I was seven. I remember telling the security guard that when he found me, wandering the car park, crying.
It is Iris who points at the hotel on the outskirts of Calais and suggests we see if there are any vacancies. I glance at the hotel, one of those generic, custom-built ones, low slung and dimly lit so that it has the look of a photograph, dulled by time.
It doesn’t have the appearance of a hotel one would book in advance, and I am unsurprised when we are offered three rooms by a small, squat man behind the desk with a solitary tuft of sandy hair clinging to the top of his forehead. He looks at me, confused when I shake my head. I sift through what remains of my French vocabulary, untouched since my schooldays, and endeavour to ask for one room with three beds. I don’t want to let Iris out of my sight, and Dad could also be a flight risk, left on his own.
The room is really a twin room into which three single beds have been crammed. A swift glance beneath the beds reveals a careless attitude to vacuuming, and the bed linen is congested with pilling from the weight of too many unfamiliar bodies and excessive laundering at high temperatures. Still, it smells clean, and the bathroom stands up to brief scrutiny. I do not allow myself to dwell on the shower tiles as I will be certain to see something I will not be able to un-see.
Best not to look.
‘Come on Dad, time for bed.’ He stands obediently in front of me, holding his arms up when I ask him to, so I can pull his jumper off. He looks different in his pyjamas. Older and frailer. A watered-down version of himself.
I leave his socks on for comfort. I hold out my hand. ‘Your teeth, good sir,’ my comical tone hopefully masking the revulsion I feel when he wrestles them out of his mouth, sets them in my palm. I know it is unkind, but I have never grown accustomed to the slimy warmth of them.
I rinse the dentures under the tap and drop them into the plastic tooth mug, fill it with water, and set it behind the shower curtain so Dad won’t see the dentures and try to hide them.
Mostly I don’t notice how crazy dementia is. And when I do think about it – why on earth do people with dementia hide their dentures? – there are no answers. Not from medical professionals, not from books or articles or research studies or television programmes. Nobody can come up with an explanation for why demented people hide their dentures. Perhaps that’s why I don’t think about it. Because there are no answers.
It’s the disease, is all anybody can come up with.
The bloody disease.
I look at myself in the mirror above the sink, but it is stained and difficult to make me out. Just as well really.
Back in the bedroom, Dad is asleep. Which isn’t a surprise. It’s been a long day.
What is a surprise is Iris. Her eyes are closed, her book is face down and open across her chest, and her glasses are perched on her nose. I approach carefully. I don’t want to wake her. I lift her ancient copy of The Secret Garden and memorise the page number she’s on before I close it. I take her glasses off and pull the duvet over her shoulders, tuck it under her chin. I hesitate before I kiss her. We are not kissers, as a rule. But even though it’s been a long time since I tucked anybody in, old habits die hard I suppose. Iris’s cheek is soft and warm. In her sleep she smiles, then turns over onto her side. She looks happy and peaceful. As if we are not in a shabby hotel room that feels like a million miles away from home, where housekeeping is not a priority.
Think of something nice, my mother used to tell me when I couldn’t go to sleep.
I feel bad now, telling Kate I didn’t need to speak to Brendan earlier, on the telephone. I should have spoken to him. That’s what husbands and wives do, isn’t it? They speak to each other.
It wasn’t always like this. With Brendan and me. We used to speak to each other. And not just about the house and the girls and his job. Real talk. Proper talk. It’s hard to remember what about now. Interesting things. I’m sure of it.
He was handsome. I shouldn’t say was. He is handsome. I’ve just … I suppose I’ve grown accustomed to his face. I don’t think familiarity breeds contempt, but it’s probably fair to say that it makes you stop noticing after a while.
I met him at work. I was one of dozens of girls – fresh out of a secretarial course – in the typing pool at the insurance company. Brendan had started with the company as a runner. Delivering documents to various offices around Dublin. The girls joke that he was like an olden-days Zip File. He was a loss adjuster by the time I met him. He’d come into our section with his files neatly stacked and bound with an elastic band and the little tape with his dictation sealed inside an envelope with his name and the date on it.
I think it might be true to say that I fell in love with his voice. That was the first thing. He has one of those low, smooth voices that put you in mind of melted caramel. But not in a sleazy way. There was a lot of sleazy going on back then, but that was not Brendan’s way. He wasn’t shy exactly, but he was quiet. And mannerly. He’d always say please and thank you on the tapes. It might not make it into a romance novel, but my mother was a stickler for manners, and I suppose it rubbed off on me. I would sift through the piles of dictation and pick out his tapes and do them first, even though we were told to do the work in strict date order.
And then – and this is the romantic bit, even though the girls laugh when I say that – one day, there I was, going through my in tray, looking for Brendan’s dictation. When I opened the envelope to fish out the tape, there was another envelope inside, and this one was addressed to me in Brendan’s tidy hand, my name – Terry Keogh back then – in small, block letters. The envelope was sealed. I glanced around to make sure no one was looking, but when you work in a typing pool, someone’s always looking, so I pocketed the envelope and got on with my work and didn’t open it until I was on the bus home that evening.
It wasn’t exactly a love letter.
It wasn’t even a letter really. It was a note.
Dear Terry,
I received two tickets to a play in the Abbey from a grateful broker. I wonder if you would like to accompany me? It’s this Saturday. If you are agreeable, we could eat in The 101 first (they have a theatre-early-bird menu that is quite nice).
Please let me know by return. I look forward to – hopefully – seeing you on Saturday evening.
Yours sincerely,
Brendan Shepherd
It was that word – hopefully – that did it.
My mother liked Brendan, although it’s fair to say that she liked most people. Perhaps liked is the wrong word. She accepted people. Even the people who fell away after Dad was diagnosed. There were many who did that, dementia not being the most social of diseases. Even Dad’s GP admitted that, if she had to choose, she’d pick cancer.
‘Everybody has their own cross to bear,’ Mam said when I’d give out about Dad’s friends from the snooker club who rarely called after he stopped playing.
‘He’s a dependable sort of fellow,’ she said of Brendan. She said other things too, but dependable, for her, was an important trait. Dependable meant arriving home on time. Being sober on a regular basis. Making it to your children’s school plays. Having money put by to repair the boiler when it shudders to a premature halt on a freezing January night.
Brendan was dependable. Is dependable. It’s just … I’m not sure what happened. Nothing really. Or nothing out of the ordinary at least. We went out together for a year, got engaged, got married, had two children. I mean, that’s a lot really. It’s certainly not nothing, but, I don’t know, it all seems like it happened a long time ago.
18
IT IS ADVISABLE TO DRIVE YOUR VEHICLE IN A DEFENSIVE MANNER. BE PREPARED TO STOP, SOUND THE HORN AND BRAKE.
In the morning, there is cause for cheer.
Cheer might be overstating it. After all, I am still in France, still driving the wrong way out of Calais – that is to say in a Swiss-direction – and still on the wrong side of the road.
The cause for cheer might have something to do with the
road itself. A quiet minor road instead of the motorway that Iris favoured.
Or perhaps it is the spring weather. There is something cautiously optimistic about the white fleece of occasional cloud, the vastness of the milky-blue sky and the brightness of the young leaves unfurling green along the boughs of the trees lining the road.
Perhaps the cause for cheer might be Iris, who seems to have accepted that Dad and I are her travelling companions for the moment. Accepted might be a little strong. Resigned is probably more apt.
Or perhaps Vera and my mother were right; I just needed a good night’s sleep.
I think we are in the Champagne region now. As far as the eye can see, flat fields filled with neat rows of vines, interrupted by stone farmhouses with wooden shutters and smoke curling from chimneys.
Dad farts and says, ‘Good arse,’ in a matter-of-fact kind of way, which makes Iris and me laugh, and the sound of our laughter is so ordinary and that is also a cause for cheer. I roll down the window and imagine the sound drifting outside, reaching across the fields like a warm wind carrying nothing but good intentions.
I remember Vera then. What she said. About the road to hell. And then I sweep her out of my head with the brisk, decisive movements I employ when brushing the kitchen floor and, just like that, she is gone.
I replace her with positives. The fact that it is only Wednesday. We don’t have to be in Zurich until Friday evening. I still have time to turn this around. To turn us around. Facing for home.
And the fact that I have learned the route for the next four hours off by heart. I don’t need to consult the map. That’s a positive. Reading in the car – even road maps – makes me nauseous. I certainly could not be described as a good traveller. I once threw up on an escalator in the shopping centre. I take the stairs now.
As the day gains, the light from the sun intensifies, splashing against the windows like soft rain. I pull the visor down.
‘Do you need your sunglasses?’ asks Iris.
‘No, it’s fine,’ I say. The glasses are in my handbag, which is on the back seat. Iris would have to lean and stretch, and, after her fall in London and yesterday’s incident on the cliffs, I’d say she’s as stiff as an ironing board.
‘Look,’ Dad says, pointing out the window at a graveyard. I was hoping he wouldn’t notice them. They appear regularly on both sides of the road. Fields and fields of identical white crosses, stretching towards the horizon in orderly lines. I say nothing, but Dad taps on the window with his finger. ‘Look,’ he says again. ‘It’s a … a …’
‘Oh,’ says Iris, peering out her window. ‘It’s one of those World War One graveyards. We should stop.’
I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to draw this on us. Graveyards. I want to avoid all reminders of … well, death I suppose. Out of sight, out of mind, as my mother used to say.
‘Oh dear, I’ve driven past the entrance,’ I say, tightening my grip on the wheel in tandem with the acceleration.
‘There’s another one up ahead,’ says Iris.
And there is. And beyond it, another one. And another after that, I’m sure. There’s no getting away from them.
I check my rear-view mirror, slow down, indicate and drive into a small car park that is surrounded on three sides by the relentless crosses.
‘Will I just get out and take a few photographs on your camera for you?’ I ask Iris. The graveyard is grassy with no path. Not ideal for crutches, which could sink into the ground. Then there’s the matter of the slope of the hill.
‘I want to take a look myself.’ Iris opens her door and pushes it wide with the rubbery end of one crutch.
‘Do you need a hand?’ I say.
She shakes her head, arranges herself between the crutches. ‘I’m fine. There’s not a bother on me.’
Then why? I want to ask. Why can’t we go home?
‘I don’t like it here,’ says Dad, staring at the rows and rows of crosses. I get out, open his door, crouch beside him. ‘You can stay in the car if you like. I’ll stay with you, okay?’
‘Why are we here?’ He looks at me when he asks the question, his face creased in bafflement.
‘I was just wondering that myself, Dad,’ I say.
Iris is already halfway up the graveyard. Dad gets out of the car and inches forward, careful to give the crosses a wide berth.
Not all of them are crosses. There are some rectangular shaped markers, with a domed top, each engraved with a star and a crescent moon. Most markers have a name, a date, and a rank number. Some just bear the inscription, ‘Un Français Inconnu. Mort Pour La France.’
And, worse, there are crosses that are blank. Nothing written on them. No name. No country. No reason for dying.
Even the brightness of the midday sun spilling across the white stone of the markers refuses to soften the stark interruption of the landscape with the remains of these soldiers. Some of them only boys, younger than my girls. Never been in love. Probably never even been kissed. Maybe never discovered who they really were. What they were capable of.
Although perhaps few of us do.
‘There’s something peaceful about this place, isn’t there?’ says Iris.
‘Peaceful?’ I check myself, but I’m certain I’m not feeling peaceful. I think I might be angry. I don’t know why. It sits uncomfortably on me, like an ill-fitting jacket.
‘Yeah,’ says Iris, looking around and not noticing that I might be angry, which is good because maybe it means that I’m not angry after all. And now I’m annoyed with myself because it seems that I’m a person who doesn’t know if they’re angry or not. What kind of a person doesn’t know how they feel?
‘With all the trees surrounding the place,’ continues Iris, ‘it just feels kind of … sheltered, you know?’
‘They’re beech trees,’ I say. I recognise them from a nature project Anna did in fourth class.
‘Are you okay?’ Iris stops walking and looks at me.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
Iris shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You just look a little … angry.’
So I am angry.
I shake my head. ‘I’m fine.’ And then I look at her. ‘We’re so different, you and I.’
Iris grins. ‘Yes, but good different,’ she says. ‘Like Mork and Mindy.’
‘No, I mean …’ But what do I mean? I sweep my hand around the graveyard. ‘You look around this place and you see beauty and peace and shelter and I just see death and hopelessness and …’
Iris puts her hand on my arm. ‘I’m sorry, Terry, I shouldn’t have asked you to stop here.’ I shrug like I don’t mind.
She should not have asked me to stop here.
‘Anyway,’ Iris says. ‘I just want to say that I’m glad you’re here, even with all your death and hopelessness.’ She smiles her disarming smile and I can’t help feeling a rush of affection for her, and I am about to smile back when she continues with a breezy, ‘And on a more practical note and one that you will be surprised by, given my casual relationship with administration, I have made all the necessary arrangements.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘I have all the paperwork in an envelope,’ Iris says. ‘I’ll give it to you at the border.’
‘We both know I’m not leaving you at the Swiss border,’ I say.
‘Ah, Terry, we agreed.’
I ignore her.
‘Tell me about all these arrangements you’ve made,’ I say, trying to keep my voice level.
‘I don’t think we should talk about it now,’ says Iris.
‘I want to know,’ I say.
‘Okay, well it’s a private cremation in Zurich and then posted home,’ she says. ‘The funeral director I’ve been in touch with does a lot of work with the clinic and knows exactly what needs to be done, so you’re not to worry about …’
‘What address did you give?’ I don’t usually interrupt people.
Iris flushes in a most uncharacteri
stic manner. Looks away from me. ‘I … I gave them yours. I know I should have asked first, but … I hope you don’t mind.’
I want to say yes. Yes, I do mind. I want to say it in a sharp tone. So there can be no question of my not minding.
But then I notice that my father is relieving himself against a tree in a mass war graveyard.
I run towards him, grateful for the interruption. I wait until he’s finished, then take a bottle of water out of my handbag, tell him to hold his hands out, which he does, like an obedient child. I pour the water over them, dry them with my scarf, spray them with the anti-bacterial spray I keep in my handbag.
‘No sign of your mother?’ he asks.
I shake my head. ‘No. Not yet.’
‘Maybe she’s gone to see your brother?’ This is unusual. Dad rarely mentions Hugh, and I often wonder if he has forgotten him completely.
‘Maybe,’ I say, crossing my fingers tightly. Mam never lied to Dad. She always explained everything to him as if he didn’t have dementia. As if he was still here.
I link his arm and we make our way back towards the car, Iris behind us. Suddenly I stop. Twist around to look at Iris. ‘When did you make the arrangements?’ I say. Iris shakes her head. ‘Ah, Terry, I don’t want …’
‘When?’
‘A year ago.’ Her voice is small but steady. There is no getting away from the veracity of the statement.
A year. A whole year.
I turn around, continue walking so that Dad has no choice but to continue walking too, doing his best to match my pace.
Iris follows us. I hear the sink of her sticks into the soft ground, the quickening of her breath as she struggles to keep up.
I do not slow.
19
TIRED DRIVERS ARE A MAJOR ROAD SAFETY RISK.
Driving is a great distraction. Even when one is a nervous driver, as I am. Perhaps especially when one is a nervous driver. Because I have to give everything over to it. Every last bit of my anger, my frustration, my confusion. I have to park all that somewhere and concentrate on the road.
Rules of the Road Page 16
