by Sibel Hodge
His brown eyes flashed dark with hatred, making him look nothing like the gentle giant of a man I once knew.
‘She knows.’
‘Knows what?’
He gripped the arms of the chair, lifting himself up. ‘I want to get out! You can’t keep me in here!’
‘OK. It’s OK. Let me help you with your slippers, though.’ I worked his feet into a pair of moccasins with hard soles that Ethan and I had bought before he came into the home. ‘Do you want to go for a walk in the grounds? Get some fresh air?’
‘Can we go to Durdle Door?’
Durdle Door was a natural limestone arch formed on a beach near Lulworth, about a thirty-minute drive from Mountain View. It had always been one of Tom’s favourite places to walk his dogs in his younger years, but it seemed to take on greater significance for him in the later stages of his Alzheimer’s, and driving him for a trip out there always seemed to lift his mood. He couldn’t manage to go all the way down from the top to the beach these days, but he was content to walk along the chalky white path on the cliffs above, where he could still enjoy the amazing views and refreshing, salty sea air.
‘I don’t have time to go there and back today, Tom. Next time I visit, I’ll take you out along the cliffs. I promise.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Let’s go in the garden, then.’
‘Do you want a wheelchair?’
‘No. I want to walk. I’m not dead yet.’
I smiled.
Tom shuffled slowly along the corridor that led to the communal lounge/TV room and then through the large glass doors onto the patio.
I hooked my arm through his to steady him and we took a tour of the grounds.
‘Ethan sends his love.’
‘Ethan?’
‘Your son.’
‘Ethan,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t think I know him.’
‘He’ll come and see you at the weekend. He’s working in York again this week.’
‘I don’t want him here. She’ll be here.’
‘Who?’
‘Georgia. She doesn’t leave me alone. I want to be left in peace.’ He stopped walking, turned to me and clutched my forearm with his bony hand. ‘It’s my fault.’
‘I don’t understand, Tom. What’s your fault?’
His eyes watered and he averted them from mine, staring into the distance blankly as if in some kind of trance. ‘I killed her, Olivia. I killed her.’
Chapter Two
I drove home with Tom’s words echoing in my head.
I killed her.
After he’d uttered them, he became so agitated I couldn’t get anything else out of him. It took half an hour to get him back inside. He’d thought I was trying to take him to an abattoir to chop his head off. Eventually, with the help of one of the male nurses, a wheelchair and a strong sedative, he was resting back in bed again.
What the hell did he mean he’d killed her? Killed who? Who was Georgia?
It couldn’t be true, though. Absolutely not. Confusion was a perfectly normal symptom of the disease. Maybe he’d seen a TV programme about someone called Georgia who was killed, although quite frankly, I didn’t think they should be letting the residents watch stuff like that. Or maybe he’d been chatting to one of the other patients whose daughter called Georgia had gone missing.
Yes, that was it. That was absolutely it. I’d never heard Tom mention anyone called Georgia before.
When I got home I made myself lunch and turned on the TV, flicking through the channels to find something to distract me. I ate a cheese and ham sandwich that I didn’t even taste, swallowing it down with water to get it past my dry throat. I couldn’t even tell you what programme I watched.
After letting Poppy out into the garden to do her business, I walked the ten minutes to work.
I was chock-a-block with patients from 1 p.m. until 6 p.m. when the nurses’ appointments finished. I thought maybe dressing changes and assisting with smear tests and blood pressure checks would keep me occupied. Usually, I would have a great time chatting with the patients, putting them at ease, finding out what they’d been up to − I’ve always been pretty nosy and love talking − except I couldn’t get it out of my mind: the look of guilt on Tom’s face. The desperation in his eyes. The fear.
When I walked back in the front door, Poppy greeted me, wagging her tail so hard with excitement her whole backside shook. I praised her, flapped her ears a bit, which she loved, and kicked off my shoes by the bottom of the stairs next to Anna’s.
‘You OK, darling?’ I called out.
‘Yeah,’ Anna said. ‘I’m in the kitchen.’
I walked up the hallway and found Anna sitting on a stool at the island in the centre of our large farmhouse-style kitchen, which oozed sunlight and was the heart of the house. Her school books were placed in neat rows over practically the whole surface. Pens of various colours were lined up horizontally in front of her. She was so precise about certain things I sometimes wondered if she had OCD, but I always pushed that thought to the back of my mind. We all had it to varying degrees, didn’t we? We all had routines, things that we liked just so. I’d seen far too many labels placed on kids these days. I wasn’t about to put one on my precious girl.
I kissed the top of her head. ‘How was school?’
‘Good. But I’ve got some maths homework I might need help with. When’s Dad back?’
Ethan was the maths genius and always helped Anna out with it. I could only add up with a calculator. I think I had number dyslexia, or something. When I looked at numbers on a page they all swam together.
‘He’ll be back Friday.’
‘But he’s always working away at the moment,’ she whined.
‘He’s overseeing a big project in York and he needs to be on site. He can’t commute from there to Dorset every day; it’s too far.’ I stroked her hair then peered in the fridge. My appetite still hadn’t returned, and I didn’t fancy cooking. What I fancied was a big glass of wine. ‘He’s going to call later so you can have a chat, though.’
‘OK.’ She bent over her notebook and underlined something neatly with a red marker pen and a ruler. ‘I’ve got to do a project on capital punishment for Religion and Ethics.’
‘Oh, how nice,’ I drawled. I’d had a meeting with the school recently about them wanting to fast-track Anna through some of her subjects because they’d classified her as ‘gifted’. Ethan and I had debated this for a while. I didn’t think the school should be bandying about those kinds of terms. What about the other kids who weren’t gifted? How would it make them feel? Still, Anna was very intelligent, and we’d decided in the end to go ahead with it. It meant she was learning some of the curriculum a lot earlier than she should’ve been, but she was clearly enjoying it, and from her reports she was doing really well.
‘It’s really interesting, actually,’ she said. ‘What do you think about the death penalty?’
What a cheery pre-dinner conversation. ‘We don’t have the death penalty in the UK.’
‘Yes, I know, but I don’t think I can put that excuse on my homework as to why I haven’t done it. We’ve got to consider the ethics behind it.’
‘Um . . . well, let me see.’ I shut the door on the pretty much empty fridge. Unless I could make something out of a lone cheese triangle, some dried-up flat leaf parsley, a wrinkly mushroom and a potato with sprouty bits on it, then dinner would be of the takeaway variety. ‘I think if you’re guilty of committing a crime − and presumably to get the death penalty we’re talking terrible types of murder − then I think you’d probably deserve it. I mean, take Myra Hindley, for example. What if she’d ever been let out of prison before she died? Or Peter Sutcliffe? People wouldn’t be safe, would they?’ I explained who they were. ‘So the death penalty could be for the protection of the public to make sure it doesn’t ever happen again. Plus, it would h
opefully put people off doing such crimes in the first place and the crime rate might go down.’
‘Actually, from the research I’ve been doing so far, about 90 percent of top criminologists in America think that the death penalty doesn’t act as a deterrent to reduce murder or violent crimes. And . . .’ she lifted her pen in the air and pointed it at me, ‘doesn’t it actually make you as bad as the criminal if you kill them?’
‘No.’
‘Why? It violates their human rights.’
I rolled my eyes. I hated these in-depth ethics homework debates. Sometimes you just know things, don’t you? You know things are right or wrong, but you don’t want to spend all night analyzing why you know it. ‘Because people who kill and rape and torture shouldn’t have any human rights. They gave them up when they did whatever heinous crime they committed. And if a bunch of psychos were allowed to wreak havoc and do whatever they wanted without consequences, then we’d be living in a world of anarchy and chaos, wouldn’t we?’ Although I sometimes thought we already were living in such a world, anyway, but we were calling the psychos ‘governments’. ‘Every action has a reaction. Every deed has a consequence. There’s always a price to pay. And people have to think about that before they commit crimes.’
‘Yes, but two wrongs don’t make a right.’
‘Sometimes they do.’
‘You could make the criminal pay back to society by serving their time in prison instead. That would also give them punishment for what they’d done and would still protect the public.’
‘Not if they got let out again, which happens a lot now due to overcrowding. Most of the time they only serve piddly little sentences these days. And I wonder how many prisoners actually reoffend. Have you researched that yet?’
‘No, but that’s a good point, Mum.’ She scribbled that down.
‘Yes, I make them occasionally.’
‘Shouldn’t they have a second chance to become educated in prison and change so they could start a new life when they’re released?’
‘Not everyone deserves a second chance.’
‘What if the person was innocent, though, and they got the death penalty and were executed? Then you would’ve killed an innocent person.’ She sat back smugly and crossed her arms. ‘That wouldn’t be justice, would it? We’d be as bad as they were for supposedly murdering someone.’
‘Do you want a delivery pizza for dinner?’ I changed the subject, not really wanting to talk about death anymore. It made me think of what Tom had said again, and I wanted to get it out of my head because there was no way it could possibly be true.
The guilt of not providing a healthy, home-cooked meal like Nadia would be doing right now was cancelled out by the excitement on Anna’s face.
‘Yeah!’ Her eyes lit up. ‘Ham and mushroom?’
‘If you like.’
I ordered the pizza, fed Poppy and poured myself a large glass of something Australian, fruity and red. Ethan knew all about different kinds of wine. I just knew about drinking it. Pulling up a stool, I sat next to Anna and stared into space.
‘What do you think?’ she asked a few minutes later, popping the cap back on her marker pen.
‘Pardon?’
‘Weren’t you listening?’
‘Um . . . sorry, I was miles away.’
‘About penicillin?’
‘I know all about penicillin. What about it?’ I said, thinking back to my medical training.
‘No, it’s OK. That would be cheating if I asked you. I’m going to do some research on the Internet about it.’ She slid off the stool, tidying her books into a neat pile. ‘I’ve just started doing the history of medicine.’
Conscientious to a fault, my daughter. I wondered how long it would be before it all went wrong. Before she locked herself in her room and only came out to eat. Before the only response I’d get from her would be a monosyllabic grunt. When she wouldn’t want to be seen dead in public with me or Ethan, and would take the advice of her friends over her parents. Before she stayed up all night partying and slept all day. I dreaded the thought of when it would all change. I didn’t like change.
Later, I was on my third glass of wine, staring through the window of the kitchen into the dark woods behind, when the phone rang.
‘I’ll get it!’ Anna shouted from the lounge and picked up the wireless phone. ‘Dad!’
I heard her chatting and laughing with Ethan but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I was too busy deciding how to broach the subject of what Tom had said. In between swigs of wine I chewed on the skin at the side of my thumbnail until I drew blood.
Fifteen minutes later, Anna padded gracefully into the kitchen like a dancer, all skinny long limbs and perfect posture. Not like some of the kids in her class who slouched all over the place. I wanted to tell them they’d end up with neck and shoulder problems later in life. She handed me the phone and padded out again.
‘Hi, sexy,’ I said to him, watching Anna’s retreating back.
Anna glanced over her shoulder and pulled a face at the word ‘sexy’, miming sticking her fingers down her throat.
‘Hi, darling. How’s everything going?’
‘I’m going to take this upstairs.’ I slid off the stool, picked up my wine and went up to our bedroom, shutting the door firmly.
‘Oh, sounds ominous. What’s Anna been up to that you don’t want her to hear? Did she get caught shoplifting? Or try to get served at the Kings’ Arms with a fake ID?’
I laughed but it sounded flat. ‘No, it’s nothing to do with Anna. It’s Tom.’
‘Dad? Why? What’s happened?’ His voice rose with concern.
I lay on my side on our king-sized bed, head propped up with one hand. ‘I don’t know how to say this, but when I got to the nursing home today, Mary said he’d been having some bad dreams and acting agitated afterwards.’
‘I thought you were going tomorrow, not today.’
By then, I’d completely forgotten what Nadia had told me before about Lucas and his possible affair. I wanted to tell Ethan about that, too, ask his opinion, but I’d promised to keep her secret. ‘Well, Nadia was tied up with some stuff so I said I’d go. Anyway, Tom’s been acting strange after these dreams, they said.’
‘He’s got Alzheimer’s. He’s been acting strange for years. And he’s had bad dreams for a long time. What do you mean by strange?’
I stared up at the ceiling and took a breath.
‘Liv?’
There was no easy way to repeat what Tom had told me so I just blurted it out. ‘He said he’d killed someone called Georgia.’
Silence on the other end. Then, ‘What do you mean? Killed someone?’
‘Just what I said. Tom’s been dreaming about someone called Georgia. Afterwards, he gets very upset and agitated, so much so that Mary asked if I knew anyone called Georgia because Tom told her she’d disappeared.’
‘Disappeared? Well, who is this Georgia?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to explain. I asked him about her and he said she was haunting him. That she wouldn’t leave him alone. And then, when I took him outside for a walk and some fresh air, he told me he’d killed her.’ My head throbbed. Probably with the wine, but maybe from anxiety, too.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Liv!’
‘I’m not being ridiculous. I’m not being anything. I’m just repeating something Tom told me and the staff.’
‘Well, it doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t even know anyone called Georgia. Neither do I. He’s just confused. I mean, last week he came out with a really obscure story about walking along the Great Wall of China, and he’s never even been there!’
I rubbed my forehead. ‘I know, I know. I’ve been thinking of all the strange things he’s talked about lately that either didn’t happen or didn’t happen like he’s remembering them.
It’s just . . .’
‘Just what?’
‘The look on his face. He really believed it, I’m sure. He believed he’d killed her.’
‘Liv! This is Dad you’re talking about. The man who traps field mice in humane traps so he can relocate them back outside and not have to kill them. The man who gets dogs from the rescue centre because he can’t bear to see them alone and unloved. The man who spent six months doing volunteer work in India when he retired so he could help build schools and houses for poverty-stricken villages! He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s just confusing some story from another resident or a newspaper article he’s read, and thinks he’s done something when he hasn’t. Or he’s made it up. You know yourself that Alzheimer’s is capable of producing hallucinations and delusions.’ He paused for a second. ‘I’ll go and see him at the weekend with you, but, honestly, we’ve been here before with him talking about stuff that’s never happened.’
‘Yes, I know all that, but still, he . . .’ I trailed off, feeling ridiculous then for even bringing it up. Ethan’s voice sounded reassuring and confident and comforting, and he was absolutely right. Of course he was. ‘Yes, I agree. You’re right. He’s just confused.’
‘I’m always right.’ He laughed.
‘Hey, you’re living in a house full of women. The women are always right here. You’re only right when you’re asleep.’ I laughed back and changed the subject. ‘So, how’s the hotel project going?’
He groaned. ‘The directors keep changing their minds at the last minute, which results in yet more headaches and delays. And at night I’m sick of seeing the inside of this hotel room where I’m staying. The food isn’t as good as yours.’
I laughed again. ‘OK, so now I know you’re lying.’ I was an average cook at best, with a tendency to overcook. Well, I called it ‘overcook’. Someone else might say ‘burn’.
His voice softened. ‘I miss you, darling. And Anna. I wish this project was already over. Weekends with my favourite girls just aren’t cutting it at the moment.’
