“She doesn’t seem miserable to me,” the fake son said. “You seem miserable. She makes me feel bloody well miserable. But look at her: she seems happy as Larry.”
“Is this Larry fellow coming to dinner?” Kay said, meticulously peeling a purple foil from the clear sheet on top. “Should I set an extra place?”
“You said ‘if she could see herself,’” the pretender continued. “But that’s, like, the whole deal: she can’t see herself. I may not care for that glazed look in her eyes any more than you do, but otherwise her expression is always either rapt or bemused. So maybe she makes us want to top ourselves, but Mum? She seems miles from suicidal.”
“Miles from suicidal!” Kay repeated, delighting in the musicality of the phrase.
“Have you ever offered her the option of ending it?” the handsome one asked quietly.
“Oh, yes, more than once,” the nice old man said. “But when I bring it up, she can’t concentrate. She seems to understand what I’m talking about to start, and then bingo, she doesn’t. She’s been well beyond a capacity for consent for quite some time now. You can’t offer tablets to people who don’t know what tablets are or what they do.”
* * *
Kay went to pains to impress upon these visitors who threaded inexplicably in and out that she had a terribly important appointment with a young woman named Adelaide, who was astonishingly lovely and wore long flowing dresses in sepia tones. Adelaide had been entrusted with Daddy’s crucial work papers, which Kay was to deliver to her father before he went to the surgery tomorrow. Mummy was jealous of Adelaide, so Mummy had to be assured that there was nothing between Daddy and this poorly wisp of a girl, who was not long for this world anyway. Meanwhile, the nice old man seemed to have money problems, so they were all going on a trip. Kay loved to go on trips. The nice old man said she would like it where they were going, and Kay had no reason to believe otherwise. Kay liked it everywhere.
Oh, she experienced brief interludes of agitation. She’d quite an altercation with the nice old man, when she put her foot down that she was not leaving the house without her husband Cyril, who had obviously been kidnapped, perhaps even by the old man himself. But in time she accepted the geezer’s dubious assurances at face value (whilst resolving at first opportunity to ring the police). When she insisted that Hayley had to have her breakfast immediately or she’d be late for school, the nice old man promised on a stack of Bibles that he would drive their young daughter to the school himself, with a parental note if necessary to explain the girl’s tardiness.
Yet for the most part, the whole world of vexation had been miraculously neutralized, as former sources of annoyance converted to sources of merriment or absorption. Sitting for hours in a nearly stationary traffic jam was every bit as entertaining as whooshing along at seventy-five. She was as content to wait at a bus stop indefinitely as she was to get on if the bus arrived. She had defanged the eternal bugbear of “taxes” by neatly forgetting what exactly the word alluded to. On her every side, other people exploded with a host of complaints (she’d long ago stopped worrying about who they were; if they were so rude as to neglect to introduce themselves, that was their problem). They railed against telecom providers whose ignorant customer service personnel were all patchy English speakers in India, lamented the devastation of their pension funds due to some worldwide event to which Kay was under no obligation to attend, and forecasted Armageddon along a variety pack of vectors—climate change, mass migration, fresh water shortage, food insecurity, unsustainable sovereign debt—whilst for Kay these were mere sounds that came and went. The one certainty to which she cheerfully clung was that, whatever these whinge-bags were on about, it would eventually go away. Although it pleased her to spend a fair bit of time on the floor, her prevailing sensation was of floating overhead, looking down on all the little people and observing the paltriness of their supposed troubles. She felt very wise.
Kay was sometimes discombobulated, but the confusion passed, and who cared about being a bit at sixes and sevens anyway. Looking out the windows was a delight: so many people and shapes and cars and lights. The skies raced with clouds that formed faces, smiling as they passed by. And the inside of her head bulged with a fabulous grab bag of miscellany, like those big snarled bins in charity shops whose every item cost a quid. Suddenly that poofy green sofa in Rotherhithe would float across her consciousness like another cumulous cloud, and she would remember with a sly secretive grin what she and her husband had got up to on those pillows in the early days of their marriage. A funny little soap-dish box would loom in her mind pulsing with outsize powers, and the fact that for some reason the black box was always cold made it seem all the more excitingly sinister. She paraded before herself a sequence of her favourite frocks through the ages, as if putting on her own private fashion show—including an especially stylish dress with an off-centre, check-shaped collar in which she had waltzed into their first real home. Sometimes she imagined whisking up a roux for her famous cauliflower cheese or cutting lard into flour for a meat pie, and this whimsical style of cookery had the advantage of dirtying no dishes and never getting flour on your sleeves. There was sleep as well, of course, which afforded great sweeping vistas of Australian outback, gnarls of mangroves weaving like live snakes, swaying palm trees of the southernmost point of the continental United States, or the austere Buddhist temples in the mountains of Japan. She must have seen terribly much in her life to have stored such a boundless library of pictures that she could mix and match, though often the landscapes in her dreams were of her own contrivance—plunging with great chasms or rushing with mighty waters that she had never seen, even with all her journeys. Yet the mosaic of waking and the cinema of slumber tended to blend. A memory of the long flag-lined promenade of the Mall in the approach to Buckingham Palace melded indistinguishably with a faintly distorted facsimile of the boulevard in her sleep; the intermingling of confection and recollection didn’t trouble her in the slightest. It was all just one vast glorious canvas of colour, texture, horses, and big pompous buildings. This undulating montage was every bit as transfixing as the grandiose epics she and Cyril had seen in Leicester Square: Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, which she could also project in eidetic sequences on the back of her skull. A young Arab’s heartbreaking sink into quicksand until only a hand remained. The gallop of the sled across snow-covered hills with red-cheeked Lara and a soaring soundtrack.
Other times she sang: “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini!” or “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” Some afternoons she serenaded the pelting British weather on the other side of a pane with scraps of poetry she’d memorized at school: Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? When oftentimes she couldn’t complete the verse, she made up the rest—It’s a flight plan for foreigners / Margaret is a porn star—then moved blithely on to disconnected phrases that had scored themselves on her mind with uncanny insistence: Eight out of ten cats prefer it! Every little helps! It does exactly what it says on the tin! The milk chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand! Or, if inexplicably, Compare the meerkat dot-com!
It was a bit concerning that the nice old man could sometimes be so forward. Though it felt nice and safe and close when he held her, she was worried that allowing him to touch her like that was disloyal to Cyril.
7
Fun with Dr Mimi
“Mum! Where are the tablets?”
“. . . In the fridge. A black box, top shelf, back left.”
Having dashed through the kitchen and scuttled up the back stairs, Cyril was crouched at the door of the master bedroom listening to his daughter’s screeching below. He was quaking with rage. Imagine, not only had his own wife grassed their plans to the one child certain to make a maximum palaver over the disputable but much-touted sanctity of human life, but now Kay had given up the decades-long hiding place of their magic beans without a fight.
“It’s not there,” came accusingly from downstairs.
That’s right, he thought, clutching the bottle in his pocket. It ain’t.
“Then ask Cyril,” Kay said. “He’s the master of ceremonies.”
“You mean Dad is the homicidal maniac, from the sound of it!” Hayley exclaimed. “Another Dr Kevorkian! Or Harold Shipman! He’s obviously brainwashed you into going along with one of his blinkered, fanatical socialist fixations! This whole nonsense is so like him I could be sick!”
Cyril felt a great welling up from a place in himself with which he was little acquainted. The force arose unbidden; so involuntary was its eruption that the closest comparison he could contrive was to vomiting, although the sensation was not so unpleasant. This—quantity, this—substance, this—enormous, formless thing wasn’t outside of him, or alien to him; it was him. And this deep very-self was affronted. How dare these women stand in his way? Should these weaker-willed creatures be allowed to defeat his plans of some thirty years? Should these soft, maudlin pussycats be allowed to hinder the courageous, honourable climax of an illustrious career? The consternation was blinding. He would show them what he was made of: fire, not their women’s water. For they had no right to thwart him, no right to demand he, too, wither, crumble, and evaporate like every other addled old cretin clinging to the thinnest excuse for being alive, raging in hackneyed, over-cited poetry against the dying of the light. Those two had no right to compel Dr Cyril J. Wilkinson to implode into one more gibbering, palsied parody of his formerly formidable person, becoming one more burden on the state, one more burden on family, one more source of resentment, boredom, mockery, pity, and endless eyeroll. With all their sentimental wittering, they had no right to insist that he demean himself like all the others, conspire in his own ridicule, and obliterate all he had been and all he had achieved by growing witless, dependent, and enfeebled! He had the tablets and he had the power.
Yet amidst his flaming indignation, Cyril had not altogether lost his capacity to think methodically. In his panic of a few minutes before, he had hesitated in the kitchen, torn between fleeing upstairs and absconding out the back door to conceal himself in the garden. His choice of upstairs had made emotional sense, for he associated their bedroom of nearly half a century with safety, succour, and refuge. But, in practical terms, the unlit garden would have been more strategic. There was the tool shed, or he might have hauled himself over the back wall and into the great big wonderful world in which a freeborn Englishman could do with his own life whatever he pleased.
Yet it was too late for that Plan B. He could hear his “saviours” storming up both staircases. He might secure this door from the inside, but those meddlesome emergency personnel had the booming voices of bruisers. A cheap domestic doorknob lock—it wasn’t a bolt—wouldn’t keep them out for long. If he took the overdose now, they’d be sure to haul him off to A&E and pump his stomach. As a GP, he was familiar with standard procedure: he’d still feel unwell, he would not be dead, and they’d keep him in hospital under observation. They’d force him to see one of those lame, prying psychiatrists. He’d have to promise never to do it again. No one would believe him.
He was fucked.
* * *
Cyril stood as straight as his back allowed. Under the stern eye of the paramedics, he’d no choice but to relinquish the bottle of Seconal into Hayley’s outstretched rubber-gloved palm, though he kept his gaze steely, and rather than look to the floor with a suggestion of embarrassment he locked eyes with his daughter. “That is not your property,” he said, “and this is none of your business.”
“I think it’s very much my business,” Hayley said primly. Her mask was adjusted so poorly that it wouldn’t be doing any good, and that was dubiously assuming that any of those preening badges of purity and conformism ever did any good. “I’m the one who’d have had to clean up the mess if your warped scheme had succeeded.”
His daughter was enjoying the whole drama enormously. She’d cast herself as the heroine of this tale, and that was not a role she’d frequent opportunity to fill as a neurotic, under-occupied housewife.
Once they’d all trooped back downstairs, Hayley assured the paramedics covered in protective gear that she had matters in hand. She promised to stay overnight to keep an eye on her disturbed, sadly diminished parents. When one medic provided her with the number of the local Community Mental Health Team, she tucked the slip of paper into her wallet with elaborate care, giving her bag a brisk zip.
After the young men left, Hayley marched to the downstairs loo, head held aloft in a posture of sacrifice and resolve. As Cyril eyed her from the hallway, she located a bin bag under the basin and proceeded to empty out the entire contents of the medicine cabinet. There went the ibuprofen, aspirin, antacids, cold-sore cream, anti-fungal toenail treatments, and constipation tablets with which her gaga parents could no longer be trusted. By the time Hayley finished child-proofing the two loos upstairs, they should have counted themselves lucky to have retained a spare toilet roll—and not because of the nationwide shortage due to hoarding, but because, theoretically, they might have looped the paper multiple times round the shower-curtain rail and used it to hang themselves.
Struck dumb by Kay’s treachery, when the spouses went to bed Cyril couldn’t bring himself to speak to his wife. Not one word. Once they arose in silence the next morning, it was as well that they’d no fruit or baked goods for breakfast. Their daughter had removed all the knives.
* * *
All day, they were effectively under house arrest—even more so than their compatriots, who could at least still go to the supermarket. That evening, Simon and Roy arrived; as the new head of household, Hayley let them in. Typically for a bloke who never got with anyone else’s programme, Roy alone was not wearing personal protective equipment. Although Roy was just the type to contract COVID-19 and spitefully cough and sputter his way about town as a “super-spreader,” Cyril gave their middle child begrudging credit for resistance to suffocatingly self-righteous social pressure. Once the parents were exiled to the sitting room, Simon went presumptuously upstairs; as the floorboards creaked overhead, Cyril could hear him nosing about the study and unashamedly slamming file drawers containing not a single document that should concern the boy. Thereafter, their children’s collusive muttering round the kitchen table was punctuated by unkind-sounding bursts of laughter. The couple’s situation recalled those movies in which Nazis invade a local’s home, billeting in the bedrooms and making free with the wine cellar, all the while expecting the frightened inhabitants to be nice to them or else.
At last, the three siblings filed into the sitting room an ostentatious two metres apart, as Boris would have instructed. They rearranged the chairs in a “socially distanced” semi-circle around their misbehaved progenitors on the sofa. The pulled-back seating seemed to indicate less a consideration for the dangers of contagion than a wholesale withdrawal of familial warmth.
“We want you to understand,” Hayley began, clasping her gloved hands piously in her lap. “We’re all here out of concern, and we only want what’s best for you. It’s not like we’re putting you on trial.” Whatever people go out of their way to tell you that they are not doing is a reliable indicator of what they are doing. “It’s obvious you’re having emotional problems, like, depression and that. And maybe you’re having trouble living on your own. Naturally you value your independence, but we can’t elevate independence above safety. I’m afraid you’ll have to consider this an intervention. You’ve clearly become a danger to yourselves.”
If some children of geriatric parents found generational role reversal uncomfortable, Hayley wasn’t one of them. Twisting in his chair, Simon was the one who looked uncomfortable. Cyril was accustomed to seeing his firstborn in nothing but the smart dark suits he wore in the City, but during this lockdown folderol he was trading from home; a shabby flannel shirt and ill-fitting jeans compromised the investment banker’s usual air of authority. After all, the eldest ought logically to be presiding, but this was his si
ster’s show. Roy was slumped with his signature smirk, tipping the chair back on its hind legs as if to remove himself from the festivities an extra few inches. He always placed himself outside the family unless he was looking for money. The trendy short beard he’d sported in recent years had sprouted in patches. A bald section on his chin was the shape of Norway.
“It’s not as if we set the kitchen on fire because we can no longer tell the difference between vinegar and white spirit,” Cyril said levelly, disliking the fact that in his own home with his own children he felt compelled to control his temper—and not to spare their feelings, but to protect his interest. He didn’t care for the texture of this encounter one bit. “You interrupted the execution of a plan of many years’ standing, made in a state of rationality at an age younger than Simon is now.”
“Mum wasn’t into it,” Hayley said.
“If your mother was having second thoughts, she should have told me, not you,” Cyril said.
“Yes,” Kay said, looking to her writhing hands. “I should have put my foot down with your father myself and not dragged you into it, dear. I put you in an untenable position, for which I apologize awfully.”
“That last-minute text was a cry for help, and I’m glad you sent it,” Hayley said.
“The point is what we’re going to do now,” Simon said, clearly accustomed to meetings in which digressions had to be contained. “The three of us can’t keep popping by to make sure you aren’t trying to kill yourselves again.”
“It’s called being put on ‘suicide watch’ in the nick,” Roy said.
“You should know,” Hayley said curtly.
“Legally,” Simon added, “we’re not meant to be popping by at all.”
“Indeed,” Cyril said. “So however delighted we are to see our three lovely children, your well-intended ‘intervention’ entails the mixing of multiple households. Your best mate Boris, Simon, wouldn’t approve a-tall, a-tall. In the nicest way possible, then, I’m going to have to invite you all to go home.” This absurd and profoundly un-English lockdown was a time of hair-splitting legalism, line-toeing, tattle-taling, and censorious tsk-tskery. But Cyril wasn’t above his own procedural pedantry if it served his purpose.
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