All I Can Think About is The Machine

I sign in quickly and go straight to Mum’s ward, where I find her sitting on Jean’s table.
It’s Jean’s table because that’s where she sits most the day, ordering staff around and generally chastising everything and everyone that comes her way. Jean is the type of ogre that you don’t want your Mum sat next to, but you don’t want to go against her because you don’t know what she’ll do once you’re gone.
Mum’s place at the other table has been commandeered by a lady who’s taken Betty’s old room. Betty, a kind lady, passed away last week.
I look towards Alex, the old Polish boy who’s worked there ever since Mum came four years ago, but he’s busy chewing on something as he serves some sort of dessert to Dottie on Mum’s favourite table.
Jean starts up and the new lady tells her to shut up.
Jean’s never had anyone tell her to shut up before, and I can’t help liking the new lady, but when I look over to her, her face is crumpled up with hatred and I have to look away.
Mum isn’t even picking at her food, which is supposed to be liver and bacon in a sauce with mashed potato and broccoli, so I try to feed her but she’s clearly unimpressed.
‘Can I go to the toilet, please?’ asks Ethel, who’s blind.
A massive wave of guilty shame glides into my brain as I realise for the thousandth time that Mum eats this rubbish every day while I have real food at home.
‘Can someone take me to the toilet, please?’ asks Ethel in the exact same tone.
Mum’s all but stopped eating main meals and concentrates on desserts mostly, which explains why she’s either constipated or has diarrohea.
‘Can someone take me to the toilet, please?’ asks Ethel again, and this time Alex comes to her aid.
As soon as she’s out of earshot, the new lady tuts. ‘I can’t stand that woman,’ she scowls, ‘she’s disgusting.’
I see Dottie nodding in agreement but she’s noticed that I’m looking at her. As I turn away, she covers her face with her hand.
At least the new lady still has her marbles. Apart from Dottie, she’s the only one that does.
I try to feed Mum again but she won’t have any.
I ask Alex to take her plate away when he returns from the toilet and he asks if she’d like spotted dick or rice pudding but she wants neither. Has he even washed his hands? I don’t want to wait to find out.
‘Shall we go for a walk, Mum?’ I ask, and her eyes light up.
‘Oh yes, let’s do that.’
We walk up and down the long corridor and pass the lady who holds dolls, the man who walks with his hands behind his back and the lady who races up and down as if her brain’s on fire.
We always sit at the same settee in front of the fake birds with the CD-played birdsong tweeting away.
Here we hold hands and watch the madness around us. The lady racing, the man who gives nothing away, the lady with the doll; up and down, up and down.
‘Would you like to lie down and watch some telly?’ I ask.
Mum looks at me with a pained expression. ‘I love you so much, I love you...’ as if she’s thinking I’ll be swept away from her, never to be seen again.
‘And I love you too, Mum. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,’ I say, and I mean it.
Everything she’s done for me, the scrapes she pulled me out from, the money she gave, the hell I raised. Without her, I’d be dead, which would have killed her.
I have to remember that there are monsters in Mum’s head at all times.
Her type of dementia can swirl her back to traumatic childhood experience and then cast her off to later nightmares in a second. All information has been stewed, all reason hammered out; a limp broccoli stick that, when squeezed, turns to mushy, colourless water.
I have been told many times that the food reaches all levels of protein requirement at the care-home, but I’ve now figured out that this analysis is conveniently taken after it’s been cooked off-site and chilled down.
By the time it gets to Mum’s plate, the on-site cooks have blasted all the goodness out of the vegetables and the hot-server, where the food rests for an hour at an excruciating temperature, has dried out the meat content. The gravy is a thick film of gunk that cannot be stirred.
All the food comes in individual metal and cardboard packs which take the servers forever to open because they’re so hot.
The dry dessert sticks to the bottom of the pack and has to be scraped off and the wet dessert, which is always rice pudding, is congealed and tasteless.
Where there is taste, there is bitterness and disgust on most of the ladies faces.
As we pass through Mum’s ward to go back to her room, Jean stares at the new lady and the new lady whispers to Dottie. I wish Betty was still here.
Once in Mum’s room, I put her in bed, switch the telly on and pull the chair close so we can hold hands.
We look into each other’s eyes and smile, but then I see Mum slipping into mild psychosis.
‘Let’s watch some telly, shall we?’ I say, and Mum nods urgently with a smile.
It’s a case of jolting her out of the thoughts that swoop into her brain as soon as they arrive, a bit like getting the monkey off my shoulder when he comes to tell me I can drink like a gentleman.
It’s Countdown and I know Mum can’t tell one word from another, let alone making one up from letters, but I can’t resist.
The letters C H E A U G K P T are chosen by a contestant.
‘Ketchup,’ I say, but Mum’s back with the thoughts and there’s a scowl on her face.
‘They’re horrible,’ she says, ‘horrible. They go like this,’ she says, biting down on an imaginary something.
‘Who’s horrible, Mum?’ and I know I shouldn’t ask because she doesn’t know but I’ve switched off temporarily.
‘Look, Mum,’ I say, as the word ‘ketchup’ comes up on the screen. ‘I got that one.’
‘Yes, darling, you did,’ she says, and that’s when I want to believe that she understands, that she’s back to normal and that we can go out to lunch and she won’t make a scene, that one day I’ll win the lottery and buy a mansion which I’ll turn into a retreat for abused children and Mum can prance around on the lawn with a full-time nurse and eat proper food away from this hellhole.
___
About a month ago, I had a meeting with the manager and offered to cook two lunches and two dinners every week for all sixty-four patients at the care home.
Initially, she seemed very interested.
I told her that I didn’t want any money but that I’d need an assistant to help peel and cut the vegetables.
‘What about the cooks that are already here?’
‘Sack them, they’re useless,’ which they are.
She said she couldn’t do that because they were on contracts, which I found hard to believe.
Although they’d been employed for six months already, still no fresh food had been cooked on-site.
I asked her what exactly they did, and she explained that they were training and that she needed a licence to cook on-site, which was part of a new program, but because of lots of things that she listed but seemed to evaporate from my mind the moment she said them, it was taking a long time to get the go-ahead from head office.
‘So they’ve been here six months and not cooked yet?’
The manager stayed quiet with one of those half-smiles that says you know what the answer is so why even ask.
She said she’d set up a meeting with the head of food management but I still haven’t heard back from her. Hot air, just like everything else.
When it transpired that I’d have to be trained in health and safety and food regulations and all the other stuff, which would take about a year, and then there was the CRB check and insurance procedures, it slowly registered that the machine would never allow it. It was in place to stop sense.
The contracts for off-site cooking were worth millions to those who engineered the deals and they would fight for as long as they could to keep things as they were.
‘It’s such a lovely offer, honestly,’ she said at the end, by which time my face had probably blown up to the shape of a football, wound up with all the red tape stopping me from providing my mother with fresh food.
___
Mum starts to doze off after a while so I get up from my chair, but the instant I move her eyes pop open.
‘I’d better be going, Mum,’ I say solemnly, to which she nods kindly.
Somehow, she knows I have a life somewhere and respects my freedom to leave her, even now.
After pulling back the chair to its original place by the window, I return to Mum and stroke her forehead. Her eyes close and I continue to stroke, knowing that this is the best moment of her day. A time of peace, however fleeting.
As I stop stroking, her eyes open again and there is momentary peace.
We smile at each other and I go to kiss her.
‘I love you so much, Mum.’
‘I want to go with you,’ she says, trying to hide her pain as she wrestles herself to sit up.
Racked with hatred for myself, I return to her side, knowing that I can’t take her with me, that she has to stay here.
‘Mum.., please,’ I say, stroking her forehead, and she seems to understand that I will be going without her.
As I walk towards the door, I look back and smile.
‘I’ll be back in a few days, OK?’ and she nods like an obedient child as I tear myself away from her eyes.
Walking down the corridor, I feel such sadness and contempt for my own selfishness, my inability to make a real difference, that I can’t think. My mind locks down and I’m tired beyond belief. Remorse, pity and love fuse in a swirling, angry vortex of confusion.
I will not let the machine beat me or my mother.
Before saying goodbye to Alex, I ask him why she was sitting on Jean’s table and not at her usual place.
He gives me a story but I’m not listening.
‘She’ll be at her usual place in future, won’t she?’
‘Yes,’ he nods.
‘She doesn’t seem to be eating much lately,’ I say, and I know Alex won’t lie to me.
He just nods with a sad grimace.
I sign out and get in my car. I want to cry but I don’t know how to. The thought of crying is quickly transmitted as pathetic and I roll a roll-up and smoke deeply to fill my lungs.
The machine won’t beat me but I think about it all the time, how it’s killing Mum, and me.

‘