I Dream of Tomorrow

“The first step to achieve what we want in life is to decide what we want.”

– Ben Stein

He did not give. He did not want. Instead, he twitched and fidgeted, fingering the tie-less opening to his shirt. The unbuttoned collar sitting at his throat, mis-matched with his suit, was causing him discomfort.

He regretted having removed his tie moments before he left the office to wait at the door on the street. He had waited, summoned by her text message, telling him that she had left her meeting early; telling him she was on her way to meet him.

He watched her as, thinking herself anonymous, she had climbed the steps up from exit two of Tottenham Court Road tube. He leaned against the doorway to the theatre next door to his office, affecting a casual pose; as she came to the last few steps and raised her head to see whether he was waiting, he casually lifted his hand in a gesture half wave, half indifference.

They walked, she tall in her heels, he shorter by an inch. Her advantage was unfair, until she pointed out that someone had trodden on her shoe and broken the decorative chain that adorned its front.

She made sure that he was aware of her shortcomings.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked her.

“London?” she said, almost guilelessly. He thought he sensed a hint of sarcasm around her response.

”Bloomsbury,” he replied. “I thought a literary type like you would have known that.”

“I didn’t,” she said.

Her body was a non-committal punctuation mark walking along the street beside him. He pointed out buildings of merit or remark to her, as they walked the streets of Bloomsbury. She faked her interest. He felt the heat of her beside him, even though she was a good half foot away from him. He wanted to touch her but was afraid.

They were close to the British Museum. He took her to a café across the road.

“I come here a lot,” he said. “The quality of service can be a little lacking at times.”

“This is London,” she replied.

He led the way inside. A waiter showed them to a table tucked away in the back. Her presence with him seemed to make all the difference. Service was quick, or at least faster than usual, and they barely had time to make small-talk before their drinks arrived.

They talked about nothing: map pins; equity in houses; the spending of sixty five thousand pounds. She confessed to a liking for speed. He revealed himself to be conservative and cautious.

She worked at keeping the conversation going. It was out of character for her. Somehow he realised that, but he allowed it to happen. His usual garrulous persona had taken an hour off. Conversations that they could have had remained shelved. He watched her lose interest. He recognised the attempt she made to cover over her disappointment.

He had lost his touch since becoming what the Bible would term ‘middle-aged’.

He thought that he knew what he wanted. He thought of it in terms of what he’d had but had allowed to slip away. He saw it as something that other people attained or achieved or acquired. Something beginning with A.

She had had that too; something beginning with A. He was unaware of that.

Their food arrived. They ate. When the food had gone, the conversation grew ever more stilted and he tried to look at his watch discreetly.

“I’m keeping you,” she said.

He could see on her face that she had thought his talk of a visit to the Museum was an indication that he would take a long lunch, if not the afternoon off.

“I should get back,” he said.

She looked away from him, towards the murals on the back wall.

“You could still look round the Museum,” he told her.

“Oh, I’m out tonight. I should get back.” She paused. “Give myself time to prepare.”

She waited for him to speak. He didn’t.

She summoned the waiter. All that it took was a glance.

“They always ignore me,” he said.

At the counter he accepted the bill from the owner. The owner beamed at him. He was short by fifty pence in change.

“Don’t worry about it,” the owner said.

Standing beside him, she smiled at the owner.

“You should come here with me more often,” he told her, as they left. “Usually they’re exceptionally churlish.”

Part of him wondered if the owner of the café had mistaken this lunch meeting for romance. Part of him wondered if she had thought the same. A smaller part knew that he had shied away from thinking that way.

She walked beside him, tall and striking in the early summer sunshine. From time to time he brushed against her. He wanted to do more, but the touch of his sleeve or his hand against her seemed to act like positive poles of a pair of magnets.

It was not much, but it was enough. When she hugged him at the door to his office, before descending once again to the Underground, he kept himself as limp as was polite.

What, after all, was the point? She lived two hundred miles away. She was here for a day, and then she would be gone. Far simpler to keep it as it was. Friends of a sort, connected by a mutuality of acquaintance.

Boiled down beyond all hope of attraction or compatibility, that was all it was.

Knowing what you wanted from life; that was the key. He had the sense that she knew, and it scared him. He was so long out of the game, and not yet used to being half of that fabled three score years and ten, that he no longer knew what he wanted or how to achieve it.

He watched her walk down the steps to the Underground.

She didn’t look back.

© J R Hargreaves June 2007

Without The Booze and Fags (in homage to Beryl Bainbridge)

She was old. Nothing else to be said; Gran was old.

Lying there on the floor of the book shop, her limbs bent under her, her frail bones covered by papery skin, she looked old.

“It’s not the booze, darling,” she said, looking up at me with her chocolate button eyes.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

Nobody came to help her up. The people who had come to see her tonight, on this book tour for which she was too old, just stood and stared at the drunken old woman who had lost her footing on the slippery laminate floor.

I bent down and gripped an arm. I tried to manoeuvre her, to find her other arm, but she lay there, helpless.

“Have you broken anything?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, darling. I landed quite softly. I slipped, you know. It isn’t the booze.”

Her best friend had died the night before. Another author, someone the reading world had already forgotten, long before she even hit her 60s.

“Don’t let me go the way she went,” she had begged me, earlier that evening. “It’s disgusting to die that way,” she said.

I had promised to smother her with a pillow if she ever fell victim to a stroke.

“I wouldn’t want to go on, darling,” she told me.

“I know, Gran,” I said. “I know.”

She was small and frail on the floor beneath me, and I couldn’t find a way to lift her up.

I straightened, looked round for someone to help, caught the eye of one of the shop assistants. She might have been a manager.

“Can you help me?” I asked. “She’s fallen.”

“Of course,” she said, coming out of her gallows curiosity.

Together we lifted my grandmother from the floor.

“I’m fine, darling, I’m fine,” she assured us both. “So kind of you to help,” she said to the shop assistant.

The woman blushed. “It’s not a problem,” she said.

I hoped that the blush was one of embarrassment for having left my grandmother so long in her indignity.

“Come on, Gran,” I said, tucking a hand under her elbow. “I’ll get us a cab.”

“It wasn’t the drink, Charlie,” she told me again.

“I know,” I replied. “Walk carefully on the stairs here.”

Slowly we made our way down the stairs to the shop entrance. The London evening was sticky with heat. I saw a cab pull around the corner, a hundred yards away. Still holding onto Gran beneath her elbow, I raised my other hand. The cab drove towards us.

I helped her in and settled her back into a seat. She pulled the seatbelt across her shoulder and buckled herself in. Not many people do that in a cab. Not many people have had an accident in a cab that catapulted them through a window, either. Cautious to the last, apart from when drunk, that was my grandmother.

“You see, dear, Sofia was my oldest friend. I had to have a little drink.”

“Where to?” the cab driver asked. I gave him directions.

I sat alongside my grandmother and held her hand and she rambled on about her friend. She was one of the few survivors. All three of her husbands had predeceased her. She still lived in the same ramshackle house, peopled and littered with skeletons and carnival masks. She still climbed the three flights of stairs to the room that housed her ancient computer.

“I couldn’t live anywhere else, darling,” she said, to anyone who asked or dared to suggest that she move to live with one of her daughters.

My mother would heave a sigh of relief when she heard her say it.

“The house is a death trap,” I would say.

“Then let her live with you, Charlie,” was her reply.

The cab stopped outside her house. She had pointed out to me the place on the corner where the van had run into the cab she was in, that night she went through the window.

“I still have the glass in my lip, darling,” she told me. “The next book I write,” she said, “there will be an accident in a taxi cab.”

She had given up smoking, though, and writing was suffering. There would be no next book. Like any writer, she needed the thing that was killing her to spur on the creative flow. Without the suck and drag, without the flick of ash, she was nothing.

We were out of the cab and I was helping her up the steps to her front door when she gripped my arm.

“You won’t tell your mother, Charlie?” she said, her face close to mine, looking up at me.

“Won’t tell her what?” I asked, playing along.

She frowned. She didn’t get it.

“You won’t tell her that I fell,” she said.

“Oh, that?” I said, feigning surprise. “No, of course not.”

She seemed to start breathing again, as though she had been holding her breath while waiting for my answer. She said nothing, just turned from me and pushed her key into the lock.

I saw her in.

“Do you want tea, darling?” she asked me, filling the ancient aluminium kettle at the tap; a tap that was connected to an ancient lead pipe. It was a wonder that she wasn’t dead a long time ago. Or pensioned off in a nursing home for the senile.

“No thanks, Gran,” I said.

“Something stronger, then?” she asked.

“No. Nothing for me, thanks.”

It was late and, although I knew that she never went to bed before midnight, I wanted to see her settled. I wanted to know that she wouldn’t sit at the table, drinking more, trying to piece together the book that would never come.

I wanted her to be a grandmother like anyone else’s; not this driven creative force that had lost its way and was drifting through its last days. I wanted her to stop being Beryl, but I knew it would never happen, and that I would hate her if it did.

She made tea in an equally ancient aluminium teapot.

“You should get rid of that, Gran,” I said. “The kettle too.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Charlie. I’ve been using these for years. All that nonsense. Do I have Alzheimer’s? Am I senile?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, then.”

She sat at the table and removed her watch, scratching her wrist.

“I think I need a new strap, Charlie, darling,” she said, inspecting the grooves and redness where the strap had been resting against her too warm skin.

“I’ll call for you in the morning,” I said. “We’ll get you one tomorrow.”

I was spending a couple of months with her. I was between projects and she had got it into her head that she might not be much longer in this world, so she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren.

The other grandchildren came along later than me, but she treated us all the same, answering Jo and Beth’s 3 and 5-year old questions with the same abstract clarity as she used when speaking to me about the past or about her writing. With Simon she explained the principles of making arrows and the importance of a well trimmed flight to encourage speed and distance when released from the bow. It was a moot point whether Simon wanted to know this information, but Gran persisted nonetheless.

My mother said she had been the same when she and her sisters were growing up. She was this force who thought that everyone, no matter what their age, was on the same plane as her.

She was right to think that way, as well. There was something childlike in her approach to the world that sat well with adults and children alike. Some might view it as an eccentricity, but to us it was just Beryl.

“Where does one get a watchstrap these days?” she asked. She was looking at the offending item in question. “I must have had this one for twenty years. I can’t remember where I got it from.”

“From a jeweller's,” I said. “Or a watch repair shop.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “You are clever, Charlie, dear.”

The tea was still stewing in the pot, no doubt filled with aluminium that had leached into the water.

“Are you having tea?” I asked.

She sighed.

“I don’t think so, Charlie, no.”

“Well, I think I’ll be off then,” I said, rising from the table. “Don’t be up too late. I’m coming round for you at nine.”

“Oh, I only need six hours these days, darling,” she replied, breezily. “It’s one of the advantages of getting old.”

She saw me to the door.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to call you a cab?” she said, as I stood on the doorstep, bending down to kiss her soft, dry cheek.

“This is London,” I said. “I’ll pick one up on the main road. Besides, the tube will still be running at this time.”

“You’re such a good boy, Charlie,” she said, pulling me into an embrace. There was untold strength in those arms. I would have bet my life that she would live until she was a hundred.

At 3 a.m., tucked safely into a deep sleep, I was woken by the phone ringing.

“Charlie?”

It was mum.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice still sludgy with the sediment of sleep.

“It’s your Gran. She’s been taken ill. We need to get her to A&E.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” I was awake now, standing at the window to my flat, stark naked and not caring if anyone could see me.

“She says she has pains in her legs that won’t go away.”

“Well, she did fall after the reading tonight,” I admitted, feeling like a traitor for having broken my earlier promise.

“I know. She told me.” My mother’s tone was flat with suppressed exasperation. “Are you fit to drive?”

“I don’t have a car,” I said.

“Oh. I forgot.”

”I’ll call a cab. I can be at Gran’s in ten minutes.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there.”

At the house, my grandmother was sanguine.

“It’s nothing, really, darling. I feel fine. It’s just when I walk up and down those stairs, or if I spend too much time on my feet.”

We took her to A&E. My mother unashamedly told them who my grandmother was, told them how old she was, explained that she couldn’t really be expected to sit in a waiting room full of drunks with cut heads until a doctor was free.

The triage nurse asked Gran some questions. In the end, it wasn’t who she was or her age that helped her to jump the queue; it was the severity of her condition.

“I told you I wasn’t long for this world, Charlie,” she told me triumphantly as she was wheeled into a cubicle to be seen by a doctor.

There were tests. There were hushed conversations. There was a period of waiting. Then my grandmother was returned to us.

“Are you her daughter?” the doctor asked my mother.

“One of them,” my mother replied.

“Then please tell her to stop smoking completely and to cut down on the alcohol she consumes.”

“They told me if I don’t stop, I’ll have to lose a leg, darling,” she told me cheerfully as I helped her into another cab, one that would take her home.

“Well, then, perhaps you better had,” I said.

“I will stop,” she replied, “but I suppose this is the end of my career.”

Neither mum nor I knew what to say.

“It’s not such a bad thing,” she said, looking at us with her chocolate button eyes. “I’ve had a good run, after all.”

“You never know,” my mother said. “You might still be able to write.”

“Without the booze and fags?” my grandmother exclaimed. “Not likely!”

We stayed the night, both worried that she might not make it through.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

In the morning, I took her for her watch strap. She chose one made of fake snakeskin.

“It has a certain shabby chic to it, darling,” she said, admiring it against her wrist. “Don’t you think?”

She held it up to me, so that I could admire it.

“Do you know,” I said, “I think you’re right.”

She grinned at me like a girl still in the first flush of youth.

In the afternoon, she sat at her computer, waiting for inspiration to strike.

“I don’t know if I can do this, darling,” she told me, when I took her up a cup of tea.

She sipped at the tea.

“Is this made with a tea bag, dear?” she asked.

“Yes, Gran,” I said.

She set it down gently on a coaster at the side of the keyboard, alongside a now empty ashtray.

“I need a ciggie in my hand!” she cried, and thumped her hands down onto the keyboard.

“It will come, Gran,” I said, knowing instantly that it was the wrong thing.

“Oh, you. You know nothing!”

She was up and pacing from the room. I followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen and watched her pour herself a glass of wine.

“The sun’s over the yard arm, darling,” she said as she saw me looking at her.

“The doctor said you should cut down.”

“I am cutting down, Charlie. I’d have had three by now if I wasn’t.”

She held the bottle out to me and I took it from her. I poured myself a glass and we drank together like naughty children.

“You’ve got to have some fun, Charlie,” she said to me with a wink from her button eyes.

I laughed.

“Gran,” I said, “you’re not wrong.”

© J R Hargreaves June 2007