Page 6 of A Midlife Gamble

Libby shrugged. Her smile as swift as it was small. ‘I’m not sure that matters much now, mum.’

Helen turned to the tap. Did it still matter? It didn’t feel as if it did. What had been so important just a few minutes before seemed as muted and distant now as a yellowed photograph. Past. Swept out of existence by the news that had blown into her life. Either way, she wasn’t going to argue it. She hadn’t the energy. Suddenly she hadn’t the energy for anything.

‘Unless…’ Taking hold of Ben’s little finger Libby lifted it with her own little finger. He gurgled with pleasure and she smiled. ‘Unless I leave him here? He’ll probably sleep if…’

‘Do that,’ Helen said. Because something had to be salvaged. Somethingalwayshad to be salvaged. She went to take Ben. ‘You’ve prepared, and it is important.’

Meeting her eye, Libby gave Helen a tiny nod, then without saying a word she turned and walked over to Caro, and placed her baby into Caro’s lap.

‘Libby,’ Caro gasped, instinctively drawing the baby to her, holding him safe.

‘It’s ok,’ Libby smiled. ‘I know you’ll look after him.’

‘I…’ Caro couldn’t finish. Her lips pressed together as she shook her head and blinked away tears. ‘I will, of course I will.’

‘I’ll leave you to talk,’ she said and barely a minute later, the sound of the front door closing had ushered a new silence into Helen’s house.

She was still standing by the counter, next to the kettle. Caro was still sitting holding Ben. In much the same way, Helen thought as she watched, Caro had once held Libby, or Jack, twenty odd years ago. Where did it go? All that time? Caro would have held the baby Alex too. Alex who, more than any of them, still needed protective arms around him. Turning back to her window, she leaned her hands on the counter, dipped her head and wept. She had just seen a depth of maturity from her daughter that she hadn’t witnessed before. Even so, Libby was wrong. This was not a time for talking. She’d been here before with her mother. There would be no talking, because there were no words.

3

The A5 wipe-clean board, propped up against the window-ledge of her mother’s room, read:

Today is Wednesday

The weather is sunny

The next meal is lunch.

Kay looked out of the window. It was a Thursday and it was pouring down.

‘I know.’ The woman clearing her mother’s dinner tray looked across at the sign and then at Kay. ‘I’m sorry. I must change it.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t mind.’ Kay smiled. I don’t either, she felt like saying. I’m more than happy for mum to be living in a never-ending, always sunny Wednesday morning. She sat and watched as the woman eased the tray-table to the end of the bed and leaned across to smooth the sheets, as carefully as if she were smoothing a silk gown.

‘Thank you… Lisa,’ she said, noting the name badge. Most of the staff at Ashdown House, the nursing home her mother had been living in since the summer, she knew by name now. But this lady had been away recently. Lisa = large, she noted. It was a memory trick. A mnemonic that helped her remember names, because from the beginning it had felt important to Kay that she knew the names of everyone involved in caring for her mother. From Fiona the cook (F= food = cook) to Hollie the perpetually h = happy manager. It reinforced the idea that Ashdown House really was a home, her mother’s home, a place where everyone knew everyone else’s name. And this lady, Lisa, was quite large.

Smiling, Lisa straightened up. She poured a fresh glass of water and placed it on the bedside table. Turning back to the bed, she picked up the dinner tray and went to the door. With a hand on the handle, she turned, stretched out a leg and used her foot to nudge the wastepaper bin back against the skirting board. ‘Your mum thinks it’s a cat,’ she said. ‘Wants it up on the bed with her.Not always.’ Lisa smiled, emphasising the words.

Kay looked from the bin to the bed. Moving it, as Lisa had, meant it was now hidden from her mother’s view.

‘Are you coming to hear The Purple Irises?’ Lisa said. ‘They’re really fun.’

‘I’ll be out in a few minutes,’ she managed.

And the door brushed shut.

Kay turned back to the bed. Lisa wouldn’t know of course, but her mother didn’t like cats. She wouldn’t go within touching distance, let alone have one up on the bed. They’d never had one in the house, and she collapsed in a fit of sneezing if she ever came into contact with them. But it was exactly as Lisa had said. The shrunken woman in the bed before her, this fragile knit of wasted muscle and hollowed skin, plucking at the bed sheets,wasn’t alwaysher mother anymore. Like now. All through her lunch, spoon-fed by Lisa, this bird of a woman had been kept upright by a nest of feathered pillows. But that wasn’thermother.Hermother had been a straight-spined, formidable presence in the corridors of the school where she had been headmistress.Hermother had worn Debenhams jackets with softly padded shoulders, tan-coloured tights and court shoes. And throughout her childhood and most of her adulthood, Kay had never seen so much as a bare shoulder fromhermother. But the woman that lay before her now was dressed in a thin and oddly childish nightie, her bare, wasted arms and speckled chest on show to the world. And, the woman who lay before her now, was a widow. Hadn’t she just told Kay and Lisa all about the funeral? How she’d buried her husband on a Monday afternoon, after a terrible battle with pneumonia. It had been snowing. Snowing! Which was all so wrong, becausehermother’s husband, Kay’s own, dear father, was right now in the lounge, with a cup of tea and a slice of fruit cake, settling himself into a ringside seat to hear The Purple Irises,whose monthly cabarets were a highlight of Ashdown House.

No, the woman before her, either in body or in mind, wasnot alwaysher mother. Dementia had gouged away so much. The fathomless hurt came from the fact that sometimes she still was. Sometimes there were lucid moments in which they knew each other as profoundly as they ever had. Moments that were wide and open as the prairie, clear as raindrops. Moments Kay knew she would never poison with the vocabulary of cancer, dissections, radiotherapy, burdens of disease, but in which the child inside her yearned to lay her head on her mother’s chest and weep.Mum, I’m sick, I’m very sick and I’m very scared.

The reality was, lucid or not, in the manner that mattered the most, she was now motherless. Disease, both her own and her mother’s, had separated them as effectively as the grave.

She stretched a hand out, placed it on top of her mother’s and pressed down, seeking to quiet the constant plucking. ‘There,’ she said. But as soon as she withdrew, the clawing of the sheets began again. One more agony to witness.

‘The Purple Irises are here,’ she tried. The first month her mother had been at the home, she’d enjoyed a wonderfully lucid afternoon, singing along with the songs from her younger days. Frank Sinatra, The Carpenters, Barry Manilow.It was always worth mentioning them.

But the woman in the bed looked up at her and with clear eyes said, ‘Kay’s gone.’

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