I’m lying on my stomach on the kitchen floor, over at the worn patch by the sink. The floorboards complain as I lean on them and stretch my arm into the dark space beneath the cabinets where dust and missing things accumulate. I feel blindly about for the front-door key. It’s the last one we have, and I’ve already checked the lock, where Charlie sometimes leaves it when he lets himself in after a walk. I don’t like being down here; I’m nervous of what I might find. When I opened the kitchen door the other evening, a small black creature darted from the bin to beneath the fridge: a mouse, or maybe a baby rat – our neighbours found a dead one in their cellar last week. I don’t want to meet a baby rat or the rat bait that’s on a saucer somewhere under here too. I pull out a Lego man covered in sticky black gunk, a chewed tennis ball, but no key.
I pick dog hair from my tongue and move to get up; an exposed nail on a board clings to my shirt and causes a small tear. I curse and look at the kitchen clock. The big hand is stuck and juddering behind the small one; it’s eternally a quarter past three. I’m unsure of the actual time, but I know that I should have set off for the library long before now and that all the seats in the quiet room will be occupied. The students who trail in and out – restless, flirting, bored – are less distracting than Charlie on one of his searches: for his glasses, keys, wallet, phone, sometimes so frustrated when these objects elude him that he’ll shout and break things, and I will have to stop what I’m doing and go to him. Or I’ll find him standing at the top of the stairs, trying to remember why he climbed them seconds earlier with such purpose. Sometimes he’ll come into whatever room I’m in and begin to tell me something. Then he’ll pause and look at me for help, his mouth slightly open, his eyes full of worry. ‘Sorry, it’s gone,’ he’ll say as he goes back out, closing the door as quietly as he can so as not to disturb me further.
It’s September 2013, four months after Lucia’s birth and death. The Nipe and I had travelled alone to Italy the previous month to join some of my family there for a holiday – a happy thing for us both after all the sadness. Despite my pleading, Charlie had refused to come with us. He said the mosquitos would be biting; that he disliked the two untidy apartments jointly owned by my four siblings and me since our mother’s death. I visited the baby’s grave in the Angels plot of Glasnevin Cemetery a couple of times on my own, but the pain was still too raw – the teddies and brightly coloured plastic windmills too much to bear – and the long drive on the M50 through blinding tears too precarious to attempt regularly. A post-mortem said that she had died not because of any genetic abnormality but because the umbilical cord had become hypercoiled and had cut off the blood supply between us.
We both grieve for our baby, but privately, in different rooms. And we still begin each day together, after I have left the Nipe at her Montessori pre-school, with a walk along Bray seafront in the milky early light, down as far as the old hotel, stumbling over stones as we pick our way to the water’s edge, where Blue waits, upright and alert, eyes locked on the ball in Charlie’s hand. Home again and after a quick coffee I’ll kiss Charlie goodbye on the forehead as I leave for the library. He’ll look at me, forlorn. ‘No, don’t go,’ he’ll plead, wrapping his arms around me. ‘Let’s get back into bed for a bit.’ It hurts him that I want to be away from him. He’s the same when I say I’m meeting a friend for dinner or that I’m going for a bath; he’s just happier when we’re together on our own. ‘I have to work,’ I tell him, irritated, forcing myself free. ‘We have to work, it’s the middle of the working week.’
There’s an unstable stack of upturned plates and bowls on the draining board and an assortment of sudsy cutlery. Charlie has stopped using the dishwasher; he prefers to wash things by hand these days, standing happy and quiet by the sink in his plaid pyjama bottoms, stopping only to slap off the radio if it gets too noisy or if he hears that Harvey Norman ad he hates.
I start to put away the dishes, but they still feel sticky with grease – a bit of last night’s pizza is stuck between the prongs of a fork, traces of muesli line the rim of a bowl. For Christ’s sake, I say aloud, tossing one, two, three dirty knives back into the sink. He has also begun lately to spend a lot of time ironing. Often when I get home in the evenings and call his name, I can tell from the direction of his reply that he isn’t upstairs where I want him to be – absorbed in his work – but down in the utility room, bent over the ironing board. ‘Ach, there you are, sweetie,’ he’ll say, resting the iron on its back and sliding out from behind the board to embrace me. And then: ‘I haven’t stopped, honestly,’ in a slightly effeminate way, tilting his head in the direction of a pile of beautifully pressed towels and sheets. ‘I do still make you happy, don’t I?’ he’ll ask when I don’t seem grateful. I know he does these things to be useful, to try to keep me content, to try and make some order of our increasingly disordered lives, but I worry that he is no longer painting.
On sunny days he’ll set up a lounger in the back garden, pull off his vest and work on his tan, followed, perhaps, by a few hours of gardening, but most often he’ll simply go back to bed. I tease him that his favourite position these days is horizontal. This amuses him. ‘I’m a hard man. Hard in my underpants, hard to get up in the morning,’ he’ll say, laughing and waiting for me to laugh along like I used to. When he doesn’t receive any softness he’ll force himself upright. ‘God almighty, I never get a break,’ he’ll say as he fumbles for his glasses on the bedside table. He’ll tut at me for my bossiness, then take my hands in his and pull me close to him. ‘I do love it when you barge me.’
Once a week he’ll set off for the high street to buy paints and to have an argument with his bank: he’ll yell at them that their useless fecking ATM still isn’t working, thump his fist on it and kick the wall around it because he can no longer make sense of the information on the screen. ‘And why do you keep changing my fucking PIN number?’ he’ll roar through the window, because he’s forgotten the four digits he has always used. Customers inch away; cashiers shift in their seats, shoot glances at each other. Then he’ll demand to know why they keep sending him cards that don’t work – he doesn’t understand that he can’t withdraw money when all of his accounts are overdrawn. He’ll return home, furious and without any paints, but with some bit of religious iconography or a china pig from the Vincent de Paul charity shop on the Quinnsboro Road and a story of some poor elderly woman or injured animal he helped along the way. Always empathetic, even when angry, always vigilant and watchful and curious – craning his long neck and turning his bald head in a cartoonish way to peer over the high wall of someone’s garden. ‘Good God,’ he’ll say if he notices the enormous backside of some unfortunate passerby, and he’ll hold brief conversations with each dog he encounters and its owner, every industrious cat.
An unfinished painting has been resting on his easel for months. It’s of the baby, Swee’Pea, from the Popeye cartoons. The baby’s body in its red sleepsuit is complete but its face is just a round cream shape waiting for features. Charlie’s chickens have lately been faceless too, or sometimes two-faced: two perfect beaks, one shadowing the other. At Halloween, with great difficulty, he carves a pumpkin – and gives it two sets of eyes but no nose. The Nipe sees that this is wrong, but she doesn’t want to hurt her dad. She doesn’t want to put a candle in it either. We find a discreet home for it in the back garden, where it slowly rots and caves in on itself. His last show, with his new gallery, the Peppercanister in Dublin, had been disappointing. He had to prepare for it while I was in hospital and he was minding the Nipe, and he only produced half a dozen new pieces – the rest he’d cobbled together from old works that had been stacked against the wall in his studio for several years or hung about our home. The resulting collection was disjointed and confusing. Only three paintings sold on his opening night, out of a possible twenty. He tried to be brave and philosophical about it, but I saw the hurt on his face. It was just the opening night, we told each other, the show would run for a further two weeks; but nothing more sold, and I knew it would take him time to rebuild his confidence. ‘I’m working up to it,’ he says whenever I ask when he might begin painting again.
At breakfast each morning, only getting out of bed when I’ve returned from delivering our child to Montessori, he sinks his teeth into a slice of Marks and Spencer’s ciabatta bread, toasted and dripping with butter. I have to turn away or subtly cup my hands over my ears to dull the satisfied sound he makes as he eats, my mind full of irritation, resentment and questions, feeling ashamed of my meanness but angrily justified too: what will you eat when my money runs out? Why am I having to do it all on my own? Why won’t you teach students at home once a week? I would do up fliers, I would distribute them, I would bring the students if you were willing to teach them. Why won’t you apply for the art teacher vacancy in the local primary school? Why haven’t you made any provisions for getting older? Why did you cash in your pension from NCAD to travel around India? Why aren’t you trying to help support our child? I fire all of this at him silently, though I know he knows what I’m thinking. He blames the recession, the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, for taking away all his money and his motivation. He blames the bastards in the bank.
Still looking for the missing key, I search the dining room next. It’s cold in here; the dark cabinets which had once seemed so right for the room are now oppressive, closing in on me and concealing things that we need. The mahogany table in its centre is as shiny and blemish-free as when we bought it seven years ago, when we still had optimistic plans for dinner parties, lists of potential guests and what vegetarian food we might feed them. But there was always some reason why the parties didn’t happen, and the table has never been used; its leather seats are still perfect and plump, without the flattened imprint of wear or damage from rowdy, memorable nights.
There’s a large cupboard opposite where I’m standing, one that Charlie had shipped home from India many years earlier. It’s such a hulk that it entirely blocks the stained-glass window behind and it seems now to be listing to the right, as though the ground beneath is subsiding under its weight, as though it has given up trying to look its best now that it no longer needs to, now that we’ve decided to sell. The bank still owns more than half this house and we can no longer afford to pay them back. We are trying to live off my two-book deal but are almost at the end of it, my second book yet to be published – and this house was always too large for a family with just one child, and unmanageable given Charlie’s tendency to hoard, and mine to hide chaos behind closed doors.
We spend whole weekends cleaning to prepare for viewings, our child silenced by the TV screen. We pull fresh duvet covers over grubby ones, pick dog dirt from the garden, light vanilla-scented candles, hoover carpets, build fires, put opera on the stereo, conceal the peeling enamel base of the bath tub with rubber ducks and foam alphabet letters. Charlie hides his human skulls and shunts the clay statue of Sister Scholastica deep into the mossy wet undergrowth beneath the mimosa tree that overhangs our garden from the Atlanta Home for the Elderly next door.
And then we wait in the park opposite the house, or in the car if it’s raining, while strangers explore our home, unknown children test the swing in the garden or climb the ladder up to the Nipe’s playhouse, seeing everything now as we once did. Before our first viewing, Charlie removed the elephant-grey cover from his Moto Guzzi, which he keeps in the driveway. Neighbours and passersby noticed it; this gave Charlie some pride – he answered their questions, reassessed its beauty himself. Now he’s removed the cover for good but he no longer rides it – there’s some sort of mechanical problem with it, he says. So it rusts, idle, sat on occasionally by a child on a play date, momentarily entertained before sliding back off with boredom. We decide to sell the Moto Guzzi too.
I open the Indian cupboard and lift out a heavy glass ashtray containing American coins, badges, safety pins – and reach for a wad of cards beneath it. I’m no longer looking for the missing key, now I’m in search of something else that’s been bothering me. I sift through the cards till I find the one I want. Charlie gave it to me on my last birthday, when I turned forty-four, along with his usual gifts: a jumper from Topshop (always stylish, always grey, always the right size) and a couple of books – a slim volume of Emily Dickinson’s poems and The Poet and the Murderer by Simon Worrall. I’d read the card while he’d hovered beside me in the kitchen, the Nipe on my knee, and had felt my stomach lurch:
Hapy Birthdy my darling, I stil love you to much.
There it was in the writing: the problem, now impossible to deny. I’d hugged him, thanked him, let the Nipe blow out my candles, spraying saliva over the chocolate icing. Later that day, I’d found the felt-tipped pen he’d used and had added the missing letters and put it back on the mantelpiece so I could pretend, to myself and anyone else who might open it, that everything was OK.
I can hear him upstairs now, going from room to room, still in search of the key. Neither of us is working and neither of us is earning, yet we are continuing to pay the local Montessori to mind our daughter all day.
Our home, the three of us as a family, is no longer functioning.
*
‘That was such a broken thing,’ Charlie says. We are sitting at the kitchen table; he slurps his tea while I huddle over mine, allow the steam to dampen my face – he has always been better able to tolerate hot liquids. When he puts the cup down, I can see that his hand is shaking. He is talking about Lucia, the baby we lost, about the pain of seeing her born dead.
‘At least we have our Nipe. The wee bat,’ he says, smiling at the thought of her – our beautiful, solid, perfect, healthy child, five doors down from us now. ‘I can still see his face. The back of his head. The back of his head came off in my hand,’ he says, holding his shaking fingers high and stiff in the air. He looks at them, wild-eyed, reimagining the horror and wanting me to imagine it with him, as though this was the first time he has described Michael’s death to me. ‘It never goes. His face. The poor wee thing.’ He is remembering our tiny baby at birth and the bleeding head of the boy who had died in his arms. The two events, the two deaths, have somehow merged, become muddled, in Charlie’s mind.
When I leave for the library an hour later, it’s raining; the sort of rain that drenches you in seconds, pelting off the gutters, saturating the ferns and hydrangeas in the flowerbed, forming instant puddles on the porch and on the saddle of the old motorbike. I yell goodbye, make a dash for the car, holding my satchel over my head, yelping like a teenager. It’s only as I’m reversing, at the gate and about to turn the wheel hard to the right to face towards Greystones, that I notice Charlie. He is upstairs, at the sitting-room window, perched on the back of the sofa, his feet against the window ledge, watching me as I leave, watching the rain. Even in those few moments I can see that he is not simply crying, but howling so deeply, with such primal force and pain, that his face is entirely contorted. I know he will need to curl up with a hot-water bottle held to his stomach for the rest of the morning, to ease the spasms he gets when he is this distraught.
The Nipe found him trying to climb out through that same window on the night following a tiny funeral service we had for the baby at Glasnevin Cemetery: Charlie and me, a pastoral care worker from the hospital, the gravedigger, and Lucia in a small white box. The Nipe described what had happened to me the next day, sitting forward in her car seat, our eyes meeting in the overhead mirror as I drove. He had been thumping his fists against the glass – that was the sound that woke her – and when she came in she found him trying to prise the window open. She had taken him by the hand, told him he was just having a scary dream and had led him back to bed. ‘I like taking care of Dada,’ she said with an embarrassed smile, her one dimple indented.
We are all restless at night, each of us up and moving at different stages along the dark, carpeted landings, up and down the creaky stairs. Even the dog paces the hall to find a comfortable spot – the soft collapse of settling bones – and cries too loudly in his dreams, his claws digging into and marking the freshly varnished floors.
After Charlie’s attempted escape I move back into our bedroom so that I can keep a closer eye on him. I’ve been sleeping in the spare room for many months – sex is a long-forgotten thing, sleep fitful and light, even with Xanax and ear plugs and meditations I’ve downloaded onto my phone. Charlie wakes another night that same week and gets up and dressed in the dark. I have a follow-up appointment at the maternity hospital early the next day and Charlie will be taking our child to Montessori.
‘What are you doing?’ I say, switching on the bedside light, squinting at the clock.
‘I have to take the Nipe to school – have you forgotten about your appointment?’
‘Charlie, it’s 3 a.m. It’s still night time.’
‘Ach, Jesus,’ he says, staring at the bedroom curtains for too long before getting back into bed, still dressed.
Unable to sleep, I take my phone from the table, plump a pillow behind my back and type a list of Charlie’s symptoms into Google:
Short-term memory problems
Very tired
Very thin
Visual problems
Low mood
Upset stomach and flatulence
Then, one by one, I enter all the possible causes I can think of to find out what their symptoms might be:
Post-traumatic stress disorder?
Depression?
Stress?
Chemical imbalance?
Vegetarian diet?
Brain tumour?
Carbon-monoxide poisoning?
Exposure to high levels of radiation during a visit to Chernobyl?
Infection from dental implants?
I begin to keep notes of specific incidents. The time he put the car seat into the car upside down and tried to force our protesting daughter into it. The day he washed her hands in scalding water and was furious with her for screaming. The many, many times he had forgotten food in the oven. That evening when he put Nipey in the bath with her socks still on. The night he drove into oncoming traffic, swearing at the shock of headlights and horns and at me for grabbing the wheel. The morning he phoned me in the library to ask where the ‘floor cleaner thing’ was.
‘You mean the mop?’
‘No. You know, the floor cleaner thing.’
‘The sweeping brush?’
‘Jesus, no. The cleaner thing!’
‘The hoover?’
‘The hoover, the hoover. I can’t find the fucking hoover. Where have you hidden it?’
One Saturday morning all three of us are in the bathroom together, grumpy from another disturbed night and the prospect of hours of cleaning ahead for an open viewing of our home that afternoon. The Nipe is brushing her teeth and Charlie is overseeing this activity while I scrub at a ring of grime round the bath.
Teeth done, she throws her brush into the basin, trots out of the room and back to her cartoons. Charlie shouts after her that she needs to rinse out her mouth. ‘We never rinse out,’ I say, flushed from standing up too swiftly, aware of how much this will annoy him. ‘The dentist says it’s better not to.’
‘Bunkum!’ he shouts, and calls her again, this time more aggressively. She reappears, Charlie takes the cruddy cup containing our toothbrushes, rests them on the sink edge, fills the cup with water and hands it to our child to drink. ‘You can’t give her that filthy thing,’ I protest quietly. He grabs it back, flings it into the bath tub, its murky contents staining the wall. Then he calls us both fucking cunts.
Ten minutes later he comes down the stairs on all fours to see what it feels like to be a dog. The Nipe giggles – her love as unconditional as Mr Blue’s.
I can’t even look at Charlie. I walk past them in silence, through the kitchen and on out into the garden where I can breathe.
I pick up dog dirt, wandering around in my grey dressing gown. Someone is playing a trumpet – mournful and faltering – in the nursing home next door. Charlie often says that I should just toss him over the wall when the time comes, when he is too old and confused for us. I climb the ladder to the Nipe’s wooden playhouse and crouch down, giant-like, in the damp and cobwebbed hut. He won’t think to look for me here. I feel strongly at this moment that my daughter and I need to be free from this aggressive, lazy, unkind man. My heart has gone cold to him. We are a broken thing.
In the weeks that follow this outburst, I talk to my sister and a few close friends. I tell them I want to leave Charlie but that I’m worried he has become too dependent on me, that he won’t manage on his own. I make an appointment to see our family doctor and set off on a bleak Friday evening. The Nipe screams to go with me, Charlie yanks her back indoors by the neck of her hooded top, incensed by her wailing and hurt by her rejection of him. I want to take her with me, I worry that she isn’t safe when Charlie is this upset, but I don’t want her to hear what I have to tell the doctor about her dad, about our family. The doctor sits back in his seat, tells me to take my time. I sob and shake for over an hour as I describe the situation at home. He listens, empathizes, says Charlie needs to be seen urgently. The doctor feels Charlie may be depressed and he wants him to take some memory tests.
There was one thing I missed in those dark last months before the sale of our home, despite my concern for Charlie and my increasingly close observation of him. I noticed that he was continuously removing and rehanging paintings around the walls of our home, but what I failed to see was that he had taken every one of his unsold paintings from the walls, and those stacked up in his studio, and had painted over each one of them in white.
*
‘That’s not good, is it?’ Charlie says when the consultant at the Memory Clinic tells us that he has Alzheimer’s disease. It is the 8th of April, 2014. He turns to me and puts his hand on my shoulder as though I’m the one who has been given the diagnosis. It’s too hard to watch Charlie try to absorb these words. I look instead at the beige plastic chairs pushed under the Formica table, a large green folder, a brown envelope, the two men sitting opposite us: one black, one white. One a stranger, the other the husband of an old school friend of mine. Charlie lets go of my shoulder and joins his hands on his lap. I slip my hand between his. We both look down at his feet, at his Converse high-tops.
The two men try to reassure us, they tell Charlie that there are still many things that he can do, they tell him of all the support available to him, they tell him that there will be medication to slow the progression of the disease. Then they ask him to sit in the waiting room so that they can chat to me on my own. I don’t want Charlie to be in that empty room with out-of-date magazines, the TV just below audible. I don’t want him to be left alone to try and make sense of what has been said, or to know that we are discussing him in his absence.
But he leaves the room, and now, no longer needing to be brave, I break down. Without Charlie there, both doctors are more honest, less philosophical about the future. The smiling models on the glossy ‘Dealing with Dementia’ brochures I have been given do not fool me for one moment. This really is every bit as bleak and as bad as it sounds. I tell them that things are not good between the two of us, that I don’t know how we will manage, that I can’t stand the thought of all he will have to endure, that I am so worried about the impact all of this will have on our young child.
I cry openly as I drive us both home; beside me, Charlie is buoyant. Now he has a name for what is happening in his head, an excuse for all he has done wrong. He had endured six months of brain scans, memory tests, blood tests, weekly visits to a counsellor to help him with his depression, along with daily antidepressants. Now there would be no more need for investigations; we could slow everything down. I feel so close to him. I want to take care of him, I can’t stand how frightened he must feel. I tell him again and again that he will not be facing all of this on his own.
Three days later he breaks down in the kitchen. ‘I don’t want to be the one on the seafront that everyone laughs at,’ he says. I know we are both thinking of the chicken boy. Or the man who would stand at the bottom of the Seacliff Road in Bangor every morning, looking this way and that, hands joined behind his back, never going anywhere, just watching and waiting.
Charlie asks me not to tell anyone and I feel that I have betrayed him, as I have already confided in my family and close friends. He feels embarrassed by his illness, ashamed of it and very, very scared. I hold him, tell him that he will always be Charlie, that no one is laughing at him.
Inside I feel trapped; all I see ahead is a grey vortex of padded envelopes and doctors and social workers and blister packs, a great miserable weight of responsibility and guilt and anxiety, a downward spiral for Charlie that I must travel along too. I already feel that I am not doing enough for him but at the same time resentful for having to do so much, too much. There is no conceivable happy ending to this. I cannot now leave Charlie, no matter how deeply unhappy I have become. This is what our lives will be for the rest of Charlie’s life, until he can no longer feed himself, until he forgets how to swallow, until everything that is Charlie is stripped away.
*
My second novel, The Playground, is published in September 2014. So many copies are pre-ordered that it is reprinted before the night of the launch. My editor is delighted, there is a large and supportive crowd and drinks back at the hotel we are staying in, the Nipe eating room-service chips and watching movies with a teenage babysitter, excited by our excitement and by being up so late. Charlie is proud and upright all evening, pretending to recognize everyone, losing his train of thought often but hiding or laughing off his mistakes.
I had joked to our neighbours that I hoped we’d have moved before my second novel was published as all of them were in it. This wasn’t true, of course – though, like all writers of fiction, I create characters from observing the habits, appearances and traits of real people and then fusing them into something imaginary.
Shortly after my novel comes out, someone makes us an offer on our home. There’s a sense of movement and change at last and it gives us a new and happier energy. At breakfast time a few weeks later, Mr Blue’s heart-leaping bark tells us that someone is at the gate – Charlie goes to see, the Nipe skips after him and runs back through the hall into the kitchen moments later: ‘There’s a parcel for you, Mama!’
I grab it and take it with me in the car, toss it on the passenger seat along with the rest of my post and go for a walk up Killiney Hill with Mr Blue. Back in the car with a panting dog and mucky boots, I pick it up. The address is handwritten and there’s no stamp. I turn it on its back to open it. Above the seal are the words ‘Go back to Dalkey ASAP’. I have never yet lived in Dalkey, so this is clearly from someone who doesn’t know me very well – but well enough to know where I live now and where I am hoping to move to.
I open the envelope. Inside is a copy of my second novel, its pages hacked from the spine and ripped into tiny pieces, thousands of jumbled-up words, the cover picture of a child on a swing, beheaded and sliced through the middle.