“That’s so kind of you. When did he get here?”
“A couple of hours ago. He was very sweet and polite. Once we worked out what was going on, we made him a cup of tea and rang the police to let them know his full name and that he was here.”
“Thank God you live here. There are so many people who would have turned him away and he would have been wandering around out in the cold with no phone.”
“He was clearly just confused.”
“He was born in this house. He grew up here with my grandma and his brother. Then my grandma lived here until she died.”
“How did you know he’d be here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think the memory of your childhood home is impossible to destroy. I can imagine it becoming even sharper and clearer to someone in his condition. I don’t know how I’m going to explain what’s going on to him.”
“I’m not sure how far into this you are, but something we learnt with my dad is that it was much easier for him if we didn’t argue with any of the illusions he found himself in.”
“I have tried to do that sometimes. Didn’t you feel like you were lying to him?”
“A bit,” she said with a shrug. “But there’s a way of not contradicting what he’s saying without encouraging it either.”
“That’s good to know.”
“You will feel a bit silly. But it’s a bit of discomfort for you that will make such a huge difference to him.”
I nodded, relieved to finally have someone to talk to about this, without everything I said being dismissed.
“Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“I was going to say, think about how you’d speak to your child if they had an imaginary friend, or they believed something to be true that wasn’t, but it brought them comfort. Going along with it rarely does anyone any harm. And then they get to the end of the thought at some point.”
We went back into the kitchen where Dad was looking in the cupboards.
“What are you after, Dad?” I asked.
“A tin of sardines. She keeps them in here usually. I fancy some sardines on toast.”
“Why don’t we head back to Pinner and I can make that for you. Nelly’s obviously out today, so maybe it’s best if we head off. You can tell me all about your mum and this house on the way home.”
Dad frowned for a moment, then turned to the woman whose kitchen he was rifling through.
“Will you tell her I was here? Will you tell her I dropped by to say hello?”
“Of course, Bill. I’ll be sure to pass on your message.”
He nodded, then closed the cabinet door.
* * *
—
I ordered a taxi to take us home and put up with the extortionate price of the long journey to avoid agitating Dad further on a busy tube on a Saturday night. I rang Mum to tell her what had happened and she was relieved. We spent the majority of the journey in silence, Dad staring out of the window, hypnotized by the A40.
“I don’t know why my mum wasn’t there,” he said.
“She was probably just busy doing some errands or meeting people today.”
“My dad wasn’t there because my dad left.”
“That’s right.”
“He left when I was ten years old, for Marjorie who lived on the next road along. They’ve both moved away now.”
“Yep,” I said, remembering Dad’s childhood photo albums that had fewer than ten pictures of the grandfather I never met, then a space for a missing man in every other image until the pages ran out. “They have.”
“But my mother is still waiting for him,” he said. “She will keep waiting and waiting for him for ever, I imagine. She stands at the letterbox every day when the post comes, but nothing ever comes from him. He’s not coming back. We will never see him or speak to him again.”
* * *
—
“Home again,” I said cheerily as I opened the front door, trying to gently re-root Dad back in reality. “That was a nice bit of nostalgia, wasn’t it?”
“Nostalgia,” he repeated, hanging his charcoal coat on the hallway wall hook. “Greek. Conjoining of nostos and álgos. Gorgeous.” He smiled at me. “I must go to bed, I’m spent.”
“All right. I’m going to stay tonight. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Goodnight,” he said, and went upstairs holding the bannister with every step.
* * *
—
In the predawn hours of the next morning, unable to sleep, I went to Dad’s bookshelf and picked up his dictionary of English etymology. I sat on the floor, cross-legged, with my back pressed against the sofa, and flipped to N.
Nostalgia: Greek compound combining nostos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). The literal Greek translation for nostalgia is “pain from an old wound.”
The doorbell rang. It had been a few days since Dad had gone missing, and I’d stayed at the house since I’d brought him home. Mum and I had been sitting nervously at the kitchen table. Dad was busy upstairs sorting through books in his soon-to-be-converted study.
“Okay, remember to be as clear and detailed as possible with her about all the information,” I said. We both stood up to go to the door.
“Yes, I know.”
“We’re incredibly, incredibly lucky to have been assigned an Admiral nurse. We have to make the most of her being here. Please don’t brush over things when you’re talking about Dad.”
“All right, all right.”
We opened the door to a woman in a bright-red duffle coat with cropped grey hair. She was short, even shorter than Mum and me, with small, round, sparkling brown eyes, a button nose and a girlish gap in between her two front teeth.
“Hello,” she said in a voice tinted with a Midlands accent, “I’m Gwen.”
“Come in, Gwen,” I said.
“Thank you. Blimey, it’s cold, isn’t it!”
“It is,” I said. “I’m Nina.” I put out my hand. She took off her fleecy glove before she shook it. It was a sweet and old-fashioned gesture, and it made me like her instantly.
“Nina, lovely, and you are?”
“Mandy,” Mum said.
“Mum.”
“Stop it,” she hissed.
“Her name is Nancy,” I said.
“My name is Mandy.”
“Okay, just to be clear for any documentation or paperwork, her real name is Nancy but she inexplicably wants everyone to call her Mandy.”
“What a great idea!” Gwen said, taking off her coat. “I’d love to change my name, I’ve always thought Gwen was so dull.”
Mum looked at me, eyes wide and face indignant. “Thank you,” she said triumphantly.
“Lovely name, Mandy. My favourite aunty was Mandy. Such a fun lady.”
“It’s a fun name,” Mum said proudly.
“It is!” she said.
“Gwen, can I get you a cup of tea or a coffee?”
“Oh, tea, please. Milk and one sugar if you have it.”
“Coming up,” I said. “Shall we all talk in the living room?”
“Yes,” Mum said.
“I actually might talk to just the carer first. Who’s the carer?”
Mum and I looked at each other. It was a word neither of us had ever used, let alone discussed. Gwen had been here for less than two minutes and she had already made it clear quite how badly we were managing. Mum’s face had arranged into an uncharacteristically crestfallen expression. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“I suppose,” she said quietly, “I suppose I am.”
“Lovely, how about we have a chat first, just the two of us? Then, Nina, you can join us in a bit.”
* * *
—
I sat in the kitchen and listened to
the clock tick as I tried to make out the conversation in the room next door and heard nothing. I kept recalling Mum’s face when Gwen had said the word “carer.” My mum wasn’t a carer. She was so many things—efficient, organized, managerial. A reliable mother, a fun friend, a loving wife. But she would never be a carer. She had been so young when she’d met my dad—their dynamic had always been somewhat dictated by their age gap and he had always been her great protector. It irritated me when I was younger—Dad was forever defending Mum’s slightly unreasonable behaviour. He was devoted to her. He was the one who cared for her. I had never, in all my life, imagined a time when he might be the one who had to be protected and defended by her.
* * *
—
After about an hour, Mum came into the kitchen and asked me to come through. We sat next to each other on the sofa and Gwen sat in Dad’s armchair.
“Did you tell her everything, Mum?”
“Yes.”
“About the stroke, about everything the doctor said? Did you give her all the medical letters and the notes from the hospital?”
“Nina, stop talking to me like I’m a child.”
“She has, Nina,” Gwen said. “She’s been very helpful with informing me on all of your dad’s medical history.”
“Because I feel like I’ve been left to be the only repository of information throughout this whole thing and I can’t be that any more, I can’t. I’m so scared something’s going to happen to Dad and someone’s going to ask for all the facts and I’m going to forget something or miss something out and—”
“Since when have you been the one with all the information? You’re never here!” Mum said.
“Exactly! That’s what worries me! I’m never here and I’m the only one who seems to be taking this seriously!”
“Hang on, hang on,” Gwen said. “Your mum is taking this very seriously, and we’re all going to make sure that we keep a record of important information from now on. Nina—tell me what your biggest concern is at the moment for Bill.”
“My biggest concern is that Mum’s going to let him wander out of the house again in the freezing cold and this time he won’t be so lucky to meet people who are understanding and nice.”
“Okay,” Gwen mediated. “The front door. This is a very common problem and there are a number of things we can try.”
“I’m not putting some huge lock on my door and making my home feel like a high-security prison!” Mum squawked.
“There’s lots of things we can do before it gets to that. How about a curtain? If you hang a curtain in front of the door, he won’t feel so compelled to go to it.”
“What sort of curtain?”
“Now is not the time to be worrying about interior design, Mum.”
“Just a plain dark curtain,” Gwen said. “And the other thing we should sort out is something called the Herbert Protocol. It’s a form we can fill out now and keep updating as Bill’s condition changes, then we have it on hand to give it straight to the police if he ever goes missing again.”
“Okay, that’s good,” I said. “Let’s do that today.”
“Is there anything else you wanted to talk about, Nina?”
“Yes,” I said. “Dad is misremembering things. It used to happen a bit, but he was mostly very lucid. Now he’s often lucid, but the imaginings are happening more and more. He’ll get people’s stories confused. Or the timeline of his own life muddled. He starts talking about things that aren’t happening or people who aren’t here and I think the best way to deal with it is to go along with it.”
“Absolutely not,” Mum said.
“Someone told me it’s the most effective solution. And that there’s a way we can avoid contradicting his story while also not encouraging it too much.”
“I just don’t see how that’s going to help anyone,” Mum said.
“He’s getting frustrated because he thinks he’s telling the truth. Imagine how frustrated you’d get if someone kept saying you were wrong about something you knew to be a fact.”
“That’s right,” Gwen said. “And as Nina suggests, there’s a way of doing it sensitively. What’s a recent example of this behaviour?”
“He thinks his mum is alive, but she died twenty years ago,” I said.
“Right, so, next time that he talks about his mother, instead of telling him that she’s dead, try asking him to share some happy memories of his childhood. Or look through a photo album together and talk about the photos of her.”
“Can you do that, Mum?”
She was picking at her cuticles, which looked red and angrily shredded, and refused to make eye contact with me.
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
—
Gwen stood in the hallway and retrieved her coat from the hook.
“Now, you have my number and email address to get in touch whenever you need me.”
“Thank you,” Mum said.
“And I’ll check in again in a week.”
Dad came down the stairs and, before Mum and I had a chance to work out what to say, Gwen walked towards him with an outstretched hand.
“Ah! Good afternoon, Bill,” she said with sunny, crisp formality. “I’m Gwen. Lovely to meet you.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” he replied.
“I hear you were a teacher.”
“Yes.”
“And what did you teach?”
“Children, mainly,” he said.
Gwen laughed. It felt good to see Dad back in the role of being the dispenser of comedy rather than the accidental subject of it. Gwen said goodbye to us, then left. Shortly afterwards, I left too. Mum promised to speak to me every day to keep me updated on how Dad was.
I didn’t tell Mum about Max. I had started making childish bargains with the laws of fate, and decided that the more people I told about Max’s disappearance, the less likely it was that he would come back. I was doing everything I could to keep him alive with me—I had started reading our early messages like they were the pages of a play. I preferred to live with a half-alive version of him than admit he was gone for good.
I picked up ingredients to make tomato soup that night for dinner—it was a particular kind, the recipe for which I’d spent some time perfecting for the new book. A sweet, smooth, infantile soup that replicated a tin of cream of tomato. It’s what I craved when I was low; when I wanted to remember a time when someone pressed their cool hand on my forehead when they were worried about my health or gave me a time I had to go to bed so I didn’t have to think about it myself. On the way into the supermarket I saw the homeless woman who once told me she liked Party Rings when I asked her if she’d like anything from the shop. I always picked up a packet for her if she was there. A stooping elderly man with a spine arched like a crescent moon unloaded his trolley in front of me at the till: a bag of cat food and three miniature trifles. I wondered if his mum had given him trifle when he was little. Sweet, smooth tomato soup, sugary round rainbow biscuits, mushy ambrosial custard and jelly. The contents of supermarket baskets are surely evidence that none of us are coping with adulthood all that well.
* * *
—
That night, while I was slowly simmering butter, onions and tomatoes in a pan, I heard a loud noise rise through the floorboards. It was a continuous roar, an animal sound. It sounded like rage and resentment—like a war cry and war wounds. Like red-faced football fans of a losing team flooding into a tube carriage after a match. Heavy metal music.
Outside Angelo’s door, the sound was deafening—firework bangs of drums, fingertip-bleeding guitar strums and the cries of monsters and demons. I banged on the door, but the music was so loud even I couldn’t hear the sound of my knock. I could hear Angelo’s voice shouting along to the non-existent melody. I used the soft side of my fists and banged harder, but there w
as no reply.
I went upstairs and knocked on Alma’s door. She opened it and smiled—her hazel eyes sparkling, her heart-shaped face swathed by a black headscarf covered in blue flowers.
“Hello, Alma, how are you? How are your chillies?”
“Both of us feeling the cold weather, but fine otherwise. How are you?”
“I’m well, I’m well. Are you being disturbed by the noise downstairs?”
“What noise?”
“Angelo, the guy who lives on the ground floor. He’s playing really loud music, can you not hear it?”
Alma leant out of her door frame and turned her head quizzically towards the stairs.
“Ah, yes,” she said. “Now I can hear. But not inside. I’m lucky, I think, because I have an extra apartment below me to absorb it.”
“Yes, exactly, I’m absorbing it.”
“Oh dear,” she said.
“I’m absorbing too much of it, of him. Have you been woken up by him before?”
“No, never heard him. This is the good thing about being old and deaf.”
“You’re not old,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re a bit deaf, for your sake. He makes so much noise and he’s been so uncooperative whenever I’ve tried to speak to him about it.”
“What can I do?” she asked. “How can I make this easier?”
“Oh, Alma. You’re so lovely.”
“If the noise becomes too much, you can always sleep on my sofa.”
“Thank you.”
“But I suppose you will go to your handsome boyfriend’s house instead,” she said, her irises catching the hallway light like gemstones. “How is he?” Alma had become obsessed with Max after he once carried her shopping up the stairs for her. Since then, every time I saw her she told me how lucky I was to be with him—what an extraordinary man he was. I decided not to point out that he too was lucky to be with me, a woman who had carried Alma’s shopping up the stairs more times than I could count.
Ghosts Page 15
