fort. What they meant, of course, was that others had it far worse. I
16
understood. But broken arms didn’t ease my splinters.
17
I knocked, then stepped inside. She looked up and I smiled, hoping
18
that she would remember me. Her face was static, creases etched deep
19
into her forehead and her lips permanently pinched. I could see her
20
hands moving beneath the duvet and I knew that she was using the
21
index finger of one hand to pick at the dry, ragged skin around the nail
22
beds of the other.
23
Sometimes it took her a few minutes to recognize me. She was star-
24
ing and I knew that she was flicking through the box files buried deep
25
in the alcoves of her mind, trying to process my entrance, to place my
26
face, my outfit, desperate to decipher this new arrival.
27
Looking back now, it’s hard to believe that she had been living there
28
for eighteen months. It always felt temporary, a sort of limbo. I didn’t
29
think it then, although it sounds impossible now, that of course nursing
30
homes are temporary. They are the midpoint, not between two mo-
S31
ments in this life, but at the fringe of life itself.
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4 6
E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
She had been diagnosed at sixty but, by then, she’d been living alone
02
for a year, her divorce finalized, and my father long gone. I had known
03
for several months that there was something wrong; I thought at the
04
time that she might be depressed. She was short- tempered in a way
05
she’d never been before, sniping at me for little inconveniences— too
06
much milk in her tea, mud on the soles of my shoes.
07
She started swearing. In the first twenty- five years of my life, she
08
had never once— certainly not in front of me— said “shit” or “fuck.” She 09
opted instead for “sugar” or “fudge,” muttered very quietly beneath her 10
breath. And yet suddenly the most flamboyant profanities were part of
11
her everyday language. All I wanted was a pinch of shitting milk. You’re 12
getting fucking mud fucking everywhere.
13
Sometimes she’d forget when I was due to visit, despite my steadfast
14
routine. I would ring the doorbell early on a Saturday morning. I would
15
hear her slippers padding against the carpet as she approached the front
16
door. I would hear a tinkling as she secured the chain. She would pull
17
the door back, just a couple of inches, and poke her nose through the
18
small gap. She would scan me, sliding her eyes up to my face and down
19
to my feet, and say, “Oh. Is it today?”
20
I wondered if she was drinking too much. I took her to see a doctor.
21
He nodded while I explained the situation and I felt sure that he under-
22
stood. I felt sure that he knew exactly the cause of this shift in her
23
personality, that he knew the answers I’d failed to find online, the med-
24
ication or therapy or advice that would put an end to this.
25
“Menopause,” he said, when I’d finished describing my mother’s
26
symptoms. He nodded solemnly. “Definitely the menopause.”
27
The following morning my mother fell down the stairs. I received a
28
call from her neighbor. He’d heard a strange noise and, thankfully, had
29
let himself in with a spare key. My father had given it to him years ear-
30
lier, to water the plants and feed the fish while we were all in Cornwall.
31S
By the time I arrived, my mother was sitting on the sofa, her dressing
32N
gown secured tightly around her waist, clutching a cold cup of tea and
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S E V E N L I E S
47
arguing with her neighbor, who was really rather keen that she go to the
01
hospital, just for a quick once- over, purely to be on the safe side.
02
“Oh, not you too,” she said when she saw me. “I missed the step. I
03
wasn’t concentrating. I’d have righted myself in a minute or two, but
04
this busybody couldn’t keep himself to himself, could he, letting him-
05
self in as though he lives here too, the bloody cheek of it.”
06
He was a kind man— far too nice and far more patient than I’d
07
have been in the presence of such a rude and ungrateful neighbor—
08
and he promised that he would keep an eye on things. He worked
09
from home, he said, so he was always nearby. The walls were thin, he
10
said, so he’d keep his music turned down, just in case she ever needed
11
help again.
12
I wondered how many arguments he’d heard over the years.
13
She fell again two weeks later. He heard the crash and called an
14
ambulance. She had a cut on her forehead where she’d ricocheted off
15
the banister. She said it was fine, not too deep, just a graze, but he in-16
sisted that she go to the hospital. It was still bleeding when I met her
17
there nearly two hours later.
18
We were seen by a doctor, a woman not much older than me, who
19
frowned when I knowingly nodded and said confidently, “Menopause.”
20
“Do you think it’s the menopause, Mrs. Baxter?” asked the doctor,
21
and my mother scowled. “I’m not saying it isn’t the menopause,” the
22
doctor continued, “but is that what you think this is?”
23
My mother raised her nonbloodied eyebrow in response and then
24
sighed and shook her head.
25
“In that case I’d like to run a few more tests. Would that be okay?”
26
My mother nodded.
27
She was diagnosed with suspected dementia that afternoon. She
28
lived alone at home for a little longer, getting progressively worse. But 29
when her diagnosis was confirmed six months later, she moved into the
30
residential home, with the support and the nursing and the care that,
S31
even living with her, I wouldn’t have been able to provide.
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4 8
E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
k
02
03
I sat down in the armchair, laying my coat across my lap. I opened my 04
mouth to speak, but my mother shook her head. She wanted to find the
05
right file; she didn’t want my help.
06
“You’re late,” she said eventually.
07
“Only a few minutes,” I replied, twisting to see the clock hanging
08
above my head.
09
“The train?” she asked.
10
I nodded.
11
She was there. Her eyes were focused and warm. Sometimes I feared
12
that she’d given up, that she was willing the dementia to sprawl across
13
her brain like a fungus, to seep in and destroy the final shreds of her
14
humanity. But, on days like that one, I felt sure that she was still fight-15
ing, pushing back in her own small ways, refusing to be indoctrinated
16
by the emptiness any sooner than was absolutely necessary.
17
“Did you end it with that boy?” she asked. Stanley and I had been
18
on two previous dates, one of which hadn’t been awful, and I’d told
19
her about it— the picnic in the park, the drinks in the pub— when I’d
20
visited the previous week. But I’d also told her that he was a lawyer,
21
that he was boring at his best, that his only saving grace was his very
22
soft hair.
23
I could see that she was proud to have remembered our previous
24
conversation. Often she could remember the tone of a discussion— if
25
she was angry with me or pleased or if she simply enjoyed the company—
26
but sometimes she remembered small details. I remember wondering
27
then if she wrote them down when I left, prompts for the following
28
week, ways to stay connected when her mind was trying so very hard to
29
disengage.
30
“Stanley?” I asked.
31S
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “I don’t have enough space in here”— she
32N
tapped her forehead— “to remember all the names.”
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S E V E N L I E S
4 9
“Then, yes,” I said. “I did it last night.”
01
“Good,” she said. “He didn’t sound much like a Jonathan to me.”
02
My mother’s dementia had— somewhat conveniently— erased her
03
memories of my relationship with Jonathan. Her recollection was sim-
04
ply that I fell in love and then he died. Which wasn’t what had hap-
05
pened at all.
06
It wasn’t that my parents disliked Jonathan. In fact, I think they
07
quite liked him: he was magnetic and funny and always very polite. But
08
I think they liked him in the way that parents like an early boyfriend.
09
He was fine. He would do. But he wasn’t what they envisaged when
10
they imagined me married.
11
They were livid when I told them we were engaged. Having failed to
12
agree on a single thing for the previous decade, they were both adamant
13
that I was making an irreversible mistake. They argued that we were
14
too different. He loved space and fresh air; I loved the coziness of my
15
own home. He loved people and noise; I loved familiarity and silence. I
16
think they felt that he wasn’t good enough, wasn’t smart enough, didn’t
17
earn enough as a cameraman. I didn’t care.
18
In the weeks after we’d got engaged, my mother would call me re-
19
peatedly, sometimes multiple times in a single day, to insist that I was
20
ruining my life. She ranted relentlessly, zealously, telling me that love 21
wasn’t easy and that it was far too complex, too multifaceted for me to
22
possibly understand and that marriage was for another time, another
23
decade, another life. She claimed that we were too young, too naive,
24
too set on something beyond our comprehension. In the background, I
25
could hear the air whistling past the mouthpiece as she paced the hall-
26
way at home, the sharp turns at either end of the corridor, the wild
27
sighs between sentences. She didn’t quite say it, not in these words, but 28
I think she was trying to protect me from her mistake, from a marriage
29
that had narrowed every part of who she once was into a few wilting
30
words: into “wife,” into “mother,” into “heartbreak.”
S31
She told me that I had to make a choice; I chose Jonathan.
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
Perhaps it should have been a difficult decision. But it wasn’t.
02
When Jonathan and I were alone, we were both entirely ourselves.
03
That was my greatest joy, having found someone with whom I could be
04
myself and who, in turn, was his truest self for me. When we were with
05
others, my parents in particular, we were both a little better— that little 06
bit funnier, that little bit nicer, that little bit more in love. We amplified 07
ourselves in order to be the sort of couple that made others comfort-
08
able. He made jokes at my expense, lighthearted gibes that elicited
09
laughter from the other men, from my father, and I was politer, bring-
10
ing him drinks and asking if he wanted anything more and encouraging
11
him to just shout if he needed something from the kitchen. And we
12
touched in a way that sometimes felt contrived, his arm around my
13
waist, my head against his shoulder. When we were alone, our bodies
14
bled into one, limbs entangled, skin stretched against skin.
15
It was an easy choice.
16
I suppose I thought that my mother would surrender in time, that
17
she’d decide that she could live with my marriage. It didn’t seem fair
18
that this should be the moment when she reinstated her motherly love.
19
When I was nearly four years old, my sister, Emma, was born seven
20
weeks early in a wave of chaos. She was
rushed to intensive care and
21
deposited in an incubator as my mother was wheeled into surgery to
22
stem some unstoppable bleeding. They both returned home several
23
weeks later but, in just that one month, everything had changed. From
24
then on, my mother became more and more obsessive, fretting increas-
25
ingly over her younger daughter: asking always is she cold, and is she
26
thirsty, and is she breathing. I became closer to my father as a result—
27
he could do nothing right in those first few months— but my mother
28
was there for me only in body. She wasn’t interested in bedtime stories,
29
or first school photographs, or the intricacies of what went on during a
30
child’s day. She hasn’t really been interested in me since and so I
31S
couldn’t believe that she felt me worthy of her attention in adulthood.
32N
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S E V E N L I E S
51
Shortly after my wedding, my father asked my mother for a divorce
01
and moved out. Judy, his secretary and long- term mistress, had been
02
widowed a year earlier. She’d threatened to leave my father if he didn’t
03
commit to her fully. My mother’s threats had always felt unconvincing,
04
but evidently Judy’s were not. It was no surprise to any of us that my
05
father chose her.
06
I thought my mother might need me more in the aftermath of that
07
loss. I guess I should have known better.
08
There was a year when we didn’t speak to each other at all. I re-
09
member expecting a phone call on my birthday— because surely moth-
10
ers and daughters are bound by birth, if nothing else— but it never
11
came. I didn’t hear from her when Jonathan died. I wondered if she
12
would attend the funeral. She didn’t. I hadn’t given her the details, but 13
I suppose I thought— maybe I even hoped— that she might have asked
14
for them from somebody else.
15
But then, unexpectedly, just a month or so later, she started sending
16
me emails, one or two a week, nothing significant, just updates on her
17
life, things that made her think of me: a new furniture shop on the high
18
street, an article in a magazine, a trailer she’d seen for a film that she 19
thought I might enjoy.
20
I replied eventually— I’d seen the film and I thought it tedious— and
21
somehow we settled into an uncomfortable dialogue. I was angry with
Seven Lies (ARC) Page 7