11

We’re running late and I’m driving too fast.

‘Can I please have your phone?’ the Nipe nags from her car seat behind me. Beside her, in a harness secured to the seat belt, Sunny whines to be free. I slow down at the junction just beyond Finnegan’s pub in Dalkey village to allow a few pedestrians to cross. They’d seen my hearse-like car approach at speed and had hurriedly returned to the kerb in case I didn’t stop. I watch their anxious faces turn to relief when I gesture with my hand for them to go ahead. As they cross – several teenagers, a mother with a buggy, an elderly man – some of them wave to thank me, others walk on without acknowledgement, and I imagine at that moment what a shock they would get if I were to put my foot on the accelerator and plough headlong in to them. This is how I am thinking now; I resent people whose lives appear to be continuing normally, I resent people with partners, I am jealous of intact families. I observe them with something more than envy: I am baffled and mystified as to how they’ve made it work when we couldn’t.

It’s a bright and still Sunday afternoon in November 2015. I travelled with Charlie by train to the North yesterday to deliver him to his oldest and closest friend, Hayden, at Belfast Central station. After his six weeks in hospital, we all felt he needed some fun and a change of scene. I read Darkness Visible by William Styron to him on the three-hour journey. People noticed my reading aloud to him, but Charlie didn’t mind. Once ashamed of his illness, he now tells anyone he comes into contact with about it. He says he has dementia, he says he is dying, that he won’t be here next year.

The book is an account of Styron’s descent into depression and his subsequent recovery, and Charlie had read it before, many years earlier. Every so often he would nod in recognition, put on his glasses and use his finger to find where I was in the text. Styron wrote about the potential link between the early loss of a parent and the development of severe depression in adulthood, which made me worry about the Nipe, who will undoubtedly lose her father while she is still very young – though not within the next year as Charlie fatalistically put it.

I couldn’t share these thoughts with Charlie because I didn’t want to upset him, so I continued reading with a heaviness in my chest. I no longer have great expectations, any expectations, for future relationships. I just want calm and stability for the Nipe and me, and to have something other than silence to look forward to in the evenings. Her father is fading from her, slowly leaving the stage – she no longer likes him to see her in the bath, she takes his hand crossing the road so that she can help him, rather than the other way around, and she has lately begun to call him Charlie instead of Dad. Their relationship is a precious and fragile thing: before he dies I would like there to be someone new, someone to give her piggybacks – someone happy and strong, with energy, a father figure for her, to making losing her dad a little less painful, to reduce her risk of developing severe depression.

I have relinquished my role of carer for a full week, and today feels like my first day of freedom. I’m going to return to my writing and I’ve decided to apply for another short residency at Annaghmakerrig within the next month so that I can work more intensely on the book about Charlie and me.

I’ve arranged to leave the Nipe with her cousins in Blackrock while I meet an old friend for a walk on Sandymount Strand. Somewhere between Dalkey and Dún Laoghaire, Sunny wriggles out of her harness and leaps from the back seat onto my lap, ignoring the Nipe’s commands. Standing on my knee, Sunny presses her rear end against the steering wheel and somehow manages to jam the horn. It blares – deafening, alarming – for the next twenty minutes. The Nipe and I scream, Sunny circles, the driver in front gesticulates rudely, people on the street stop and stare. I never use the horn; I find it too aggressive and rude and now, even when I pull over and take the key out of the ignition, I can’t make it stop. I career down my sister’s road still beeping at everyone – a man trimming his hedge, children on their scooters. Peace is restored when a neighbour gets a screwdriver and removes a fuse, but for a long time afterwards I can hear the horn in my head. It is telling me that I need help. I am in a permanent state of anxiety; I need people to notice that all is not well.

*

‘It was just too cold up there,’ Charlie says, when he returns from his trip. When I hug him, he begins to cry. He spent yesterday with his older brother, Bill, a former world-champion sailor who lives with his wife in their home town of Bangor. Bill drove him and drove him and drove him all around the country, Charlie says, pointing out restaurants and cafés and things that Charlie had no interest in and no longer any memory of. He saw ‘Browner’, brother of the late, murdered, Michael Browne, being thrown out of a bar as he and Hayden were walking in. And his sister, whom he had not spoken to for years. He says she was all done up and flouncy. But his dementia was very bad, he says; every time he tried to say something, the words just evaporated. He wanted to go home, he missed me. He missed Mr Blue. He didn’t realize he would be away for so long, he didn’t understand what was going on.

He has brought back some gifts for the Nipe and has lined them up along the fireplace: a plastic lizard, a black-and-white stuffed dog and a Sylvanian badger – she would no longer have any interest in these things if she saw them in a toyshop, but she knows what she must do; she pretends to be delighted with them. He has gifts for me too: a grey top and a large black platter with a little bird figurine on the side; there was meant to be a second bird, Charlie says, but it fell off somewhere on the journey down and he couldn’t find it again.

I remember now that a new carer was due that day. Following Charlie’s stay in hospital we have been granted fifteen hours of state-funded care a week – every crisis gives us a little more help.

‘I sent her away,’ he says without emotion when I ask him how it went. ‘She was black as your boot.’

I tell the Nipe to go upstairs. Unusually obedient, she gathers the chocolate bunnies and three white envelopes in her arms – gifts for the children to thank them for taking such good care of Blue in the weeks that Charlie has been gone.

‘Jesus, Charlie, what happened? Why didn’t you let her in?’

‘Hello, are you Charlee?’ he says, in a bad Jamaican accent. ‘I didn’t reply, just closed the door on her face.’

‘Oh God, Charlie, why?’

‘I specifically said that I didn’t want a black woman looking after me. I don’t want a Negro in this house.’

I tell him he never said anything of the sort, how outrageous it is, how rude and how upsetting it must have been for that poor woman who was surely apprehensive in the first place, approaching the house of a man she had never met before who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.

‘She had hair up to here,’ he says, indicating high above his head, as if this justified anything. ‘I was scared of her.’

And then he blames me. He says I’d promised to be there to meet her. I tell him I would be meeting her now if he’d actually let her in. She’d arrived early, probably to start off on a good footing on her first day.

I have never known Charlie to be racist. It’s true that he had a large collection of golliwogs – one year he decorated the entire Christmas tree with them, and little black dolls often appear in his paintings – but he just saw these as old-fashioned toys. I have never, in the eleven years we have been together, believed that he was genuinely uncomfortable around black people. This isn’t Charlie, it’s his illness.

We attempt a fight but Charlie is no longer able to argue – he doesn’t have the words, the speed, or the verbal armour needed for a good argument; it makes me feel like a bully, shouting at someone who can’t defend himself.

I leave the bedroom and put on his tea, still angry with him. I turn on the TV, the electric fire, throw a pizza in the oven, pour both of us a large glass of wine and insist that he gets out of bed to join me.

He follows me in, sits at the kitchen table and tells me about two incidents that happened while he lived in the States. He says he has told me them before, though I can’t recall either one. The first was that he was crossing a road in LA when two black men punched him in the face and stomach for no apparent reason. The second was when a black man began masturbating beside him in the cinema one afternoon. Charlie said he’d been too frightened to move so had sat there beside him while this continued and when the man had come he’d put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder and had asked him for a tissue. These are the reasons, he says, that he won’t allow a black carer into his home.

The wine and my anger gradually soften him and soon he is ashamed of how he’s behaved and wants to apologize to the woman.

‘Can you hear my ear squeaking?’ he asks, out of the blue. ‘Listen, when I chew. Can you not hear it?’ I move as close as I can to his ear but I can’t hear a thing. Then he asks me, as he does most days, if there is any news of a cure.

*

I’m carrying an overly full bin sack down to my apartment’s communal bins the next morning when my phone rings. It’s the mental health nurse from Carew House at St Vincent’s. At our last meeting with them, shortly after Charlie had been discharged from the Elm Mount Unit and allowed to go home, his consultant at Carew House said he didn’t need to see Charlie any more. Charlie was confused and upset by this. Did they not want to see him because he was dying, he asked on the drive home, because there was nothing more that could be done for him? I didn’t fully understand why the consultant didn’t need to see him again either but assumed it was because the acute crisis was over.

It’s raining – the sort of hard rain that stings your face – and very windy. The bin sack is heavy and too full, because I’ve been too lazy and busy to empty it sooner. The wheelie bins are kept behind a gate at the far end of the car park, and I have to drag the bag down several flights of steps to reach it.

I manage to lug it down with surprising ease as I listen to the nurse. She says they would like to offer me some counselling, that she and her colleagues are concerned that I’m not coping. She says I need to pull away from Charlie – would I be willing to see a psychiatrist to help me manage our relationship better? My sister, brother and close friends say I need to pull away from him too, but I don’t see how I can. Who will give Charlie his breakfast and his medicines in the mornings without me there? Who will make his tea each evening? And how can I extract myself without feeling that I am abandoning him or appearing to others not to be doing my duty? I also do not want to pull away, difficult as it all is. I miss him if I don’t see him every day, and it’s impossible for me not to worry about him when I know that he is unhappy.

I tell her that I do not need to see a counsellor. That I’m managing OK. When I reach the bin, I flip the lid and toss the bin sack in. Lloyd Grossman tomato and basil sauce, well beyond its sell-by date, drips down my shirt, an eggshell cracks and oozes over my shoe. I turn and see an ugly trail of rubbish – rotting kiwis, tampons, a broken glass – all the way back up the stairs to the door of my apartment.

*

Although he was remorseful about the carer he sent away – we asked her to give him a second chance; she understandably refused – Charlie is emphatic in his dislike for his new morning carer. He gets up as early as he can and attempts to make his own breakfast before this man arrives, so that the carer doesn’t prepare his food. The man always uses the toilet as soon as he gets there, and Charlie hears no sounds of hand-washing. Then he comes out and puts his hands directly into the muesli, takes out a fistful, empties it into a bowl and gives it to Charlie. And on their walks he yanks leaves from plants, just for the heck of it, carelessly destroying things in which Charlie still sees beauty.

He has also had to adjust to a new district health nurse – the previous one was a gentle, empathetic woman whom Charlie had a soft spot for, but she had recently been awarded Nurse of the Year and had now moved on to higher things.

‘Is he sleeping?’ the replacement nurse asked me on her first visit, biting into a ginger snap which she’d initially refused, saying she was keeping an eye on her figure.

Charlie was sitting on the sofa beside her, facing her and concentrating hard, hoping he could answer her questions.

‘I’m getting these wild hallucinations. They’re like crazy LSD trips,’ he said, but she didn’t respond to him; she looked at me, pen poised, waited for me to translate.

‘He’s having a lot of bad dreams.’

‘And is he eating regular? What’s his appetite like, I mean?’ I shot a glance at Charlie, answered again for him.

‘Is he constipated at all?’ I gave her a look I hoped she’d understand. She missed it, rubbed crumbs from her polyester trousers.

‘Do you get me? Like, is he having regular bowel movements?’

‘Yes, I get you, but Charlie is sitting beside you. Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

Charlie had sensed that this was wrong, but he waited for my reaction to confirm his feelings. He got up, went out to the front garden and refused to come back in until she had gone.

*

Today when I leave him, Charlie is slapping a Persian rug off the grass in the front garden – he and his new carer are doing a spring clean of the flat. Despite his own dubious hygiene, the carer seems shocked by how filthy the place is, by how much dog hair there is beneath everything. For months I’ve been saying that there is nothing we can do for Charlie’s cough, but just hoovering the floors once in a while would have been something. Something I could have done, but have failed to do. His cough is always worst in the morning – making him push back from the table on his chair and bend forwards in discomfort. When I hear it, what I hear is: ‘You are not doing enough.’ Cough, cough, cough.

‘Don’t be going with men,’ he says to me through the open car window as I reverse. I stop, tell him I won’t, lean out and kiss him on the forehead. I feel guilty that I am leaving him to go on this trip alone; I feel guilty every time I leave.

*

A strange thing happens when I return to Annaghmakerrig eleven years after meeting Charlie and Skippy there. Instead of it seeming smaller, run down, less special – as so often happens with memories – it is all grander and more beautiful. The lake is much broader than I remember it and more dramatic, the house is the same ochre yellow, but looks freshly painted and is surrounded by neat hedges and manicured lawns.

I have been given my old room, Lady Guthrie’s, and it looks just as it did when I first stayed in it, though the spiral staircase leading up to the old bathroom has gone and there is now an en-suite in one corner of the room. On the bedside table is a hardback book entitled Annaghmakerrig. It’s a collection of stories and artwork from artists who have stayed there: John Banville, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín – and me; the first chapter of my debut novel, With My Lazy Eye, is reproduced in full.

The sight of the four-poster bed piled high with pillows and cushions makes me think not of romance but of the delicious, rare prospect of a full night’s rest without the company of a flatulent labradoodle and a sleep-talking child.

I am here for five days to make a proper start on my new book, and I can think of nothing else; I feel so intensely nostalgic and miss the old Charlie so deeply that I wonder if I will last till Friday. Domino has agreed to move in with him while I am gone, and a friend is minding the Nipe.

I want to call her to say goodnight, but my friend texts to suggest that I leave it for this evening as she seems to be quite happy without me. I tried to get her attention the other evening while she watched cartoons. ‘Why don’t you go and lie on your bed with a book,’ she said to me without turning around. Then she said that she needed some headspace. I sat forward, amused by her use of the phrase. ‘Look, Mum,’ she said, ‘look how close our heads are,’ illustrating with her hand the distance between them. ‘That’s why I need some headspace.’ She turned her face back to the TV. And maybe she did, maybe we both did.

When I open the swing door to the kitchen, I can see them all there in my mind: the dangerous writer, the beautiful dancer, the journalist with the flat cap, the poet who spoke only when he was drunk, the grumpy American. But one of them has since died, one has moved to Berlin, the writer never got another book deal and has given up, Charlie will never be back. In real life every face at the table is different, of course, none of them familiar to me. But I am unrecognizable too. Mary from the office remembers Charlie’s iguana; she even remembers Skippy’s name and that she liked to be stroked under the chin.

I am no longer shy or intimidated by the artists around me. I am one of them now, but tonight I don’t have the energy to chat; I listen instead. I look down at my place mat. It’s an image of the lake and the boat; I think a set of six would make a good gift for Charlie for Christmas, to remind him of this place – lately he has begun asking how we first met – but the mats are not for sale.

‘What is that word?’ Charlie asked me the other day, looking at the ground as if he might find it there. I knew the word he meant, because we had talked about it every day that week. It was a word he had printed out and given me to use for my first novel.

‘Petrichor?’ I suggested.

‘Petrichor! That’s it,’ he said, sitting back with relief and crossing his legs. ‘You should use that word in your book. Petrichor.’ Then he smiled as he recalled that lovely thing: the smell in the air after heavy rainfall.