A Midwinter Match

by Jane Lovering

  14

  Zac and I drove to Leeds through the late evening.

  ‘I’ll take you straight home afterwards.’ Zac steered us out onto the practically deserted A64. Apart from late-night shoppers taking advantage of long opening hours, there weren’t many people out and about in the snowy landscape. ‘I really do appreciate the company. It was… tough, this morning.’

  I touched his hand. It felt a little strange to be able to do it, but nicely strange. ‘It’s okay. And you can always put me on a train, you know. You don’t have to drive me back.’ Just please don’t make me buy my own ticket, I added, but only inside my head, where the walls were having minor wobbles at the financial implications.

  ‘No, it’s fine. I don’t mind.’

  ‘Well, maybe if you’re good, I can put in a word for the sofa again.’ I looked out of the window at the fields flashing past. Between the outskirts of York and the suburbs of Leeds lay a flat, winding mass of snowy scenery, lit only by a cold moon. Occasional farmhouse lights illuminated paddocks and gardens, the odd well-fed and rugged-up horse, some huddled sheep straight from a Christmas card. Garish outdoor decorations stained the snow like multicoloured murder scenes and our headlights showed the road ahead to be a stirred-up mess of browning slush.

  ‘Mum won’t even know who you are,’ Zac said conversationally, after miles broken only by swooshing tyres and the flash of occasional Christmas lights. ‘But I want to introduce you. Visiting hours are different at the more secure unit and I’m not sure how I’m going to…’ he tailed off. ‘I usually try to get to see her three times a week, and then we had the weekends of course, but things might be… well…’ He dropped his head and drummed his fingers on the wheel. He swallowed hard.

  ‘You could ask to change your hours? Start early, leave early?’

  ‘That wouldn’t really go down well with the counselling, unless I can get our clients to agree to come in mornings only.’ A half-grin. ‘And you know how much some of them hate mornings.’

  I sighed. ‘Why does life have to be so complicated? Why can’t we all live nice tidy lives with regular hours and no paperwork?’

  ‘Because that’s not a life, that’s a children’s TV programme.’ Zac swung the wheel. ‘Here we are. It’s down here.’

  The nursing home lay at the end of a long track which ran across fields on the outskirts of the city. The fields were scrubby and poor and even the snow looked half-hearted, but the building itself was a big old house with lights shining from practically every window, and it had a lot of effusive decoration going on around the front door.

  Zac’s mum was in the hospital section, behind several doors which required us to show identification and use passkeys. The carpeted hallways were plush and there were framed paintings on the walls.

  ‘It’s like a hotel,’ I said as we walked through the last set of doors.

  ‘An expensive one.’ Zac looked around. ‘Mum has additional funding provided, and she had insurances that are paying quite a large proportion of the fees. I just have to make up the rest,’ he added, glumly. ‘Ah, here we are.’

  Zac’s mum, Debbie, was in a bed in a small room which contained one other patient. There was a hushed bustle going on and a lot of starched uniforms. It looked like a hospital in a 1950s drama.

  ‘She’s resting,’ a nurse informed us. ‘She’s doing better than she was this morning though, and her temperature is coming back up to normal. Go and say hello, but don’t keep her talking too long.’

  We went over. Debbie was still the pretty woman from the photograph, ageing had barely touched her, apart from greying her blonde hair and adding some fine lines to her face. She lay sleeping, her hands wrapped in some kind of thermal thing, and the bed covered in cellular blankets.

  Zac sat on the chair beside the bed and gently took a gloved hand. ‘Hello, Debbie,’ he said quietly. He can’t call her Mum, I thought. She doesn’t know he’s her son. And my heart ached a little more for his situation.

  Eyelids flickered. A brief smile hovered for a second, and was gone. ‘Simon? Did you bring Zac? Did you fetch him from school?’ Her speech was slow, she seemed to grope for words.

  Zac’s face betrayed only a momentary flicker of pain, but my eyes were filling on his behalf. ‘Zac’s fine, Debbie,’ he said. ‘He’s really, really fine.’ He smiled at me over the bed, where I stood awkwardly, feeling too big and too out of place. ‘Yeah, he’s doing very well.’

  Debbie opened her eyes. ‘I don’t like it here,’ she said. ‘I want to go home. Zac will be home from school soon.’

  ‘You just have to stay until you’re better. Look, I brought someone to meet you. Debbie, this is Ruby. She’s my girlfriend.’

  Girlfriend. Yes. I liked the sound of that. It added a little bit of sweetness to the situation.

  Deep brown eyes, very much like her son’s, met mine. ‘You can’t marry your sister,’ Debbie said.

  A small wince of pain creased his eyes, but I supposed he was used to this kind of conversation. ‘And I don’t intend to. Anyway, we just looked in to say hello as we were passing. Make sure you’re all right.’

  A lady who wasn’t wearing a nursing uniform, but instead had about four different lanyards around her neck, popped her head into the room. ‘Ah, here you are. Zac, can I have another word with you? About–’ she looked at Debbie, then at me ‘– what we talked about this morning?’

  Zac stood up and indicated the chair to me. ‘You sit here and have a chat,’ he said, despite me making ‘don’t leave me’ faces. ‘I won’t be long and this is important.’ Now he gave me a significant look, as though I was supposed to know what he had to talk about. The moving of his mother to this new unit, presumably. Oh dear.

  When he’d gone, Debbie looked at me again. ‘Who are you, then?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m Ruby. I work with Z… Simon.’

  ‘Oh. On the buses?’

  I had no idea how to handle this. Did I just go along with her beliefs or did I challenge them? I had no real experience with talking to someone with dementia and my brain felt hot with the mixture of embarrassment and a kind of fear. I tried to remember my training. It had been quite a while since I’d needed to wheel it out. Her beliefs are real to her. That was what it boiled down to.

  ‘Er, well, we don’t work on the buses any more. It’s in an office now.’

  ‘Oh. Have you seen Zac? He should be home from school soon.’

  I had another pang, thinking of Zac, never being recognised for who he was. ‘Yes, I’ve met him once or twice. He’s lovely.’

  Debbie showed me the pictures beside her bed, which all seemed to be of Zac up to the age of about ten. She didn’t have any more recent ones, presumably it upset her. In her mind, Zac was still a little boy.

  ‘I like the jumpers you knit for him,’ I said, when she had mired herself in a swamp of altered reality and was trying to explain how the pictures could be both old, and also current. ‘I’ve got two nephews, would you knit some jumpers for them?’

  She looked pleased for a moment, smiling softly at the photo of Zac wearing an obviously hand-knitted bright yellow jumper that made him look as though he was sitting in the centre of the sun, but then her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know who you are. Did you break in?’

  Just then, the door opened and Zac came back in and I nearly threw myself at him.

  ‘We have to go now, Debbie,’ he said. ‘We’ll come and see you again soon.’

  ‘When are you coming back?’ Her tone was forlorn, as though we were abandoning her in an empty room; there were at least three nurses in there, all busily sorting equipment and updating records on the, I couldn’t help but notice, very state-of-the-art computer.

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. Now, you have a good rest.’ He kissed her forehead.

  ‘Will you bring Zac with you? When you’ve fetched him from school?’

  Zac smiled. ‘I’ll see. He might w
ant to stay at home and play games.’

  Debbie’s face relaxed from the worried frown. ‘Oh, that’s right. He loves those games.’ We left whilst she still seemed happy to let us go.

  We got halfway down the entrance corridor before Zac stopped me. ‘So, that’s my mum,’ he said, catching me by the elbow to stop me walking. ‘What do you think?’

  I looked at his earnest face. There was a little crease of anxiety between his eyes and his mouth was drawn down at the corners, as though he was sucking something bitter. ‘I think it must be very, very hard for you,’ I said, trying to sound gentle but without being condescending.

  ‘It’s always worse for the relatives.’ He gave me that look that seemed to be significant again, but I wasn’t sure why. ‘When you don’t know what to expect, or how to behave. At first, I used to argue with her, when she got me mixed up with Simon or when she insisted on things that were obviously… well, she was confused.’

  ‘Current thinking is not to challenge beliefs.’ I sounded as though I was reciting from my training handbook or my textbooks. ‘What she thinks is absolutely real to her. It would be like me telling you that you drive a Mini and you’re deluded to think otherwise.’

  Zac nodded slowly. ‘I hoped you’d say that,’ he said, enigmatically. ‘Now, let’s go back to the house of dreadful singing and a near-terminal sofa. I really don’t want to be alone right now.’

  ‘No. I can see why.’

  We walked on a few more strides along the thickly carpeted floor, past a doorway through which I could see a very elderly lady being helped to walk to a chair, and a woman in uniform arranging flowers in a wall niche. There were subtle, understated decorations everywhere and a large tree with a silver and gold colour scheme in a corner.

  Then Zac caught at me again. ‘You understand, don’t you?’ He sounded almost breathless. ‘Please understand, Ruby.’

  There was such feeling in his voice, such an echo of loneliness and despair that I, once again, felt vaguely guilty about my own anxiety issues. What, after all, did I really have to feel anxious about? No money and a precarious job? Pah, practically everyone has that and they don’t all resort to all night panic attacks and medication. Here was Zac, struggling to carry all this worry.

  But then I thought, My beliefs are just as valid. The thought caught me by surprise. I’d got quite used to feeling that my anxiety attacks, the general feeling of panic that those walls in my head tried to keep suppressed, weren’t legitimate. That they weren’t somehow serious enough to be ‘a thing’. As though something in my personality had built up my natural background fears of being alone forever, in debt forever, and turned what other, normal people dealt with on a daily basis into some kind of huge drama. As though I was somehow showing off by living with this personal dread.

  My beliefs are just as valid. What Debbie believed was real to her. What I believed was real to me. It didn’t matter that my anxiety was triggered by something others may see as trivial. It was my anxiety. They were my panic attacks. And I was entitled to feel terrified. It was real to me.

  In this overlit hallway that held a faint scent of disinfectant beneath the expensive infusers, beside the tasteful tree, I held that revelation to me as though it somehow proved something. I am allowed to believe what I want. This isn’t a competition.

  ‘Yes.’ I reached up and laid my hand against Zac’s cheek, trying to show, through touch, that I understood. I may not really grasp the complexities of his life, but I was here, alongside him. ‘Yes.’

  He let out a sigh that was a cross between a gasp and a sob. ‘I was worried for a minute there. You went very quiet.’

  ‘Oh, no, that was… something else. Me realising something. It’s fine.’

  ‘Good. Only… look, I’ve had a couple of girlfriends, in the past.’

  I looked at him. Tall and slightly flushed from the heat in here, dark pencil-lines of stubble forming across his chin and those large, intelligent eyes. I couldn’t believe that I’d ever thought he looked smug or complacent. I could see the tracery of worry around his eyes. ‘Only a couple? You disappoint me. I thought I was going to have to fight off hordes of disappointed women, I was going to buy a special stick.’

  He laughed and it sounded as though he was shedding years’ worth of tension. ‘I can probably muster up a crowd, but I don’t know about a horde,’ he said and he was smiling into my eyes now. ‘But–’ and the smile died ‘– they’ve not really been able to grasp the situation with Deb— with Mum. That I can’t move halfway across the country for a “really good job”, not now she’s settled here. I can’t take long holidays because she gets distressed without visitors after a few days. I’m not loaded with cash, because I have to help pay her bills.’ He opened the inner front door and we emerged into the snow and strobe effect of the front of the home. ‘And it’s pretty expensive,’ he went on, in a low voice. ‘It just about leaves me enough to cover my bills and buy food. If I think about it too much, well, that’s when I… well, you saw, the other morning.’

  I took his hand. ‘I’m still paying for my expensive tastes in interior design for a house I only lived in for a few months,’ I said. ‘So I’m in no position to judge.’

  Zac looked down at our hands, fingers wound around one another. ‘We’ve gone blue,’ he observed mildly.

  ‘It’s these lights.’ I swung our arms up and out of the electric blue effect that the multitude of outdoor decoration was causing. ‘Look.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering,’ he carried on, still looking at the anoxic tinge of our skin, ‘why your ex isn’t liable for half the costs? His name was on the mortgage too – why are you carrying all the debt?’

  Slowly we walked down the ramp towards the Discovery, which was the only car parked in the visitors’ car park, I noticed. I wondered about the other residents, and how often they were visited.

  I tried to think of the best way to frame my answer. ‘Partially guilt,’ I said, when we’d negotiated the ramp and trudged over the slushy grit. ‘I was the one who talked him into buying when he clearly, as I now know, had no intention of staying with me.’

  ‘And the rest of the reason?’

  The inside of the car was still warm, but cold in comparison to the hospital-level heating in the home. ‘Stupidity, really. And stubbornness. Gareth didn’t leave an address when he moved out. I never asked him where he was going and once we’d blocked each other on every device known to man, I couldn’t get in touch to ask. Without knowing where he is… well, the bank don’t care who pays. They go after the person whose address they have got, and that’s me.’

  ‘And that guilt stops you looking for him?’

  I nodded, feeling a bit feeble. ‘It sounds stupid, I know. And now, with hindsight, I know that he is as culpable as I am. He could have said no. He could have walked away. But I made his life so easy, why would he?’ I shrugged. ‘So. Yeah. My fault.’

  Zac looked back over his shoulder at the huge house as we pulled out of the car park and onto the wet snow of the lane onto the main road. ‘Guilt,’ he said. ‘I get that one. I could get Mum into a fully NHS-funded place now, she’s reached the level of not being able to care for herself. But there was only her and me, and I can’t bear to see her in a place set up for bingo and all-day TV-watching, with people thirty years older than her. She’s only sixty-three. I can’t help think about your mum and all about her running and the dogs and the trifle.’

  ‘To be fair, the trifle is Dad. Mum would happily never cook again,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the contrast, though. I know how Mum’s life should be, and I want to keep it as close as it can be for as long as I can.’ He steered the car out onto the road, which was still mostly empty, only one other pair of beams coming carefully through the slush at us. ‘Though I am aware that I’m losing that battle, with what happened last night.’

  ‘She’s going to stay in the hospital unit?’

  ‘Pretty much. They’ve got a more secure section, r
ound the back, she’ll move in there once she’s recovered. We can recreate her room exactly, she won’t even notice.’ He swallowed the last three words. ‘But this place,’ he indicated with a jerk of his head the place we’d already left, ‘caters for all kinds of long-term nursing needs. So it’s not just for people who… for those with memory loss. It’s full of rich people’s relatives who are inconvenient in any way.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter, Zac. You can’t judge people for the choices they make, you know that. No doubt everyone who has their relatives in there feels they are doing their best by them, the same as you with your mum.’

  He shrugged and carried on driving.

  I kept my face turned to the snowy fields and hoped that Zac never realised that the true reason I didn’t want to look for Gareth was that I couldn’t bear the comparison. I couldn’t stand for Gareth to look at my life as it was now, with no real home, the same job as I’d had when we were together, a dependence on medication to help me sleep and stop the panic from rising. How was it fair that he had left me and yet he’d prospered and I was floundering around in the ruins of my previous life?

  I caught Zac’s eye and we smiled at one another and I realised that I’d rather have him, here and knowing everything about me than a rich blonde and having to keep up appearances. Gareth was doomed now to a life of depending on his wife’s family money and being dictated to, and it served him right.

  Oh, who was I kidding – that life would suit him down to the ground.

  And me? Well. This life may be precarious, and I may be out of a job, but at least I had Zac.

  15

  The house was in chaos when we arrived. Sophie was packing to leave for Christmas with her family whilst simultaneously preparing what looked like a hundred costumes for the school Christmas play which was tomorrow. She kept putting things down in bags and then realising that they were for the play and unpacking them again in an increasingly distracted way. Cav was sitting by the window like a cat waiting for a squirrel, and he leaped up to paw at the Discovery until his bike was released from the boot and he could coo over its safe return. He was heading out to Dublin in the morning to spend Christmas with his sister, so the hallway was full of cycle bags of gear.