Page 16 of Filter This
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The bathroom adjoining Miles’s room was a place Ali never went into if she could help it. It was a large windowless wet room with a showerhead in one corner, a sink and a raised toilet with bars for patients to hold on to. In there, there was an ever-present danger of encountering some new fresh horror of his disease and now, pacing frantically, she was assailed by the depressing accoutrements of decline – nappies, urine-sample containers. ‘Just don’t look closely,’ she counselled herself. She needed to address the problem at hand.
More DMs were dropping in from eagle-eyed followers who’d spotted the sign for the ward and assumed she was in hospital.
‘Oh, exciting! Are you trying out the ear lobe lipo we were chatting about?’ asked @LauraOD.
‘If you’re in for fillers, get 2ml, with 1ml can’t see any difference TBH. They’ll try and argue but stand your ground,’ advised @makeupmadam119.
‘Ali?’ Tabitha called from outside the door. ‘You dad’s ready for his lunch – will I give it to him or do you want to?’
‘OK, OK,’ called Ali. ‘I’ll do it. Leave the tray and I’ll be right out.’
Ali flicked on the camera and smoothed her hair. ‘Hey, lovelies, thanks for the DMs. A few of you guys might have gotten the wrong end of the stick there. I’m not getting anything done and I’m totally fine – I’m just working on a little surprise coming in a few months. Big kisses!’
There, that’s fine, thought Ali, hitting Post.
She slipped back out of the bathroom and went over to give her dad a gentle kiss on his cheek. ‘Sorry, Miles, Instagram dramz!’ She smoothed his hair. ‘How are you?’
Miles lay flat on his back, a sheet draped over him. Ali had a slight fear of her dad’s body now. She didn’t like to think of how frail he was beneath the flannel pyjamas he wore. He was extremely thin. ‘The Slimming World gang would be so proud – you’re, like, Victoria Beckham-thin, Dad!’ Ali’s feeble attempts at humour dissolved in the oppressive atmosphere. Miles’s brown eyes were open but trained firmly on the opposite wall. He didn’t appear to even register her presence in the room. The doctors said he might have some cognition but how much was anyone’s guess. Based on this, Ali tried to chat to him as much as possible and fill him in on what was going on in her life, but she couldn’t get over a persistent and unpleasant sense that he really had no concept of where he was or even what he was anymore.
Ali wasn’t sure which thought was worse: that he had some consciousness left but couldn’t communicate with them, or that there was nothing left of his mind and all this chatter was slipping into a terrifying void where the spark and flow of his neural pathways had once twisted and turned. The locked-in theory gave Ali nightmares. She frequently dreamed that Miles was back but he wasn’t the charming, loving jokester he’d always been: he was an angry, malevolent being who was raging with her. After these dreams, she always felt vulnerable, as though exposed as the shitty person she’d always suspected herself to be.
Being a good daughter was just so much work. She often looked at her fellow visitors and wondered at their incredible reserves of love and patience. They seemed relaxed and at ease, like compassion and care came easily to them. She tried to touch her father, to hold his hands and stroke his cheeks, but deep down she knew the truth was she was scared of touching him and she hated this about herself.
She never had the guts to ask Mini if she suffered this frustrating spiral of self-hate. Ali suspected Mini would not be good at alleviating Ali’s guilt, and she certainly didn’t want to invite Mini’s analysis – mainly because, more often than not, her analysis sounded distinctly like criticism. There was a lot of ‘you never’ and ‘you always’ and, TBQH, who needed that?
After pushing open the windows and taking a few deep breaths, Ali pulled up a chair to her dad’s bed, raised its head and assessed the lunch spread.
‘I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, Dad, it’s pretty fucking bleak today. By the looks of it we’ve got a pre-masticated mélange of vegetables, some meat-related product and a gravy of indeterminate origin. Quality-wise, I’d say we’re talking mid-seventies transatlantic-flight meal with an extremely depressing calorie-pumped pudding for dessert. Aesthetically speaking, let’s just say there are more appetising sights on offer when googling “untreated haemorrhoids”.’
Ali watched Miles closely, searching for a reaction, any glimmer, no matter how tiny, that he’d heard her. Nothing. She loaded a fork and brought it to his mouth. Even though his gaze never shifted, he accepted the bite and even chewed and swallowed. This seemed confirmation enough that Miles was gone from her – old Miles would never have accepted such a hideous meal.
Once his bites had started to slow, she carefully tipped some of his thickened drink into his mouth and wiped his face. The gloopy beverage was supposed to prevent fluid going down the wrong way and potentially causing pneumonia, which could be serious for her dad. Or a way out, Ali would often catch herself thinking on particularly bleak days.
‘I have to take a picture for this thing I’m doing,’ Ali announced. It sometimes felt awkward talking to Miles. She’d seen other visitors showing their loved ones pictures on their phones or reading aloud from the newspaper but it felt somehow pointless. Maybe she and Mini were just too cynical – not that she particularly liked admitting that she was like Mini in any way.
Ali turned on her Spotify and hit Play.
‘I made you a new playlist.’ She smoothed Miles’s hair, which was longish, the way he’d always worn it, and still a lovely shade of blond with just a hint of grey. He still looked like himself in lots of ways. At sixty, he was younger than many of the nurses and doctors who looked after him and, apart from being so incredibly thin, and his complexion, which was now a troubling shade of grey, he still looked a lot like his old self. Ali couldn’t quite remember when all the problems had started, which seemed ironic given the diagnosis Miles finally got at fifty-five. Alzheimer’s. A particularly cruel flavour: early onset.
The first signs were so innocuous that Ali and Mini worried they might’ve been missing them for ages. Forgotten words, buying the same CDs over and over, pouring milk on his porridge and then going to do it again and again until Mini or Ali would stop him. When he sang around the house, gaps in the lyrics appeared that he filled with nonsense words. In time (so, so quickly, really – early onset advances rapidly, the doctors explained) the songs were all nonsense and you had to listen carefully to hear the beautiful melody still buried beneath.
‘I didn’t put any of your prog rock shite on there,’ Ali warned as the reedy voice of Neil Young trickled into the room. The sun had rounded the building and light was pressing against the curtains. Ali pulled them back and the room instantly brightened, though the dreary atmosphere remained.
She checked her phone for the time – 2 p.m. Better get going – she didn’t want her post to be too early in the day and get buried by all the rest, but she couldn’t be too late either. Ali set to work, pulling out the gear she’d brought for the #OOTD picture. She smoothed a pale-green floral print dress and hung it on the back of the wardrobe. She felt a familiar sense of calm descend as she plotted the post – Instacalm they should call it, she thought.
Ali chattered along to Miles as she unpacked the rest of her clothes. ‘The brief said “show your own unique flair”, which some Instagrammers have taken to mean “show your own unique flaps”! Anyway, I just need to do a gorge shot of my chosen outfit, and if I get picked I’ll get a wild-card entry to the Glossies’ Influencer of the Year award, which could be an amazing springboard career-wise.’ Not that Ali really knew what her career goals were anymore. She flashed on Terry’s kind expression of the day before – her script was too ‘mannered’. Ali pushed the thought away, things are depressing enough without dwelling on that. She glanced over at Miles. His eyes were staring slightly upwards and his mouth was hanging slightly open – it was a face that looked mildly mocking, which reminded her of the old Miles in a funny way. He would’ve been pretty amused by some of the more ridiculous Insta-antics.
‘Don’t scoff,’ Ali said with faux indignation. ‘It’s a big deal! The Glossies have the power to put an influencer on the map. It’s the launch tonight and then the wild-card nominee has two months to make their mark. Maybe even win. We could be talking tan brand ambassador, maybe a coffee-table book, cosmetic collaborations, seriously!’
After trying a few different looks, Ali settled on a floaty midi navy dress covered in tiny stars and some perfectly battered ankle boots. She looked delicate and feminine. It wasn’t the most Insta outfit, but she reckoned the gamble might pay off – she would stand out from the crowd purely by dint of covering up a bit.
She grabbed her phone, which was now playing Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Never Going Back Again’ – fitting, given her Stevie Nicks-inspired look.
‘I’ll be back – I just need to find someone to take my pic. No offence, but I’m not entirely convinced you’d manage it.’ She blew a kiss over her shoulder and slipped out the door.
Ali headed down the corridor scouting for the right person. She passed lots of residents she recognised and then rounded the corner towards the nurses’ station. She toyed with the idea of asking one of the care team but it seemed inappropriate. Tabitha was there doing paperwork. She loved Tabitha – she was in her fifties and had three teenage sons at home in Manila and somehow, in the last two years of coming to Ailesend so often, her presence had practically become more comforting than Ali’s own mother’s.
