by Jo Gatford
It’s becoming harder to distinguish the spaces in between. My bed has been made but I don’t remember lying in it. The only hint that I did not pass a silent night is the splintering ache in my limbs, the heaviness of my joints, a flaring of pain behind my eyes with each pulse of my over-stimulated heart.
The nurses describe my nightly exploits in the same tone Ingrid next door talks about the latest soap storyline: lip-lickingly plump little portions of can-you-believe-its, wrapped in quasi-professional restraint. Last night they found me hysterically sorting socks, searching for something in my top drawer that clearly wasn’t there. And I woke wondering if there would be croissants for breakfast.
They say it’s a benign symptom, harmless to the one who experiences it, but it’s not. The not-knowing is like chloroform, stuffed into my nostrils, shoved deep down into my lungs - like a strap stretched tight across my sunken chest. The dread in knowing there will come a day when I blithely give away all the things that should never be known, without even noticing. My brain melts, my tongue loosens, and secrets could slip out of me as easily as sighs. The only way I know they haven’t already done so is the fact that my children are still speaking to me.
Matthew sits there, not three feet away from me, watching the clock until he’s spent his requisite hour and feels justified in leaving. He does it kindly, I suppose, or perhaps it’s contrived. He times his visits exactly an hour before lunch so that it will be one of the nurses who asks him to leave and not his own decision to go. He breathes through his mouth so he won’t have to smell the sweetness of the phlegm and decomposing flesh that permeates the very walls of this death camp. He’s given up trying to uphold a conversation with me, never knowing whether he will find a relevant response, a stammering idiot or a silent rebuttal. An hour of stifling quiet in between, “Anything you need, Dad?” and “Nurse says it’s time to go, Dad. I’ll see you next week.”
He must think I’m not speaking to him, but what is there left to say? You really don’t have to sit here and watch me disintegrate.
He looks tired. A petulant anger that must surely be directed at me. I worry about the hidden things when he’s here. I can’t concentrate. He’s saying something but I can’t decipher it. It’s hard enough trying to keep my eyes from fixing on what I don’t want him to find. The eyes in the shadows beneath the bed.
The room is too small and the walls lean in. A divan, a chair, drawers, a window, two doors. One leads to a bathroom that could fit inside a cupboard. The other leads into the leafy-carpeted corridor, to notice boards and dado rails twisted with tinsel, a multitude of comfortable chairs and staff rooms locked tight. Two doors, but not always a bathroom and a corridor. Those are just two possibilities within the labyrinth. Sometimes the doorways lead to my kitchen, my aunt’s greenhouse, the plumbing aisle of Warton’s building merchants’, the passenger seat of Lydia’s car, a clifftop.
The clifftop is the worst. There are fingernails on the edge, elongated footprints that slide from mud to sky, waves rising up to block out the sun. There is no way of returning from where you’ve been, but there is always another door. The only door on the clifftop is the telephone box and I can never bring myself to step inside.
The dementia is vascular, sniping at me with little strokes, a descending staircase, pushing me deeper within myself. Each one blunts another corner, cutting off the link between fingers and buttonholes, spoon and teacup, time and movement, nurse and step-daughter. I wonder if it will turn me inside out, eventually. The universe has become finite, composed entirely of doorways, shrinking ever smaller, closing down the open spaces. I move from door to door, from this gentle prison and weathered body to standing at a bay window, swaying a warm baby in my arms; to dragon-breath steam in a morning garden, turning potatoes out of the soil with a fork; to a dark, vanilla-scented bedroom, tracing Lydia’s waist with hot palms, back when I had two of them. Some days I look down to find my right hand sawn off with no recollection of the bite, the gangrene, the surgery.
I always return, though I don’t always know I’ve been away. And there is always another door.
I watch the doorway to the hallway now, keeping an eye on the predator, tensing for the pounce. It is waiting for Matthew to leave, urging me to slip through its wavering threshold.
“Dad?” he asks.
I nod.
“You remember who I am?”
When I am here, when I walk amongst the other residents, I see them slipping. Each day less coherence, fewer smiles, more confusion, fear, frustration. I feel them dragging me along with them, though I won’t know it when I’m pulled under. Am I getting worse? And would they tell me if I were? Matthew looks into my eyes as though there is less of me there to be found. He watches for the day when there is no recognition at all. Today, I remember. I know my own son. I say, “Matthew.”
“And Angela?”
I nod. Step-daughter. Lydia’s eldest, Alex’s half-sister, Matthew’s step-sister. Poor Angela, siphoned in between the pieces of a badly-fitted family jigsaw.
“And Alex?”
A chill hits my guts, rising up, crushing my oesophagus until I can’t swallow without wincing. Alex. My baby boy, always, even though he stands at my height, even though his breath smells of tobacco and he talks about base-rate tracking mortgages and doesn’t let me pay for drinks. I miss him. I don’t know how long he’s been away but it feels like too long. Angela comes less frequently these days, too. I would be angry but I can’t access it - it falls limp in the place of a sadness I can’t justify. The real reason they haven’t visited lurks behind yet another door – this one locked and bolted and impenetrable – and Matthew won’t tell me.
“When is he coming to see me?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. Disappointment. I should know why. But I cannot have all things at all times. It’s enough that I know where I am, know this musty, gloomy room and the cause of my imprisonment. I know my eldest son. Tomorrow it could all fade behind a discoloured film of the past - he could be a stranger like the rest.
#
Matthew is gone, and the nurse attempts to coax me into the common room for lunch. I offer mild-mannered refusal and she eventually leaves me with the contemptible cliché of a tartan blanket draped across my knees. I cannot move, not when the doorway beckons with promises of elsewhere, the possibility of a brief hiatus from the inexorable nursing home days.
The home’s brochure describes lunch as ‘a sociable affair’, which translates into ‘sandwiches on side tables and laps, wherever we happen to be sitting’. Sandwiches and tea, the never-ending supply that might as well be administered intravenously. Testing each chair for dampness before sitting becomes second nature once you witness the sheer volume of warm liquid consumed daily. Then, the choice between Battenburg or Victoria sponge. On Sundays there is chocolate log and mint Vienetta. When Ingrid’s sister bakes, there is fruit cake you could use to sink dead bodies.
Dinner is a tightly orchestrated ‘sit down affair’ in the dining room - meat and two veg boiled to oblivion so as to disintegrate harmlessly when pressed against the roof of one’s mouth. It coincides with the shift change, so must be served and eaten by six precisely. Actually, it’s beside the point whether it’s eaten or not. As soon as the clock in the foyer starts its hollow pinging, plates are whisked out from under chins, forks snatched from hands, napkins yanked out of shirt collars and the very tablecloth pulled away like a magic trick. Except all that’s left is a sad collection of trembling, stained leftovers, cowering in their wheelchairs, blinking like confused, surfacing moles.
When I step through a new door they disappear back underground, all of them. They cannot intrude on things that have already happened, or into echoing misty landscapes that even I do not recognise. I am lost here, but through the warren of doorways I have years ahead of me, and the torturous illusion that I could do things differently. It shows me things I didn’t even know I’d done wrong. It shows me Lydia, before the hospice. And it shows me
Heather, before she vanished. Before Matthew.
Back here, with the rest of them, the pull of gravity is a thousand times more urgent. We are the most fragile of fruit, rotting from the inside out while our skin puckers and our orifices slacken, bruising like two-week-old plums. We are reduced to mucus-ridden, barking turkeys upon contracting a simple cold. Our eyes dim milky yellow, our ears grow ever larger but ever more useless, our teeth crumble in our mouths and our brain cells – having long stopped reproducing themselves – die lonely deaths, jettisoning random memories as the ship goes down.
The doorway calls. I need to move. Before I can gather the right connections between intent and muscle contraction to raise myself out of the armchair, a woman who looks remarkably like my dentist lays a tray on my lap. She smiles for longer than seems necessary, asks if there’s anything else she can get me. I shake my head at my knees, uncomfortable with the over-familiarity, hoping I did not misunderstand the question. She leans forward and gives me a light hugging around the shoulders before she leaves. A waft of shampoo scent hangs in the air behind her. She has the same hair as Lydia, all frizz and unruly wonder, standing out from her skull like balloon static, conker-brown and squirrel-red in the light. Windy autumn hair. You’d expect it to smell like damp grass and bonfires but it doesn’t. It smells like almonds and chemicals. I watch her go. If I squint my eyes I can imagine that she is my Lydia, just off out to get some milk, and I am sitting in my leather recliner, about to watch the tennis.
Next door, the incessant bing-bong of the nurse-call button harmonises with the rabid yelling of my neighbour, Ingrid, who is apparently in need of some new sheets. No matter how hard I squint my eyes, there is no way of squinting my ears.
It is time. The doorway glows, expanding at the sides as though an enormous bubble is pushing its way through, distorting the physical space within the architrave. There are answers inside, and faces. Alex’s face, impatient and irritated that I have taken so long to find him.
My knees obey, finally. The contents of my tray hit the carpet with a muted clatter of plastic and melamine, blanketed in tartan. Flakes of tuna and kernels of sweetcorn stick to my slipper soles. A slice of cucumber, carefully whittled into the shape of a leaf, lies sneakily camouflaged against the patterned carpet. The doorway beats a blood-gushing heartbeat into the air around it, sound waves almost visible, sucking the air out of the room like an airlock on a spaceship. Step through or die. Follow or stop breathing.
There’s something the other side – something more vivid than tuna mayonnaise and salad vegetables and white sliced bread, something that is long dead but still more animated than this place. It knows I will always step through. She knows. I have been following her for thirty-five years.
Chapter Three
Alex died on my birthday, almost as if he’d timed it on purpose. Like he was making sure I wouldn’t ever forget.
Angela had booked a table at a cheap Italian, picked up Dad from the nursing home, and insisted everyone order three courses, even though I knew she couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t want to celebrate anyway.
“It’ll be good for your dad, too,” she’d said. “A chance to get him out for an evening, to get the whole family together - how often does that happen?” What she meant was: Alex had decided to come down for the weekend and my birthday was a convenient excuse to get him to see Dad, to salve his state of mind with the presence of his favourite son.
But Alex hadn’t turned up, as I suspected he wouldn’t. We filled up on garlic bread and wine and he eventually sent a text to say he was on his way but traffic was a bitch and that he’d join us for dessert. I laid bets on a second text within twenty minutes saying he wasn’t feeling up to it and maybe he’d see us tomorrow, and that everyone would be okay with this. Disappointed, but not surprised, though somehow it was never his fault.
“You’re paranoid,” Sabine said. She was still my girlfriend back then, with a weird affection for my dysfunctional past.
“One day,” I’d said, “you’ll lose your blinkered optimism about my family all getting along and see what a manipulative bunch of fuckers we really are.”
She used to laugh at my snarling, jaded rants. This time she just scowled. “Oh, I know exactly what you are. But you’re becoming worse than any of them.”
My second glass of red wine set alight a glowing in my chest. The tea lights on the tables reflected double in the French doors at the back of the restaurant, transforming the £13.99 set meal into something more festive. Even the way my dad ate with his mouth half open didn’t seem to be quite as annoying as it usually was, until he said, “The one time Heather made meatballs, even the cat got ill.”
Angela looked from my face to Dad’s with a frantic expression, as though reality would cease to exist if someone didn’t respond quickly enough.
“Really? She… Heather was a bad cook?” Angela said. The rest of us stopped breathing for a second. Dad poked at his pasta.
I felt Sabine’s hand slide into the crook of my elbow, heard her breath catch at the top of her throat. Clare gaped at her grandfather, disbelief cornered with the hint of a smirk - the prospect of a scandal.
The acoustics in the restaurant were off-balance, somehow - too much glass in the aspirational modernist architecture that turned the clatter of crockery and echoes of speech into pressurised white noise.
“Peter?” Angela prompted, “You were telling us about Heather’s meatballs.”
Clare sniggered and Angela slapped her on the thigh in a reflexive movement, then breathed out a hushed apology.
“Hmm?” Dad murmured.
Sabine’s fingers clasped around my forearm with anticipation and I fought the urge to shake her off. This was not meant to be dinner and a show. I slammed my fork onto the glass table and everyone startled. Dad laughed around a mouthful of spaghetti as if we were all mad for gawping. “If you like your meat raw, eat at Heather and Peter’s. That’s what
our friends said. Your nan was no better, you should remember that, Matthew. God almighty, ‘Beef Stew Thursdays’ at Alice’s used to give me chronic gut-ache.”
The silence finally reached him and he looked around the table for a response. “You remember, Matt?”
I suddenly wished Alex was there, knew exactly what he would say if he were: “If your mum was such a shit cook, why was she so fat?” Except it would have been a whisper in my ear, never within range of Dad. A lifetime of yo-mama-so-fat jokes to justify Alex’s angst that Dad might have loved my mum more than his.
Sabine squeezed my arm to bring me back. “Matt?”
A quiet rage sapped the blood away from my face and fingers, leaving them tingling. I almost asked Alex’s question myself, just to see Dad’s face change. See it melt.
“Thirty-five years today,” I said, instead.
Dad gave me a nod. Angela exhaled, as if suddenly aware she had been holding her breath. Sabine removed her hand from my arm and folded her napkin in her lap. Clare raised her glass of Coke with a toneless, “Happy birthday, Uncle Matt.”
I let them relax for a second before clarifying: “Since my mum disappeared. Thirty-five years today.” I kept my eyes on my dad, and the relieved atmosphere promptly dissolved.
“That’s thirty-five birthdays she’s missed then,” Dad said. “Well counted, Matthew.”
“You had us though, Matt,” Angela said quietly.
“And Lydia,” Sabine added. And by invoking her name, just like that, I lost my chance to reply. Alex would have had a field day.
I could have pointed out that Lydia wasn’t my real mother, and they would have replied: but wasn’t I grateful that she raised me since I was three?
I could have complained that my birthday was forever shadowed by my mother’s disappearance, and they would have replied: but you’re thirty-five now. Do birthdays really matter anymore?
I could have asked why my dad never told me anything about my mother, and they would have replied softly: but couldn’t I see the ma
n was still mourning, too? Couldn’t I just give him a break?
My dad had returned to his spaghetti with new purpose, spinning his fork into the centre of his plate, creating a pasta vortex too large for a single mouthful, until flecks of tomato sauce began to slop over the edges and splatter against Angela’s cardigan.
I took a breath to say something but Angela’s phone buzzed on the glass-top table. I raised my eyebrows to Sabine, waiting for the confirmation that Alex had stood us up.
“He’s not going to make it,” Angela said, and I laughed and drummed a victorious rhythm on the table but no-one else thought it was funny. “He’s around all weekend though,” she continued, brushing the tomatoey specks from her sleeve.
“Is he?” I said. “Is he really?”
Sabine glared at me and Angela set her jaw. The waitress arrived and bounced on the balls of her feet behind my chair and said, “How’s everything for you all? Okay? All done?” She glanced at Dad but did not falter at the sight of his unwavering focus on his rotating food, or the plastic hand that clattered clumsily against his plate.
“It’s fine, thank you,” Sabine replied, when it was obvious no-one else was going to.
The waitress ceased her bobbing and stooped to retrieve a fallen napkin, catching sight of a silver-wrapped present poking out of Angela’s bag. “Ooh, someone’s birthday?” she asked, shrilly.
I pulled my mouth into a brief smile and raised a guilty hand. Clare sank several inches lower in her seat.
“Would you like to order some dessert, birthday boy?” The waitress grinned, and started stacking plates and wiping the tabletop. As she leaned across me, her blouse brushed my cheek and I blushed like an adolescent, then winced, feeling the coldness of Sabine’s sneer beside me.
I passed the waitress my plate. “No. Shall we get the bill?”
“I’ll have a coffee, please,” Sabine said mildly, though her ambivalent expression was a poor mask for what I knew lay beneath.
