The Story Behind The Headline

In the morning she gets up first, goes downstairs and makes herself a cup of tea. She has a bowl of cereal for breakfast, then goes and showers in the ensuite. She is careful when she showers, as she is worried about a fall. She has heard about people younger than herself who have died after breaking a hip.

If it’s raining she will look out of the window and think about her son, driving to work in the rain, and her grandchildren, getting wet while they walk to school. She may give a passing thought to her daughter in law. Once dressed, she goes downstairs and tidies round, cleans her kitchen, and then the bathrooms: the downstairs cloaks, the main bathroom and the ensuite.

It is ridiculous, cleaning all these bathrooms at her age. But he wants all these bathrooms. He insists on having all these bathrooms.

She finishes the cleaning, which doesn’t take long as, being cleaned every day, dirt never has time to accumulate. She makes herself a cup of coffee, and hears him stirring upstairs.

There is the uneven thud of the smaller walking frame that he uses upstairs. She hears him go into the bathroom, and closes her eyes. If she is lucky he will manage to go the toilet and wash himself. Slightly less lucky, and he will just fall, but be able to pull himself up. Unluckier still, she will have to push the button on the pendant he refuses to wear round his neck, and summon the Lifeline warden. Worst case: he will lose control before he gets to the toilet, slip and fall in his own muck.

He will not let her call the warden when that happens. He will crawl out of the bathroom, scraping his elbows and knees and soiling the landing carpet, and wait until she has cleaned the bathroom, again. She will have to help him up, sometimes getting his muck on herself, and take him to the ensuite where there is a walk in shower. The ensuite is attached to her room, so he may soil her carpet and bedclothes. There she will have to shower him, worrying about a possible fall and a broken hip, and bring him clean clothes. When he has gone downstairs in the stairlift she will scrub the carpets, strip the bedlinen if necessary, and put all the washing, including his pyjamas, into the machine.

Today he makes it to the toilet, but falls afterwards, on the landing. He will not let her call the warden. He crawls into his bedroom and eventually pulls himself up on the bed. He lies, exhausted. It is an hour and half since he got up. There are blood stains on the landing carpet, from his scraped knees.

He does not like to eat breakfast, preferring to sit by the open patio doors, summer and winter, with a pipe and a cup of tea. By eleven o’clock he is hungry, and wants to have his lunch. He likes very light meals, often a salad or a small piece of meat with peas and potatoes – he will not eat vegetables. She prepares his meal and then cooks for herself – a piece of fish, maybe, or a lamb chop, with broccoli or cabbage. He eats at the table by the patio doors, she takes hers down to the sitting room end, and watches television.
When she has finished he struggles on his larger walking frame down to the sitting room end and collapses into his chair, while she takes her tray out to the kitchen. He turns the television up very loud; he is quite deaf but will not have a hearing aid. She does the dishes, puts the tea towel for washing, and goes upstairs for a lie down. He will sleep in his chair for a couple of hours.

When she comes down he has gone back to the chair by the patio, smoking another pipe and reading the paper. At four o’clock he wants his tea. She makes him a sandwich or some cheese on toast, he has some ice cream or a piece of cake afterwards, and she cuts him up an apple. With the shaking, he can’t manage to cut fruit or anything else very much. Then she brings him a cup of tea.

She makes herself a sandwich and goes down to the sitting room end, to watch television. When he has finished he hauls himself up with the frame, and starts his journey down towards his armchair. She gets up and takes her plate and cup into the kitchen. She mops the spills from his cup of tea, and washes up his things.

Depending on what is on, she may sit and watch television with him for a while. He likes to eat chocolate while he watches. She goes to bed early, liking to read. The television is on so loud that there is no point in trying to sleep before he goes to bed and anyway, she needs to be awake in case he falls.

On Friday morning the taxi comes to take her to the supermarket. She has her mobile switched on and rings him every quarter of an hour during the two hours she is out. On Tuesday mornings she gets the bus into town to shop and pay bills, and again phones him every fifteen minutes. One day her bus back did not come at the usual time and he phoned her over and over again, his voice rising with panic, no matter how many times she told him she was coming home, she was nearly there, she was at the end of the road.

In a month’s time it will be her eightieth birthday and her son and grandchildren, and of course her daughter in law, are coming over for the day. They are going out to lunch at a hotel. The choice of restaurant is circumscribed by the need for disabled access and an easy route to the toilet, and a relaxed staff who will not mind if he spills his drinks or drops his food, or speaks in too loud a voice. They have been to this hotel several times before, the staff know them and are very kind. It is a familiar routine. They do not stay long because he becomes anxious if he is away from the house for more than a couple of hours. They cannot go in their son’s car because of the wheelchair, so they book a special taxi. Several times on the fifteen minute journey he asks the driver to check that the cab back is reserved, and soon after they sit down to eat he starts asking her to phone and check again, and again. She pretends to phone the taxi company on her mobile, to reassure him. If the cab is not there when he is ready to leave, he becomes agitated and starts shouting at her that she should have checked more often.

Her son, the grandchildren, and of course the daughter in law, will come back to the house for a few hours. They will bring a birthday cake, and when the candles have been blown out and the cake cut, and she has given them a cup of tea, they will depart.

She is always heartbroken and relieved to see them go. He agrees to wear incontinence padding when they are there, but still she knows that he is anxious, she is anxious, in case there is an accident during the visit. There never has been, and this makes her resentful. He will never wear the incontinence pads when they are on their own, and she thinks how much easier her life would be if he would. If he can manage not to have an accident when they are there, why can he not manage when they are on their own? He says the pads make him uncomfortable. She thinks of her hands, raw with scrubbing the stains off his clothes and the carpets.

The daughter in law works for a local authority and has suggested contacting their own council for some social services home care. They could have a carer in, to help him shower. He could go to a Day Centre a couple of afternoons a week, to give her a break. He could even have respite care for a few days; she might be able to go away, perhaps visit her son and grandchildren. She mentioned the showering to him but he refused. She told her daughter in law that there was no point mentioning the Day Centre or the respite, he would never agree.

Her son offered to pay for a home help to come in and clean. He was very insistent, so she agreed. The woman who came was nice enough but it was a strain having to lock her jewellery away twice a week, and make sure there was no money lying around. She didn’t like the idea of someone else cleaning their toilets, so she told the woman to leave those, she would do them herself. After the first week she told the woman to leave the bedrooms because neither of them wanted someone else rooting about through their private things, and the kitchen, because she wanted to be sure it had been done properly. The Agency said the woman wasn’t allowed to climb up to do windows or damp wipe the picture rail, so in the end there didn’t seem any point in having her. Her son offered to find an agency who would allow windows and picture rails, but she told him not to bother. His father didn’t like having someone else round the house.

This Tuesday, when she was in town, she phoned him as usual and there was no answer. She left it five minutes and phoned again, and then again, in case he was in the toilet. There was no answer and she could see the Lifeline pendant, which he refused to wear, lying on the sideboard, useless. She went for a bus, continually ringing him from the bus stop, then on the bus. She was still phoning when she was walking up the path.

He had fallen from the toilet upstairs, lying in his own muck, filthy handprints on the wall and door where he had tried to get up. He was crying, asking where she had been, demanding she get him up. She told him she could not. She told him they would have to get the warden. She went downstairs to get the pendant, while he cried after her, begging her not to.

The wardens were lovely. They showered him down, put him in his pyjamas and put him to bed. They told her she should not be having to look after him alone, she should have someone to help. They were not allowed to clean for her, so after they had gone she set to scrubbing the floor and the door and the walls, and cleaning the toilet, while he wept and swore at her for humiliating him.

That was yesterday, and now she sits in her armchair and he sits in his, eating chocolate and watching television.

Deliberately, while the television pounds the room with noise, she remembers. She remembers the dance where she first met him. She remembers watching him play football and cricket. She remembers the sex. She remembers his skill at making model boats and aeroplanes. She remembers him building a snowman with their son, winning the father’s race at sports day, buying her silver jewellery for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. He never even remembered their fiftieth.

She was a strictly brought up working class girl, and her loving, though deeply felt, was always done with a reserve. Her passion was clasped inside her, visible in her eyes, shown in the way she cared for her house, and her child, and kept herself nice, even as the years passed. The passion of her love had never broken out. Never risen in her chest until she burst with it, never brought her to shrieking wordlessness, never blinded her with searing red fire.

Not like the passion of her hate.

She boils the kettle and fetches it in, and pours the scalding water into his lap. There, she says, that will keep you clean. Hot water is good for you. Too astonished to move, he stares at her with tear swilled eyes, his mouth forming sounds he is in too much pain to voice. She hits him with the kettle, several times round the head, until he starts to bleed. She picks up the box of chocolates and crams them all into his mouth, until his cheeks puff out like a grotesque hamster and his eyes bulge. Eat, she says. Eat. Chew. You like your chocolate. Eat your chocolate. Chew.

She goes across to her armchair and picks up a cushion. It doesn’t take long, and she presses harder than she strictly needs to, grinding the cushion into his face. She didn’t know she still had such strength.

She stands and looks at her accomplishment. Typically, he has soiled himself while dying; there is a terrible smell and his muck is everywhere. Well, she won’t clean him up. Not again.

She goes upstairs, and carefully showers in the ensuite. She still does not want to fall. She puts on clean clothes. She knows there is brandy in the sideboard from Christmas, so she fetches the bottle and a glass. It smells terrible downstairs, so when she comes back to her room she closes the door. She takes all the tablets she can find in the house, his, hers, it doesn’t matter. She forces the brandy down, as much as she can manage, and carefully ties a plastic carrier bag over her head.

Her last thought is to hope that soiling oneself is not a reflex in death. She wouldn’t like a stranger to have to clean her up.