Someone Like You (46 page)

Emma, who wasn’t drinking because she was designated driver, crunched into a spring roll and stole a surreptitious look at her watch. Nearly six. She and Pete had decided to invent another party that evening so they’d have an excuse for leaving early.

‘You know that Kirsten will dump your parents on us,’

Pete had groaned. ‘We may as well have a contingency plan so we have some hope of escape.’

Their real plan was a quiet evening at home. A trickling sound made Emma glance over at her mother who was sitting at the table between Emma and Jimmy. She had stopped pushing food around her plate with her fork; her glass had fallen sideways in her hand and she was slowly spilling her red wine on to the floor as tears ran unheeded

down her face. Emma stared at the slowly spilling wine, too shocked to do anything for a moment.

‘Mum!’ hissed Emma.

As her mother’s red eyes turned to face her, Emma was frightened by what she saw in them: AnneMarie’s expression was of sheer, anguished fear.

‘I’m afraid, Emma,’ she sobbed. ‘Afraid. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know anything any more.’

Her mother’s hand jerked and the trail of red liquid started splashing on to her lap, soaking the floral silky skirt with a growing crimson stain. It was like blood, Emma thought in horror.

‘Mum,’ she said in distress, trying to take the spilling glass from her mother. AnneMarie’s hand was clenched tightly around it and more wine slopped on to Emma and the carpet before she could wrench it away. Crouching down on the ground beside her mother’s chair, she threw her arms around AnneMarie.

‘Mum,’ she crooned, ‘it’s OK, I’m here and Dad’s here.’

‘But you’re not always here and I can hear the voices and I can’t remember things,’ moaned her mother.

Emma kept hugging her, but her mother couldn’t stop crying. And why wasn’t Jimmy doing anything?

‘Dad,’ whispered Emma, ‘look at Mum. Can you help her.’ She felt powerless to do anything, but so was Jimmy.

His face froze as he saw his wife with tears sliding down her face.

‘Help me, help me, help me!’ shouted AnneMarie suddenly, her voice loud and carrying across the room.

Emma could see Pete arriving from the kitchen with wine, his mouth an astonished oval. He seemed to be walking slowly towards them, as if in slow-motion.

The entire scene seemed as if it was being played in slow-motion, Emma felt. She could sense her father’s eyebrows lifting slowly in shock, could feel people’s heads swivelling at a leisurely pace towards them and mouths opening at a snail-like pace.

‘Mum,’ she soothed, ‘please don’t get upset. We’ll help you, I promise.’

‘You won’t, you won’t! You’re all against me,’ screamed her mother, clambering to her feet abruptly.

‘No,’ she roared, so loud that nobody in the house could miss hearing her, despite the sleighbells of Kirsten’s Christmas album jingling loudly in the background. ‘No, no, no, no!’ She was screaming now, lashing out wildly and shoving plates and glasses across the table.’ Crockery crashed to the floor. ‘How could you say it? What are you trying to do to me?’ she roared. ‘You don’t understand, do you hear me? You don’t understand. I won’t go there, I won’t!’

Pete dumped the glasses of wine and together, he and Emma tried to put their arms around AnneMarie to calm her.

‘Mum, it’s OK. We’re here with you, nobody’s trying to send you anywhere.’

‘You are,’ wailed her mother, still trying to shove plates from the table. ‘You’re all in on it!’

‘It’s all right, AnneMarie,’ said Pete soothingly, ‘all right. We’ll look after you.’

His calm voice seemed to do the trick. She stopped struggling and sat heavily down in her chair. Pete and Emma squatted on either side of her.

‘Mum, it’s me, Emma.’ Emma tried to keep her voice steady. It was hard: she was shaking so much she felt as if her very bones were rattling. ‘Dad, can you help?’

Hearing Emma speak to him, Jimmy O’Brien seemed to come out of the astonished trance-like state he was in.

‘Yes,’ he gasped.

He shoved Pete out of the way and grabbed his wife.

‘AnneMarie, I’m here with you, love. Don’t worry about a thing. It’ll be all right.’

She collapsed against his bulky figure, her long, pale golden hair escaping from its butterfly clip to stream untidily down her back.

‘Let’s get her home,’ Jimmy said firmly, holding his wife’s frail body tenderly.

Kirsten insisted on staying with her guests but Patrick drove Jimmy and AnneMarie home in his BMW, with Pete and a terrified Emma following behind.

‘We’ve got to call the doctor,’ Emma said, still shaking.

‘Absolutely,’ Pete said.

But Jimmy O’Brien was having none of it. ‘We don’t need a doctor!’ he roared. ‘She’s perfectly fine. A bit stressed, that’s all.’

Upstairs, where she was helping her mother to change her dress, Emma cringed at the fury in his voice.

Pete and Patrick exchanged a glance. ‘I’m sorry, Jimmy,’

said Pete firmly, ‘you’re over-ruled on this one. AnneMarie is more than just stressed. She’s not well, she could have something serious wrong with her. I’m phoning the doctor.

I can’t live with my conscience if something serious is wrong and we’ve done nothing.’

Emma strained towards her parents’ bedroom door, desperate to hear what would happen next. Her father spoke, only it didn’t sound like him really. This voice was tired and weak, not the obstreperous man she’d known all her life:

‘What if they want to put her in a hospital, what will I do then?’

‘I’m sorry, dear,’ AnneMarie smiled at her daughter, clumsily trying to close the buttons on a clean dress and failing. ‘I was angry, wasn’t I? I am sorry, I didn’t mean to be. I don’t know what came over me.’

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Emma said, gently taking over the buttoning. Her mother, who would once have been outraged if anyone had tried to help her with her toilette, sighed with relief as Emma buttoned her up. ‘Tell me,’

Emma began, ‘you said you forget things, Mum. What things do you forget?’

Her mother blinked at her. ‘Where I put things: I can’t find things any more. And I can’t seem to read. I have to get my glasses changed, they’re not strong enough. The words, you see,’ she explained earnestly, ‘the words are too small and jumbled up. I tried using your father’s magnifying glass, but it doesn’t help. Will you bring me to get new glasses, Emma?’

Her daughter had to bite her lip to stop herself bursting into tears.

‘Of course, Mum. But first, let’s get the doctor to look you over.’

The family doctor, an elderly gentleman with the kindest, gentlest hands and a charming manner, examined Anne Marie from top to toe but could find nothing outwardly wrong. She chatted away to him the way she’d always done, saying she was sorry he’d been dragged out on New Year’s Day and adding fondly that her dear sons-in-law fussed too much.

‘Fit as a fiddle, my dear,’ he told her as he left her room.

‘It sounds as if she’s very depressed from what you tell me,’ he said thoughtfully to Pete, Emma, Patrick and Jimmy downstairs. ‘That could make her lash out and get so worked up that she’d shout. But it could be some sort of seizure. We’d need tests to see what’s really wrong …’

‘No tests,’ Jimmy said angrily. ‘She’s under a lot of strain, that’s all.’

‘It’s more than that,’ Emma said. She ignored the fierce look her father shot at her. ‘She says odd things at odd times, she loses things all the time, she tried to open a tin with an egg whisk the other day. They’re all small things, but I know there’s something wrong, Doctor. Now she’s after telling me that she can’t read any more and she thinks it’s her glasses. It’s not, it’s more than that.’

‘This is the first time this type of strange behaviour has occurred? She’s been perfectly normal until now?’ the GP

asked.

‘No. She got very upset with me a few months ago when we were shopping,’ Emma said quietly. ‘In a fabric shop.

She began to shout at me and she didn’t know who I was.

I couldn’t calm her down and she was calling for Dad, even though he wasn’t actually with us.’

‘You never told me,’ said her father accusingly.

‘I’m telling you now,’ said Emma with an edge to her voice.

‘My wife is stressed and a bit depressed,’ Jimmy maintained.

‘A few tablets, that’s all she needs. Like the time she was on those tablets before, when Kirsten was sick with glandular fever. They sorted her out. That’s all she needs now.’

‘Bring her to the surgery next week and we’ll have a chat,’ the doctor agreed. ‘If she’s depressed, we can help her, but without tests, we won’t know what happened today.’

‘She was overwrought, Doctor, nothing more,’ Jimmy said. ‘She’s fine now, isn’t she? If it had been serious, would she be able to chat to you now as if nothing had happened?’

‘True. She’s only young, too. Just sixty you tell me. Well, Jimmy, I can’t think what could be wrong with her at this age, but we’ll keep an eye on her, I give you my word.’

‘He’s an old fuddy-duddy,’ hissed Pete as Jimmy let the doctor put. ‘Your mother could have a brain tumour and that man wouldn’t recognize it. She needs to see a specialist.’

‘She’ll be fine,’ announced Jimmy, slamming the front door.

Emma sent Pete and Patrick home. She didn’t fancy staying with her father any longer, but felt she should be there for her mother. Jimmy didn’t appear to know how to handle AnneMarie.

The three of them sat in front of the television for a while before AnneMarie said she was tired and wanted to go to bed. It was only half past eight.

Her mother didn’t quibble when Emma accompanied her upstairs and helped her with her clothes. Instead, she seemed happy at the company. When she was tucked up in bed, Emma sat down beside her and smoothed her mother’s long fair hair gently.

‘I’m sorry you were so upset earlier,’ she said softly.

‘You were telling me I had to go to that bad place again,’ AnneMarie said sleepily, one hand holding Emma’s tightly.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ Emma said, thinking that it was probably kinder to pretend that she knew what her mother was on about.

‘Talk to me, Emma,’ murmured AnneMarie. ‘I like to hear your voice.’

Emma started a soft, gentle monologue about what she was going to do the next day and how she’d come over in . the evening and see AnneMarie. Her voice certainly seemed to soothe her mother, who drifted off to sleep, still clutching her hand.

Emma remembered being a child and how the roles had been reversed: whenever she had a nightmare, her mother, wearing one of her lovely soft brushed-cotton nightdresses with lily-of-the-valley-scented handcream on her soft hands, would hurry in once she’d heard Emma’s screams and sit comfortingly beside her, stroking her fevered forehead and telling her that the hobgoblins had all gone.

Now she had taken the role of the mother comforting her child instead of the other way round. How strange to have someone to mother after so long dreaming of a baby; only now, her baby was a sixty-year-old woman who’d sunk into childhood again. But why? And would she get worse in the future?

She wished she had a night-light to leave on the bedside table, something dim and soothing in case AnneMarie woke up suddenly and couldn’t remember where she was.

Emma could recall the tiny light with a caterpillar inside that her mother had bought when Kirsten had been small: his green glowing body let off enough light to scare away the bad dreams. Maybe that was why Kirsten never had nightmares. She’d had Mr Caterpillar to keep her safe at night.

Her mother was breathing easily now. Emma got off the bed and silently tidied up the room. She folded clothes and sorted out the jumble of toiletries on the once immaculate dressing table. That was proof in itself that things were amiss: AnneMarie had always been incredibly house proud. She’d never have allowed any surface in her home to become dusty and untidy. Cotton buds lay scattered around and talcum powder had been spilled and not cleaned up. Emma vowed to tidy it soon.

Her mother’s handbag was dumped carelessly under the dressing-table stool, its gilt clasp open, displaying the contents.

Sitting down on the stool, Emma looked into the handbag. Instead of the usual neat array of glasses, lipstick, powder compact, purse and linen handkerchief, there was a tangled mess with lots of little scrunched up bits of paper.

Emma took a bundle out and slowly unfolded them. ‘Teabags in blue tin,’ read one. ‘Glasses on dressing table. Don’t forget!’ read another. One had Emma’s home phone number, with the digits written slightly wrong in two separate places and then scribbled out. It was as if her mother had tried to write it down but couldn’t manage to do it correctly until the third try.

Slowly, she unfolded each pathetic scrap of paper, reading each sad message that AnneMarie had written to herself.

Reminders about where the milk was kept and what day the window cleaner came round. Most poignant of all was one with her mother’s name and address carefully written on it. As if she could conceivably get lost and not know who she was or where she lived.

Emma used a tissue from the dressing table to wipe her wet eyes.

At the bottom of the handbag were buttons, lots of buttons. She counted out fifteen of them, ranging in size and colour from tiny mother-of-pearl ones to bigger navy ones that looked as if they’d been cut from Jimmy’s big overcoat. God love her, Emma thought wearily. Collecting buttons. Perhaps she thought they were coins.

‘Is she asleep?’ asked her father, appearing at the bedroom door.

Emma nodded. She couldn’t talk to him just then. He angered her so much. Today, he’d done what he always did: bulldozed over anyone who had a different opinion to his and insisted that he was right. AnneMarie was seriously ill but, as usual, Jimmy refused to see any viewpoint other than his own.

He could face the reality on his own tonight, then. Emma wasn’t going to hang around and help him deny his wife was sick. She grabbed her things and left. She could walk home; it wasn’t far.

The phone call woke her and Pete at six thirty the follow-mg morning. Emma reached groggily over to the small table where the phone sat. ‘Hello?’ she mumbled. She could feel Pete dragging the covers over his head to block out the noise.