by Vikki Patis
I leave the house at eleven o’clock, telling Seb to heat up a tin of tomato soup for lunch. ‘There’s gluten-free bread in the freezer,’ I call, swinging my bag over my shoulder and pulling on my shoes. I hear a grunt that could constitute a response, and try to push away the anxiety that’s needling at me. He’ll be okay. He’ll speak to Izzy and everything will be fine.
With a glance at the darkening sky, I unlock the car and slide behind the wheel, my nerves jangling as they always do when I’m about to drive. I’ve never been confident on the road, probably due to having learned to drive later in life. I inhale deeply and turn on the engine, easing carefully out of the space and onto the road that will take me to my mother’s house.
This is the house I grew up in, which my paternal grandfather bought for my parents when they married. The house my mother and I continued to live in after my dad left. Now she rattles around in the four-bedroom, semi-detached house, alone but for the ghosts. It has high ceilings and large windows, and a long, wild garden which I used to spend hours in as a child, searching for fairies amongst the brambles. Even in the depths of winter, it was preferable to being inside the house, which was often no warmer as Mum hadn’t paid the gas bill. These days she gets help with such things, because forgetting to pay the bills carries less judgement if you have dementia instead of just being drunk.
I park behind her rusted BMW that hasn’t been moved in two years, and get out just as the first raindrops begin to fall. Fishing for the house key in my bag, I hurry up the steps and duck under the cover of the porch.
‘Hiya, Mum,’ I call, shutting the door behind me with a firm shove. The latch is temperamental, and several times I’ve come over to find the door wide open, Mum none the wiser.
‘Why don’t you downsize?’ I asked her once when I was cooking her lunch. Something simple, scrambled eggs or chicken soup or, if she was feeling really adventurous, ham, egg and chips. ‘This place is much too big for you.’
‘This is the only thing your father ever gave me,’ she said, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke into the air, forgetting or ignoring the fact that I, too, was something he gave her. ‘It’ll be yours one day. Don’t wish away your inheritance.’ But although my mother is sixty-eight and has dementia, I suspect she’ll stick around for many years to come. My mum has always been… difficult. I suppose these days you would call her a hoarder, rooms full of junk she will never use, doors kept closed for years, the dust and spiders taking over. I drop my bag on the bottom step, the only one without something sitting on it and call out to her again.
‘I’m in here!’ Her voice comes from the back of the house. I follow it, poking my head around the kitchen door and sighing when I see the mess. She looks up as I enter. ‘This sodding machine,’ she says, waving her hands at the dishwasher. ‘Three times I’ve put my whites through, and they’re still filthy.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ I say, opening the door and seeing that, yes, my mother has been trying to wash her clothes in the dishwasher instead of the washing machine. ‘Leave that to me, Mum. You know I’ll do it.’
She tuts. ‘I’m quite capable, Olivia. I’m not an invalid.’
Only she – and Sean, the twat – calls me Olivia. When she remembers my name, that is. Last week I was Samantha.
‘I know that, Mum,’ I say, keeping my voice even. ‘Why don’t you put your feet up? I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea.’
Putting her feet up has always been one of Mum’s favourite pastimes, alongside drinking her way through three bottles of vodka in a night and telling me I’m a disappointment. Though she doesn’t do the latter anymore; I don’t buy her any alcohol when I do her weekly shop. She shuffles out of the room, muttering under her breath, while I load the soggy clothes into the correct machine and turn it on.
‘Have you had breakfast?’ I ask when I take her tea through to the sitting room. She has always insisted on calling it a sitting room, probably because she takes it at its word and does nothing but sit in there, her legs up on the pouffe that is older than I am, her hands clasped over her stomach. There isn’t even a TV in here, just shelves of books and stacks of newspapers on the large coffee table, the legs groaning with the weight. I spot a box for a smoothie maker which I know she has never used, perched precariously on top of an open box with clothes hangers sticking out the top. I suppress a sigh and call her name when she doesn’t answer.
She tuts again, and I add another line to my mental tally. So far her record has been seventeen tuts in one visit. ‘Yes, thank you,’ she replies curtly. ‘I had a Jammy Dodger.’
I place her tea on the table beside her chair and perch on the edge of the sofa. ‘What do you fancy for lunch today? I saw there’s some fish fingers in the freezer.’
Mum shakes her head. ‘Those are for Harold.’
I stare at her. This is a new one on me. ‘Who’s Harold?’
She tuts – three – and fixes me with a steely gaze. ‘Harold!’ she says, as if repeating his name will jog my memory. ‘From the post office. He comes by on a Wednesday to help me.’
Harold from the post office. I’ve never heard of him. ‘What does he help you with?’
‘Oh, this and that. Last week he pulled up all the weeds in the front garden. Doesn’t it look nice out there now?’
I nod automatically, though I hadn’t noticed any difference to the small patch of grass out the front. ‘You’re not cooking for him, are you? You know that’s what I’m here for, Mum.’
‘You can’t be here every second of the day, Olivia,’ she snaps. ‘I am allowed my own life.’ I open my mouth to respond, but she continues. ‘He cooks them himself, if you must know. Always makes me a fish-finger butty.’
I’m beginning to suspect that Harold is in fact a figment of Mum’s imagination, but I change the subject. My head is too full for her dramatics right now. ‘I was destined for the stage, Liv,’ my mother would say when I was younger, with a faraway look in her eye. And when she’d look back at me, the only thing I saw there was yet more disappointment.
‘How’s that boy of yours?’ she asks now, surprising me. She doesn’t often remember Seb’s existence.
‘Oh, he’s all right,’ I lie. ‘Studying hard for his exams.’
‘And Paige? Is she still working at that cinema?’
I freeze. I know people with dementia often forget deaths, but this is the first time Mum has forgotten that her granddaughter is no longer alive. That her boyfriend, the father of her child, beat her to death eleven years ago.
‘Yeah,’ I say, swallowing the lump in my throat. ‘Yeah, she is.’
10
Caitlyn
I’m back at the hospital by eight o’clock the next morning, Alicia in the car beside me. She squeezes my hand as I park up.
‘It’ll be all right, Mum,’ she says. ‘One step at a time.’
I count the steps from the car park to the front entrance – thirty-eight – and then again to the lift – fourteen – focusing on placing one foot in front of the other, and not on the daughter lying in a hospital bed, her wrists bandaged, her throat and stomach sore. Alicia gives me a small smile as we approach Isabelle’s cubicle, a smile that says relax, your anxiety is contagious, and I pull the mask over my face, smiling broadly at the figure in the bed.
‘Morning,’ I say, bending down to kiss Isabelle’s forehead. It is slightly clammy; is she too hot? Are they taking care of her in here? I take a deep breath and say, ‘Look who I’ve brought.’
Alicia steps up beside me, perching on the edge of the bed and grinning at her sister. ‘Anything to get me away from my mock exam,’ she says, winking.
I sit down on the chair, exhaustion suddenly sweeping through me. Alicia and I had stayed up late the night before, moving from tea to wine, drifting from the kitchen to the living room, Alicia sitting on the chair behind me, braiding my hair as we talked about everything except the photo. Alicia and I talk most days, texts flying between us with have you eaten enoug
h greens? and can you lend me twenty quid?, but I have missed having my eldest daughter around. My two girls are like night and day. Isabelle has always been serious and quiet, slipping silently up the stairs and into her room, the door shut tight, music playing until she goes to bed, or until she falls asleep and I turn it off, tiptoeing into her room and watching her for a moment, marvelling at how it feels as if she was a toddler only yesterday. You can sometimes forget Isabelle is there, but you know whenever Alicia is home. Her shoes are kicked off in the hallway, her jacket and bag thrown onto the bottom step. She sings along to her music or listens to podcasts about the history of abortion or racism in the United States while she cooks, pans crashing, drawers slamming. She leaves huge piles of washing-up in the sink, which Michael frowns at but doesn’t think to clean himself. She stretches out on the sofa, munching on Haribo or Maltesers, packets discarded on the floor, and then she is gone as quickly as she arrived, with a peck on the cheek and a waft of strawberry conditioner. She is a whirlwind, my daughter.
Is it my imagination, or does Isabelle look brighter today? There’s something in her eyes that wasn’t there before. Is she happy to have her sister with her? Though they are four years apart in age, Isabelle has always been wiser than her years. ‘You should’ve been the older sister,’ Alicia likes to say, nudging her, and it’s true. Isabelle is sensible, steady. When she isn’t hurting herself, that is.
‘How are you today?’ I ask gently, and try not to notice the flicker of annoyance crossing Isabelle’s face as she turns to me. As if I am unwelcome here. As if I am at fault. ‘Are you feeling any better?’ I consider the term. Better than what, exactly? Better than on the brink of suicide? It’s not as if this can be marked by any reliable timepoints, not like a broken leg or a cold. I can put weight on the leg now would be better. I didn’t wake up with a stuffy nose would be better. How do you measure better when it comes to mental health? I didn’t try to kill myself today.
I shake myself, realising that Isabelle is no longer looking at me but at Alicia, who is babbling on about the cake she will make when Isabelle comes home.
‘I’m thinking chocolate. What do you think, Siz?’ Her pet name for her sister. Siz for Isabelle, Sis for Alicia. ‘Ooh! Or coffee and walnut?’
Isabelle smiles then, a ghost of a smile that I latch onto, clinging to it like a drowning woman clings to a piece of driftwood. She’s smiling, so she must be okay. Everything is going to be okay. But I know there is so much more to this. So much I am in the dark about.
The curtain behind us opens to reveal a nurse, plump in her bright-blue uniform and smiling widely. ‘Morning, duck,’ she says to Isabelle in a thick northern accent. Yorkshire maybe? ‘Are you ready to go home?’
‘Home?’ I repeat, feeling my eyes widen. ‘But she’s… I mean, there’s not–’
‘Isabelle is feeling better today,’ the nurse says, smiling at me in a way that makes me feel like a small child throwing a tantrum because another kid has stolen my toy. ‘She’s ready to go home.’ She hands me a sheaf of leaflets I hadn’t noticed she was holding. ‘These are to take with you.’
I glance down at them, my mind struggling to process the words. Anxiety & Panic Attacks. Sleep Problems & How to Manage Them. Self-Harm. My brain stutters over the last one. Self-harm. Is that what my daughter has been doing?
I look back at the nurse, but she is already retreating. Is that it? I want to shout. A few bits of paper and a pat on the shoulder? Off you go, duck, try not to do it again. We’re short of beds in here.
I try to compose myself as I turn back to face my daughters. Alicia is silent for once, and I can tell her own thoughts are echoing mine. Isabelle’s eyes look tired, as if she has been awake for several days in a row, and I suddenly feel as if I am far, far out of my depth.
11
Seb
Josh: Can u believe this??
Ben: My dad went mental when he found out I sent it to the group
Liam: I know. It’s proper mad
Lew: I didn’t even see it before I got dragged out of form! It was hot though, am I right?
Josh:
