Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
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Bradbury House is an old-fashioned brick-built building nestled down its own private lane in a leafy suburb of northern Leeds.
It’s so familiar to me now that I could probably drive here with my eyes shut.
It looks fabulous now that it’s autumn – the trees around the perimeter are dappled with shades of gold among the vivid greens, and the contrast of them against the bright blue of the sky looks like something off a postcard.
I knew the first time I drove past that it was the right place for my mum.
She grew up in the country – in a small farming village near York, and her love of nature followed her all the way to the coast, where she met my dad.
He was a sea lover through and through, but my mum was always happier on land, spotting shapes in the clouds or picking up really good leaves to show us.
It was about this time of year when I first drove past here, and it was the leaves that caught my attention. I knew she’d love them. She couldn’t stay in any of the places she thought of as home. It just wasn’t safe. This felt like the next best thing.
My heart is in my throat as I pull my car up in one of the visitor parking spaces and cut the engine. This is a part of my life that I don’t like to share with people, but I’ve got a hunch about Lucy, and I’m hoping like hell that I’m right.
I think that she’s going to get it.
She turns to me with wide eyes as I pull the key out of the ignition, leaning her head sideways against the headrest, just like she did last night.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ she says softly. I know what she’s doing, and I’m so grateful to her for doing it. She’s giving me space to explain. I know she saw the sign on the way in, and in the very unlikely event that she missed it, there’s a matching one just to the right of the entrance.
Bradbury House Residential Care Home.
I take a deep breath and rip off the band aid.
‘This is where my mum lives,’ I say, the words sounding more clipped than I mean them to. ‘She has early-onset Alzheimer’s. It’s quite advanced.’
It feels strange to say it out loud. I haven’t told anyone in such a long time. Other than my family – and the guys from the bar, whom I class as family – I haven’t talked about it with anyone except Jessica.
Word gets around in a small town though.
It felt like everyone in Whitby had something to say about it when I moved her out of there.
But Bradbury House has one of the best reputations of any specialist Alzheimer’s unit in this part of the country, and since it’s only ten minutes’ drive from my sister’s flat, it seemed like a no-brainer.
Since then, I’ve tried my hardest not to mention it to any new people I meet. I can’t bear the conversations, the awkward winces, the well-intentioned stories of hope.
But Lucy’s reaction surprises me.
She’s starting to make a habit of that.
‘What’s your mum’s name?’ she asks, a small, genuine smile playing across her beautiful face.
I brace myself before I say it – a habit. ‘Gilly.’
‘Gilly,’ she repeats to herself, her smile growing and blossoming as she does until it lights up her whole face. ‘I’d love to meet her.’
I honestly nearly cry on the spot. I miss people asking about her like she’s a person and not a problem that I have.
Even the people who know me the best tend to avoid the subject completely, which I understand, but that makes it feel as if she’s slipping even further away from me.
And the further she slips, the more I’m forced to remember all the things I’ve lost trying to keep her here. My money. My mind.
My mortality.
Lucy reaches for my hand and squeezes it gently, and that gives me the burst of strength I need to get up. As we walk into the entrance hand-in-hand, I feel the familiar rush of anxiety creeping up my spine. It’s the same questions which run through my mind every time.
Is she sad?
Has she managed to eat?
Will she remember me?
I blow out some of the nerves with my breath and smile over at Mandy behind the desk as I sign us both into the visitors’ book.
I’m a regular here, and I’ve got to know the staff pretty well over the last decade.
Mandy’s eyes widen a touch as she takes in Lucy beside me, but she doesn’t say anything about it.
‘She’s in the day room,’ the older woman says warmly. She has a soft spot for me, I think, or else she’s just this nice to everyone. I’d believe either.
I smile my thanks. ‘You’re a star, Mandy,’ I say, and she beams back at me.
Lucy’s hand is warm in mine as I lead her down the corridor to the big room at the back of the building, and I’m grateful for it. It’s beginning to feel like my anchor.
When we round the corner, I see Gilly immediately.
She’s in her favourite spot: a tall-backed armchair by the window, which looks out onto a small patio.
In the middle of the square of paving stones there’s a bird table with a cluster of feeders hanging from the pole in the centre.
It’s always been there, but since I moved her here the staff have gone to great lengths to keep it stocked with as many different types of feed as they can find, and now this little patio is visited by more varieties of bird than I’ve seen in my life.
Gilly has always loved her birds. Sometimes they’re the only things she can remember. She’s studying them closely, her good hand resting against the pink fibreglass cast on her other arm.
We’re almost all the way to her before she turns. She looks thinner than I remember, even though it’s only been a few days, and there’s a pinched expression on her face like she’s worried about something.
‘The coal tits are hiding the food,’ she says, a shake in her voice, which confirms it. ‘They do that so they have stores for winter, but I’m worried that the others won’t have enough.’
Unlikely, I think, though I don’t voice it. There’s enough feed out there on the patio to keep every bird in Britain fed for the next few years.
‘Mum. It’s me,’ I say, pulling up one of the footstools from the other side of the wall and plopping down next to her. I reach out and touch her gently on her good arm. ‘It’s Liam.’
She stills then, eyes wandering off to one side, like she’s thinking about it.
‘I have a son called Liam,’ she says after a while, her fingers twisting into the blanket in her lap. My chest tightens with the familiar drop of disappointment. She’s not here. Not yet.
‘I’m your son Liam,’ I tell her, the same way I tell her every time, and at the sound of my name again her face lights up. It makes her look younger – closer to her fifty-eight years than usual.
‘It’s his birthday next month,’ she says, excitement brightening her voice, and when she reaches a hand out for me, I take it. ‘He’s going to be eight.’
It goes like this, the rise and the fall. The highs of the things she remembers, and then the grief for the parts that are lost. But I hold back my feelings – smile past them. She knows me, even if she doesn’t know me now.
‘That’s me,’ I remind her. ‘I’m older now. I grew up.’
And then she looks right at me, her eyes as clear and bright as I’ve ever seen them. For that moment, her face relaxes out of the lines she’s frowned into it, and she’s like her old self again.
‘I don’t remember,’ she says, so painfully aware of what she’s lost that it breaks my heart.
‘I know.’
And then, just as fast, it’s gone. Her eyes drift back away from me, and she adjusts the blanket that someone has tucked over her knees.
‘I haven’t seen this little nuthatch before,’ she says. Her voice sounds small, like it’s coming from far away. ‘You don’t normally see them around here. They’re very territorial.’
She’s told me this fact about the little nuthatch every time I’ve visited for about the last two years, but I don’t mind.
She doesn’t know her family, or what day it is, or what she had for lunch, but she can tell you everything there is to know about British garden birds.
It’s like they’re her link to the past – back when she was a farm kid hanging out in the woods with her dad’s binoculars.
I’ll pretend to be interested in nuthatches all day long to give her that.
I catch Lucy’s eye off to my left. She’s been there the whole time, hanging back a little, giving us space. She smiles when our eyes meet, her expression soft and understanding, not even a trace of pity in her eyes.
Then she starts to move, grabbing another stool and sitting on Gilly’s other side, next to the window.
‘Hi, Gilly,’ she says, her voice beautifully bright and calming. ‘I’m Lucy. You haven’t met me before.’
Gilly doesn’t look at her, and I can see by the shrink of her shoulders away from Lucy that she’s suspicious.
She doesn’t deal well with meeting new people.
Lucy doesn’t push her to respond, she just sits, looking out of the window at some bird that might or might not be the little nuthatch. I don’t even know how you’d tell.
None of us speak again for a while, and I can almost feel the tension building in the room. I start to wonder if this was a mistake – if I could have unknowingly upset my mother by bringing Lucy here. But before I can dwell too much on it, Lucy speaks, breaking my train of thought entirely.
‘Do you have a favourite bird?’
‘Yes,’ Gilly replies abruptly, her good hand clasping into a tense fist, and I’m just about to intervene, to say that we’re going to go, when Lucy speaks again.
‘My favourites are goldfinches.’
She’s so calm when she speaks. Despite Gilly’s apparent rudeness, Lucy hasn’t lost an ounce of the cheer in her voice. Not that she’s getting very far. The three of us are just sitting in a silence I’m finding more and more difficult to deal with every passing second.
Until, all of a sudden, I hear Gilly speak.