The calls that ease my guilt

I’d arranged a Skype call with my mother but the computer wouldn’t co-operate. It issued commands I didn’t understand. By the time I’d found someone half my age to solve the problem in half a minute, it was too late to Skype my mother.

But that was perhaps as well. For though I am generally of an equable disposition, quick to smile and slow to anger, forever patting dogs and toddlers, give me five minutes with a duff computer and my head boils and rage builds and suddenly I’m Krakatoa Joe. The words I speak are the ones my mother’s never heard me say.

Were it not for my mother I’d have no use for Skype. I don’t trust the fact that it seems to be free. The corporate world gives you nothing for free. I must be paying in some other and worse way. But my mother is dying demented on the other side of the world, and seeing her on screen from time to time eases the guilt.

I rang the rest home and apologised for missing the rendezvous and made another appointment. (Rest home. Ha. How language can creep up on you and make you lie. In the place where my mother lives there’s little rest. And it isn’t home. Home is where the inmates lived before they came there and where they all want to go back to. The hot-house lounge is full of sad, confused and wrinkled children all begging to be taken home, to be returned to a life that’s vanished.)

My mother has now journeyed beyond even that. She no longer seems to remember home. And her mad inventions have dried up – the poison plots, the U-boats under the floor. Her sap has all but sunk back down. She barely reacts to my sister’s visits. She barely speaks.

When she finally appeared on my computer screen, propped up on pillows in her high-sided cot, she looked more gaunt than ever, the flesh shrivelled from her face, her skin a glassy parchment, a few shreds of hair still clinging to her scalp.

I fluttered fingers to her as one would to a baby in a pram. I called her by name from ten thousand miles away, blew her kisses, said simple halfhonest things. She looked at the screen for a bit with vague and watery eyes, then looked away.

‘‘Her sap has all but sunk back down.’’

The carer had a thick foreign accent. ‘‘Look, Joy,’’ he said to my mother, repeatedly, ‘‘is video call. Who zat, Joy? Who zat?’’ She said nothing. I carried the computer around the kitchen to show her the dog, the fish tank, the bottle of wine I was drinking, anything that might spark a response. Nothing.

‘‘Who zat, Joy? Is your son. Who zat?’’ My mother turned to him. ‘‘Oh do stop talking,’’ she said. Her tone was rasping. She didn’t speak again and after a few minutes she fell asleep.

I thanked the carer, who turned out to be Romanian. They have all nationalities there. Pay is low, turnover high. ‘‘I’m sorry my mother was rude.’’

He laughed. ‘‘Is nothing,’’ he said. ‘‘Is all the time. No worry.’’

They feed my mother pills to ward off heart attacks or a further stroke. Some months ago, and tellingly, she started to refuse them. So they gave them to her as a liquid. She spat it out. Now they’ve taken to grinding the pills to powder and sprinkling it over her food, the salt of lifeextension. I don’t blame them. I expect they could get in trouble for not doing so. But oh the pointlessness of it. We can invent Skype. Can’t we let the dying die?