I lie there in the single bed I used infrequently as a teenager, staring at the cheap paper lampshade and the wobbly edge of paint between ceiling and wall. Through the curtained window, I can hear Dad’s whistle as he pushes the buggy towards the beach.
This ground-floor bedroom is as serviceable as all the others I have inhabited. A room that had other functions in the months I was away. There is a bookcase filled with House Group reading material, and a collection of chairs pushed up against the walls for those mornings when the church group calls. Now the bed is crushed into a corner, so as to keep the baby from falling from it. I rearranged the furniture myself, like a maniac, the first night.
There is only the dry noise of the wind through the trees now Dad’s whistle has died away. It is one of those rowdy sea winds that throws the branches against one another. Being in the midst of a strong wind is how it has felt since the morning the chorionic villus sampling results came in.
Within hours of receiving them, like a Victorian lady in crisis, I had a violent attack of the nerves.
My skin and my self crawled with something no scratch could soothe. I put it down to relief that our baby could live and guilt over how I had allowed myself to be coerced into believing only ‘healthy’ children deserve to.
My father-in-law, the doctor, who had advised us to abort, weighed in again, ringing with news that I had gone down with multiple sclerosis. ‘The nerves’ had left me weakened down one side of my body, pins and needles scattering through my limbs and my back.
When I mentioned the words ‘multiple sclerosis’ to the consultant at Addenbrooke’s, his pencil snapped in half.
‘MS employs the word multiple for a reason,’ he said, his eyes fixed on my vast stomach, stowing the pencil halves in the drawer of his desk. ‘No professional would diagnose you with it until you had had another deterioration. It would be no kindness to use that diagnosis at this stage.’
More than stupidly I then rang the MS Society for reassurance, and was told that it was rare to have an ‘episode’ in pregnancy. ‘The reason women are counselled not to have children’, she said, ‘is really about how quickly their symptoms deteriorate once a child is born. It is an exhausting time.’
And it is. Matthias has been back to work since we returned from hospital. When the midwife comes knocking and finds me alone, I confess to her that I don’t know what the hell I am doing.
‘Don’t worry,’ she tells me. ‘If you’ve been parented well, you’ll be fine.’
I take to my bed.
I am a terrible mother, and this knowing means I do not sleep, but lie rigid in my parents’ single bed, staring at the paper lampshade in a curtained gloom.
Soon I am worrying whether Dad has bothered to take the baby’s hat and mittens with him, and once I struggle down from that worry the next one starts to loom. They have already been gone an hour. Worry has become a convincing cover for a yawning lack of love.
I have substituted milk. The Bean feeds until he’s sick. He cries for hours. And each time he does I am unable to find the emotion to talk, or hug, or smile. Instead I lift my shirt with resignation, marooned on the sofa in front of some truly terrible daytime television, the constant pins and needles a ghostly reminder that self-catheterisation will be next.
I am not good at doing nothing either. Boredom has always felt dangerous. It is the time of day for a lynching, the time that leaves enough space for that appalling sickness for home. Made mute by the collective lies we tell ourselves about how wonderful new motherhood is, I have had no authentic conversation with anyone for months.
It will be the first time in my relationship with Mum that I am able to feel empathy for her, and what she might have gone through in those early years. It is hard enough having a single baby, without looking after two crazed stepchildren too. I try to imagine how she might have survived, and frankly can’t.
While the building works at home slow to a standstill, away in Ayr I spend a good deal of time in church, or being pleasant to fellow congregation members in tedious community hall-type settings, elderly men peering down my shirt as I feed. But all of it is better than being alone with the knowledge of how terrible I am.
But Mum and Dad are good. Here the days are not as diabolical as they were at home. There the Bean was often even more relieved than I when Matthias got in. They did baths together, they did crooning and they did love. In Scotland there is holding, and hugging too. Mum and Dad shuffle the Bean away at every opportunity so that they might sniff and tickle and poke. Each morning Dad walks along the seafront with dog and buggy. Back home, he sings. For whole hours our Bean forgets his hunger. He forgets to cry.
Through the curtained gloom I hear the dog’s claws clack along the garden path outside and fly from the room. Head full of missing mittens, hats and feeds I find Dad out in the hall, bent over the buggy, lifting the Bean from beneath his blankets. He is singing in barely audible tones:
‘If that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s going to buy …’
In the mouth of the hood the Bean’s huge brown eyes blink in that sleepy slow way babies do, as if they want to check what’s in front of them can’t disappear. When his lids reopen the Bean watches love, transfixed.
Lie 60: Let me tell you a secret
Do I kid myself that by betraying my parents, I am telling the truth?
Truth to some is less important than privacy and I have violated theirs. It will be the biggest criticism laid against me – and I deserve it.
If we are weighing up the pros and cons of truth and privacy, in their marriage perhaps it was privacy that worked for Mum more. She had a secret, a secret that she and Dad shared. It gave them an opportunity to be intimate. It also gave her power, and it gave her control.
Secrets are a burden and a glee. They create insiders and outsiders. Secrets go hand in hand with prohibition, silence, furtiveness and intimacy. Not all secrets are lies. Our vote is our secret, and the discussions we have on juries as we reach a decision on guilt are too. In fact secrets are official government policy. Or can we argue that actually these are examples of privacy rather than secrecy? To keep things private is often motivated by a respect for our audience, as much as for ourselves. Our salary, our unsightly bare bottoms, the detail of the sex we had last night nobody else needs to know, or wants to. Whereas to keep a secret is to actively hide it – to stow the evidence, for example, of a terrible run of A-level results, directly in the bin.
Jung said that secrets act like a ‘psychic poison’. They are literally unspeakable, and when told have a prohibitive price tag. We might speculate that secretive affairs enhance romantic relationships, but a paper in the Journal of Social Psychology found that, against the author’s predictions, whether it is new love or old, furtive office fucks or long-standing double lives, secrets are a burden.
Infidelity or not, many relationships are heavy with secrets. We fall in love, not thinking it will be relevant in those early days to explain why sex in a particular position is not enjoyable, and then as things progress we grow less and less comfortable with admitting the truth. Dodgy finances, an STD, giving up a child for adoption can all become secrets. With the desire to avoid disapproval, often there are more secrets in a marriage than in any other kind of relationship. The honesty and openness that a husband and wife expect can force us to sometimes bury who we are.
Secrets exclude and this is probably why they are a regular feature of life in the playground. Liberating for a child, they are power. Sean likes secrets. When I told him that I thought Mum was illegitimate, he replied:
‘Oh, I knew that, and she told me who he was.’
‘So? Go on. Who?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘What do you mean you can’t tell me?’ Even now remembering this conversation makes me furious. ‘Of course you can tell me. She’s dead.’
But he wouldn’t.
The worst secrets are those we feel we cannot speak of to anyone. Often they are inextr
icably linked to shame. One school friend told me that she would wet the bed each night, only to have to return to her own mess every evening, without ever telling a soul. At school we had to keep our failings and our mess to ourselves; to be homesick was just as much a failing as peeing the bed. My sickness was the worst secret I’ve ever had to hold.
Until my father-in-law’s ‘multiple sclerosis’ telephone diagnosis.
God, to have had more of a sense of humour. To have realised that he’s an ignorant man, who doesn’t like me at all.
But no. The pins and needles and its terror were a tale of misfortune I spoke of to no one. I said I was enjoying my new baby and I pretended I was thinking about anything other than MS.
Jung is right. This secret of mine was poison. I committed myself totally to my symptoms with a self-absorption I still feel ashamed to admit to.
In worrying how I might be judged for the pathetic way I carry sickness I am not alone. When we become terminally ill, psychologists have found, we feel that we ought to be good. We are motivated to leave a good impression. It is the last chance we are given to do an important task well.
Although Mum and Dad must have felt angry at the unfairness, terrified of what was to come, despairing over how little time there was left, neither admitted to these feelings. Always they were stoic and well behaved. In their dying they were heroic. This final secret of how difficult death is, they did not share.
Lie 61: We’ll see you for your second course of chemotherapy in a month’s time
The last time I ever spoke to Dad on the phone he was weeping. It was a cold November morning. Dark outside. In the distance I heard car doors slamming. The transportation had arrived to take him for chemotherapy. He could not walk the ten yards to the car. He had had the operation. And he had had the radiotherapy. This was the last ditch.
A glioblastoma multiforme is a hideous cancer in all respects. From one doctor’s description of ‘red and yellow’, I imagined it suppurating with pus and blood. An image on Google shows what appears to be a brain with frostbite. It is blackened around the edges. Another shows sections where a tumour has dug in, seeping custard and raspberry. Wet.
The glioblastoma multiforme grade IV grows rapidly. It invades and alters neural function and, left untreated, is lethal. The silent areas of the brain allow tumours to become large before any symptoms arise. Prognosis is poor. The median survival for patients presenting with this type of cancer is about four months with surgery, and nine months when followed up with radiotherapy. One article remarks that prolonged treatment is futile and hospitalisation should be kept to a minimum.
After that final call I flew up to help collect him from hospital. I had my daughter with me, who was ten weeks old. We were accompanied by a family friend, as my mother could not bear to go.
Let us call the friend Susan.
In retrospect, as visiting companions go, she was not a good choice. Perhaps something had ‘happened’ between her and Dad. There had been a time when they went out together, presumably because she was attempting a Christian conversion. If this were the case wires would have inevitably got crossed. I’m guessing something embarrassing ‘happened’ because every time she invited the family round, Dad was militant and slept. Slept in any chair she waved him into, bolt upright, and almost as soon as he sat down.
As I lumbered down the Glasgow Western’s windowed corridor I carried the baby in her car seat, shifting the weight from one arm to another. It was a long walk, the walls punctured by regular rectangles of safety glass. They offered views onto the wards either side. Elderly men, tucked in, ghosted each bed.
Behind me I could hear Susan struggle as she tried to keep up. She had been talking of death the length of the dual carriageway. Now there was only her breath and the rasp of her nylon tights.
Through the safety glass I searched for Dad’s face.
We had passed the fourth door before I recognised him. He was the only man fully dressed and sitting up in a chair. He gazed through the exterior window at another building that cast a shadow across the room.
As we entered, the other patients, who were still tucked up, peered at us over the turn of their sheets. My father looked round with the smile of someone who was not sure who we were. Dumping the baby on his empty bed I kissed him, and for a moment he looked bewildered, his brow wrinkled with questions he was too afraid to ask.
I thought this latent confusion was because of the baby. He didn’t think of me as a parent, but as a child. Yet it was to Susan that his eyes slid, tripping over the remains of the brain tumour and the hole it had left.
‘You’ve got your hat on, Dad,’ I said to ease the atmosphere. ‘Everyone will think you’re about to escape.’
His face relaxed. It was banter he was used to.
Susan busied herself with Dad’s possessions, her backside protruding from his locker, putting things on the bed beside his bag. Her actions seemed dubious, and he reached for the small holdall.
‘I’m just packing your bag, John,’ she shouted.
The baby whined. A nurse, in white, appeared.
‘What a wee one,’ she said, stroking a cheek. ‘Not often we get new babies like you in here.’
The baby wriggled in her car seat and began that yawing cry that would soon become a roar. Relieved to have something to do, I slumped into a chair and hauled out a breast. All the men watched with frank curiosity as the baby’s breathless whinging gave way to silence.
‘Beautiful baby, Mr Doyle,’ the nurse said. ‘Is she your granddaughter?’
‘Yes, John,’ yelled Susan from the confines of the bedside locker. ‘A new granddaughter.’
But he was more worried about his bag, clasping onto it tight. As the nurse took a turn with the rest of the patients, Susan pulled one edge of the bag towards her. She stuffed it with pyjamas, a tangerine and yesterday’s newspaper. Dad’s thin hand stretched to keep hold of the other end, exposing the hospital tag looped at his wrist.
As I continued to feed the baby another nurse arrived with a clipboard. She wore blue. My father shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He seemed to be dodging something at eye level that we could not see. The blue nurse looked from me, to my father, to Susan.
Even though Susan was slumped on the bed, wheezing from the packing exertion, she had an air of authority that we seemed to lack, for the blue nurse addressed her.
‘Two pills before breakfast for the next four days.’
‘Is everything all right, Dad?’ I asked loudly, for I could see he didn’t have his hearing aid in.
‘Something’s fallen,’ he said.
‘I can’t see anything.’ I tore the baby from my breast and placed her on the bed. ‘Shall I have a look?’
‘It’s my hat. Can you see it?’
His hat was on his head, but I knelt down, nevertheless, to look where he was gesturing.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I said from the floor. ‘Maybe it was a tissue or something, because your hat is on your head.’
‘Oh.’
The nurse in blue peered over her clipboard.
‘Mr Doyle?’ she said.
Dad looked up benignly.
‘So we’ll see you for your second course in a month’s time.’
My father was now stooping, his hands waving above the floor as if to clutch at something. I placed my hand on his arm.
‘Don’t worry. You’ve still got your hat. What is it you’re seeing?’
‘Something dark,’ he mumbled.
I picked up the baby and threw her against my shoulder. With a loud burp she emptied milk down my back.
‘Where’s Mum?’ he asked.
‘She’s at home getting supper on.’
The nurse in white broke off her tour of the beds.
‘Mr Doyle, you’re not leaving us already?’
She held out her hands and I passed her the baby, the warm wetness of the milk on my shirt already turned cold.
‘She’s a wee doll, isn’t she?’
She leant down so my father could see my daughter’s face. But Dad was trying to get up. He had heard the word ‘leaving’, and uttered by someone in uniform, it provoked action that my words – ‘escape’, ‘car’, ‘home’ – had not.
Yet co-ordination was impossible or he had not the strength for it. One hand was white as it clutched the arm of the chair from the exertion of trying to get to his feet. Each time he found a foothold on the smooth floor, he slumped down again, as if pushed. Susan bustled out to find a wheelchair.
‘It’s a long walk to the car,’ I said to him. ‘Better to get some wheels.’
Meanwhile the nurse walked the baby round from one patient to the next. I found it easier to watch her progress rather than make conversation with Dad. She sat down on the edge of one bed and the man’s face lit up. His hand moved awkwardly out from beneath the coverlet. With extreme concentration he reached out his old, shaking fingers to stroke a curled and tiny fist.
Wheels located, the nurse dropped the baby into her car seat and together we braced ourselves against the bed to heave Dad into the wheelchair. He reached out for his bag.
Between the telephone conversation in the early darkness thirty-six hours before and the Glasgow Western, my father had slipped out of reach. Like a boat watched from shore.
I picked up the plastic bottle of pills. It was light. I had imagined intravenous torture, patients honking into buckets beside the bed. But this treatment appeared humane. I tucked the bottle in beside my daughter and belted her in.
Susan and I battled out of the hospital, carrying the car seat and hauling the wheelchair between us. The chair had all the effectiveness of a defective supermarket trolley. Dad clasped his bag on his lap.
When he squeezed into the hatchback it was with a horrible groan. Though he was now thin, he still filled the space, his hat pressed against the roof of the car, knees locked uncomfortably against the dashboard. He took a deep breath when we closed the door, as if he were having to make himself small, and asked again:
A Book of Untruths Page 16