must have let something slip. Forgotten where you live or fed raw eggs to the cat? Something like that.”
It’s about this point I realise, by the rapidly filling catheter bag hanging from her bed, that while she is talking she is also casually urinating.
She fills the silence with: “Fine, I’ll go first. Well. I kissed my own brother.”
The catheter tube sways gently and bounces off the bedside.
“By that I mean
kissed
him, kissed on the lips. Like a lover.”
I nod, then stop. I can hear her mouth moistly twisting in a grin but I can’t take my eyes off the yellowing tube.
“So they tell me, anyway. I didn’t know who he was, or at least, I knew that I knew him, and I knew that I loved him, very much, so I assumed he was my husband. He’d come to meet me and my daughter for a pub lunch at the Harvester, and when he walked in I took him by the face and kissed him. I might have squeezed his bum a bit too. He’s quite handsome, even at his age.”
She stops pissing and the tube stills and drains. I look up at her. She’s laughing but she doesn’t seem to find it all that amusing.
“My husband died eighteen years ago, if you can believe it. How could I forget something like that?”
I try to ask her a question but it flails out of me in a grunt, instead. Since the last stroke, it’s been harder to push the words forward. By the time I get around to getting them in the right order the conversation has usually moved on. The doorway is almost ready, has almost reached terminal velocity. It vibrates around me now, so violently, so loudly that I can’t believe Ingrid hasn’t noticed, can’t believe that there aren’t paint chips and splinters flying across the room.
“They didn’t see the funny side, let’s put it that way,” she says. “But you should have seen his face.” She laughs in a lazy way: Ahah, ahah. Ha. “So, what about you?”
I want to answer her but I don’t know what I did to deserve this place. It’s bizarre to be told you can no longer look after yourself, like living with someone you never see; an annoying and intrusive character who leaves his shoes in the fridge. It reminded me of living with Heather, a compulsive but distracted tidier who would abandon small objects halfway through putting them away, having spotted something else that needed sorting. My watch would end up in the pestle and mortar, her cheque book in the fruit bowl, loose change in the craters of half-burned candles.
Before the doctors confirmed that my brain was shrivelling like a forgotten apple core, whenever things in the flat became misplaced, I wanted to blame Heather out of habit, even though she was thirty-odd years gone. She might well be invisible now, creeping in to sneak away with my glasses and the can opener.
Ingrid is still talking but the warmth of the doorway has reached my skin - the panicked flush of taking a wrong turn, missing a step, realising that you are about to drive onto the wrong side of the motorway. I know this feeling. It means I am reeling in a lost memory, albeit consciously out of reach. My body reacts to the recollection, but my mind isn’t in on the joke. I wonder what it is. It feels like a nasty one. I don’t really want to know, but I step backwards through the doorway anyway.
#
My foot lands on the cream kitchen tile of the house my children grew up in. Baked beans quiver in a pan on the hob, at the cusp of boiling. It was winter in the nursing home but here I stand in a short-sleeved shirt, irritable about cooking in the heat. Two plastic plates sit on the worktop: plain blue for Angela and Peter Rabbit in watery pastels for Matthew. My focus fixes on the miniature carrots and cabbages dotted around the rim. Not that Matthew ever ate his vegetables. He will be sitting next door, cross-legged, six inches away from the telly. Angela with him, in the armchair, in a book. The space above my diaphragm becomes a weightless vacuum of anticipation. I will bring them
It’s about this point I realise, by the rapidly filling catheter bag hanging from her bed, that while she is talking she is also casually urinating.
She fills the silence with: “Fine, I’ll go first. Well. I kissed my own brother.”
The catheter tube sways gently and bounces off the bedside.
“By that I mean
kissed
him, kissed on the lips. Like a lover.”
I nod, then stop. I can hear her mouth moistly twisting in a grin but I can’t take my eyes off the yellowing tube.
“So they tell me, anyway. I didn’t know who he was, or at least, I knew that I knew him, and I knew that I loved him, very much, so I assumed he was my husband. He’d come to meet me and my daughter for a pub lunch at the Harvester, and when he walked in I took him by the face and kissed him. I might have squeezed his bum a bit too. He’s quite handsome, even at his age.”
She stops pissing and the tube stills and drains. I look up at her. She’s laughing but she doesn’t seem to find it all that amusing.
“My husband died eighteen years ago, if you can believe it. How could I forget something like that?”
I try to ask her a question but it flails out of me in a grunt, instead. Since the last stroke, it’s been harder to push the words forward. By the time I get around to getting them in the right order the conversation has usually moved on. The doorway is almost ready, has almost reached terminal velocity. It vibrates around me now, so violently, so loudly that I can’t believe Ingrid hasn’t noticed, can’t believe that there aren’t paint chips and splinters flying across the room.
“They didn’t see the funny side, let’s put it that way,” she says. “But you should have seen his face.” She laughs in a lazy way: Ahah, ahah. Ha. “So, what about you?”
I want to answer her but I don’t know what I did to deserve this place. It’s bizarre to be told you can no longer look after yourself, like living with someone you never see; an annoying and intrusive character who leaves his shoes in the fridge. It reminded me of living with Heather, a compulsive but distracted tidier who would abandon small objects halfway through putting them away, having spotted something else that needed sorting. My watch would end up in the pestle and mortar, her cheque book in the fruit bowl, loose change in the craters of half-burned candles.
Before the doctors confirmed that my brain was shrivelling like a forgotten apple core, whenever things in the flat became misplaced, I wanted to blame Heather out of habit, even though she was thirty-odd years gone. She might well be invisible now, creeping in to sneak away with my glasses and the can opener.
Ingrid is still talking but the warmth of the doorway has reached my skin - the panicked flush of taking a wrong turn, missing a step, realising that you are about to drive onto the wrong side of the motorway. I know this feeling. It means I am reeling in a lost memory, albeit consciously out of reach. My body reacts to the recollection, but my mind isn’t in on the joke. I wonder what it is. It feels like a nasty one. I don’t really want to know, but I step backwards through the doorway anyway.
#
My foot lands on the cream kitchen tile of the house my children grew up in. Baked beans quiver in a pan on the hob, at the cusp of boiling. It was winter in the nursing home but here I stand in a short-sleeved shirt, irritable about cooking in the heat. Two plastic plates sit on the worktop: plain blue for Angela and Peter Rabbit in watery pastels for Matthew. My focus fixes on the miniature carrots and cabbages dotted around the rim. Not that Matthew ever ate his vegetables. He will be sitting next door, cross-legged, six inches away from the telly. Angela with him, in the armchair, in a book. The space above my diaphragm becomes a weightless vacuum of anticipation. I will bring them
Similar Books
