6. Ivy
Ivy
Dawn has been perfectly lucid so far this morning. It will make it easier for the care workers who are coming to pick her up; that’s for sure. But in some ways, it’ll make it harder. For her. For me.
She’s sitting quietly at the small kitchen table, drinking tea from her sippy cup and dressed neatly in cords and one of her oldest but most adored pink cardigans, before the twins even surface.
Her physical symptoms have been quiet today, too.
It’s almost as if her body is trying to say, Hey, I’m fine, see?
! I’m perfectly capable of living independently! Don’t send me away!
It breaks my fucking heart.
She’s fifty-four, for crying out loud.
It’s just plain wrong; that’s what it is.
I pop upstairs and duck into the girls’ room.
I want to make sure they’re okay before they say this most fucked-up goodbye to their mum.
As usual, it smells of the dirt-cheap Sol de Janeiro dupe body spray they buy by the gallon from Boots.
Also as usual, their room is a bomb site, a mix of clean and dirty clothes strewn all over their twin beds and all over the fucking floor.
I feel the familiar irritation mixed with sympathy.
I’m well aware that school is full on for them this year, and they don’t have a tonne of extra energy to keep their room tidy.
Most days, they’re just trying to get through the day.
Most days, we’re all just trying to get through the day.
‘How’re you doing?’ I ask. Both their furry robes are on the floor in exactly the same position, as if they’ve shrugged them right off their shoulders and walked away. I bend and grab them so I can hang them up on the hook that exists solely for that purpose.
Rose ignores me as she applies mascara in the mirror. Their school has a ‘light makeup’ policy, and you’d better believe the twins stretch that definition to the max.
‘How’s Mum this morning?’ Lily asks by way of an answer.
While she’s slightly the more sensitive of the two, they’re weirdly similar, not just in looks but in vibes.
Everyone comments on it. I always thought there was supposed to be one good and one bad twin, or one shy one and one overly controlling one.
But nope. Rose and Lily don’t just look identical, with their long, glossy brown hair and big brown eyes like their mother’s; they act almost identically, too.
They’re spookily close, and most of the time that’s annoying, because you’re always outnumbered with these two. There are times, though, when I’m glad that they have each other and that everyone else seems to exist outside their twinny little bubble, and today is definitely one of those times.
‘She’s having a good day,’ I tell Lily now.
I know it’s her only because she’s sitting on her bed and her gold L necklace is visible above the V of her school shirt.
Rose obviously has an R one. It’s their tiny gesture towards accommodating the rest of the world, and their teachers in particular.
If the twins don’t want you to be able to tell them apart, then you’d better believe they’ll make that happen with zero effort.
A good day in the Cooper family’s language means Dawn is lucid. No more than that. Lily presses her lips together and nods, and there’s something about the determined tilt of her delicate little chin that kicks me in the ribs. It’s as if she’s bracing herself for what’s to come, and no wonder.
You know when people say that kids are better off with divorced parents than unhappily married parents who bicker all day long?
I’ve been wondering if it’s the same for kids who have parents with dementia.
I can’t decide what’s more awful for the twins: their mum being moved out of the family home and into a care facility while they’re still basically children, or having to live with a parent who’s not always the person they love and, even worse, not always the person who loves them.
On days like this, when the horror and shame of what I’m about to let happen to my beautiful stepmother is eating me alive, it feels like the first option is the worst. Surely nothing is more important than keeping a family together at any cost?
Not when we’ve all lost Dad, and my own mum is long gone.
Surely I’ve learnt my lesson? Surely I should just dig in?
Try harder to make it all work, to keep the Cooper women under one roof?
Except I know that’s not true.
The truth, actually, is that there is no good option, that it’s all unbelievably shite, but that what we’re doing is the right decision based on a truly crap choice. I’m moving Dawn into a home mainly for her sake. She deserves the care and dignity that I can’t give her.
But I’m also doing it for my sisters.
I know that, every time their mum doesn’t recognise them, or she swears at them, or they have to watch me help her to the loo or take her off for a bath, a little piece of them dies.
I know they don’t understand it, not really, nor do they understand their feelings of shame around having a parent with advanced dementia.
Rose cried on me last week when she admitted that having a crazy mum was embarrassing.
And I get it, I really do. We talked about using kinder language than crazy to describe her mum’s condition, and I told her it was okay and natural to feel embarrassed and that it was also natural to feel guilty and conflicted about how disloyal that feels.
They’re fourteen, for God’s sake. Everything is embarrassing at that age.
You’re pretty fucking shallow at fourteen; I remember it well.
You’re boy-obsessed and totally tribal. If you get socially shunned, it feels like death, which is a nice way of saying that fourteen-year-old girls are little bitches, basically, and Year Ten is a constant state of comply or die.
I’m not explaining any of this very well.
I’m obviously not bundling poor Dawn off to some home because she’s an embarrassment, but I am hoping that, once she’s set up and receiving the care she deserves, the girls will find their home life a bit more stable.
The flat may be a shithole, but it’s still home, and I want them to feel safe here.
When you’re still processing one parent dropping dead out of the blue, and the other one is erratic and abusive and terrifying and doesn’t know who the fuck you are, then you can be damn sure you won’t feel safe.
Social services agrees with me. I haven’t told the girls this, but our social worker has been very encouraging of the decision to move Dawn to a proper care facility.
I don’t ever want them to think that their welfare is the driver behind us taking this huge step, but I do want them to start to rebuild their lives.
I’d like things here to be nice, and stable, and quiet. A calm, safe environment for Lily and Rose as they embark on their GCSEs over the next two years. I’d like us to have enough money to cover rent and put food on the table.
It may not sound like much, but that’s the extent of my ambitions for the time being.
Even if that last part currently feels as scary and bloody impossible as climbing Everest in flip-flops.
‘Come on,’ I tell the girls softly, ‘let’s go and have brekkie with your mum.’
They shuffle out, technically dressed if you excuse the fact that their rolled-up skirts are far too short, and the three of us trudge down the narrow staircase.
We live in a poky duplex above a greasy spoon caff on the Harrow Road, which is a very long, busy, grimy road with absolutely no redeeming features.
It’s north of Notting Hill, which is super fancy, and south of Maida Vale and Little Venice, which are insane, and yet it’s the grungiest road ever.
Think dodgy kebab places and laundrettes and shops that sell vapes and stolen mobile phones, and you’ll get the drift.
It used to be that the girls’ room and Dad and Dawn’s room were upstairs and I slept in the box room next to the living area, but Dawn and I switched a few months ago.
She can’t manage the stairs anymore. Far from it.
I don’t know what we’ll do with the extra room once she’s gone.
The girls won’t want to sleep apart, no matter how cramped their room is, so they’ll probably pitch the idea of turning it into their very own walk-in floordrobe.
Lily wrenches open the stair gate I had to put on the bottom step so Dawn couldn’t wander and break her neck at night. It’ll be nice to get rid of that piece of junk, I suppose. (The stair gate, not my stepmother, obviously.)
‘Hi, Mum,’ she mumbles as she folds herself over so she can hug Dawn. Rose follows her, and they kind of engulf their frail mum, their long hair falling forward like a shiny brown curtain.
Dawn’s eyes are wet when they pull away and collapse onto their chairs, and I close my own eyes for a second.
Her pain is so palpable. I love Dawn, truly.
Not quite as much as I loved Mum, of course, but she died when I was very little, so my memories of her are hazy and sparkly and a little vague, like an old fairytale.
I would consider myself a visual person, but my memories of my mum are more like feelings.
I remember how it felt to have her hug me.
How it felt to climb into bed between her and Dad on weekend mornings.
The feeling of slamming into her when she picked me up at the school gate.
Whereas I’ve suspected for a long time now that my visual memories of her come mainly from photographs.
So yeah, I love Dawn, and she loves me. She’s a beautiful human being with a beautiful heart, and she basically saved me and Dad.
But, at the end of the day, the twins are her flesh and blood, and they’re minors.
I’m an adult. If Dawn wasn’t ill, and we didn’t have the girls to look after, I probably wouldn’t even be living at home by now.
Or if I was, it would be purely to save money.
I’m twenty-four, after all. I’m perfectly capable of standing on my own two feet.
Which is why this moment isn’t for me. Not in the slightest. I’ll ride in the community ambulance with Dawn in an hour or so.
I’ll get her unpacked and settled in. Right now is for her and her daughters.
So I put the twins’ bowls in front of them, and I pour out their Shreddies, and I even pour their milk.
I want them to feel like they’re getting proper quality time with their mum.
‘Oh, my girls. My beautiful, beautiful girls,’ Dawn says. ‘I’m so sorry this is happening. I’m just so, so sorry.’
Rose frowns down at her Shreddies as she stabs them with her spoon to mash them up. It’s a grim habit, if you ask me, but what can you do? As long as she gets some food in her tummy before she goes off to school, that’s all you can hope for.
‘At least you won’t miss us all the time,’ she says to Dawn now. ‘Like, when you’re away with the fairies, you don’t even know who we are. You’ll be back to, like, the nineteen forties or something, thinking you were young. So you won’t miss us because you won’t even know we were born.’
‘Yeah,’ Lily pipes up. ‘And we’ll miss you, but you don’t have to worry, because we won’t miss you all the time, either.
Because we’ll be at school or on Snap or whatever.
So we’ll miss you sometimes, but it won’t be that bad.
So don’t worry, Mum,’ she adds in a kindly tone, as Dawn’s tired, strained face collapses into something between tears and laughter.
Oh dear sweet Jesus.
I take back what I said about Lily being the more sensitive one.
They’re both beautiful little sociopaths.
So this is what you get.
You build a career for yourself as a children’s librarian.
You meet and marry a kindly widower, and you love his motherless little girl as if she were your own.
You have two more little girls of your own—twins—and you’re grateful.
You’re happy. You don’t want much; you don’t aim too high.
Just a nice, normal life, filled with simple pleasures and deep love. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
Wrong.
This is what it boils down to, in the end.
A grim-looking NHS care home run by equally grim-looking nuns.
A small, bleak room with wipe-clean glossy walls in a sickly shade of cream.
A non-view out to some drab internal courtyard that doesn’t get much daylight.
A single hospital-style bed.
A wipe-clean-looking padded armchair in one corner.
A walker in the other.
And whatever small comforts your stepdaughter has packed for you: a colourful crocheted blanket that you made for yourself, once upon a time, when your fingers worked properly. A sad little plant from IKEA that probably won’t last the week. Your sippy cup. And photos.
So many photos of you and your girls and your late husband. Images of happier times, framed in plastic and shielded behind smash-proof Perspex for when you get confused or aggressive.
Prompts, really—prompts that might, occasionally, pull you out of the fog.
Reassurances for when you come to and you find yourself all alone.
Reminders that you were loved.
That you are loved.
That you are not alone.