His phone beeps and he fumbles it up off the bedside table. A message from Alex Hargreaves. What time is it? 1.32. Why is he sending out messages at this time? Rob drops the phone back on the table, hears Vernon’s father struggle out of bed and shuffle to the toilet, moving slowly along the dim landing, worries that he’s woken him. Tomorrow, if he feels well enough, if he can manage any food, they will try to have breakfast together.
The last time he saw Jack he was a big man, robust, argumentative, a talker, natural Shop Steward material. He’s made an effort, given they have a guest, shaved, put on a shirt though the collar is far too big now and it’s loose on him around the shoulders. It’s a shock to see him like this, a few weeks or months from death, when in Rob’s memory he is a solid, almost fearsome figure.
Jack raises a forkful of beans to his mouth, hand shaky, no appetite at all, sips at his tea asks how things are going up in Scotland, what the work situation is up there.
Rob tries to stay neutral on it all, independence, referendums, political hopes and fears, but even as he talks he can tell that Jack is hardly listening, exhausted with the effort of getting down the stairs, of sitting up in the chair. Breakfast half-eaten he excuses himself, goes back to bed, tells Christine he can make it up there on his own, doesn’t matter how long it takes him, important he stays mobile as long as he can. She’ll bring him up a cup of tea.
They try to make small talk as they finish off their food, but both of them are aware how long it is taking him to get back up to bed, the pause halfway up the stairs that seems to last forever. He can feel Christine’s edginess wondering if she should go out to check on him, give him a hand. The speed with which he’s losing weight, losing strength, soon he will be bed bound. How will she get him to the toilet? He’s lighter but still heavy, too heavy, and she doesn’t know if she can get help with that, the nurse and the home help will come round once a week but he’ll need round the clock care, how will she provide that on her own? Thank god she’s still healthy enough, but what if something happens to her, if she falls, breaks her arm, she’s not young and at this age anything can happen, come out of the blue. She has her sister round the corner, her niece and nephew, but how much can she bother them?
Rob can see she’s agitated. Let me wash those pots, he says. Oh no, love that’s alright, you’re a guest, she says.
No really that was great, first home-cooked breakfast I’ve had in a while.
Oh right well, she says and smiles, obviously preoccupied.
He hasn’t done much pot washing recently either, looks at the pots and pans, rolls up his sleeves, knows he should check the train times, get together more stuff out of Vernon’s trove upstairs, itemise it, see what value any of it might have.
A few plates in the draining rack and suddenly he senses Christine hovering at his back.
Could you read something for me love? I can’t make head nor tail of it. She has several sheets of paper in her hand, her glasses on, peering over them apologetically at him
I need to go to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, but they’re so busy these days, booked up solid.
It’s about the house, she says.
Well I’m no expert, he says.
You see it says there that I owe them money but that’s not right is it? Her voice tails off and then whispers back. I mean I can’t say anything to our Jack, I don’t want to worry him. He already worries enough about what I’ll do when he’s gone.
Alright, he says, well I’ll wash these pots and we’ll have a cup of tea and take a look at it.
Have you taken out some kind of a loan he asks? Is that what it is?
Well they are buying the house back from me.
Who are?
Well, this agency, here, they’re connected to the bank. She lowers her voice though it’s impossible for Jack to hear them, lowers it perhaps through the shame of having borrowed, having debts, she’s old enough for that still to carry a sense of stigma.
Well you know. With the cuts, she said. We can’t just get all this treatment for free. She glances away, out to the garden. It’s criminal, she says. All his life he’s paid in. Forty years. He never smoked or drank, he kept himself fit and there’s plenty that haven’t and now he needs treatment and we have to pay, you see. Well I daren’t tell him, I don’t want to upset him.
Sorry, Rob says. I still don’t quite follow.
Well the bank is buying the house back from me, every month they give me a lump sum and after I am gone, I mean I have no one to leave it to, the bank gets the house minus the cost of the funeral and whatnot.
I see. Rob says. I see.
But here they are telling me that the money they are going to give me is going to go down.
Right. Rob wipes his hands on his trousers, turns from the sink, takes the pages from her and scans them, flicking through some densely written pages of terms and conditions.
Have you got the internet here?
She laughs. Oh no, I can’t be doing with all that at my age. Well, I’m sorry to bother you with it love.
Really, Rob says, you need to talk to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. I am sure it’s some kind of mistake.
She still looks troubled.
I mean this house is all we’ve got she says. And you have to pay for everything now. Your pension won’t cover it. You don’t even own your home now, pay back the bank for years then find you have to sell it back to them to fund your retirement. And then if something goes wrong you end up owing them. That can’t be right, can it?
Rob is going through the items he’s brought down from the loft in the back bedroom, here’s V. C. 96 1–5 3 and his own section V. C. 96 1–5 2. He has a number of texts from Alex Hargreaves he doesn’t bother reading, responds to his most recent one, sent 37 minutes before, saying he has the middle two parts of the novel. He’s tempted to open the envelope and have a look at the text but something stops him. It doesn’t feel right somehow. He promised he would wait. And yet he’s prepared to sell it?
He decides against telling her that he has found a videotape. They might want to watch it and perhaps they are better off not seeing their son again, suddenly, young, alive. Rob is not sure he can bear to watch it either, especially not if there is footage of all of them, the old crew in there too, a sudden confrontation with his younger self, twenty years erased just like that. He has vague memories of Vernon messing about with the video camera, getting Rob, wrecked off his face in some dazzling midsummer sunlight, to talk to himself, his future self.
Not that, he hopes, not that.
No, he’ll keep quiet about the video. It is intended for him anyway, there may be unusual, arcane things on it he wouldn’t want his parents to see or know about, especially at this late stage. He tucks the cassette away under the clothes in his bag and waits till later to watch it. He sits in the room for a few hours going through things, Christine bringing him up a cup of tea, offering him a dinner he gratefully accepts.
Then when she has gone to bed he squats down and pushes the tape into the video player, the small of his back throbbing, out of breath from having grappled around the back of the TV to switch the scart socket from the DVD player.
There it all is though, he knew it would be, Beaconfields, that legendary day, caught in all its glory, over three hours’ worth of tape. A cultural artefact in its own right. Vernon interviewing, or at least asking questions of, everyone he can get his hands on. Rob too, he winces to see himself, there, eyeballs out on stalks and gaunter, waxier than anyone really ought to be outside a mortuary. Christ, and here’s Vernon, talking into the camera, he doesn’t look too bad, looks straight enough, this is for posterity, Vernon says and Rob off camera snaps back immediately fuck posterity, what you gonna do, curl up with your pipe and slippers in your old age and reminisce about how, once, you really lived?
We are not going to get old, mate, Vernon says.
Too right, too right, Rob says. When you’ve reached your peak it’s time to die!
Ahh yes, brave words, and yet, here he is. Whereas Vernon. He fast-forwards.
Brave words, really? They came easily enough. Words do come easy, eh? Talk is cheap. Ah now, here, he presses stop, play. Vernon has set the camera up on a tripod off in quiet corner of the field and is squatting thoughtfully, hands on his knees, his hair swept over to one side.
One day I am going to get out there and not be able to make my way back. Or it might take a long time, years, decades, centuries. But I will be back one day. In a matter of seconds. In the blink of an eye. All that time will have passed.
Memories of Vernon, back from one of his trips, Rob excitedly asking him where he had been, and Vernon saying, it is like orbiting a black hole, slowly pulled further and further in, I seem to have been away for a second, a brief, dark flash of time but here hours have gone by.
And then it became days, weeks, years, perhaps. Perhaps it is true, that for a moment they lost sight of him, that out on the road somewhere, the night so dark even god could not see him, he slipped through the mesh of things and has spent all this time struggling back to us. Any day now, any day. Any moment could be the moment.
Perhaps it’s this moment, here, now, his heart thuds, the wind funnelled through the narrow street, the sound of rain, almost like fingers, drumming there, at the window.
Waiting, waiting.
Nothing.
Traffic chaos. Floods all up the line, massive delays, advised against travelling.
Christine’s tutting over it all, peering over her glasses at the muted TV. Good job you’re not trying to get up to London today love, she says
Aye, he says, sips at his tea, checks his texts. Alex Hargreaves has agreed to five grand, but needs to see the work, wants it scanned and sent. Christine goes off to do another fry up. Now someone else is here she might as well take the opportunity to make a full breakfast, she sometimes fancies one herself but it seems such a lot of effort for just one person, the sad single egg and sausage, half a tin of beans, a slice of toast. She will have to get used to that, she thinks, cooking for one. It doesn’t seem worth it, living only for yourself, does it?
Rob’s appetite’s come back and he relishes the food, the fat and salt, the grease, delicious. They both sit back satisfied, he offers to make the next cup of tea and against Christine’s insistence gathers the pots together to wash. She comes in behind him and starts putting things back in the fridge.
Would he mind, she asks, going into town for her, getting a bit of shopping in? She’ll pay the bus fare of course, it’s just that she can’t leave Jack alone upstairs, he’s so weak now, needs help toileting himself, she says with downcast eyes, and it’s such a shame, he was always so independent, proud.
Dying, she says, takes all your pride away, and then rushes on past those sad eventualities to take refuge in practical things, daily necessities. The nurse can’t come today to watch over him, it turns out, and she can’t ask Rob to do it and besides Jack won’t want anyone seeing him like that anyway, so defenceless, dependent. It’s only a few things from Morrisons.
He wouldn’t mind, he’d be glad to, but he insists on paying. She gives him a plastic mac to wear and a shopping list and detailed instructions of where to get off the bus that he duly follows, then wanders up the hill from the supermarket car park to look at the shipyard and the enormous Trident sheds. The last time he saw these he was tripping on a handful of mushrooms and they had looked to him like temples of an alien culture, raised gleaming in the centre of the dark red brick and granite town. He takes a deep breath, leans against a low wall, the other side a mess of empty packets and broken bottles, a high fence, the docks.
A middle-aged man goes past with a dog, nods at him. Rob nods back. Rain begins to fall. London, a couple of hours away, seems a distant planet.
The pain in his hips is subdued enough for him to go and look for an internet cafe around the centre of the town. He gets a latte, takes the pages out of the envelopes and puts them into the photocopier feeder, can’t bring himself to read any of it somehow, sends it to himself as a PDF, pays 50p for an hour online, forwards it to Hargreaves. Then he Googles
reverse mortgage
and
USG
, comes up with a whole set of warning articles, forum posts, a welter of opinions and snippets of advice from all kinds of sources. Now this doesn’t look too good. There’s an article about gullible pensioners signing up to reverse mortgaging schemes offering generous monthly payments predicated on rising house prices and a fixed income stream, and how the monthly pay-outs are based on continuously assessed valuations of house prices in your area, leading, the article says, “to the perverse situation in which many elderly people have had to go out to work in order to make up the shortfall in payments until the value of the house picks up again”. So you have an income stream as long as your house is rising in value, set at a baseline valuation, if it falls below that, you have to give them money.
Around the quietly echoing supermarket squinting at the list then back on the bus, hood up, carrier bag on his knees, wondering how to give her the bad news.
Five grand, maybe he should have asked for more. Maybe that will be enough to tide them over.
I think, he says, another cup of tea in his hand now, I think if you sign up to this, if the bank buys your house, then it releases the money to you in stages, but you have agreed, if the house goes down in value, to make up the difference.
She looks confused. So they buy it and then if it goes down I have to pay them?
His phone buzzes and he glances at it. Hargreaves again. Leave me alone, man.
The income is derived from the valuation of your house at a given point, not its value.
I mean houses are going down everywhere round here, the Yard’s losing jobs. Lay-offs, she says. I mean, people wouldn’t need to borrow money if they had spare. How can they be expected to pay more than they, when they came round, they told me, it will help you with the cost of your husband’s treatment Mrs Crane, help me pay for mine when I need it, fingers crossed I won’t, help me pay the bill in, in a home, a care home, you know.