Jonathan Coe: Number 11

‘It’s full of spiders back there. I can’t stand them.’

‘Really? What’s so scary about spiders?’

‘Haven’t you heard of arachnophobia?’ I asked.

I don’t think Alison had. She just said: ‘You’re as bad as my mum. She goes bonkers if she sees a spider, especially a big one. Once she actually fainted. Really.’

Clearly she regarded this as pathetic behaviour, although I was very much in sympathy with her mother, as it happened. Not caring to think about it any more, I looked around and said: ‘Do you think we could climb that tree?’

We walked to the back of the garden to take a look at it. I realized, as we did so, that although my grandparents’ house did not look very impressive from the front, the back garden was actually quite large. The lawn was in two tiers, each with a slight incline, so the patch of soil from which the tree grew was itself quite high up, almost on a level with the first floor of the house.

I don’t know why I had suggested climbing it. At home, I liked to borrow quite old-fashioned children’s books from the library, the sort of stories in which middle-class kids ran wild in the countryside, having picnics, building dens and apprehending local criminals while they were at it. Trees, in this universe, were there for climbing. So Alison and I might as well climb this one. It was a plum tree (Gran told me this later) and there were plenty of sturdy-looking branches close to the ground, but even so, for two townies like me and Alison, who both lived in places with no gardens to speak of, it was a daunting prospect.

Alison went first, and seemed to make pretty short work of shimmying up to a branch about three-quarters of the way to the top of the tree. After a few seconds’ hesitation I clambered after her.

‘This is cool,’ she said, as we sat on the branch together and surveyed our new domain.

From here we had a good view of the adjoining gardens and indeed the whole neighbourhood. Neatly kept gardens similar to my grandparents’ were spread out on every side: trimmed lawns, lily ponds, patio furniture — all speaking of the same modest, comfortable, unadventurous life. Next door, a couple about the same age as Gran and Grandad were sitting at a white plastic garden table, drinking glasses of white wine and nibbling from a Tupperware bowl filled with Pringles. They looked up at us and Alison waved back cheerily, calling out, ‘Hi there!’ The man just stared back but the woman raised her hand in cautious reciprocation.

I don’t know how long we sat there. It was fun. It was a long, warm, mellow July evening and we could have stayed in the tree for the whole of it. After a while Alison looked at her watch.

‘Our mums’ll be taking off in a minute,’ she said.

‘Do you two girls want some cake?’

It was Gran, calling from the back door of the house. I climbed down from the tree first, taking it fairly slowly and warily. Alison, though, attempted to jump from about five feet above the ground, and she landed heavily on her left leg.

‘Ow! Fuck! God dammit!’

I stared at her in amazement, blushing. Never in a million years would I have dared to use the F-word, even with no grown-ups around. But it wasn’t the time to dwell on niceties of speech. She seemed to be in real pain. She couldn’t even get up, at first.

‘I’ll get Gran.’

I ran indoors and came back with both my grandparents. Between us we helped Alison to her feet, and then she limped down towards the house, resting on our shoulders.

‘Off with those jeans,’ Gran said, as Alison sank down, wincing, into one of the kitchen chairs. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’ Grandad was hovering in the background, but she glanced at him and made a ‘Get out!’ gesture with her eyes. When he still didn’t take the hint, she said: ‘Go on, Jim — make yourself scarce.’

Seeing Alison peel off her jeans, Grandad finally understood. ‘I’ll go and … take some air, I think,’ he muttered.

Gran took a good look at Alison’s leg but couldn’t see very much wrong with it. ‘Well, there’s no bruise,’ she said. ‘And I can’t see any scratches either. Bit of a swelling here, though.’ She laid a finger on Alison’s leg just above the knee and applied some gentle pressure.

Alison winced again. ‘That’s been there for a while,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s anything much.’

Gran rubbed some cream on the swelling and after that Alison decided she’d had enough of the great outdoors and stayed inside to watch TV. I wandered out to the garden again and found Grandad talking over the fence to his next-door neighbour: the one whose wife had waved at us.

‘Hello,’ said this red-faced, white-haired man, beaming down at me. ‘It’s Rachel, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I remember you from the last time you came. Goodness, but you’ve grown up a lot since then.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, since it seemed to be intended as a compliment.

‘And this time,’ said the man, ‘you’ve brought a little black friend with you, I see.’

Now this really flummoxed me. It would never have occurred to me to describe Alison in this way, and in fact I’d never heard anyone mention the colour of her skin before. All I could do, rather stupidly, was to say ‘Thank you’ again, and wonder why this peculiar man was smiling at me so kindly.

Death is final. I know that’s a banal observation but what I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that this week in Beverley was the first time I had really understood it. And yes, that must be the real reason I’ve never forgotten the death of David Kelly. It was the first time the reality of death had been brought home to me. It was, if you like, the first death in our family.

Up until that point I’d known almost nothing about the war with Iraq but now I could tell that something had changed; a line had been crossed. A good man had died, and could not be brought back. And our Prime Minister (I realized now that this was who Grandad had been talking about) had blood on his hands.

‘Whatever else you say about her,’ he told me, ‘Mrs Thatcher would never have allowed anything like that to happen. She was a great lady.’

‘Has he been going on about that woman again?’ Gran said, as we did the washing-up together. ‘I wish he’d change the record.’

She was always criticizing Grandad for something or other, I noticed, and yet they seemed far more devoted to each other than my own mother and father had been. (Mum and Dad had split up by now. That holiday they’d taken without me — the time my brother and I had been sent to Beverley together — had been a last-ditch attempt to patch things up, I think. Needless to say, it hadn’t worked, and they’d gone their separate ways soon afterwards.) It struck me that Grandad would rarely let Gran out of his sight and did not like her to carry out any tasks that were remotely strenuous.

‘Has Gran been ill or something?’ I asked him, one day near the beginning of our visit.

‘What makes you ask that?’ he asked, not looking up from his Telegraph crossword.

‘I don’t know. You never let her do anything. Mum was the same with me after I had chicken pox last year.’

He glanced up at me now. ‘A few weeks ago, she had a bit of a … funny turn. So the doctor asked me to keep an eye on her, that’s all.’

I realize now that this way of speaking was completely typical of Grandad. What he referred to as a ‘funny turn’ had in fact been an epileptic fit, following which Gran had been sent to hospital (after a wait of four weeks) for a brain scan. Now they were waiting for the results, but both were aware that the news could be bad. A brain tumour was the most likely explanation for the fit, and many patients die within a few months from cancerous gliomas.