Chapter Eight: Not Ready
Mum was upset at the news a live-in carer would be moving in. I don’t think she knew why she was upset, she just was.
‘You’re not LISTENING to what I’m SAYING!’ She shouted at me. With my aunt and brother both occupied fixing up the house, I was taking the brunt of the anger.
‘Mum, me and T can’t go on looking after you 24/7. The alternative is you go into a hospice, which I know you don’t want…’
‘What about POWER OF ATTORNEY?’
‘Er…what about power of attorney?’
‘You’re not LISTENING TO ME.’
It was distressing. A full ten minutes of a woman who had no idea what she was trying to say getting upset because I had no clue either.
‘Oh just FUCK OFF then!’ She shouted eventually, gripping her teddy Billy hard in her hands. ‘Just FUCK OFF AND NEVER COME BACK.’
I did not fuck off. I watched helplessly as my mother cried.
I don’t understand you.
‘We aren’t abandoning you, you know,’ I chirped up eventually. ‘We are all going to visit. You’re going to have someone here all the time to look after you. A professional.’
She glared at me.
‘And it means,’ I pressed, ‘that you won’t have to worry about anything. You can concentrate on feeling better. We’re giving the house a really good clean right now, you don’t need to worry about that either.’
She perked up a bit.
‘I won’t have to worry about anything?’
‘No, mum. We’re sorting out care for The Man Who Is Not My Father too. He’s safe, we’re getting him sorted with a good care home. Everything’s okay, mum.’
Her eyes were wet. She was like a little child.
‘So, can I start on these cobwebs in here, then?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, go on. But get me some juice first.’
I could hear her muttering to herself while I poured a sippy cup of juice in the kitchen. Half Schweppes lemonade, half orange juice. She would only have Schweppes, maybe because it was the lemonade they served at the bar she used to run.
There was a few cans of Guinness in the fridge – both normal, and zero alcohol.
‘She said she bought some,’ my brother D told me when mum was first admitted to hospital, ‘for The Man Who Is Not Our Father. To make him feel better.’
I thought of that anecdote as I flipped open a lemonade can. And that sign perched up in the laundry room: GUINESS GIVES YOU STRENGTH.
My mother was always a very clever woman, yet she believed advertising drummed into her from youth. The idea that Guinness has a load of iron in it.
Guinness has barely any iron in it. You can call camel piss a source of iron if you want – it’s technically true. And to be fair to mum, for a long time even doctors were fooled into prescribing the gooey stout to pregnant women. Yes, really.
Taking up most of the fridge shelving was about a hundred 200ml bottles of strawberry-flavoured Fortijuce juice, a high protein concoction that is, unlike Guinness, full of vitamins.
A milkshake version of same was designated to the back of the bottom shelf, because it was “bloody gopping”.
Mum was prescribed at least one of those bottles a day, but I’d seen her manage maybe one and a half total on all the days I’d cared for her. Sometimes she’d try to down one, flinching against the taste, only to chuck it back up right seconds later.
‘I’m bloody sick of this,’ she would mutter yet again, trying to daub the juice from her chin.
She so wanted to get better. She really, really wanted to start living her life again. Mobility seats and walkers still stood in the kitchen and hallway at her behest, for when she would walk again. She even asked me where I’d like to go for “a family holiday”. She wanted to take her children and sister to Florida.
She knew she had fucked up. She wanted to fix it.
She was not ready to die.
‘ALEXA! PLAY YORK MIX RADIO.’ Mum shouted when I wandered back in, juice in one hand and feather duster in the other.
‘It’s playing already, mum. Alexa, volume up!’
A bleep. Taylor Swift became louder, unfortunately.
I propped the sippy bottle into mum’s long-nailed hand, and messed with the bed controls to sit her up. Then I opened the curtains.
Warm sunlight pressed down on the carpet, which was thick with dust. Relics from the hotel bar she ran with The Man Who Is Not My Father sat on the windowsill. Fancy, empty whisky boxes. A porcelain elephant. A little brass cannon. I can remember shoving my tiny finger in the end when I was a child, and panicking when I couldn’t pull it out.
‘So who’s here?’ Mum demanded, while I twirled an enormous cobweb around the duster.
‘Your son D and your sister T.’
‘Can you go get them. I want a word.’
‘They’re busy, mum.’
‘I said, I WANT A WORD.’
Jesus. That angry tone still made my shoulders stiff. Off I ran.
Both D and T came down. The three of us stood expectantly at the bottom of the bed.
‘Right,’ mum said, her long nails prodding the air between us. ‘You’ll need to fix that wonky skirting board in the bathroom,’
‘Yeah,’ D said. ‘I’m doing that now. Do you know where the missing plank from the flooring went?’
‘No. The Man Who Is Not Your Father was trying all sorts of renovations. I couldn’t stop him.’
She looked downcast. Four years being her husband’s carer. Alone, in this house with the guy after his stroke, his brain deteriorating, increasingly violent…she’d been miserable.
‘It’s alreet,’ D said cheerfully. ‘I’ll sort it.’
‘Will you?’ She looked at her youngest with genuine gratitude, then seemed to catch herself. ‘The tap in the bathroom isn’t working either,’ she snipped.
‘Right.’
‘And the ensuite shower is in a bit of a state.’
You’re not kidding, I thought, thinking of the mould. Some of the patches were so big, they looked ready to peel off and go down to the local for a pint.
‘We’re going to sort that,’ T said. Mum actually looked impressed, delighted.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘This is lovely. I could get used to this.’
‘Erm,’ I interjected, eyeing the scrawled notebook at her bedside, ‘Do you want to tell us about the things you’ve been seeing?’
Despite the Home Hospice nurses’ speculation, her hallucinations didn’t sound like painkiller side-effects to me. I could see she was dying, probably imminently, and wanted my family’s opinion.
‘I wrote about it,’ mum perked up. ‘Didn’t I Sar? Last night I wrote about what I saw.’
She’d had her couple of glasses of knock-off Baileys, and I’d left her with a pen and notepad. She read her notes out to me in the early morning, and they were nonsense.
It’s not the medication, my mother’s brain is turning into soup.
She flapped her long nails at the bedside table. I picked up the notepad, put it in her hands.
‘Right, you listening?’ She looked meaningfully at my brother and aunt.
‘Yep.’ D said.
‘Right,’ She straightened herself a little, about to perform.
Then:
‘I thought I saw a…woman in…corner walls.’ She squinted at her own writing. ‘Then the part that…wasn’t up…went down.’
She glanced meaningfully at us, then back at the paper.
‘I took the…sandwich with…my hands and the nails weren’t on them. So my hands fell off.’
I’ll admit it: I struggled not to laugh here.
‘Then…microwave kettle,’ she continued, ‘with most of it on the plate. Going…round…the tinsel, but not in the room. It worked because…ham sandwich. Not…but…especially.’
She looked at us like a child reading a top-graded essay to her parents.
‘Right,’ D said eventually. ‘That’s interesting.’
She loved that. Her face softened. She curled her fingers at the paper edge demurely.
‘Well, I just thought I’d write it down.’
‘Yeah,’ D continued. ‘I think you should keep on at that.’
‘Do you?’ Her eyes filled with stars. She looked at my brother like he were her dad. I choked up a little, it was so sweet.
Exhausted by her performance, she fell into a nap. While D and T continued their work around the house, I took the paper pad from her lap. She’d been trying to write a shopping list too.
Her handwriting was as beautiful as I remember. But the shapes and sizes of the letters were inconsistent. They spread across the page in odd gaps. Between words were scrawls of shapes, usually squares. Squiggles.
She used to be one of the most articulate women I have ever met. To see the nosedive on that slip of paper was…something. It was something.
‘Are you okay, love?’
She’d woken up, staring at me through bleary eyelids. It was her. It was Mum. My Mum. That woman from so long ago.
‘Yes, Mum. I’m okay, I’m just getting things sorted for you.’
‘Okay,’ she smiled, and passed back out.
I gently tucked her hair behind her ear.
Oh, Mum. You really are a pillock.
The syringe driver with bulky cassette was getting on my tits, to be honest.
The hospital home care bed was a little smaller than a single bed width-wise, so perching the cassette under the pillow was practically asking for it to be knocked off.
The syringe tube tangled around mum’s arm as she did her agitated, subconscious moving. Some nights, she would pull the needle from her skin, then complain of pain all day.
‘This reminds me of that Fantasia video,’ I said, propping the cartridge on the bedside table and eyeing the in-line. ‘You remember? When I was four, I slept with the VHS as a teddy every night.’
She nodded a little, then grimaced. I gently pulled her arm, peeked under her shoulder.
‘Oh,’ I muttered. ‘The syringe has fallen out again.’
‘Oh, bugger.’
Putting down my feather duster for a minute, I got her some oxycodone. She just about managed to get the syringe into her mouth, and push it herself.
When the St Leonards Hospice carers came for their afternoon visit, mum wasn’t as chatty with them as usual.
‘Are we alright to freshen you up, Kay?’ The ethereally pretty one asked. Her colleague, a woman in her mid 50s sporting a red glasses and streaky-dyed pixie cut combo, took a basin of warm water from me in the kitchen.
‘How are you holding up?’ She asked.
‘Erm, well…’
‘I’m asking because…we share information. So I know about the…trauma around being here, and…was it your mum’s partner?’
‘Thank you. I’ve put it in a mental box for now. She’s been seeing things.’
‘Right.’
‘I thought it might be because the cancer got to her brain?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so, given where it is,’ the basin sloshed in her hands. ‘It could be the medication.’
I wondered if she was saying this to make me feel better. To give me hope.
‘Well,’ the carer added chirpily, ‘I’ll be back this evening, so we can have a bit of a regroup then. Just wanted to be sure you’re alright.’ She smiled, and off she went.
How do they do it? I thought. I wasn’t sure what to do with all the empathy. It certainly wasn’t something the walls of the house had seen in an awfully long time.
I stood at the sink and glared at my reflection in the window above it. I remembered that exact pose – teary, mascara running, a heck of a lot younger – staring back the night my first boyfriend dumped me.
It was at the school disco. The Man Who Is Not My Father picked me up, drove me home wordlessly while I quietly cried in the passenger seat.
Then, when I ran the kitchen tap for a glass of water, Mum gently said:
‘If you want to talk to me about it, you can. Alright, kiddo?’
A peek of Mum. That woman from within the muddy shell.
I never talked to her about it.
Because I was used to being rebuffed, or her being annoyed with me. There was nothing to suggest that when I wanted Mum, she would come out rather than the cold, bristly woman she was most of the time.
I stared at my reflection a little longer, listening to the soft chattering of the carers in the living room.
‘He wasn’t even nice,’ I told my sixteen-year-old self’s reflection. ‘He took his clothes off on MSN Messenger a year after he dumped you. I didn’t even ask him to, he just did it. It was like a yam. It wasn’t worth seeing, kiddo.’
The ghost of myself walked again through those walls.
(And sixteen-year-old me must have heard my future self, because she started fancying some other boy the day after the disco anyway.)
T told me she’d had a call from the district nurse. Someone was going to come over and get rid of the bloody syringe driver to swap with a pain patch. I went to tell mum.
‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘Cos it’s been playing silly beggars.’
It was beeping intermittently. I picked it up from under the pillow, detangling the line.
‘I can’t get it to shut up,’ I muttered, pressing the single accessible button. The LCD screen glowed; fifteen minutes of painkiller left.
‘ALEXA!’ Mum shouted, ‘PLAY YORK MIX RADIO.’
‘Mum, for f…you made me jump out of my skin.’
‘Oh, did I?’ She grinned at me, ‘She’s not listening to me though. ALEXA.’
‘Mum, it’s playing the radio.’
‘PLAY YORK MIX RADIO.’
‘Mum, mum it’s already on. It’s playing Michael Bublé.’
‘It’s not!’ Mum grouched.
‘Alexa! Volume up!’
Michael became altogether too loud for my liking.
‘How come she does it when you say?’
‘I don’t know mum, maybe she likes me better.’
‘ALEXA….’ She looked at me for a moment. ‘What did I want her for?’
‘I don’t know mum.’
‘ALEXA…Oh, I wish you’d bugger off.’
The Alexa thought for a moment, before replying:
‘I don’t know how to do that.’
Mum and I looked at each other, and burst out laughing. I shoved the beeping cassette in a nearby drawer.
Mum was confused, forgetful. But she was becoming something else more frequently – not the mum I knew from my teens who made The Man Who Is Not My Father her entire world, the one who cut off her own children to protect him.
As her brain fell away, Mum came out – that vibrant and funny creature that doted on her children and hated seeing them sad.
‘Are you alright, love?’ She asked again when I wandered in with my feather duster after a bit of a mental breakdown. Eyes already sore from crying, I thought I’d start up again.
Mum, I thought. I’ve missed you so, so much. Where have you been?
‘I’m fine Mum,’ I lied, ‘The nurses are coming to get that thing out of your arm. We’ve going to use a patch thing instead. Like one of those nicotine patches.’
‘I quit smoking.’
‘I know, Mum, but this one’s for your pain.’
‘Oh. Okay. Is anyone coming over today?’
‘Just the district nurse, and then the carers in the evening.’
‘Right. So, who’s looking after the dog?’
This threw me. She was talking about Bru, a border collie I dog sit for. I’d had to bring him with me on one visit. She used to have a collie – another thing only just learned about her.
She was a closed book opening only when the story was about to end.
Mum smiled from ear to ear when the dog stared up at her goofily, tongue lolling from his mouth. We caught her on a good evening, that night.
‘Er, Bru is with his dad,’ I said levelly. ‘He’s at my place looking after my rats.’
‘Well, if he’s looking after Bru and your rats, how can you be here?’
She pointed at me with those long nails. I felt like I was in a courtroom.
‘Er, I’m here because I’m here looking after you.’
‘Right. So Bru doesn’t exist.’
‘No, Mum, Bru does exist.’
‘So Bru’s dad doesn’t exist then.’
‘Mum, he…hang on.’
I texted the dog’s dad asking for a selfie of the pair of them. Despite using the caveat ‘to prove to my dying mother that you both exist’ he delivered with no contextual queries.
‘Right,’ Mum said. Her nails clicked on my phone as she studied the photo closely. ‘I see.’
Then, after another pause:
‘So you’re not here then.’
‘Mum, Mum I’m clearly here…’
A slip of understanding shone through the mud..
‘I’m sick of this,’ she muttered.
‘I know, Mum. I know.’
Another long pause.
‘So the dog isn’t real then?
Shortly after, a district nurse showed up. She took away the beeping syringe driver, gently pulling the canular from Mum’s emaciated arm.
‘I’m just going to put this patch on your back, okay?’ The young nurse said. It was a large plaster-like sticker. It would give Mum the not inconsiderable pain relief she needed. That huge tumour was pushing her insides out.
By the time T and D left and the carers came in the evening, Mum was exhausted. They changed her, freshened her up, and she was barely conscious.
Afterwards, she still wanted a glass of knock-off Baileys.
Sleepy, but still wanting a chat, she talked at me about cheese. Especially one she had somewhere, some part of the past that she could not pinpoint.
‘It was amazing. It was really strong, it came in little barrels.’
‘Can you still get it, then?’ I asked.
‘You know what, I’ve never seen it in years in years.’
This was it. The pointless, chatty conversations I’d been fantasising about for more than a decade. Anecdotes and comparisons that would have bored the arse off anyone listening in.
She passed out with the glass of knock-off Baileys propped up against her arm.
I took the glass. She stirred in her sleep when I did, so I stroked her forehead and hair. She didn’t wake up, but turned to her side and curled up a little.
I Billy on the pillow beside her, and went to sleep a few meters away on the living room sofa.
I just wanted to be near her. I wanted to be near Mum.
I was not ready to lose her again.
17/05/26