The Little Girl in the Radiator: Mum Alzheimer's & Me (10 page)

1. Mum somehow manages to bar the front door
before Martin arrives home.

2. Martin arrives home and cannot get in.

3. Shouting occurs, which mum ignores.

4. Mary telephones mum.

5. Mum opens the door and goes to Mary.

6. Martin enters the house.

So she followed the sequence every single
time, and not until she received her cue from Mary (the telephone call) could
she open the door. She was merely being faithful to the script we had developed
between us.

‘I’ve just had a brilliant idea!’ said Mary,
beaming a huge smile at me.

‘Yes?’

‘What if I was to phone your mum
half-an-hour
before
you’re due home from work?’

I realised at once the beautiful simplicity
and perfection of Mary’s solution.

‘That way, she would already be in here when
you got home, so the door wouldn’t be locked, and you wouldn’t be locked out!’
said Miss Marple, triumphantly.

Problem solved!

We tried this, and it worked like magic. If
I’d been a bit smarter and realised this myself earlier, I could have saved £90
on the locksmith.

We simply cut a few lines of dialogue and
rewrote the running order:

1. Mum somehow manages to bar the front
door before Martin arrives home.

2. Mary telephones mum.

3. Mum opens the door and goes to Mary.

4. Martin enters the house.

My advice to anyone who finds themselves in
a repeating drama with an Alzheimer’s patient like this is to try and think of
the whole episode as a play. Try and recognise the roles of the characters
involved, including your own, and then think of a way to bring the curtain down
before the normal time – removing one or two of the plot twists, as it were.
Try to bring the final stages nearer to the beginning, so you effectively cut
out the trauma in between. Of course, this is all a lot easier said than done,
but the solution is inside the problem; all you have to do is become detached
enough to see it.

I HAD BEEN CONSCIOUS for some time that I
had been treating my mother like a prisoner. I would go off to work in the
morning, lock her into the house for her own safety, and she’d be there until I
came home in the evening. Later on I would go to bed, and again I’d lock her
into the house. Apart from occasionally telling random hairdressers that she
was being held captive, mum never complained. But she had been a very active
woman in the period before her Alzheimer’s, and I knew she missed going out and
about.

One thing she had always liked to do was to
hop onto the train on a Saturday and go the two short stops up the line from Coventry to Birmingham. Birmingham’s market had been famous in the 1960s and 1970s, and
the hustle and bustle always seemed to inspire her to new heights of shopping
frenzy. She would dash about the covered stalls, laughing and joking with the
stallholders, haggling here and there, and generally having a great time. She could
spot a bargain at 100 yards, as keenly as any hovering falcon ever tracked a
mouse. Then she and dad would come home on the train again after the market had
closed, both laden with their bargains, happy as a couple of school kids.

It was a Friday night and we were watching
television in the lounge. ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Would you like to go to Birmingham market tomorrow?’

I knew full well what the answer would be.

‘Oh, I would
love
that!’ she cried,
in genuine delight. ‘We could take Bonzo with us and go on the train!’

I thought about the difficulties I might
encounter on the train journey, as I tried to keep an eye on mum, without
having the added trauma of trying to prevent our demented dog from humping the
leg off some terrified passenger.

‘I think we’ll leave Bruno here, mum,’ I
said. ‘He doesn’t like to go on trains.’

I had no idea whether or not this was true,
but I didn’t much care.

Bruno sat up straight as soon as he heard
his name mentioned. ‘Oh, look at him!’ said mum. ‘He wants to go shopping with
us!’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘Oh, bless him!’ cried mum.

Bruno was looking at mum, then back at me,
then again at mum. Of course, mum took these quizzical canine glances to mean
that he really wanted to go on a train and have a look round the market where
he could buy himself a bone and a new collar. And that he was promising
faithfully to behave himself.

‘He’ll be
so
disappointed if he
doesn’t go,’ pleaded mum.

‘No, he won’t.’

‘Oh, he will. I understand him more than you
do,’ she said.

‘No, you don’t. He doesn’t understand what
we’re saying, and he isn’t going.’

Mum threw her arms around Bruno’s neck as
though he were a long lost relative.

‘Poor Benji!’ cried mum. ‘I’ll bring you
back a new collar and a big new bone!’

Mum bent her head and kissed the hairy hound
long and hard on the top of his head.

‘Oh, bless him!’ she cried again.

‘We’ll need to make an early start in the
morning,’ I said. ‘We’ll have a quiet day shopping.’

The next morning I got up at eight o’clock
and mum met me, washed, dressed and ready in the kitchen. She had her hat and
coat on, and was holding Bruno by his lead; a small piece of paper was attached
to his collar.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, taking a closer look
at the paper.

‘It’s his name and address, just in case he
gets lost in the crowds, then someone can take him home for us,’ announced mum
triumphantly, obviously very pleased with her idea.

It was some street in Dublin.

‘I told you last night, he’s not coming with
us,’ I said. ‘And that address is in Ireland, anyway. Now, I’m going to get some
breakfast.’

‘Yes, of course it is,’ she said. ‘It’s
our
address.’

I sighed as I poured the cereal into the
bowl. ‘No, it isn’t, we don’t live in Dublin. We live in Coventry.’

Mum looked at me as though I was becoming
very forgetful, more to be pitied than argued with. She laid her hand gently on
my arm.

‘Yes we do, Richard. I think you need a
holiday.’

I sloshed the milk into the bowl.

‘My name’s not Richard, and we don’t live in
Dublin. I
could
do with a holiday, though.’

Mum and Bruno went and sat together in the
front room. Mum was very quiet; I think she was wondering who I might be, if I
wasn’t Richard.

Eventually, I got dressed, took Bruno’s lead
off and managed to get mum out of the front door without him. We parked the car
at Coventry train station and headed into the main concourse.

‘Two return tickets to Birmingham New Street,
please,’ I said to the man behind the glass wall at the ticket counter.

‘Is the sea calm today?’ asked mum.

‘I have no idea,’ replied the man. He looked
somewhat surprised; given that Coventry is right in the centre of England, and is about as far as you can get from the sea in any direction, I didn’t blame
him.

‘I’m not a very good sailor,’ explained mum,
to the ticket seller. ‘I always get seasick on the ferry. I just wondered if it
was going to be a rough crossing to England, that’s all.’

‘You’re already in England,’ replied the man, very quietly.

Mum nodded, and smiled, but clearly didn’t
understand. The man slid the tickets under the glass partition.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and we moved away. It gets
very tedious explaining to everyone you meet that the person you are with has
Alzheimer’s. After a while you just stop bothering and leave them to figure it
out for themselves, if they can – and, if they can’t, who cares anyway?

‘When’s our train due in?’ asked mum.

I looked at one of the display screens
overhead.

‘About 15 minutes,’ I said.

‘Let’s have a nice cup of tea,’ suggested
mum.

In the small cafeteria we ordered two teas
and mum ordered a jam doughnut, which she carefully wrapped in a paper tissue
and placed in her handbag.

‘Why are you saving the doughnut?’ I asked.

‘It’s for Billy,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you just feed him dog food? I’m
sure he’s not supposed to eat jam doughnuts and cream cakes, and all the other
crap you give him. No wonder he’s mental.’

‘He is
not
mental!’ cried mum. ‘We
love our mid-morning cream cakes. We both look forward to it.’

I bet he did; he’d really landed on his
paws. I could just tell that this simple trip to the market was going to turn
into a major adventure, like the simple trip to the hairdresser’s.

The train was more or less on time, and we
had finished our tea when it pulled into the station.

‘Let’s have a meal on the train,’ said mum.
I think she was trying to make the most of her day out.

‘We can’t,’ I replied. ‘We’re only going two
stops… we’ll be there in less than 20 minutes.’

‘It takes longer than that to get to Dún Laoghaire,’ said mum, chuckling at my naivety. Dún Laoghaire is the port in Dublin where the ferry departs for Holyhead.

‘Where do you think we’re going?’ I asked.

‘We’re going to England, aren’t we?’ said
mum.

‘We’re
in
England, mum,’ I said. ‘We
live
in England. We’ve lived in England for
decades
. We’re going to Birmingham market, that’s all.’

‘Oh,’ she said, disappointed.

‘And we’re not going on the ferry, we’re
only going two stops on the train!’

Mum was nodding. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she
said.

The Saturday morning trains to Birmingham are always crowded, and you’re lucky if you can get a seat. I knew we probably
wouldn’t be able to sit together, so I decided to let mum sit while I stood
nearby so I could keep an eye on her.

We boarded the train after a little queuing
up.

‘Stay close to me,’ I said. ‘I don’t want
you to get lost.’

‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ said mum,
indignantly. ‘I know what I’m doing, you know.’

We squeezed down the narrow aisle of the
first carriage, between the settling bodies and the two rows of seats. I was
leading, and calling back over my shoulder. ‘Stay close now,’ I said, ‘there’s
a vacant seat up here, you take it and I’ll sit over here.’

We reached the seat. ‘You can sit here,
mum,’ I said, turning around.

She wasn’t there.

‘Shit!’

I looked frantically back down the way I had
just come, the way I thought we had both just come. I couldn’t see the end of
the carriage as people were still standing in the aisles and throwing luggage
onto the overhead racks.

I started to roughly barge my way back down
the train.

‘Hey, steady on!’ complained someone as I
bumped past.

Suddenly the aisle was blocked in front of
me by a big fat woman in a red hat. I didn’t have time for courtesies, I had to
get past her and find mum right now. This huge woman was actually standing in
the middle of the aisle rooting through an enormous handbag.

‘Wait a minute, I know I put it in my bag
this morning,’ I heard her say to someone as I drew level with her.

When I was small my dad had always insisted
on me having good manners, especially when dealing with grown-ups, authority
figures, or females of any age. ‘Manners cost nothing, son,’ he used to say. I
hope he would have understood. I drew level with this mountainous woman, as she
was still rummaging through her bag, when I simply took as big a step as I
could, sideways.

‘Oooooh!’ shrieked the woman, as she crashed
headfirst back into her seat, the contents of her handbag rattled across the
metal floor of the train.

‘Sorry!’ I muttered as I went past her.

‘Some people have no manners these days!’
she shouted after me.

I couldn’t see mum anywhere. A whistle blew
and the train pulled away. I looked frantically out of the carriage windows,
one after the other, hoping to God I didn’t get a last glimpse of mum on the
platform. I couldn’t see her. As the train left the station, people melted away
from the aisle into their seats, and I could see the whole of the carriage. I
stood in the middle, desperately scanning the faces and heads about me. I
couldn’t spot her anywhere.

I began to make my way down the carriage,
retracing our steps. I scanned every head and face as I passed. No luck. I came
to the end of the second carriage, and still couldn’t spot her.

Where the hell can she have got to? I
thought to myself.

It suddenly occurred to me that she might
have entered one of the small toilets which can be found at the end of each carriage.
I went back down the aisle and found a locked cubicle.

‘Mum?’ I said, gently tapping on the door.

‘I ain’t your mother!’ came back a deep male
voice.

‘Sorry!’

I turned again and went down the aisle
towards the point where we had boarded the train, again scanning all the heads
and faces as I passed. I entered the second carriage again and began to walk
slowly down the aisle. If she wasn’t in the toilet, and she wasn’t in the
second carriage, then she must be in this one, I reasoned.

She wasn’t there.

I suddenly had a sick feeling: she mustn’t
have got on the train at all. We must have become split up on the platform back
at Coventry. I boarded the train, and she didn’t. If that was the case then she
would be wandering around the city right now, completely lost, and I was
already miles away and going in the opposite direction.

But I’d been
sure
she had boarded the
train right behind me. On the fast train, it’s only two stops from Coventry to New Street, the other being in the middle at the National Exhibition Centre.
The NEC is a huge arena where thousands of people flock from all over the
country to events like the British Motor Show and big rock concerts. Years ago
I’d been there to see The Who and David Bowie.

‘Next station stop, National Exhibition Centre,’
announced the voice over the Tannoy system, and the train started to slow down.
People began to get up from their seats and gather their bags together.
Suddenly, I was plunged back into the middle of a mass of people, and I still
had no idea where mum was.

I pushed and shoved my way roughly down the
aisle again through the barricades of bodies. I was starting to panic. People
were pulling down large and small cases, and squeezing down the aisle as best
they could. Dozens of people were getting off the train here, and there was a
large queue of others massing on the platform waiting to take their places on
the train.

When the departing crowd had got off, and
the new lot had boarded, I had dozens of fresh heads to scrutinize up and down
the carriages. Everyone had changed and I had to start all over again looking
for mum.