On a busy stretch of the Finchley Road, a few doors down from the Secrets table- and pole-dancing club, and the Thai Siam health and beauty bar, stands a large boarded-up sports bar called the 3one7. It was once a three-storey Victorian pub called the Carney Arms and at weekends – before it folded in the wake of an under-age drinking scandal – it doubled as a pre-club evening nightspot with DJs playing funky ‘sexy’ house music for buff lads on the pull, and girls on their way ‘up West’. There were pool tables and big-screen broadcasts, although during the week most of the sixteen satellite TV screens scattered around the venue were blank, the upstairs and basement roped off, and the clientele corralled on the ground floor in the mid-afternoons would change to companionless off-shift waiters on their way to the bookie’s and a few unaccompanied professional drinkers. It was here, on a January lunchtime in 2003, that my dad, accompanied by a blind man and a chef – both from the same care home where he was staying – escaped for a celebratory drink to mark the new year.
The exit doors at the care home needed a manually entered key-code before they would open on to a narrow brick driveway set back about ten feet from the pavement. My dad didn’t know the code and I don’t suppose the blind man did, but I’m sure the chef could do it in his sleep. The section of the Finchley Road outside the door is a ‘red route’: double red lines; no stopping at any time. The noise can be quite startling when it’s busy: four car lanes and two bus lanes of delivery lorries, skip-hire trucks, double-deckers, cars, coaches and white transits all jostling like jockeys in the final furlong for that extra yard of space.
The 3one7 is about two hundred yards away from the care home. It sounds near, but my dad, with his bad lungs, had been finding a short walk up and down the corridor was about enough most mornings; not only that, but the bar is situated on the other side of the road, across a box junction and a couple of pot-holes, where the pelican crossings need smart decision-making once the pedestrian signal flashes green.
By the time the three of them arrived, my dad was gulping for air. He made it through the front door, took a few tottering steps and then collapsed on the carpet.
You might have thought that at this point the chef – an employee at a care home, after all – would have realised how reckless he had been and sprinted back for help, but no; instead, he and a member of the bar staff propped my dad up against a fruit machine, and gave him a glass of whisky to revive him. The effect on his brain, already dangerously short of oxygen, must have been nothing short of psychedelic, but – more by luck than judgement – his heart didn’t stop, and they got him upright and seated on a bar stool. My dad, to his credit, composed himself and got his breath back. Everyone cracked a couple of jokes, and then, quite remarkably, they all got to the front door and somehow managed to walk back.
I suppose you have to have some sympathy for my dad. As a persistent drinker he must have found the enforced sobriety at the care home – unless you count the evening sherry – hard to bear. The drop in blood-alcohol levels must, at the very least, have brought on mild withdrawal symptoms and cravings, and with no emergency sugar substitutes readily to hand – the Coca-Cola, the bars of chocolate, the dried fruit – it must have all got too much, especially when a young companionable chef was rolling back the years before him.
Of course when I found out I confronted the care home and expressed my outrage in the strongest possible terms, and there were unstinting apologies, but apart from moving him somewhere else – which in itself would have been even more disruptive for him – I realised there was little else I could do; I had no legal charge over him; he was still a grown-up; the care home had adequate security measures in place on the front door, which were circumvented in extremely unusual circumstances; and I could no more control events than I could stop him going back to bed all day. Perhaps I should have insisted on the chef’s dismissal, but that seemed overly hysterical, and anyway I considered that was up to them.
When it all blew over I realised I actually secretly admired my dad for the sheer audacity of his escape; and it occurred to me that I had felt many things for him over the years – admiration, respect, anger, disdain – but overarching all of it was a long indecipherable allegiance.
‘So you tunnelled out then?’ I said to him a few days later. We were sitting in the lobby of the care home just inside the doors to the outside world.
‘What?’
‘You and the chef. The bid for freedom.’ I nodded towards the doors.
‘Do you know the chef as well?’ he said, looking at me as though we’d found a mutual acquaintance. ‘Nice fella.’
I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately avoiding the subject or had clean forgotten. ‘No, not personally,’ I said.
‘Good sense of humour.’
That was the stamp of approval. I remembered coming home from school one day and riding my bike down to the shed at the end of the alley and seeing a huge extendable ladder propped up against the back of the house. At the top of the ladder – which was flexing under the weight – and about six feet below the guttering, almost on the top rung, was a man. He must have been about thirty or forty feet off the ground. But what made me gasp was the fact that another man was standing on his shoulders and reaching up over the guttering. They seemed unfeasibly high – as if performing a reckless circus trick. My dad was at the bottom looking up. I’m not sure if he was meant to be helping to stabilise the ladder, but he was leaning on it nonchalantly with one hand, smoking. He saw me and gestured to the spectacle above. ‘That’ll be our Chris Kerrigan up there,’ he said. ‘Fine roofer. Good sense of humour.’
I smiled at him sitting there, his hands mottled and creased, planted on his knees, the rumble of traffic kept at bay by the glass doors. ‘Glad to hear it. You’re getting on all right then?’
‘You’ve got to get me out of here, Ben, you know,’ he said, turning to me.
‘Why?’
‘I’m not cut out for it.’
I tried to think of an answer. I knew if I answered firmly and logically he would accept it, as the deferral of power was in place, and I was now in charge, but before I could find the words he carried on.
‘They’ve asked me to play the piano, you know.’
It seemed unlikely. He hadn’t played for years. I looked at his stiff white fingers. Was he imagining it? Had he been telling jazz stories to impress them? ‘That’s nice of them,’ I said, for want of anything better to say.
‘You must be joking. They’re all potty.’
One of the staff passed us, carrying a bag of linen. ‘Feeling better this afternoon, Tommy?’ she called out.
My dad flashed a compliant smile.
‘All at sixes and sevens this morning, weren’t we?’ she said loudly. ‘But we’re all here for you, that’s all that matters.’
I smiled at her too. She winked at me. I didn’t ask what had happened. She carried on towards the lift.
We sat in silence for a moment. I wished I knew the best course of action. I wished there was a sign. One minute everything was normal – by which I meant the same as a recognisable and non-frightening past – the next, everything was strange and alarming. Then words came out of my mouth, as if from nowhere: ‘Mum’s doing much better. Feeling stronger. She’s been thinking of getting you back to the flat with her.’
He immediately took my hand. His palm felt cold. I was aware of his bony fingers as they squeezed mine, and the power I seemed to be wielding.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’