Hungry

by Grace Dent

  ‘You need to pace yourself, darling,’ says Jay. ‘There are five more plates to go.’

  ‘Oh I’m fine, I’m starving,’ I say. But by the time the last chef arrives, clutching calves liver in a port reduction, my face is a tad green.

  I escape from the day’s filming without humiliating myself, at least, but I feel a little like I’ve let myself down. In the final edit, I get eight seconds maximum on camera, meekly head tilting like Princess Diana, saying the duck and the soufflé were lovely but the fish, not very controversially, ‘isn’t very nice’.

  Matt, Tom and Courtney find my demure pose hilarious, and circulate the clip via email, playing it again and again. They laugh and laugh.

  ‘I think you need to be more you,’ says Tom.

  ‘Just tell them the truth,’ says Courtney.

  Next time I vow to build my hair up big and walk with my shoulders back, like I’m completely meant to be there, to deliver some home truths. There’s no place on primetime telly for polite ambivalence.

  Over the following year, being an increasingly familiar face on MasterChef begins to change everything. From that moment on, I gave up my right to eat dinner in private anywhere ever again.

  When you appear on MasterChef, everyone from school mams buying Weetabix in the B&M Store to yuppies in the Farrow & Ball shop to flight attendants to traffic wardens to bin men to the woman who’s doing your smear test will stop, squint, and say, ‘Oh, hang on, I know you!’

  The show, after thirty years and hundreds of hopeful contestants, is still so well loved by people from every demographic; it’s watched by folk of all ages, faiths, races and of every class. Just as me and my dad loved watching fancy food people getting overexcited about scallops, now people watch me with their own kids. It’s just a simple show where people cook and others judge, but it’s captured the nation’s heart. Deep down we are all food critics.

  April 1976

  We’re on holiday at Pontins near Southport.

  Me, Dad, Mam, Dave and Bob.

  There’s a fancy-dress competition and I’m a bunny rabbit. I put my blue gymnastic leotard on over white woolly tights. My bunny ears are Dad’s Odor-Eaters. The winner is a ghost, draped in bed sheets.

  Afterwards there is a ‘Dance with your Dad’ contest. We spin around the floor to ‘Silver Lady’ by David Soul, then Baccara’s ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’.

  My tiny feet fit on top of his big feet.

  Whenever we walk around the holiday camp people tell Mam that my little brother David is gorgeous. They say nothing about me, as I’m not. I know I’m strange-looking – my eyes a touch squinty, my teeth wonky.

  Dad says I am lovely, though. I am his only little girl. I eat mashed potato and battered fish in the Pontins canteen each teatime. Mam toasts crumpets with jam in our chalet before bed. I am fast asleep by seven, after half an hour of insisting I’m not going to bed.

  At night I wake from nightmares and appear beside Mam and Dad’s bed, crying.

  ‘Can I gerrin?’ I say, crawling in between them where I carve out a space to lie in. Sweaty, wriggly.

  I sleep with a foot in Mam’s back and a hand in Dad’s bristly face.

  In the morning Dad wakes up grumbling.

  ‘How is she here?’ he says. ‘Does she not have her own bed?’

  ‘She was scared,’ Mam mumbles. ‘Of monsters.’

  Dad pokes me in the stomach. He knows I am listening.

  ‘So if the monsters come from here and there,’ he says, pointing to both sides of the bed, ‘you’ll be here in the middle, safe.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, opening my eyes, giggling.

  ‘Monsters?’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Monsters.’

  Carlisle, August 2016

  ‘Grace, are you there? Are you there, Grace?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here, Dad. Are you OK?’

  It’s 3 a.m.

  ‘Yeah, I’m OK, presh,’ he begins. ‘I’m just thinking.

  I need to get a ladder.’

  ‘Why?’ I say, sitting up.

  There is a long silence. I am lying in bed in their flat in Carlisle. For months Mam’s health has been trickling downhill. She assures me it’s nothing – first a cold that won’t leave, or perhaps a chest infection, then almost certainly, an interim doctor assures me, bronchitis.

  It’s certainly not cancer, nothing to worry about, and don’t worry about Dad, Dad is fine too, don’t worry about us.

  For the last year the saga of Mam’s breathing has been flickering in the background of phone calls home. I’ve tried to keep an eye on it from afar; I liaise with Dave and Tam each day and grab days in the North when I can, but it’s not working. Not properly. Not like it would if I was there all the time. It’s too easy to lose track of doctor’s appointments and what has been prescribed and if it’s worked and what is being hidden. Mam has been playing down her illness to everyone close. Her doctor sent her away multiple times with instructions to rest and drink Benylin, before eventually giving her antibiotics, then more antibiotics, until eventually, after three months, she couldn’t walk or even stand up and was rushed to hospital. Dave called me as I was about to go on stage to talk at the Edinburgh Festival.

  I descended on Carlisle, all sharp elbows with a notepad and pen, looking for answers and promises. Mam was in a ward for people with heart problems. The nurses looking after her there had no clue as to why she was breathless but were at least kind and made me tea.

  Mam was fading. She was washed out and lifeless. All the colour in her cheeks had gone. And there I was, the pushy daughter from London, the one who wanted to solve problems by asking the right people the right questions. The one who wanted to speed things up and get her the right course of treatment. The one who wanted to know why we were in the heart unit when this seemed to have nothing to do with her heart.

  No one was able to help me.

  But of course there was tea if I wanted it.

  A specialist may be around later, they told me, but it’s Thursday heading into a bank holiday weekend, so you probably won’t see him until Tuesday.

  Mam’s biggest concern was my dad. He couldn’t be left alone.

  ‘I’ve told the nurses he has dementia,’ she said. ‘They’ve put him in the office until someone could come.’ It was the first time the word had come out of her mouth.

  I nodded, because I knew it too.

  Dad taps again at the bedroom door.

  ‘What’s up, Dad?’ I say, trying to sound very calm. ‘I need to get up into the attic,’ Dad says, poking his nose around the door.

  Dad’s enormous nose.

  ‘It’s a Roman nose,’ he used to say to me. ‘It’s a Roman all over my face!’

  Dad appears in the room. In a white vest and pyjama bottoms, much more unshaven than he would usually allow himself to be.

  ‘I need to get up there,’ he says. He points at the ceiling. ‘And, y’know, get behind the box and, well … y’know … do you know?’

  ‘OK,’ I say, doing the calm voice that I find works. ‘Well, let’s not go up there now. It will be dark up there now. Why don’t we do it first thing in the morning? It’s 3 a.m. now. Let’s get in the attic and find it when it’s light.’

  He thinks a little, then he nods.

  ‘OK, presh, yeah, OK, when it’s light. We’ll do it then. The attic will be dark, won’t it?’

  He goes back to bed. This is a flat. They do not have an attic.

  I lie in bed and have a small, thoroughly futile cry. Dad gets back into his bed, but he does not switch his bedside lamp off as he is lying there waiting for the daylight so we can begin our job.

  Carlisle, October 2016

  Me, Mam and Dad are eating toast in their flat in Carlisle and watching Homes Under the Hammer.

  Mam is eighty but adamant
that cancer, in all the various places it has appeared, will not stop her, even if the pills and injections make her sick and tired.

  ‘Well, I’ve had a good innings,’ she says. Or, ‘Well, it is what it is, it’s just a pain in the arse.’ Dad’s dementia has no diagnosis. Mam says he doesn’t need one yet as she can carry on looking after him. I’m on one of my two-day quickfire visits to Carlisle. I know it’s not enough. David lives in Keswick, 35 miles away from Carlisle; I live 260 miles away in London. It would work so much better if we were all under the same roof. We could concentrate on getting Dad a proper diagnosis and caring for Mam properly.

  I travel on the Virgin West Coast train, back and forth, forth and back, living in a spin between London and Carlisle, tearing through four or five restaurants a week to keep the column afloat, but the food is hard to stomach. My house in London becomes unloved and then unlovable. The pyracantha overgrows into a wall of dead black spikes, the lawn dies, Japanese knotweed takes root under the path and begins to kill one of the trees. Rats move into the ceiling in the kitchen and eat all the wiring in the kitchen spotlights. Geno, one of my beloved cats – the nearest thing I have to children – tires of being chucked biscuits by a cat sitter and moves in with the neighbours without a backwards glance. When I attempt to reclaim him, he lies impassively on their sofa, feigning amnesia.

  ‘When you were a kitten, I slept on my back for six months, so you could sleep in my armpit!’ I fumed.

  In Carlisle, Dad stands by my bed at 3 a.m. in his flat cap and jacket, asking when we’re going out to ASDA. He will not grasp in any meaningful sense that Mam is ill. He has the news broken to him afresh each day. His reaction ranges from crying to petulant anger to saying we are trying to trick him.

  I attempt to explain that Mam needs rest, that the treatment she’s having to contain the spread in her bones is brutal, that she is now the patient. But he walks about almost all of the night, so she can’t sleep and I can’t sleep and Dave can’t sleep. We are all sleepless.

  If I can get a diagnosis, maybe we can get proper help.

  But I’m scared that if I let other people in on our secret, we may have to let him go to a home.

  There is so much I want to say to Dad, but I can’t bring myself to.

  Dementia is really awkward.

  Not just painful and frightening. Embarrassing.

  I don’t like to be left alone with Dad. If I’m never left alone with Dad, it won’t be my responsibility to say, ‘Look, Dad, do you think you have dementia?’

  Which is the start of a chat that means: ‘So, Dad, shall we talk about the fact that you’ve been handed a hideous, terrifying extended death sentence, which is making you humiliate yourself in public and will make our family splitting up and strangers looking after you inevitable?

  But sometimes I can see terror in his eyes.

  Sometimes, as Dad talks nowadays, midway through a nonsensical sentence his brain catches up. And right then he understands the total ridiculousness of what he is saying, and then pure shame passes across his face. I noted this last Christmas.

  I find that shame so cutting. It hurts my heart. It stays with me all the time when I am back in London. I cannot eat the dinners I am supposed to review.

  Sometimes, as my dad talks nowadays, midway through a nonsensical sentence he stops for a moment like his brain is catching up … but then he just carries on, becoming more nonsensical until he trails off, having completely lost the thread of his original idea.

  Which one is worse? When he is conscious of his brain decaying and therefore panicked, or when he is blissfully unaware, completely barmy and also quite frightening to be with?

  Sometimes I get up the nerve to ask him a question in soft words and cushioned terms. ‘Are you feeling like you forget stuff, Dad? Like when you got up for work the other morning … did you forget you’ve retired?’ But then he will deny it or pretend not to hear. Or he just tells me plainly no. I wonder if I should track down his other children, wherever they are, and warn them it’s now or never. They would need to come now if they want to catch a tiny glimpse of the man he was. But that feels like I’m asking for help during the worst times. He wasn’t there for them during the good days. Also, Dad’s in no state to be ambushed by an awkward family reunion. I put that dilemma from my mind. This is our problem – mine and David’s – the two kids he didn’t walk out on. We can cope.

  At least, I thought we could. But too many bad things are happening at once now. We are struggling. Something has to give.

  CHAPTER 10

  Your Own Personal Toby

  October 2016

  It’s more difficult to walk through Euston without being recognised since I told one of the Celebrity MasterChef contestants that I wouldn’t feed his turd-like churros to a Labrador. Or another one who came along clutching gazpacho that there was no place in civilised society for his cold soup. But even if my face is a little more recognisable or I’ve got my own Radio 4 show, these things feel a touch hollow. Nothing really matters aside from Mam and Dad. When your heart is in shreds, being pointed at by strangers in Tesco Express isn’t much of a sticky plaster.

  On the train I look again through the rental deeds. It’s a large bungalow with many bedrooms, plenty of space and – most important of all – a big dining room with a huge table. It’s close to my brother’s work in the Lake District. It’s a crackpot plan and it might bankrupt me, but it feels right. If we can all eat together every night, we can be like a proper family. We can have one final crack at normal again before it’s taken away. Is this insane? Am I doing the right thing? Can I possibly move back to Cumbria? I’ve cased out all the ways to make life in the Lakes easier. ASDA will deliver food to the bungalow – the nearest one is thirty-five miles away. Amazon Prime will deliver almost anything else I need and leave it in a locker at an Esso garage one mile from the house within around forty-eight hours. There’s a small, rural Co-op with fresh vegetables within two miles; except I can’t drive. In fact I’ve failed my test so many times it deserves its own certificate from the DVLA. I remind myself that my gran and her sisters managed to stay fed and alive in rural Cumberland in the 1920s by sharing one push-bike and killing their own pig. I can make this work. On the train up north, I make a deal with myself that this isn’t going home forever. This isn’t the end of the road. I still own a house in London, even if it is full of cobwebs and dead plants. I’m still a Londoner. I’ll use this time, in a bungalow on a hill caring for a woman with cancer and a man with dementia, to grow spiritually, read all the Booker Prize winners and work on my conversational Mandarin. I don’t have to start wearing GORE-TEX leggings and tying my hair in a top knot all day. I don’t have to start drinking at 4 p.m., like I have been during my mercy missions to Cumbria – by pouring a large glass of Aldi Merlot and having a shuffle through Pick Me Up magazine – even if it feels nice. I can still do my job, can’t I? I just need to be more organised. I can whistlestop home once a month to London, eat four times in different restaurants, grab my post and come back. Also, I need to use my train hours wisely. If anything, this is the year I will finally begin writing the HBO-purchased screenplay that wins me an Emmy. I won’t stay in the North forever. Unless I meet a multi-millionaire septuagenarian landowner with a bad heart who needs a wife. No, not even then.

  Dave picks me up at Penrith station.

  ‘You look knackered, moon face,’ he says.

  ‘I am,’ I say. ‘How is Dad coping with the bungalow?’

  ‘He’s roaming around the corridors asking Mam when they’re going home ten times an hour,’ says Dave wearily.

  We play Public Enemy all the way back to our new home.

  ‘Hey, Dad,’ I say, wheeling in two suitcases and an enormous rucksack.

  ‘Home?’ he says.

  ‘This is me now. I’m going to stay here for a while full time. I’ve come back.’

 
Dad begins to speak. In his head it is school home time and I’ve moved his newspaper, which is his only pleasure in life. It is 1970, he’s late for Sergeant’s Mess dinner and he’s lost his right cufflink. Where is yer mam? he asks. Where is yer mam? This is all in the same sentence. All the moments of his life squeezed together to form a note, then expanding back out together. Having emitted the noise, he closes his eyes.

  ‘It’s not really the big homecoming I imagined,’ I say to Dave, as Dad begins to snore.

  We both laugh.

  ‘Do you want a beer?’ he says, handing me a tin.

  Carlisle, March 2017

  ‘Well, that’s a turn up for the books,’ I say to Dad. He nods at me, but I’m not sure he understands. The nurse at the blood clinic says Dad no longer seems to have diabetes. He weighs six stone eleven – he looks like a little sparrow – but now that he is no longer interested in food, his blood is now in much better shape. Despite the decades of doughnuts and Dairy Milk, Dad hasn’t lost either of his feet. Now he hardly eats at all. This is the tiniest of victories.

  It’s 9 a.m. at the infirmary and I’m wearing an oversized man’s North Face fleece jacket over GORE-TEX leggings. All my Shellac nails have fallen off and I am becoming lackadaisical about moustache bleaching. It’s safe to say the standards on Brand Grace Dent have fallen. Today’s breakfast was a piece of millionaire’s shortbread from the charity tuck shop, served to me by one of the Gnome brigade from my old Brownie Pack, who had salt ‘n’ pepper hair and the sort of eye bags that suggested she’d adhered obediently for decades to our Brownie mantra of helping everyone before herself. I have yet to begin writing an Emmy-award-winning rom-com, but I do have some hot tips on how to cajole a man with dementia into drinking a Complan calorie-fortified milk drink while he is shouting ‘fuck off!’