Last Train from Liguria (2010) Read online

  ‘Virginia Katherine,’ I say. ‘That was her real name. Did you know? Virginia Katherine McMath - at least I think that’s how you pronounce it. Married five times. Can you imagine? Five husbands. One’s bad enough,’ I say.

  As if either of us would really know.

  It all comes full circle. I put the paper down for a moment and that’s what I think. Full circle. We start off in a nursery and we finish up in one. Babies again. If I last long enough I’ll be one too. And what will any of the in-between matter or mean in the end? The way I’ve lived my life so far, the way I’m feeling now, about this woman in the bed, the man who’s recently left me, the meeting in a few minutes’ time with the registrar of this mental hospital and whatever it is he has to say to me. A big fat ugly wrinkly baba, that’ll be me. I’ll open my gummy mouth when I want to be fed or when I want to gibber. I’ll shit in my nappy when the urge takes me, and no other urge will concern me. I’ll finish my days in a place such as this. Sexless and therefore free. Where it makes no difference if the genders are mixed in together, or even mixed into each other, come to think of it (hairy-faced women, men who could do with a bra).

  If the shuffler sometimes shows a flop of willy through his pyjama slit; if the ex-reverend mother goes out to the toilet with one plump tit peering like a plucked chicken out the front of her nightie; and if genteel Mrs Lyons wants to mutter her obscenities - well, who’s going to care or even half notice?

  ‘Eighty-three years of age,’ I say. ‘Imagine? Proud of her pins till the end. You’d leave her in the ha’penny place, so you would. Age-wise and leg-wise. You’d knock her sideways.’ And so I continue for a bit, stretching poor Ginger’s legs this way and that, until they’ve become an exhausted subject. Well - you have to be saying something.

  Yes. In the slow passing of hospital time a simple gesture can take on a sense of exaggerated purpose. The refilling of a water jug, say, or finding a vase for the ugly flowers I’ve brought from the garage shop down the road. Folding the newspaper over, taking it across to the table in the middle of the ward in case one of the nurses wants to have a look at it later. Going down the ward and into the visitor’s toilet - now that’s an expedition in itself. When all this is over it’s usual to feel at a bit of a loss.

  I stand looking down at the table in the middle of the ward. It’s a kitchen table, red Formica, chipped black around the edges, and has been donated, like most of the furniture in here, by a charitable sort, or, as I’m inclined to think in my more cynical moments, the sort that’s too tight to pay for a skip.

  I come back to the bed and force myself to look at my grandmother’s face. It’s a different face to the one I left behind a few weeks ago, no longer scribbled with wrinkles and lines. Fuller since the stroke, you could almost say fat, and pink. I can’t get over this. It makes me want to laugh out loud, to say, ‘Would you look at the big fat pink face of you, Nonna!’

  She looks so well. Now that she can no longer swallow and it’s the intravenous drip, rather than herself, that’s responsible for feeding her. Here’s something else - without the power of her throat muscles she can no longer cry. At least that’s all over, that constant crying. That awful constant dry-crying. Jesus! At least I’ll never have to listen to that again.

  All in all, and absurd as it seems, in some ways the stroke has been good for her.

  Between the pink and the fatness and the expression of peace, traces remain of what has come to be known as ‘the incident’. At least that’s how it was described to me on the phone when they finally tracked me down in London: ‘I’m afraid there’s been a bit of an incident.’ And that’s what they’ve been calling it ever since. ‘The stroke was most likely the result of the incident.’ ‘Certain tests had to be carried out on foot of the incident.’ That’s the sort of thing I’ve been hearing. What I haven’t been hearing are the finer details: the whys, wherefores and, most intriguing of all, the how in the name of Christ could such a thing have happened in the first place?

  Regarding the incident, this much I do know: it bruised her face and it broke her arm. It left long scratches and cuts all up her legs and across her knees. It fucked up her new hip. Despite all this damage, it has to be admitted that for a while there before the incident, she was a total rip. And since it, apparently, has been a complete ‘sweetie pie’.

  I lean towards my grandmother. ‘Nonna,’ I say, ‘I take my eyes off you for a few weeks and look at all the trouble. What are we going to do with you at all?’

  I sit back and try to remember the other Nonna, what she was like before all this. But I can barely recall her younger face, which ironically looked older than the face she now has. I can only seem to get back as far as the nursing home where she lived for a year or so before she was sent here. Where we both thought she would end her days. A far cry from this hole, it has to be said.

  She’d picked it herself, after first checking out God knows how many other homes. ‘Now this is it,’ she had said. ‘This is the perfect place.’ Then she had proceeded to make all the arrangements, financial and otherwise. I couldn’t get over her forking out that type of money or that she had that kind of money to fork out. Not that she’d ever denied me anything, but it had been scrimp and scratch all the way with Nonna, and I had often got the impression that spending money gave her a pain in the stomach. Not this time though. This time she couldn’t whip out the cheque book quick enough.

  She had seemed almost happy there, in her perfect nursing home. A veranda in summer where she sat like a memsahib on her bamboo chair, occasionally smiling and nodding at other people’s conversations. The lawn to look at, trees to contemplate, the sound of water. An occasional party in the main drawing room - some eejit in a dickie bow telling corny jokes and banging on an electric keyboard. But still. A bright bedroom all to herself, and her own radio, although she always preferred to sit in silence. She was treated as a pet there, was, I believe, almost loved. They liked her neatness, her soft green eyes, what they saw as her acquiescent disposition. Of course they got over that soon enough.

  They tell you to do that in magazines and care advice brochures, they say - try to remember your loved one in happier, more positive times. Try to choose one or two things a day your loved one used to enjoy. It’s interesting I think, the way they always use that expression ‘loved one’ - an undertaker’s expression - like they’re acknowledging that he or she has already died.

  The buzzer goes on the door of the ward, and I hear Thelma coming out of the office to answer it. Thelma, a sort of nurse’s aide, is a bit on the simple side. I suspect she may be a former patient, shoved in here a long time ago and for not that much of a reason. The door is unlocked and I can hear Thelma’s loud excited whispers from here. A voice I recognize - that of the bunty little staff nurse - is admitted. The door is then locked again with a touch more ceremony than usual, and I can’t help wondering if this is for my sake.

  I get up and stretch my arm to tap on the window. The geometric line of starched caps falters and breaks apart. One startled eye turns towards me, like the eye in a shying horse. I give the nod that says, The battle-axe has arrived, girls, better get yourselves back inside.

  Bunty’s voice comes into the ward. ‘Oh!’ she goes, when she sees me (as if Thelma hasn’t told her I’m here). ‘Oh, long time no see, indeed.’ She breezes by and it could be a snarl or a smile on her lips but either way I sense disapproval. When she comes back there’s a stack of files in her arms. ‘So’, she says, looking down at the suitcase beside me on the floor, ‘are you moving in - or what?’

  ‘I was in London,’ I say. ‘I came straight from the airport.’

  ‘London!’ she goes, as if I’d said the moon. ‘Imagine that now - business or pleasure?’

  ‘Neither,’ I say and for some reason find myself standing up.

  She barrels off up the ward and I feel myself boil up with rage. I long to shout after her, to say something like, ‘Here, you - I have my own problems, you know, I ha
ve my own life. And what about all the other weeks, days, hours, when I was the only visitor in this kip? I didn’t hear you asking too many questions then!’

  I imagine her stopping in her tracks, turning to look at me, the drop of her fat little mouth, a slow blush pushing north from her chest up her neck. Then just as she’s getting ready to move off again, I hear myself continuing: ‘And another thing - I wasn’t the one who left the door open. I wasn’t the one who let her escape. I’ll be speaking to the registrar shortly by the way, and can’t wait to hear what he has to say about that!’

  In my daydream Bunty lowers her eyelids, her already red enough face darkening to a guilty purple. In reality she couldn’t give a fuck, while I stand like a fool watching her move from bed to bed, fussing and fixing, checking on charts, yapping at patients - there she goes. Even those who are sleeping or in other ways beyond listening will be addressed: briskly, loudly, a touch of tolerance bordering, it has to be said, on genuine kindness. As she always does at the start of her shift and again when it comes to an end, the way a primary school teacher might speak to her pupils at the start and finish of the day.

  It was never my idea to put her here in the first place. I sit back down and remind myself of this now, as I used to do every time I came up here for the first year or so. This was not my idea. It was that other place wanted rid of her. The so-called ‘perfect place’. A few weeks, they had assured me, a few tests, a rest. That’s how they got around me.

  The truth was they just couldn’t put up with her. Couldn’t have her sullying the atmosphere of their veranda with her carry-on and dry-crying. Couldn’t have her pacing the halls and landings, leaving the echo of that one repeated phrase in her wake, ‘I can’t, I can’t. I’m not able. I’m not able.’ On and on, she just wouldn’t stop saying it. Until eventually they had stopped asking, ‘Not able to what, darling? What are you not able to do?’ But most of all they couldn’t have her disillusioning the well-heeled relatives that their money had been wisely spent. She had simply become bad for business, I suppose.

  Behind me there’s the squeak of shoes and I turn to see Bunty. ‘You have an appointment to see the registrar, I believe?’ She looks amused. No, more than that, she looks as if she has to restrain herself from bursting out laughing in my face. The brazen cheek of me really, a mere mortal, to question the hospital authorities. Bunty obviously finds this a scream.

  ‘That’s right,’ I say.

  ‘It’ll be Mr Brook who’ll see you. Do you know Mr Brook?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, a lovely man! I can’t begin to tell you. Actually he used to treat your grandmother, when she came here first. You know where to go then?’

  I stand up and nod and go. Thelma is waiting to let me out. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘you missed it! All the excitement your nanny caused. The police and all. You want have seen the state of her when they brung her back in. Ah you missed it, you did.’

  I can never stand at the mouth of this corridor without remembering the first time I stood here. I can never look down the icy length of it without feeling that way again. There was a doctor with me - come to think of it, the last time I spoke to a doctor in here. He walked with me a little way, Doctor Ian Coyle, not an unusual name, but I had difficulty holding on to it just the same and had to keep glancing at his badge. He told me they had decided to keep her in.

  ‘You mean for more tests?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I mean, indefinitely.’

  ‘But I understood, I mean I was led to believe, anyway, you know, I thought - is she not going back to the nursing home?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘But I was told—’

  ‘They just wouldn’t be able to manage her.’

  ‘But I can’t leave her here. There has to be some place else. I mean not here, not this awful place…’ I was crying a little then, and he said that he was sorry. We came up beside two brown plastic chairs set by the wall and sat down. I remember noticing how young he was then and that he reminded me of one of my honours art students. Earnest and brave, a bit of a swot. He pulled his chair closer to mine; no aftershave but two kinds of soap. One wholesomely scented, probably from his mother’s bathroom. The other, that pink disinfectant stuff in the square bottle by the sink in the ward.

  He allowed me to smoke, even went as far as to fashion a little ashtray for me out of a piece of card he had in his pocket. He was very kind. ‘Senile dementia,’ he said. ‘Your grandmother has senile dementia.’

  I said nothing and after a moment he began to tell me a story. It was a third-hand story, told to him by the nursing home’s GP, who had been given it by the nursing home matron. A condensed version of which was now on file. He told it well, soft-spoken and slow, so that his words became pictures almost as soon as they left his mouth. And I felt I was there, watching my grandmother in the dining room of the nursing home - the ‘graciously appointed dining room overlooking the gardens’, as the prospectus would have it. I could see her, standing up suddenly and lifting her plate from the table. The plate still full of dinner and her bringing it across the room to the French doors. Passing through them, going down the few steps sideways. Pressing her hand into the food, digging her fingers in and shoving it off her plate. I can see it falling, heavy and dark, staining the velvety lawn with its bulk. And her coming back into the dining room, sleeves covered in gravy, spills all down the front of her dress, laying the gravy-streaked plate back on the table. Nobody paying all that much heed, until suddenly she starts making grabs at the plates of the other residents. Pandemonium. Old greedy eyes going into a panic, arthritic hands clutching their plate rims, shaky voices calling, ‘Help! Help!’ Staff from all corners swiftly arriving, my grandmother becoming violent, biting a nurse’s hand.

  ‘So you see…’ he concluded.

  ‘Yes, thank you, doctor, I see.’

  We arrived back at the ward where I signed the committal papers for St Ita’s hospital, Portrane, and had one more look at a heavily sedated Nonna. Doctor Ian Coyle was still chatting gently, not that I was really listening. I couldn’t stop thinking of the episode in the nursing home, not least the idea of Nonna wasting food, wasting anything. Nonna, who would turn a jam jar inside out to get the last little smear out of it.

  ‘Are you sure, doctor? Are you certain there’s no other solution?’ I had finally asked.

  ‘You know, sometimes, Anna, quite simply, there isn’t.’

  That first day. Two and a half years ago - maybe more. After finally finding my way back to reception, I had stood outside the main door trying to pull myself together with a cigarette, before attempting the long drive home. Two young men stood a few yards away from me. The tall one wore a suit that was too small, the short one wore a suit that was too big. It had crossed my mind that maybe they should swap. After a bit of shuffling and huffing the tall one approached. ‘Herehaveyegotasmokehaveya?’ came rattling out of his mouth. I noticed he had beautiful teeth.

  I gave him a smoke and he skulked away. The short one then decided to chance it. Picking his way over to me, he held his hand open and flat, as if I were a horse in a field he was trying to corner, and against his better judgement at that, I placed a cigarette on his palm and he went back to his mate.

  I had heard the lunatic cries from the sectioned wards off the corridors while I’d searched for my grandmother’s ward. And I couldn’t say the ward, when I did find it, was the prettiest. Yet I was more affected by this pair than anything else that day. It wasn’t really any one thing about them, apart from the stupid suits, nor the fact that they were so young. It was their near normality that had got to me. Everything about them, from their eyebrows down to their feet, seemed to be only slightly askew, yet it was enough to make everything wrong. Like a room where the pictures hang crooked. Maybe it brought it home to me what sort of a place this really was. This place where any one of us could end up. This place where my grandmother would have to die.

  *

  And now,
two and a half years later, on the way to see the registrar, I stand here again for the umpteenth time and still have to think about which direction to take. As I look down the first long corridor running away from me like a dim country lane in the middle of nowhere, I try to understand how she managed it. At a stretch, I might be able to accept that she got herself out the door of the ward - if the keys were left lying around or someone had carelessly left it unlocked. But I just can’t begin to imagine how, in the dead of night, she found her way not only out of the building but also off the hospital grounds.

  I am baffled and appalled. I am angry. I am nothing short of impressed.

  Moving towards the registrar’s office. A silence you could swim through. I also notice, not for the first time, that unlike other hospitals, no smells linger in these corridors, and it occurs to me now that the numerous draughts have probably sucked them all out. So bloody cold. A bolt of ivy that has slithered through a hole in the glass of a window has now curled down to the floor. I can’t remember this from six weeks ago. The chocolate-box pictures on the wall are buckled from damp and there’s a bucket with rainwater still in it, set under a leak in the ceiling. Patches of pointless heat hit out from the occasional radiator along the way. And my footsteps, which started off self-consciously slow and restrain ed, have, in my hurry to get this over with, increased their speed and impact until they’re banging out a Gestapo-like rhythm, and I am almost running.

  The minute I set eyes on Mr Brook, I start whingeing. I can see the spread of my letter on his desk, my points and questions numerically arranged. The hand is heavier than usual, the lines waver, despite the several attempts to get it just right, and I can’t even remember what those questions were now. It was supposed to have been a controlled sort of a letter. Designed to let these people know they weren’t dealing with some fool to be fobbed off with a few watery excuses. Nor was it written by an indifferent relative who couldn’t really give a shit when it came to it. I had flattered myself that this was the letter of an intelligent woman, a woman with no reason to feel guilt or remorse. A secondary school teacher in her thirties, for God’s sake, well used to dealing with tricky customers.