That night was predicted to be his last. Again. But he was still there in the morning, looking a bit more lost and bewildered, unable to talk. The carers went about their work, jolly and exhausted. The nurses changed the colostomy bag by the bed as though it were a lark. My mum, poor woman, had taken delivery of some berberis plants which were to replace the two (now) stolen, and had accidentally poked herself between her eyes with one of their points. She had of course read all I had written about her and the berberis, and now possessed the grace and humour to have a good laugh with me about her bruise. She spent her time, when not staring at Stanley, cleaning out the fridge and doing housework in the kitchen. I could see she missed cooking for him.
In the afternoon I was with Stanley when Susie came into their room. At night she touchingly still slept in the bed next to him. I was sitting in the bucket chair I had been in when a year ago Susie had told me about her plan to control the manner and time of her and Stanley’s deaths. Stanley was now restless and uncomfortable, occasionally garbling something incomprehensible. He was going to die and he was somewhere I’d put between the outskirts of that sprawling suburb Discomfort near the dual carriageway to the ancient city of Agony. What they call a bad place.
Here was precisely the situation that I and my mother had talked about, almost trained for. The nurse tag team were at another house, my sister sleeping, Rupert on the phone to his wife, soaking up a bollocking; the moment was perfect. Looking after Stanley after she died had been her last impediment to killing herself, she had told me, and that obligation was about to stop.
But what to do? I had earlier found out, with some dismay, that Stanley was still on a course of antibiotics. And I had been told we were on palliative care only. And it wasn’t like Jane or Rupert or Susie could quietly forget to give the antibiotic pills to him; the tag team delivered them under somebody’s orders, I never quite knew whose, by shots, so there was no stopping that. It was though the ordeal had to be drawn out. Even when poor old Stanley was dead I imagined the nurses dragging his body out of the fridge in the morgue and in their relentlessly upbeat manner ramming antibiotics into his corpse on 40 euros an hour, plus the drugs.
I had noticed – and been astonished by – the amount of medical supplies in his room. Two large tables were entirely taken up with his needs. I say his needs, but who knew what they were? I was more inclined to think it was the needs of the pharmaceutical company that were being met first, with all these drugs, pads, dressings, unguents, ointments, creams, applicators, drip bags and other to me unidentifiable heavily packaged medical gizmos. The drug company of course also sold the antibiotics that – although we agreed he wouldn’t have – were nevertheless still being injected into him. I began to see what a scam keeping Stanley alive was for the pharmaceutical industry. I already loathed the drug companies on grounds of their packaging and their adoration of single-use plastics. Why use a glass bottle or cardboard box as a recyclable receptacle when you can spread 8 pills into three blister packs of plastic and put them into two plastic coated cartons? Every day I saw a flip-top bin of medical waste being poured into the garbage downstairs.
I looked at Stanley. It wouldn’t take much. A pillow on his face. Softly would do it. With care, attention, and love. But what if his spindly hands tried to peel mine off? I would have to sit back down and pretend I hadn’t been trying to kill him. Which would be slightly embarrassing. And later, if he came to, meet his wounded gaze. I wondered about holding the in-tube in a tight bend out of his sight but didn’t know how long it would take to work.
Susie stood up and pointed at the door.
‘You must leave now,’ she calmly said.
‘Of course.’ I assumed she was going to lie on her bed for a siesta, but when I got outside and noticed that the door, after being shut, had opened a crack, something made me softly step back towards it and look into the room. Susie’s back was to me as she looked in a drawer. She turned, holding a small silver box, biting her lip, looking worried. She opened the box and took out two white capsules, slowly sitting on Stanley’s bed. She kissed his cheek and opened one of the capsules into his upturned mouth, reaching for a glass of water and giving him a sip to wash it down. Then she put the other in her mouth, took a long drink of water, set the glass carefully on the bedside table, and sat back beside Stanley, holding his hand with her eyes closed. Then I saw her smile.
Or at least … that is what would have happened if we’d gone the novelisation route. But we are stuck in non-fiction land here, the place that makes the rules, and she didn’t usher me out of the room.
We both sat there, possibly thinking the same thing: this is the moment. But doing nothing. Then the moment passed. We said nothing. We watched his pain in ours. Susie did later tell me that she too had thoughts of smothering him.
‘The next day, there were long strings of a gluey mucus type substance coming from his open mouth,’ she said to me. ‘Which I pulled with my fingers, on and on until it broke, but I knew that there was a lot more from where that came. I had a big towel in my hand and I wanted to end the agony and then I asked myself, frightened to hell, what I would do if he attempted to struggle? I put away the towel and cried, for him and for me.’
I also didn’t want to kill him because it just didn’t seem right, lame as that sounds after everything I have said in this book, even in the state he was in. I guess I didn’t know if he was trying to die or trying to stay alive. He seemed crap at both. Was it him, or them, keeping him going? I couldn’t tell, though he had said no to going to hospital, which was a bit of a hint. But then – maybe – he’d looked down the riveted bulge of the ferry into the veined water and thought I’m not doing that either.
What we needed, all three of us, I suspected, was someone to do it for us. In the old days, before antibiotics, drips and in- and out-pipes, the robed priest, with a few Latin phrases, bible and crucifix could be relied on to tip people over the edge. Extreme Unction. But Stanley was too strong. I remembered what Amanda had said to Nanna (who, incidentally, was still going great guns in the care home in Nottingham): You are free to go.
Although I liked that phrase, I didn’t feel it was my place to use it, and to be honest I don’t think Stanley could be shuffled off his mortal coil with mere words.
We needed extreme, extreme unction. A lay priest, or celebrant, who provided the whole package. Someone who would arrive at the house, bidden (or maybe called by some magic instinct), bringing dignity, tenderness and beauty to the proceedings, spreading calm with his humble presence. Actually, it could easily be a her. In fact probably better if it was. A reverse doula, helping the soul out of life, not into it. She was definitely nothing to do with big pharma – she came not from the chemist but from nature, and walked barefoot wearing a garland of ivy and wild garlic, holding a basket of herbs and plants. She would spend time looking at and talking to Stanley. Then, with a wise smile take from her basket … a beaker of easeful death. A sweet-tasting mixture laced with opium, hemlock and deadly nightshade, all timed to go off in the most painless but effective sequence. The job would be done. By tradition she would be paid only with food and wine.
But that didn’t happen either, and we were, not to put too fine a point on it, stuck with Stanley for yet another traumatic and grisly night.
Late in the afternoon, Jane, having a drink at the kitchen island, said to me, ‘74, Guy. That’s the best age to die. I’ve seen ’em go at all ages, and 74 is optimum. That’s the tops, that’s what I am aiming for.’
‘That gives me 14 years,’ I said.
‘It makes you use them,’ she said.
‘I can imagine that,’ I replied.
My sister was suggesting the curated life. A life with a sealed rather than frayed end. A sonnet with 14 lines, rather than 27.
Later Jane said ‘I don’t think he’s going any time too soon. Why don’t you take Mummy out to dinner?’