by Jan Carson
Den can still see the place where her mother was beautiful as a younger woman. It is round her eyes and in the slight pinch of her upper lip.
‘Hair down, Mum,’ she says, dragging a spoon through the soup loosely, in the shape of a figure eight. The clink of it tinning against the saucepan’s sides is a way of letting the tightness out. Den wishes to add, ‘You don’t have enough hair for a ponytail any more, Mum,’ but Estie is no longer listening. She has distracted herself with the mother-of-pearl buttons on her blouse and is humming softly as she fuddles the little disks in and out of their sockets. This sometimes happens. The old lady is quick to fixate upon beads and zippers, her eyes constantly going for a good place to settle. More often, however, she catches on her own anxiety. She will ask a question and hover round the edge of it, like a nervous fruit fly, repeating it for hours or even days.
Den has taught herself how to answer without listening. This is the best way to keep from hitting Estie or leaving her alone in a locked room.
‘Soup OK for lunch, Mum?’ she asks.
‘Soup,’ repeats Estie, ‘soup, soup, soup.’ She rolls the word round her mouth as if looking for an entry point. She cannot find it. ‘Shall I wear the pearls tonight?’
It is February. The kitchen lights are already on though it’s barely turned afternoon. Den is careful to switch the lights off when she leaves a room. Estie does not remember that they must save money now. She trails through the house like a restless child, leaving the television on, the fridge door open and the lights loud in every room.
‘Your house is like the Blackpool Illuminations these days,’ says Mr McNally across the road. ‘Youse must have the money to burn.’
Money to burn is the last thing Den has. She does not say this to Mr McNally, or any of the people who knew her parents when they had the shop and the holiday house in Portstewart. Neither does she tell the social worker, when she pops in to check up on Esti (friendly like, but still writing everything in her notepad).
‘Remember, Mum,’ Den says firmly, ‘we sold the pearls after Daddy died? To pay for the funeral.’
Estie lifts a hand to her neck, sketches the circle of her collar as if the pearls are still there rising and rolling against her throat. The nails on her fingers are long and dirty yellow like the skeleton teeth of animals in a museum. Den makes a note to clip them before bed. While she’s at it, she will also try to do the old lady’s toenails. This may be more than she can manage alone. Lately, Estie has taken to screaming and slicing out. There is a blue-black circle on the underside of Den’s wrist, like the almost-washed-off stamp from a nightclub door. Her mother left this on her with the remote. At the time, she’d been trying to watch her cooking show and the sound from the television had been too loud or possibly, too low. Den cannot remember which. Details do not matter any more, nor even stick, though she sometimes recalls tiny asides like stills from the cine film which is their old life: the time her mother did her tea with milk and golden syrup to cut the caffeine’s bite, the cotton hankies folded and tucked inside her cardigan cuff, the way she once sang hymns at the kitchen sink, her voice bouncing off the double-glazing so she sounded like a chorus of herself.
The bruise on Den’s wrist is almost gone now and easy to cover with a sweater sleeve.
‘Daddy is dead?’ Estie says for the first time today. Her voice climbs a hill so it is a question she is making rather than a statement. After all these years it is hard to believe she has forgotten and, from time to time, Den still wonders if all this, even the hitting, is some kind of elaborate joke. Her mother looks so good, so very good for a woman of eighty, not failed at all.
‘You’d never know to look at her would you?’ Mr McNally says, when he comes across Estie and Den sitting together on the bus. He whispers this as if the old lady is foreign or hard of hearing and only Den will catch the meaning behind his mouth. Den wants to tell him that it doesn’t matter any more, that she often loses the run of herself and shouts at her mother, ‘You’re doting, Mum! You’ve got dementia!’ Rarely do the words even land in the right place. These days, Estie cries when she should be laughing and sometimes wakes the night house up hooting like a lunatic.
‘At least Mum still has her health,’ she replies. This is a strange and slanted thing to say, given the fact that Estie is ill in the head. Forgetting yourself is worse to live with than arthritis, or losing the sight in both eyes, or even cancer.
‘You’re right there, Denise. At least she has her good health,’ Mr McNally repeats, smiling all over his face. He has the look of a wedding priest about him, far too anxious to please. Every time she sees him on the bus, Den tries to get away, but there are only so many places you can go in a moving vehicle and Estie drags on her like an anchor.
The smaller her mother shrinks the heavier she seems to feel. Once solid, Estie is now a bird of a woman. She is bent along the middle as if caught in a long study of her own slippered toes. Yet the weight of her wakes Den up in the middle of the night. She worries constantly. The feel of it is a pain in her ribcage, as if worry is made of sand and the sand has gathered inside her and cannot be shifted while lying down. She lies awake for hours turning the pillow over for a cold spot, wondering how she has arrived back here in her childhood bedroom with the same shelves and cloud-print curtains.
Every so often Den wishes Estie were dead. She only entertains these thoughts in bed, picturing the funeral, the grave and the kind things people will say in cards such as, ‘She was so proud of you, Denise,’ and, ‘You are a real credit to her.’ In bed, she can pretend these thoughts are dreams and that they have slipped out of her accidentally, without intent.
In the morning her mother is usually calmer. She lifts her arms for a hug and Den feels the guilt lumping between them like a thick sweater. It is hard to hold onto Estie, knowing all the things she has just allowed herself to think. When she has enough energy, Den feels sorry for both of them equally. On difficult days she prioritises herself. She tells herself there would have been a husband if it weren’t for Estie. Of course this isn’t true, but it helps to have something solid to hook her disappointment on.
‘Yes, Mum,’ she says, today, as she’s said every day for the last month, ‘your daddy is dead, and my daddy is dead, and there’s only the two of us left to look after each other now.’
Estie sits down at the kitchen table and draws her cardigan around her ribs, tucking one wing over the other. She wears her clothes like bandages, layering shirts and sweaters, blouses and cardigans one on top of the other until she is four inches thicker all the way round. ‘Self-protection’, the social worker calls it, and says it’s not uncommon in older people. Den worries about her mother overheating. Dehydration is the worst thing that can happen to a person with dementia – dehydration and falling over.
Estie cries. She goes fishing up her sleeve for a clean cotton hankie and finds, instead, a wad of yesterday’s Kleenex. Austerity has brought the age of clean cotton hankies to an end. Estie cries every time she hears that her father is dead. Watching her is like watching Den’s DVD of Romeo and Juliet, which is snagged during the chapel scene. Her Leonardo DiCaprio is stuck in a loop, finding Claire Danes dead amongst the candles over and over again, as if he hasn’t seen any of this coming and won’t remember it thirty seconds later.
Den has grown accustomed to the tears. Each time she breaks the bad news to her mother she tries to be touching her: a hand on her arm, an arm around her shoulder, a forehead leaning against her mother’s forehead as if they are lovers comforting each other. She has read in a magazine that old people, particularly those with dementia, find touch reassuring.
She tells her grandfather’s passing like it is not twenty-five years since he died but just this morning, and he is still upstairs in the spare room waiting quietly for the undertaker to arrive.
‘He’d a good, long life, Mum,’ she says, ‘and such a blessing to go in his sleep. Sure, he wouldn’t even have known he was dying.’
&
nbsp; She hopes this will be a comfort to Estie, even though it is a lie. Her grandfather died slowly with the cancer, the side of his face mottling and then peeling away like rotten meat. Her father died in a car crash off the Dunsilly roundabout: screech, crunch, shatter and dead before the ambulance arrived. Estie is too far gone to distinguish between these close deaths and the distant ones on the television news. Yet she still cries.
Estie is selfish when she is sad. She does not think for a moment that Den might be entitled to a slice of this grief. Everything is only happening to her and always in the moment.
‘Did you know my daddy?’ she asks Den. She could just as easily be talking to the postman or the lady who used to clean the shop. ‘He was a real gentleman,’ she continues, ‘the last of a dying breed.’
‘He was indeed, Mum,’ replies Den. She is never quite sure if her mother is talking about her father, or her grandfather, or some muddled splice of both men, wearing a bowler hat.
There is no comfort for Den in this ritual. The soft words and the laying on of hands are another thing she has to do now, every day, like the measuring out of tablets and the hair brushing and the rigmarole with the living-room curtains, which have taken over from the backyard sparrows as Estie’s latest fixation. She feels as if there is a hole at the bottom of her throat and all the eagerness is leaving her in drips. She does not allow herself to cry. Once she starts she will never stop, and what use would she be to Estie then? There is no one to take over from her, even for a weekend.
In the past, when Estie was simply old and not quite so forgotten, Den muddled through with lists and a kind of stoic bluster. She still tries, but the effort required is a ragged sort of burden to carry alone, like going upstairs with a sharp-angled parcel.
‘Shall we get you nice and clean before bed, Mum? Open wide for a big bite of cornflakes. Let’s pop you into some fresh pants,’ Den repeats these phrases, once, twice, three times a day. This easy, breezy voice does not sound like herself speaking, but it helps Den hold the distance between now and how they once were in each other’s company.
She has not been surprised by the indignity of it all, the brute moments in the bathroom, covering her own mother’s nakedness with a towel. Den has read books from the library and talked, at length, with the social worker. She is prepared for everything, even the piss and shit. When the time comes, she will approach her mother as a stranger. Faced with soiled sheets and incontinence pads, she will call the old lady Estie, not Mum or Mother. This will be easier for both of them, like a kind of acting. Den is willing and almost ready to shoulder her mother through the next decline.
But the sadness has come out of nowhere. Den has not anticipated it. Neither did it feature in any of the library books. She does not know whether to ignore Estie when she cries, or pull up a chair and join in. Her mother has, until now, been the sunniest of women, if somewhat aloof. There are concertina lines around her eyes and mouth, the fossilised remains of eighty years’ hard smiling. Den has no such lines on her face.
‘You’re lucky, Denise,’ the social worker has often told her. ‘Your mum’s not violent or distressed. It’s harder on you than her. Estie’s happy as Larry in her own wee world.’
It is clear to Den that her mother is no longer as happy as Larry or as happy as the day is long or even a pig in mud. Her mother is almost always crying or on the verge. She is thinking about calling the social worker up and saying, ‘Mum’s been crying for a solid month,’ but she holds off. She is afraid that the social worker will assume it is her fault. This might affect their benefits. The benefits are the only thing keeping them in tinned soup and Rich Teas.
At the table, Estie is rocking backwards and forwards on a stackable stool, the front legs lifting and lowering as her movements become increasingly violent. ‘The pearls are gone. Daddy is gone,’ she repeats, ‘Daddy is gone. The pearls are gone.’ It is impossible to tell which loss she is feeling most keenly today.
Den puts a hand on her shoulder, tries to stop the rocking. She can feel the sobs gathering speed inside her mother, progressing through her body like the last tight cramps of childbirth.
Once again she considers phoning her mother’s sister in Larne, explaining everything from the beginning. She could tell her aunt that money is so tight they are squeezing six pots out of every tea bag, that they live on value-pack biscuits and do their underwear in the bath for fear of wasting electricity on the washing machine. She could make it sound like necessity has forced her to ask for help, and Aunty Kathleen will make sympathetic noises and say, ‘It’s not your fault Love. You’re doing your best,’ and, ‘Maybe it’s time to think about a home.’ She might even offer to pop a cheque in the post.
Den could do this and never get the good of the confession for she will still feel guilty every time she looks at Estie. The guilt is not something she can explain with words or even write down.
It is something to do with an afternoon from ever so long ago which comes back to Den in fragments, first thing in the morning and on the toilet with the bathroom door locked, which is her only way of guaranteeing three minutes’ peace. Back then, she’d still had a mother and a father and they’d been on their holidays in England, by the coast. It had definitely been a sunny day, because Den remembers the particular blue of sky against sea, warm for England. They’d parked the car by the pier, walked along the edge of the beach and come across a whole troupe of old folks. They were lined along the sand in deck chairs with travel rugs binding their legs into mermaid tails.
Even as a child, Den had known these were not people like her parents. These were very old people, another species entirely, gone in the head and chittering to themselves as ancient machines chitter in factories. She’d been a little afraid of them and reached for her father’s hand, though she was too old, by this stage, for hand-holding. As they’d walked past, she noticed that the old people were eating ice creams – the whippy sort, in cones – and most of it was drooling down their chins and over their fingers like the white part of seagull shit. There was something of the animal about the way they ate. She had not wanted to look at them for too long and yet found herself staring.
Once they’d gained enough distance to go unheard, her father turned to her mother and said, ‘Dear love them, Estie, with their ice creams.’ He’d smiled then at his girls, a smile like the memory of a good meal. ‘Isn’t it grand that the home’s brought them on a wee run to the seaside?’
Den’s mother had not thought it was grand at all. She’d stopped on the edge of the beach and snapped at her husband like a pair of kitchen scissors. ‘If that was me, Samuel, slabbering all over my own jumper, I wouldn’t want to be paraded down the prom for the world to see. The place for people like that’s at home with their families. There’s no one but your own kin should see you in that state.’ Afterwards she’d walked on ahead of them and there were curls in the sand from where her feet had been angry and turned.
Den has always remembered the curls in the sand and the cut of her mother’s legs striding away from them, across the beach, towards the car like two cold pillars rising from her summer sandals. This is what her guilt looks like every time she lifts the telephone and imagines the various aunts and social workers and nursing homes attached to it by strong, electric wires. This is what her guilt looks like. The guilt also tastes like sand in her mouth when she wishes for another person to look upon her mother slobbering or naked on the bathroom floor. What the guilt sounds like is God in her mouth, always howling. Den tries sometimes with her fingers, but she cannot remove her teeth or make it stop.
5.
In Feet and Gradual Inches
I was under the bed when Emily died.
I’d been under the bed all day Wednesday and most of Tuesday, watching their feet approach and recede like soft brown boats scouting for a safe place to berth. Hands could fold and faces lie, but anchored to the spare-room carpet, their feet betrayed a holy horror of the bed and the sheets and my sister who was not
quite there any more. I watched their feet through a gap in the valance: my father’s boots with muddied toes, the doctor’s determined heels and my mother’s brogues, laces unravelling like her own washday hair, in strands and greasy slips.
When they came close, to kiss Emily, to fuss the pillows or take her tumbling pulse, I made myself a Jesus cross just like on a stained glass window: straight legs, spread arms and sad head, hanging. I reached far out into the room and grazed my fingers against their shoes, up and softly down. Their feet spoke to me, sweating through rubber soles and leather uppers to ask if the real adults would be arriving soon and when they might be permitted to leave. They did not feel my fingers grabbing at their heels, only the power as it left them.
Even the doctor did not notice me, though he was paid to catch the hair’s-breadth detail between one breath and the next.
You’d think, I thought, and could not believe my own selfishness, they’d miss me, even now, with my sister almost gone and fading.
Still, they did not notice me present beneath her bed nor absent from the places where I could usually be found: upside down on the good-room sofa, at the table with cornflakes, on the swing set dangling over the front lawn like a bad-luck charm.
One down, I thought, and could not believe my own cool head, one perfectly good child left to have and to hold against the coming winter. Surely, there should be more of me when Emily goes.
But they saw things differently, my mother and father. One down and their world had fallen into itself: ceiling, walls and every ordinary brick undoing until there was nothing left to lend perspective, nothing to run parallel with their grief.
