by Tammy Cohen
Out of reach.
I woke up just an hour later, my face sticky with tears.
After a long conversation with the social worker who oversaw my parents’ care, I drew up a list of potential care homes that catered for people with dementia. Sandra came round to look after Mum while I faced the soul-destroying task of touring around them all.
In one, a smartly dressed old man sat by the front door with his coat neatly folded over his lap and a bag by his feet.
‘Have you seen my daughter?’ he asked me anxiously. ‘She’s coming to take me home. I’ve had a lovely time at this hotel, but I want to go home now.’
‘His daughter lives in New York,’ confided the uniformed care assistant who was showing me around. ‘She hasn’t visited in over a year.’
In another, an elderly woman came out of a toilet and shuffled slowly down the corridor pushing a walker, her underpants around her ankles.
Every place I visited had that institutional boiled-cabbage smell, over-laced with urine and bleach and a thick fug of inertia, but the staff – middle-aged women, back in the workplace with no qualifications apart from years of keeping a home and kids, or young Eastern Europeans or Africans – were kind, on the whole, if weary and overworked. And the residents at least appeared safe.
One of the homes was only a few streets away from my parents’ house. Just twenty-two rooms, bright and modern and relatively fresh-smelling with a lovely garden out the back. In the lounge three women watched a daytime chat show in companionable silence. The manager was young and full of ideas for innovations she was going to introduce. The cost was eye-watering, but I tried not to think about that. Just as I tried not to think about leaving Mum here on her own – whether or not she’d even be aware of where she was.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll look after her,’ said the young manager, reading my emotions in my face.
Back at the house, my mother was again agitated.
‘She’s been looking for your father,’ Sandra explained. ‘She thinks he’s gone out to the pub and left her behind.’
To my knowledge, my father hadn’t been to the pub in years, apart from the odd occasion when we all went as a family group.
‘He went to the door and then that was it. Off he went,’ said Mum crossly. ‘Not so much as a goodbye. Selfish man.’
Sandra gave an ‘I’ve been here before’ sigh and said, ‘I told you, Judy, it’s not his fault, he’s—’
‘Why did he go to the door, Mum?’
My mother arched her sparse eyebrows over her pale eyes, as if astounded by the stupidity of the question.
‘Because someone rang the bell, of course.’
A finger of unease ran up my spine.
‘Who was it?’
‘Well, Douglas, I should say. Always leading him into trouble.’
I sighed, shoulders slumping. Douglas was my dad’s younger brother, who’d dropped dead of a heart attack more than a decade before.
It was like this with my mother. Me always wanting to believe she understood more than she was letting on, until I came right up against the dead end of her condition.
I noticed a huge bouquet of flowers propped up in a bucket against the back wall of the living room. Plump white and green tea roses and blousy blue hydrangeas were crammed in with delicate lilac wax flowers and sprays of white baby’s breath, all wrapped in acres of cellophane.
‘They came while you were out,’ said Sandra. ‘Gorgeous, aren’t they? Must have cost a fortune.’
Nick, was my first thought, and I felt a surge of warmth as I unwrapped the cellophane and extracted the card from its creamy-white envelope.
So sorry to hear your news, Tessa. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do. Sending love and strength, Frances.
Instantly, warmth was washed away by guilt.
Frances had called while I was on the train to Oxford the day of my father’s death, staring rigidly out of the window as tears rolled down my face. I’d sent her a terse text a few hours later, explaining what had happened and how I’d be tied up making arrangements for the next couple of weeks. At least that was one positive thing about this whole hideous business, I remembered thinking, that it provided a natural breathing space where the girls and I could regroup and Frances would step back.
But now here were these over-the-top flowers.
She must have got the address from Em. I knew it was kind of her but, in my fraught state, it felt like yet another thing I needed to be grateful to her for.
The flowers were too tall for any of my parents’ vases, and I clattered around the kitchen flinging open cupboards and drawers before dumping them finally back in the plastic bucket, much to Sandra’s consternation.
‘A beautiful bouquet like that, it seems criminal.’
I left the flowers on the floor of the kitchen, out of sight.
On the train, Henry presses his nose to the window and keeps up a commentary of what he is seeing. ‘There’s a field. There’s another field. Look, Mummy, a sheep!’ I love him and am exhausted by him in equal measure. More so because we are on our way to the cemetery, and that always makes me tense, as though there isn’t sufficient air inside me for all the breaths I need to take.
There is a young woman opposite and she smiles at me conspiratorially as Henry prattles on, but I look away and pretend I haven’t seen.
Ironically, the first time I visited the cemetery was with Matt. We stumbled across it, literally, while wandering around Coldfall Woods, a gap in the perimeter fence opening up on to a seemingly secret graveyard, the headstones mellow with age and lichen.
‘Wow,’ Matt had said, as we wandered around, amid graves that seemed to grow out of the woodland itself, a mossy stone angel, weeping under trailing ivy, and glimpsing in the distance a church spire, grey against the winter blue sky. ‘When I go, this is where I want to end up.’
What would that younger me, swaddled in love and a striped woollen scarf, have said if she’d known that, just a few years later, we would bury him right there? Not in the wild, overgrown section where all the ancient graves and tombs crumble into the earth, but in the part nearer the church, the newly dug graves laid out in neat rows, marble tombstones gleaming like jewels.
When we step into the graveyard, from the more conventional road approach, Henry runs ahead to see Daddy. He has brought a picture he painted at school that he can’t wait to show him. He is so proud of that picture, and the idea of leaving it pegged out by stones on each corner, to be torn to pieces by the wind and the rain, breaks my heart.
I turn the corner into Matt’s row.
‘Look, Mummy,’ says Henry, who is already lying on the ground spreading out his painting. ‘Someone very kind has left a present.’
The teddy bear is glossy and new, with shallow yellow glass eyes that glint where they catch the light. It is box fresh, as if recently placed.
I remember your face as you shyly handed me the parcel. ‘I know it’s a bit naff,’ you said as I unwrapped the velvet elephant, skin soft and smooth as grey moss. ‘But I thought you might like it.’
Holding the teddy bear as far from me as possible, as if it contained a bomb that might explode at any moment, I place it on the grave at the furthest end of the row.
‘Why are you putting Daddy’s present on someone else’s special place, Mummy?’
Henry is sitting up, frowning.
‘Because this poor man doesn’t have any presents. Daddy would have wanted to share, wouldn’t he?’
Henry thinks for a moment, and then nods.
After that, Henry talks to Matt about his teacher and next-door’s new puppy, but I don’t listen. My eyes are scanning around the graveyard, up one row, then the next. There’s a figure in black some distance away and my heart stops for a moment, but when I look closer and see the stooped back and white hair, I realize it can’t be you.
But you have been here. To this place, of all places.
And I will never be free of you.
38
The day of the funeral, it poured with rain.
Mum was in a subdued mood, submitting to everything I asked of her like a docile child.
The previous night, she’d woken in the early hours, upset. Crying and hitting herself repeatedly on the head until I’d knelt down on the carpet next to her and pressed her hands in mine.
We travelled to the crematorium in the back of a funeral car, along with Rosie and Em, who’d arrived the previous night. ‘Why do people think it’s okay to stare?’ asked Rosie crossly, as a woman standing on the pavement craned her neck to see inside the car. ‘I feel like we’re some sort of art installation.’ But I didn’t blame them. Death was kept so separate from us these days, as if it might be in itself contagious, so when we did butt up against it we gawped in fascination.
My mother was wearing a midnight-blue woollen dress and the threads of my heart snagged, remembering how we’d bought that dress together for her cousin’s funeral. Could it really be just six years ago? We’d met up in John Lewis on Oxford Street. Spent a couple of hours shopping. Had lunch in a little Italian café in the back streets. Were there clues, even then? If there were, I didn’t see them. She’d always been a bit ditsy in that ‘where are my glasses?’ type way. There was nothing new. Nothing to set alarm bells ringing.
Phil was waiting for us outside the crematorium. I was grateful for the long hug he gave me and the steadying fact of his presence. I was so sleep-deprived my thoughts were like balloons drifting off into space before I could quite grasp them. Phil felt like an anchor weighting me to the here and now.
There was no sign yet of Kath and Mari. Though I hadn’t been able to face talking to them on the phone, I realized now how much I was relying on them being here to get me through the ordeal of the funeral. They’d loved my dad, both of them having complicated relationships with their own fathers, and had often told me over the years how lucky I was. But more than that, they’d been at all the other big life events since we met – my wedding, at the hospital straight after the girls were both born, the night Phil moved out – it was inconceivable to think of going through this without them.
Other mourners arrived, though not many. I’d known it would be a heartbreakingly small gathering. So many of my parents’ friends were now dead, and the pair of them had become semi-reclusive over the last tortuous year or so of my mum’s illness.
I looked at my phone. Only five minutes to go. My oldest friends were cutting it very fine.
The guests from the preceding funeral spilled out of the crematorium in a wave of dark clothing, some holding tissues to their noses.
A man in a black suit and with the kind of bluish complexion that spoke of long, sunless days cloistered indoors, appeared discreetly by my shoulder to tell me the room was now empty if I wanted to take my pew.
After one last glance around, searching in vain for a flash of distinctive red hair, I led the way inside.
The service was low key. I read a Seamus Heaney poem my dad had loved. Phil gave a speech, recalling a few favourite family anecdotes. There was a hymn.
I was sitting in the front row, with my mother. Phil sat behind with the girls.
I kept turning around to smile encouragement. They looked so pale, both of them – and so young. It was too easy, caught up in the day-to-day stress of living, to lose sight of the children they’d so recently been.
Earlier, I’d managed to have a little chat with Rosie on our own in my parents’ dated 1980s kitchen. ‘How are you feeling now – about Steve?’
‘I’m okay.’ She smiled weakly, as if to prove her point. ‘To be honest, Grandad dying has put it all into perspective, really. I hadn’t known him long enough to get properly emotionally involved. I was stupid to get so upset. I think it was just the rejection that hurt, you know?’
Of course I knew. When did she get so wise, my daughter?
Now she was sitting stiffly next to her father, pressing her lips together to keep from breaking down.
Next to her, Em’s head was bowed. At first I thought she was crying and I was just about to lean back to touch her knee when I realized she was hunched over her phone, texting. Just a few furtive taps and then she put it away again, but I turned back to face the front feeling a tug of disappointment.
I knew she was upset, and I was sure her friends were being lovely and supportive, but couldn’t she have managed without her phone just for forty-five minutes?
A door opened at the back of the room and I gazed expectantly, waiting for Kath and Mari to pile through, breathless and apologetic, having taken a wrong turning or having had to go back for something they’d forgotten. But the figure who darted inside, wearing a plain black dress and a solemn expression, resembled neither of my oldest friends.
Grief and shock meant there was a delay before I placed her, and, when I did, my chest felt suddenly tight.
Frances.
Seeing me looking, she gave a small wave and slid into one of the rows at the back. I caught Em’s eye, and she shrugged, glancing pointedly at her phone, which is when I realized it must be Frances she had been texting with just moments before.
I turned to face the front, my emotions all over the place.
I’d been so longing to see my friends, and it certainly wasn’t Frances’s fault that Kath and Mari had let me down. And yet, what was she doing here? She had never met my parents. She barely knew me.
After the service the mourners stood outside in small knots. I had my arm linked through my mum’s and various people I half recognized came up to tell us how sorry they were, and what a lovely man my dad had been.
My mother, for once, stayed silent, accepting the condolences with a fixed smile. Frances appeared over the shoulder of a woman who’d once worked as my dad’s PA and was in the process of recounting a long and touching anecdote about how supportive he’d been when her husband was ill.
‘I’m Frances Gates, a friend of Tessa and Em’s,’ said Frances, after the woman had moved away, taking my mother’s limp hand in hers. Then she turned to me.
‘Tessa, I was so sorry to hear about your dad. I know how much he meant to you. I hope you don’t mind me coming. I just wanted to show support to you both. I asked Em for the details. I knew you’d be busy.’
‘No, of course I don’t mind. That’s very kind of you. And thanks for the lovely flowers too.’
My voice was as cracked as parched earth.
Everyone was invited back to the house for sandwiches and tea. Sandra and her daughter had made the food – ‘We did some egg ones, because we know your Rosie is vegetarian’ – and I was so grateful to her I cried, which set her off too, and soon we were both in floods of tears.
Mum, who was more animated now that we were back on familiar territory, had decided this must be my wedding reception and wandered around the room graciously greeting guests and asking if they’d come far and saying what a lovely couple Phil and I made. When she got to me, she whispered:
‘Do you think people are enjoying themselves? I worry it seems a bit flat.’
Phil came over, asking who Frances was, then insisted on being introduced so he could thank her for what she did for Em and give her a hug.
‘What a nice woman. It’s very good of her to come,’ he said afterwards. I didn’t reply.
I jumped as someone tapped my shoulder and felt a surge of hope that it might be Kath and Mari, finally arriving, with a story about how the satnav had taken them to completely the wrong place, but when I turned around it was Dr Ali, who had come to pay his respects.
‘I’m afraid I only have twenty minutes or so. I’m on my lunch hour,’ he apologized, his eyes liquid in his craggy face. ‘But I wanted to come. Your father was my patient for twenty years, you know. I liked him immensely.’
‘Thank you.’ I was embarrassed but not surprised to find my voice clogged up with tears.
Dr Ali waited, giving me time to compose myself.
‘I have the post-mortem re
sults, if you need to discuss them.’
I nodded. I’d known, of course, that the post-mortem was being carried out – we’d had to wait a few days before Dad’s body was released for cremation. But I hadn’t wanted to think about the results until the funeral was over with. It was all just too much.
‘It’s as I told you, I’m afraid. An intentional overdose of insulin. The dial on his pen was turned up from ten to a hundred and the autopsy bore that out.’
‘But he could have made a mistake, couldn’t he? His eyesight was awful. He could easily have mistaken a hundred for ten if he had the wrong glasses on.’
‘Indeed, although it doesn’t explain why he was tampering with the dial in the first place.’
Dr Ali’s tone was kind and calm, but firm, closing the door on any question of doubt.
I nodded again, unable to speak.
‘Ian was a fine, courageous man who devoted his life to looking after your mother, but you know, everyone has their breaking point. You must not think it is any reflection on how much he loved his wife or his family. He was just tired, I think.’
I was grateful for the doctor’s delicacy. His precise way of speaking seemed to lay the facts gently to rest.
But after he’d gone I walked into the kitchen and opened the kitchen drawer where, for the past God knows how many years, my father had kept his diabetes equipment, and stared into it as if I might find answers there to the questions I couldn’t even face asking.
39
‘Don’t you worry about it, Mum will be happy as Larry here with us, won’t you, dear?’
The care assistant had a large, lumpy frame but a wide, generous smile and, once I’d got over the strangeness of her referring to my mother as Mum, I warmed to her.
My mother, meanwhile, had found the remote for the television that stood on a chest of drawers on the far side of the room and was busy hopping through the channels, seemingly unperturbed to find herself in these new, unfamiliar surroundings. I’d brought photos and a rug and a bright, striped duvet cover to make the room feel more like home, but she had shown no interest in anything apart from the TV.
