The Mist of Life - Max Dunbar
Sam sometimes thought that she had never known happiness until she turned eighteen. She had grown up in a semi-detached house in a Cheshire village, the youngest of four girls. Her eldest sister Sarah taught at the Academy, had a house in New Mills and was married with three children. Her sister Kate had a management job at Stepping Hill, a house in Woodley and was married with two children. Her sister Lindsey had a support job for GMP, a house in Romiley and had just given birth to her first child.
Well into her thirties, Sam had done... nothing. She had lived in nine different cities and three different continents, ran her own public relations company, worked for parliamentarians and NGOs, saved lives, fallen in love... but she had left no mark upon the world, and that was why her mother greeted her as if she had always expected her youngest child to come home again.
‘So what happened to that older man you were living with?’
‘We kind of wanted different things.’ The older man had wanted children. She had thought she would start wanting a child as she grew older but it never happened. For Sam, kids represented drudgery, slavery, nothing else. It wasn’t an opinion she ever voiced, particularly not in this house. ‘And he owned the flat... I couldn’t find a decent place in time. And there was that temporary contract in Manchester.’
The old girl gave her a strange look – a kind of belligerent incomprehension. Sam was actually a little worried. Her mum had been like her dad, both had always seemed younger than they were. Now it came to Sam that the old girl really was past sixty, really had grown old.
‘Well, that’s a shame. You know that you’ll be expected to earn your keep. I’m retired now.’
‘That’s absolutely fine.’ A rush of irritation – the first of many. As if she had expected room and board for nothing, like some surly mid-twenties boomerang!
They worked out a plan: three hundred from Sam’s salary at Mind, to cover food and utility bills. Coming from London, this was a low rate, and Sam was sure she would be able to save enough to get a place in town. This would be a temporary thing. No more.
In her wandering years she had sometimes felt guilt about the weddings and Christmases she had missed. Now that she had finally returned (not for long, though, she kept telling herself, just a temporary thing) Sam thought her guilt had been misplaced, for her mother was as insufferable as she had always been.
Can I count the old ways? The constant admonishments. Leave the shower door open. Do not touch the walls as you go downstairs. Do not only smoke outside but collect your cigarette ends once a week and put them in a bag. The micromanagement of other lives: a barrage of worthless and unsolicited advice. The meals she insisted they eat together, everything a fucking ceremony, that took too long to prepare and never contained anything worth eating. The faux-comic stresses and accents upon commonly used words. Little things. When you live together, little things make a lot.
Sam stayed away from the house as much as possible, for fear that she would lose her temper and shout at the old girl, or attack her. She worked hard at the mental health charity; she had never been afraid of hard work and this felt like good work, making a difference. At the weekends she stayed with old friends and went out in Manchester. When she caught the Piccadilly train, at the end of the working day or on a Sunday evening, a deep and terrible sadness would come over her, and it seemed like everything good had bleached out of the skies.
One day she came home from work and her mother was in a consultation with Gudrun Barrett. They sat at the kitchen table, hands joined; Gudrun’s ‘partner’, John, was also seated, dressed as always like a professional rambler in shorts and packsack.
‘Become aware of the problem you would like to work on,’ Gudrun was saying. ‘Notice any unpleasant bodily sensations, any tension, anxiety, or negative thoughts.’
Sam smiled at the company, not wanting to interrupt the session. John said hello, loudly. Sam was wearing a skirt and his eyes followed her ass out of the room, as they had when she had been young.
‘Tap this gently but quite fast with the four fingers of your other hand.’ Gudrun spoke in a creepy faux-hypnosis. ‘It is usually easiest to tap with your dominant hand, right or left, it doesn’t matter.’
Later, her mother came and found her. ‘Did you see that John and Gudrun were here this evening? Why didn’t you say hello?’
‘Because I didn’t want to interrupt you,’ Sam said, ‘and because they are creeps and frauds.’
The old girl ignored this. ‘Gudrun’s been helping me a great deal with my hypertension.’
‘Personally,’ Sam said, ‘I’d try my luck with an actual doctor.’
John and Gudrun were the only family friends she couldn’t pretend to like. John’s previous marriage had dissolved after his arrest for sexual activity with a child; her mother was always quick to point out that the evidence was purely circumstantial, and that the school had let him go back to work. Shortly after the CPS dropped his charges, John had taken up with Gudrun, a self-styled ‘interpretative psychotherapist’ who worked for the Prison Service. In this capacity she had introduced a panoply of interesting new treatments, including reflexology, cosmic ordering, abstinence-based alcohol and substance counselling, EFT or ‘tapping’ therapy, reiki and acupuncture to the captive audience of HMP Styal.
‘You shouldn’t say that. Gudrun’s going through a horrible time. They suspended her from the prison.’
‘How come?’
Her mother explained. Last year Gudrun had treated a nineteen-year-old prisoner, serving eight months for theft. Both the treatment and the sentence came to an abrupt end when the inmate hanged herself in her cell. The prisoner had been a student at the University of Manchester, and the family was wealthy. Like all psychotherapists, Gudrun answered to no regulatory body, but the family had used their legal connections to get the Prison Service to launch an investigation. Investigators had noted the unusually high suicide rate – more than for any other practitioner Styal had employed – among Gudrun’s patients, and had charged her with medically negligent homicide. It would come to court in December.
‘It’s all nonsense, of course,’ her mother said. ‘One of those humanist groups trying to make the poor girl into a cause celebre.’
‘Well, I’m sure you know better than people who are actually trained to investigate this sort of thing,’ Sam said.
Her mother was silent for a moment, and then said: ‘You’re a mean, horrid person.’ She left the room before Sam could answer.
‘So, what time are you leaving tomorrow?’
‘Midday, like I said.’
‘How are you going to get all your stuff across?’
Another thing: the same questions over and over. ‘I hired a van.’
They were eating a casserole. The best china was out, and candles had been lit. Words left a ripple like stones.
‘Do you remember,’ her mother said, ‘when Kate was nine, Sarah would have been about twelve, Lindsey was around seven – you, you would have been five... and your father was doing those experiments with his tape recorder...’
Sam slugged at her wine. She had heard this story about eight times since her return home, and always in that fey, didactic voice. ‘You like to tell stories of the past. Is that because you don’t think you’ve got much of a future?’
Her mother’s mouth hung open a little from that pouchy, turnip face. ‘What... I don’t understand...’
‘Also, you treat me like a child. Is that because it makes you feel young?’ There was a calculated kindness to Sam’s tone.
‘You always were a horrid little child,’ her mother said. ‘You never had a good or kind word for anyone. And you haven’t changed.’
That was it. Sam got to her feet. ‘I have been here for months and during that time I have been as friendly and helpful as possible! I vacuum, I wash up, I take the bins out, I deal with tradesmen, I would even cook meals for us if you let me. Despite my personal dislike for you, I have treated you with respect and kindness from day one. And all I get is condescension. Well, listen –‘
‘Samantha –‘
‘No, for once I’m going to talk, and you’re to listen. I don’t fucking like you, we never had a good relationship, and when I’m gone there will be no relationship. You can live vicariously through your grandchildren. I have never felt comfortable here. Never. That’s news to you, I take it?’
Now there was a sly tone in her mother’s voice. ‘You must tread carefully, Sam. This house could be your pension.’
It took a moment for Sam to register the enormity of this insult. ‘You.... you think this is about money? You mindless cunt, you arrogant bitch!’ She picked up the candelabra (a present from John and Gudrun) and hurled it at the wall: it shattered. ‘Do not be up,’ Sam said, ‘when I get back.’
She had to go out, but figured she would end up on a loose and circumspect wander. Instead she ran into some schoolfriends and they spent a few lively hours in the Lion’s Head: Sam may not have felt comfortable in the town, but she had always been respected there. It was one am by the time they called it a night.
The hall lights were on, but there was no intuition that something was wrong. Her mother’s body therefore came as a complete shock.
Sam found her half in and half out of the kitchen. She turned her mother over, in a fury of panic and love, and the superstition came
(I did this)
(You caused this.)
and her mother’s eyes were closed. One cheek twitched, as if a moth had been trapped there.
In Sam’s other hand she was rapping details into her BlackBerry. The body lay in fluid and the smell of piss rose, abrasive and urgent. Sam didn’t notice.
Her sisters turned up at Stepping Hill, sometimes with husbands in tow, dull-eyed and slack-jawed fellows who had sired equally dull-eyed and slack-jawed kids. There was a new respect in the eyes of her sisters, Sam had found their mother, and in turn Sam noticed that her sisters seemed to look more like each other these days – the same pinched face and slanted eyes. Like they were merging. If I stay any longer, will that happen to me?
Came a time where her mother was able to leave. But where? Her sisters were all in cramped and leveraged townhouses. And Sam no way was going to put her in a care home. She’d seen care homes, and knew what happened to people in them. It was best, they agreed, if their mother could live in the house she loved as best as possible. And so they both went home.
The first thing she did was call Andrea and apologise because she could not move into the Levenshulme houseshare after all.
Recovering from a stroke is not easy. There are certain aspects of daily life that you may find more difficult.
Communication. Her mother suffered from global aphasia. She would repeat phrases and questions, always phrases and questions Sam knew from growing up, and Sam would think back to her irritation at these repetitions over dinner and wonder if they had been one of the semantic crutches and affectations we all use or signs of a sinister senility. It helps if you sing to her, Leo said. But there had never been music in this house and Sam’s sporadic attempts at ‘Eternal Flame’ or ‘Heard It On the Grapevine’ got no response. The old girl could no longer read, and every night Sam would read to her from Agatha Christie and PD James (her mother had no other books) until she fell asleep, and Sam often crashed beside her, in the double bed her mother had bought forty-three years ago.
Sam herself only spoke in functional terms, to doctors, specialist nurses and benefit assessors. Sometimes she made herself speak to her mother, forced herself into long rambling monologues, but not much got through. The rest of the time she said little or nothing.
Eating. The nurse specialist said most people learn to swallow again after two or three weeks but it never happened. The consistency of food had to be massaged and streamlined; soaked, pureed or commercially thickened. The meal itself would be spooned to the old girl on a trial and error basis with cloths and paper towels on standby. Sam herself lost three stone by that year’s end. She couldn’t find time. And everything she did eat tasted like she imagined strokefood would taste – the taste of soaked and pureed brain.
Cognition. Her mother never regained the feeling on the left side of her body, and had trouble recognising the paralysed left arm as her own. From the next room (Sam had moved into her sister’s bedroom) she would be woken by screams as her mother batted and wrestled the left arm away from her, thinking it was some alien parasite or burden... which, in a sense, it was. The paralysis made it impossible to wash or dress herself, and Sam did this for her each morning.
In addition to this, her mother suffered from prosopagnosia (Sam herself found it genuinely hard to recognise the face in the mirror, which seemed ten years older, limned with cares and lines) agnosia (both mother and daughter would jump at the unfamiliar ring of landline or mobile) and dyspraxia (her mother could not so much as pour juice from the carton or the cup, and Sam found herself dropping things, cigarettes, wallet in the street, purse on the steps, although she had never been clumsy, not even as an adolescent).
It was harder to think. Processes were foggy and dull and full of a mindless significance. She forgot important stuff, and the unimportant stuff clanged and recurred in her head – lines of bad novels, XFM jingles, and a line she had remembered from her grandfather’s funeral she had attended up at St Jude’s when she was a little girl:
In the mist of life
In the mist of life, we are in death.
*
The doorbell rang at midday. At that point her mother had been looking at the stubbled wallpaper near the boiler in the dining room. She was stroking it with one hand, and making a strange cooing noise. She had been doing this for twenty minutes. Sam couldn’t keep her eyes off it. Pans rattled on the hob, but she couldn’t take her eyes off her mother.
She answered the door on its second ring. Sarah stood there with her husband.
‘Happy Christmas!’ she cried.
‘Happy Christmas to you, Sarah. Really appreciate it.’
She made no move to invite them in. The kids began to get restless.
Sarah said: ‘Can we come in?’
‘Nah, I don’t think so.’
Her husband made to say something, but Sarah silenced him with a gesture. ‘Sam. We have to get together as a family on this.’
Sam reached and hustled her sister into the hallway. She closed the door before her in-laws could cross the threshold. ‘Sam, what’s going on?’
She handed Sarah a glass of champagne. Sarah sipped at it, then gave her mother an uneasy glance. The old girl was on her hands and knees now, admiring the marble tile by the boiler.
‘I haven’t seen you since the hospital,’ Sam said. ‘Nor Lindsey, nor Kate. Which wouldn’t bother me. You have your own life to lead. But what gets me is that you have always gone on about how family comes first. Yet, I have been here for months, taking care of her, with no help, no support, no visits or phone calls.’
‘I appreciate you’re upset, Sam, but the kids should see their grandmother. The others are on their way. We thought we’d surprise you.’ She shook her head. ‘You know, I’ve never seen you take responsibility for anything?’
Sam laughed. ‘She won’t recognise them. She doesn’t seem to recognise you. Hey, look! It’s your firstborn!’ The old girl had picked up an apple and was eating it, with mixed results. ‘Doesn’t recognise me, some days, and I’m with her twenty-four seven. She can’t think, man. And as for responsibility, I’m doing my share. I change her pad six times a day. They knocked back her DLA application, my carers’ allowance claim is lost in the system somewhere and I’m getting to the stage where I don’t know how I’m going to heat this house.’
She lit a cigarette – a sin since childhood, but who the hell cared, now? ‘There’s no way I can deal with a family gathering now. There’s only so much I can pretend to like. So you can just get back in your car with your inbred children, and fuck off.’
There was a brief quiver to her sister’s face – she looked so much like their mother then, Sam thought, her mother during that argument, just before the blood clot had burst in her brain. Then Sarah broke.
‘Fine! Look, it’s been hard for us too, you know. We had to deal with her when you were off travelling in India and finding yourself.’ Her sister knocked back the champagne and left the room. The door slammed.
Sam had done a small roast. She mashed up some chicken and gravy and fed it to her mother over half an hour. She thought of putting a paper hat on the old girl’s head, and the vision that occurred was so macabre that her feeding hand jerked, and strokefood spilled down her mother’s cardigan.
*
Her only other guest was John. At the time the sun had gone and she was on that foggy kind of drunk, reading an Anne Tyler novel stretched out on the sofa. Opposite, her mother sat watching the Strictly special; the occasional rhythmic keening made Sam look up and over.
She was tired enough to let John in. John had problems of his own that Christmas. Ten days previously Gudrun had returned to Styal, not in her old capacity as an interpretative psychotherapist, but as an inmate. John said she seemed to be coping badly with her eight-year sentence; there was a right to appeal, but it could take months. Sam said she had no sympathy at all. For either of them.
Before they went to bed she guided her mother into the bathroom and washed and changed her into nightwear. As she wiped down the effluvia from the backs of her mother’s thighs, a stat Leo had thrown came to her – something like a third of people become carers at some point – and she realised that this was a reality for thousands, probably millions of people. You thought you could escape? You thought the cosmopolitan would save you? Think again, bohemian child! Welcome to the family, baby! This is love! This is what it comes down to!
The shit had caked to the inside of her buttocks, like wire wool.
In the mist of life –
There is nothing. There can be nothing more.
It’s your love that kills you.
The snow came down for the third year running. Her carers’ allowance came through, which meant she no longer had to choose between heat and eat. There were times where she was not feeding, or washing, or dressing, or wheeling recycling bins around the front, or fixing the boiler, or sweeping floors. A house is a machine for living in; sometimes, for moments at a time, the machine stopped.
She had grown close to the care co-ordinator, a guy called Leo who had been in her half year. Back then they had been separated by teenage social strata, but all that was well behind both of them now, and they developed the friendly flirtation that exists between a single woman and a married man.
Her mother had taken to wandering. Sam would be woken during the night by strange and ghostly footfalls. There was no rhythm to it. She would find the old girl halfway up a staircase, or an odd point in the hallway, finding patterns and order in wood panelling or skirting board – the same significances and meanings Sam had come to find herself in such everyday things.
One morning she got up to find that her mother had fallen. The old girl was sprawled across ten risers in the same position she had been so many months ago.
The first conclusion lit up her mind like a forest flare. She rushed and knelt at the old girl’s wrist. At first there was nothing, and her mother’s skin was cold. Then –
(beat)
there was a pulse. Came again. A regular pulse, not the random thrum of arrhythmia.
The eye on her bad side came open, and in it there was that sly, didactic look there had been on the last meal they shared as sentient creatures – the look of the teacher who has nothing to impart and yet insists that you learn the lesson. And the evil thought came
(for fuck’s sake, why don’t)
(why don’t you die? why don’t you do the world a favour and just die?)
Sam washed and dressed her mother. Her mind was so blank it was like she’d had a stroke herself. Then she took her mother downstairs and sat her in her wicker chair. Then, and only then, Sam sat at the table and put her head in her palms and cried. And it wasn’t for her flesh and blood – it was for herself. And that was the worst thing. Sam Rhodes wished she were dead.
She cleaned herself up before she answered the door, but Leo picked up on it immediately. ‘Have you been crying?’
‘Yeah.’ She explained as best she could. ‘I mean, the worst thing is, I’m crying because it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life. And I hate myself for this selfishness. I never felt love for her, never, and what does that say about me?’
Leo had made tea and lit cigarettes – nowt better than a fag and a brew, he always said. ‘Well, family love ain’t simple and positive. It’s complicated and weird, all mixed up with other feelings we have, like guilt, resentment, duty.’
‘But I don’t feel love. Even now. I feel like I’m dead inside.’
‘With families, it’s action more than feelings that count.’ He had his hand on hers, and the warmth of it almost made her cry again – it felt like she hadn’t touched anyone for a long, long time. ‘You’ve done a lot. People in town say so. Looking after your mum all this time on your own. Lot of people would have stuck her in a care home, then sold the house from under – your sister Sarah, for one, she’s nowhere near the saint she makes herself out to be. No one would have blamed you but I worked for Southern Cross and I never got to understand it. Why people would leave their parents to rot in bedsores that go down to the bone.
‘This Iraqi guy worked with me up in Macclesfield. He said to me once that he didn’t get it – back in his country people had their parents living with them when they got old and sick. The attitude was: you did everything for me, so I’ll do everything for you. And it’s not like you’re even trying to take credit for it.’ He took her cheeks in both hands, and kissed the top of her head. ‘But maybe you should give yourself some.’
*
When you’re a carer, the new supermarket counts as a day out.
The new supermarket had been an issue of contention for the last three years. Suburban retirees saw the development as innately evil, and lobbied MPs, councillors and local media against it; there were Facebook groups, e-petitions and SAVE OUR COMMUNITY signs on Volvos and Lexi and every third window in the beaming rows of detached new-builds. Sam thought she would have starved without the basic range.
It started off as a productive day. She’d had five hours unbroken sleep and felt fairly refreshed. Her mother was washed, dressed and fed with minimal resistance. Sam even felt moved to put on a clean turtleneck and Levi’s (she had fallen out of the laundry habit in recent weeks). There was spring sunshine, and the supermarket had cheap readymeals and cut-price DVDs and lots of bright colours and happy machines. Sam and her mother were having a great time until John turned up.
‘Sam!’ He looked terrible. ‘You’ve got to help me.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s Gudrun.’
In the household aisle John explained that the Styal regime had proved too onerous for Gudrun, who had hanged herself the previous night (although no one ever knew this, this had happened in the very same cell as the patient who had triggered Gudrun’s own sentence). Now Sam understood that the stricken palpitations of John’s face, for surely no other woman would be attracted to him, and he would have to spend his life alone. She understood but did not sympathise. A shot of loneliness would do her fine.
‘Can I come back with you? Can we talk about this?’
‘Listen, John.’ She summoned all the kindness she could. ‘Your partner is dead – I appreciate that this makes you feel bad. But I can’t help. My priority needs to be her.’ She gestured to the old girl, who was picking up shower gels and squirting them into her hands. ‘My mum, she takes a lot of looking after. You need to find someone else to talk to. What about your Alpha Course?’
‘But... but it’s so difficult!’ She saw that, even in his state of grief, John was still looking at her chest as he spoke to her. It was the final capering absurdity. Please, for fuck’s sake, let my mind snap!
‘Hey, tell me about it.’ Sam grinned. ‘You know sometimes I think of killing myself? I’m like you, I don’t see a future for myself. But that’s life, you know? It’s really difficult. I would kill myself if not for the old girl. I love her. Well, maybe not. But I love her as much as I can.’
She glanced over, and saw that her mum had fallen again. A couple of Lynx shower tubes were on the bare tiles. An old man in a flat cap stood over her.
‘Fuck!’ Distracted by this dipshit, and she takes another turn. Yet another failure of responsibility.
‘Your mum – ’
‘She’ll be fine. And you will be, too. Go with God, John.’
But they weren’t fine. Paramedics came out in eight minutes and pronounced her mother dead at the scene. There was quite a crowd, and John hovered and whined in the background. Her sisters came down, and they went to the old house with Leo the care co-ordinator. There was plenty of wine, but she felt like beer. She was too shaken to go outside again so Leo headed to the Bargain Booze for a case of bottled Peroni.
The sun went down and thoughts drifted from the horrible practicalities of death into the horrible practicalities of work. Her sisters were gone by nine; they hugged her hard at the door. It was then that, for the first time, she got a sense of being part of a family. It was happy and complicated and strange.
Sam didn’t have a job, but there would be horrible practicalities for her too. Funeral. Probate. Estate management. She couldn’t begin to think about it.
‘I just think, if I hadn’t been distracted, talking to that prick,’ Sam said, ‘she might still be there.’
Leo said: ‘It was as much the second stroke as the head injury that killed her. You’re feeling survivor’s guilt. Hey, you should go and talk to my sister – she’s a CBT therapist. You did everything you could in terms of prevention and, if there’s an inquest, I’ll stand up and swear to that.’
She kissed him, on the lips. He seemed taken aback, in a good way. ‘Apart from the guilt,’ Leo asked, ‘what else do you feel?’
Sam thought about it. ‘I feel tired. Mainly I feel just tired.’
The funeral was on a Monday. Sam was surprised at all the friends that turned up. People from phases of her mother’s life she never knew existed. Easily hundreds at the graveside. How incurious we are. How little we know people, even those closest to us. Each human life is... something that encompasses worlds. The force of it. She stood in her overcoat on a cold sunny day and someone was reading:
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the Name of the Lord.
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
In the midst of life we are in death –
The therapist was over in Macclesfield. Her sisters were handling the wake and she slipped away from the world of children and families and responsibility as she had so many times before.
Leo’s sister asked her: ‘How do you feel, Sam?’
‘My mother is dead,’ Sam told her. ‘And I’m happy.’
Well into her thirties, Sam had done... nothing. She had lived in nine different cities and three different continents, ran her own public relations company, worked for parliamentarians and NGOs, saved lives, fallen in love... but she had left no mark upon the world, and that was why her mother greeted her as if she had always expected her youngest child to come home again.
‘So what happened to that older man you were living with?’
‘We kind of wanted different things.’ The older man had wanted children. She had thought she would start wanting a child as she grew older but it never happened. For Sam, kids represented drudgery, slavery, nothing else. It wasn’t an opinion she ever voiced, particularly not in this house. ‘And he owned the flat... I couldn’t find a decent place in time. And there was that temporary contract in Manchester.’
The old girl gave her a strange look – a kind of belligerent incomprehension. Sam was actually a little worried. Her mum had been like her dad, both had always seemed younger than they were. Now it came to Sam that the old girl really was past sixty, really had grown old.
‘Well, that’s a shame. You know that you’ll be expected to earn your keep. I’m retired now.’
‘That’s absolutely fine.’ A rush of irritation – the first of many. As if she had expected room and board for nothing, like some surly mid-twenties boomerang!
They worked out a plan: three hundred from Sam’s salary at Mind, to cover food and utility bills. Coming from London, this was a low rate, and Sam was sure she would be able to save enough to get a place in town. This would be a temporary thing. No more.
In her wandering years she had sometimes felt guilt about the weddings and Christmases she had missed. Now that she had finally returned (not for long, though, she kept telling herself, just a temporary thing) Sam thought her guilt had been misplaced, for her mother was as insufferable as she had always been.
Can I count the old ways? The constant admonishments. Leave the shower door open. Do not touch the walls as you go downstairs. Do not only smoke outside but collect your cigarette ends once a week and put them in a bag. The micromanagement of other lives: a barrage of worthless and unsolicited advice. The meals she insisted they eat together, everything a fucking ceremony, that took too long to prepare and never contained anything worth eating. The faux-comic stresses and accents upon commonly used words. Little things. When you live together, little things make a lot.
Sam stayed away from the house as much as possible, for fear that she would lose her temper and shout at the old girl, or attack her. She worked hard at the mental health charity; she had never been afraid of hard work and this felt like good work, making a difference. At the weekends she stayed with old friends and went out in Manchester. When she caught the Piccadilly train, at the end of the working day or on a Sunday evening, a deep and terrible sadness would come over her, and it seemed like everything good had bleached out of the skies.
One day she came home from work and her mother was in a consultation with Gudrun Barrett. They sat at the kitchen table, hands joined; Gudrun’s ‘partner’, John, was also seated, dressed as always like a professional rambler in shorts and packsack.
‘Become aware of the problem you would like to work on,’ Gudrun was saying. ‘Notice any unpleasant bodily sensations, any tension, anxiety, or negative thoughts.’
Sam smiled at the company, not wanting to interrupt the session. John said hello, loudly. Sam was wearing a skirt and his eyes followed her ass out of the room, as they had when she had been young.
‘Tap this gently but quite fast with the four fingers of your other hand.’ Gudrun spoke in a creepy faux-hypnosis. ‘It is usually easiest to tap with your dominant hand, right or left, it doesn’t matter.’
Later, her mother came and found her. ‘Did you see that John and Gudrun were here this evening? Why didn’t you say hello?’
‘Because I didn’t want to interrupt you,’ Sam said, ‘and because they are creeps and frauds.’
The old girl ignored this. ‘Gudrun’s been helping me a great deal with my hypertension.’
‘Personally,’ Sam said, ‘I’d try my luck with an actual doctor.’
John and Gudrun were the only family friends she couldn’t pretend to like. John’s previous marriage had dissolved after his arrest for sexual activity with a child; her mother was always quick to point out that the evidence was purely circumstantial, and that the school had let him go back to work. Shortly after the CPS dropped his charges, John had taken up with Gudrun, a self-styled ‘interpretative psychotherapist’ who worked for the Prison Service. In this capacity she had introduced a panoply of interesting new treatments, including reflexology, cosmic ordering, abstinence-based alcohol and substance counselling, EFT or ‘tapping’ therapy, reiki and acupuncture to the captive audience of HMP Styal.
‘You shouldn’t say that. Gudrun’s going through a horrible time. They suspended her from the prison.’
‘How come?’
Her mother explained. Last year Gudrun had treated a nineteen-year-old prisoner, serving eight months for theft. Both the treatment and the sentence came to an abrupt end when the inmate hanged herself in her cell. The prisoner had been a student at the University of Manchester, and the family was wealthy. Like all psychotherapists, Gudrun answered to no regulatory body, but the family had used their legal connections to get the Prison Service to launch an investigation. Investigators had noted the unusually high suicide rate – more than for any other practitioner Styal had employed – among Gudrun’s patients, and had charged her with medically negligent homicide. It would come to court in December.
‘It’s all nonsense, of course,’ her mother said. ‘One of those humanist groups trying to make the poor girl into a cause celebre.’
‘Well, I’m sure you know better than people who are actually trained to investigate this sort of thing,’ Sam said.
Her mother was silent for a moment, and then said: ‘You’re a mean, horrid person.’ She left the room before Sam could answer.
‘So, what time are you leaving tomorrow?’
‘Midday, like I said.’
‘How are you going to get all your stuff across?’
Another thing: the same questions over and over. ‘I hired a van.’
They were eating a casserole. The best china was out, and candles had been lit. Words left a ripple like stones.
‘Do you remember,’ her mother said, ‘when Kate was nine, Sarah would have been about twelve, Lindsey was around seven – you, you would have been five... and your father was doing those experiments with his tape recorder...’
Sam slugged at her wine. She had heard this story about eight times since her return home, and always in that fey, didactic voice. ‘You like to tell stories of the past. Is that because you don’t think you’ve got much of a future?’
Her mother’s mouth hung open a little from that pouchy, turnip face. ‘What... I don’t understand...’
‘Also, you treat me like a child. Is that because it makes you feel young?’ There was a calculated kindness to Sam’s tone.
‘You always were a horrid little child,’ her mother said. ‘You never had a good or kind word for anyone. And you haven’t changed.’
That was it. Sam got to her feet. ‘I have been here for months and during that time I have been as friendly and helpful as possible! I vacuum, I wash up, I take the bins out, I deal with tradesmen, I would even cook meals for us if you let me. Despite my personal dislike for you, I have treated you with respect and kindness from day one. And all I get is condescension. Well, listen –‘
‘Samantha –‘
‘No, for once I’m going to talk, and you’re to listen. I don’t fucking like you, we never had a good relationship, and when I’m gone there will be no relationship. You can live vicariously through your grandchildren. I have never felt comfortable here. Never. That’s news to you, I take it?’
Now there was a sly tone in her mother’s voice. ‘You must tread carefully, Sam. This house could be your pension.’
It took a moment for Sam to register the enormity of this insult. ‘You.... you think this is about money? You mindless cunt, you arrogant bitch!’ She picked up the candelabra (a present from John and Gudrun) and hurled it at the wall: it shattered. ‘Do not be up,’ Sam said, ‘when I get back.’
She had to go out, but figured she would end up on a loose and circumspect wander. Instead she ran into some schoolfriends and they spent a few lively hours in the Lion’s Head: Sam may not have felt comfortable in the town, but she had always been respected there. It was one am by the time they called it a night.
The hall lights were on, but there was no intuition that something was wrong. Her mother’s body therefore came as a complete shock.
Sam found her half in and half out of the kitchen. She turned her mother over, in a fury of panic and love, and the superstition came
(I did this)
(You caused this.)
and her mother’s eyes were closed. One cheek twitched, as if a moth had been trapped there.
In Sam’s other hand she was rapping details into her BlackBerry. The body lay in fluid and the smell of piss rose, abrasive and urgent. Sam didn’t notice.
Her sisters turned up at Stepping Hill, sometimes with husbands in tow, dull-eyed and slack-jawed fellows who had sired equally dull-eyed and slack-jawed kids. There was a new respect in the eyes of her sisters, Sam had found their mother, and in turn Sam noticed that her sisters seemed to look more like each other these days – the same pinched face and slanted eyes. Like they were merging. If I stay any longer, will that happen to me?
Came a time where her mother was able to leave. But where? Her sisters were all in cramped and leveraged townhouses. And Sam no way was going to put her in a care home. She’d seen care homes, and knew what happened to people in them. It was best, they agreed, if their mother could live in the house she loved as best as possible. And so they both went home.
The first thing she did was call Andrea and apologise because she could not move into the Levenshulme houseshare after all.
Recovering from a stroke is not easy. There are certain aspects of daily life that you may find more difficult.
Communication. Her mother suffered from global aphasia. She would repeat phrases and questions, always phrases and questions Sam knew from growing up, and Sam would think back to her irritation at these repetitions over dinner and wonder if they had been one of the semantic crutches and affectations we all use or signs of a sinister senility. It helps if you sing to her, Leo said. But there had never been music in this house and Sam’s sporadic attempts at ‘Eternal Flame’ or ‘Heard It On the Grapevine’ got no response. The old girl could no longer read, and every night Sam would read to her from Agatha Christie and PD James (her mother had no other books) until she fell asleep, and Sam often crashed beside her, in the double bed her mother had bought forty-three years ago.
Sam herself only spoke in functional terms, to doctors, specialist nurses and benefit assessors. Sometimes she made herself speak to her mother, forced herself into long rambling monologues, but not much got through. The rest of the time she said little or nothing.
Eating. The nurse specialist said most people learn to swallow again after two or three weeks but it never happened. The consistency of food had to be massaged and streamlined; soaked, pureed or commercially thickened. The meal itself would be spooned to the old girl on a trial and error basis with cloths and paper towels on standby. Sam herself lost three stone by that year’s end. She couldn’t find time. And everything she did eat tasted like she imagined strokefood would taste – the taste of soaked and pureed brain.
Cognition. Her mother never regained the feeling on the left side of her body, and had trouble recognising the paralysed left arm as her own. From the next room (Sam had moved into her sister’s bedroom) she would be woken by screams as her mother batted and wrestled the left arm away from her, thinking it was some alien parasite or burden... which, in a sense, it was. The paralysis made it impossible to wash or dress herself, and Sam did this for her each morning.
In addition to this, her mother suffered from prosopagnosia (Sam herself found it genuinely hard to recognise the face in the mirror, which seemed ten years older, limned with cares and lines) agnosia (both mother and daughter would jump at the unfamiliar ring of landline or mobile) and dyspraxia (her mother could not so much as pour juice from the carton or the cup, and Sam found herself dropping things, cigarettes, wallet in the street, purse on the steps, although she had never been clumsy, not even as an adolescent).
It was harder to think. Processes were foggy and dull and full of a mindless significance. She forgot important stuff, and the unimportant stuff clanged and recurred in her head – lines of bad novels, XFM jingles, and a line she had remembered from her grandfather’s funeral she had attended up at St Jude’s when she was a little girl:
In the mist of life
In the mist of life, we are in death.
*
The doorbell rang at midday. At that point her mother had been looking at the stubbled wallpaper near the boiler in the dining room. She was stroking it with one hand, and making a strange cooing noise. She had been doing this for twenty minutes. Sam couldn’t keep her eyes off it. Pans rattled on the hob, but she couldn’t take her eyes off her mother.
She answered the door on its second ring. Sarah stood there with her husband.
‘Happy Christmas!’ she cried.
‘Happy Christmas to you, Sarah. Really appreciate it.’
She made no move to invite them in. The kids began to get restless.
Sarah said: ‘Can we come in?’
‘Nah, I don’t think so.’
Her husband made to say something, but Sarah silenced him with a gesture. ‘Sam. We have to get together as a family on this.’
Sam reached and hustled her sister into the hallway. She closed the door before her in-laws could cross the threshold. ‘Sam, what’s going on?’
She handed Sarah a glass of champagne. Sarah sipped at it, then gave her mother an uneasy glance. The old girl was on her hands and knees now, admiring the marble tile by the boiler.
‘I haven’t seen you since the hospital,’ Sam said. ‘Nor Lindsey, nor Kate. Which wouldn’t bother me. You have your own life to lead. But what gets me is that you have always gone on about how family comes first. Yet, I have been here for months, taking care of her, with no help, no support, no visits or phone calls.’
‘I appreciate you’re upset, Sam, but the kids should see their grandmother. The others are on their way. We thought we’d surprise you.’ She shook her head. ‘You know, I’ve never seen you take responsibility for anything?’
Sam laughed. ‘She won’t recognise them. She doesn’t seem to recognise you. Hey, look! It’s your firstborn!’ The old girl had picked up an apple and was eating it, with mixed results. ‘Doesn’t recognise me, some days, and I’m with her twenty-four seven. She can’t think, man. And as for responsibility, I’m doing my share. I change her pad six times a day. They knocked back her DLA application, my carers’ allowance claim is lost in the system somewhere and I’m getting to the stage where I don’t know how I’m going to heat this house.’
She lit a cigarette – a sin since childhood, but who the hell cared, now? ‘There’s no way I can deal with a family gathering now. There’s only so much I can pretend to like. So you can just get back in your car with your inbred children, and fuck off.’
There was a brief quiver to her sister’s face – she looked so much like their mother then, Sam thought, her mother during that argument, just before the blood clot had burst in her brain. Then Sarah broke.
‘Fine! Look, it’s been hard for us too, you know. We had to deal with her when you were off travelling in India and finding yourself.’ Her sister knocked back the champagne and left the room. The door slammed.
Sam had done a small roast. She mashed up some chicken and gravy and fed it to her mother over half an hour. She thought of putting a paper hat on the old girl’s head, and the vision that occurred was so macabre that her feeding hand jerked, and strokefood spilled down her mother’s cardigan.
*
Her only other guest was John. At the time the sun had gone and she was on that foggy kind of drunk, reading an Anne Tyler novel stretched out on the sofa. Opposite, her mother sat watching the Strictly special; the occasional rhythmic keening made Sam look up and over.
She was tired enough to let John in. John had problems of his own that Christmas. Ten days previously Gudrun had returned to Styal, not in her old capacity as an interpretative psychotherapist, but as an inmate. John said she seemed to be coping badly with her eight-year sentence; there was a right to appeal, but it could take months. Sam said she had no sympathy at all. For either of them.
Before they went to bed she guided her mother into the bathroom and washed and changed her into nightwear. As she wiped down the effluvia from the backs of her mother’s thighs, a stat Leo had thrown came to her – something like a third of people become carers at some point – and she realised that this was a reality for thousands, probably millions of people. You thought you could escape? You thought the cosmopolitan would save you? Think again, bohemian child! Welcome to the family, baby! This is love! This is what it comes down to!
The shit had caked to the inside of her buttocks, like wire wool.
In the mist of life –
There is nothing. There can be nothing more.
It’s your love that kills you.
The snow came down for the third year running. Her carers’ allowance came through, which meant she no longer had to choose between heat and eat. There were times where she was not feeding, or washing, or dressing, or wheeling recycling bins around the front, or fixing the boiler, or sweeping floors. A house is a machine for living in; sometimes, for moments at a time, the machine stopped.
She had grown close to the care co-ordinator, a guy called Leo who had been in her half year. Back then they had been separated by teenage social strata, but all that was well behind both of them now, and they developed the friendly flirtation that exists between a single woman and a married man.
Her mother had taken to wandering. Sam would be woken during the night by strange and ghostly footfalls. There was no rhythm to it. She would find the old girl halfway up a staircase, or an odd point in the hallway, finding patterns and order in wood panelling or skirting board – the same significances and meanings Sam had come to find herself in such everyday things.
One morning she got up to find that her mother had fallen. The old girl was sprawled across ten risers in the same position she had been so many months ago.
The first conclusion lit up her mind like a forest flare. She rushed and knelt at the old girl’s wrist. At first there was nothing, and her mother’s skin was cold. Then –
(beat)
there was a pulse. Came again. A regular pulse, not the random thrum of arrhythmia.
The eye on her bad side came open, and in it there was that sly, didactic look there had been on the last meal they shared as sentient creatures – the look of the teacher who has nothing to impart and yet insists that you learn the lesson. And the evil thought came
(for fuck’s sake, why don’t)
(why don’t you die? why don’t you do the world a favour and just die?)
Sam washed and dressed her mother. Her mind was so blank it was like she’d had a stroke herself. Then she took her mother downstairs and sat her in her wicker chair. Then, and only then, Sam sat at the table and put her head in her palms and cried. And it wasn’t for her flesh and blood – it was for herself. And that was the worst thing. Sam Rhodes wished she were dead.
She cleaned herself up before she answered the door, but Leo picked up on it immediately. ‘Have you been crying?’
‘Yeah.’ She explained as best she could. ‘I mean, the worst thing is, I’m crying because it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life. And I hate myself for this selfishness. I never felt love for her, never, and what does that say about me?’
Leo had made tea and lit cigarettes – nowt better than a fag and a brew, he always said. ‘Well, family love ain’t simple and positive. It’s complicated and weird, all mixed up with other feelings we have, like guilt, resentment, duty.’
‘But I don’t feel love. Even now. I feel like I’m dead inside.’
‘With families, it’s action more than feelings that count.’ He had his hand on hers, and the warmth of it almost made her cry again – it felt like she hadn’t touched anyone for a long, long time. ‘You’ve done a lot. People in town say so. Looking after your mum all this time on your own. Lot of people would have stuck her in a care home, then sold the house from under – your sister Sarah, for one, she’s nowhere near the saint she makes herself out to be. No one would have blamed you but I worked for Southern Cross and I never got to understand it. Why people would leave their parents to rot in bedsores that go down to the bone.
‘This Iraqi guy worked with me up in Macclesfield. He said to me once that he didn’t get it – back in his country people had their parents living with them when they got old and sick. The attitude was: you did everything for me, so I’ll do everything for you. And it’s not like you’re even trying to take credit for it.’ He took her cheeks in both hands, and kissed the top of her head. ‘But maybe you should give yourself some.’
*
When you’re a carer, the new supermarket counts as a day out.
The new supermarket had been an issue of contention for the last three years. Suburban retirees saw the development as innately evil, and lobbied MPs, councillors and local media against it; there were Facebook groups, e-petitions and SAVE OUR COMMUNITY signs on Volvos and Lexi and every third window in the beaming rows of detached new-builds. Sam thought she would have starved without the basic range.
It started off as a productive day. She’d had five hours unbroken sleep and felt fairly refreshed. Her mother was washed, dressed and fed with minimal resistance. Sam even felt moved to put on a clean turtleneck and Levi’s (she had fallen out of the laundry habit in recent weeks). There was spring sunshine, and the supermarket had cheap readymeals and cut-price DVDs and lots of bright colours and happy machines. Sam and her mother were having a great time until John turned up.
‘Sam!’ He looked terrible. ‘You’ve got to help me.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s Gudrun.’
In the household aisle John explained that the Styal regime had proved too onerous for Gudrun, who had hanged herself the previous night (although no one ever knew this, this had happened in the very same cell as the patient who had triggered Gudrun’s own sentence). Now Sam understood that the stricken palpitations of John’s face, for surely no other woman would be attracted to him, and he would have to spend his life alone. She understood but did not sympathise. A shot of loneliness would do her fine.
‘Can I come back with you? Can we talk about this?’
‘Listen, John.’ She summoned all the kindness she could. ‘Your partner is dead – I appreciate that this makes you feel bad. But I can’t help. My priority needs to be her.’ She gestured to the old girl, who was picking up shower gels and squirting them into her hands. ‘My mum, she takes a lot of looking after. You need to find someone else to talk to. What about your Alpha Course?’
‘But... but it’s so difficult!’ She saw that, even in his state of grief, John was still looking at her chest as he spoke to her. It was the final capering absurdity. Please, for fuck’s sake, let my mind snap!
‘Hey, tell me about it.’ Sam grinned. ‘You know sometimes I think of killing myself? I’m like you, I don’t see a future for myself. But that’s life, you know? It’s really difficult. I would kill myself if not for the old girl. I love her. Well, maybe not. But I love her as much as I can.’
She glanced over, and saw that her mum had fallen again. A couple of Lynx shower tubes were on the bare tiles. An old man in a flat cap stood over her.
‘Fuck!’ Distracted by this dipshit, and she takes another turn. Yet another failure of responsibility.
‘Your mum – ’
‘She’ll be fine. And you will be, too. Go with God, John.’
But they weren’t fine. Paramedics came out in eight minutes and pronounced her mother dead at the scene. There was quite a crowd, and John hovered and whined in the background. Her sisters came down, and they went to the old house with Leo the care co-ordinator. There was plenty of wine, but she felt like beer. She was too shaken to go outside again so Leo headed to the Bargain Booze for a case of bottled Peroni.
The sun went down and thoughts drifted from the horrible practicalities of death into the horrible practicalities of work. Her sisters were gone by nine; they hugged her hard at the door. It was then that, for the first time, she got a sense of being part of a family. It was happy and complicated and strange.
Sam didn’t have a job, but there would be horrible practicalities for her too. Funeral. Probate. Estate management. She couldn’t begin to think about it.
‘I just think, if I hadn’t been distracted, talking to that prick,’ Sam said, ‘she might still be there.’
Leo said: ‘It was as much the second stroke as the head injury that killed her. You’re feeling survivor’s guilt. Hey, you should go and talk to my sister – she’s a CBT therapist. You did everything you could in terms of prevention and, if there’s an inquest, I’ll stand up and swear to that.’
She kissed him, on the lips. He seemed taken aback, in a good way. ‘Apart from the guilt,’ Leo asked, ‘what else do you feel?’
Sam thought about it. ‘I feel tired. Mainly I feel just tired.’
The funeral was on a Monday. Sam was surprised at all the friends that turned up. People from phases of her mother’s life she never knew existed. Easily hundreds at the graveside. How incurious we are. How little we know people, even those closest to us. Each human life is... something that encompasses worlds. The force of it. She stood in her overcoat on a cold sunny day and someone was reading:
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the Name of the Lord.
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
In the midst of life we are in death –
The therapist was over in Macclesfield. Her sisters were handling the wake and she slipped away from the world of children and families and responsibility as she had so many times before.
Leo’s sister asked her: ‘How do you feel, Sam?’
‘My mother is dead,’ Sam told her. ‘And I’m happy.’
Max Dunbar
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He also writes criticism for 3:AM and Butterflies and Wheels. He blogs at http://maxdunbar.wordpress.com/ and tweets at http://twitter.com/MaxDunbar1.
Max Dunbar lives in Manchester and can be contacted on [email protected].
Max Dunbar lives in Manchester and can be contacted on [email protected].