It Started With Paris

by Cathy Kelly

  Leila stared sternly at the dog.

  ‘Do not do anything I have to pick up,’ she warned.

  Still Pixie gazed up adoringly. As if I would, she seemed to be saying. I am a nice lady dog.

  Leila wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘You do understand, don’t you?’

  As they walked along Poppy Lane, Pixie weaved back and forth across the path sniffing out interesting smells.

  Katy’s mum had always had a dog, and as teenagers Katy and Leila had used the pooch shamelessly. ‘Walking the dog’ was code for going down to the playing fields on the off chance that Michael and his pals would be hanging around. Often Leila would end up walking the dog round the fields on her own while Michael and Katy kissed. Eventually she’d told them they could walk him themselves.

  ‘Walk and kiss,’ she’d said cheerfully.

  Today, she decided that it wasn’t so bad, this dog-walking thing. It reminded her strangely of the morning she’d watched the dawn come up and had gone outside to be a part of this glorious event. The sight of the woods nearby, the scent of earth drenched by rain made her feel relaxed and happy. Grounded, in fact. She was a part of this planet, yet she never noticed her surroundings, just rushed blindly from one place to the next.

  Pixie was so obedient that Leila felt guilty for trying to get out of taking care of her. After all, this little bundle of furry love was her mother’s sole companion. If Mum had to go into a nursing home to recover from the accident, then taking care of Pixie would be the least Leila could do – although she’d need to figure out how she was going to combine it with long days in the office.

  There were bigger problems to worry about, though. When she got home, she would have to google ‘rheumatoid arthritis’ and find out all she could about it. How limiting an illness was it? It was so unfair that her mother, who’d spent much of her life taking care of her husband, should be struck down by illness at a point when she should have been able to relax and enjoy her retirement.

  Finally they came to the laneway by the Mastersons’, which Leila remembered well from her teenage days. The drizzle was easing off and a hint of winter sun was peeking out from behind the clouds. There was nobody in the parkland and she bent down and unclipped Pixie’s lead.

  ‘Just a quick run,’ she said.

  Pixie licked her hand gratefully, then set off like a steeplechaser. For a small dog, she could really go, Leila thought in surprise as Pixie belted towards the goalposts halfway down the field. When she reached what looked like the middle of one of the pitches, she squatted down.

  ‘Sh—’ Leila stopped herself. ‘Sugar,’ she said instead, and felt in her pockets for the nappy bags.

  Finished, Pixie bestowed a winning doggy smile on Leila and raced off again.

  Leila looked down with distaste. This type of thing was why she’d never wanted a dog.

  It took four bags, because Leila had to double-bag her hands before touching the dog faeces. When she eventually straightened up, she looked around for both the dog and the poo bins; there was no sign of Pixie, but she spotted a red bin at the other end of the field and set off towards it.

  ‘Pixie!’ she roared. ‘Come on, walk with me, Pixie!’

  There was no response.

  She felt a surge of panic combined with irritation. Where the hell was the damn animal?

  The wellingtons were too big and were flapping around her legs, making it difficult to stalk through the damp grass to the last place she’d seen Pixie.

  To her left was the disused railway line that had once linked Bridgeport with Waterford. All that remained was a section of track and the ruins of a tiny station where generations of local teenagers had hung out at night. If Pixie was there, she’d be in danger of having her paws sliced by broken glass, Leila thought with mounting horror. The teenagers inevitably brought beer bottles and packs of fags, so that the ruins resembled the aftermath of a music festival. The Tidy Towns people had never made it as far as the train station, even when Leila was young.

  ‘Pixie!’ she roared. ‘Come here!’ She started to run.

  When she reached the ruins, she found a smashed vodka bottle, many cigarette butts and Pixie cavorting with a large black-and-white dog. It was clearly a love affair, as Pixie was coquettishly sniffing the bigger dog’s ears while his plumy tale wagged in delight.

  ‘Please tell me you haven’t been doing naughty things with this lovely boy?’ Leila said, petting the black-and-white dog’s head and then grabbing Pixie by the collar. ‘We do not want a litter of puplets and I have no idea if you’ve been spayed or not,’ she said.

  The lovelorn Pixie wriggled free simply by pulling her narrow head through her collar.

  ‘Oh,’ said Leila, staring at a happy sex-starved spaniel flinging herself at her boyfriend in a way that implied she had a feminine itch and he might scratch it. A delirious and clearly excited Romeo made few efforts to be lover-like.

  ‘Pixie, at least play hard to get,’ yelled Leila, running after her. ‘He won’t respect you in the morning.’

  But Pixie hadn’t read The Rules, and neither had Romeo.

  ‘Somebody should have told me you were in heat,’ Leila panted, wellingtons flapping, as she tried to catch them.

  It took ten minutes, a lot of sweat and plenty of shouting before Pixie was once again firmly on her lead. Leila dragged her away and the other dog followed happily.

  ‘I hope he’s your boyfriend and not a one-day hook-up,’ she said as Pixie trotted beside her, the model of good behaviour again. Nobody would think she’d been totally ignoring Leila’s roars for the past ten minutes. ‘If he is your boyfriend, well done – at least one of us has a man. Not that I want a man, just so you know.’

  The two dogs looked up at her, panting and happy.

  ‘Yeah, the second sign of madness is talking about your love life to dogs,’ Leila told them. ‘This can be our little secret, right?’

  The rain began to pelt down, and the three of them started to run towards the lane.

  ‘He is not coming home with us, Pixie,’ Leila informed her. ‘It’s all I can do to look after you. We are operating a one-dog-only household.’

  By the time they’d made it down Poppy Lane, Leila and the two dogs were soaking wet, but Leila knew she couldn’t relent and let Romeo in, even though he looked at her with anguished black eyes as she slipped through the front gate with Pixie and shut it firmly behind her, leaving him outside.

  ‘No, Romeo, go home. We’ll be out again tomorrow and you can smooch then. Smooching only, no lurve. We don’t want any surprises in … well, however long doggy gestation time is.’

  In the utility room, Leila stripped off the now soaking raincoat. Pixie stood waiting beside the radiator, where an old towel was hanging. She looked meaningfully at the towel and then back at Leila.

  ‘You get dried with that? Fine.’

  Being dried was clearly one of Pixie’s favourite things, and she wriggled luxuriously as Leila used the towel to rub her coat. Once she was dry, she scampered into the kitchen and sat expectantly beside her water bowl.

  ‘Dinner, right?’ said Leila.

  She found dried dog food and some unopened cans in a cupboard and gave Pixie what she hoped was a suitably sized portion. Pixie gulped it down at high speed, and when Leila had changed out of her wet clothes and made herself an omelette for dinner, the dog sat hopefully beside her, eyes moving in time with Leila’s fork.

  Afterwards, Leila lit the fire in the living room, flicked on the TV and curled up with a cup of tea and some biscuits. Pixie leapt on to the couch beside her, snuggled in close and studied the biscuits with the zeal of an undercover policeman watching a suspect.

  Leila laughed and hugged the small dog closer to her.

  ‘You’re a little sweetie, do you know that? I can see why Mum got you. It’s a long time since I had anyone to watch telly with, Pixie. I could get used to having you around.’

  Nora Hummingbird always sang as she did her rounds of
the nursing home. Sometimes she hummed under her breath, shimmying to the tune as she walked, beautifully light on her feet for a woman who’d been on those same feet since dawn.

  Occasionally she found herself humming when she showed new people around the home, scared, anxious people who were looking for somewhere their loved one could receive the care they could no longer get at home.

  ‘We do our best to make the Hummingbird as much like home as we can,’ she said on her introductory tours. ‘None of the residents are restrained here, either chemically or physically. We take care of them.’

  First, there was the music. Miss Polka, as everyone called her, came four times a week with her bells, triangles, small drums and little sound system. She wasn’t called Miss Polka really, but when she’d first arrived, a few people had had trouble with the Russian name Ekaterina, so Miss Polka had stuck. It suited her too: small, dainty, with grey hair worn in a knot, a colourful scarf always tied just so around her neck, and bright clothes like a flower, Miss Polka seemed shy until she was behind the Hummingbird’s piano, when she blossomed like the flowers she resembled, and sang till everyone did their best to join in.

  It did a person’s heart good to see Miss Polka in the downstairs living room on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, spending a happy hour with her listeners, who could often be moved by music when they’d long since ceased to understand anything said to them.

  ‘Music touch us when all else is gone,’ Miss Polka said to Nora in her heavily accented English.

  ‘True,’ agreed Nora.

  Ger, who took the exercise classes, brought people for gentle walks round the large walled garden, where there were plenty of seats and a tiny pond where several loud frogs obediently sang as soon as human beings went near. Ger had child-sized water bottles half filled with rice for people who could manage a bit of arm-lifting.

  ‘It helps with the muscle wastage,’ he explained to the families of the residents. ‘And if the bottles get dropped, nobody gets hurt, unlike with real weights.’

  He organised gentle movement classes twice a week, when the chairs were moved from the centre of the big sitting room to the walls, and people could follow him doing steps to the right and left, and making pointy toes and upwards toes. Nora knew that new families walking round were often surprised to see a magazine-handsome gym instructor leading a group of people who were generally all following their own regime, moving happily in different directions.

  ‘His granny was a resident for five years,’ she explained. ‘He likes coming here.’

  It was, as with everything in Bridgeport, a little more complicated than that. But Nora was good with people’s private business.

  Leila Martin, for example, didn’t know that Nora was best friends with Grace Rhattigan and already had a mental picture of Dolores Martin’s life, including how she’d superbly cared for her husband for so many years.

  ‘She lives on her own, and my sister and I want her to be fully recovered from her hip injury before she has to go home,’ Leila said, with the slightly tearful anxiety that Nora saw in some people when they came to the Hummingbird for the first time. ‘Plus, she has rheumatoid arthritis and—’

  At this point Leila burst into tears. ‘I didn’t know,’ she sobbed. ‘I should have noticed. How could I not have noticed?’

  ‘How could you, when you work in a different city?’ Nora said softly, no reproach in her voice. ‘Your mother must have had her reasons for keeping it to herself. Now that you know, you can help.’

  Leila nodded as if she agreed, but her eyes told a different story. ‘I feel so conflicted about this,’ she blurted out. ‘I should be taking care of my mother, the way she looked after Dad.’

  ‘We can’t always do what we’d like to,’ Nora said, pouring tea. ‘Life is rarely that simple.

  Nora was used to people coming to the Hummingbird Nursing Home scared and guilty about bringing a loved one there to stay. It seemed so final; like saying, I have to give up, I can no longer look after this person who nurtured and cared for me for so long.

  It was one of the dilemmas of the modern age. In a world where generations no longer lived under the same roof, who would take care of the parents and grandparents? She always tried to tell people that in an ideal world families would live in big houses, or in lots of smaller interconnected houses, where everyone was taken care of, be they old, infirm, whatever. But this was not an ideal world.

  The reality was that sometimes people reached a point where they were no longer able to look after their relative, where their mother or father or grandparent needed twenty-four-hour care from somebody else.

  As Leila Martin sat in her office, hands clasped together, eyes big in her pretty face, Nora could tell exactly what was running through her mind: I should be taking care of my mother, I should be looking after her until she’s totally back on her feet. I should somehow move my life so that I’m with her, so that she’s no longer lonely or anxious or worried about her hip or wrist or rheumatoid arthritis …

  ‘There’s something you’ll find here that will make you feel a lot better,’ Nora explained. ‘The carers who will look after your mother have boundless energy and kindness and love. You’ll sometimes look at them and think, Why can’t I do that? Why do I get annoyed when she can’t do such and such?’

  She could see Leila’s eyes brimming.

  ‘The reality is that someone who’s paid to come in here and take care of people can go home at the end of the day. Yes, they do become emotionally involved with the people they care for, because that’s the sort of nursing home I run. Nobody works here if they’re not made for the job, trust me. But at the same time, they’re emotionally removed because they’re not a relative. It is their job – a vocation, but nonetheless a job. It’s different for the families. Perhaps this won’t be the case with you, Leila, because your mother will get better and go home. But some of our patients have dementia or other illnesses from which they won’t recover, and their families are torn in two about leaving them here. They go home feeling guilty, asking themselves, Why can’t I give them the care they need? There must be something wrong with me; if I were a better son or daughter I’d love them enough to look after them.

  ‘But they do love them enough. The Hummingbird is a place where we care for people, but we do not have thirty or forty years’ love for that person behind us, and that makes a difference. It makes it easier for us and harder for relatives like you.’

  Leila started to cry in earnest now, and Nora slid a box of tissues across to her.

  ‘That’s just what I’m thinking,’ said Leila, mopping up her tears. ‘I should be doing this. My mother looked after my father – he was bedridden with a back problem, and she gave up years of her life to him. I feel ashamed because I can’t do the same for her. My sister lives nearer, but she’s all on her own with a small son to take care of. I have to do this.’

  When Leila had rung her sister to tell her about the Hummingbird and suggest they go to look around it together, Susie had cut her off.

  ‘You organise it, Leila,’ she said. ‘You go see what it’s like.’

  ‘But you should come—’

  ‘I trust you to make the decision,’ Susie said fiercely. ‘I’ll take time off when she needs to move into the nursing home. She might have to go by ambulance, but if not, I’ll drive her.’

  Even though Leila was mindful of the fact that Susie, being older, had helped out more with her father’s care, and that it was all she could do to cope with her own life and Jack’s, her attitude seemed harsh, as if she was washing her hands of her mother. It had taken till now for Leila to understand that what Susie was really saying was that it was her turn to step up to the plate.

  Nora patted her hand gently. ‘Leila, you have to make peace with your decision and understand that your mother needs the type of care that you can’t give her. Full stop. She will get that here; she will be loved and taken care of. She will make friends among the other resi
dents and she will enjoy her time here. I promise you,’ she added, grinning, ‘she’ll want to come back and visit.’

  Leila managed a weak smile.

  Nora got to her feet. ‘Let’s go have a look around then, shall we?’

  The Hummingbird Nursing Home was nothing like Leila had imagined. Parts of it were new, like the lovely reception area and the big octagonal sitting room with huge glass windows overlooking a fabulous garden. Other parts were old, but everything was spotlessly clean. Leila had looked up the things to watch out for: an overpowering scent of urine, or worse, for example, and she was on the alert, but there was no smell like that at the Hummingbird. Cleaning products, yes, but overall an amazing rose scent.

  ‘What a lovely smell,’ she said. ‘Where’s it coming from?’

  ‘It’s my special secret,’ said Nora. ‘I have these very nice rose candles that are made locally using a strong natural aroma. I light them for maybe ten minutes in the morning – keeping an eye on them, because you can never be too careful with candles. The scent is so pure it lasts for the rest of the day. It’s nice for people to be able to smell the outside when they can’t get out. Of course, plenty of the residents can get out, and they enjoy making use of the garden.’

  She led the way through the sitting room, where all manner and ages of people were sitting, some accompanied by visitors, others chatting to each other. Nobody looked sad or lonely, as if they’d been confined to a chair and ignored. There was music on the radio, staff in yellow-striped outfits moving between the patients, plenty of cheerful talk and laughter.

  Nora showed Leila the type of room her mother would have: a pretty bedroom with a big window looking out at a raised bed filled with primroses and a wooden garden seat where two elderly ladies were sitting bundled up in warm clothes, chatting. There was an en suite bathroom equipped with emergency buttons and cords, and a television and radio.

  Finally Leila relaxed. She and Nora got chatting and discovered that they had connections in common: Leila’s best friend, Katy Desmond, was marrying the son of Nora’s best friend, Grace Rhattigan.