The last bus

Hell is other people and their fridges. Me and mine included, I’m sure.

I am subdued. Welcome to damp suburban London. Much as I love the city of my birth, I will never feel affection for these featureless outer stretches, where the nineteen fifties never quite escaped.

Being carless isn’t helping. In the last two days I’ve trailed around Harrow and environs on the bus and overground train. Wretched. Not had to wait long, and the Oystercard system is good. But there is something so down-at-heel about the London experience now. Everyone seems to be on the edge of suicide. The same sensation struck me in New York a few months ago, when we took the A Train through the city from the airport. Maybe folks are soured by the recession? Or were things always this bad?

My sister’s funeral is on Monday. Today I walked with her twin up to the local station. We were followed in by local celebrity resident Barry Cryer. As we sat on a bench on the northbound platform, the diminutive raconteur started up the stairs leading over the tracks to the London-bound side.

Several minutes later, he had still not appeared on the downward flight of steps opposite, and the terrible thought struck me that he might be planning to leap to his death as the Watford train came in. A tragedy, as we had already swiped our cards. Would we have to pay again on the replacement bus?

A secondary thought was that he might have succumbed to the effort of climbing the first flight, and be squirming in agony in the final throes of a cardiac arrest, halfway across the bridge. Urgent questions appeared: how much would the Daily Telegraph pay for the story? Or was Cryer more of a Guardian man? In that moment of panic, I couldn’t be sure, but I knew I had to act quickly before someone else claimed the prize. Fumbling for my camera, I hurried up the stairs in pursuit of celebrity. With luck I might even capture his dying words on my phone’s voice recorder. As Britain’s foremost generators of one-liners, his final utterance would surely become a fixture in anthologies to come. And the nation was depending on me to capture it.

But tragically, he wasn’t dead or dying, but merely staring disconsolately at the distant London skyline. Maybe he was being summoned to Broadcasting House to deliver yet another eulogy to some newly expired king of comedy, and seeking inspiration. Or was he morosely considering something that I have wondered on his behalf: when all the old-timers except him are gone, who will be left to deliver his own eulogy?

On reflection, despite the missed Telegraph payday I’m glad he’s still with us — or was at mid-day today at least. At his age, being alive at noon does not carry a very long guarantee.

The overground train arrived, and I noted that the old British Rail rolling stock has finally been replaced. The clacketty-clack of my youth is gone, replaced by the food-processor howl of the modern plastic London Underground. I was reminded of the same journey taken one Wednesday evening in 1969. Or rather, the return leg, from Watford Junction to Euston. QPR had won 1-0 at Vicarage Road, and I recall us hanging off the luggage racks, jubilantly crashing our feet against the splintering walls of the carriage (still divided into small compartments in those days), in time to the raucous singing. “Bang-bang-banger-bang, banger-bang-bang…RANGERS!!”

Watford. What for? A desperate shit hole. I thought that even before I left the UK, so you can imagine how it appears now. Switzerland seemed a long way off just then. Metaphors involving aging, slovenly wives and glamorous mistresses are all too easy. Safer for me if you fill in the blanks. But take my word for it, this stretch of high street around Watford Junction Station is a bloody dismal walk, and made even more so by our destination — the chapel of rest (The Family Concern, Concerned About Families).

*****

Hello Goodbye.

It was hard not to think of her lifelong Beatles obsession as we gazed at the bit she’d left behind. Dead people like to make it very clear that they are somewhere else. Otherwise engaged. It’s a very extraordinary experience, and to undergo it with her surviving twin sister added something further.
God knows what river of thought was rushing through her head.

I said: “Would it be awful to take a picture of her?” Later on, I imagined sending the snap to Smirnoff’s Marketing Department:

Dear Sir, My late sister was a tremendous fan of your products. I thought you might like to use this picture in a future advertising campaign.

But of course, that would not be fair. Like raging against a kitchen shop because one of their knives had been used to murder someone. It wasn’t vodka that killed Susan, it was Susan that killed Susan.

I’m glad I went to see her. My first instinct, when asked, was to refuse, but I knew it had to be done. The week since her death has been all about logistics, and shamefully little about emotion. I thought I remembered so little about her. But today, curiously, seeing her husk in that coffin, I could suddenly recall so much more from our childhood.

Another bus, another train, another bus, another drab and dreadful suburb. Welcome to Harrow & Wealdstone. Here is a social club, outside which a boisterous crowd of lads in their twenties are necking Carlsberg and smoking and chortling. They wear ill-fitting dark suits. All have black ties. Someone else’s funeral; someone else’s life.

Over the road, the mosque is shaking out the faithful from Friday prayers. Not a scimitar in sight, and barely a frown.

At the printers, We collect the order of service cards, then cross the road to wait for the next bus with another bunch of people staring at their shoes in silence.

The seedy bustle of the hospital gives it the air of a patched-up 1970s shopping centre. From over here, you can enjoy a Costa cappuccino and watch the merry sea of anxious faces bobbing past, and flowing round the obstacles of white-faced old people being trundled from one humiliation to the next.

The corridor walls are decorated with posters proclaiming the hospital’s ‘corporate objectives’ for this year: To increase satisfaction and engagement, to improve patient outcomes and reduce inequalities, to deliver Foundation Trust status by achieving the agreed milestones…… Christ. No wonder everyone here is ill.

My father’s incarceration was supposed to have ended two weeks ago, but he has had his sentence extended for bad behaviour. In time-honoured family fashion, he refuses to do what he’s told. We show him his daughter’s funeral service booklet, and he starts to cry.

Outside, it starts to rain as we wait for another fucking bus.

This evening I called my other sister to discuss the arrangements for Monday. The car has broken down. “So we may have to travel by bus”. Gah!

And she reminds me we need to put together a eulogy for the funeral service. Sigh. Where’s Barry Cryer when you need him?