“Left leg back a bit” I say for the second time, “Bring your body round towards me.”
He tries to move. Nothing happens. I tap his left thigh, indicating the leg I want him to move, but he doesn’t respond. He’s still crying and time isn’t on our side.
“You have to move that left leg” I tell him, “You have to help us.”
I can feel him making a huge effort. My mother is staring up at him, her face flushed with the Martini. Finally, the right leg inches forward.
“Wrong one” I say, “Wrong leg. It’s got to be the left leg. And it’s got to come backwards.”
He’s shaking his head now. He wants to sit down. He’s exhausted.
“The leg” I repeat. “The left leg. Move it. Backwards. Towards me.”
Very slowly, he shakes his head. His knuckles are white on the Zimmer frame.
“I can’t” he mutters, “I don’t know how to.”
The following morning, exactly a week after my father lost his wits, we hold an impromptu case conference. With us in the kitchen is Sue, our social worker, and Hillary, the carer who’s done most for my father over the last year or so. Sue has been over the road to take a precautionary look at my dad and is in no doubt that the latest TIA has perched him on a very precarious ledge indeed. Sitting in bed, he’d gazed up at Sue.
“It’s hard standing up like this” he’d announced solemnly, “I don’t feel at all steady.”
Lin and I have already mapped out what we rather grandly call a strategy. Moving them out of their flat isn’t an option. Both my mother and my father have a deep-seated horror of nursing homes and I see absolutely no reason why their lives - honourably led - should contract to a strange room and institutional cooking. We may have had our problems as a family but their love has been unconditional and the least I can now do is return that support. At the same time, both Lin and I agree that having them living with us would be a nightmare. In practical terms it simply wouldn’t work - for one thing, the bathroom is upstairs - but the real reason is emotional. We’re blessed with a wonderful marriage. We regularly close the door on the outside world and that, I’m afraid, matters more than anything else.
This decision of ours simplifies the discussion no end. Between us, Lin and I already do all the shopping, all the laundry, some of the cooking, and most of the cleaning. Hilary washes and dresses my father in the mornings. We regularly check up during the day. I put him to bed at night. All that’s left is what Sue rather delicately calls “toiletting”.
So far, my mother has been able to cope with the potty and the commode but after last night’s pantomime I rather fancy those days may be over. We all exchange glances. There’s talk of pads and nappies but I’m far from certain that my mother will give them house room. One way or another, someone’s got to be on call to wrestle father from the riser chair to the commode. The implications of this give our rather smug talk of “strategy” a totally new spin. I write novels for a living. The office where I work is six miles away but there’s absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t clear a space for myself at home. We have a room upstairs with a computor and a desk. Writers travel light. It’ll be nice to have a change.
Sue, the social worker, has seen this kind of compassionate entrapment before. She’s kind enough not to spell it out but she clearly feels obliged to sound the gentlest warning.
“This could go on for quite a while” she says, “You ought to be aware of that.”
I mutter something about being an only child but in truth I’m just a little numbed. After a lifetime’s efforts, my dad has finally pinned me down and the irony - alas - is that he’s far too daft to realise it.
Six
That night I go across to the flat at half past six. I’ve spent far longer than I should trying to figure out the strange inner tides that govern my dad’s new life and I’ve decided that after supper is the likeliest time for him to need the commode. My mother has always preferred to save the day’s biggest meal for the evening and the bits of lamb chop I recover from his lap are the remains of that ritual. When I walked into the room, my father seemed almost cogent again. He looked up, a smile on his face.
“Hallo mate?” he said, “How are you?”
Now, moments later, he watches my hands crabbing over his cardigan, bewildered again.
“How were the chops?” I ask him.
“The what, dear?”
“The chops. The chops you had for supper.”
“I don’t know.”
My mother hovers over both of us, staring down at him. Over the last couple of years, her features have sagged and her jaw hangs down, giving her a slightly pugnacious look. The lines of her face are etched deep with worry but there’s anger in there too. You can see it, sense it. She’s never had much time for laziness. Deep down, I suspect she thinks my father’s making a lot of this up.
In due course, I persuade him onto the commode. I’ve positioned it in front of the telly because he hates performing to order and I and my mother beat a retreat to the kitchen to give him a little privacy. We pass the time by going through the lower compartments in her deep freeze. Lin and I do this regularly, searching for the fresh food my mother buries under the clothes-pegged bags of frozen peas, but we’d obviously missed the packet of BestValue sausages, nineteen months beyond their eat-by date.
Back in the living room, my father is slumped on the commode, his head tilted at an odd angle. Sensing movement behind him, his right arm comes up to protect himself. I wonder quite what he’s been expecting but when I lay my hand on his shoulder, trying to comfort him, he ignores me. He’s staring at the little carriage clock perched on the top of the bow-fronted cabinet. The workings of the clock are exposed, two tiny wheels spinning one way, then the other, and his head tilts slightly as he struggles to follow the movements. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Time dribbling away.
I bend to the commode. It’s obvious that something’s happened but I’m not quite sure whether he’s finished or not. When I ask, he doesn’t answer. He’s still staring at the bloody wheels.
“It’s a clock” I explain, “Can you tell me the time?”
“The what?”
“The time.”
He shakes his head, looking round at me. The whites of his eyes are starting to yellow.
“I don’t know” he says.
Three hours later, I’m back again to put him to bed. My mother has already changed and she’s standing in the tiny hall in her blue quilted dressing gown, staring into space. The sound of a boiling saucepan comes from the kitchen. She drinks a lot of tea and if she can’t manage to finish a mugful, she saves it to reheat later.
“Hallo dear” she says vaguely, “I thought it might be you.”
I undress my father in the riser chair and slip on his pyjamas, first the top and then the bottoms. My mother usually warms the pyjamas on the kitchen radiator (“DO NOT COVER”) but for some reason, this evening, she’s forgotten. Feeling the cold kiss of the Debenhams heavy-duty cotton my father shivers.
“Oooooh.....” he mutters, “Chilly.......”
Ready for bed, I get him out of the riser and onto the Zimmer frame. The wheelchair, brakes on, is two steps away. To my infinite relief, he seems to manage the sideways shuffle. He sinks heavily into the chair, his head back, his eyes closed. Looking at the expression on his face, you’d think he’d just finished a marathon.
I push him along the hall and into the bedroom. This is a routine now, familiar, comfortable, much rehearsed. I know exactly where to pre-position the Zimmer frame, straddling the angle between the chest of drawers and the big double bed. I know exactly where to park the wheelchair, comfortably within reach of the chest of drawers. My father bends forward, one hand on the Zimmer frame, one hand on the chest of drawers, levering himself upwards. For one tiny moment, he’s almost vertical, swaying slightly, trying to decide which way to turn. Brakes off, I pull the wheelchair away, step into the vacated space, and haul him backwards and sideways, trusting o
n gravity and his own bulk to do the rest. It’s my favourite step in this strange nightly pas-de-deux, curiously graceful, and my father collapses backwards onto the bed, as surprised and as frightened as he was last night and the night before and the night before that. His eyes have closed again. He’s puffing hard.
“Don’t do that” he says, “Don’t do it.”
“I have to. It’s the easiest way.”
I bend to his feet. Since I can remember, he’s always worn a thick elasticated stocking on his right leg, a crude remedy for varicose veins, and although the stocking no longer serves any real medical purpose, the ritual of putting it on in the mornings and wrestling it off at night seems to offer him some comfort.
“Socks next.”
My mother, already in bed, is half-watching us. She’s been reading a novel of mine for nearly a year now. When I last checked, she’d got to page 36.
“OK, mum?”
“Fine, dear, thank you.”
I wriggle my fingers up my father’s leg and start to unroll the stocking. My father’s eyes are open. He has a message for me. He’s trying to sort the words out.
“I need to do something in the bucket” he says at last.
He tries to roll sideways. I restrain him.
“You’ve done it” I remind him. “Big job.”
“What?”
“Big job. Really big job.”
He tries to roll sideways again. Mercifully, it’s beyond him. He comes to rest with a sigh. Then he nods.
“Big job” he agrees.
Seven
The weekend brings Tom, my eldest. He’s driven down from Beaconsfield with his climbing gear and his power tools to work his magic on a neighbour’s tree. The tree has got out of control and we spend the morning pruning it back. With his hair full of pink cherry blossom, Tom looks like the fairy queen.
By two o’clock, the work is over. The weather is glorious, the first real taste of sunshine, and back home I retreat to the garden with a pot of tea and yesterday’s copy of The Guardian. Moments later, there’s a knock on the door. My mother again, worried about my dad. He needs to go to the loo. It’s beyond her to get him out of the chair. Can I pop over and sort him out? Of course I can. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why we’re rearranged our lives, our routines.
I let her into the flats across the road through the locked communal front entrance. Down the hall, the door to my parents’ place is open. In the living room, my father is half out of the riser. Time is clearly short. I position the commode and between us my mother and I haul him out of the chair and across the foot and a half of intervening carpet. This is far from easy and in my mind’s eye I have an image of the three of us, locked together by the iron demands of my father’s failing body. In one way or another, our little family has been ever thus. Father immoveable, beyond reason, impossible to ignore. And us fussing around him, doing his bidding, tending to his every need. Once, this mute compliance of ours struck me as the very best reason for leaving home. Now, it’s simply sad.
Finally enthroned on the commode, my father stares bleakly at the horseracing on the telly. For the best part of forty minutes, I wait for a result. Nothing happens. Finally, I convince him that it’s been a false alarm and we go through the whole procedure in reverse. I’ve noticed a light brown stain on the riser chair and I’ve had a scrub with washing-up liquid and a towel but it’s still there. When I apologise for the dampness, my father takes no notice. He’s plainly exhausted. Even the 3.15 at Plumpton fails to rouse him.
Back across the road, I’m washing my hands in the bathroom when Lin returns. She’s carrying two Waitrose bags and at first I assume she’s been out for most of the day. She shakes her head. My father had suffered what she delicately terms “an accident”. Summoned by my mother, she’d found him in tears in the riser. Unable to help himself, unaware that anything was even happening, he’d lost control of his bowels. It was, says Lin, a terrible mess. I nod, numbed, watching her unload bottles of bleach and disinfectant.
“When did this happen?”
“Just after midday.”
“And?”
“I cleared it up. Your poor mum. It was everywhere.”
I’m thinking of the stain on the riser, of my father on the commode, of his failure to produce a result. It all makes sense. But why didn’t they tell me?
Lin shrugs. She’s produced a brand new pair of rubber gloves from the bottom of one of the bags. I’ve never seen her wear rubber gloves in her life.
“Because they can’t remember” she says.
We head for the shops again, indulging ourselves with a mile-and-a-half detour that takes us along the seafront. There are old people everywhere and we’re suddenly overwhelmed by their presence. In wheelchairs. In parked cars. Bent over tables in cafes. Does everyone have this problem of ours? Does every son and daughter measure out their days by the tick of their parents’ carriage clocks? Of course they don’t. Get a grip.
In Boots, we browse the shelves marked “Personal Hygiene”. With luck, my father might just squeeze into a pair of Extra-Large Bikini-Style nappies. And with luck, a pair of voluminous PVC panties might just spare the riser chair another dose of disinfectant. For the best part of a year, prompted by well-intentioned advice from carers and the social worker, I’ve done my best to anticipate this situation. Given my father’s condition, given what the doctors call his “neural deficit”, he’s bound in the end to lose control of his basic bodily functions. It’s what happens. It’s inevitable. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.
Intellectually, of course, I accept all this. In a world of diagrams, and Stannah Lift catalogues, and cosy chats over coffee, I understand exactly why there may come a time when he’ll need a bit of hands-on support. But that’s a world away from what’s just happened. What’s just happened is rank and foul and disgusting. My father has become incontinent. The tide of mortality has crept a little further up his beach, not quite swamping him, not quite washing him away, but leaving him as helpless as a baby. Sue Dawkins was right. This could go on for months, for years, day in, day out, an eternity of newly-soiled sheets, encrusted nappies, and the harsh chemical tang of barely diluted bleach. Walking back through the precinct, I notice how quiet we’ve become. I squeeze Lin’s hand. She squeezes mine.
When we get to my parents’ flat, my father is watching the snooker. He’s been sports-mad all his life. He played badminton, cricket and - later - bowls to County standard. He knows the rules of snooker inside out but now the function of the cue ball defeats him. What’s it for? Why are they allowed to pick it up?
Lin and I unpack the nappies. There’s no point discussing what happened earlier because both of us want to forget it and in any case neither my father nor my mother will ever remember. Instead, when I unpack the nappies and the plastic pants, I introduce them to my father as strictly precautionary. You’ve had a bit of a turn. These are just in case.
My father simply nods. His eyes never leave the television. It‘s a good idea. Do it.
Getting the nappy and the pants on is much simpler than I’d thought. While my father hangs onto the Zimmer frame, I enfold him in Boot’s best. Jimmy White is doing rather well. My father never much liked Jimmy White.
Back home, our mood lightens. We’ve confronted the worst. We’ve sorted it out. He’s clean, dry, and - as far as we can judge - happy. No one’s died. No one’s in pain. Life goes on.
That evening, Lin, Tom and I drink the day’s winnings from the tree job up the road. I cook a huge curry and pop across the road at ten. Match of the Day starts in forty minutes. A year’s experience tells me I’ll be back in time for Tottenham v. Everton.
When I let myself into the flat, my father seems very sleepy. The nappy is dry and unsoiled, a definite result. I kneel at his feet, easing his legs into the pyjamas, then try and coax him upright from the riser chair. Never before has this failed. Tonight, for whatever reason, he simply can’t get to his feet. We try again and again
. Already, the chair is at its maximum upright travel, the upholstered squab nearly vertical, but when he reaches forward to lever himself up into the Zimmer frame, nothing happens. The messages are stopping somewhere between his brain and his legs.
I summon Tom. Between us, just, we manage to transfer him to the wheelchair. He’s leaden, flopping around like a puppet full of sand. Every movement, on our part, requires immense effort and the very newness of what we’re trying to do produces whimpers of alarm. Physically, my father is not a brave man. He’s convinced we’re going to hurt him.
Through in the bedroom, we must now get him out of the wheelchair and onto the bed. Working in confined spaces isn’t easy. How do real carers do this kind of thing? How do they cope? I can tell from the expression on Tom’s face that for him, too, the learning curve is pretty steep - not just the mechanics of load-bearing but the profoundly shocking novelty of seeing his grandfather - so physically big, so dominating, so always in charge - reduced to this pitiful sack of a man. When my own grandfather was terminally ill, my mother deliberately shielded me from the realities. Only now, 33 years later, do I understand why.
Finally, we manage it. While Tom looks on, I complete the evening ritual. Stocking off. Socks off. Bedsocks on. Tablets in. Sheets over. Wheelchair away. Commode positioned. Waterglass full. Window an inch open. Curtains pulled across. Living room tided. Wastepaper basket emptied. Telly unplugged. Lights off. Goodnight.
Crossing the road, Tom voices his bewilderment. How come he’s so helpless? What on earth happens next? I can’t think of a sensible answer to either question. Back home, Lin has the good news from White Hart Lane. Spurs have won, 3-0.
Next morning, Sunday, I’m up by eight. Tom has a girlfriend at Southampton University and he needs a street map to find her new bedsit. She’s giving him lunch and he wants to be out of Portsmouth by noon. I drive up to my office through the rain. I havn’t been here for several days and already it has a strange, abandoned feel to it, as if somebody had suddenly slipped away. Half a pencilled chapter, lying on the desk. Reminders to pay the rent and sort out a fault in the photocopier. Circled dates in next month’s calender. May was shaping up pretty well. Until a couple of days ago.
Estuary Page 2