The Ugliest House in the World Read online

  Kate hated that Gareth was a Liverpool fan. It reminded her of his father. "He was a wanker," she told me once. "But he was a way out of this dump. I wouldn't have minded if he'd just left me. I could have made do. I could have found someone else. But when he left me with Gareth, where else could I go?"

  Gareth and my father used to play football in the garden of the cottage. They moved two stones from the top of the drystone wall marking the boundary between the two properties and used them for goal posts. I used to watch them, sometimes with Kate. Gareth was too small to shoot from a long way out. He had to get close to the goal before he could kick the ball far enough to take a shot, but then my father would come charging out like an old bear and bundle him over and take the ball. He'd hold him off with one arm until Gareth got tired trying to run around him. They would both be laughing and panting. When the boy began to kick his shins my father would drop-kick the ball into a far corner of the field. He used to find that funny. He didn't like it when I called him a cheat. "If I didn't cheat," he said, "I couldn't play with him."

  "He loves you," Kate said.

  "Did you use to cheat like that when you played with me?"

  "I honestly can't remember."

  "As your doctor, I'm telling you, you should take it easy out there."

  As Gareth got closer you could always hear him talking to himself breathlessly. At first it was just mumbling, but as he got closer you would hear this running commentary on his own game: "He passes to Rush. Rush beats one man. He beats two. Still Rush. He turns. Shoots. Scores!"

  Ian Rush is Liverpool's star striker and a Welshman. Kate told me that Gareth was once sent home from Sunday school for carving graffiti into the desks. He carved "Liverpool AFC" and "You'll never walk alone" and "Ian Rush walks on water."

  I was a big disappointment to Gareth, I think. He would run up to me where I leaned on the gate with his mother and try to pull me away.

  "Why don't you play?" he'd ask.

  "I don't think so, Gareth. I've got a bad ankle."

  "But you're a doctor."

  "Doctors get hurt too."

  "But you can make yourself better."

  "I'm on holiday. I don't even make myself better on holiday."

  Another time he said to me, "Why don't you live here? Your dad lives here. If you lived here your ankle might get better and you could play football with us."

  Another time he said, "If you had a little boy he'd want you to play with him."

  "Gareth, I'm not even married."

  "So? Do you have a girlfriend?"

  "Gareth, don't you have anyone your own age to play with?"

  "No."

  The first time I met Gareth, he scored a goal and threw himself to his knees the way he had seen the players do on TV Unfortunately, my father's field wasn't Anfield and he slid into a half-buried rock. He began to wail. His mother came rushing out of their house, and my father ran to the boy.

  "It's okay," my father kept saying.

  "What happened?" Kate said.

  They called me to have a look at him, but I just smiled and waved. My father came over.

  "What's wrong with you?" he said, "dome and look at the boy. He's got hurt playing with me and his mother's worried. What kind of a doctor are you?"

  "He's fine," I said. "You can see it from here. Look at him rolling around. If he has that much movement in the knee there's no damage. All he wants is sympathy, which you're much better at giving."

  "Don't be childish. At least put the mother's mind at rest."

  Kate looked over at us at that moment. She had that hard stare of hers, the one that says, "1 don't care, but make your mind up." It's the one she has when she stands behind her customers as they look in the mirror and try to tell her how they want their hair. Anyway, it made me go over.

  "Hold still, Gareth. I can't help if you don't let me look at it." He stopped for a moment and looked at me and I lifted his leg and felt around the knee. "Does that hurt? That?" I looked thoughtful for a moment. I flexed his leg. "Well, Gareth, I would have to say that in my carefully considered opinion, what we've got here"—I paused for effect—"is a bad knee."

  He didn't get it, but Kate did. She laughed out loud. She couldn't stop. She told me later it wasn't that funny. She was just so relieved. Gareth looked at her in amazement, but it made him forget his knee. She tried to say she was sorry, but when she saw his face she went off again.

  "You better lay off football for a while," I said, and that's when my father promised he'd teach him how to fish and they marched down to the stream, leaving me alone with Kate.

  Perspective in Renaissance Painting

  We sit at the back of the chapel. The coffin has been placed end on to the aisle rather than side on and from here it is hard to tell how long it really is. It looks about the size I'm used to. The discovery reminds me of perspective in Renaissance painting.

  The coffin is closed, but the minister talks about Gareth's love of football and of Liverpool and 1 imagine him lying there in the red shirt he was always so proud of, with Ian Rush's number nine on the back.

  Kate and her father are sitting in the front row. Her head is bowed, but her shoulders are still and I am sure she is dry-eyed. My father leans over and whispers in my ear, "1 only wish we could have caught one fish. I promised him we'd get one." I shake my head. My father was supposed to take the boy fishing last week. He forgot when they were meeting and he was out shopping when Gareth came for him. The boy went to play in our drive while he waited. He was swinging on the stone gatepost when it toppled over on him. It was solid slate. It's still lying to one side of the drive, and I will offer to help carry it out of the way sometime. It will take two of us, although my father hurled it there by himself when he found the boy. Not that it made any difference.

  There are only four pallbearers. The coffin rides on their shoulders, but each with his free hand holds it in place as if it were so light it might just float away.

  No one has said anything to us at the chapel, but when we get up to leave, two men slide into the pew on either side of us. I recognize the one next to me as the local grocer. He once told me that my father had bought a bar of soap off him every day for a week. Sure enough, under the sink at the cottage I found bar after bar after bar, but when I asked Father if he had some he said, "No, I think I must have run out."

  "Sorry," the grocer says. "The family would prefer if you don't come to the grave."

  Father hangs his head and looks at his hands.

  "My father wants to pay his respects," I say. I'm watching people file out.

  "The family would prefer if he stayed away."

  "Did Kate say that?"

  "The family."

  The man next to my father says something to him in Welsh.

  "What did he say? What did you say to my father? What did he say to you?"

  No one answers.

  "Take your father home," the grocer says.

  "What did he say? I'm not going anywhere until I know what he said."

  "He said, 'Are you satisfied?'"

  "What the bloody hell does that mean?" I say. "It was an accident."

  The grocer waits until the last person leaves and the four of us are alone in the chapel.

  "A lot of people are saying it was negligence. They're saying it wouldn't have happened if your place had been properly kept up."

  I get my father to his feet. The grocer puts his foot up on the pew in front to block the way. His leg is straight, and if he leaves it there I will stamp down and break it at the knee.

  "Get out of my way. I'm taking him home." He lets lis by.

  "You do that," the grocer shouts after me. "Take him home. Take him back to England."

  Kate Hops from Foot to Foot

  Kate and I used to make love in the ugliest house. I would stand in the darkness beside the wall and when I heard the rattle of the chain holding the door shut I would step out. She brought blankets from her house and I brought a torch from my car. It was always too cold to undress. She would push my trousers down and I would lift her skirt. When I touched her breasts she would shy away and make me rub my hands together to warm them. She would hop from foot to foot while she waited for me to be warm enough to touch her.

  Once I asked her if her father knew where she was going on the weekends when I was visiting. "I'm sure," she said. "But he knows better than to ask." I wondered, then, if she went out every weekend.

  "Doesn't your father know?" she asked me back.

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't think about it. He never brings it up."

  "What would you do if he did?"

  "I'd lie. I already he. I tell him I cotne to see him."

  "That's not a lie," she said. "Why else would you come?"

  "I can't imagine."

  "I'm serious."

  "I come to see you."

  "That's what you tell your father when you're lying. Why should I believe you?"

  I lay on my back and looked up at the rough walls above me and thought of the people who built them. I wondered how they felt sleeping beneath them on that first night with all that precariously balanced weight around them. Did they have confidence in their balancing act? Maybe they drew lots.

  Conversations with Kate were like a balancing act.

  Another time she said to me, "If you're worried about your father being able to look after himself up here, you should take him away. I don't want to stop you doing what's right."

  "You're not stopping me."

  "I try to look in on him as often as I can."

  "I appreciate that."

  Grandfather's Dog

  When we get home I tell my father I've decided to take him home with me the next morning. He says he's staying.

  "Didn't you hear
them? They think you're responsible. I'm not leaving you here."

  "I am responsible. They're right. Who else's fault is it?"

  "It doesn't have to be anybody's fault."

  "I promised him. He was here because I promised him."

  "You promised him you'd catch him a fish," I shout. "Don't be stupid. You're not responsible for his death. It was an accident. No one's responsible."

  "This is my home," he says. "I can't leave."

  "This is where you live. It's not your home. It hasn't been your home for forty years."

  "Rubbish." He stands at the window and points. "My father lived over that hill and my uncle over that one. Did I ever tell you about them?"

  "Yes," I say. "Lots of times."

  It's a story about the time my grandfather's dog had a big litter and he told the family that they were not to sell any of the pups. His brother disobeyed him and told him the dogs had died. When my grandfather found out he'd sold them he never spoke to him again as long as he lived. My father says his uncle was the one who met him at the station when he came back from his national service in Germany to see Grandfather before he died. Even then the old man wouldn't see his brother. When I was a child I always thought it was a story about greed or about telling the truth, but that isn't it. It's not a story about my uncle. It's a story about my grandfather.

  "Why weren't the puppies to be sold?" I say now.

  "I can't remember," my father says. "It doesn't matter."

  "Then what's the point of the story?"

  "I don't know. Something about seeing things through."

  "You're talking like a bloody idiot. You're as bad as these people. I'm not leaving here without you. You will be in that car tomorrow if I have to carry you."

  The Dam

  In the late afternoon, my father goes down the field to the stream. He's still in his black suit, with a spade on his shoulder, but I haven't the energy to fight with him. I'm sitting on our wall, watching Kate's house. I keep my eyes on the net curtains of her kitchen as I hear him splashing his way into the stream. The lights come on in her house; someone, not Kate or her father, comes out and pushes through the sheep who are clustered around the house for warmth. Whoever it is strides up the path and vanishes.

  I hear him splashing and cursing behind me. If there is a fish in there still, it's too quick for him. I remember when we used to come on holiday up here and he would catch a dozen or more. He'd string grass stems through their gills and let me carry them in the door, although I never caught a single one. All he let me do at the riverbank was sit and touch the caught fish. I learned that they started out slick and became sticky as the afternoon wore on. Somewhere between the two states they died. He said that if I played with them and got used to the feel of them I'd learn how to catch them. He was wrong. It wasn't the feel of the fish I was afraid of. It was the feel of the unknown when I slid my fingers into the water. He probably couldn't have cured me, but he didn't try that hard—as long as I sat still and let him enjoy himself reliving his boyhood.

  I see the door to the house open and shut again, and in the yellow light I see Kate. I assume she is making for the ugliest house and I pick up my torch and move to meet her, but then I see she is heading for my father and I quicken my pace.

  "How are you?" I ask her gently.

  "I just want to see your father," she says.

  "Why?"

  "I hear you had some trouble in the chapel and I wanted to say I'm sorry for it."

  "They said it was his fault. You don't think that, do you?"

  "It's all our faults," she says. "If you'd taken him home when you should have. If I hadn't given you a reason for letting him stay here."

  "That's insane." She's talking like a relly. "It was an accident. A random accident. No one's to blame. No one's responsible. The gate was just loose."

  I put my hand on her arm but she shrugs it off and strides on toward him. I follow, shaking my head.

  She stands on the bank with her hands on her hips and looks down at him in the water. In the dusk the water is black except for where it bubbles white around his calves. She just looks at him for a long moment. I'm ready to put my hand over her mouth and carry her kicking and biting back to her father's house if necessary.

  "Are there really fish in here still?" she says.

  "I hope so," he says. "There always have been as long as I can remember."

  "Show me how you catch them," she says, and he explains to her about trout tickling.

  "Who taught you all that?"

  "My father," he says. He turns and looks into the gloom. "Over there you could just see the road to our old house."

  "You should come in," Kate says, and he smiles up at her tone and I almost think he is going to listen to her.

  "Let me catch you a fish first." He winks at her.

  "It's too dark, isn't it?"

  "Not if you help me. This is my last chance. Will you?"

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "The surest way is to build a dam."

  She takes the torch from me and holds it while he uses the spade to dig a narrow channel beside the stream. The stream is horseshoe-shaped at this point and he digs the trench from the start of the loop to the end of it. Lights are coming on in all the windows of the village on the hillside behind us.

  "You're crazy," I say. "Both of you." But I take my own shoes and socks off and get down into the stream and begin moving rocks. I'm not having him manhandle them. The stream is so cold I lose the feeling in my feet in minutes. It makes it hard to keep my footing, but I work faster, thinking that even if I drop a rock on my toes I'll never feel it. I pile them up at the neck of the horseshoe and my father cuts the last yard of trench and water begins to rush down the channel. He lifts clumps of turf and throws them into the water to seal my dam and the water stops flowing into the horseshoe and begins to run out of it at the bottom. Kate stands at the other end beating the water, driving the fish back.

  The level begins to drop slowly. The banks are revealed. Stones and gravel give way to mud.

  "Shine the torch," my father says, and 1 take it from Kate and move it back and forth across the remaining water. It is brown from the mud at the bottom. We wait for any movement.

  "There," Kate cries. She points, and in the light I see her arm is streaked with dirt. My father climbs down into the streambed, and mud flecks his trouser legs. He crouches over the shallow pool left in the center of the stream and slides his hands in. He catches something and shouts, but loses his grip, and his hands thrash in the water. It is as if he is washing them. Finally he gets a grip and throws something up onto the bank. In the torchlight I see it is an eel, black and shiny. It twists in the grass and I take the spade and chop it in two. I turn around and with the torch I see my father on his knees in the streambed. He has his hands deep in the mud. Kate is standing over him with her hand on his shoulder. He is shaking.

  "I know," she says. "Oh, I know."

  "What are you doing?" I say. The torch plays back and forth from one face to the other. "What are you doing? It was an accident. It's nobody's fault. What are you doing?"

  Whitewash

  When I take him out to the car in the morning, we see that the walls have been covered in red graffiti. I don't speak Welsh, but even I know what Cymru am byth means. It's a nationalist slogan: "Wales forever."

  I make my father sit in the car while I go and fetch the cans of whitewash from the shed. I wonder who did it. The grocer maybe. Maybe even Kate's father. I wonder if they were up here daubing it while we were down by the stream. It is nine o'clock on a Sunday morning and people are opening their curtains and fetching their newspapers. I imagine the whole hillside watching me as I paint over the slogan. Of course, I keep going. I've been wanting to do this for so long.

  It takes me almost two hours to do the whole cottage and when I'm finished it shines in the bright morning light.

  Relief

  SOMETIME BETWEEN the cheese and the fruit, while the port was still being passed, Lieutenant Wilby allowed a sweet but rather too boisterous fart to slip between his buttocks. The company around the mess table was talking quietly, listening to the sound of the liquor filling the glasses, holding it up in the lamplight to relish its color against the white canvas of the tent. It was, Lieutenant Bromhead had just explained, a bottle from General Chelmsford's own stock, and not the regulation port issued to officers. A hush of appreciation had fallen over the table.