False Hope Read online

  But this? I reached out and stroked a finger along one of the raspberry-red leaves of the poinsettia – this tangible evidence that the world was full of good, thoughtful people. A case where there was surely – no, definitely, unequivocally – no doubt. Which reassuring thought helped not a bit.

  I hadn’t been entirely truthful about not having been there, either. Back when I was still a very junior doctor, and on a placement at a GP surgery, I received a letter in the post from a firm of solicitors, acting for a seriously ill patient who was seeking compensation for a delay in diagnosis after a follow-up appointment letter, dictated by me, had been sent to a previous address. It wasn’t anything to do with me – it was a mistake in their patient database. And my defence union then, as I knew they would now, made it clear I had nothing to worry about. Writing to me was just standard procedure, due diligence: they automatically wrote to everyone involved. The fear, though, the dread, the sick feeling in my stomach – none of those took a blind bit of notice.

  What upset me most was that I couldn’t tell anyone, and it hit me hard how alone and vulnerable I suddenly felt. Yes, I could tell Matt I’d had a complaint made against me – oh, and by the way, happy Christmas! – but obviously not who had made it. And this on top of the anxiety that had been stalking me since the moment I’d recognised Aidan. Just the very thought of being embroiled with that family again filled me with dread.

  Chapter 6

  There was no defined ‘palliative care’ end-stage for Hope. Despite the gruelling rounds of radiotherapy and the living hell of chemo, with no hope of a cure she was ‘palliative’ from day one, so, with Dillon to think about, she was encouraged from the start of treatment to think about what she might want to leave for him.

  It was usual practice to encourage patients to create memory boxes for their children, especially those with little ones who were too young to understand what was going on. You could put anything you liked in them – letters, photos, poems, keepsakes – but, if they felt able, patients were urged to make recordings as well. Of them singing lullabies, telling stories, reading favourite books aloud. They even had a space at the attached support centre for them to do so. But Hope being Hope, she didn’t want to hang around in places that kept reminding her that she was dying, and she certainly didn’t want to hang around there with Dillon in tow.

  Just people’s faces, she said, when they look at him. It goes right through me.

  No, she wanted to do it in the privacy of her own home. And with Aidan invariably working evenings (or sometimes, as she came to realise, finding solace for his ‘dying girlfriend’ woes elsewhere), and armed with the voice recorder and stash of memory sticks I’d amassed for her, she’d spend night after night reading everything she could lay her hands on, from the boxed set of Narnia books she’d kept since her own childhood, to Roald Dahl, to Dr. Seuss, to Little House on the Prairie. All the special stories she would have read to Dillon had she lived. But none of which (the sadness was still a weeping wound, even now) I’d been able to interest him in listening to in years.

  She made recordings for me, too, which she’d put in the post. During those final awful months, they’d regularly plop on to my doormat and, naturally enough, I played the first of them as soon as I got it because I had no idea what it contained.

  I don’t know what I’d expected, quite, but it made for grim listening. An emotional confessional, which she’d obviously recorded in stages, it was a rambling account of how a pair of my jeans, which had ‘mysteriously’ disappeared during a weekend home from med school, had (as had been obvious to me at the time, despite her denials) indeed been ‘borrowed’ by her. And would have been returned too, were it not for the fact that she’d managed to get cooking oil all over them – she was characteristically light on the details of her evening – and dared not admit to it, for fear of my wrath. And also – and here the recording grew even more upsetting – because it went right to the heart of our dysfunction as siblings.

  I had, she’d explained, this sense of validation. This sense that it was alright for you. Not just about the jeans – okay, yes, but only as an example – but you had this thing you always did, which I could never seem to manage. If you wanted something, you made a plan, then you worked till you got it. Didn’t matter if it was clothes, or a job, or your GCSEs, or your place at uni. Even to get our fucking father to bend to your sodding will. You applied yourself. You always did. They even told me that in school once. ‘If only you could apply yourself, Hope, like your sister.’

  Because I never got that ‘applying’ gene, did I? You have no idea just how much I resented you for that. How much I hated you that day.

  ‘Hope, please don’t do this,’ I said when I called her.

  ‘Oh, just ignore it,’ she told me. ‘Feel free to bin it. I’m just cleansing my soul ready for the great beyond.’ She’d laughed then. ‘Dying person’s prerogative.’

  Still she kept sending them.

  I couldn’t bear to listen to them, but I couldn’t bear to bin them either. So, traumatised and upset, I stashed them away – in an old iPhone box, in the bottom drawer of the spare-bedroom desk (long-established graveyard of obsolete tech), never imagining there would be a time when I’d ever want to hear them, but always knowing they were there, a piece of my little sister’s soul. So when Matt accidentally chucked them out during one of his sporadic sort-outs, I was devastated. Why hadn’t I taken better care of them? Why hadn’t I taken better care of her?

  Perhaps taking care of Mum was my penance. It was definitely why my expectations for Christmas were low – this our first in our new, not-quite-feeling-like-home home. It was becoming all too obvious that the speed of Mum’s deterioration had stepped up a gear, the things she did so odd and distressing.

  It had started only minutes after she’d arrived, early on Christmas morning. Matt had driven over to pick her up while I showered, and when I came back downstairs she was holed up in the downstairs loo. And had been there a while – ‘Is Nanna alright?’ Daniel had anxiously asked me – so I went and knocked. ‘You okay in there, Mum?’

  There was no answer. Nor any sound. I knocked again.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Alright, I’m coming.’ The lock squeaked and the door was finally opened. Mum emerged with her hands clasped together as if cradling a small bird. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, then bustled off to the kitchen. I stood aside, peering briefly into the cloakroom, where my gaze couldn’t help but land on the poinsettia I’d been given, and which sat, looking festive, on the windowsill.

  Or had. Because, for whatever reason, she had removed every single petal.

  And the day seemed set to proceed in the same vein. I was desperate to get outside, go for a walk, take the boys down to the sea, but the weather was awful, squally wind and rain thumping regularly against the windows, and they were happier in any case diving into their presents. And to go out alone, wilfully get drenched just to grab a bit of time to get my head straight, would mean leaving Matt to deal with Mum, and I didn’t feel I could. Since he’d agreed to move down here – no small thing, for a multitude of reasons – I was about a million marriage brownie points short of enough. The sense of owing him was something I hadn’t fully factored into the equation, and though we never discussed it, so I didn’t have his take on the massive new imbalance in the relationship scales, it coloured everything Mum-related, and perhaps always would.

  Instead, I tried to put the complaint out of my mind, enjoy the boys, and keep Mum occupied by drafting her in to help me prepare our Christmas dinner. Some skill sets, I’d reasoned, both from research and experience, endured because they were so well embedded. My paternal grandmother, for instance, who had also died with dementia, could still, when so much of her was lost (she recognised no one), make a pretty reasonable cup of tea. That she made them endlessly, sometimes lining up multiple cups and saucers for imaginary guests, was neither here nor there. She still understood, and could follow, the basic steps.
/>   I should have known better. While I was in the den off the kitchen, helping Dillon set up his new VR headset, she had, at my suggestion, prepped all the carrots and parsnips – the former into minuscule orange dice, and the latter into tiny diamonds, as if they were runner beans.

  Most poignant of all was that she looked so delighted with her efforts, and even as I counted to three in my head and told her what a great job she’d done, I marvelled at the myriad ways a brain could malfunction, at just how complex were the connections that we took so much for granted.

  ‘So, what’s next?’ she asked brightly.

  ‘How about you lay the table?’ I suggested. ‘Daniel, d’you want to help Nanna? Put the crackers out and everything?’ And to watch them was like a balm for my tense, scratchy mood; her taking charge, and him following along like a loyal foot soldier behind her, quietly rearranging the misplaced cutlery and turning the table mats right side up, and every so often looking across at me and grinning.

  What a simple thing it was, I thought, to see life the way a child does. To just see crazy Nanna, doing her crazy Nanna thing. It was just what it was, and that was how we’d urged the boys to see it. To understand that dementia was an illness like any other. That just as a broken leg might mean walking with a limp, so an injured brain was what made her limp mentally. The only difference, we’d explained to them, was that she wouldn’t get better, so it was important that they saw the funny side and made the most of her while they could, till such time as she disappeared beyond reach.

  Her enjoying spending time with them, though, was the greater revelation. One major lesson for me when I’d first become a mother was the realisation that the joy of being anointed as a grandparent was not universal; that no sea change in temperament necessarily occurred. That not all grandmothers called Joy lived up to their names. I’d had high hopes that this new stage would mark a change in our relationship, but soon learned that a distant, self-involved, and not terribly maternal mother could become a distant and self-involved grandmother too.

  Which made it sad that it was only now, with her higher functions failing, that she found a pleasure in her grandsons’ affectionate, undemanding company that had eluded her much of the time when she was well. Back then, they more often than not had a strictly time-limited appeal for her – after which time they bored her or got on her nerves.

  Which I knew wasn’t all my mother’s fault. I never knew my maternal grandmother because she died in a road accident when Mum was four. She was raised then by a father who, consumed by his grief, could barely function (we learned much later that he had twice attempted suicide), and a grandmother who felt it her duty to counteract the effects of her – to her mind – self-indulgently grieving son, by spanking Mum with a stick for the smallest transgression. She liked her punishments to be short, sharp, and physical. Of physical affection, on the other hand, there was none. When Mum was eleven, without a squeak of dissent from my grandfather, my great-grandmother packed her off to boarding school.

  Academically, it was probably the making of my mother (she left university with a first in mathematics, and went on to have a stellar teaching career). Emotionally, it probably destroyed her.

  In any merry-go-round discussions about the endlessly debate-worthy subject of my family, this snapshot of my mother’s miserable childhood would come up again and again. It seemed to be both the root of why she never really hugged us (or our father, as it turned out; a few months before he finally left her, in one almighty firework-extravaganza of a row, I heard him yelling at her that she had all the warmth of a North Atlantic cod – funny, the things you remember) and the reason she found marriage and mothering such an exasperating business; she’d never had a template to work from.

  I kept reminding myself of this, rote fashion, all through the rest of Christmas Day, when, more than once, I was aware of Dillon’s anxiety around her. The boys hadn’t spent such a lengthy chunk of time with Mum continuously since we’d moved down to Brighton, and where Daniel seemed able to shrug off the odd things she said and did, I’d more than once spotted Dillon appearing tense around her, watchful, as if keeping a wary eye on a dangerous-looking animal, much as he’d always done whenever we’d visited a farm park or petting zoo. As if she might snap at him, or bite his hand, without warning.

  But now we were two-thirds done with Boxing Day, and an end was in sight. I was just congratulating myself on a job reasonably well done when, quite without warning, and obviously without meaning to, it was me that she tipped over the edge.

  Lunch done, she and the boys were in the living room, watching Toy Story (again) while Matt and I finished off the clearing up. I was desperate by now to get outside; just to be outside. To feel some cold on my cheeks instead of the warmth of a suffocatingly overheated house. To be alone for a bit with my still-racing thoughts about the complaint process that was still hanging over me.

  But it felt self-indulgent to do so, so instead I put the kettle on, to make tea. And once I’d done that, I popped my head round the living-room door. ‘Cuppa, Mum?’

  A moment passed, and I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. ‘Mum?’

  Her head swivelled on her neck, almost Exorcist-style.

  ‘Will you just GO AWAY, you stupid, irritating woman!’

  She turned away then, back to Woody, her dismissal forgotten, and because both boys were now looking at me with their anxious, ‘is this just a Nanna thing?’ expressions, I pulled a face (eyes crossed, jazz hands, smile-and-wink, in that order) to reassure them that all was well before retreating back into the kitchen, where I was immediately ambushed by such a welling of emotion that a sob, out of nowhere, escaped my lips.

  Matt, who’d been unloading the dishwasher, turned around, confused. ‘You okay?’ he said.

  I knew I couldn’t speak, so I didn’t even try. Just shook my head, left the room and ran up the stairs.

  He followed me up there five minutes later, presumably to give me time to compose myself. Matt hated, really hated, to see me crying.

  I was in the en suite when he appeared in the bedroom doorway, trying to deep-breathe myself back into a state of composure. He had one hand on the door handle, a Christmas tea towel slung over his shoulder, and a look of what I assumed he hoped conveyed husbandly concern, but provided only the thinnest veil over his obvious irritation. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  I stamped on the pedal-bin lever. Not ‘What’s wrong with you.’ ‘What’s wrong with you.’ The difference only made me cry harder.

  ‘Nothing. It’s nothing. I’m fine,’ I told him, dropping the piece of mascara-streaked loo roll into the bin, knowing that, as much as him, I was trying to reassure myself.

  He walked across to join me in the en suite. ‘No, you’re not.’

  I turned away from him to turn the tap on, splashed some water on my face. ‘I am. Honestly. I’m just, I don’t know . . . I’m just feeling a bit emotionally exhausted. Just Mum snapping at me the way she does—’

  ‘What? What did she say?’

  I grabbed the hand towel and scoured my face with it. Tried to still the rhythmic shudders. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I lowered the towel, met his reflection in the mirror. ‘Honestly,’ I told it. ‘I’m okay now. I’m fine. Just having a moment. Go back down. I won’t be long, I’ll just—’

  ‘Will you stop saying you’re bloody fine when you’re not! And stop it with all this “Mum” business. This is not about Mum. I know it’s not. You’ve been like this for days.’

  I dried my hands, then plucked another couple of pieces of loo roll off the holder, and even as I swabbed away at the tears – they just wouldn’t stop welling now – the less emotional part of my brain registered that, despite us being so bad at communicating lately, Matt was no less capable of reading me than he ever was. It was a comfort, but it made me want to cry even more.

  And want so much to just tell him. Sod it. We’d done Christmas now, hadn’t we? I sat down on the edge of the bath. ‘I’ve had a compla
int made against me.’

  ‘What?’

  He was suddenly all ears. Shifting gear, stiffening, as if readying himself for a fight. I had a bad time once, at work, when I was surgical registrar, under a boss who was as much consultant misogynist as consultant surgeon. A shouter. A thrower of surgical instruments. An ageing lion, he had a reputation for taking the term ‘theatre’ literally, and when stressed – which he often was, as he was going through an ugly divorce at the time – could reduce not just me, but whole teams to tears. I’d often cry in the evenings, too, and I’ve never been a crier. And Matt would duly bristle. I don’t care if he’s having the divorce from hell. I’m going to go up to that hospital and knock his bloody block off!

  Matt, who, to my knowledge, had never hit anyone in his life. But, full of impotent rage, would get so incredibly angry. And I never knew quite how to manage it. I could handle my own anger, refuse to let it rule me, because I had seen and heard, and felt, so much of it growing up. I knew that you could spread a slick of bile just as easily as you could sprinkle fairy dust, that angry feelings could be just as contagious as happy ones. So I’d just grind it out, because what else was there to do? I’d get up in the dark, sick with nerves, a knot of anxiety in my stomach, learn my craft, keep my head down, get through the day, return home. Dogged stoicism was sewn into the fabric of my being. But on some nights I’d get in, and, without even taking my coat off, I’d just lie down on the living-room floor and leak tears. And on those nights Matt had no idea what to do with me either. And I knew why, as well. Because if I crumbled, he crumbled; the whole edifice crumbled.