Chapter Three: Justin McBieber and the Paté Shower.

As day one comes to an end Mum and Dad settle in for a sing-song. I'm beginning to think this might be fun. But we've a long way to go yet...

The dining room team is all smiles as we shuffle in. Or the practised manifestation of the smiley emoji I spy on a poster pinned to the back of the swinging kitchen doors, with ‘be happy’ in bold Comic Sans, below. 

“You’re the spitting image of my wife’s sister,” Dad says to the sweet young Polish girl who shows us to our lochside table. “She’s dead now,” he says, grabbing the girl’s arm as if this sudden revelation has the power to unsteady her. “I’m talking about when she was a lot younger.”

As if to prove her vitality, the girl smiles and pulls out Dad’s chair for him. “Would you like water for the table?” she asks.

Dad looks startled. “Water for the table,” he repeats, playing for time and shooting a look at me. 

“That would be lovely, thanks,” I say.

“Still or sparkling?” she asks 

“Yes, thank you,” Dad says.

I’m noticing more how, when interacting with strangers, Dad looks first at me. I am his interpreter; his envoy sent, one sentence ahead, into the world. Mum, who stopped wearing her hearing aid years ago because she didn’t like the sound of birds tweeting in her ears, is merely happy to come along for the ride.

“Isn’t it beautiful,” she says, as a highland gloaming sets the mirrored surface of the loch on fire. “Take a picture, Dave.” 

Meals are served at a terrifying pace. Plates of paté start scudding around the room like a summer meteor shower. Mum doesn’t eat any of hers, nor of her ‘Mexican style’ chilli con carne. She scrapes them all onto mine and Dad’s plates, but manages to find room for her strawberry and shortbread meringue (“not sweet enough,” she says, as she rips open two sachets of sugar to sprinkle over it).

“We don’t want to be late incase we can’t get a seat for bingo,” Mum says, as we take a breath when the desert plates are whisked from under our noses.

I tell her that bingo is three days away. She’s not convinced. “I saw the bingo machine when we came in,” she tells me. “It’s out ready.” 

“I think that’s always there,” I say. “And anyway, the lounge is huge. We’ll definitely get a seat.”

“We need to be at the front.” she says. “Because I can’t hear…and don’t you think that girl looks like Aunty Margy when she was younger?”

“Dad said that before, Mum,” I say. “Yes, a bit.” 

“She’s a bit heftier than Margy,” Dad says. 

Mum’s not heard much for the past decade; preferring instead to embark on a slow, voluntary retreat from the world. After years of aborted attempts, our conversations are mostly confined to her telling me about the neighbours and the characters from Coronation Street. My role has long since been reduced to a million different ‘oh really,’ eye raises about the fortunes of two groups of people I know very little about. 

Mum’s stubborn sequestration has left her floating frustratingly between planes, catching the occasional word and confecting a parallel, hallucinogenic narrative out of them. 

Content to use these sensory scraps to flesh out her existence, Mum’s is a world where a report of a hurricane in Florida will elicit a panicky text “Dave, don’t go to the beach, you might get swept away”; a piece on the local news about a young thug warrants little more than an observation about his ‘kindly face’.

“You need to go to SpecSavers about your hearing,” Dad says.

“You need to go about your tongue,” Mum deflects.

“Sometimes I’m glad I don’t hear,” she’ll say when, after failing to catch a trivial remark, I’ve resorted to shouting at her in frustration: knowing that I’ll be weighing up the usual ‘it’s not her fault/it is her fault’ arguments in my head as I drive home, feeling miserable. 

Mum’s refusal to wear her hearing aids has robbed her of any ability to squirrel away life’s sharp objects. In her bubble-wrapped world, each new day is as soft focussed and out of register as the last. She can’t remember me spending a week in hospital earlier in the year, but can tell me the number of each of the three buses she needed to visit me in Alder Hey – and the names of the nurses who cared for me – when I had meningitis 50 years ago. 

She holds out her hand for me to take it as we leave the dining room. It’s as delicate and frail as a fallen bird’s nest; but its warmth is the same warmth I’ve always felt. It fits my palm the way it always has. I catch the last rays of the sun as it sinks behind the hills, and I tell myself: remember this. 

I suppose this entire adventure is a gloaming of sorts. A golden hour. Not quite day, not yet night. A time to pay heed.

In truth, I’ve been grieving for my parents for the past few years. But here they are. Mum dressed to the nines in various shades of glittery purple, Dad, happily the other side of a pint of Best and a G&T, back to his sparring weight again. 

Maybe, I think, I’m taking this holiday for myself after all. Maybe Mum and Dad are doing me the favour. We’re on a strict itinerary. Everything’s been mapped out for us. For one week only, there will be no sudden phone call in the early hours. 

We’re good. 

We find a quiet booth at the back of the lounge and Dad starts chatting animatedly to the couple next to us. “Can’t you tell I’ve got the look of a loser,” he says to a couple from Maghull, after confessing his lifelong support for Everton. “I’m beyond help,” he says. “They should put me out of my misery.”

“They should put the entire team out of their misery while they’re at it,” the man replies.

Dad gives a thin-lipped smile which, I know, says ‘you’ve gone way too far’, and turns back to Mum and me. 

“He’s a red,” Dad whispers to us. “I should have known,” he says, shooting side-eyes to the man, who’s wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and T-shirt with a picture of two parrots drinking a cocktail, with ‘It’s five o’clock somewhere’ written underneath. 

Justin McBieber is having trouble with the hotel’s PA system. He’s joined by a young man with hair like undercooked vermicelli, sporting a purple cloak and knee-high leather boots. 

“Can you hear me?” shouts the theatrically attired man, who turns out to be the hotel’s entertainment manager, Owen. 

“No!” screams a table of 60-something women who’ve taken it upon themselves to snatch three ice-coolers from the dining room for their stage-side table. 

“Ooh, I can see you’re well lubricated, girls,” Owen says as he sashays over to them,  waggling his glittery fingernails in their direction, like the witch in Hansel and Gretl. “Ladies,” he announces to the room, “take your fellas’ walking sticks off them if you don’t want them led astray later. I can see we’re going to have trouble with this lot.”

Everything’s suddenly gone a little too Butlins for my tastes. I busy myself with my phone and pretend to be invisible. 

“Where it began, I can’t begin to know when,” sings Justin McBieber, as he rattles through Sweet Caroline accompanied by a pre-recorded backing track he’s punched into a little MIDI machine. 

“I’ll be taking requests tonight,” says Justin, after the applause dies down. 

The rowdy table shouts out ‘Living Next Door to Alice.’

“Well you’ll nae get me singing the rude version,” Justin blushes. “Not on yer life!”

“Play it!” they scream, thrusting their glasses towards him like bayonets.  

“Listen, ladies, it’s nae worth the hassle. I played Sex On Fire the other week and a couple from Chester stormed out and complained to the manager. I cannae risk it.”

Mum and Dad are settled in and oblivious to it all. To Mum, the conversation is just a distant rumble. She’s texting her friends while Dad scans the sports pages of the Daily Record: “It’s all Scottish teams,” he says, perplexed. 

“Jean’s dachshund had to get put down,” Mum tells Dad, as her phone starts pinging at full volume and news starts to flood in from home. 

“Not another one,” Dad says, forming his latest conspiracy theory against the ill-fated couple over the road. “It’ll be because of all the crisps she fed it.”

It’s time for me to go. Time for Mum and Dad to have a holiday together. The worry and uncertainty; the shock of the new, has all evaporated. They’ve been up since six this morning, I think, and they look ready to take on the world. They could indeed, as Justin McBieber sings, walk 500 miles. But the hapless son is done.

I say my goodnights and head upstairs.