The carriages were always quiet on a Saturday morning. There was normally a man in a suit, hungover from a Friday night that had rolled unexpectedly into a Saturday morning. There was often a woman with a pram, a new mother trying to fill the hours between wake and sleep and sleep and wake, hours that hadn’t existed a few months earlier. There were sometimes security guards, cleaners, nurses, all travelling home from night shifts. And there was always me.
I saw Marnie every Friday evening and I went to visit my mother every Saturday morning.
The dayroom was at the front of the building and I passed it on my way to my mother’s room. I tried not to peer inside, to focus only on her door at the end of the corridor, but it always pulled my gaze. It had an otherworldliness that was strangely magnetic. It was full of old people in armchairs, some in wheelchairs, all with blankets draped over their legs. The carpet was every colour, ornate and fiercely patterned. It reminded me of the carpets in fancy hotels, where the managers were afraid of food stains and mud and make-up.
Here, the patterns were similarly effective. They disguised dirt and vomit and, yes, food stains, but not from raucous three-course meals with laughter and gossip and wine, but from sticky, thick mashed potato flung deliberately on to the floor.
Other than the multicoloured carpet, the room itself was rather bland: empty beige walls, no photographs or pictures, no paintings or posters, and dark leather armchairs, easy to wipe clean. I suppose the décor itself was really rather unimportant. This room was compelling not because of its specifics, but because of its inhabitants. It served as a backdrop for a scene that depicted life and death and the thin periphery that existed between the two. Those people were half in and half out. Their hearts were beating and blood was trickling through their veins, but their souls were slipping, their minds melting, their bodies crumpled and broken. It was an eerie, uncanny place, a room full of people who were barely still people, of life that was almost not life, of death that was not quite death. My mother never wanted to spend time in there and the nurses had long given up insisting.
She was in her room instead and was sitting upright in bed when I arrived.
I stood in the doorway and watched her, just briefly, as she fiddled with the bobbles sewn on to the blue woollen blanket draped over her duvet. She pulled the bedding up towards her chin and knotted her hands together and they bulged beneath the covers. The window was wide open and a cool breeze lifted the fabric of the curtains, so that they fluttered and cast a shadow against the wall.
At sixty-two, my mother suffered from early-onset dementia. The doctors at her facility – when they visited, once a week; we rarely overlapped – had pointed out that she was at the older end of early-onset, as though that was a revelation that should provide some comfort. What they meant, of course, was that others had it far worse. I understood. But broken arms didn’t ease my splinters.
I knocked, then stepped inside. She looked up and I smiled, hoping that she would remember me. Her face was static, creases etched deep into her forehead and her lips permanently pinched. I could see her hands moving beneath the duvet and I knew that she was using the index finger of one hand to pick at the dry, ragged skin around the nail beds of the other.
Sometimes it took her a few minutes to recognise me. She was staring and I knew that she was flicking through the box files buried deep in the alcoves of her mind, trying to process my entrance, to place my face, my outfit, desperate to decipher this new arrival.
Looking back now, it’s hard to believe that she had been living there for eighteen months. It always felt temporary, a sort of limbo. I didn’t think it then, although it sounds impossible now, but of course nursing homes are temporary. They are the midpoint, not between two moments in this life, but at the fringe of life itself.
She had been diagnosed at sixty but, by then, she’d been living alone for a year, her divorce finalised and my father long gone. I had known for several months that there was something wrong; I thought at the time that she might be depressed. She was short-tempered in a way she’d never been before, sniping at me for little inconveniences – too much milk in her tea, mud on the soles of my shoes.
She started swearing. In the first twenty-five years of my life, she had never once – certainly not in front of me – said shit or fuck. She opted instead for sugar or fudge, muttered very quietly beneath her breath. And yet suddenly the most flamboyant profanities were part of her everyday language. All I wanted was a pinch of shitting milk. You’re getting fucking mud fucking everywhere.
Sometimes she’d forget when I was due to visit, despite my steadfast routine. I would ring the doorbell early on a Saturday morning. I would hear her slippers padding against the carpet as she approached the front door. I would hear a tinkling as she secured the chain. She would pull the door back, just a couple of inches, and poke her nose through the small gap. She would scan me, sliding her eyes up to my face and down to my feet, and say, ‘Oh. Is it today?’
I wondered if she was drinking too much. I took her to see a doctor. He nodded while I explained the situation and I felt sure that he understood. I felt sure that he knew exactly the cause of this shift in her personality, that he knew the answers that I’d failed to find online, the medication or therapy or advice that would put an end to this.
‘Menopause,’ he said, when I’d finished describing my mother’s symptoms. He nodded solemnly. ‘Definitely the menopause.’
The following morning my mother fell down the stairs. I received a call from her neighbour. He’d heard a strange noise and, thankfully, had let himself in with a spare key. My father had given it to him years earlier, to water the plants and feed the fish while we were all in Cornwall.
By the time I arrived my mother was sitting on the sofa, her dressing gown secured tightly around her waist, clutching a cold cup of tea and arguing with her neighbour, who was really rather keen that she go to hospital – just for a quick once-over, purely to be on the safe side.
‘Oh, not you too,’ she said when she saw me. ‘I missed the step. I wasn’t concentrating. I’d have righted myself in a minute or two, but this busybody couldn’t keep himself to himself, could he, letting himself in as though he lives here too, the bloody cheek of it.’
He was a kind man – far too nice and far more patient than I’d have been in the presence of such a rude and ungrateful neighbour – and he promised that he would keep an eye on things. He worked from home, he said, so he was always nearby. The walls were thin, he said, so he’d keep his music turned down, just in case she ever needed help again.
I wondered how many arguments he’d heard over the years. She fell again a fortnight later. He heard the crash and called an ambulance. She had a cut on her forehead where she’d ricocheted off the banister. She said it was fine, not too deep, just a graze, but he insisted that she go to hospital. It was still bleeding when I met her there nearly two hours later.
We were seen by a doctor, a woman not much older than me, who frowned when I nodded knowingly and said confidently, ‘Menopause.’
‘Do you think it’s the menopause, Mrs Baxter?’ asked the doctor and my mother scowled. ‘I’m not saying it isn’t the menopause,’ the doctor continued, ‘but is that what you think this is?’
My mother raised her non-bloodied eyebrow in response and then sighed and shook her head.