It’s early evening when we arrive at Shanganagh Terrace, and it’s getting dark. The Nipe waves up at the black silhouettes of children watching us from their bedroom window. She’s been at swimming lessons and is in her pyjamas and slippers, her hair tied up in a sodden bun. She shouts things to the kids that they can’t hear, but one by one their heads disappear and they thunder down the stairs to open the front door for her. I tell her she has one hour. This is a habit we have quickly fallen into: the Nipe plays with the children upstairs each evening while I spend time with Charlie in his flat below.
Everyone in the house has warmed to Charlie in the four months he’s been living here, and he is often invited to join the rest of the household for dinner – he phoned me drunk the other night to say that they were all lying on the sitting-room floor, he wasn’t sure why. Val gives Blue daily treats, and the kids spend happy hours throwing balls up and down the laneway for him. This set-up means I can visit Charlie on his own, without worrying that the Nipe will unwittingly cause a problem or that she might witness her dad in some form of distress.
This evening he is in high spirits. Bob Dylan is crooning from the stereo, the gas fire is alight. He wants to help me with the heavy bags of groceries I’m carrying through the hall. He always wants to physically unburden me. It bothers him if my handbag is too full or when I wear uncomfortable shoes. He tries to take one of the bags from my hand but we struggle with the exchange – he can’t seem to see the handle, is unable to catch hold of it. I lower it to the floor so that it’s easier for him to lift up, but he grabs the side of the bag instead, causing everything to fall out. ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘I’m a buck eejit.’ I reassure him but I’m sure he hears me sigh as I bend down, stuff it all back in and hurry through the hall ahead of him.
He doesn’t let my impatience upset him, and as I unpack he shadows me, still wanting to help. He tells me about the trip he and Domino took that day to the Alzheimer’s Society centre in Blackrock. He describes a large room filled with people shuffling about and dithering, ‘all half mad as I’ll be soon,’ he says. ‘They’re going to try and make a corner for me where I can paint. It’s a very nice place and not too far from the sea.’ To hear him sound so upbeat and appreciative makes me feel acutely sad. He had always been so interested in aesthetics, demanding attractive surroundings, a beautiful home, a pretty partner, an expensive car, a large studio. Now he is excited by the prospect of painting in the corner of a room in a centre for people with dementia.
At the start of our relationship I saw his interest in beauty as purely a part of his visual, observant and creative nature. It was only when we ran out of money and he continued to want these things around him that it irritated me, and then I began to resent what I saw as a materialistic and shallow attitude. Simple things make him happy now: the intense redness of a flower, the pattern of a night sky, walking along Killiney Beach, hot whiskeys, chocolate ice-cream.
We sit at the small kitchen table together; a Sylvanian badger peeps out between the leaves of some fake flowers between us. I put my hand on his. He tells me that he had a dream about us last night: he dreamt that I was writing a book about him. I tell him that I am in fact writing about us, that this is all I can write about at the moment, as my mind is filled with thoughts of nothing else. I had had an idea for my third novel but when I sat down to begin it, I just couldn’t concentrate, so I had started instead to make notes about Charlie and our lives. When I say all of this, he sits upright.
‘Will you write a book about me?’
‘About your illness? Would you like me to?’
‘I want people to understand what’s happened to me. Will you explain why it all went wrong, so they’ll know it wasn’t my fault? Will you put Arnold in?’ he asks, recalling his childhood friend. ‘And Michael Browne?’ – the murdered boy. ‘And when I worked in LA?’ He is adamant that I must write the book, that he can help, and that he will give me lots of material.
Ever since his diagnosis I had been thinking that I should write down some of Charlie’s childhood memories before they were gone from him, so that the Nipe would be able to read them when she’s older. I also felt compelled to record what this illness had done to our relationship, and I wanted to tell the story of our years together and how things had come apart between us – perhaps as a form of self-defence, or a sort of therapy to help me work my way through it.
‘But I’ll have to tell our whole story, Charlie, I’ll have to include the parts when you’ve been a pain in the ass. I’ll have to be totally honest.’ He smiles, pushes his chair back, winces at the screech it makes against the tiled floor, stands up and hugs me.
We hear them coming then; half a dozen children swarm in through the hall, led by the Nipe. They gather in the second bedroom; a low-ceilinged, windowless and permanently hot room (there’s a radiator by the bed that can’t be turned off). There’s confusion over the ownership of this room, and it has already caused several arguments between the Nipe and her dad. We agreed to tell our daughter that it was her room so that she would always feel welcome in Charlie’s home, but Charlie has since moved his paintings and other precious things in and he doesn’t want any of it disturbed. I ask him to pretend it’s hers even if it is not. He doesn’t understand this. I tell him that he needs to at least try and act like a father for the small amount of time he spends with his daughter. As soon as I’ve said this I regret it; it’s cruel of me. He often offers to mind the Nipe, but I always dismiss his help. I can’t tell him that he may no longer be left alone with his daughter – not even for ten minutes, one doctor told me.
There are now too many children in the place and their presence is unsettling Charlie. I realize that, much as he wants me to be here, I am also unsettling to him. I speak too fast, I move too swiftly, my thoughts flit from topic to topic, I am easily distracted and I do too many things at once. Charlie gets up and begins to move back and forth. He says he is looking for something, but he can’t remember what. He gives up, creeps into the second bedroom and lets out a roar that makes all the children scream. Nipey laughs and looks at her friends with pride. She begs her dad to do it again. Then he remembers what it was he was looking for. He brings me into his bedroom. He tells me that he met a nice Italian man that afternoon, who stopped to ask him for directions as he and Blue were on their way down to the beach. The man had then given him a lift into Dalkey village; he even drove Charlie to the bank machine to help him to withdraw two hundred euros to buy some Italian leather goods. I’d heard about this con man on the radio, preying on vulnerable people and selling them fake leather coats. ‘I thought this would do for your sister,’ Charlie says, pulling an ugly brown leather jacket from a plastic bag and holding it up for me to see.
*
When I show Nipe the apartment I’ve found for us to rent, she puts her hand over her mouth in astonishment, her blue eyes bright as anything. Then she runs through the open-plan room. ‘Is it really ours?’ she asks again and again, jumping on the sofa, trying out the telescope, climbing up on to the window seat. I have the sense that she is putting this on somewhat, that she is playing up her happiness because she feels that I need her to be happy, but we had been living in my sister’s since we moved out of Bray and she had talked all that time about having our own home again. It had been a difficult few months, sharing a bed, living out of suitcases, and with Charlie panicking and running away as he did, just days before Christmas.
The apartment is high on a hill, only a five-minute drive from Charlie’s flat, with huge windows that face the sea. The Nipe gets so giddy that she wets herself and then has the most dramatic tantrum of her five years. She refuses to leave – we aren’t moving in for another week – and I have to drag her out and carry her down the steps to the car while she kicks and screams and bites me.
For the first few months at the new apartment, I feel shaky and am overcome at night by a fear that I will become ill and that the Nipe will wake to find that I have collapsed. I put the numbers of my sister and two friends who live close by into my phone and show her how to find them. She senses my fear and then her own fears begin – she rejects her own bed and moves in to mine. Each night, curled up beside me, fighting sleep, she is full of anxiety and reasons to keep talking:
‘I do like our new house, but I was happy when we were all together in the old house.’
I tell her that we couldn’t afford to live in the old house any more.
‘Why can’t Dada and Mr Blue move into our new house?’
‘It isn’t big enough for Dada and Blue.’
‘Can Dad and Mr Blue have a sleepover with us at least?’
‘Maybe, now off to sleep.’
‘Will you marry Dad some day?’
‘No, that’s not going to happen.’
‘But will he always be my dad?’
‘I promise he will always be your dad.’
She pauses, seeming satisfied with this. Then she says: ‘So one day I might have a second dad, but Dad will always be my real dad?’
‘That might happen one day, sweetie. How would you feel about having a second dad?’
‘I don’t mind so long as he tickles me.’
A day later, she meets me behind the sofa. I’m not sure what we’re both doing there, but this is where we converge.
‘If my new, second dad was really nice and fun and kind and tickled me when you were there but was mean to me when I was by myself, who would you believe?’
‘Always you,’ I say, feeling out of my depth and wondering whether she should see a counsellor.
For her sixth birthday, that February, I buy her a white labradoodle puppy. Nipey names the puppy Sunny and says that she is her little sister. The dog makes us both feel safer and helps our apartment feel more like a home. We fall into a chaotic sort of routine. I walk the Nipe and Sunny to school, pulled all the way by the puppy, the Nipe cautious on her scooter behind us, then it’s home and into the car to drive to Charlie’s to get him up and give him his breakfast. A carer arrives mid-morning and Domino is there every afternoon. I return in the evening when I’ve collected the Nipe from the childminder’s and drive too fast back over Killiney Hill to give Charlie his tea. Before I go after dinner I give him a Xanax – he’s on three a day now – washed down with red wine and a Magnum ice-cream.
Leaving is often like something from the pantomime – as soon as I get one thing settled, another falls out of place. I’ll get Blue out of the hatchback boot he has leapt into in the vain hope of a walk and put Sunny in, while trying to keep Charlie safely indoors and the Nipe in the car with me. Finally, Blue will be in his bed, Charlie on the sofa waiting for his second carer, who comes for an hour each evening, Sunny’s white head will be visible in the car, but the Nipe will be missing. Back upstairs, one child asks another and I drag mine out protesting, secure her in her seat. The narrow and busy laneway requires endless reversing and turning and pulling over and waiting in order to get out of it. At home, once the Nipe is asleep, I will run myself a deep bath, lie with my head under the water, listen to my own breath.
‘You take on too much. You need to slow down,’ Charlie said to me the other day. It’s true. I’m running on adrenaline, in a permanent hurry. He says I am always leaving and this is true too, I am. But Domino and I feel happy that, together, we are pulling this off. This precarious transition seems to be going smoothly, and Charlie is in buoyant form.
*
We are least at odds when we walk together, me always a few steps ahead because I want to get in shape. Charlie doesn’t stride any more; he moves slowly now, with a new tentativeness and a vagueness in his eyes as he concentrates on the uneven ground beneath him.
He is quieter on our walks these days. When I say this to him I know he can hear the slight irritation in my voice. I want to have a conversation. I want him to notice things, as he always has done, I want him to stop calling Sunny ‘he’. I correct him every time he gets it wrong, though I know it’s unfair and unnecessary.
‘You don’t need this,’ Charlie said to me the other day, suddenly upset. Meaning himself, his illness, Charlie and Alzheimer’s disease. We had paused at the base of the hill to watch Sunny tumble on the grass with a young beagle. The fluid movement of their rolling was soothing; their alternate dominance and submissiveness, their gentle biting, the pause and sudden pounce, the soft paw on paw, belly on belly. Rather than go uphill, we decided that day to walk along the coastal path, the part that always makes me think of my mother – a magical, open expanse, light breaking in beams through the clouds, the sea beyond silvery grey and endless. Charlie was taking his time behind me, taking in the colours and sights and sounds.
‘I want to help you, but I have nothing to give you,’ he said, a little dramatically, when he caught up with me. I told him that this wasn’t true, that he had given me the two most important things in my life: our daughter and my vocation as a writer.
He pulled off his beanie hat to let the winter sun warm his bald head – ‘I need to get some sun on my barnet,’ he said, as he always did. And then a line lodged in his brain since schooldays: ‘And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…’
A woman with several dogs walked towards us. The dogs stopped to sniff each other, Sunny snatched a dropped tennis ball, they panted and curled around our legs. ‘A swirl of dogs,’ Charlie said and the woman laughed.
‘A swirl. That’s exactly the right word,’ I said as we walked on.
He smiled, twirled his stick like a baton; Sunny by his side, me, always slightly ahead. And there it was, a memory, even as it was being made, and happiness, however fleeting.