He was not what you’d call a lovable man, my grandad. It wasn’t that he was cold, exactly. It was more as though he had a huge distance inside himself. There’s a game I used to play with my friends. One of us had to think of someone we all knew, and the others had to work out who it was by asking questions like “If this person was a musical instrument, what would it be?” or “If this person was a place, what would it be?” I used to think that if Grandad were a place, it would be one of those great empty landscapes you sometimes see in American movies: flat, an endless road, tumbleweed blown by a moaning wind, a vast blank sky. And after Dad disappeared, he withdrew even further into this remote space.
It was a funny thing, a surprising thing, that brought him back to me. It was algebra.
I collided with algebra in my first year at secondary school, and it sent me reeling. The very word itself seemed sinister, a word from black magic. Algebracadabra. Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words; figures make numbers. They had no business getting tangled up together. Those as and bs and xs and ys with little numbers floating next to their heads, those brackets and hooks and symbols, all trying to conceal an answer, not give you one. I’d sit there in my own little darkness watching it dawn on the faces of my classmates. Their hands would go up —“Miss! Miss!”— and mine never did. The homework reduced me to tears.
“I don’t see the point of it,” I wailed. “I don’t know what it’s for!”
Grandad, as it turned out, liked algebra, did know what it was for. But he sat opposite me and didn’t say anything for a while, considering my problem in that careful, expressionless way of his.
Eventually he said, “Why do you do PE at school?”
“What?”
“PE. Why do they make you do it?”
“Because they hate us?” I suggested.
“And the other reason?”
“To keep us fit, I suppose.”
“Physically fit, yes.” He reached across the table and put the first two fingers of each hand on the sides of my head. “There is also mental fitness, isn’t there?”
Behind us, Gran was watching a comedy game show with the sound off.
“I can explain to you why algebra is useful. But that is not what algebra is really for.” He moved his fingers gently on my temples. “It’s to keep what is in here healthy. PE for the head. And the great thing is you can do it sitting down. Now, let us use these little puzzles here to take our brains for a jog.”
And it worked. Not that I ever enjoyed algebra. But I did come to see that it was possible to enjoy it. Grandad taught me that the alien signs and symbols of algebraic equations were not just marks on paper. They were not flat. They were three-dimensional, and you could approach them from different directions, look at them from different angles, stand them on their heads. You could take them apart and put them together in a variety of shapes, like Lego. I stopped being afraid of them.
I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but those homework sessions were a breakthrough in more ways than one. If Grandad had been living behind an invisible door, then algebra turned out to be the key that opened it and let me in. And what I found wasn’t the barren tumbleweed landscape that I’d imagined. It was not like that at all.
I’d known for a long time that he was fond of puzzles. When I was younger he used to send me letters with lots of the words replaced by pictures or numbers. They always ended 02U, which meant Love to you, because zero was “love” in tennis. He was often disappointed when I couldn’t work them out. Or couldn’t be bothered to. Now I discovered that Grandad’s world was full of mirages and mazes, of mirrors and misleading signs. He was fascinated by riddles and codes and conundrums and labyrinths, by the origin of place names, by grammar, by slang, by jokes — although he never laughed at them — by anything that might mean something else. He lived in a world that was slippery, changeable, fluid.
He lured me into the weirdness of crosswords. He bought two newspapers, the Independent and the Guardian, every day, glanced at the news without too much interest, and then settled down to do both crosswords. At first I simply sat and watched him fill in the grids by some mysterious process. I watched as the tip of his pen moved from one white square to another, not forming letters, almost hearing him think. Then, in a flurry of writing, he would fill the squares and I would have no idea how he did it, how he locked one word into another. But he didn’t try to explain it until I asked him to.
“Okay. Look at this one: nineteen down. It’s quite easy. The clue says Artist up for prize, six letters. So what this tells us is that we have to find a six-letter word for artist that means something else when we write it backwards.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, because in a down clue, up tells us to turn the word upside down, which is the same as writing it backwards.”
“I see,” I said untruthfully.
“Okay. Can you think of another word for artist?”
“Um . . . painter?”
“Does that make a word when you write it backwards? Here, have the pen. Write it out. Is retniap a real word?”
“I don’t think so.”
“No. And it’s got seven letters, so it wouldn’t fit anyway. What might an artist do, as well as paint?”
“Draw?” I said.
“Ah! Good. Someone who draws might be a drawer, yes?”
I was confused, maybe thinking of the drawer I kept my dad in.
Grandad said, “Write drawer backwards. What do you get?”
“Reward.”
“Good! Now look at the clue again. What’s another word for prize?”
“Reward! Is that the answer?”
“Of course.”
He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn’t, as I’d thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed. Gradually I became a crossword freak.
“These people who make them up,” Grandad said, “the compilers, they all have their own little codes. You can learn these codes, break them, and that can lead you to the answer.”
“Show me. Give me an example, Grandad.”
“Okay. This one here,” he said, tapping the Guardian with his pen, “he is fond of using the language of maps. When he says going north in a down clue, it means the word is written backwards from the bottom to the top. Because north is always at the top of a map.”
“Like drawer and reward,” I said, remembering. “That could be Artist going north for prize, yeah?”
He leaned back in his chair, faking amazement. “Hey, that’s right. Well done. PE for the head, yes?”
Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It seems to me,” he said, “that your grandmother is talking to us in crossword clues these days. And unfortunately I am not clever enough to work many of them out.”
When there was no longer any choice, they took her away.
It was a bright, sharp October day, a month or so after my fifteenth birthday. When the social worker buzzed the intercom, Grandad made an awful wounded noise. I had to answer; he couldn’t. We eased Gran away from the cookery programme she was watching. In the lift Grandad kept taking deep breaths and I could hear them catch in his throat. Gran was serious-faced and excited because she knew that today she was the centre of attention and it had been a long time since she had gone anywhere special. Looking at her lit up like that, I was struck by how beautiful she must once have been. She still was, really, with that perfectly straight silver-white hair and those big, deep black eyes.
I was on half-term holiday, and the arrangement was that Grandad would go to the nursing home with her, and I’d go back to Mum’s. Grandad would come and have dinner with us when Gran was settled. But it didn’t
happen like that.
The social worker and the driver met us in the lobby. Gran seemed to think they were friends that she’d forgotten. The driver put the suitcase in the boot of the car and got behind the wheel. When I opened the back door for Gran, I could see that she’d decided something wasn’t right. Her eyes were flickering from side to side, a distress signal I recognized. So I held her hands and told her that everything was all right, feeling ashamed of myself. And eventually she got into the car and sat quietly next to Grandad. The social worker closed the back doors and got into the front passenger seat. Grandad wound down his window and began to say something to me. Then the driver let out this shocked howl because Gran had reached forward and grabbed his dreadlocks and was hauling his head back against the headrest. Her eyes were wild and she was showing all her teeth. The social worker tried to intervene but was hampered by her seat belt. Grandad was slow to react but at last got a grip on Gran’s wrists. She let go of the driver’s hair and threw herself back in her seat and started yelling.
Something in Dutch, then: “I know who you are! I’m not going with you!”
“Marijke,” Grandad said. “Please, my love, what’s the matter?”
“I’m not going with you! I’m staying with Tamar, here with Tamar.”
The social worker said, “It’s all right, Mrs. Hyde. Really. You can’t —”
She was cut off by Gran’s scream. It was a terrible, raw sound, not feminine, not even human, and the worst thing was that it was my name she was screaming.
Grandad’s head recoiled as if she had struck him physically, and he stumbled out of the car. “It’s you she wants,” he said. “Not me. Please. Christ.”
He stood with his hands open, banging them sideways against his legs, and the tears were unstoppable now. The driver had got out of the car and was rubbing the back of his head vigorously and saying “Shit, man” as quietly as he could manage.
I said, “It’s okay, Grandad. I’ll go with her if that’s what she wants. It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
By this time the social worker had got out too, and she said, “I don’t think that’s appropriate, really. It really ought to be Mr. Hyde . . .”
“You can see what she’s like,” I said.
Gran was alone in the car now, sitting bolt upright, pulling against the seat belt. Her eyes were still very wild and she was turning her head from side to side, trying to work out where the stationary car was taking her, looking for familiar landmarks along the imaginary route.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Grandad kept saying.
I didn’t know what he was sorry for: his tears, his wife’s behaviour, or something else altogether.
Eventually we decided that I would go with Gran in the car, and Grandad would follow in a taxi. We didn’t have mobiles in those days, so he went back up to the flat to call for the taxi. He was gone quite a long time. It was pretty edgy in the car, but I kept hold of Gran’s hand and she stayed fairly calm, just looking about. She even gave me a quick smile, but it was that twitchy kind of smile you find yourself doing when you accidentally catch a stranger’s eye on the tube. By the time Grandad came out again, the taxi was already pulling into the car park. Our car, the social-work car, set off. I looked back through the rear window and Grandad was standing next to the taxi watching us go. He still had his hands hanging by his sides, open and facing forward, as if to show us and everyone else that there was nothing in them.
The home we took Gran to was over in Chiswick. River Reach, it was called, although it wasn’t on the river. It was one of those huge houses originally built for Victorian millionaires, all turrets and twiddly bits of masonry and fancy brickwork. Above the front porch there was a two-storey-high stained-glass window. From the outside, it was a blank mosaic of lead and dirty glass. Inside, when you walked up the stairs, you could see that it showed angels carrying things — a ship’s wheel, an anchor, a coil of thick rope — in the general direction of heaven. At the top was a scroll with words in very elaborate writing that I couldn’t understand. Grandad said it was Latin, but he never got round to telling me what it meant.
When we went to River Reach that first time, it never crossed my mind that Gran would stay there for the rest of her life. I don’t mean that I believed she would get better. We’d all given up hope of that, I think. It was just that she looked so out of place; it was impossible to think that she could ever belong there. She was so bright-eyed and smart compared to the other residents, some of whom were pretty far gone, I’m sorry to say. If you’d seen us being shown round, you’d have thought that Gran was a visiting dignitary being taken on a tour of inspection: nervous and politely interested, but not quite sure why she was there.
The dayroom must have been a living room once upon a time. It was huge, with tall windows overlooking the garden. There were armchairs and wheelchairs backed against the walls. Some of the men and women sitting in them were slumped like puppets whose strings had been cut. Most were staring at a big TV set next to the empty marble fireplace. One or two sat up and brightened when they saw us, perhaps thinking we might’ve been their relatives coming to visit. There was a powerful reek of air freshener. A door opened onto what the nurse called the sun lounge. I suppose it would have been an open terrace originally, but now it was closed in with white plastic double glazing and full of easy chairs and houseplants. A wide ramp sloped down from the sliding doors into the garden. The air was full of a sound a bit like surf coming and going: it was the heavy breathing of the Great West Road half a mile away.
“It’s a shame you couldn’t have been here earlier in the year,” the nurse said. “The garden looks fantastic when the rhododendrons are in bloom.”
“Spectacular,” the social worker said. “You wouldn’t believe the colours.”
“That sounds nice, doesn’t it, Gran?” I said, and even saying that much made me feel like a traitor.
All the way through this tour, Grandad was making little humming noises like someone quietly agreeing with everything. Except that instead of nodding his head, he was shaking it from side to side.
I couldn’t imagine how we were going to leave Gran without her having a monumental fit. Or without Grandad cracking up. But as it turned out, it was no trouble at all. In the corridor going along to Gran’s room, we met a freckly sandy-haired woman, one of the staff, but not a nurse. Gran decided that she’d known this woman all her life. She greeted her like a long-lost friend and started talking nineteen to the dozen. The freckly woman was a bit startled at first — we all were — but got hold of the situation pretty quickly. When I pulled Grandad away towards the stairs, the two of them were sitting in Gran’s room, Gran in the chair chatting away in a mixture of Dutch and English, the cleaning lady or whoever she was sitting on the bed with one plump leg crossed over the other, baffled and smiling.
She went downhill quite fast. Partly because Grandad wasn’t there all the time to talk to her, I suppose. And he’d always been pretty obsessed with keeping up appearances; without his stubborn insistence on their old routines, on keeping things “normal,” she just got lost. The short periods when she was clear-headed got fewer and further apart. It’ll sound harsh, I suppose, but I’m sure that River Reach made her worse. Without being aware of it, probably, Gran adjusted her behaviour to fit in with the place. We all do that. Like at school: you find yourself going along with the rules automatically after a while, even though, when you stop and think about it, some of them are weird. At River Reach the rules were built around dementia. There’s also the possibility that Gran found her clear periods too awful to bear. I still find it terrifying to think about that. That there might have been times when she was sane enough to understand the full horror of what was happening to her, thinking she’d been the victim of some awful mistake. Like waking from a nightmare in a strange room only to find that you’re still in both.
Gran had started to forget English words long before she went to River Reach. Her English had never been perfect
like Grandad’s. She’d often search for the word for something, clicking her fingers impatiently, then give up and use the Dutch, which Grandad would translate for her. At first, the words she’d lose were slightly tricky ones, like transfer or disguise, so that was understandable. Then she started to forget ordinary words like window or shower or cushion. By the time I was fourteen or so, her two languages were leaking into one another continuously. I couldn’t tell, of course, if what she was saying still made some sort of sense. Judging by the look I sometimes saw on Grandad’s face, I don’t think they did, not always. After a couple of months in the home, she seemed to have lost English completely. And I never worked out if she could still understand when she was spoken to in English, either. She would respond to me sometimes, but I had no way of knowing if it had anything to do with what I’d said. The staff at River Reach did what English people do when they speak to foreigners: talk slowly and loudly in English, and mime. Funnily enough, Gran reacted quite happily to the nurses miming at her and drawing the shapes of things in the air. She’d often look livelier, a little more aware. Younger, even. When Grandad and I visited her together, he’d translate bits and pieces of her rambling chatter for me. She spoke my name lots, and when I caught it in among the Dutch, I’d ask him what she’d said. He always told me more or less the same thing.
“She says she loves you. She says she has always loved you.”
Which I believed, of course, even though when she looked at me she didn’t always seem to know who I was.
She started hiding food in her room. At first it was stuff we brought in for her: fruit, biscuits, cakes, that sort of thing. Then she began smuggling bits of lunch and dinner upstairs in her handbag. The staff soon caught on. They’d wait until Gran was in the dayroom, then go up and fish the pork chop or the omelette out of her underwear drawer or the wardrobe. Most of the time she didn’t seem to notice, or mind, but once, when I was there, she got very agitated. She grabbed Grandad’s sleeve as soon as we arrived and hissed a stream of Dutch at him.