Look, when I made a wish on an eyelash to be Little Dorrit, I didn’t mean be her in real life, I meant to be her on the telly. So what am I doing dutifully folding my father’s shirts whilst he reclines on the bed making demands for drinks and little things to amuse him? I fetch his shoes, I carry his stick, I worry after him when he wants to climb the stairs. He isn’t allowed out, except to the garden, his marshalsea yard, from whence he sends me to the shop to buy a paper and a ‘lucky dip’. Yes, another disconcerting new habit: minor gambling. He explains it as ‘I’ve broken my arm, I’ve got cancer, if I could win a million pounds I’d have something to leave my children.’ However, since these slips lie, accumulating, ignored in his wallet, it’s unlikely he’d ever know if he had won anything.
It occurred to me today, as I was making his bed, that once he’s dead, I won’t experience being loved like that ever again. I never thought about it before, but there is something about his unconditional love and admiration that is so consistent I’ve always taken it for granted. This is the cleverest man I know, and he thinks I’m clever! I can’t do crosswords – I feel bright if I’ve managed a word-search; chess is beyond me, in fact I have no patience for puzzles at all. I certainly don’t feel under any obligation to complete any such mental gymnastics to feel I’ve achieved something in the day. I don’t read maths for fun, or know any dead languages. I know my mother loves me, but she can also see my shortcomings. My father is blind to these. To him I am beautiful, clever, gifted, faultless.
He may have taken on some of William Dorrit’s characteristics, but I’d like to paint a kinder picture than that. Of course, he’s decided he’s Hamm from Endgame. Glad his self-image is that of the existential hero.
In some moments I feel like I’m the entire entourage of George III, trailing after him as time brings another whim each minute: ‘garden’, ‘some morphine’, ‘a glass of water’ , ‘my book!’, ‘I need my pen from the attic’, ‘not that one’, ‘crossword’, ‘ryvita’, then silent agony when he thinks he’s fucked up his morphine spreadsheet. God knows what inner torment this brings. He won’t explain the problem. He won’t be helped. ‘It’s too annoying’ apparently. But he doesn’t understand why he can’t print from the laptop, which is not connected to any printer. Nor will he be told.
An endless stream of health professionals trail through the house. My father has a spreadsheet for these too. He gives them marks. These aren’t numerical, but adjectival. When I’m in charge of the keyboard they are things like ‘dreamy’, ‘lovely’, ‘incredible lantern jaw’, ‘special needs’. When he is able to type himself they are more like ‘fool’, and ‘idiot’.
I find his aristocratic air when dealing with these people, particularly the carers, amusing and alarming. He is under the illusion that it is more important for a tea to be brought to my mother in bed than it is for him to have help dressing. In fact he is remarkably polite; only losing his patience once, when one of them insisted it is safer to walk downstairs backwards.
My mother thinks he is the smartest dressed out-patient in the hospital. This would be true if eccentricity was equal to smartness. He is keen on a pale blue nightshirt with white polka dots for daywear, corduroy trousers, a pastel multi-coloured stripy poncho on top, and a rather ‘ethnic’ red and blue skull cap. Along with the black eye from his ptosis surgery, and sling for the broken arm, he is quite a picture. Perhaps the red socks and Birkenstock sandals are a little de trop.
My mother also thinks that she is Mrs Manningham in Gaslight, to my father’s Mr Manningham: his behaviour bringing her own sanity into question, as objects disappear, get lost, or move mysteriously from one room to another.
My brother, however, pisses himself at my father’s, when-your-back-is-turned- hyperactivity, calling him Andy from Little Britain. The guy in the wheelchair who leaps about when no one’s looking.
Yesterday, my father and I were filling in a feedback form for the out of hours GP service. You’ve got to find something you can do together and I totally love forms. I usually don’t send them. It’s the box ticking that’s satisfying. Isn’t that why people want to be teachers? So they can tick registers?
It came to the final question – ‘how satisfied overall where you with the care you received?’ with a choice of four answers. I think we chose ‘satisfied’, but my father insisted I add a note to this: ‘see King Lear’. Dutifully, his Cordelia added these words, whilst declaring that perhaps this wasn’t totally appropriate behaviour for a man who wants to remain on the outside of healthcare institutions as much as possible. He said he remembered discussing Lear with his father towards the end of his life. ‘Poor man,’ he had said, ‘he had three daughters’. Oldness and infirmity doesn’t turn you into a nice person. If you’ve behaved horribly to your family all your life, you’re not going to change the habit when you start feeling crap, are you?
Anyway, dad has got his left handed typing more up to speed now, and has started making incomprehensible entries on his own blog. Now I'm thinking he fancies himself as a new Joyce. And in new trousers from Primark, he can fancy himself full stop.