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Rooms with Views

Ernst-Peter would occasionally accompany me to walk the dogs. In the first weeks I came to realise that we had a lot in common: our brains weren’t wired for the moment. My grasp of the language often faltered… by the time I’d worked out what was being said to me and constructed my response the moment had passed. As someone who likes to talk, hear stories and tell stories, this caused me profound frustration. With time, practice and effort my competence would, of course, improve. There was little chance that Ernst-Peter would regain his competence; Alzheimer’s is cruel in any language.

He loved the dogs; he’d throw sticks for them and feel around their ears for ticks – and he’d laugh a lot at Nel’s playfulness. Their names he couldn’t grasp; they were ‘the black one’ and ‘the brown one’. With Ernst-Peter we didn’t walk too far; sometimes he just wanted to walk around the block – which meant passing the field with the alpacas and the kangaroos; they always surprised him – and surprised the dogs. Some days we’d walk to the café by the watermill in The Netherlands for a coffee or a beer, and rice flan with cherries, Ernst-Peter’s favourite… or along the lake as far as the turtles – they were always in the same spot, basking in the sunshine on a partly submerged tree trunk. Nel would sit on the bank and look inquisitively at them; Wash would get confused when they slipped from their perch into the water and disappeared… Ernst-Peter’s fascination with them was a joy to see, but being with him often made me think about my mother’s last demented years.

I was always unsettled when she spoke directly with me in English. We’d always spoken Welsh together, unless we were in monoglot English company. Of course, she was fluent in both languages, but in English she’d speak with a pretentious telephone voice, pronouncing local people’s names and the near-by villages in a bastard idiom. Mindful that the gerontologist had advised us not to contradict her, or to do too much reality testing, which would merely exacerbate her confusion and make her more agitated, we’d just chat… about the weather, or how the pears that had mysteriously appeared in the fruit bowl were still too hard… that the grape skins on the red grapes were tougher than those of the green – although she preferred the red… or that Terry had been sitting with her – though he never said a word. Often she’d try to describe how dark the days were and how bright the nights could be, and for a while this had me baffled… until one day it dawned on me that her circadian rhythms were confounded by the oxygen-starved neurons, so typical of vascular dementia. Just once, in one of the frequent lulls of our fragmented conversations, I asked her why we weren’t speaking Welsh… and her watery, red-rimmed eyes fixed me in a probing stare, as if she was searching for some right answer that had escaped her.

“Terry hasn’t come home yet,” she says, even before a hello.

I dislike the playing-along-make-believe but that was the doctor’s advice.

“Has he been gone a long time?” I ask.

She says he went to work, as usual. Something has spilled down the front of her blouse, a violent red colour. I suggest that I help her change into a clean top. She insists that it’s not necessary.

“Do you think he’s alright?” she asks.

I assure her that Terry’s probably still at work and suggest again that we change her blouse… so that she’ll look nice when he returns. After just a moment’s pause, she concedes. Her arthritis-gnarled fingers fumble with the delicate mother-of-pearl buttons, and she snags a hangnail on the sheer gauze fabric.

“It’s stuck,” she says, tugging at the caught thread.

I free her finger from the pulled strand of cotton and open each button, explaining that I’ll trim her fingernails after changing her blouse. She’s wearing neither a vest nor a brassiere and seeing her wizened, blue-veined breasts,