by Cathy Kelly
‘Doug’s here!’ yelled Mel unnecessarily as Leonie arrived.
‘Great,’ lied Leonie. She hated facing him but there was no option. Fixing a bright smile on to her face, she went into the sitting room where Doug was watching television with Danny.
Doug immediately got up. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.
‘Sorry, can’t,’ Leonie trilled. ‘I’ve got a date with Hugh,’ she lied.
‘No you haven’t…’ began Danny.
Leonie silenced him with a killer look.
‘About last week, I’m so sorry, Leonie. Caitlin turned up and I had to talk to her…’
‘Fine,’ Leonie said brightly, backing out of the room. ‘Whatever. I have to go. Bye.’
She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door shut. Then she fell on to the bed, mindless of the fact that she was still wearing her filthy walking clothes, and burst into tears.
He phoned on Saturday.
‘Say I’m out,’ Leonie whispered.
‘She says to tell you she’s out,’ Danny told Doug.
Leonie rolled her eyes. Tactful it wasn’t. Well, it might give him the message that their friendship was over, Leonie decided. If Doug was going to be superglued to the nauseous Caitlin for the rest of his life, Leonie didn’t want to have to witness it.
On Sunday, she was walking Penny when she spotted Doug’s Jeep coming down the road. Frantic to avoid him, she leapt into a nearby field, to Penny’s delight. The sheep in the field looked horrified. ‘We’ll only be here a moment,’ Leonie reassured them from her hiding place just inside the gate.
Life went on as usual. Abby enquired why Doug hadn’t been round to dinner since they’d got back from America.
‘I don’t know,’ Leonie lied. ‘He’s busy with a painting, I think.’
Abby gave her mother a knowing look. ‘And you expect me to believe that?’ she said.
Leonie groaned. ‘Not you, too. It’s like being on Oprah and being advised by the audience on what to do with your life.’
‘You’re not happy, Mom,’ Abby said. ‘Anybody can see that.’
‘I’m tired, Abby, that’s all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to put some washing in the machine.’
Another week limped by. Leonie was on auto pilot for most of it. It was her weekend on in the surgery and on Saturday, the place was jammed with clients and shivering animals. Leonie was monitoring a neutered rabbit when the phone rang for Angie.
‘Keep an eye on the rabbit, will you?’ Leonie asked Louise. ‘I have to get Angie.’
She went into the second surgery and stopped dead. There, holding a quivering and howling Jasper on the examining table, was Doug. He looked harassed, his hair was windswept and he was wearing his walking clothes. He looked tired. Too much sex, she thought grimly.
‘What’s wrong with Jasper?’ she asked immediately.
Recognizing his old friend, Jasper wagged his plumy tail weakly.
‘Poor love,’ she said, stroking his head.
‘He’s hurt his paw. The dew claw has been ripped away from the flesh.’ Angie was preparing to numb the area.
Jasper howled with the pain and howled even louder when Angie approached him. She had that vet smell, Leonie knew, the smell all dogs hated.
‘There’s a phone call for you,’ Leonie told her. ‘Mrs McCarthy, about her cat. It’s urgent.’
‘Right. I’ll be back in a moment.’
Angie left the room.
‘Why have you been avoiding me?’ Doug asked quietly.
Leonie wouldn’t look at him. She kept her head facing Jasper, who had stopped howling but was pleading with her to let him get out of this horrible place.
‘I haven’t been avoiding you,’ Leonie said sharply. ‘I’ve been busy with my life, the way you’ve been busy with yours.’
‘I haven’t been busy,’ Doug replied. ‘I’ve been lonely and depressed. There’s been nobody dropping round at all hours making sure I take my vitamins or dragging me out of the studio to get some fresh air. Nobody to invite me to dinner and feed me home-made lasagne. Nobody to laugh with and talk to.’
Leonie found she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled slowly and shakily. ‘What about Caitlin?’ she asked. ‘The love of your life has come back, you don’t need boring old me to make you coffee or talk to. You’ve got Ms Wonderful to do that with you.’
Before he could reply, Angie swept back into the room. Jasper whimpered again.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said, staring at Leonie, who was very pale around the mouth.
‘I must go,’ Leonie said and ran from the room.
She hid in the loo for a few minutes until she was sure she had overcome the desire to cry. Then she went back to look after the rabbit. They were short-staffed today and there were so many animals to keep an eye on; she couldn’t leave it all to Louise and Helen.
She’d just closed the rabbit’s cage a few minutes later when Angie appeared, followed by Doug and Jasper, who was panting happily and holding up his front paw which was now expertly bandaged.
‘You’re not allowed in here,’ Leonie yelped. ‘Jasper’s better now. You should go home.’
Angie took Jasper’s lead from Doug, who advanced until he was standing very close to her. She could smell the distinctive scent of oil paints and there was a smudge of yellow ochre on his shirt.
‘You can fix his paw,’ Doug said, ‘but you can’t fix my heart.’
Leonie stared tremulously up at him.
All the nurses were watching. Even the animals in the cages were interested. Watching humans having a heart-melting drama was more fun than watching the nurses approach with injections and rectal thermometers.
‘Doug, what are you on about?’ Leonie said, desperately trying to control her emotions.
‘You – I’m on about you. You’ve been avoiding me for two weeks. You won’t go for walks with me and you never come to the studio for coffee any more.’
‘This is hardly the place to talk about it,’ she squeaked.
‘You won’t talk to me at home, so I had to come here.’
‘And you hurt poor Jasper to get me to talk to you?’ she enquired.
‘No, Jasper knew I was desperate and when he came home today limping, it was the ultimate sacrifice.’
Even at a moment like this, Doug could make her laugh.
‘I’ve never met anybody who can jump to conclusions like you do,’ he added.
‘That’s true,’ Louise interjected.
Leonie gasped at the injustice of it all.
‘You were convinced that German Shepherd’s leg was broken when it wasn’t,’ Louise pointed out.
‘That’s not jumping to conclusions, that’s imagining the worst-case scenario so you can make the correct decision. I’d prefer to over-react than under-react,’ Leonie said.
‘You over-reacted when you saw me with Caitlin,’ Doug said softly. ‘I couldn’t bring you to the airport because I had to comfort her. She was in bits because she wanted us to get back together and I told her it was out of the question, that I was in love with someone else.’
Leonie felt tears prickle behind her eyes.
Jasper, getting bored, howled.
‘Quiet, Jasper,’ warned Angie. ‘This is better than Coronation Street.’
Everyone laughed. Doug reached out and pulled Leonie towards him. ‘I love you, Leonie. If I have to tell you in front of an audience, I will, because I’m crazy about you and that’s the only way you’ll believe me.’ He raised his voice. ‘I, Doug Mansell, am madly in love with Leonie Delaney, mother-of-three, big softie and jumper-to-conclusions.’
The audience clapped and the animals who weren’t recovering from anaesthetics joined in, howling, barking, yelping and flapping their wings.
‘Really?’ Leonie said, leaning against him weakly.
Doug kissed the top of her head because her face was buried against his shirt.
‘Really. I’ve spent the past week trying to t
alk to you and if it hadn’t been for Abby, I wouldn’t have said anything because you made me think you were still with that bastard Hugh.’
‘Abby?’
‘She’s been plotting with me. If Jasper hadn’t rushed things by hurting his paw, I’d have been round this evening to drag you away. Abby is packing a suitcase and I was going to whisk you off to Kilkenny for a romantic few days away. Mount Juliet, two days in a beautiful country estate.’
The audience sighed at the romance of it all.
‘I figured the masterful approach was the best, seeing as you refused to even talk to me.’
‘I’ll kill Abby, the little wretch. She could have told me,’ Leonie said.
‘You can’t. She’s looking after the dogs for us,’ Doug said. ‘Will you come?’
Leonie rubbed the paint off his shirt, then patted his beard. ‘Yes, I’d love to.’
The girls sighed again.
‘We can’t disappoint them,’ Doug said, a wicked glint in his eyes. ‘They need a kiss for the end of the matinee performance.’ And he kissed her so hard that Leonie had to lean against the medicine cupboard to stop herself from falling over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Seven months later
As she listened to the six o’clock news on the kitchen radio, Emma cut the steaming chicken breast into small pieces and then ladled a large spoon of mashed potato on to the plate. She’d made some gravy for her father’s dinner but knew it would be a mistake to give any to her mother. Gravy went the same way as things like baked beans or dark pasta sauces: all over either Emma or the floor. It was an inexplicable fact that the only occasions Anne-Marie became upset at meal times were when she was eating something with the capability to stain. With pale foods, she fed herself quietly with the plastic fork or meekly let herself be fed. With bolognaise sauce, she became agitated and hurled her fork across the room, splattering the furniture and walls till the place resembled a bit of modern art. It was like feeding a child, Emma had thought on many occasions. An adult-sized child who could be surprisingly strong.
‘Mum,’ she called now, putting the plate on the kitchen table along with a cup of lukewarm tea. ‘Mum, dinner is ready.’
When her mother didn’t appear, she went looking. Anne-Marie was in the dining room vigorously attempting to open the patio doors. It was her favourite occupation after pacing around the house restlessly and only the fact that the doors were permanently locked with the key carefully hidden meant she couldn’t escape. Three months ago, when she’d disappeared one night and had been – mercifully – discovered by the next-door neighbours standing crying in their front garden, Emma had insisted that all the doors and windows remained locked.
Jimmy, shattered by his wife’s sudden disappearance from their bed at three in the morning, had nodded mutely. The house was now a mini-Colditz. Anne-Marie had proved herself to be remarkably resourceful at climbing out of wide-open windows. Complicated window locks that allowed windows to be opened no more than a fraction were the only option. Child-proof fasteners on the cupboards and drawers were another innovation, along with a plastic cover for the front of the video after she broke the previous one by sticking a tape in backwards which jammed the mechanism. It would be awful during the hot months of the summer, Emma knew, when they’d long to throw open all the windows. But Emma wondered what would have happened by then. Would her mother still be living at home? She was deteriorating so fast, Emma was sure her father wouldn’t be able to cope for much longer. Not that he was coping that well now.
Today, a cool Friday evening in March, Anne-Marie was in a calm mood and patted Emma’s arm gently as she was led into the kitchen for her dinner. Emma put sugar in the tea, then sat down beside her mother to see whether she needed help or not. Or not was this evening’s answer. Attacking her meal hungrily, Anne-Marie stared into space as she chewed. Her once-pretty face was now devoid of expression a lot of the time, except when she was unaccountably afraid. Those times, her big eyes were wide with some unspoken fear. Fear was one of the few emotions left to her these days. Today, her face was a blank canvas, her eyes glazed over and the muscles slack as she chewed slowly with her mouth open. Emma had never realized how much a person’s face relied upon emotions until her mother had become ill. She’d assumed your face was your face, sometimes lit up with thoughtfulness or happiness, always marked with some sort of expression even when you were mentally miles away.
But watching a woman succumbing to the horrible grip of Alzheimer’s made it clear to her: the brain was everything. When that was slowly being eaten away by the ruthless progression of the illness, the face became just another body part. All the humour or intelligence seemed to have faded away. Anne-Marie didn’t talk much any more; except for murmured ramblings or the occasional angry moments when she threw things and then cried pitifully for Jimmy.
She still said people’s names out loud and she recognized them – Emma, Kirsten, Jimmy, and Pete especially for some reason. But putting the right name to the face was often beyond her. She called Emma ‘Kirsten’ most of the time, which Emma no longer minded. She was thinking ahead to the time when her mother wouldn’t recognize her and wouldn’t be able to call her anything.
‘She’ll know you’re important to her but she won’t actually know who you are any more,’ the kind Alzheimer specialist had explained to them all on the sobering day three months previously when he’d made his diagnosis.
Of all of them, Jimmy had been the most shocked by those words. Emma had long since read every book about progressive dementias that she could lay her hands on. She knew all the painful details, from the slow, gradual loss of faculties to the final indignities of incontinence, and liquid meals if, as sometimes happened, the patient stopped being able to swallow. With her usual forbearance, she’d forced herself to read every horrible detail.
Kirsten refused to look at any of the books her sister bought, while Jimmy had resolutely insisted that there was nothing wrong that couldn’t be cured.
An operation, he said gruffly, that’s what was needed.
He’d built a lovely conservatory for this doctor once and the man knew all about brain surgery. That was it.
They trekked to see a neurological specialist who had looked candidly at Emma across the room and kindly tried to explain to Jimmy O’Brien that it was unlikely that any surgery could help his wife. He could probably have explained what was wrong with her but, instead, recommended them to the gentle, helpful Alzheimer expert who’d managed to impart his dreadful news as compassionately as he knew how.
Only an autopsy would confirm his suspicions, he explained, because of the nature of dementias. But he was pretty certain Anne-Marie O’Brien had Alzheimer’s. She would eventually need twenty-four-hour nursing care.
Jimmy had looked as if he might cry for the first time in his life. His big shoulders were slumped in defeat, he wasn’t the booming, hearty Father Christmas any more, but a broken shell of a man. Kirsten looked out of the consulting room window, her face impenetrable. Only Emma had talked to the specialist, discussing what they should do for the present, what sort of treatment, if any, Anne-Marie would benefit from, and what nursing homes he could recommend. Jimmy and Kirsten went outside: Jimmy to sit with his wife, who’d been outraged to be left with the specialist’s nurse while the rest of them went in for a chat; Kirsten for a forbidden cigarette.
It was easier to talk frankly without them in the room.
‘My father has trouble dealing with this,’ Emma said.
‘It’s hard for everyone. I can’t think of many people who would find it easy,’ the specialist replied. ‘The difficulty is that you will be the person coping until the others come to terms with your mother’s illness. Your sister also has trouble with it…?’ he probed gently.
Emma nodded. Now was not the time to get into Kirsten’s blinkered view of life. Like the naughty toddlers who thought that if they covered their eyes and couldn’t see you, you could no longer see them, Ki
rsten believed that nothing could hurt her unless she actually looked it straight in the eye.
‘In practical terms,’ Emma began, getting out a notebook to record exactly what he said, ‘where do we go from here? How long is my mother likely to continue the way she is now?’
At the time, she was often agitated and, while talkative, couldn’t remember conversations or incidents or even meals. Minutes after having lunch, she’d angrily complain that she was being starved and wanted something to eat.
The specialist explained that it was impossible to work that out. The illness progressed at different speeds. Some people stayed at one level for ages; others, like Anne-Marie, became worse with dizzying speed.
He pointed out that Alzheimer’s worked along a step system: a person could be on one level for a while, then drop to the next step, never to go back up. The descent was irreversible.
Drugs could help in the early stages but, ultimately, the progression continued. Because Anne-Marie was a young patient, she could live many years with the illness. Moreover, as she was energetic and had a tendency to move around a lot, caring for her could ultimately be harder than for an older, less mobile person. She would need a secure, specialized unit which would inevitably be expensive. If she became more agitated than she was now, he would advise admitting her to the psychiatric hospital to try and help her with drug therapy which would at least help her to sleep.
‘Some people wear themselves out walking constantly; others want to eat all the time because they forget they’ve been fed, and then they put on huge amounts of weight. Every patient is different, each one is unique. But,’ he leaned forward in his chair, ‘the patient isn’t the only patient, if you understand what I mean. The whole family is affected by Alzheimer’s. The family needs to be looked after and often that’s where the biggest problems occur. The principal carer has a lot to put up with. Will you be the principal carer?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I have a job and, up till now, my father was trying to work from home on the phone. I’d drop in every evening to see how things were going. But the past month, he’s had to take time off because my mother wouldn’t let him leave in the morning.’