‘I’ll be next,’ said Nicholas’ nana. ‘You wait and see.’
‘You’re as fit and healthy as me,’ Nicholas said. ‘Healthier, I suspect.’
‘I’ve got a line of tablets to take every morning as long as your arm,’ she said.
‘It’s this new GP she’s seeing,’ said Nicholas’ grandad. ‘I think he’s trying to keep the pharmaceutical companies in business.’
‘I don’t think they need much help,’ Liz said with a laugh.
‘Isn’t there an argument that says they have to charge a lot for drugs to fund new research?’ said Nicholas.
‘There’s certainly a lot of money being spent on research for HIV and AIDS drugs,’ Liz agreed.
They fell silent.
As part of the service, Nicholas read an extract from the title poem of his father’s forthcoming collection.
The Sniper was published in the autumn, as planned. Nicholas and Liz hosted a small launch party at the flat in Camden, which Ray had left to them in his will, much to their surprise as they had not known he even owned it. Nicholas discovered it had been a present to Ray from David, the architect. David, it turned out, had been providing Ray with financial support for years. They had had a long-term open relationship.
At the party, Nicholas said a few words on his father’s behalf. He kept half an eye out for a balding intruder wearing a velvet jacket that might by then have become fashionable again, but there was nothing to worry about on that score. The party was well attended and some appreciative reviews followed in the poetry press, alongside respectable notices in the TLS, the Guardian and Time Out (by the poetry editor, who could be considered impartial).
Nicholas and Liz registered with the Adoption Agency and got the ball rolling there. They filled in a hundred forms and submitted to a thousand interviews, or so it began to seem to them. They took to observing certain parents when they were out and about — and Liz sometimes came across them in the NHS — and they wondered why such people were not subjected to the same rigorous testing they were having to go through. They read about cases in the news involving parents’ abuse of children. They became extremely sensitive to the subject. Nicholas’ own unusual upbringing was the subject of particular scrutiny.
‘Anyone would think we were convicted murderers or rapists,’ Liz said, aghast at the latest test of suitability.
‘Or drug addicts who are going to leave needles lying around for their adopted children to play with,’ Nicholas added, similarly disgruntled.
There were numerous false starts and delays and there were times when one or other of them started to lose the will for battle. But finally, in spring 1994 they had their first face-to-face meeting with Jonny, who was very nearly four years old. He was very quiet and withdrawn, uncomfortable meeting people and uncomfortable, it seemed and according to the reports, with himself — with his body, his intellect, his emotions. But he had been through some tough times, like a lot of children up for adoption. He had seen some trauma. Nicholas and Liz were put fully in the picture, but they didn’t hesitate for a moment. Liz said later that she felt as if her heart jolted or shifted position on meeting him. She knew it was silly, she added, because it’s not even in the heart that you really feel these things, but in the stomach or gut, but she insisted on the heart. She felt, she said, that when he reached out his little hand to shake hers, he didn’t stop there but carried on somehow and his hand passed into her chest where it grasped her heart and gave it a squeeze.
They had more face-to-face meetings, completed further interviews with assessors and psychiatrists and all manner of folk and finally the handover took place.
‘It’s like Checkpoint Charlie,’ Nicholas whispered. ‘Or North Korea.’
Finally, in May 1994, they were a family. They were living, the three of them, in the flat in Camden Town. They didn’t expect it to be straightforward.
And it wasn’t.
Birthdays were difficult. Jonny’s fifth birthday came around in May 1995. Nicholas and Liz felt caught. They wanted to listen to others and take advice, but at the same time they didn’t want to. They emphatically didn’t want to. They didn’t want to do things the way they had been done before, because clearly that hadn’t worked, so they wanted to do their own thing, but it had to be right. They couldn’t afford to make mistakes. By 1995, children’s birthday celebrations had already started to become much more elaborate affairs than during Nicholas’ childhood, which admittedly had been far from typical.
They organised a party at the flat inviting children from school. It soon got out of hand as Jonny refused to accept the result of any game in which he was not declared the outright winner. When the candles were lit on the cake he refused to blow them out, or to let anyone else do so. When one child did manage to blow them out, Jonny started screaming until Nicholas relit them and asked the other children to let Jonny blow them out himself. But again he refused. In the end, frustrated and embarrassed, Nicholas blew them out and Jonny focused on the dark coils of smoke rising from the blue and white candles, his face set like a mask.
The party went downhill rapidly. Jonny bit and scratched other kids and ended the afternoon wearing a dress he had somehow physically removed from one of the girls. Unusually for a little boy’s party, most of the guests had been girls. Jonny had not asked for any boys to be invited, but Nicholas and Liz had tried to do what they thought was the right thing by insisting on a more balanced guest list. Parents who stuck around, hovering uneasily at the edge of the party to wipe food off chins or to check that little Sammy or darling Annabel was not given too many fizzy drinks, were quietly outraged at Jonny’s behaviour, exchanging shocked expressions and openly glaring at the young offender while offering strained and patently false smiles to Nicholas and Liz.
Both parents thought it a good idea to try to involve grandparents as much as possible. There was a vague plan for Liz’s mother and her new partner to come over from Perth at some point, but it really was very vague. Nicholas encouraged his grandparents to increase the frequency of their visits to London, but his grandad disliked leaving the front room, never mind Manchester.
‘What about you, Nana?’ Nicholas asked. ‘We could meet you at Euston and then it’s just a couple of stops on the Tube.’
‘I don’t know, love. It’s a long way and the GP says with my heart I shouldn’t be going on long journeys.’
‘Well, we’ll just have to come up and visit you and Grandad.’
They went up on the train on a Friday. It was a tight squeeze in Nicholas’ grandparents’ house, Nicholas and Liz in the spare room and Jonny having a bed made up on the floor of the same room out of the cushions from the settee downstairs. They took these up at the end of the night, and transferred Jonny from their bed to the floor while he was asleep.
‘Your grandad’s getting quite frail, isn’t he?’ Liz whispered as they lay in the darkness listening to the night sounds — the pipes, the floorboards and general settlement.
‘Is he?’
It hadn’t occurred to Nicholas that this might be the case, but as he thought about it while listening to his son’s regular breathing he realised it was probably true. The unwillingness to move very far from the front room was not just inertia or laziness; he moved slowly and unsteadily and even the shortest walk seemed to leave him out of breath. He was nearly eighty, after all.
‘I wonder if, while we’re here, we should offer to do some shopping for them or something?’ Liz suggested.
‘You’re right. Good idea. I’ll offer in the morning.’