‘See you; you were never easy to get on with. Always critical. Always having to be clever clever’
The sun beamed through the open patio doors. It seemed to spread a whole body halo around his mother, as if she’d received a final benediction by light straight from heaven.
‘We’re not this, we’re too that. Christ! Sometimes we thought you hated us. Hated your own family. All we ever gave you was love and you sitting there all sullen in judgement of us’
He didn’t recognise this mother. She spat these words with bile, red eyes like the devil. He didn’t know she was capable of such violent contempt. In a strange way he was quite impressed. This over-polite pleasant woman had a bitchy side. He almost thought ‘good for her. ‘Bout time you stood up for yourself’. He almost smiled at the thought. His old mother was damning him to hell and a part of him felt proud of her. There was a certain vindication to it, and he couldn’t totally disagree of her bitter portrait of him.
He had sat in his parents house on many occasions and well into adulthood like a sullen tanager, resentful and monosyllabic. Grunting answers to their friendly enquiries as if the effort would take his last breath. They suffocated him. She anxious and his father subtly controlling and with an agenda laid out for matters to be discussed. He, art and philosophy, she, cushions and the cheap frying pan she purchased at Poundland. The more his dad tried to sway the conversation his way the more anxious his mother became and the more objects she brought from the kitchen to show him. His brother was allowed a way to deal with this. He snarled and hissed and ploughed his own conversational furrow. The youngest was allowed this luxury but he knew that if he adopted this behaviour then sensitivities would be deeply bruised.
These were his parents and he loved them dearly. He just couldn’t stand being in the same room as them at the same time.
And there was no way past it in the tiny one-bed flat. Not until there was a new arrangement one day and his mother took to watching her own telly in the bedroom.
The care home which, due to her condition, his mother was now forced to exist in seemed quite airy and bright although with that stale whiff of stale urine and over-boiled mince that seemed to pervade such places.
She wasn’t happy here, at least not when she was sentient and a little more lucid than at present. It was actually better for her when she was off on one of her mental tangents when she couldn’t have cared less where she was. She could have been sitting amongst the animals in Edinburgh zoo for all she knew or cared. But when she came around and realised where she was it scared her afresh every time as if she’d only just realised.
‘Is there no one coming to take me home?’
‘You and your bloody music! All we ever did was encourage you. Do you remember that time we brought that guitar all the way up to Liverpool for you, me and your dad?’
‘Was that the time he was meant to have turned deaf but really he wasn’t?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, son. I think you make some of this up just to confuse me. We brought that guitar up for you and all you did was drink and resent our presence. Me and your da felt so unwelcome and we’d done you such a good turn’
‘I know ma, and I’m so sorry. I always felt you’s were stealing my personality. Something like that’
‘Stealing your personality? I don’t even know what that means. We barely got a cup of tea and a sandwich from you. Your dad and I had to go out for something to eat’
‘Aw ma I was never mean that way. I think you’re confused’
‘Mean-spirited your da said. You were mean-spirited’
Outside some birds were chirping and he heard the low buzz of the traffic on the main road. An orderly popped her head around the room door and asked was everything ok. He answered that everything was fine. He wanted to add just my very soul being eviscerated before me, that’s all!
‘We used to dread you visiting your father and I, but we were too polite to let it show’
The nurse does a double-take ‘now now Mrs Bryant. Your son has come all this way from Scotland just to visit you’
‘Only because he has to. I bet he can’t wait to get back up there. It’s all obligation now. Only moved back up there to be different as usual’
I address the orderly who is looking a bit flummoxed by this rather involved family strife..
‘See that form of dementia when your mother can’t even remember who you are…?’
She nods in nervous agreement.
‘Why can’t she have that kind…?’
A butterfly enters the room. A pretty yellow and lemon it flutters briefly then falls in a dead faint to the floor.
