– Tilly has complained it smells of hamsters – I am crawling around the M25, with a potted azalea and the gnawing suspicion that by the time I actually have the opportunity to start this brave new life of mine, I’ll be on a mobility scooter.
Then I hear Alice’s voice reminding me it’s the least I can do on Mother’s Day when I haven’t seen our mother since before I moved – even if she was away with Gerald on an art appreciation cruise and then spending every spare minute rehearsing H.M.S. Pinafore – when she, Alice, is sitting on the other side of the world, worrying.
‘Get on a bloody plane, then!’ I say out loud, looking at the line of traffic snaking ahead and braking sharply as the van in front abruptly stops.
‘Arse!’ I shout, as I inch forward again, shot through with guilt and resentment.
My mother’s not overly thrilled, either.
‘He’s a very clever man,’ she says, as I step across the threshold of her neat chalet bungalow. ‘But I do wish he wouldn’t go around in that dress.’
She has been to an exhibition by Grayson Perry at the Turner Contemporary, where she has admired the pots and ‘those wooden ones’ but still isn’t convinced the artist needs the frock and wig.
‘It’s the children I think about,’ she says. ‘They’ll get teased at school.’
‘I don’t think so, Mum.’ I say, handing her the plant and throwing my coat over the bannister. ‘As far as I know, he’s only got one daughter and she’s grown up now.’
‘Hmmm,’ my mother looks as though she doubts this. ‘Sonia hasn’t got any better either.’ My mother has always believed in the non sequitur to keep conversation zipping along. While I am still making the mental leap from the famous artist to Gerald’s rather dour daughter, she has moved on to her geranium cuttings having died in the frost.
‘You don’t expect it in March,’ she says. ‘Though Mo will say that May thing about casting the clout.’
‘How is Mo?’ I enquire, trying to analyse what is even odder about my mother than usual.
‘Still likes her tea.’
It is then that it hits me. My mother hasn’t moved. Usually by now I’d have been offered three different sorts of hot beverage and very probably a sandwich. But I’ve been in the house a good five minutes and she is still in the hallway in front of me.
‘Shall we go and make some?’ I suggest.
‘Some what?’
Everything in the kitchen looks as always. The surfaces shine, the sink is scrubbed, the storage jars arranged in formation. The floor is speck-free, the tea towels folded with regimental precision and the mugs lined up along the shelf have their handles pointing in the same direction.
But as I watch my mother, watching me filling the teapot, the low-level dread that started when I hit the Thanet Way, deepens further. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’ I ask, disturbed by her stillness.
She looks back at me, her face troubled, the skin on her cheeks seeming to sag. I see how old she looks and how tired.
‘Not really,’ she says.
I carry the tray to the sitting room and wait while she settles herself in her usual chair. The book on the table is the same crime thriller she told me she was reading weeks ago. A bookmark pokes out of it, barely a quarter of the way through.
The air in here feels slightly stale and the irises on the pine cupboard are curled and faded. My mother flings open windows in deepest February, will sense a dead petal at ten paces.
‘What’s happened?’ I ask. ‘You’re not well, are you?’
She shakes her head slowly. I am clutched by fear.
‘It wasn’t a migraine, was it? When they took you to hospital?’
She sits up straighter. ‘Oh yes, they think it was,’ she says, sounding stronger. ‘A migraine with auras,’ she adds firmly. She smiles at me now. ‘I thought it was a stroke too …’
She lifts up her tea and takes a small sip. ‘I didn’t want to say it on the phone’.
My heart is thumping as she tells me.
She’d been in the garden, trying to pull out the dandelions from among her sprouting forget-me-nots, when she’d started to feel a bit sick. So she’d come indoors to get some water and then her vision had started to go hazy and she was seeing wavy lines. Recognising this as classic migraine, after having them for years, and feeling her head start to ache, she’d called Mo to put her off coming round for supper. But when she tried to speak to Mo, her words came out backwards.
Mo called an ambulance and came straight round. They both now thought my mother was having a stroke, and the paramedics clearly agreed as she was whisked off to A&E – ‘such nice young people, couldn’t have been kinder’ – where she had various tests and a CT scan, which showed that in fact she hadn’t had a stroke, and they concluded, according to my mother, that it probably was just a migraine after all.
By now she could talk normally again and they told her migraines could affect speech and that if she hadn’t tried to make the phone call she might never have known. The relief made my mother feel better immediately and she went home, took painkillers and had a better night’s sleep than she usually did, feeling fine by the next day, although the hospital wanted her to have a second, different, sort of scan, just to make sure, so she had gone for that when she got back from Poole, and seen a neurologist.
‘And?’ I prompt as she is silent again. ‘What did he say?’
The room is getting darker and my mother rises from her chair and walks slowly across the carpet and turns on the standard lamp she’s had all my life. Then she sits down again and I see the distress in her eyes. ‘I had wondered,’ she says. ‘But it was still a terrible shock.’
‘What?’ I ask softly, my mind racing through the possibilities. A stroke the first scan had missed? Cancer? A brain tumour? ‘Tell me.’
‘Oh Tess,’ my mother says, with tears in her eyes. ‘I’ve got some sort of dementia.’
‘My uncle had Alzheimer’s.’ Jinni opened a cupboard with one hand and reached into the tall fridge with the other. ‘It’s an absolute bastard.’
I sat at the enormous table in her vast stone kitchen, looking in awe at the battered range, deep butler’s sink and numerous drawers, as she deftly uncorked a bottle and put a generous white wine in front of me. I swallowed.
‘It’s not necessarily that – the damage is frontal-temporal only but I’ve been Googling and it doesn’t sound good. I don’t know how quickly …’ I stopped. ‘We’re waiting for an appointment with the consultant.’
Jinni looked back at me. ‘And she’s okay at home on her own?’
‘Her
