by Grace Dent
I am mashing a vast pan of Maris Pipers with butter and cream. There are sausages in the oven. I have frozen peas in the microwave, powdered gravy in a jug and a bag of Aunt Bessie’s frozen Yorkshires on a baking sheet waiting to go.
If we all eat together then we are still a family. No matter what. Those are the rules, aren’t they? How can it be the end if we’re all still eating sausage and mash?
‘And I saw this fella,’ Dad rambles. ‘He says, he says to me, “Oi, Scouse!” He says, “Hey, Scouse!” So I looked at him and it was … oh, I forget his name. Clive. Clive. Used to work with him. Helluvanice lad. Anyway. He had a little cat. A cat in a bag.’
My father is in a chatty mood. He has not left the house on his own for some months, although in his head he was in town just this morning.
All of us have our own tactics for dealing with my dad’s confabulations; Mam tries to correct him when he talks, but this just makes him angry. He can’t understand why she’s undermining him and thinks she’s doing it just to be awkward. Dave humours him. I try to draw the memory out. I like to squeeze it a bit further to see where it’s going. I slip in questions about his daughters and his son when he’s off his guard. But I cannot get any sense out of him. It feels a bit duplicitous. I’ve not popped back to London for weeks. My first Guardian columns have gone out to a largely positive reaction, but to get them done I’ve been leaning on Dave hard to keep an eye on things while I rush to Manchester and Birmingham. I have been writing from 5 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then trying to snatch naps while Dad and Mam have their afternoon snooze. Although I’ve learned the hard way about this; I opened my eyes last week to find that Dad had found my handbag, taken two sets of keys from the front pouch, unlocked the front door, then the porch door, and was behind the wheel of the Volvo, starting the engine. I cannot forgive myself. I keep imagining him in an overturned car on fire in a field or squashing kids on a zebra crossing.
‘Grace, look at me, I’m on that hill,’ Dad says, pointing out of the window.
‘Oh yes, I see,’ I say, stirring the gravy.
My tactic is to allow the fantasies, to just let them flow, as he looks happy. I like the communication. It’s something, but even that is slipping away now. I know it can’t last forever.
As sections of his brain furl up, he has trouble, when speaking, differentiating between thoughts and reality. If he looks out of the window up at the hill and his brain wants to make small talk about how cold it might be up there, he’ll say, ‘’Ere, Gracie, look at me blowing about on the hill. I am there, can you see me?’
‘Ooh. Are you?’ I say. ‘Which one are you? You’ll be tired when you get back, won’t you?’
‘Yes, I’ll get blown off and land in the field.’
He laughs and walks off.
He is happy. And I’m happy to have communicated.
The problem with this tactic is that by the end of the day you are both as doolally as each other.
And every day of this madness is conducted in a haze of grief, but ambiguous grief, as you’re bereaved of the person you love while babysitting their shell. Mam wonders if the diagnosis is an exaggeration. Maybe he needs a vitamin B12 injection? Maybe he is putting it on? We all agree he can’t go into care.
May 2018
It is 1 a.m. and in a matter of hours I am supposed to be going to London on the 10.11 Penrith to Euston train to film MasterChef and then coming back via Leeds to review a restaurant, but Dad is in a small ball curled up on one side of his bed.
I think he is breathing.
I get very close.
He is breathing. He has not stood up for four days. I cannot get him to drink water. I take some bread with marmalade and a small square of chocolate, but I can’t convince him to eat. Not even Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut. Is this what dying looks like? Or is he just tired? Or depressed? I look on the Internet to see if this is a stage of death. Me and Dave have not been able to wash him for weeks. He screams and shouts if we mention it. I think Dad is dying, but then he could possibly just be very dehydrated. How do you force someone to drink?
I look up bedsores. Rickets. Malnutrition.
I look up undertakers.
I look up Alzheimer’s care homes. Outreach groups. The images are always of smiling people holding chinchillas from a local petting zoo. My father, I am quite sure, would rather be dead than do group activities.
Dad hates enforced fun. He never did a flippant thing or a hobby in his life. My father is ex-military, he is rough and wily, he does not do arts and crafts. I feel like I’m betraying him by even considering humiliating him in this way. Also, how would he act if he got there? He can be so cruel with his words.
But in the backgrounds of these pictures of dementia groups there are always people around me and my brother’s age.
Relatives. Carers.
I want to hold my hand out and say, look, we are here too. Please help us. But I am too scared. Also, if we let other people into this situation, they could take events out of our hands.
I snap the laptop shut.
Dad is on his side in a ball. I check his breath with my hand in front of his face, then get into bed and wonder if he will last the night. At 6 a.m. he is still breathing. David tells me to go to London, so I set off for Penrith Station and hope Dad lasts until I get back.
June 2018
I cannot tell you about the weeks before my father stopped living with us.
Some of the things that he did. It was not him.
It was another person.
And I’ll always feel that I let him down. I couldn’t make him drink or eat, no matter what I cooked.
I knew under my watch he was going to die sooner than he should.
But the fact is that leaving him in his little room in the care home while he was crying, promising him I would definitely come back, has robbed me of a bit of my heart which will never grow back.
July 2018
Visiting Dad plays on my mind for at least seventy-two hours before I go. On trains, in hotel rooms and when I close my eyes to sleep. I must go. I must go. But it’s a cloud over my day before I set off and I feel worse when it’s done.
Dad is a skull in a chair.
Time, for him, is like a concertina. Opening and closing in the same sentence.
I sit in his little room. He sits on the side of his bed like an inmate.
Sometimes he cries. He cries for Mam, who he never sees – except Dave brought her to visit him yesterday, he just didn’t recognise her.
He cries because I am keeping things from him.
He cries because he is a burden to me.
I like it best when he sleeps, as he is peaceful. I put on mid-afternoon reruns of Emmerdale and sit by the radiator in the room that no longer has a carpet – he cannot have carpet anymore, as he can’t be trusted to tell anyone he needs the loo.
‘Do you remember A Touch of Frost, Dad? Do you remember our Alsatian, Cilla?’
His mind is a snowstorm of fragments that partially happened and dreams and nightmares he firmly believes are true.
‘Jesus is there in the roof tiles,’ he says.
‘The lads had all their sheepdogs out and I was referee.’
‘There is a little cat in this room, Gracie, can you hear it?’
August 2018
In the main common room at the care home, a young woman from a local petting zoo has brought some live animals to show the residents.
A guinea pig.
A mouse.
A salamander.
‘Everyone is in there,’ says one of the ladies, beckoning me in.
I creep in at the back.
My dad is on the front row. Front and centre.
Almost everyone in the group has dementia.
I stand by the wall beside the weekly meals’ menu, written in bright colours in Comic Sans.
&n
bsp; Dad is engrossed in the guinea pig. He is soft and child-like, just like the people in the adverts I’ve seen for the dementia care groups. Like a little boy at nursery school.
He always loved animals.
The girl places the small bundle of fluff in his hands and he cuddles it to his chest, but he’s clearly a little scared of it too.
August 2018
Mam and me are having a pot of tea and sultana scones together at 3 p.m. in a garden centre just outside Carlisle. It’s the kind of simple thing we haven’t been able to do for a very long time. For months leaving the house with Dad or without Dad was impossible.
I imagined things might be easier once we had moved him to the care home and he had nurses who could safely wash him and feed him and even boss him around a little without him screaming abuse. Also, his room has an alarm, so now he couldn’t escape and get into the road or fall downstairs or set fire to anything.
But things are not easier, they are just differently hard.
Now Dad’s gone, there’s no wandering and no searching. He’s no longer sleeping for so long that we have to go in and check he’s breathing. There’s no more worrying and putting off what will happen next. We just have much more time to think.
When we get back from the garden centre we sit in the lounge, me and Mam. Her treatment is ongoing, which means endless trips to the hospital for injections and pills. She is still stable but completely exhausted.
Day after day after day, we tell each other that we’ll ‘take it easy’, but instead we end up fraught, conducting a laborious post-mortem of what has led us to this point.
It is all we can talk about.
It is the only thing to talk about.
Dad.
At least some of the stories are grimly funny. I remind her about the time I picked her up from hospital with him in tow, and in a blink between paying for the taxi and entering the building I lost him. Then, after some frantic searching, numerous elevator journeys and a tannoy call-out, I found him in the cafeteria running about pushing a wheelchair. It was very Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em.
‘The daft bugger,’ says Mam, laughing. ‘We should have left him there then.’
I remind her about when he began to carry a leather flight bag around with him everywhere, even in the house, full of surreal items that he had decided were today’s treasure. Me and Dave used to play a game called ‘What is in the bag today?’ One evening, after a particularly manic day, Dad fell asleep and we checked inside to find five neatly folded bobble hats.
‘That bloody bag,’ she laughs. ‘He looked like Roy Cropper off Corrie. I put it in the bin one day and he fished it out.’
We talk about the beginning, years and years ago, when he started to leave the front door open, and then the car door standing wide open in supermarket car parks. And how he’d become lost on short shopping trips out and would then wait by the front door of the shop, furious that he had been abandoned.
We take all the pieces apart like a puzzle and put them back together over and over again. The accusations about a conspiracy, all the screaming and shouting and anger over imaginary events. How it all became less easy to be sympathetic about, and how eventually he was just plain frightening.
Mam is so tired. She has been chained to all of this for so many years. But now he has gone and she no longer wants to live freely. How can she just go out for a scone at a garden centre? Why should she live in freedom when we’ve put him in jail?
We talk and talk. Sometimes we get cross with each other and sit in separate rooms – me at her for not accepting this is what it is: this is us now. We could not get food, liquids or medication into him. We could not bathe him. He fell lots of times. Some very dangerous things happened when we were tired. We must try to move through this bit and see him being looked after properly as a positive. We can visit! Mam is frustrated at me for not saying that perhaps this is temporary.
‘Maybe Dad will get better once he has had a rest too, and then we can get him home,’ she says.
We argue, fall out and fall back in. I tell her I love her.
I try to make her laugh.
I remind her again about when he got hold of the car keys. This was not funny at all while it was happening. It could have been horrific.
I remind her of the months he pretended he was almost paraplegic and couldn’t move his legs or arms, but when no one was looking he was fine, like the guy from Little Britain. That is actually pretty funny, on reflection.
Dad is no longer here, but he is still in every room we sit in for weeks and weeks and months and months. Dad’s space at the table will always be empty. The wound I have about Dad only ever seems to grows the slenderest of scabs. The merest memory makes it bleed.
Things I miss about Dad
I miss when he ate the last roast potato at dinner and shouted, ‘It’s the fast and hungry in this house, Gracie.’
I miss when he described stupid folk by saying, ‘He’s about as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.’
I miss him mispronouncing words to wind me up. Profiteroles as ‘Profunferelos’, Yacht as ‘yachet’.
I miss him referring to my mother as ‘Mein Führer’.
I miss how he couldn’t buy any item of clothing without it having a specific named purpose. ‘I got these trousers for wearing to the lock-up,’ he’d say. ‘I got this jacket for walking the dog.’ ‘I got these pants for going for breakfast on the cruise.’ If you wanted him to accept a new item, you had to sell its unique purpose. ‘Happy Christmas, Dad! I got you these socks to put on if you’re defrosting the car.’
I miss our shared black, twisted sense of humour. I once made him a sign in a medieval font that said, ‘The Floggings will continue until Morale improves’, which hung in the kitchen.
I miss him grassing me up to Mam to save his own skin during a silly family row, then jigging about in the background, mouthing, ‘Your turn! Your turn! Your turn!’
I miss watching Fawlty Towers and Billy Connolly live on VHS.
I miss sending him Beryl Cook postcards of round-bottomed ladies in jacuzzis.
I miss listening to Johnny Cash albums in the car with him.
I miss him saying, ‘Oh, leave her alone, she’s only a little lass,’ which he did even when I was forty.
I miss the WD-40, spare change, dust and random pieces of wood he left about the house.
I miss all these things and a million more.
‘Does he still recognise you?’ my friends ask when I explain why I’m no longer around.
‘Sometimes,’ I say. But I leave it there. I don’t explain anything else.
Because in the moments when he recognises me, he is Dad. He’s there. His facial muscles – very briefly – arrange themselves how they once did. But then he’s gone again. It’s over. And having him back for a few seconds just leaves me sore.
CHAPTER 11
Whelks in Jam
August 2018
Even with a head brimming with syrup and abject sadness, I need to go back out to work. I need the cash.
Maybe that is, after all, the true meaning of being working class.
For the last twenty-one days I have wandered around bra-less, in leggings, hollow-eyed and despondent, but this won’t get the bills paid. It’s impossible to review restaurants from under a duvet in a back bedroom in the remote Lake District.
So I’m back on the West Coast line from Penrith to Euston, stood in the toilet of Coach K. At Penrith I have red eyes from crying; by Oxenholme I have attached false eyelashes to my lids and let the glue dry, and swooshed myself thoroughly with a lint roller. As we pass through Lancaster, I have a packet of hair pins out and have the beginnings of an up-do. By Milton Keynes I am 60 per cent the person I once was, give or take the silver flecks in my hair that I hide clumsily with mascara. In a taxi at Euston Station
I slip on a pair of heels, spray myself with Issey Miyake perfume and paint on a smile. Nothing is perfect, but I have definitely established a light veneer of London Me.
I’m off to review a totally ridiculous restaurant. It’s not ridiculous in the eyes of the London food scene or the Michelin-star people, but it’s certainly ridiculous if you’ve become accustomed to dining out in a garden centre.
This is a multi-million-pound-renovation West London dining experience. It involves a stark open kitchen where, as you arrive, a squadron of chefs are moving micro-fungi around plates intensely with silver tweezers. Many of the plates will be less like lunch, more like a Jenga game of shards and textures.
The restaurant’s £50,000 Bose stereo system is playing The Joshua Tree by U2. The atmosphere when I arrive is tense. Really bloody tense. My attempt to book anonymously has clearly been thwarted. Most London restaurants use one of the same half-dozen reservation platforms these days, all leaving trails of electronic cookies wherever I leave my false names and phone numbers.
This has certainly happened here, as everyone from the door people to the chefs to the kitchen porter are being that kind of ‘normal’ where they bump into each other and smile with faces that look sore. Their hands wobble as they try to take a coat. Sometimes in these situations I see younger ones being taken aside and slapped down verbally for moving my glass too quickly, or too slowly, or not moving it at all. Sometimes waiters disappear in the middle of my dinner and I cannot decide whether their shift has ended or they’ve been taken outside and executed. Sometimes I sit on the loo in newly built restaurants and hear the kitchen crews through the MDF wall being shouted at by chefs because my plate went out without garnish, which was the final straw in a terrible week, in a terrible year, for a chef who has not seen his wife or baby for weeks. In these cases, I’ll act like I’ve not heard and one of the front-of-house staff will meet me outside the bathroom and escort me straight back to my seat to get me away from the noise. We will both discuss the recent weather and pretend everything is normal.
This is all normal.
It is normal that there’s a picture of my face on the wall of every kitchen, with added notes on my likes and dislikes and more than likely with Satan’s horns drawn on my forehead. On the days you’re in the mood for all this, being a restaurant critic is an absolute blast. But the downside is that sometimes you’re not and the cavalcade must go on. Off you must trot into another heavily staged room with freshly painted walls where everyone is smiling and oh so normal but also insane, to eat the very long tasting menu.