Escape From Shangri-La Read online

  I had always longed to be in an ambulance on an emergency dash to hospital. When I’d twisted my ankle I’d gone by car and there had been no drama at all, no excitement. But with Popsicle it was the real thing. The ambulance arrived at the house, lights flashing, sirens wailing. Green-overalled paramedics came dashing into the house. They were struggling to save a life under my very eyes.

  As he lay there, crumpled on the kitchen floor, all the colour drained from his face, Popsicle looked very dead. I couldn’t detect any sign of breathing. And there was so much blood. The paramedics felt him, listened to him, injected him and put a mask on his face. They told us again and again not to worry, that everything would be all right.

  They stretchered him out to the waiting ambulance, where the radio was crackling with messages, and around which a dozen or more of our neighbours were gathered. Mandy Bethel was there, Shirley Watson’s scandal-mongering sidekick from school, so I knew the news would be all over the estate in no time. Mr Goldsmith from next door was there too. And Mrs Martin from across the road, who’d hardly even spoken to me before, put her arm round my shoulder and asked me who it was that was ill. ‘My grandfather,’ I said, and I said it very proudly, and very loudly too, so that everyone should hear.

  Then we all climbed into the ambulance with him and we were driven away at speed, sirens wailing. I only wished they hadn’t closed the doors, because I should have liked to have seen their faces for a little longer, especially Mandy Bethel’s. I felt suddenly very important, very much at the centre of things.

  It was only when I was inside the ambulance and looking down at Popsicle, deathly white under the scarlet of the blanket, that I realised this was not a performance at all. Suddenly it was serious and I could think only that I didn’t want Popsicle to die. I didn’t say prayers all that often, only when I really needed to. I needed to now, badly. I had just found myself a grandfather, or he had found me, and I did not want to lose him. So I sat in the ambulance and prayed, with my eyes closed tight. My mother thought I was crying and hugged me to her. That was when she began blaming herself.

  ‘Maybe it was the bath,’ she said. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have made him have a bath. Maybe we should have warmed him up more slowly.’ And later: ‘He was soaked to the skin, he was shivering. And I just left him sitting there, all that time, in those wet things.’

  ‘It wasn’t you,’ said my father. ‘It was me. I shouldn’t have told him about Mum, not straight out like that. I didn’t think.’

  We sat in casualty at St Margaret’s until the early hours of the morning. When I’d come before with my ankle it had been busy, full of interesting injuries. This time there was hardly anyone there to distract me. I tried not to think of Popsicle. I kept picturing him lying there under a white sheet not breathing, not moving. I flicked through all the Hello! magazines, all the National Geographics and the Readers Digests I could find, but I was quite unable to concentrate on any of them. My mother and father both sat grey-faced, like stony statues, and didn’t speak to each other, nor to me.

  We hadn’t had supper and I was hungry. I begged some change off my mother and fed the vending machine. There wasn’t much to choose from. I had a meal of Coca Cola, chocolate biscuits and two packets of cheese and onion crisps. I was feeling a bit queasy by the time the doctor finally came to see us.

  She was a lot younger than I thought doctors could ever be. She wore jeans and a T-shirt under her white coat, and twiddled her dangling stethoscope around her fingers as if it was a necklace. She smiled an encouraging smile at me, and I knew then that the news was going to be good news. Popsicle was not going to die after all. I wasn’t going to lose him. I felt like whooping with joy, but I couldn’t, not in a hospital.

  ‘How is he?’ my mother asked.

  ‘Stable. We think he’s had a stroke, a mild stroke. We’d like to keep him in for a while under observation. We’ll do some tests. All being well, he can go back home in a couple of weeks or so. He’ll need a bit of looking after. He lives with you, does he?’

  ‘Not really,’ said my father. ‘Not exactly.’

  My mother looked at him meaningfully.

  ‘Well,’ my father went on, ‘perhaps he does. For the moment anyway.’

  The doctor was looking from one to the other in some bewilderment. ‘I’m afraid he does seem to have lost some movement in his right side. But given time that should right itself. For a man of his age I’d say he has a very strong constitution. He’s very fit. But there is one other thing. He’s got a very nasty head wound – fractured his skull in two places. We won’t know the extent of the damage – if any – for a while yet. Another reason for keeping a good eye on him.’

  ‘Can we see him?’ I asked.

  Her bleeper went off. ‘No peace for the wicked,’ she said. ‘The nurse will show you the way.’ I watched her walk off down the corridor and decided that if I didn’t end up as a concert violinist, or a round-the-world singlehanded yachtswoman, then I’d be a doctor like her – maybe.

  Popsicle was lying in a bed surrounded by a fearsome array of monitors and drips. There was a tube in his nose and another in his arm. His hair was gold against the white of the pillows. There was a wide strip of plaster across his forehead, and a dark grey bruise round his eye. He wasn’t a pretty sight, but at least the dreadful pallor had gone. He was asleep and breathing deeply, regularly, his mouth wide open. He must have sensed we were there. His eyes opened. For some moments he looked from one to the other of us. He didn’t seem to know who we were.

  ‘Not angryla,’ he murmured, looking around him. He was more than bewildered, he was frightened, and agitated too. ‘Not angryla.’ He wasn’t making much sense.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Cessie. It’s all right. You had an accident. You’re in hospital. It’s all right.’ At that he seemed to calm down, and a sudden smile came over his face.

  He knew us. He knew me. He beckoned me closer. I bent over him. I was so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. ‘See what happens if you eat too many chocolate digestives.’

  ‘It was the sloe gin,’ I said, and he managed a smile.

  My mother was beside me and taking his hand. ‘You’ve had a bit of a turn,’ she said. She was speaking slowly, deliberately and loudly too, as if he were deaf. ‘The doctor says you’ll be right as rain. We’ll come and see you tomorrow, shall we?’ Popsicle lifted his hand and touched his forehead. ‘You clunked your head, when you fell. You’ll have a bit of a shiner too, a black eye. You’ll be all right, Popsicle, you’ll be fine.’

  Popsicle was looking up at my father, trying to lift his head, trying to say something to him. ‘Popsicle. You remember, Arthur? It’s what you used to call me when you were little. D’you remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ said my father.

  ‘And you had big ears in those days too,’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘And you still have,’ Popsicle chuckled just once, and then drifted off to sleep. My father stood there looking down at him. He reached down, took Popsicle’s hand and laid it tenderly on the sheet. His hands so wrinkled, so ancient.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he said, and he turned on his heel and walked out of the ward without another word.

  By the time we got home there wasn’t much of the night left, but I spent what there was quite unable to sleep. I kept going over and over in my mind everything that had happened that day. I knew as I lay there in bed that my ordinary life was over, that from now on everything was going to be extraordinary. Popsicle had come out of nowhere, out of the blue, to be my grandfather; and nothing and no one would or could ever be the same again.

  4 THE PRODIGAL FATHER

  EVERYTHING HAPPENED VERY FAST AFTER THAT. They didn’t want to keep Popsicle in hospital for long, so we had a lot to do and very little time to do it. The spare room needed a good lick of paint, and some new curtains. We set up a radio by his bed, fixed up a television for him on top of the chest of drawers, and brought one of the armchairs up from
the sitting-room so he could sit by the window and look out over the garden.

  My father took very little part in all this flurry of activity, indeed he was scarcely ever home. He did, at my mother’s suggestion, add legs to a wooden tray so that Popsicle could eat his meals in bed if need be. And my father took his time over that, disappearing for long hours into the garden shed where he did his carpentry – joinery he called it. But whenever he emerged he seemed distant, uneasy somehow. And if ever I asked him about Popsicle – which I often did, and so did my mother – he’d simply shrug and say that it was all a long time ago. Then came the argument over the patchwork quilt.

  It was the morning we were due to bring Popsicle home from the hospital. My mother and I were upstairs in what was to be Popsicle’s room and I was helping her to spread out the old family patchwork quilt. It fitted the bed perfectly.

  ‘1925,’ she said, showing me the date sewn into one of the corners. ‘The year Popsicle was born, if I’ve worked it out right. Looks fine, doesn’t it, Cessie?’

  She stood back and looked around the room. ‘I want it all to be special for him, Cessie, really special.’

  At that moment my father came in and at once noticed the quilt. ‘Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a bit?’ he said. ‘You always said that quilt was too good to use. Unique, you said. Part of your family history. He’ll get food on it. Bound to. It’ll spoil.’

  ‘What is the matter with you, Arthur?’ my mother said. ‘It’s for your father, isn’t it? To make him feel at home. Don’t you want him to feel at home?’ She didn’t wait for him to reply. ‘Well, I do. This is my family heirloom, made by my great aunt, and I want him to have it on his bed.’ She touched his arm as she passed him to open the window. ‘Come on, Arthur. I just want him to feel welcome, that’s all – you know, like the fatted calf and the prodigal son.’

  ‘With one big difference,’ my father said. ‘This isn’t the prodigal son come back home, it’s the prodigal father. And we hardly know him. You don’t know him. I don’t know him. I just think you’re laying it on too much, that’s all.’ My mother was looking at him long and hard. I knew that look, and my father did too. He turned away.

  ‘I may not be back till late,’ he said, and he was gone.

  ‘Won’t you even be here when we bring him back?’ she called after him. He didn’t reply.

  My father wasn’t there when we came home with Popsicle that evening. Popsicle never asked where he was, so we didn’t need to excuse or explain or lie. ‘He’ll be busy at work, I expect,’ was all he said. But he caught my eye, and I could see how hurt he was, how disappointed.

  Popsicle spent those first ten days or so of his convalescence up in the bedroom that had become his. He slept a lot, either propped up on his pillows in bed, or in his armchair by the window. With his head bandaged, he looked less like the Viking warlord I had first known, and more like an Apache warrior. He had his meals up there, and the bathroom was right next door, so he never needed to come downstairs at all.

  Whenever my father wasn’t about – and he wasn’t about these days – the three of us settled into a routine of our own. My mother would cook. I would ferry trays up and down the stairs. I would cut up Popsicle’s food and she would help bathe him – his right arm was almost useless, though he could walk unaided by now. I’d play him my violin whenever he wanted me to, and that was often. ‘I love a good tune,’ he told me. ‘Scott Joplin, George Formby, Vera Lynn, Elvis, the Beatles, you name it and I’ll sing it. I know them all, off the radio.’ I soon discovered he was particularly passionate about the Beatles. He’d hum me through one of their songs. I’d practise it and then play it back for him. ‘Yesterday’, ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Norwegian Wood’ – he taught me them all, and then sang along with me, once I’d got the hang of the tunes. Strictly speaking this wasn’t violin practice, but I counted it as such – and it was a lot more fun.

  Sometimes, though, he was happy just to sit in his chair for hours and watch the goldcrests flitting about the garden or the swallows swooping down to drink from the goldfish pond. Watching alongside him, I learnt more about birds in a few days than I’d learnt in my entire life.

  But whether it was birdwatching or the Beatles, when it was time for one of my father’s radio shows, everything else was forgotten. We had to promise always to remind him, even to wake him if he was asleep.

  The radio had to be turned on well before time, just to be sure he didn’t miss the beginning of each show. It was the highlight of his day. He had only to hear my father’s voice and his whole face would at once be suffused with loving pride.

  I just wished my father would be home more often, for Popsicle’s sake, and for mine too. He never came to hear me play my violin these days. He just didn’t seem interested any more. My mother said he was overtired, working too hard, but I felt there was more to it than that.

  Dr Wickens used to come in every few days to check on Popsicle, and a nurse would call daily to change the dressing on his head. There would be hushed and confidential discussions as my mother, or my father, or both, walked them out of the front door and up the path, always out of earshot. From their faces and from everyone’s reluctance to answer my questions, I knew something was not quite right, but I had no idea what it was. I wasn’t that worried either, because Popsicle was getting out and about now much more. There was already more use in his arm, that was obvious, and he was up and down the stairs like a yo-yo.

  Dr Wickens had recommended gentle exercise; but said he mustn’t get cold. So, every day now, with Popsicle well wrapped up in his coat, and in what he called my ‘Rupert Bear’ scarf, we would walk slowly down the road to the park. It wasn’t far. My mother made him carry a stick, on the principle that three legs are safer, more reliable, than two. Popsicle didn’t like it but he went along with it.

  To begin with, I dreaded going on these walks. I was forever worried about bumping into Shirley and Mandy, my tormentors from school; but once we’d discovered the ducks, I forgot all about them. Popsicle adored ducks. To sweeten them in close he’d make wonderful ducky noises, quite indistinguishable from the real thing. We’d sit there on the bench, and wait till we were completely surrounded, and deafened by a chorus of raucous quacking. When he was quite sure they were all there, he’d dig deep into his bag of crusts and hurl them as far as he could out on to the pond. How he’d chuckle to watch them go, and how he hated to leave them when the time came. ‘Back tomorrow,’ he’d tell them. And we always were.

  He loved the garden too. When it was warm we’d often find him out there, picking weeds off the rockery or raking the lawn. He liked to be up and doing, he said.

  But I did notice that he was a little wrapped up in himself these days, as if he were lost in his thoughts and didn’t know the way out. I’d often find him sitting in his armchair just staring ahead into space. Sometimes he wouldn’t even know I was there till I spoke to him.

  If he was brooding, I thought, then perhaps he had good reason. My father hardly ever seemed to speak to him, not unless he had to. Whenever they were in the same room together, it was always uncomfortable. All too often, my father would find it suddenly very important to be elsewhere. As he left the room, the hurt on Popsicle’s face was plain to see.

  It wasn’t until some time later that I was to discover what all this was about. My father was home late again after work. They must have thought I was already asleep, but I wasn’t. Popsicle had turned off his radio in his room so I could hear quite plainly every word they were saying downstairs in the kitchen.

  ‘But have you asked him again?’ My father’s voice.

  ‘I can’t keep asking him, Arthur. It upsets him. And, anyway, asking him isn’t going to help. It isn’t going to make it come back, is it? You just have to accept it. You know what Dr Wickens said. It wasn’t the stroke that’s caused it. He told us. He explained it all. The brain’s nothing more than a jelly, a blancmange, and the skull’s there to protect it. You jolt th
e skull violently enough, you bash the brain up against the inside of the skull, and it can cause serious damage, bruising, bleeding, whatever. The result can be some loss of memory, temporary or otherwise. So it’s hardly surprising that Popsicle can’t seem to remember much, is it? If he says he can’t remember where he lives, where he’s from or anything else, then I believe him. And I simply can’t understand why you don’t.’

  ‘All right, then tell me this, how come he still remembers Bradwell? Answer me that. He goes on and on about the old days when I was a kid in Bradwell. As far as I can see he remembers anyone and everyone from those days. And that was forty, fifty years ago. Yet he can’t seem to remember where he lived before he walked in here four weeks ago. Now doesn’t that strike you as a little strange?’

  ‘Not really. My memory’s fairly patchy already, and I’m only thirty-six years old, and I haven’t just fractured my skull in two places. But you don’t mean “strange” do you, Arthur? You mean convenient. Why don’t you come right out with it. You just don’t want him here, do you?’

  ‘What do you expect? He’s a complete stranger to me. I don’t know the man.’ He was almost shouting now. I could hear my mother shushing him to lower his voice. ‘Listen,’ he went on, just as loudly. ‘Let’s say you’re right, let’s say he has lost his memory – which I doubt – who says it’ll ever come back again? Who says he’ll ever remember where he comes from? He can’t go on living here for ever, can he?’

  ‘I don’t know why not. He’s not much trouble. And, besides, you’re never here these days, are you? What’s it matter to you?’ He seemed temporarily silenced by that. My mother hadn’t finished with him yet. ‘For God’s sake, Arthur. He’s an old man. He’s got no one else, so far as we can tell, and nowhere else to go. After all those years he’s found his son and you’ve found your father. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

  My father was speaking much more calmly now, so that I had to get out of bed and put my ear to the floorboards to be able to hear him at all. ‘Of course it means something,’ he was saying, ‘but I’m not sure what, that’s all.’ He didn’t go on for some moments. ‘Listen, there’s things you don’t know, things I haven’t told you.’