Just as I was holding Kieran Judd by his neck and pushing so hard his eyeballs popped, Dad was ringing the hospital and asking to speak to Dr Abdelbaki. He lied and said, yes, he was a close relative, and it was as easy as that. The doctor told him about the tests they had run and the results they had received back.
Jon was, he said, micronutrient malnourished, which was normally referred to as hidden hunger. He said it was more common in the Third World but there were more and more cases of it in Britain and America because of bad diets. He said that it’s called hidden hunger because the person may be eating but they are eating the wrong kind of food, food deficient in vitamins and nutrients. The tests showed that Jon didn’t have enough iron, vitamin A, zinc or iodine. He was run down and his immune system was weak and as a result he was more prone to catching disease. And when Dad told me that, I thought about the tight, hard, cough that had plagued Jon from the first day he’d turned up at our door and which sometimes grabbed him and shook his chest like an earthquake.
They would keep Jon in hospital for a few days, put him on a drip and feed him. They would monitor his response and then, if everything went as expected, he should be OK to leave. The doctor asked when Dad would be coming to visit next and told him they would talk more then. Before Dad hung up he asked about the grandparents. And there was a lot to tell but to be blunt they were knackered.
The hospital had run a battery of tests and the doctors were armed with pages of results as evidence. Jon’s grandma was suffering from dementia and her mind was gone, her memory dissolved. She didn’t know where she was or who her husband was most of the time. Nobody knew what ghosts she could see and when she talked it could just be a name said over and over, or rambling sentences that went nowhere and made no sense. When Jon described her random and fractured speech, it made me think of the book my mum had started to write when she had been unwell. She was troubled by something or everything and when she wasn’t sleeping her eyes darted around the room looking for something that wasn’t there in the empty corners, a constant expression of worry working her face. The hospital said they would try and make her comfortable but her mental health would only get worse in time. Jon’s granddad wasn’t as bad. The doctors didn’t get much out of him but he knew where he was; he knew what was going on. He just didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. He could walk, very slowly, and they were feeding him, trying to make him stronger. Both were as malnourished as Jon and there were no decisions to be made. If they ever did make it out of the hospital, it wouldn’t be to go back to their house on the fell. Dad was told it had gone on far too long and things had got out of control. It wouldn’t be left to happen again. Jon’s grandparents would be found residential care. Jon would be found a home elsewhere. It would, they said, be better for everyone.