Keeper

by Andrea Gillies

  “You’re quite right. All the things are in there.”

  I give her the coffee jar. “Can you put this in for me?”

  She holds the jar up and pushes it a little further until it hits a can of chocolate powder. Then she brings it down again. “It won’t do it for me.”

  She has enough latent knowledge to understand what’s needed to put something somewhere, lifting the jar into place, but doesn’t seem to recognize any longer that there needs to be a gap, a coffee-jar-shaped vacancy on the shelf. Nor can she coordinate the movements to place an object down and let go of it.

  Nancy enjoys going into town. It’s an ideal size and shape for her, our little town. There’s just one main road, snaking from the harbor round into the high street, where for a brief stretch it’s been pedestrianized before opening out again by the church. There are side streets leading off, but most of the shopping is here, along the high street, which is crowded with eighteenth-and nineteenth-century buildings and twentieth-century shop fronts, some of them early twentieth century by the look of them, with prewar sign writing. There’s a stationer, a music shop, a delicatessen, a ladies’ wear shop with just the kind of skirts and shirts and cardigans that appeal to Nancy (but not to teenage girls), two small boutiques (that do appeal to teenage girls, but sell £80-a-pop jeans, so not to their mothers), old-fashioned drapers, Boots the chemist and Woolworths, plus jewelry and gift shops that rely on the tourists. Socially Nancy’s become entirely liberated from convention. Meeting people for the first time, she’ll likely as not embrace them and, tears welling, say how glad she is to see them again. “I knew you once when I was very small,” she’ll say emotionally when introduced. Random strangers are hailed in the street.

  Nancy likes to go round the ladies’ wear shop commenting on things. If I want to make her laugh I suggest something for her in green. She can’t abide green: It’s one of the few things I can count on for her to remember.

  One of the assistants might approach. “Need any help?”

  “These were very popular, I was just saying to this lady here”—Nancy gestures toward me—“and everybody wore them when I was young.”

  The assistant looks at the cardigans dubiously.

  “They’re everywhere the ones like this in the place, all around us,” Nancy says. “And it’s really nice to see them again, you know, all together again because they like that. What am I saying? Listen to me blathering on. ‘They like that,’ she says. Honest to god, I’m losing my mind, I think. But, you know, they’re nice, these things, aren’t they?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “It’s awfully pretty! I was just saying to this lady here when you came in”—she gestures toward me again—“but she thought it wasn’t. So. We all have different tastes and it would be a dull world if we didn’t.”

  “That’s very true,” the assistant says, giving me a special look and retreating. Nancy grins after her and her teeth are appalling, yellow and coated and every crevice jammed with food. She no longer wants to take her false teeth out and clean them and won’t countenance their cleaning in situ. Attempts have been made and abandoned. There were tears, fisticuffs, and biting. We’re used to the state of them but strangers recoil.

  Nancy looks lingeringly after the assistant.

  “What a lovely person she is,” Nancy says.

  Babies in strollers are followed round the drugstore, waved at, sung to, engaged in one-sided conversations, which their mothers consent to warily.

  “Look at you, you’re gorgeous, and you know it, don’t you? You’re much more beautiful than the others.” She leans forward, tries to pinch a rosy cheek. “The others are nasty about you, but don’t you listen.”

  She’s transfixed by the sight of so many racks of nail polish.

  “You used to wear this all the time when you were younger, when you were working, do you remember?” I say to her. She’d spend part of every evening laboriously doing her nails, taking off the day’s keyboard-chipped varnish, filing into soft points, applying various unguents and then color and topcoat from a vast collection on her dressing table. Morris filled her Christmas stocking with polishes.

  She smiles delightedly. “How do you know that?” she asks. “You’ve been talking to someone, haven’t you? But it wasn’t this sort. It was the other kind, not in the same one, I mean. Jings crivens, I’m having trouble expressing myself today.”

  I take her to the shampoos. These now take up a whole aisle. Every time I come in here there are more brands, more daring claims.

  “Which one shall we get?” I ask Nancy.

  “Oh, don’t ask me. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Between you and me I think they’re all the same, except that some of the expensive ones are terrible, too busy trying to do other stuff to your hair to clean it.”

  “That’s very true,” Nancy says.

  “So why don’t you just pick the prettiest?” I say to her.

  She starts to laugh. “No, no, I couldn’t.”

  “Go on. The prettiest bottle.”

  She stands with her hand raised, looking embarrassed. She seems to find it impossible to make a choice, or understand what choosing is. Perhaps memory is essential for selecting. How else do we know what we like?

  “Just choose one. Anything. Whatever appeals.”

  She begins to mutter to herself. Her blush deepens.

  “What about this pale blue one?” I say. “You like blue.”

  “Oh yes! That’s wonderful.”

  We pay for our toiletries and Nancy tells the checkout girl that she has lovely hair. She reaches out to touch it but I intercept her arm and hold on to it.

  In Woolworths, while I’m buying magazines and having a look at the latest films on offer, Nancy wants to talk to small children. Preschool children, little girls in pink anoraks, small square-jawed boys with buzz cuts and suspicious eyes, hang on tighter to their mothers as Nancy stalks the aisles looking for somebody of three or four to talk to.

  “Look at you, you totey wee thing,” she says, bending to smile her toxic-toothed smile. A little girl with fair curls smiles back, twisting her Barbie in her hands. Nancy reaches out. “Can I see your dolly?” The Barbie is handed over. “Oh, look at this, she’s absolutely beautiful, look at her gorgeous dress.” Nancy beams.

  “I’m buying her a new dress,” the poppet squeaks.

  “Kelly! Kelly!” The mother approaches, looking alarmed. “Come on, I said.” Poppet is dragged off unwillingly and we hear her mother saying, “I told you not to talk to strangers. How many times have I told you?”

  I leave Nancy choosing a chocolate bar and go to get a magazine for Jack, and when I come back, I find her standing by the pick-and-mix with a fistful of truffles, mouth working furiously, three gold sweet papers at her feet.

  Obviously, this is a very minor kind of criminal behavior (though I’m glad that the staff here know us, nonetheless), but the principle that makes Nancy feel entitled to the chocolates is one that’s dangerous to apply to life in general. The loss of frontal lobe wisdom, moral sense, any kind of brakes on her impulses: It might just as easily apply to a soft-top car, a diamond bracelet, somebody’s baby in a buggy. For Nancy, everything is available. It’s fair game. If she wants something she takes it. And she believes that everybody in the world operates that way. The idea of ownership is gone, which isn’t to say that she doesn’t assert that things are hers and hers only; what’s gone, specifically, is the idea of other people’s ownership of things she might want for herself. This is becoming a problem in the United States, where the huge number of Alzheimer’s sufferers means that the legal system is having to grapple with issues of culpability surrounding dementia-sufferer crime. It’s a thorny problem. If repeatedly you steal things because you no longer understand what stealing is, what is the state to do with you? What can the mechanics of civilian control do with otherwise fully functioning and peaceable adults who can no longer be reasoned with?

  Nancy�
�s hesitant, out on the street. She doesn’t like the paving stones, carefully avoiding the cracks, looking down and adjusting her feet as she goes, first with small steps and then at a stride—an inconsistency that is tricky when your arms are linked together. She no longer deals well with changes of level, either, hesitating before going up or down from road to curb. At home, she has developed a thing about the black-painted slate floor in the back corridor, pausing as she comes off the carpet and dipping a toe in the “water” first. She thinks it’s going to be wet. Sometimes she thinks it’s a hole and I have to go first.

  If it’s blowy on the high street she hangs on to her hat, laughing near hysterically. We go into the council-run coffee shop, the Victorian Gothic ex–council headquarters, and eat a subsidized bit of apple pie with scalding weak coffee. Nancy likes it in here. She eats her pie with relish and licks the plastic container.

  She’s happy in town. It’s when we get back that the trouble starts. She has no memory of being here, but emotional associations with things remain, subconscious associations, and Nancy’s begun to associate the house with incarceration. Her spirits wilt visibly as she trundles back into the kitchen, and is steered toward her sitting room. She doesn’t want to take her coat off or her shoes. She retreats to her bedroom, putting her bathrobe on over her coat. I go and crouch at her knee and take her hands and look up at her. She looks angry.

  “Don’t speak to me. Don’t say a word,” she growls.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nobody talks to me. Nobody wants anything to do with me. They invite me here but then they ignore me. I’m going to take my things and go.”

  “But Nancy. We’re your family. We look after you.”

  “You DO NOT.”

  “But Nancy. You don’t know where you are.”

  She laughs mirthlessly. “That’s what you say.”

  “Okay, then.” My dander is up. The apple pie will go unrewarded. No kindness will go unpunished.

  “Tell me where we are, then. Go on. Tell me.”

  She looks out the window. “We’re here, of course.”

  “But where are we?”

  “Edinburgh.”

  “We’re not in Edinburgh.”

  “Well, you aren’t.” She puts great emphasis on the you. Is this a metaphysical point? I wonder. “I’m going home,” she adds.

  “How are you going to get home?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s a two-mile walk to the village bus, and even then …”

  “Well, that’s me, then. I’ll say good-bye to you.”

  I follow her out. She’s standing in the yard, looking in astonishment at the great open garden, the wall, the sea, the sky. What must it be like, to be as sure as you can be sure of anything that you’re awake and in your own city, and open the door and find the ocean there?

  “Come on, let’s go in, it’s starting to rain,” I say. She follows me meekly indoors.

  NANCY’S MOODS TAKE a decisive downturn. Daily she tells us that none of us love her, that none of us like her, that none of us want her here. We spend a lot of our weekends trying to convince her that she’s wrong. Trying to convince somebody that you love them is exhausting work. Particularly when you need to reiterate it all, almost word for word, twenty minutes later. Chris takes on the job of trying to distract her at the weekends so that I can have a break. But, of course, I feel terrible, sitting by the fire with the Saturday papers and hearing it all going on. I go into the kitchen to make coffee and find the two of them, Chris and Nancy, sitting at the table making soup. Nancy has her own chopping board, her own knife, and is busy mangling a potato. Chris is saying, “The thing is, Mother, that we don’t ignore you on purpose. The thing is that we all have busy lives, and things we want to do. We both have to work, we’re working people who have to make a living in order to pay the mortgage on this big house and look after you. And when we’re not working, we have other things we want to do sometimes. We want to go out, and spend time with our children, and paint pictures, and read books. We can’t be sitting with you talking every minute of the day and you have to understand that.”

  Nancy says nothing, her knife jabbing at the potato.

  Later on, when everybody is called for supper, Nancy refuses to get out of her armchair.

  “I’m not coming.”

  “Supper time. Soup and lovely homemade bread and apple pie. You helped make it, remember?”

  “I’m. Not. Coming.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  She looks at me, takes a breath. Thinks better of it. Then takes another.

  “I know very well what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get me out of here.”

  “That’s right. It’s supper time. It’s just through there. That door. The kitchen. Your food is waiting for you.”

  “I know very well what you’re doing. I’m not allowed out of here. I’m to stay here. I’ve been told that I’m to stay here and not move. I’m not to move a muscle. I’m not allowed in there, oh no, that’s what she said, she said I was to stay put and not move. The people who own this place told me that I’m to stay right here and I’m not allowed anything to eat at all.”

  Scraps of information in Nancy’s paranoia are traceable. I do tell her to “stay there” when I go off to get her supper. I do tell her she can’t have a whole tin of shortbread to herself, that she’s not allowed it (especially not five minutes before supper). These oddments get mangled, garbled, by the disease. Jigsaw pieces that don’t fit are forced together to make a whole new picture.

  I take her supper to her on a tray. The rest of us eat our dinner in silence, subdued by the outburst, hearing Nancy telling her soupspoon her troubles.

  When I take her coffee in, she is crying. I crouch by her.

  “What is it? What on earth’s the matter?”

  “It’s nothing,” she sobs. “Nothing at all. Just people being nasty to me. It’s always happened so I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “What people?”

  “Not you. I’m not talking about you. You’re very nice. You’re the only one that’s nice. The rest of them are nasty to me. And they laugh at me, those nasty children. They laugh at me behind my back.”

  I can feel my hackles rising. “Don’t you dare talk about my children that way,” I say hotly. “Those are your grandchildren, and one of them, your grandson, tried to help you today and you called him an arsehole.”

  The idea of Nancy calling anybody anything remotely this rude is pretty funny, in retrospect, but it isn’t amusing at the time.

  “Granny’s gone to the dark side,” Jack warns his friends when they come to tea. Jack and his friends can handle it, raising their eyebrows at each other and making themselves scarce, but I am a lot less sanguine.

  I’ve wondered, since this period, whether Nancy was bullied as a child. Whether long-term memory is creating long shadows in her dealing with children, now that she’s ill. Her grandchildren are indescribably sweet and tolerant, rushing to her aid whenever she’s troubled, trying to anticipate her needs. So either the brain is inventing maliciously—can misfiring neurons be said to be malicious?—or there’s something from the past that’s got mixed in, released by the subconscious and bobbing to the surface.

  Nancy’s wandering at night, presumably looking for Morris. I am dimly aware of this, surfacing from sleep half a dozen times, aware of noises below. Doors opening and closing. Someone talking. But I can’t wake myself up enough to go and do anything about it. When we come down in the mornings we find all the doors open, things rearranged, piles of Nancy’s clothes on the pool table.

  Chapter 8

  Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  NANCY AND MORRIS HAVE HAD FIVE PROPERTY STAGES of life, which have mirrored what you might call the Five Ages of Nancy. These have been, in brief, apartment-house-apartment-bungalow-us. Property number one, the original apartment, was par
t of a period-house conversion in the city. They bought it before they were married and worked on it on weekends leading up to the big day. They graduated to property two, a stone-built row house at the end of a row, with its family bedrooms, little garden, handiness for the park and the primary school, as a prelude to the adoption of two children, first Chris and then his sister, who lives in Canada with her own young family and is rarely in touch. Downsizing to number three, a ground-floor retirement apartment, came at the point at which there were young granddaughters, and Morris could walk only with sticks. They were intending to stay at property three for the rest of their lives, but there were two other unexpected moves to come, as a response to encroaching dementia. Three, if you count the nursing home.

  Alzheimer’s crept up slowly, like Granny’s footsteps in the game “What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf?” (Mr. Wolf isn’t sure. Mr. Wolf has forgotten how to read a clock.) The first obvious clue was the classic one: forgetting things, being absentminded. “Where are the keys? Where? What clay pot on the dresser?” But then, over three, four years a bad memory became something else. Nancy needed reminding about money and its rudimentary mathematics, how the door opened and was locked, and about things we’d just talked about. Eventually, under pressure, she saw her doctor and ended up at the memory clinic at the hospital. We’d had no encounters with dementia before, and stupidly we failed to realize that memory clinic is a euphemism. We’d ask, on the phone and on our visits, how things were, what the clinic had to say, but Nancy was vague and Morris studiedly vaguer. “I think she’s getting on fine, though her memory’s terrible. They’ve put her on some pills.”

  The pill, it turns out, was galantamine. Alzheimer’s wasn’t mentioned. It was on her file, though. A later doctor would mention it almost casually, would see our faces, would be shocked by our not knowing. “It helps with memory loss” was all that was said at the time, about the prescription; a fudge enacted by the clinic for an anxious spouse’s sake, perhaps, or, more disingenuously, by Morris for ours. There’s no cure for dementia. There’s no partial cure. All that’s available is a slowing down of the symptoms of fire damage. Sufferers’ experience of the drugs available is patchy and inconsistent. They don’t work for everyone. They’re hit and miss, and usually only of short- to medium-term use.