Chapter Seven: Care
My aunt T took over after my last meltdown, settling herself into the dining room sofa for the following few nights.
Back in my own home, I slept for two days solid. My heart hurt. I found myself crying and moaning as if I were sick.
My brother D, concerned and no longer chucking up in a caravan, let me know the whole paternity thing was irrelevant to him. A little sternly, he pointed out how much he and T and our brother J were pulling together to get through this. I needed to show up too.
It felt harsh, to be honest, given the shock of such a revelation on top of reopening the molestation wound. The flashbacks had become intense. Every time mum was snippy and rude to me, the thread stopping me from telling her to fuck off to her paedophile husband became very taut indeed.
But I had become too wrapped up in my PTSD. Mum’s sister and my two brothers have trauma too, but they showed up because “it’s the right thing to do”.
Which it is. It doesnt matter that mum wouldn’t have done the same for us.
Well, she would have…the woman she was before The Man Who Is Not My Father did what he did would have shown up for us.
I cannot properly articulate how difficult it is to provide care for a family member, especially if they are pretty much helpless. Each time I did a shift, the three or four nights nearly destroyed me.
Even without the absolute exhaustion, the constant requests (or demands, if she was in a bad mood) drive you down. On one afternoon, even though she’d told me to fuck off (I can’t remember why), mum called me every ten minutes from 2pm to sometime after eight when she finally fell asleep.
Usually, it was to pick her sippy cup from her bedside, then shout at me because “it’s not coming out” (she wasn’t tipping it enough, but if I tried to guide her, she’d slap my hand away).
She’d call because she was “too hot” or “not right”, to ask the time or if the fan heater was on (it always was).
Even when she was sleeping and I laid down for a nap, my body was flush with adrenaline. Then some thirty minutes later when I was nodding off, she’d call out again.
She’d demand to be moved to a certain position, then insist that wasn’t what she asked for.
‘YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ME,’ she shouted, ‘I NEVER SAID I WANTED TO BE ON MY SIDE. I WANT TO BE ON MY SIDE.’
On the fifth day after I last cleared off back home, T had her own little breakdown.
‘I’m leaving,’ she told D on the phone while power-walking to the bus stop. ‘You have to come look after her.’
Apparently, mum really went at her sister. Telling her to fuck off, bringing up T’s late husband, screaming and all sorts. After five days waiting on her hand and foot with little sleep, and doing at least 70% of the full-time care days since mum had been discharged from hospital, T reached her limit.
But T calmed down, and she went back to her sister.
“It’s the right thing to do.”
Out of me and my two full-time employed brothers, I was the only one feasably able to provide 24/7 care and give poor T a break.
So I put all of my PTSD, anger, and horrible memories in a great big mental box and shoved it into the darkness.
I drove up to take over from T the morning of the 7th day of her run.
‘Are you going to be alright?’ My aunt asked, during our debrief in the kitchen.
‘I’ve put everything in a box,’ I said, ‘And shoved it over there.’
‘Right,’ T nodded, clearly grateful, ‘And I hope you’ve wrapped chains around it, put it in another box, wrapped that up with chains…’
‘Yep,’ I laughed.
‘I’ve sorted out 24/7 care,’ she told me at some point, very much out of mum’s ear shot. ‘They’re going to start on Wednesday.’
‘You’re kidding?’ I was drinking one of mum’s Slim-Fast shakes at the time, and dribbled it down my chin. It’s not like a woman weighing less than six stone is going to need these, I’d thought as I dibsed the sixpack of them. ‘How?’
‘I just kept on at them. She needs 24/7 care.’
‘Yes, she absolutely does. And it’s not like we know what we are doing.’
I glanced at the kitchen table. It was piled with boxes of medications I couldn’t even pronounce the name of, never mind understand what they were supposed to do.
‘I’ve not broached the subject yet…’ T looked a little furtively towards the kitchen door. ‘So don’t mention it. Me and D are coming over Sunday to tell her, and get the place ready, because the carer’s going to need a bed and a room to sleep in. She can’t stay on the sofa.’
‘Agreed,’ I wiped my chin. Since the start of this, mum had adamantly refused to let T or me sleep on either her or her husband’s bed, getting very angry whenever we broached the subject. Thus far, it had been easier to just let her have her way.
The relief of knowing I wouldn’t need to do any more unpaid, untrained shifts caring for someone who encapsulated so much mental agony was wonderful. I’m so grateful to live in a country where support is accessible for families like mine.
‘OH, PISS OFF,’ Mum’s voice cut through the air. ‘GERRAWAY WI’ YER.’
‘Who’s she talking to?’ I asked.
‘People who aren’t there,’ T shrugged. ‘She’s been doing it a lot.’
Mum started laughing to herself. At least she sounded happy.
That evening, mum asked for “a snifter”. I googled whether she could have alcohol with painkillers. Answer: normally, no. But if you’ve got weeks left, fuck it. Have a drink.
I cracked open a bottle of knock-off Baileys. One from Aldi, I think. She wanted about a finger with some ice. A little nervous considering the woman is an alcoholic, I watered it down ever so slightly.
‘Straw!’ She shouted when I plonked the short glass on the table beside her.
I cut a straw in half and propped it into the milky drink. Unable to sit up by herself, she needed the head of the hospital bed whirring up. I pressed the drink into her cold fingers.
‘Oh my God,’ she said after a sip. ‘This is bliss!’
I chuckled as she pretty much inhaled the rest.
‘Get me another one?’ She weakly tried to lift the glass. I took it before the ice went everywhere.
For the next hour, she sipped at a second (and then a third!) glass of the knock-off Baileys, enjoying herself. She told me about her favourite drinks, about the kind of mischief her and T got up to on nights out in their youth; how they would order a big glass of sangria with two straws and “get a bit gobby” with anyone they disliked.
She told me about her father’s home brew – a bitter so strong it’d melt your eyelashes. Her mother used to drink barley wine. They were poor, but they got by. Her dad rode his bike to and from work every day, and filled the holes in his shoes with cardboard.
I got the bed comfy for her, and propped her teddy at her bony shoulder. She fell asleep smiling.
Mum slept right through till 6am. She woke me by singing.
‘Nana nana nana nana Batman!’ She chirped, amongst other mutterings and laughter.
I tried to go back to sleep, but she called for me soon after.
‘Hellooooo?’ I think she’d given up working out if I’m Sarah, Louis, or her Amazon assistant Alexa.
I trundled into the room, my blanket wrapped around me.
‘Yeah?’
‘Oh hiya. What time is it please?’
I peered groggily at the dust-coated clock on the mantlepiece.
‘It’s quarter past six.’
‘In the morning?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s quarter of an hour after you last came in, then.’ She said chirpily.
‘You what?’ I asked, brain creaking.
‘You came in here at six o’ clock and said it’s six o’ clock.’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Yes you did, I saw you.’
Oh, so now she’s hallucinating me. That’s creepy. I’m not sure I like that.
‘Do you need anything?’ I asked, choosing to leave that particular battle.
‘Can you do me a boiled egg and toast?’
It was a good day, that Saturday. Mum only told me to fuck off and never come back once, and that was because she wanted more Baileys thinking it was seven in the evening. It was seven in the morning. I know she’s dying, but I draw the line at morning Baileys.
The sun was shining, so I pulled the curtains wide and opened the windows. Warm air, tinted with the promise of summer, swirled into the stuffy room.
‘There’s the bitch, again!’ Mum shouted suddenly, mid-sentence. She pointed towards the doorway.
‘Who?’ For a moment I was terrified one of the carers had let themselves in. Mum had been getting progressively ruder, after all.
‘That bitch, I just saw her run past the doorway,’ she shouted, annoyed. ‘That blummin’ leprechaun! I just saw her again!’
I can assure you there are no leprechauns in that house. I think I’d have noticed.
‘What does she look like?’
‘She’s little and she’s got a big pointy nose, and a pointy hat.’
‘So, a witch?’
‘No!’ She flapped her hand at me. ‘Not a witch. I know what a bloody witch looks like.’
‘How often do you see her?’
‘I saw her yesterday and all.’
‘Maybe it’s a gnome.’
‘It’s not a bloody gnome!’
Hallucinations are an end-of-life symptom that I’d been briefed to report to the carers. It could mean death is on its way.
‘Have you seen anything else?’
‘I’ve seen a woman and a little girl, in old clothes. Stood in the hallway. And my mum.’
‘You saw your mum?’
‘Yeah. I’ve seen her a couple of times. And a man, a pitch-black man, but I can’t see his eyes.’
Yep. Okay. Great. That was it for me, thank you. It was hard enough sleeping on that old sofa without thinking about some shadow person watching like an inter-dimensional pervert.
‘It’s okay,’ one of the carers told me later, ‘if the hallucinations aren’t distressing her.’
But what if they’re distressing me? I thought, thinking of deep, empty eye sockets floating in the ether.
I slept with the light on that night.
The next morning, mum awoke me at another godforsaken hour with more singing.
‘Doo doo doo, Superman!’
A medley of Queen songs followed, including excerpts from Freddie Mercury’s solo album. It was nice to hear her happy, having full conversations with invisible people. One of them in particular was making her laugh like a drain.
‘Who you talking to?’ I asked when I trudged in, having written sleep off.
‘Oo hello. Can I have some more juice, please? And I can’t find Billy. Is D coming today?’
‘Yes, mum.’
‘Can you get him to bring us some Twix?’
The pile of requested chocolates and biscuits was growing by the day. She was always remembering some sweet treat she hadn’t had in ages, asking for it right up until we sourced it.
‘I don’t know why you’ve brought Milkybar,’ she’d told me after three days going on about wanting some, ‘I’ve never liked Milkybar.’
D and my aunt were due to come over at lunch time – as far as mum knew, for a visit. Really, it was for that chat about the carer moving in.
With mum dozing, I went to scan the whole house for things we’d need to fix. And by ‘we’ I mean, ‘D chucked into the room with his toolbox while T and I occasionally throw biscuits through a gap in the door’.
Even though I’d been looking after mum regularly for a month, I hadn’t quite noticed how bad the house was.
This was partly because mum wouldn’t let me notice.
I know that sounds odd especially she was confined to a hospital bed, but she was always controlling with things in her home that didn’t need controlling. Things like, not allowing myself or my brother to touch the thermostat – to the point they had it installed too high up for us to reach without them hearing the creak of stairs.
I can remember every time I came down from my room in the evening as a teen, hearing them muttering about which one of us it was and what it sounded like we were doing. And if there was a drawer or cupboard opened, in would bundle The Man Who Is Not My Father wanting to know what I wanted.
Their weekly Asda shop was sacred. Although the time was reserved in the afternoon, an entire day was blocked out for it. Which meant D and I could do absolutely nothing else – I couldn’t go for a walk to the village because I’d need to be let in again, even if it was 10am, because “we’re going to Asda this afternoon”. Mum really would get pissy about stuff like that.
We were absolutely not allowed to use the oven on an evening. If I was hungry late at night, even if I’d been at work, I had to grab something cold from the fridge or Mum and The Man Who Is Not My Father would kick off. Even the idea of an oven meal popped into the hatch for twenty minutes was offensive to them.
Except for now and again, when that sweet cheerful woman peeked from the bars of her angry, mum-shaped shell – and Mum, drunk, made me fried mashed potato or eggy bread at 11pm while we chatted. It was exceptionally rare, but magical.
One time when my brother and I were staying over on a break from university, mum and The Man Who Is Not My Father went away sailing. When they came back, I was most surprised to be confronted by my mother about the baked lemon cake I’d attempted and subsequently burned. The only way they could have known about that was if they went through the bins. And I’ll bet you any amount of money that’s exactly what they did; it was just the kind of people they were.
In the many years since, the abject hatred of the world and people around them got worse.
There’s a posh-looking block of flats on the land next to the house now. I remember it being a burned carcass of a building, and later a flattened carpet of grass. At some point, the land was sold to a developer who went ahead and made good use of it.
‘They were absolute pricks about it,’ D told me. ‘They were complaining and having a go and writing letters and all sorts.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Cos they are pricks,’ D shrugged. ‘That’s why their driveway is still fucked. The developers were going to re-tarmac it for free, but they were such pricks they were like “fuck ‘em” and didn’t bother.”
There’s a lovely, smooth tarmac road with clean paving and fresh saplings leading right up to the block of flats’ car park. At the corner where the long drive to mum’s house begins, it stops abruptly.
And then there’s about a million signs encouraging people to very much piss off.
PRIVATE PROPERTY, DO NOT ENTER
NO THROUGH-ROAD. PRIVATE PROPERTY.
NO TRESPASSING. TRESSPASSING IS ILLEGAL.
They are faded from years of sunlight.
All things considered, I thought as I crept up to the upstairs landing, mum letting carers into her home three times a day after purposely cutting herself off for so long is something I should – kind of – be proud of her for.
It must be hard to let strangers in to your home at the best of times, never mind if you didn’t let your own children in for the last fifteen years.
Since being stuck in that little hospital bed in the living room, my aunt, D and I had done what we could to maintain her sense of control.
At first, she played Hell when she heard the creak of stairs without her permission. The whole reason T and I were sleeping on that squishy sofa in the dining room, rather than one of the two whole-ass beds upstairs, was because mum didn’t want us to. We were unclear on why, but went with it because, odd as it sounds, it was easier.
The cobwebs. There were so many cobwebs.
Every single corner at the ceiling or floor sported at least one. Each was covered in dust.
Even though I’d visited and stayed over a good few times in the weeks prior, I’d not notice just how bad it was. I knew it was dirty, but the more I really started looking, the worse it got.
I wanted to use the shower. I used to wash every weeknight in that same cubicle when I was in college; the Imperial Leather foam in metal cans felt like a real treat.
But when I shifted the curtain, I was greeted with black mould.
For a moment I saw the ghost of sixteen-year-old me, scrubbing myself amongst an obscene amount of shampoo and shower foam.
Then I noticed the ceiling – also pocked with mould. And cobwebs. And two instances of dead spider, one of them apparently having died while attempting to eat the other.
Long-gone plants sat on the windowsills in most of the rooms, often coated with dust.
The corners of carpets were discoloured with dirt.
When I opened the master bedroom curtains, I was effectively bukkake’d by spurts of dust. A dead centipede dropped onto my foot for the money shot. Proud of myself for not screaming at that one.
When I crept into the second bathroom, with dated sink and bath squished up like a toddler’s Lego creation, I was surprised to see the flooring looked like an especially shit round of Tetris.
‘Do we know where that random chunk of flooring in the bathroom has fucked off to?’ I texted D.
‘Not a clue,’ D replied. ‘I did look. It’s not anywhere.’
Something very sharp caught on the foot of my tights. I narrowly avoided stepping on two slabs of upturned, dismembered skirting boards. Each sported three enormous masonry nails.
The Man Who Is Not My Father had been attempting D.I.Y. right up until his brain gave up entirely.
I wandered into his office. Because mum had sent me or my younger brother up here a few times to rifle through for some password or file or document, the room was messy.
Half-heartedly, I piled papers together and slipped them into meticulously-labelled, color-coded folders.
Plastic food containers were scattered around the large desk, some holding batteries or paperclips but most were empty; old Clover and Anchor butter tubs faded with age. I started piling them into each other, ready for the bin.
It struck me in that moment: for a man who was ever present in my childhood and teen years, I had absolutely no idea who he was.
He’d never offered information about himself, never tried to spend quality time with my brother or I before or after the outing of the molestation incidents. When he gave me a lift anywhere as a teen, he did so in absolute silence. He didn’t even tell me when his dad, a wonderful sweet man who played harmonica, passed away.
The only time I remember The Man Who Is Not My Father showing a slip of personality was one Christmas before the incident, when he carefully pulled Cinderella-themed fairy lights from a dusty box and let me hold the fragile carriages in my tiny fingers.
‘These belonged to my mum,’ he said, eyes wet. He smelled of alcohol.
His mum passed away when he was only five. In the entire time I knew him, he did not tell me a word about her. I only knew that she’d been married to the sweet old man with the harmonica, and she had those Cinderella fairy lights.
The Man Who Is Not My Father’s mental decline was written in notebooks and scraps of paper on his desk. Countless writings of the exact same login details, appointment times struck through and rewritten again and again, my mother’s mobile phone number on countless stubs and post-its.
He’d always written exclusively in block captials, but his bold, strong lettering became wobbly, faint. I found lists of numbers and symbols I didn’t understand, likely some shipping lingo – wind speed, latitudes and longitudes, weather station locations. Despite being off the waves for a long time, he’d kept track of things like that even back when I’d last seen him nearly fifteen years ago. Always perched over some sea map in the dining room.
I found a little notebook with his name on. It was a diary. A sailor’s diary.
Oddly transfixed, I sat down on the dusty carpet and started reading.
It wasn’t a juicy diary.
Written across 1992, a year before he met my mother and while in his late thirties, he wrote clinically about his time on a boat. Noting the onboarding of various acquaintances, moving from marina to marina or spanning some stretch of active water. He made a note of dinner on the mainland, or when some boat tool had a paddy.
There was absolutely no emotional information – nothing about how he felt, no jokes or observances. While it was interesting to think of him having these adventures, it didn’t make me know the bloke any more than the paltry amount I already did.
Beside a plastic in-tray, I noticed some little drawers marked for 1989.
“Sailing.”
His block capital writing, young and bold.
They were full of little Kodak projector slides. Photos of the deck of a boat, ropes wrapped around poles, big-booted men pulling at sails and smiling for the camera. I recognised him in a few, wearing a blue beanie hat. Even when he was young, he had a creepy look on his brow.
Or maybe I’m biased.
The majority of his photos, whether from projector slides or found loose in the room, had no people in them at all. Night photos taken around York, blurs of car lights running from the shutter; the outside of the grotty flat he had lived in with mum when my brother and I were little; a corner of York Minster, shot from the cold pavement below.
Only one photo I found of them together, mum and him. Taken apparently by surprise, both looking deer-eyed from the bar of the hotel they ran together. Mum with her big, crimped hair. Him with his watch facing inward.
I left his effects alone, still with no idea who this man was.
‘Do you support this?’ Mum snapped, glaring at me.
She was not taking the idea of a live-in carer well. T and D stood awkwardly at the end of her bed, while I carefully used the latter as a human shield.
‘Well, I think you need-‘ I began.
‘THAT’S NOT WHAT I ASKED,’ She shouted. ‘WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY?’
The three of us had been shouted at for a good ten minutes by this point. Mum was furious.
She didn’t understand that T and me looking after her for 24/7 shifts indefinitely wasn’t viable. I’d been unable to work at all while there, and T was going to go nuts without sleep. Not to mention with neither of us having carer training, we couldn’t even change her pants without putting her in danger and we certainly couldn’t administer the right medications.
‘Alright!’ I snapped back from the safety of my younger brother’s shoulder. ‘Yes, I support this. There’s no other option.’
She stared at me with that unbridled hatred she often did during my teen years. I retreated a little further behind my brother, who tensed his shoulders protectively.
‘Right.’ She shrugged eventually. ‘I guess it’s what we are doing then.’
The mood swings; God they were like a rollercoaster. An especially vomit-inducing one.
‘You’ll have someone here to look after you all the time,’ T said, while I pretended to be busy by sort of rearranging stuff that didn’t need rearranging. ‘It will be nice for you.’
She warmed to that idea. She warmed to the idea of having someone taking care of everything for her, so she wouldn’t have to worry. It would be like having a friend.
‘And I’ll be able to sit here and just crochet,’ mum said brightly.
‘Yeah!’ I encouraged her, knowing very well she was no longer capable of holding anything without help.
With various tasks still outstanding, T and D peeled off upstairs and I wandered into the kitchen to tidy up. I heard loud thuds from upstairs – probably D hammering those lethal skirting boards back in.
I heard mum muttering to herself. I poked my head out the kitchen, and saw her sitting with Billy in her lap. She was talking to him, and crying.
29/04/2026