the future were apparently not worth a damn. His teeth were just the latest in a long line of ailments that needed my attention right this minute. There was his knee, always—but also his swollen prostate, his crippled hands, his deteriorating eyesight, his conveniently timed migraines, his booze-induced memory lapses, his am-dram dizzy spells. Crossing the road together one day he went for my arm and held it. I groaned and tutted and I’m sure I blushed as well. At the imposition of it. He could walk unassisted. But from then on it was the same routine whenever we crossed a road, and I knew that—in an instant, with a single lunge for my arm—my obligations to him had a new weight, a slow dragging weight, and there was no reversing it. My life, for the first time since I was a boy, was someone else’s.
This is why I thought of smothering him while he lay there swearing and whimpering in bed. Which is not to say I had sufficient upper body strength to complete the task. Gaunt as he was, he had a fierceness that emerged in the right conditions. With that pillow pressed down over his face, his warped hands with their untrimmed nails would suddenly become capable and strong, groping for my eyes; his bad knee would recover its power in time to thump me in the ribs; those stark silver screws in his mouth, I was sure, would gnash through the pillow.
The dentist was due to check on the screws later that afternoon, and the following day the temporary teeth would be installed. Online, the clinic made much of their “pain-free promise.” I got dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. Find your perfect smile. Father’s instinctive distrust of medical professionals melted away when he saw a video of a man biting into an apple, chewing loudly and obnoxiously with bared, teeth-like attachments. Eat with confidence. Apparently I was too late, they had stopped serving an hour ago, so I went to the bar and ordered some peanuts and a lemonade. I was quite happy reading the news on my phone, posting and replying to comments here and there, when he rang.
“Where are you?”
“Down at the bar.”
“We need to go and see him. I’m in agony.”
“You’re due this afternoon.”
“Didn’t sleep a wink.”
“Come down to the bar.”
“I’ll go alone if I have to.”
I went up to the room and he was still on his back, under the duvet. A shower was out of the question, he said. The painkillers barely touched the pain, he said. They were in a white paper bag on the bedside table. I counted only two empty pouches.
“Have another one of these.”
“I just did.”
“You’re supposed to take two every six hours.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing. Spiteful child.”
It was one of his regular put-downs. Spiteful child. This time he couldn’t quite get his lips around the words; he had trouble with his ts and his ds. But I knew what he was going for. I felt it before he said it. His vocabulary was very limited compared to mine, and “spiteful” was a word, like “classic” or “travesty,” that he used whether or not it properly applied to the matter at hand.
Work was never far from my mind. I checked emails whenever I had a spare moment and thumbed out hasty replies. The job was new and I was eager to make my mark. There had been a desperate stretch, not too long ago, when I had been unemployed for several months. It happened without warning, like a trap door opening beneath my feet. I had a strong case at the employment tribunal, which was forever pending. Father didn’t know; he never asked about work. Even when I showed up at his bungalow in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon he didn’t ask any questions. On the one occasion when he handed over some money, I had an explanation prepared:
“I’ve met someone and I want to get married.”
But I never got to say it. Lacking even the faintest curiosity, he wrote out a cheque on the arm of his chair, breathing hairily through his nose. The sum was trivial: two hundred pounds. I hadn’t named a figure. For his sake I smiled and said thank you. Had it been fifty pence I would have done the same. My tact, my deference, was absolute.
Let there be no doubt: my explanation was an honest one. I was going to ask Tammy to marry me. After that last summer in Coniston, when her kindness restored the breath to my lungs, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Of course, the medication played a role and, looking back now, I can’t quite return to that frame of mind, that tender, weepy state, which seemed to put a soft silk gauze over everything. For God’s sake, man, you were drugged! is what I tell myself, repeatedly, when I catch myself brooding and reflect on my actions at that time.
After dropping Father at the dentist I sought out the café where I’d enjoyed the pastry. It was a cool afternoon and I didn’t mind getting lost in a fruitless meander. I challenged myself to find the quietest route—narrow alleys and byways, shaded side-streets, apparent dead ends revealing oblique openings if you held your nerve—until eventually I approached water, the flat silver breadth of the Danube. A familiar calm came over me. Bodies of water anywhere in the world always had the same effect. Along the river, boats of every size moved at varying speeds. A sign on the river’s edge caught my attention:
Danube River Sightseeing Cruise. Day/Night/Sunset.
I used my phone to take a photo and must have stood too long without moving, for when I turned to go there was a man in my path. He had the smug expression of someone whose patience had been rewarded. In his hand was a hat, held upside down and containing a flat square device, like a calculator. He asked, in English, if I was enjoying the juggler. He pointed towards a clearing, the centrepiece being a parched fountain in the shape of a mermaid, where scattered tourists watched a man tossing sticks of fire into the air and catching them. Card is good, said the man.
That night in Coniston, last summer, I had sung for Tammy. There had been karaoke in the pub, but I gave nothing away until last orders were called and it was nearly empty. Tammy was talking about what could be done with the décor to appeal to the young, and my mind was loose, adrift, as it used to be around bedtime, rushing and retreating at the prospect of sleep.
“The young will have their day,” I said.
“I haven’t had mine yet,” she said.
That got me onto singing. Patiently I had sat through the tyros, mooing their way around Abba and A-ha, while I gulped back a tangible melody in my throat, a neckful of song. Now: out it came. It was, I admit, a tad old-fashioned. ‘Running Scared,’ Roy Orbison. She didn’t know it. While I hurried my way through the final lines, skimping on the high notes, she played with the bracelets on her tanned wrists and stared down at them, as though she were listening furtively through a locked door.
“You’re good at that,” she said.
And I—for reasons unknown even to myself—started to talk about my father.
“You worry me, you do.”
“What is there to worry about?”
“When you’re not here.”
“I’m not a nurse.”
“I think of you chucking yourself in front of a car, or off a bridge.”
I told him to be quiet.
His new teeth were in—or the placeholder teeth, which he would need to wear for several months before the real ones were installed. They were white and attention-seeking. The overall effect was of a boxer’s gumshield, bunching bolshily behind the lips.
We had our first sit-down meal in the hotel’s dining room. I ordered lamb chops. He went for cod in parsley sauce. His dinner came with chips in their own basket, which he slid over to me without comment. I watched him try the cod. He used a fork to mash the fish into the sauce; to pick at the fish, looking for tiny bones; to scoop a few flakes and bring them close to his lips, hesitating, tonguing the new equipment in his mouth. I was nearly finished with one of my chops by the time he tasted the cod. His jaw moved slowly, haltingly.
“Mm,” he said.
“All okay?”
“Mm!”
“Must be nice, eating something solid.”
“Where’ve you been all day, then?”
“I fancy a boat trip, down the river.”
From his mouth he removed a bone twice the width of a hair.
“Give over. I get seasick.”
“It’s a river, nice and gentle for you.”
“I can’t feel them.” He put his fingers over his lips. “It hurts.”
“It’s one or the other. They’re numb or they hurt.”
“My gums hurt. My teeth are—wrong. Wrong, it’s all wrong.”
He put down the fork and sipped from a glass of water.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t have one of your moods.”
“You’re one to bloody talk!”
Saying this sent him into a coughing fit. I very badly did not want his new teeth to be jarred out of place—they didn’t seem secure in the blighted soil of his gums—so I stood and patted him on the back.
“Give over, sit down. Go on. I’m fine. Sit down. I can manage.”
But he did nothing to stop me. It was part of his game to pretend my help was unwanted, unnecessary. I went through the motions, played my part, knowing the particulars of his every response. How does a man become so dull? How did my own swift, stealthy, unpredictable mind—which has never settled long enough for me to recognise anything like a consistent pattern or motive—how did it—how did I—spring from this droning nuisance, this pathetic know-nothing who, no matter how hard I’ve tried, has defined the limits of my own life to such an extent that as a fifty-one-year-old man, outwardly free of obligation, I found myself across from him, eating food I didn’t want, in a place I would never willingly visit, daydreaming once again about bringing it all to an end?
Tammy was there when I opened my eyes. A slight thing, she struggled to lift my head up off the floor. She wanted me in the bathroom. My mouth was wet. I had vomited profusely on myself, the bed, the walls. I thought for a moment that I had been assaulted, knocked on the back of the head, my room ransacked.
“What a stupid thing to do,” said Tammy.
The pain was extensive. I tasted blood. I must have fallen, alerting Tammy downstairs, because the last thing I recalled was sitting up in bed against two cushions, watching the news, taking the pills five at a time.
“You’re fucking mad, you are.”
Her hands were under my arms. Finally I was able to lean over the toilet bowl. My shirt was unbuttoned; she was taking it off. I had never been colder. My belly was out, my hairy shoulders, my back with its varied dispersion of moles.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“This’ll get round, you know. People talk.”
We were just in time for the evening cruise along the Danube. I had convinced him he needed the air. The night was soft and warm. Father was in a wheelchair borrowed from the hotel. He said his knee wouldn’t last the journey. Rolling him onboard, I felt a certain privilege. Fellow passengers looked on with kindness and patience. I parked him by the stern’s guardrail, out in the open. There was a small roped-off area where a man in a white tuxedo was disentangling cables at the back of an old amplifier. I went to the bar for an orange juice and a bottle of mineral water and when I returned father was speaking to an elderly but sprightly English lady who had taken the last remaining seat. From the way he was rubbing his knee I could tell what they were talking about. I heard him say “arse over tit” and “shattered into five pieces” and “you just have to get on with it, at the end of the day.” The lady looked at me with a genuine smile, which told me he hadn’t shared the whole story.
“I don’t want any of that,” he said when I put the bottle of water on his lap.
“You need to stay hydrated, Dad.”
“I need a proper drink.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head so the lady would laugh. She did, and went on to talk about her daughters, who had paid for her holiday, a birthday treat, and who pestered her to drink and exercise and eat regular but sensible meals, and who could be a bit of a pain but ultimately had her best interests at heart.
A clunking sound, a squeak, a rumble underfoot. Someone applauded, a few others joined in. We were off, unmoored, moving at a clip across the purple water.
If I had made it to Coniston, I would have taken Tammy on a paddleboat up to Brantwood. There we could have been alone together, Tammy in the golden light, saying, I understand, I do, if you ever want… Since then, I haven’t been able to stop… What you said that day, it made me… I can’t remember the last time I felt… I know why you did it, how he made you do it…
My view from the top of the stairs: Father stumbling, grasping for the rail, turning sideways, making it worse for himself, so that his full weight comes down on his knee, crushing it against the edge of a step. He opens his mouth to scream, the shock of it stabilising him for a moment—a failed breath—before he continues his roll down to the bottom.
He was a singer, this man in the white tuxedo. Into the cheap microphone he said everything twice, once in Hungarian and once in English. A thin backing track accompanied his warbling through a selection of songs appropriate to the age group. He even gave ‘Ring of Fire’ a go, excitedly moving close to the amplifier so that a bolt of feedback zapped our ears. An old couple got up to dance. The lights on the banks of the Danube defied the darkness—everything was vividly textured, enhanced and degraded at the same time. The old among us—and there were no children to be seen—had the grey, desiccated quality of corpses, animated by electric light, blue around the ears.
“My boy does a bit of singing,” I heard Father say. He was still talking to the English lady. By now there was quite a crowd around the two of them. At some point they had got onto the subject of teeth, it seemed, and several passengers had their own stories to tell. I stood apart, with an empty glass in my hand. The white tuxedo finished his set with a lounge version of ‘Sweet Caroline’ and I wanted to smash the glass over his skull, push the shards into his cheek, stamp him into the deck.
“Fank you, fank you, tips please welcome.”
The microphone was left buzzing on the amp. I was near enough to pick it up.
“Put your hands together,” I said, the self-effacing compère, twisting the cord around my finger and pulling it out from under my feet. The white tuxedo smiled, nodding, clapping. This kind of thing happens all the time, he seemed to say. A passenger wants a go—well, be my guest.
“Roy Orbison?” I asked, not looking at anyone, an old shyness creeping in. “Any Roy Orbison fans onboard?”
A smattering of cheers. The white tuxedo said, “Very good, very good,” and came closer.
I didn’t need a backing track. The first lines were enough to ignite the atmosphere. They all knew it. Just running scared, afraid to lose. It was easy. I opened my eyes to see my father, clear and immediate, hunched, small, fist-like in his metal chair. The passengers standing around him, they were swaying. As I came to the end of the song I lost control of my breath; I seemed to be singing into a vacuum. The white tuxedo had both his hands on my wrists. “They want more,” I said. Only he could hear me. I was surrounded by a vast shush of water. Someone had unplugged the microphone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benjamin Wal is a short story writer and playwright from Northampton, England. His stories have previously appeared at One Hand Clapping.
