Chapter 28 #2
With another couple of tentative steps, I reach her and oh-so-gently encircle her wrist with my hand to halt her.
The bones are so frail, the skin paper-dry.
She has something that looks like egg but could be anything down the front of her dressing gown, which hangs open over her nightie.
Her hair is flat and drab. For fuck’s sake, don’t they wash her here?
‘Steve’s going to make you a nice cuppa when you get home,’ I say softly.
I don’t want to frighten her. I stroke her wrist with my fingers.
‘We’ll all snuggle up on the sofa. But how about a nice bath first?
I could wash your hair for you. And we could read Rebecca—I’ll even start on chapter one for you. ’
‘You don’t like chapter one,’ she murmurs. Her voice is every bit as flat and lifeless as her hair, but her literary observation sends a thrill dancing through my heart.
I grin at her. ‘Maybe it’s time I gave it a shot.
What do you say? A nice bubble bath and a head massage?
Dad can go and get the car warmed up.’ It was one of the only things that worked for her when she was distressed at home—if I could get her into the fucking bathtub in the first place, that was.
There was something about the somatics of being touched, being cared for, that soothed her nervous system in a deep place that the dementia couldn’t touch.
Besides, it will make me feel better. Less helpless. I’m here; I may as well make myself useful.
I turn to the nun. ‘I’m going to give her a bath. If you can help me get her in, then I’ll take it from there.’
‘She had a bath yesterday,’ the nun says, putting her hands on her hips. ‘She doesn’t need another one.’
I’m not taking this shit. ‘They’re good for her. They calm her down. Unless you’re telling me you ration the hot water here?’
We glare at each other.
‘She’d be calmer if she had visitors more often. You and your sisters don’t visit her nearly enough. There’s only so much we can do.’
My eyes sting instantly with unshed tears.
Of all the cruel, inhuman things to say.
Her decision to aim right for the thing I feel most guilty about is a kick to the stomach.
‘I’m their caregiver. I’m the breadwinner.
They’re at school, for God’s sake. What the hell do you want us to do? We’re doing our best.’
But are we, really? I think about my carefree weekend with Xav, buggering off to Belvedere without a backwards glance.
About the effort it takes to get the twins to visit their mum at all, because they find this place ‘depressing and creepy’.
No arguments there. But should I be pushing them harder?
Should we all make more effort to put in extra hours here?
The nun sweeps into the cold little bathroom with a contemptuous look at me. ‘Well, if you can’t be here then I hope you’re remembering her in your prayers. The power of prayer is what will get her, and all of you, through this.’
I stare at her navy-and-white back as she disappears off to run the bath. I have no fucking words to say to that.
It’s after one when I get to bed after a slow journey home on the night bus.
The irony is that I gave up Alchemy to make sure the girls were properly looked after in the evenings, and it turns out I’m still bailing on them—only now I have no extra money to show for it.
But my going to see Dawn makes a difference, I tell myself.
We may be running to stand still here, but it still means something that I showed up.
It still means something that she was able to find some emotional and bodily peace for a few minutes in that small bathtub.
And, even if she won’t remember any of it, I’ll feel better knowing that she has clean hair and a clean robe. That she has a little extra piece of her previous dignity.
I lie on my back, arms folded over my chest like an exhausted corpse, as I force myself to face today’s email from the council.
It should have been good news—it’s the news I’ve been waiting for, after all—but doesn’t feel like it.
Instead, it feels, just as Dawn’s transfer to the home did, like another stark reminder of how far we’ve sunk. How spectacularly I’ve failed.
The news: six days before Christmas, the girls and I will be moving out of our home and into a council flat. Not only that, but the new place is in the most infamous estate for miles around.
In my ears, my secret song is playing over and over.
Usually, it adds something. A… presence, maybe? A comfort. A weird sensation that I’m not totally alone in this world. It’s a security blanket of haunting notes and hushed tones and soft sleigh bells.
But not tonight. Tonight I feel wrung out. And, worse than feeling alone, I feel bereft, because the absence of Xav is more excruciating than my simply being on my own. He is not here, and I feel it as if someone has cut off a hand or a foot.
It’s like the weekend rewrote my DNA. That imprint of his body curled around mine for two nights has literally imprinted itself on my wiring.
I thought, na?vely, that leaving Belvedere would be hard, and it has been, obviously.
But leaving him has been far harder. In the space of forty-eight hours, my body and brain became addicted to him.
The guy is a walking dopamine hit, to be fair, with his devastating looks and his fancy words and the soft, beauty-loving soul that somehow, against the odds, my own soft, beauty-loving soul has sought out and landed on.
My friend Izzy at Alchemy has ADHD, and she’s always talking about ‘seeking behaviours’. She’s tried explaining to me that, when she’s feeling out of whack, her brain is relentless, always seeking a novelty, a reward. Somewhere to land.
I never really understood what she meant.
Now I fucking do.
I lie here and think back to Flora’s face, flushed with panic and excitement as she filled me in on their family meeting: that her father had ‘requested’ Xav and Selena’s wedding be moved forward to New Year’s Eve.
I recall the cold, dead thud of my stomach as it hit me that, within seven short weeks, he’d be married.
She couldn’t know, of course, how heavily those words would lie on me.
Xav sent his apologies for missing our pub lunch and walk—he had to go and deliver the good news to his betrothed, basically—but boy, did he make up for it later.
He came to the other pub with us after dinner, and let’s just say that we were so wrapped up in each other all evening that Flora could have banged half the gardening staff and he wouldn’t have noticed.
My fingers flex on their opposite shoulders as I allow myself to remember the way he was in bed that night, and I make a small, soft noise of pain that I can’t hear above the music.
He refused to talk at all about his impending marriage, but God, did he devour me in every way.
He kissed every inch of my body. Went down on me.
And, if I’m being completely honest with myself, what we did after that, for hours and hours, was less fucking and more making love.
I can’t be a hundred percent sure. After all, no one sure as hell ever made love to me at Alchemy.
But I don’t have a better way to describe the way it was between us that night: endless, searing eye contact, and murmured endearments, and the mutual worship of skin with our mouths and our fingers, and gasps of disbelief from both of us at how deep he could wedge himself inside me, how slowly and intentionally he could move.
At how otherworldly perfect it could feel to be with another person like this, as if we were alone together in this sublime bubble, our bodies celebrating the fact that our souls had recognised themselves in each other.
And that is dangerous. That is heady and unhelpful.
I have a life to survive here; I have two kids who depend on me and a very beloved stepmum who’s in a very scary place right now and has no one else to advocate for her, not to mention an imminent move to a bleak-as-fuck new reality.
I need all the strength I can get right now, because it feels like I’m standing in the path of one of those tennis ball serving machines, except instead of balls, it’s serving me up lemon after lemon.
The thing is, I’m so tired of trying to make lemonade.
Next time life gives me a lemon, I swear I’m going to squirt the fucking thing into someone’s eye.