But something had gone wrong, because I couldn’t make him happy. He didn’t even seem to want to be happy.
He was always crying and I couldn’t understand why. I thought he should be glad to be rid of my mother, that he was much better off with me. I didn’t miss her and I couldn’t see why he did.
I brimmed with love and concern for him and I was quite prepared to do anything for him, spend time with him, cosset him, cook for him, get him anything he wanted or needed. Except I didn’t want to listen to him tell me how much he had loved her.
I wanted to take care of him only if he was going to be happy about it.
“Maybe she’ll come back,” he said over and over.
“Maybe,” I muttered, thinking What’s wrong with him?
Although, luckily, he never did anything practical to try and win her back. He made no great displays of passion, like standing outside Ken’s yellow house and shouting neighbour-waking abuse at him in the middle of the night. Or daubing “Adulterer” in green fluorescent paint on
Ken’s front door. Or emptying the trash cans of the neighbourhood in Ken’s driveway, so that when he left in the morning for a hard day’s dry cleaning, he would sink ankle-deep in rusty tin cans and potato peelings. Or picketing the dry cleaners with signs saying “This man stole my wife. Don’t get your shirts cleaned here.”
Although I couldn’t understand his pain, I tried to lessen it. But all I knew to do was to force food and drink on him and treat him like a convalescent invalid and point out the (few) amenities and diversions offered by our home. Like asking him in gentle tones if he would like to watch TV. Football? Or suggesting that he get some rest.
Bed and TV were about the extent of our recreational facilities.
He barely ate, no matter how hard I coaxed him. Neither did I. But while I knew that I’d be okay, I was afraid that he had started on his terminal decline.
Even before the end of the first week I was exhausted.
I had thought my love for him would give me limitless energy, that the more he asked of me the better I would feel, that the more I did for him, the more I would want to do for him.
I tried too hard to please and that burned up an awful lot of energy. I eagerly watched him, anticipated his every need and did things for him even when he said that I didn’t need to.
And then I was surprised to find that I was shattered. The mere practicalities, alone, took their toll.
Like the fact that it took me at least an hour and a half to travel to work every morning. I had become spoiled by the thirty-minute journey from Ladbroke Grove, where I had numerous trains, buses and taxis to choose from.
I had forgotten what it was like to commute from the suburbs, where there was only one train at my disposal and if I missed that there was a twenty-minute wait until the next one.
I had once been a master of the ancient art of commuting, but I had lived in the city for too long and had lost many of my skills. I had forgotten how to sniff the air and stare at the sky (and the electronic noticeboard) and feel that the train was leaving in about one minute and that I had no time to buy a paper. I was no longer able to sense the vibes of a packed platform and realize that three trains in a row had been cancelled and, if I wanted any chance of getting on the next one, I should start kicking and squeezing my way to the front immediately.
I used to know such things instinctively. I used to commune with the trains, almost merging into one being with the Underground system, man and machines working synchronously, in perfect harmony.
But not anymore.
And even though I had always been late for work in the past, I could have been on time if I had wanted. Now I really had no choice. I was at the mercy of London Underground and their various delaying mechanisms, leaves on the track, bodies on the track, signal failures, someone leaving their cheese sandwiches on the train, causing a bomb scare.
I had to get up very early. And before the first week was over, I discovered that Dad had a little problem and it became obvious I would have to get up even earlier.
At work I worried all day long about him, because it soon became clear that he couldn’t be left on his own for any length of time. Taking care of Dad was like taking care of a child. Like a child, he had no fear, no sense of the consequences of his actions. He thought it was no big deal to go out leaving the front door open. Not just unlocked, but swinging open. Not that we had much to steal, but nevertheless, it was a bit worrisome.
As soon as work finished I rushed home. Anything could have happened. Almost every day there was a crisis of some kind. I lost count of the times he’d fallen asleep, either leaving the bath running, or the gas on. Or with a pot bubbling and burning, forgotten, or with a cigarette slowly burning its way through the cushion he was sitting on.
I often came home from work, exhausted, to find hot water leaking through the kitchen ceiling. Or to the smell of burning and a blackened, burned-out pot on the stove while Dad lay slumped asleep in his chair.
There were no more nights out on the town for me. I had thought I wouldn’t mind and I was ashamed to find I did.
And the early nights didn’t mean that I got plenty of sleep, because Dad usually woke me in the middle of the night and I had to get up to help him.
Dad wet his bed the first night I was home.
The heartbreak that I felt very nearly pushed me over the edge to insanity.
“I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,” I thought desperately. “Please, God, help me to live through this pain.” To see my father so stripped of his dignity was almost more than I could handle.
He woke me up at about three in the morning to tell me. “I’m sorry, Lucy,” he said, looking mortified. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I hushed, “stop saying sorry.”
I had a quick look at his bed and realized that there was no way he could sleep there.
“Why don’t you go and sleep in the boys’ room and I’ll, you know, tidy, er, up your bed,” I suggested.
“I will so,” he said.
“Do,” I urged.
“And you’re not mad at me?” he asked meekly.
“Mad?” I exclaimed. “Why would I be mad at you?”
“You’ll come and say good night to me?”
“Of course I will.”
So he got into Chris’s single bed and pulled the covers up to his chin, his slack old person’s chin rough with white stubble. I smoothed down his wispy grey hair and kissed him on the forehead and I was filled with a fierce pride, a sense of how well I took care of him. No one would ever look after anyone as well as I would look after Dad.
When he went back to sleep I pulled the sheets off the bed and wrapped them up to take to the laundromat. Then I got a basin of hot, soapy water and scrubbed and rinsed the mattress.
The only thing that worried me about the whole episode was that the next morning, when Dad woke up in Chris’s bed, he was confused and frightened. He didn’t know how he’d got there because he couldn’t remember anything of the night before.
When he wet his bed on the first night I was there, I thought it was because he was so upset, and that it was an isolated event.
But it wasn’t.
It happened nearly every night. Sometimes more than once. Sometimes in Chris’s bed, too. When that happened, I got him to move to Peter’s bed.
Luckily—because there was nowhere else for him to move to except mine—he managed not to wet Peter’s bed.
He always woke me up to tell me and at first I got up and comforted and relocated him.
After the first few nights I was so exhausted that I decided to leave my nocturnal cleaning-up until the morning, before I left for work.
I didn’t, couldn’t leave it until the evening, and it was out of the question to ask Dad to help.
Instead, I reset my clock to half an hour earlier than the horribly early time it was already set for, so I could clean up whatever needed to be cleaned up each morning.
>
When he woke me to tell me that he had wet his bed, I just told him to move to another one and tried to go back to sleep.
But it was so difficult, because he was racked with guilt every time it happened and wanted to talk about how sorry he was and to make sure that I wasn’t angry with him. Sometimes he would ramble on for hours, crying and saying he was a failure and that he’d try to make sure it never happened again. And because I was so tired I found it hard not to get impatient with him. And that would upset him and I’d feel destroyed with guilt, which meant I got even less sleep, which made me more impatient the next time…
And, always, like little whispers in the corner of my head, was the memory of what my mother had said about him being an alcoholic. I watched everything he drank. And it seemed to be an awful lot. More than I remembered from when we were young. But then I wasn’t sure if I was overreacting to what she had said, so I tried to put it out of my mind.
Maybe he was drinking a lot, but so what? His wife had just left him, so why shouldn’t he?
Chapter 69
My life quickly developed a routine.
In the evenings I had to run to the laundromat to dry the sheets I’d left in before I went to work. Then I made his dinner, then there was usually some small crisis to deal with because he was forever burning things or breaking them or losing them.
I don’t know when the tiredness turned to resentment. I kept it hidden for a long time because I was ashamed of it. Through guilt and misplaced pride, I even managed to hide it from myself for a while.
I began to miss my other life.
I wanted to go out and get drunk and stay up late and swap clothes with Karen and Charlotte and talk about boys and the size of their penises.
I was tired of having to be constantly vigilant, of always having to be there. A big part of the problem was that I had wanted to be perfect for Dad. I had wanted to be the one who took care of him better than anyone else. But I couldn’t and then I didn’t even want to. It wasn’t a challenge anymore, it was a burden.
I was aware that I was a young woman, that looking after Dad wasn’t my responsibility. But I would have died rather than admit it.
Taking care of the two of us seemed an awful lot harder than looking after just me. A lot more than twice as hard. And a lot more than twice as expensive.
Before long, money became a real worry. In the past, I had thought it was a problem, I never felt as though I had enough to buy essentials like new shoes and clothes. But now I was horrified to find I was afraid that I wouldn’t have enough to cover essentials like feeding the two of us.
I couldn’t figure out where it was all going. For the first time in my life I was afraid of losing my job. I mean, really afraid.
Everything had changed, now that I had a dependent. I suddenly understood why they say in marriage ceremonies, “Till debt do us part.”
Except, of course, that I wasn’t married to Dad.
It was easy to be generous with the money when I had plenty of it. I had never imagined that I would begrudge my father anything. That I wouldn’t have given him the cut-off Lycra shirt off my back.
But it wasn’t true. As money got tighter, I resented having to give him any. I resented him saying to me every morning before I dragged myself off to work, “Lucy, love, could you leave some money on the table?”
I resented the worry. I resented having to ask for an advance on my paycheck. I resented having no money for myself.
And I hated what it did to me—the pettiness, the watching of every bite that went into his mouth, the watching of every bite that didn’t go into his mouth. If I go to the trouble of buying food for him and cooking it for him, the least he could do is eat it, I thought angrily.
Dad got welfare money every two weeks, but I wasn’t sure what he did with it. I ran the household on my salary alone.
“Couldn’t he even buy a pint of milk?” I sometimes thought, in impotent rage.
I felt increasingly isolated. Apart from the people at work,
the only person I ever saw was Dad. I never went out with any of the people I used to see. I didn’t have time, because it was so important to get home immediately after work. Karen and Charlotte kept saying they’d come out to visit me, but they made it sound like a trip to a foreign country. Anyway it was a relief that they didn’t come—I didn’t think I’d be able to act happy for an entire two hours.
I missed Gus terribly. I fantasized about him coming to rescue me. But I had no chance of running into him while I lived in Uxbridge.
The only person I saw from my old life was Daniel. He was always “dropping by” and I hated it.
Every time I answered the door to him my first thought was how big and sexy and attractive he was. Then my second thought was of the night that I threw myself at him and he’d refused to bed me. I burned with shame at the memory.
And, as if that wasn’t hard enough to cope with, he constantly asked awkward questions.
“Why are you always so tired?” and, “You’re going to the laundromat, again?” and, “Why are all your saucepans burned?”
“Can I do anything to help?” he asked over and over again. But my pride wouldn’t let me tell him how bad things were with Dad.
I just said, “Go away, Daniel, there’s nothing for you to do here.”
The money situation got worse.
The sensible thing would have been to give up the apartment in Ladbroke Grove. After all, what did I gain by paying rent on a place I never stayed in? But, suddenly, I realized that I didn’t want to, that I was terrified of having to do that. My apartment was my last link with my old life. If that went, it would be a sign that I was never going back, that I was stuck out in Uxbridge forever.
Chapter 70
In the end, out of desperation, I went to see our local doctor, who happened to be Dr. Thornton, the same man who had prescribed antidepressants for me all those years before.
Ostensibly I went to get advice about Dad’s bedwetting, but in reality it was a good plain old-fashioned cry for help. In the hope that he would tell me what I knew to be true wasn’t really.
I hated going to Dr. Thornton. Not only was he a cranky old man who should have been put out to pasture years before, but, because I knew he thought our entire family was nuts. He’d already had to deal with me and my depression. And there had been that time when Peter was fifteen and he’d got his hands on a medical encyclopaedia and became convinced that he had every disease he read about. Mum was in to the doctor’s office almost daily with him as he worked his way alphabetically and hypochondriacally through the book, exhibiting symptoms of Acne, Agoraphobia, Alzheimer’s, Angina, Angst and Anthrax until finally someone blew the whistle on him. Even the Acne wasn’t real. Although the Angst certainly was, by the time Mum had finished with him.
Dr. Thornton’s waiting room was like the day of judgment, packed to the rafters with fighting children, screaming mothers and consumptive geriatrics.
When I was finally granted an audience with His Healingness, he was slumped across his desk, looking exhausted and bad-tempered, his pen poised over the prescription pad.
“What can I do for you, Lucy?” he asked wearily.
I knew what he really meant was, “I remember you, you’re one of those crazy Sullivans. So? Losing it again, are you?”
“Well, it’s not about me,” I began hesitantly.
He immediately looked interested.
“A friend of yours?” he asked hopefully.
“Well, sort of.” I agreed.
“Thinks she might be pregnant?” he asked. “Hmmmm, is that it?”
“No, it’s…”
“Has a mysterious discharge?” he interrupted eagerly.
“No, nothing like that…”
“Very heavy periods?”
“No…”
“Lump in her breast?”
“No,” I said, almost laughing. “It really isn’t me. It’s my dad.”
“Oh him,” he said,
annoyed. “Well, why isn’t he here? I don’t do virtual diagnosis.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sick of it,” he burst out. “It’s all mobile phones and Internets, and computer games and simulated flights. None of you want to do anything real!”
“Er…” I said, shocked, not knowing how to respond to his outpourings of Luddite vitriol. He’d become slightly more eccentric since our previous encounter.
“You all think you needn’t do anything,” he went on in a high voice. His face was flushed. “You can just sit at home with your modems and your PCs and think you’re living, that you needn’t get off your lazy behinds and interact with other human beings. You just E-mail me your symptoms, is that it?” Physician, heal thyself! Dr. Thornton seemed to be cracking up.
Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the fight went out of him.
“Well, what about your father?” he sighed, slumping back over his desk.
“It’s a bit embarrassing,” I said awkwardly.
“Why?”
“Well, he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with him…” I started to delicately pick my way through the complicated story.
“Well, if he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with him, and you do, then perhaps you’re the one with the problem,” said Dr. Thornton bluntly.
“No, listen, you don’t understand…”
“I do understand,” he interrupted. “There’s nothing wrong with Jamsie Sullivan. If he cut out the booze, he’d be fine.
“Although maybe he wouldn’t be,” he added, as if he were talking to himself. “God alone knows what shape his liver is in by now. Probably hexagonal.”
“But…”
“Lucy, you’re wasting my time. I’ve got a waiting room full of sick people out there, really sick people, who need looking after. And instead I get the female Sullivans plaguing me, looking for cures for a man who has decided to drink himself to death.”
“What do you mean, female Sullivans?” I asked.