“But there are hard feelings,” said Fat Charlie. “Lots.”
“Do you have an address for him?” asked Rosie. “Or a phone number? You probably ought to phone him. A letter’s a bit impersonal when your only son is getting married…you are his only son, aren’t you? Does he have e-mail?”
“Yes. I’m his only son. I have no idea if he has e-mail or not. Probably not,” said Fat Charlie. Letters were good things, he thought. They could get lost in the post for a start.
“Well, you must have an address or a phone number.”
“I don’t,” said Fat Charlie, honestly. Maybe his father had moved away. He could have left Florida and gone somewhere they didn’t have telephones. Or addresses.
“Well,” said Rosie, sharply, “who does?”
“Mrs. Higgler,” said Fat Charlie, and all the fight went out of him.
Rosie smiled sweetly. “And who is Mrs. Higgler?” she asked.
“Friend of the family,” said Fat Charlie. “When I was growing up, she used to live next door.”
He had spoken to Mrs. Higgler several years earlier, when his mother was dying. He had, at his mother’s request, telephoned Mrs. Higgler to pass on the message to Fat Charlie’s father, and to tell him to get in touch. And several days later there had been a message on Fat Charlie’s answering machine, left while he was at work, in a voice that was unmistakably his father’s, even if it did sound rather older and a little drunk.
His father said that it was not a good time, and that business affairs would be keeping him in America. And then he added that, for everything, Fat Charlie’s mother was a damn fine woman. Several days later a vase of assorted flowers had been delivered to the hospital ward. Fat Charlie’s mother had snorted when she read the card.
“Thinks he can get around me that easily?” she said. “He’s got another think coming, I can tell you that.” But she had had the nurse put the flowers in a place of honor by her bed and, several times since, had asked Fat Charlie if he had heard anything about his father coming and visiting her before it was all over.
Fat Charlie said he hadn’t. He grew to hate the question, and his answer, and the expression on her face when he told her that, no, his father wasn’t coming.
The worst day, in Fat Charlie’s opinion, was the day that the doctor, a gruff little man, had taken Fat Charlie aside and told him that it would not be long now, that his mother was fading fast, and it had become a matter of keeping her comfortable until the end.
Fat Charlie had nodded, and gone in to his mother. She had held his hand, and was asking him whether or not he had remembered to pay her gas bill, when the noise began in the corridor—a clashing, parping, stomping, rattling, brass-and-bass-and-drum sort of noise, of the kind that tends not to be heard in hospitals, where signs in the stairwells request quiet and the icy glares of the nursing staff enforce it.
The noise was getting louder.
For one moment Fat Charlie thought it might be terrorists. His mother, though, smiled weakly at the cacophony. “Yellow bird,” she whispered.
“What?” said Fat Charlie, scared that she had stopped making sense.
“‘Yellow Bird,’” she said, louder and more firmly. “It’s what they’re playing.”
Fat Charlie went to the door, and looked out.
Coming down the hospital corridor, ignoring the protests of nurses, the stares of patients in pajamas and of their families, was what appeared to be a very small New Orleans jazz band. There was a saxophone and a sousaphone and a trumpet. There was an enormous man with what looked like a double bass strung around his neck. There was a man with a bass drum, which he banged. And at the head of the pack, in a smart checked suit, wearing a fedora hat and lemon yellow gloves, came Fat Charlie’s father. He played no instrument but was doing a soft-shoe-shuffle along the polished linoleum of the hospital floor, lifting his hat to each of the medical staff in turn, shaking hands with anyone who got close enough to talk or to attempt to complain.
Fat Charlie bit his lip, and prayed to anyone who might be listening that the earth would open and swallow him up or, failing that, that he might suffer a brief, merciful and entirely fatal heart attack. No such luck. He remained among the living, the brass band kept coming, his father kept dancing and shaking hands and smiling.
If there is any justice in the world, thought Fat Charlie, my father will keep going down the corridor, and he’ll go straight past us and into the genito-urinary department; however, there was no justice, and his father reached the door of the oncology ward and stopped.
“Fat Charlie,” he said, loudly enough that everyone in the ward—on that floor—in the hospital—was able to comprehend that this was someone who knew Fat Charlie. “Fat Charlie, get out of the way. Your father is here.”
Fat Charlie got out of the way.
The band, led by Fat Charlie’s father, snaked their way through the ward to Fat Charlie’s mother’s bed. She looked up at them as they approached, and she smiled.
“‘Yellow Bird,’” she said, weakly. “It’s my favorite song.”
“And what kind of man would I be if I forgot that?” asked Fat Charlie’s father.
She shook her head slowly, and she reached out her hand and squeezed his hand in its lemon yellow glove.
“Excuse me,” said a small white woman with a clipboard, “are these people with you?”
“No,” said Fat Charlie, his cheeks heating up. “They’re not. Not really.”
“But that is your mother, isn’t it?” said the woman, with a basilisk glance. “I must ask you to make these people vacate the ward momentarily, and without incurring any further disturbance.”
Fat Charlie muttered.
“What was that?”
“I said, I’m pretty sure I can’t make them do anything,” said Fat Charlie. He was consoling himself that things could not possibly get any worse, when his father took a plastic carrier bag from the drummer and began producing cans of brown ale and handing them out to his band, to the nursing staff, to the patients. Then he lit a cheroot.
“Excuse me,” said the woman with the clipboard, when she saw the smoke, and she launched herself across the room at Fat Charlie’s father like a Scud missile with its watch on upside down.
Fat Charlie took that moment to slip away. It seemed the wisest course of action.
He sat at home that night, waiting for the phone to ring or for a knock on the door, in much the same spirit that a man kneeling at the guillotine might wait for the blade to kiss his neck; still, the doorbell did not ring.
He barely slept, and slunk in to the hospital the following afternoon prepared for the worst.
His mother, in her bed, looked happier and more comfortable than she had looked in months. “He’s gone back,” she told Fat Charlie, when he came in. “He couldn’t stay. I have to say, Charlie, I do wish you hadn’t just gone like that. We wound up having a party here. We had a fine old time.”
Fat Charlie could think of nothing worse than having to attend a party in a cancer ward, thrown by his father with a jazz band. He didn’t say anything.
“He’s not a bad man,” said Fat Charlie’s mother, with a twinkle in her eye. Then she frowned. “Well, that’s not exactly true. He’s certainly not a good man. But he did me a power of good last night,” and she smiled, a real smile and, for just a moment, looked young again.
The woman with the clipboard was standing in the doorway, and she crooked her finger at him. Fat Charlie beetled down the ward toward her, apologizing before she was even properly within earshot. Her look, he realized, as he got closer to her, was no longer that of a basilisk with stomach cramps. Now she looked positively kittenish. “Your father,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” said Fat Charlie. It was what he had always said, growing up, when his father was mentioned.
“No, no, no,” said the former basilisk. “Nothing to apologize for. I was just wondering. Your father. In case we need to get in touch with him—we don’t have a tel
ephone number or an address on file. I should have asked him last night, but it completely got away from me.”
“I don’t think he has a phone number,” said Fat Charlie. “And the best way to find him is to go to Florida, and to drive up Highway A1A—that’s the coast road that runs up most of the east of the state. In the afternoon you may find him fishing off a bridge. In the evening he’ll be in a bar.”
“Such a charming man,” she said, wistfully. “What does he do?”
“I told you. He says it’s the miracle of the loafs and the fishes.”
She stared at him blankly, and he felt stupid. When his father said it, people would laugh. “Um. Like in the Bible. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Dad used to say that he loafs and fishes, and it’s a miracle that he still makes money. It was a sort of joke.”
A misty look. “Yes. He told the funniest jokes.” She clucked her tongue, and once more was all business. “Now, I need you back here at five-thirty.”
“Why?”
“To pick up your mother. And her belongings. Didn’t Dr. Johnson tell you we were discharging her?”
“You’re sending her home?”
“Yes, Mr. Nancy.”
“What about the, about the cancer?”
“It seems to have been a false alarm.”
Fat Charlie couldn’t understand how it could have been a false alarm. Last week they’d been talking about sending his mother to a hospice. The doctor had been using phrases like “weeks not months” and “making her as comfortable as possible while we wait for the inevitable.”
Still, Fat Charlie came back at 5:30 and picked up his mother, who seemed quite unsurprised to learn that she was no longer dying. On the way home she told Fat Charlie that she would be using her life savings to travel around the world.
“The doctors were saying I had three months,” she said. “And I remember I thought, if I get out of this hospital bed then I’m going to see Paris and Rome and places like that. I’m going back to Barbados, and to Saint Andrews. I may go to Africa. And China. I like Chinese food.”
Fat Charlie wasn’t sure what was going on, but whatever it was, he blamed his father. He accompanied his mother and a serious suitcase to Heathrow Airport, and waved her good-bye at the international departures gate. She was smiling hugely as she went through, clutching her passport and tickets, and she looked younger than he remembered her looking in many years.
She sent him postcards from Paris, and from Rome and from Athens, and from Lagos and Cape Town. Her postcard from Nanking told him that she certainly didn’t like what passed for Chinese food in China, and that she couldn’t wait to come back to London and eat proper Chinese food.
She died in her sleep in a hotel in Williamstown, on the Caribbean island of Saint Andrews.
At the funeral, at a South London crematorium, Fat Charlie kept expecting to see his father: perhaps the old man would make an entrance at the head of a jazz band, or be followed down the aisle by a clown troupe or a half-dozen tricycle-riding, cigar-puffing chimpanzees; even during the service Fat Charlie kept glancing back, over his shoulder, toward the chapel door. But Fat Charlie’s father was not there, only his mother’s friends and distant relations, mostly big women in black hats, blowing their noses and dabbing at their eyes and shaking their heads.
It was during the final hymn, after the button had been pressed and Fat Charlie’s mother had trundled off down the conveyor belt to her final reward, that Fat Charlie noticed a man of about his own age standing at the back of the chapel. It was not his father, obviously. It was someone he did not know, someone he might not even have noticed, at the back, in the shadows, had he not been looking for his father…and then there was the stranger, in an elegant black suit, his eyes lowered, his hands folded.
Fat Charlie let his glance linger a moment too long, and the stranger looked at Fat Charlie and flashed him a joyless smile of the kind that suggested that they were both in this together. It was not the kind of expression you see on the faces of strangers, but still, Fat Charlie could not place the man. He turned his face back to the front of the chapel. They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a song Fat Charlie was pretty sure his mother had always disliked, and the Reverend Wright invited them back to Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna’s for something to eat.
There was nobody at his Great-Aunt Alanna’s whom he did not already know. In the years since his mother had died, he sometimes wondered about that stranger: who he was, why he was there. Sometimes Fat Charlie thought that he had simply imagined him…
“So,” said Rosie, draining her Chardonnay, “you’ll call your Mrs. Higgler and give her my mobile number. Tell her about the wedding and the date…that’s a thought: do you think we should invite her?”
“We can if we like,” said Fat Charlie. “I don’t think she’ll come. She’s an old family friend. She knew my dad back in the dark ages.”
“Well, sound her out. See if we should send her an invitation.”
Rosie was a good person. There was in Rosie a little of the essence of Francis of Assisi, of Robin Hood, of Buddha and of Glinda the Good: the knowledge that she was about to bring together her true love and his estranged father gave her forthcoming wedding an extra dimension, she decided. It was no longer simply a wedding: it was now practically a humanitarian mission, and Fat Charlie had known Rosie long enough to know never to stand between his fiancée and her need to Do Good.
“I’ll call Mrs. Higgler tomorrow,” he said.
“Tell you what,” said Rosie, with an endearing wrinkle of her nose, “call her tonight. It’s not late in America, after all.”
Fat Charlie nodded. They walked out of the wine bar together, Rosie with a spring in her step, Fat Charlie like a man going to the gallows. He told himself not to be silly: After all, perhaps Mrs. Higgler had moved, or had her phone disconnected. It was possible. Anything was possible.
They went up to Fat Charlie’s place, the upstairs half of a smallish house in Maxwell Gardens, just off the Brixton Road.
“What time is it in Florida?” Rosie asked.
“Late afternoon,” said Fat Charlie.
“Well. Go on then.”
“Maybe we should wait a bit. In case she’s out.”
“And maybe we should call now, before she has her dinner.”
Fat Charlie found his old paper address book, and under it was a scrap of an envelope, in his mother’s handwriting, with a telephone number on it, and beneath that, Callyanne Higgler.
The phone rang and rang.
“She’s not there,” he said to Rosie, but at that moment the phone at the other end was answered, and a female voice said “Yes? Who is this?”
“Um. Is that Mrs. Higgler?”
“Who is this?” said Mrs. Higgler. “If you’re one of they damn telemarketers, you take me off your list right now or I sue. I know my rights.”
“No. It’s me. Charles Nancy. I used to live next door to you.”
“Fat Charlie? If that don’t beat all. I been looking for your number all this morning. I turn this place upside down, looking for it, and you think I could find it? What I think happen was I had it written in my old accounts book. Upside down I turn the place. And I say to myself, Callyanne, this is a good time to just pray and hope the Lord hear you and see you right, and I went down on my knees, well, my knees are not so good any more, so I just put my hands together, but anyway, I still don’t find your number, but look at how you just phone me up, and that’s even better from some points of view, particularly because I ain’t made of money and I can’t afford to go phoning no foreign countries even for something like this, although I was going to phone you, don’t you worry, given the circumstances—”
And she stopped, suddenly, either to take a breath, or to take a sip from the huge mug of too-hot coffee she always carried in her left hand, and during the brief quiet Fat Charlie said, “I want to ask my dad to come to my wedding. Getting married.” There was silence at the end of the line. “It
’s not till the end of the year, though,” he said. Still silence. “Her name’s Rosie,” he added, helpfully. He was starting to wonder if they had been cut off; conversations with Mrs. Higgler were normally somewhat one-sided affairs, often with her doing your lines for you, and here she was, letting him say three whole things uninterrupted. He decided to go for a fourth. “You can come too if you want,” he said.
“Lord, lord, lord,” said Mrs. Higgler. “Nobody tell you?”
“Told me what?”
So she told him, at length and in detail, while he stood there and said nothing at all, and when she was done he said “Thank you, Mrs. Higgler.” He wrote something down on a scrap of paper, then he said, “Thanks. No, really, thanks,” again, and he put down the phone.
“Well?” asked Rosie. “Have you got his number?”
Fat Charlie said, “Dad won’t be coming to the wedding.” Then he said, “I have to go to Florida.” His voice was flat, and without emotion. He might have been saying, “I have to order a new checkbook.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Funeral. My dad’s. He’s dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She put her arms around him, and held him. He stood in her arms like a shop-window dummy. “How did it, did he…was he ill?”
Fat Charlie shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
And Rosie squeezed him tightly, and then she nodded, sympathetically, and let him go. She thought he was too overcome with grief to talk about it.
He wasn’t. That wasn’t it at all. He was too embarrassed.
THERE MUST BE A HUNDRED THOUSAND RESPECTABLE WAYS TO die. Leaping off a bridge into a river to save a small child from drowning, for example, or being mown down in a hail of bullets while single-handedly storming a nest of criminals. Perfectly respectable ways to die.
Truth to tell, there were even some less-than-respectable ways to die that wouldn’t have been so bad. Spontaneous human combustion, for example: it’s medically dodgy and scientifically unlikely, but even so, people persist in going up in smoke, leaving nothing behind but a charred hand still clutching an unfinished cigarette. Fat Charlie had read about it in a magazine: he wouldn’t have minded if his father had gone like that. Or even if he’d had a heart attack running down the street after the men who had stolen his beer money.