Escaping the ramblings of broken minds

JOE BENNETT

‘You know you’re old,’’ says my mother, ‘‘when you see your grandmother’s hands on your lap.’’

The comment surprises me. It seems to come from nowhere. But I look down at her hands, lying half furled on the tartan rug that’s wrapped around her hips and legs. The hands are the claws of a bird. The skin is softened by hand cream, but discoloured by age and thin like bird skin. Beneath it lie the worm-cast squiggle of black veins and beneath them the fan of tiny ancient bird bones.

‘‘I didn’t understand that when I was a girl,’’ she says and she continues to stare at her hands as if they were a clue to some cosmic mystery.

We are sitting in a park near the nursing home in the south of England where my mother has spent the last 18 months in the vague haze of dementia. I am on a bench, she in a wheelchair parked with the brakes on.

When I left London this morning, the tops of the office buildings were lost in grey cloud, and here, 50 miles to the south, the same cloud muffles the afternoon. Early daffodils have dotted the grass bank, and a few purple crocuses. Fat wood pigeons coo and swoop and waddle and a pair of crows peck at the cricket square.

I played a few games here in my youth half a century ago and I say as much. My mother looks at me with rheumy 94-yearold eyes and I repeat my words. But she does not reply. It is hard to know what registers with her and what she misses. It is as though the connections that make us who we are fire only intermittently in her old and damaged head.

Sometimes, without warning, she comes out with apt and pithy comments, as above. At other times it’s nothing but fantasy or nonsense, a jumble of stuff about a neighbour who’s a professional poisoner, or that my brother has taken up residence in the nursing home in disguise. ‘‘Matter and impertinency mixed,’’ as they said of King Lear, ‘‘reason in madness.’’

We are in the park so as not to be in the lounge, the dread and overheated lounge, where perhaps two dozen formerly able adults sit or lie or slump in various stages of degeneration. The woman in the chair next to my mother’s lay awkwardly on her side, an arm and half her face contorted by a stroke. She muttered constantly into her armpit from one side of her mouth, muttered words that sounded as though they might make sense but that I couldn’t make out.

Her husband, who had come to visit, sat beside her drinking tea and paying her no attention whatsoever, preferring to beam across the room at any carers or other visitors who caught his eye.

‘‘Good afternoon,’’ he said to me when I arrived, ‘‘good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon. Such a lovely day. Lovely day.’’

‘‘Indeed,’’ I said, and then as if infected by his style, ‘‘indeed.’’

One resident tried to grab my arm as I went by. ‘‘You’ll take me to the garage, won’t you, Peter?’’ he said. ‘‘For my bike. We’ll have to hurry now. They’re closing soon. My bike.’’ His voice was plaintive like a child’s, urgent, desperate. He was pleading.

If I worked here no doubt I would get used to the ramblings of the demented, but I come from the common world of the uninjured and bring with me assumptions of meaning and coherence, of words importing something. These husks of people, these broken minds and

As we wheeled down the ramp from the front door, "yippee," she giggled, "we’re free."

bodies, these remnant shreds, these shrivelled toddlers, unnerve me.

And so, though my mother belongs among them, I felt impelled to wheel her out of there, if only for an hour or so, rugwrapped, bone thin, wisp-haired, appallingly fragile. And she was just as keen to go. As we wheeled down the ramp from the front door, ‘‘yippee,’’ she giggled, ‘‘we’re free.’’

A squirrel scampers across a patch between trees, its spine rippling like a sin-wave, a man in a green jacket throws a frisbee time and again for a delirious mongrel, a young couple walk hand in hand, he in a track suit, she in leggings and a puffer jacket, and they pause at the corner of the path to kiss, pressing firm flesh to firm flesh, and there is succour in the wholeness and the wellness of it all.

‘‘I’ll be back on Sunday,’’ I tell my mother as I leave her in the lounge an hour later, ‘‘for your birthday. I’ll be here for your birthday.’’ I kiss her gently on the lips and on the forehead. She says nothing, watches me leave. She is crying.