Fred.

In London at twenty-five I was a volunteer with an old persons charity, decorating mostly. I also paid weekly visits to Fred. Fred, in his seventies, lived in one first floor dingy room at the back of a dingy house in Islington. He never left that room. His trouble breathing made smoking difficult but he persisted heroically. One Christmas day I was delivering meals on wheels and went back to Fred’s where he was cooking me our own Christmas dinner. I have often wondered since that day which was more beneficial, delivering meals to the helpless or accepting the gift of effort and pride involved in cooking one for a friend. Anyway I had a car and I often tried to get Fred to go for a ride. He couldn’t walk far but he could make it to the car and the rest would be sitting which he did most of the time while listening to the radio. He didn’t have a TV. But he had a clinching argument; his cousin might come while he was out and he didn’t want to miss him. Even though the cousin, I forget his name, had never been to visit Fred in years Fred was wedded to the indisputable possibility that he might do in the hour or so we were away. So on my weekly visits we sat and talked and likely as not he turned the radio back on when I left.

            Now my son works for a company providing Internet access to student’s halls of residence and we also talked while trying to get his old Yamaha SRX600 going, which it did first kick and which gave us a great sense of achievement. He told me that many students nearly have a panic attack when their Facebook goes down. That somehow reminded me of Fred, a sort of stasis of dependency wrapped up in a single room alone. It made me angry the thought that some twenty year olds might be living the life of a wheezing seventy year old asthmatic wedded to sitting and waiting for a cousin that never comes.