Someone Like You (74 page)

The audience clapped and the animals who weren’t recovering from anaesthetics joined in, howling, barking, yelping and flapping their wings.

‘Really?’ Leonie said, leaning against him weakly.

Doug kissed the top of her head because her face was buried against his shirt.

‘Really. I’ve spent the past week trying to talk to you and if it hadn’t been for Abby, I wouldn’t have said anything because you made me think you were still with that bastard Hugh.’

‘Abby?’

‘She’s been plotting with me. If Jasper hadn’t rushed things by hurting his paw, I’d have been round this evening to drag you away. Abby is packing a suitcase and I was going to whisk you off to Kilkenny for a romantic few days away. Mount Juliet, two days in a beautiful country estate.’

The audience sighed at the romance of it all.

‘I figured the masterful approach was the best, seeing as you refused to even talk to me.’

‘I’ll kill Abby, the little wretch. She could have told me,’

Leonie said.

‘You can’t. She’s looking after the dogs for us,’ Doug said. ‘Will you come?’

Leonie rubbed the paint off his shirt, then patted his beard. ‘Yes, I’d love to.’

The girls sighed again.

‘We can’t disappoint them,’ Doug said, a wicked glint in his eyes. ‘They need a kiss for the end of the matinee performance.’ And he kissed her so hard that Leonie had to lean against the medicine cupboard to stop herself from falling over.

Seven months later

As she listened to the six o’clock news on the kitchen radio, Emma cut the steaming chicken breast into small pieces and then ladled a large spoon of mashed potato on to the plate. She’d made some gravy for her father’s dinner but knew it would be a mistake to give any to her mother.

Gravy went the same way as things like baked beans or dark pasta sauces: all over either Emma or the floor. It was an inexplicable fact that the only occasions AnneMarie became upset at meal times were when she was eating something with the capability to stain. With pale foods, she fed herself quietly with the plastic fork or meekly let herself be fed. With bolognaise sauce, she became agitated and hurled her fork across the room, splattering the furniture and walls till the place resembled a bit of modern art. It was like feeding a child, Emma had thought on many occasions.

An adult-sized child who could be surprisingly strong.

‘Mum,’ she called now, putting the plate on the kitchen table along with a cup of lukewarm tea. ‘Mum, dinner is ready.’

When her mother didn’t appear, she went looking.

AnneMarie was in the dining room vigorously attempting to open the patio doors. It was her favourite occupation after pacing around the house restlessly and only the fact that the doors were permanently locked with the key carefully hidden meant she couldn’t escape. Three months ago, when she’d disappeared one night and had been - mercifully - discovered by the next-door neighbours standing crying in their front garden, Emma had insisted that all the doors and windows remained locked.

Jimmy, shattered by his wife’s sudden disappearance from their bed at three in the morning, had nodded mutely.

The house was now a mini-Colditz. AnneMarie had proved herself to be remarkably resourceful at climbing out of wide-open windows. Complicated window locks that allowed windows to be opened no more than a fraction were the only option. Childproof fasteners on the cupboards and drawers were another innovation, along with a plastic cover for the front of the video after she broke the previous one by sticking a tape in backwards which jammed the mechanism. It would be awful during the hot months of the summer, Emma knew, when they’d long to throw open all the windows. But Emma wondered what would have happened by then. Would her mother still be living at home? She was deteriorating so fast, Emma was sure her father wouldn’t be able to cope for much longer.

Not that he was coping that well now.

Today, a cool Friday evening in March, AnneMarie was in a calm mood and patted Emma’s arm gently as she was led into the kitchen for her dinner. Emma put sugar in the tea, then sat down beside her mother to see whether she needed help or not. Or not was this evening’s answer.

Attacking her meal hungrily, AnneMarie stared into space as she chewed. Her once-pretty face was now devoid of expression a lot of the time, except when she was unaccountably afraid. Those times, her big eyes were wide with some unspoken fear. Fear was one of the few emotions left to her these days. Today, her face was a blank canvas, her eyes glazed over and the muscles slack as she chewed slowly with her mouth open. Emma had never realized how much a person’s face relied upon emotions until her mother had become ill. She’d assumed your face was your face, sometimes lit up with thoughtfulness or happiness, always marked with some sort of expression even when you were mentally miles away.

But watching a woman succumbing to the horrible grip of Alzheimer’s made it clear to her: the brain was everything.

When that was slowly being eaten away by the ruthless progression of the illness, the face became just another body part. All the humour or intelligence seemed to have faded away. AnneMarie didn’t talk much any more; except for murmured ramblings or the occasional angry moments when she threw things and then cried pitifully for Jimmy.

She still said people’s names out loud and she recognized them - Emma, Kirsten, Jimmy, and Pete especially for some reason. But putting the right name to the face was often beyond her. She called Emma ‘Kirsten’ most of the time, which Emma no longer minded. She was thinking ahead to the time when her mother wouldn’t recognize her and wouldn’t be able to call her anything.

‘She’ll know you’re important to her but she won’t actually know who you are any more,’ the kind Alzheimer specialist had explained to them all on the sobering day three months previously when he’d made his diagnosis.

Of all of them, Jimmy had been the most shocked by those words. Emma had long since read every book about progressive dementias that she could lay her hands on. She knew all the painful details, from the slow, gradual loss of faculties to the final indignities of incontinence, and liquid meals if, as sometimes happened, the patient stopped being able to swallow. With her usual forbearance, she’d forced herself to read every horrible detail.

Kirsten refused to look at any of the books her sister bought, while Jimmy had resolutely insisted that there was nothing wrong that couldn’t be cured.

An operation, he said gruffly, that’s what was needed.

He’d built a lovely conservatory for this doctor once and the man knew all about brain surgery. That was it.

They trekked to see a neurological specialist who had looked candidly at Emma across the room and kindly tried to explain to Jimmy O’Brien that it was unlikely that any surgery could help his wife. He could probably have explained what was wrong with her but, instead, recommended them to the gentle, helpful Alzheimer expert who’d managed to impart his dreadful news as compassionately as he knew how.

Only an autopsy would confirm his suspicions, he explained, because of the nature of dementias. But he was pretty certain AnneMarie O’Brien had Alzheimer’s. She would eventually need twenty-four-hour nursing care.

Jimmy had looked as if he might cry for the first time in his life. His big shoulders were slumped in defeat, he wasn’t the booming, hearty Father Christmas any more, but a broken shell of a man. Kirsten looked out of the consulting room window, her face impenetrable. Only Emma had talked to the specialist, discussing what they should do for the present, what sort of treatment, if any, AnneMarie would benefit from, and what nursing homes he could recommend. Jimmy and Kirsten went outside: Jimmy to sit with his wife, who’d been outraged to be left with the specialist’s nurse while the rest of them went in for a chat; Kirsten for a forbidden cigarette.

It was easier to talk frankly without them in the room.

‘My father has trouble dealing with this,’ Emma said.

‘It’s hard for everyone. I can’t think of many people who would find it easy,’ the specialist replied. ‘The difficulty is that you will be the person coping until the others come to terms with your mother’s illness. Your sister also has trouble with it… ?’ he probed gently.

Emma nodded. Now was not the time to get into Kirsten’s blinkered view of life. Like the naughty toddlers who thought that if they covered their eyes and couldn’t see you, you could no longer see them, Kirsten believed that nothing could hurt her unless she actually looked it straight in the eye.

‘In practical terms,’ Emma began, getting out a notebook to record exactly what he said, ‘where do we go from here? How long is my mother likely to continue the way she is now?’

At the time, she was often agitated and, while talkative, couldn’t remember conversations or incidents or even meals. Minutes after having lunch, she’d angrily complain that she was being starved and wanted something to eat.

The specialist explained that it was impossible to work that out. The illness progressed at different speeds. Some people stayed at one level for ages; others, like AnneMarie, became worse with dizzying speed.

He pointed out that Alzheimer’s worked along a step system: a person could be on one level for a while, then drop to the next step, never to go back up. The descent was irreversible.

Drugs could help in the early stages but, ultimately, the progression continued. Because AnneMarie was a young patient, she could live many years with the illness. Moreover, as she was energetic and had a tendency to move around a lot, caring for her could ultimately be harder than for an older, less mobile person. She would need a secure, specialized unit which would inevitably be expensive.

If she became more agitated than she was now, he would advise admitting her to the psychiatric hospital to try and help her with drug therapy which would at least help her to sleep.

‘Some people wear themselves out walking constantly; others want to eat all the time because they forget they’ve been fed, and then they put on huge amounts of weight.

Every patient is different, each one is unique. But,’ he leaned forward in his chair, ‘the patient isn’t the only patient, if you understand what I mean. The whole family is affected by Alzheimer’s. The family needs to be looked after and often that’s where the biggest problems occur.

The principal carer has a lot to put up with. Will you be the principal carer?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I have a job and, up till now, my father was trying to work from home on the phone. I’d drop in every evening to see how things were going. But the past month, he’s had to take time off because my mother wouldn’t let him leave in the morning.’

The specialist nodded. ‘She’s afraid. Think about it: she looks at her house and she doesn’t always recognize it. She knows she’s alone but she has no concept of for how long or when someone she knows is coming back. It’s terrifying.

She needs someone with her all the time, I’m afraid.’

It had been a long hard road since they’d been given the diagnosis. A combination of family and friends had chipped in to help look after AnneMarie. Emma spent most Saturdays with her mother and dropped in three times a week in the evenings, cooking and cleaning. Her father now worked part-time, leaving the bulk of the work to his second-in-command, while two neighbours sat with AnneMarie for a couple of mornings each week, to give Jimmy time to work.

Kirsten turned up on Sundays to help, but was no good during the week as she said she was worn out with her new job as a dentist’s receptionist. Even awful Aunt Petra rolled up on Friday mornings to sit in the house, although Emma wasn’t sure if this was a good idea or not, as Aunt Petra had a bad hip and osteoporosis and was likely to break something going up and downstairs after the constantly moving AnneMarie.

What they really needed was some qualified help, Emma felt. Her mother was no longer sleeping well and was reaching the point where she needed more specialized care than a well-meaning band of friends and family doing their best.

But Jimmy wouldn’t hear of it; it was as if he’d managed to convince himself that nothing too awful could really be happening if they didn’t have specialist care for his wife.

Having family and friends around meant things were all right, weren’t they? Once there was a care worker or nurse in the house, then he would have to give in and admit that there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

Stubborn as usual, he and Emma had had several rows about this.

‘We’re not having any nurse,’ he’d said angrily. ‘There’s no need. I can look after your mother myself.’

But you’re not looking after her yourself, Emma wanted to say. You’ve already got help and you need more. Hating herself for not saying it, she left. Over eight months of therapy had taught her that when she found herself unable to say what she wanted to, it was wiser to simply leave.

That way her father would know she was angry and didn’t agree with him, even if she wasn’t strong enough to say so to his face.

As a stand, it wasn’t emphatic enough but it was something.

She poured her mother some more tea, making sure the cup was out of her reach until enough milk had been added to make it suitably lukewarm.

AnneMarie took it and drank it straight down, spilling a little down the front of the pink pleated blouse she’d adored when she bought it in a sale in Ashley Reeves years before.

‘Twenty pounds down from fifty!’ AnneMarie had crowed delightedly that day, waving the pretty blouse with the mother-of-pearl buttons. ‘It’ll go beautifully with my grey skirt.’

Emma wiped away a tear from the corner of her eye at the memory of those days and sighed. Heartache and tiredness fought for supremacy. Exhaustion won. It was the second outfit her mother had spilled food on that day.

More clothes to wash.

Emma had been bringing her parents’ clothes home to wash them herself because Jimmy really wasn’t much good with the washing machine. The amounts were getting bigger all the time and Emma was struggling desperately to keep up. AnneMarie had been so conscious of how she looked; always immaculate and beautifully dressed and made up. Emma was determined to make sure she stayed that way, no matter what.