by Alison Clink
I hate it when people talk to me like this. I’ve got a headache and anyway what’s my face got to do with her?
‘I’m a bit tired,’ I say, trying to be smiley nevertheless.
‘Then would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Wonderful.’ I say, but I pass on the soggy cake.
*
In the room Adrian is sitting up, dressed. He’s still wearing the pj. trousers I bought him, which pleases me.
‘Hi, Ali,’ he says. ‘How’s the plans going for my release?’ He has an intense glare.
‘I’ve had a few problems with the bed,’ I confess. ‘But whatever happens Thursday will be the day you escape.’
‘Yeah. D-day. Bed or no bed.’
‘Exactly. If we don’t get the bed sorted in time then we’ll just have to push you upstairs to Jack’s room.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
‘There is just one more thing, though,’ I tell him. ‘Olivia won’t be your key worker once you’ve moved in with us because you won’t be in her geographical patch any longer.’
Adrian doesn’t answer but his expression says more than words could. How many more set-backs can a man handle?
‘Maybe I could ask her if she’ll stick with you?’
‘Yes, Ali. Would you mind?’
I give him a massage and he asks lots of questions about the family. I tell him about Abbie, Emily and Fran’s friend, who has just come back from a holiday in Sting’s house in Italy where she met Elton John and Pierce Brosnan who were both staying there too. How cool is that? Although Abbie didn’t seem to find the experience particularly special.
‘Elton John was there – I passed him in the hall and he said hello or something, and someone called Pierce something was there too who used to play James Bond…I didn’t take much notice of them to be perfectly honest…’
‘I’d love to do something like that! I was so envious when she told me. And the way she just brushed it off as if they weren’t interesting.’
‘I’ve never been bothered by celebrities,’ Adrian says. (Uh, he so is! After all he is my mother’s son.) ‘But I did once go to John Cleese’s house.’
As I rub my hands up and down the loose skin on his back, he tells me his John Cleese story.
‘It was about ten years ago. When I was going out with a girl called Hilary. She got invited to John Cleese’s house to a dinner party and I went with her. There were lots of people there and I didn’t get to talk to him. I was hoping Connie Booth would be there but of course he’d divorced her years before. I’m not sure who he was married to at that time but he had a woman with him. He had a lot of problems I think. I had a book he’d written with his psychiatrist – Life and How to Survive It. I only read half of it. I’m pretty sure it didn’t provide the answers to any of life’s unanswerable questions.’
‘What was his house like?’
‘Nice. From what I remember. He’s a very wealthy guy.’
‘Wow. You’re so lucky. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone famous. Certainly never been invited to a dinner party at a famous person’s house. Although I did once go to a party in a London flat that belonged to Roy Jenkins but only because a friend of mine knew his son. I still remember the room we were in with walls covered in bookcases from floor to ceiling. I saw the Queen once in a car in Hammersmith but I can’t think of anyone famous I’ve met. Only writers like Fay Weldon and Helen Dunmore.’ Lost in thought, I rub my hands down the backs of his arms. ‘Oh, and I once saw Gail from Coronation Street outside Marks and Spencer in Hammersmith.’
‘Who’s she? I don’t watch Coronation Street.’
‘Oh, and Rowan Atkinson in a shopping mall in Hammersmith. Jimmy Nail was in The Rutland once and David Hemmings was outside The Blue Anchor. In fact one of the actors from The Bill, Simon Rouse, lived opposite us. I knew him before he was famous. But you definitely take the celeb meeting trophy with your John Cleese encounter.’
He laughs. ‘Not sure about that. He certainly wasn’t as funny as he is on screen. Thanks for the massage, Ali,’ he says, pulling the sheet back over him. ‘I’m a bit worried about my eyes. They seem a bit up and down. This morning they were blurred and I couldn’t read the paper. But I can see okay now. I hope it’s not glaucoma or something.’ He taps the side of the bed. ‘Nothing serious. Touch wood.’
Oddly, although at the same time reassuringly, Adrian seems to be thinking of himself as a well man now the C.diff has gone again.
‘Maybe you should have an eye test.’ I say these words lightly but deep down I fear what might lie ahead. Blindness could result from cancer in the brain. But he had a brain scan in St George’s and the result was negative. If the cancer spreads to the brain, it could damage the optic nerve, I suppose. But what do I know? I’m only guessing.
Wednesday 22nd August 2007
The study is now spotless. I had no idea I was sharing my work space with so much dust, so many spiders and useless pieces of paper. Only the computer desk and two bookcases remain.
Like most weekdays I’m alone for most of today. The girls are out most of the day usually at a friend’s house, not returning till early evening. Peter, Jack and Ed are all working long hours. I’ve hardly spoken to anyone all day and I’m beginning to wonder what’s happened to the bed.
Time is slipping away. It’s only a matter of hours until the Big Day, but all I’ve done to prepare is wash things. My washing line sags beneath rows of towels, sheets and clothes. The downstairs loo is unrecognisably sanitary. I have a bed-sized space in my newly clean study. But no bed. I phone the social worker at Dorothy House.
‘There’s been a meeting about your brother’s needs,’ she says.
‘He’s coming to my house tomorrow and I’m feeling stressed. Especially as the bed hasn’t arrived.’
‘Don’t worry. The bed will come and there will be lots of support on offer. But you do realise you may have to stay up all night with him sometimes. How do you feel about this aspect of his care?’
‘I have four children, so being kept up at night isn’t alien to me,’ I tell her. But am I ready to stay up all night with an adult – in a non-drunken-party-type situation? I’m uneasy about the night time duties, but don’t share my misgivings with the social worker. I don’t want anything to get in the way of the Big Day. She asks me, for the second time, if I’ve found out from St Vincent’s what they specifically are doing for Adrian.
‘No I haven’t mentioned this to the matron yet,’ I confess. ‘I saw her yesterday and had to ask her for Adrian’s food which hadn’t been forthcoming. Engaging her in conversation about my brother once in a day is enough for me. I find her quite intimidating, I’m afraid.’ I feel like a wimp, but regrettably this is true.
*
Louise from Wandsworth Council has been trying to get hold of me. I’ve several missed calls from her on my phone. Adrian rings me to say she’s rung him too.
‘I know she’s the one holding the purse strings for Wandsworth but she had a real go at me when I told her I’m leaving here tomorrow. I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Telling me I should stay here. How the hell can someone like her tell me where I can and cannot live? It’s ludicrous.’
‘I’m not entirely surprised,’ I say. ‘I had a feeling she might take this attitude. Although, I agree, it is absurd.’
Adrian’s voice is even more croaky than usual. ‘I said to this Louise woman, “Look, love. I’m dying. I’m not spending the last days of my life living somewhere I don’t want to be.” That shut her up…’ He’s too upset to carry on.
‘Would you like me to talk to her? She’s got no reason to react like this, especially as I left her a voicemail on Monday giving her prior warning that you were leaving St Vincent’s.’
‘Yes, can you talk to her?’
Later I ring Louise. She didn’t get my voicemail.
‘Louise, I think you’ve upset my brother. But I don’t understand why, as I made sure his leaving date would be on the
last day we’ve paid for, so Wandsworth didn’t have to fork out for the whole of the next month.’
‘It’s very sweet of you to worry about the multi-million pound Borough of Wandsworth,’ she says without the merest hint of sarcasm.
So she is on our side after all.
‘It’s all fine. Wandsworth will help with funding after Adrian has moved in with you if you need any nursing support.’
I tell her a bit about St Vincent’s to reinforce our justification for moving on. About the broken lifts, the masses of olds stranded upstairs, defective showers, help buttons that don’t make any noise – the inmates could be calling for help all night and no one would know. The inedible food. I have first-hand experience of the wet cake. Louise sounds shocked.
‘You love your brother?’ she says gently, abruptly changing the mood of the conversation. She’s softly spoken with a South African accent. Her remark is somewhere between a statement of fact and a question. Unexpectedly, I’m lost for words. Her attitude is so much at odds with what I was expecting. Either she’s been thinking this over between talking to Adrian and talking to me, or he’d misinterpreted what she said. I suspect the former and gather myself together.
‘Yes,’ I squeak.
*
Adrian rings again, but in a much more cheerful frame of mind. He’s had a visit from Olivia and a doctor from Dorothy House.
‘The doctor examined me and listened to my chest. He told me I’m not about to drop dead in three days’ time! This doc seems to be saying the cancer isn’t as bad as I’ve been led to believe.’
‘Wow. That is really good news.’
I feel sucked in by this new turn of events. But hasn’t this doctor seen Adrian? Why is he so skeletal? Or is his weight loss due to the C.diff? And how can this doctor contradict what the others at St George’s said, when they were the ones who saw all the scans, X-rays and results of the biopsies? I’m desperate to believe him but at the same time I’m sceptical. And if I’m honest, I feel mild panic about the length of time I’ll be giving up my study. Of course I want him to survive, but my preparations are for a short-term set-up. And yet how can I even think about all this in terms of a room?
Because I’m desperate to get away on holiday. Because I long and need to get back to my own work. Because I need to slot back again into my own family. What a mad hotchpotch of conflicting emotions.
‘Phil G came to see me again,’ Adrian says. ‘I want to go up to London with him. Phil’s arranging everything. He’ll meet me off the train at Paddington.’
‘That’s great. A really good plan. I think it would do you good,’ I say, even though I’m sure this could never happen. I remember what Matron said about Adrian having an unrealistic grasp of what he could and couldn’t do and I know in my heart he couldn’t even board a train on his own.
‘Yeah. I really want to go back to my flat. You know, I’ve lived there for twenty-two years. I didn’t have a chance to sort things out properly when I left. You know, when you and Peter came up.’
‘Yes, of course, I understand. You need to go back.’
‘Hey, Ali, and another thing. Phil was saying we’ve had our first customers for the London Walks business. So, looks like the biz is taking off after all.’ He’s referring to an off-shoot of their original business plan which consists of corporate walks around London, followed by pub quizzes.
‘This is really exciting. Our first customers. Though apparently they’re members of the Royal National Institute for the Blind, so I’m not sure how much of it they will be able to see. Phil wants me to make up all the questions for the quiz they’ll do at the end of the walk.’
‘How brilliant,’ I say, although at the same time wondering whether the visually impaired are their ideal inaugural clientele. ‘Brilliant,’ I say again. ‘A new beginning.’
Thursday 23rd August 2007
My alarm goes off at six-thirty. A British Telecom engineer is coming to mend our phone extension ready for when Adrian arrives. The phone in the living room hasn’t been working for over a year, everyone has been using the extension in the study. But now we’ll need to use the living room one again to give Adrian privacy.
At nine a man rings regarding the delivery of a commode. I give him directions to our house.
This is it. The events of this strange day have begun.
The day we’ve chosen for the big move turns out to be one of the hottest and sunniest this summer. All morning I wait for delivery of the bed, putting the girls on dog-walking duty for the third day in a row. At midday a commode arrives but the man from Medequip who delivers all the equipment in a big van assures me there has been no order for a bed.
‘What? I can’t believe it.’ I sound embarrassingly like Victor Meldew. The Medequip man is apologetic but keen to get on with his other deliveries.
I ring the District Nurses.
‘There was never going to be a bed. Your brother doesn’t qualify. You have to be bed-bound with only a few days to live in order to qualify, and we’ve contacted St Vincent’s and they say he’s up and fully mobile. This means he doesn’t qualify. And we’ve told you this already.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but I talked to the social worker at Dorothy House and got the impression she was organising a bed for us via another route.’
‘There is no other route,’ the District Nurse informs me emphatically.
In mounting desperation and with one eye on the clock I phone Dorothy House.
The social worker, Gill, says, ‘They should supply a bed because Adrian has a continuing care package.’
I’m truly panicking now because it’s gone half-two and I still haven’t collected him and I still haven’t got a bed. There’s no way he’d make it up the stairs in our house, my suggestion to push him up was facetious, and no, we don’t have a Stannah Stairlift. Could I get one installed in the next couple of hours? No.
*
Meanwhile, Adrian has texted me to say I should pick him up by five because of ‘male help’ being gone after then. I phone him and say I’m coming, but the bed isn’t.
‘Sod the bed,’ he says. ‘Just get me out of here.’
I can see why he’s so impatient, but I don’t want to sod the bed. I think about Helibeds in Trowbridge and their irritating advert on the telly. Order at lunchtime and deliver by bedtime.
Could half-past-two be considered lunchtime? In the world of Helibeds maybe not. I log onto their website. The orthopaedic bed I saw in the Trowbridge branch is on sale for three hundred pounds less online than in their shop. But delivery is four weeks. So much for their order by lunchtime promise and their picture of a cartoon bed with helicopter blades on top.
I go on eBay. Someone has an identical bed but there’s a bid for 99p on it. How does eBay work? I wish I’d fathomed this out before now. I manage to get myself an ID number and a password and decide to email the seller, who, I notice, is also doing a roaring trade in jigsaw puzzles. One of her jigsaw purchasers has pasted the following comment – ‘I can’t wait to make it up!’ I express my interest in buying her bed and offer one hundred pounds if we can collect tonight, which might just be possible as she lives in Wootton Bassett.
The phone rings. It’s the District Nurse. A bed is coming. What are they trying to do to me?
‘I do apologise but we didn’t know Adrian had a continuing care package.’ Does this mean Wandsworth are still picking up the tab for any help we get? I don’t ask. I’m so relieved. I log off from eBay and cry a few tears before preparing myself for the next round.
Peter rings offering to leave work early and collect Adrian.
‘That would be a great help. Then I can wait at home for the bed.’
*
An hour later I glance out of the window and see two figures walking down the front path. Peter and Adrian. Adrian, swaying a bit and holding onto Peter’s arm. The late afternoon sun is still fierce in the sky. Adrian looks almost dapper in his Panama hat.
My heart moves in m
y chest.
He’s made it.
*
He settles in the garden with a glass of wine and a wide smile. Ten minutes later the bed arrives. Literally a hospital bed – probably circa 1920. I’m thinking even further back – the Boer War. Florence Nightingale. The Black Death. I resist the urge to burst into the fifties pop song “Any Old Iron”. Two men carry its components into the study and assemble it. The thing looks unmanageable – but, they put it together. I thank them, take a deep breath, swallow hard, blink away another tear and join Adrian in the garden.
We sit at the table under the parasol soaking up the heat of the early evening sun. Adrian is busy texting both Phils and Carol.
‘Ali, how do you spell yippee. Is it one p or two?’
‘I think it’s two, Adrian,’ I tell him, but it doesn’t really matter. He’s home.
Yippee indeed. (It is two.)
*
We have dinner with Jack and Willow. Roast lamb. Adrian only has meat and potato and leaves most of his, but he does have strawberries with cream for afters. It’s so wonderful to see him here, no longer a prisoner in St Colditz. His new bedroom in the study is cosy and warm – even if the bed is like something from a documentary on the History Channel.
Eventually I leave him downstairs and turn in for the night. The study is directly underneath our bedroom, which means I can hear him from our bed. He’s mumbling and making a lot of grunting noises. I nudge Peter awake.
‘Can you hear Adrian? He’s talking.’
‘He’s probably on his mobile.’
‘No. I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound like he’s talking on the phone. And anyway it’s a bit late to be phoning people.’
‘Do you want me to go down and check he’s okay?’
‘No, it’s alright. I’ll go.’
Peter has to be up early for work tomorrow. I drag myself out of bed and go down to the study. Adrian is lying in the dark in the Any Old Iron bed with the portable commode at his side.