out with a float while I settled down with a paperback.
My son at seven.
He made me smile, because he was wearing a pair of sunglasses that were way too big for him, purchased at the airport and proudly worn ever since, even at night. He would squint at his moussaka and chips in the Cretan twilight.
The waves were whipping up, but it did not cross my mind to be worried. He did not go far. But sometimes you do not have to go far to get into more trouble than you can handle. He had settled down on his float, got all dreamy in the sunlight and then he must have drifted. And by the time he noticed, it was more than drifting.
‘Dad!’
You know your child’s voice. Even on a crowded beach, with small children shouting and calling out on all sides, you know it instantly.
He was trying to stand up, although you couldn’t really stand up on that float, and he kept sinking to one knee as it threatened to pitch him into the sea. And he was scared. Face pale with fear behind those oversized sunglasses. Calling for me.
And I was on my feet and running, my heart a hammer as I ran to the water, suddenly aware of the speed of the clouds, suddenly noticing the swell of the waves, suddenly remembering that it can all fall apart at any moment.
He was a good swimmer. Even at seven. Maybe that’s why it happened, why I was too relaxed about letting him go out with a float. But suddenly it wasn’t enough that he could rescue a plastic brick while wearing his pyjamas.
I crashed through waves that seemed to be at once taking Pat out to open sea and smashing me back to the shore, switching between breaststroke and crawl and back again, getting a sickening gutful of water every time I called his name.
Finally I got to him. One hand on a corner of the float, another wrapped tight round a skinny limb. It was like trying to hold a fish.
And that was when he went into the water.
Flailing white limbs in the foggy depths. Silence, apart from the rushing sound in my ears. And then one of my arms wrapped around his waist as I kicked for the surface. The float was above our heads and somehow I got him on it and I made him lie flat on his belly, while I lumbered back to the beach, telling him that everything was all right. He clung on, somehow still wearing those oversized sunglasses and too numb to cry.
Then finally we were on the beach.
How bad was it? The parental mind has this endless ability to vault to the absolute worst-case scenario. No trouble at all. A parent panics not because of what is happening but because of what might.
But this was bad enough for everyone on the beach to put down their suntan lotion and copies of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and stare at us even when it was clear that nobody was going to die, even as we staggered off to our shared hotel room, both salty with tears and regurgitated Aegean. Bad enough for me to remember for the rest of my life.
And what I remember most is the feeling of trying to reach my son as the sea and the wind and tide combined to push me back to the shore while they tried to carry Pat out to the open sea. That’s what I remember the most. Because sometimes it felt like that was the story of us, the story of me and my boy. Trying to reach each other, wanting to reach each other, but forever kept apart by forces that were bigger than both of us.
And the funny thing about calling your child’s name is that it doesn’t do a blind bit of good.
But you do it anyway.
Ken Grimwood sat propped up in his hospital bed in a robe that enveloped his small body like a circus tent, and when he grinned at me he was gummy as a newborn baby. On the bedside table, his false teeth sat in a glass of water.
‘They found him at the bus depot,’ a Filipina nurse told me. ‘He was unconscious. He couldn’t breathe. And he had a cigarette in his hand. We found this in his pocket.’
She handed me a BBC business card with my name on, as if I might want it back. And I remembered giving it to him before he left my house only because I wanted to get rid of him. And here he was, bounced back into my life because he had my card.
‘I hardly know him,’ I said, keeping my voice down. ‘He’s not actually anything to do with me.’
Ken laughed and we watched him produce a tin of Old Holborn and a packet of Rizlas from somewhere inside his giant robe. He must have been the only person left who wasn’t using roll-ups to smoke illegal substances. He flashed his toothless grin and as the nurse advanced towards him he stuck his smoking paraphernalia under the sheet.
‘Just pulling your leg, sweetheart,’ he said.
She took his blood pressure, shaking her head.
But when she left he produced his baccy tin and his papers. He winked at me slyly.
I walked down to the nurses’ station. The Filipina was there with a large Jamaican duty nurse. They looked at me as if I had done something wrong.
‘Your father is a very sick man,’ the duty nurse said. ‘There’s fluid on his lungs and I don’t know how much longer he can breathe unaided, okay? And of course you are aware that the cancer is at an advanced stage.’
‘He’s not my father,’ I said.
‘Friend of the family?’ the duty nurse asked.
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I said.
It was clear they wanted the bed. They wanted him out of there. But they would not discharge him without someone to take care of him. And I realised that just because I had been dumb enough to give him my business card, the National Health Service were nominating me.
‘I hardly know him,’ I told them. ‘He was a friend of my father’s. I’ve only met him once. I think he has children. Do his children know? Can’t his children come?’
The nurse looked at me as though I had suggested putting him in a plastic bag and leaving him on the pavement. But she talked to Ken and got a couple of telephone numbers from the old boy. There was a daughter in Essex and a son in Brighton. I quickly took out my phone and began calling.
I got through to an answer machine. And then another answer machine. I left messages on both – telling them what had happened to their father, telling them to come quick, telling them to call me back. Then I held my phone, expecting it to vibrate at any moment. But it did not stir, as if his children were reluctant to claim him too.
Down the hall I could hear a Jamaican accent telling Ken Grimwood that there was no smoking on hospital premises.
And as I stared at the silent phone in my fist, I could hear the mocking sound of the old man’s laughter.
Joni grinned at me with her vampire smile.
Her two front teeth were both gone now. The wonky one had come out in her sandwich and the one next to it had quickly come out in sympathy. It must have been looser than she knew when she was focusing all her attention on the wonky one. So now when she smiled the milk teeth that remained at the sides of her mouth appeared like fangs.
‘I’ll brush my teeth,’ she said, and her gummy grin gave her a jaunty air, like a sailor on shore leave. ‘You get the book.’
‘Okay.’
She had strict bedtime rituals. When she was in her pyjamas and her remaining teeth had been cleaned, she hugged everyone who was in the house and told them she loved them. But she didn’t kiss anyone, because kissing was gross this year. Then she trooped up to her room and I read her a story. As she settled herself under the duvet, I looked at her bookcase for something suitable.
Joni was at that awkward age when she was getting too old for princesses and fairies but was still too young for anything to do