The Little Girl in the Radiator: Mum Alzheimer's & Me (3 page)

As soon as mum went to bed that night, I
took all the pink toilet paper off the tree, and replaced it with the coloured
tinsel we had bought at Tesco. The tree still looked a little bizarre, but then
it would, I thought to myself, as I switched off the lights.

The next morning I went to work at 7am. Mum
was still asleep. When I came home at 4.30pm, she had obviously had a busy day
decorating the rest of the house. The first thing I noticed was one of my socks
pinned to the wallpaper in the hallway. This was not a Christmas stocking, you
understand, like one you might hang over the fireplace for the kids; it was an
ordinary blue sock, stuck right in the middle of the wall with a simple
dress-maker’s pin. I stared at it for ages, then went in and shut the door
behind me. Inside, I saw that just about every sock I possessed was pinned up –
some to the walls and others to the ceiling. Even a brown one with a hole in
the toe, which I had been meaning to throw out, was there.

Mum danced into the hall. ‘I’ve been putting
up the decorations!’ she cried, with a majestic sweep of her arms. ‘We’re going
to have a wonderful Christmas!’

‘I can see you’ve been busy,’ I agreed.

‘Peggy helped me,’ she said,
matter-of-factly.

‘Good for Peggy,’ I sighed. ‘Are you
hungry?’

‘I am
starving
!’ replied mum. ‘I
haven’t had a thing to eat all day long!’

‘I’ll make us something,’ I said, taking my
coat off, and wondering what I was going to use for socks tomorrow morning.

When I went into the kitchen, the fridge
door was wide open and its entire contents were strewn across the floor.
Bottles of milk, lumps of cheese, salad stuffs, butter. The fridge itself was
empty, except for two slices of bread lying side by side on one of the empty
shelves.

‘What’s all this?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been waiting all day for that bloody
toaster to work,’ said mum, ruefully.

We stared into the empty fridge together, at
the two slices of bread.

‘We’ll have to get a new one,’ said mum,
shaking her head.

‘You go inside and watch some television,’ I
said. ‘I’ll get the dinner ready.’

I put the contents of the fridge back, and
threw out the now-stale bread. Then I opened the oven door, took out two pairs
of mum’s shoes, put them away, and turned it on.

I am not a good cook. I can do a fairly
basic meat-and-two-veg, at a push, but nothing fancy. I put some oven chips in
and cracked some eggs into a pan. Suddenly there was a scream from the front
room.

I ran next door to find mum hiding behind a
cushion.

‘That thing has just gobbled up that poor
little boy!’ she screamed, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

I looked where she was pointing:
Jaws
was on telly.

‘It’s okay, mum,’ I said, putting my arm
around her. ‘It’s just a film.’

She was genuinely upset. ‘They shouldn’t let
things like that get into the swimming pool!’ she cried, now indignant. ‘I’m
going to write a letter to the council!’

This was the beginning of our letter-writing
period.

‘Okay, mum,’ I said, taking the remote
control. ‘Let’s watch something else.’

I changed the channel over to cartoons.
Jerry the cat was being chased around the kitchen, and was being whacked over
the head with an old-fashioned broomstick.

‘That’s better,’ I said, ‘you watch that.’

Mum’s tears quickly turned to laughter. I
could hear her still laughing as I returned to the kitchen. She enjoyed a good
cartoon as much as any child ever did.

On the kitchen table there was a dishcloth
and a pair of scissors. I held up the dishcloth, it had a perfect circle cut
out of the middle of it. The circle was pinned to the wallpaper, complete with
some unidentifiable brown stain in the middle of it. Next to it was a square
cut out of another towel. The towel had been replaced on the rail by the sink.
I didn’t bat an eyelid. It’s funny; you get used to almost anything.

Simple egg-and-chips later, we sat together
watching cartoons. Mum laughed out loud, and her laughter, always being
infectious, made me laugh, too. But as I sat there, I couldn’t escape a strange
feeling that was nagging away at me.
Something
was different in the
room, I had known that as soon as I sat down – I just couldn’t say what it was.
With half an eye on Daffy Duck, I looked around. Twenty-odd socks pinned to the
wallpaper and the ceiling… Yep, that was all as expected. Two cut-up towels
draped over the arm of the chair: yep, all normal, (for our house, anyway). I
couldn’t put my finger on it. Then it hit me.

‘What’s happened to the door?’ I yelped,
leaping out of the chair.

‘The man came and changed it,’ said mum,
casually.

‘What man?’ I shouted.

When I’d left for work that morning the door
between the living room and the conservatory my father had built years ago had
been a fairly modest affair – wooden, very plain and painted white. Now, I saw,
it had been replaced by a huge, brown, sliding, uPVC thing, with faux leaded
lights criss-crossing the window panes in small diamonds.

‘
What
man?’ I repeated, touching the
door, and sliding it back and forth to make sure it was real. Up close, I could
see that the plasterwork around the frame was new and freshly painted, too.
This would not have been cheap.

‘The man who came and changed the door, of
course,’ said mum. ‘Sit down, I can’t see the television.’

It may sound like a contradiction in terms,
but when you live with someone who has Alzheimer’s you get used to being
surprised. The most bizarre things suddenly happen, and yet you take them in
your stride as though they were an everyday occurrence in every home in the
land. But I must admit that this change in the back wall of the living room,
all in the few hours since I had left for work that morning, had thrown me a
bit.

‘But…but…’ I stammered, trying to work out
how I could possibly get to the bottom of this with only mum to supply the
answers.

‘Shh!’ she replied, impatiently waving me
away from in front of the screen.

‘How much money did the man ask you for?’ I
asked, timidly.

‘He didn’t ask me for anything,’ replied
mum.

‘Well, did he leave you any paperwork?’ I
asked.

‘I don’t think so. Ask Peggy.’

‘Did you know the man?’ I was now clutching
at straws.

Mum shook her head slowly. ‘He looked a bit
like Richard.’

‘Uncle Richard?’ I asked.

‘Mmm, but a lot shorter.’

This was getting me nowhere. I began to
search the kitchen for an invoice, an estimate for the work, a business card. I
couldn’t find anything.

A few days later a bill for £4,000 arrived
in the post. I nearly fainted when I opened the envelope, but at least I could
begin to piece the jigsaw together. It seemed that, a few weeks ago, a
double-glazing salesman had called to the house while I was at work. Mum had
agreed to his suggestions and signed the work order, and promptly forgot all
about it. When the workman turned up to do the job, mum just let him get on with
it. She liked him and trusted him, because he looked a bit like Uncle Richard
(only shorter), and when he had gone away mum had forgotten all about that,
too.

I telephoned the company. I was on the line
for about 20 minutes; I won’t bore you with the details of each conversation I
had with the receptionist, the sales department, the works department, and the
accounts department, and the supervisors of each of those; suffice it to say
that I got pretty much nowhere. I tried to explain to them, as I had to the two
men in our front garden a few weeks previously, that my mother was not able to
enter into a legal contract, and therefore could not be held accountable for
the order they had received from her, as she didn’t understand it. They all
simply insisted that due process had been followed, the works order had been
signed by the customer, she had been given two weeks to change her mind, and
since she had not returned her form to cancel the order the work had been
carried out; now we owed them the money. In frustration, I eventually hung up.

I felt as though my mother had again been
violated in some way by a system that took no notice of her obvious condition.
I felt violated for her… I felt angry and used; it was almost as though she had
been mugged in the street. In the end I simply scrawled across the invoice
‘WORK NOT LEGALLY REQUESTED’ and sent it back to the firm.

When you deal with large organisations whose
paperwork is primarily generated by a computer, the human element seems to get
mislaid somewhere in the mix. The following week, I received the same invoice
again, and I returned it in the same way. Christmas came and went, and the
requests for the money, and my rejection of the invoices flew back and forth
between us like a tennis ball. Eventually, a notice of court proceedings
dropped onto the doormat around February. Below is my reply. The letter has not
been changed at all, except that I omit my mother’s address and the name of the
company concerned for obvious reasons.

Dear Sir,

It seems I have to write to you to
explain in plain and simple language what your sales representative should have
been able to see with his own eyes.

The lady with whom you state you have a
sales contract is in fact an 80 year-old Alzheimer’s patient, living at home,
and completely unable to comprehend the terms or implications of such a
contract. Because she is not ‘compos mentis’ she is not held responsible in law
for the terms of any contract she enters into. In fact, I, as her son, have her
sole Power of Attorney for exactly that reason, so that any legal contracts
have to be agreed and signed by me in order for them to become binding on her;
I have given no such consent at any time to your company.

If you wish to pursue this matter
further through the courts, then I suggest you prepare yourself and your
company to be portrayed in the public press as the kind of outfit that
browbeats elderly, defenceless mental patients into parting with their life
savings for home improvements they neither need nor require.

I look forward to hearing from you in
due course,

Yours faithfully,

Martin Slevin.

We never heard from them again, and I felt I
had achieved a little victory for Alzheimer’s patients and their families
everywhere.

That said, I must admit that it was a very
nice door.

ON THE MONDAY BEFORE that Christmas, I
came home from work to find mum sitting in one armchair in the living room
watching television, and a great featherless and headless bird sitting in the
other armchair, as though watching the box with her.

It had been positioned in the armchair the
right way up, so that its enormous, drumstick legs pointed down, and it was
resting with its back against a cushion facing the TV screen. It had been
placed there while frozen, but it had begun to thaw out and a great wet patch
was now spreading out behind and below it across the fabric of the chair.

‘What’s this, mum?’ I asked, expecting her
to explain to me how some long lost relative had come to stay with us for
Christmas, or something like that.

‘It’s our Christmas turkey, of course,’ she
replied, as though I was an idiot. ‘I got him from the supermarket this
morning. I couldn’t resist him. Isn’t he smashing?’

There was a paper tag on one of the
creature’s legs which announced proudly:

GIANT CHRISTMAS GOOSE.

WILL FEED TWELVE PEOPLE.

The damned thing was the size of a
Rottweiler.

‘How the hell did you get it home?’ I asked,
struggling under the weight of the mighty bird as I hauled its frozen carcass
off the armchair.

‘A man gave me a lift back,’ she said.

‘What man?’ I asked.

‘He looked like your Uncle Bernard,’ replied
mum. ‘Only fatter.’

A feeling of
déjà vu
swept over me.
Her eyes never moved from the television screen.

‘Never mind,’ I sighed. I wasn’t going
through all that again.

I hauled the huge goose into the kitchen and
threw it onto the floor. It landed with a sloppy splat like some sort of
suicidal nudist, with splinters of ice flying up into the air. I looked at our
small fridge. Shaking my head, I knelt down and took out most of the contents
and two shelves. I could just about get the goose in now, but I couldn’t shut
the door. I sat back and sighed. I’d not expected to spend the evening
wrestling with a headless 25lb bird. Like I said, it’s amazing what you get
used to.

I hauled it out again, put the fridge back
together and wondered what to do next. Christmas Day was still nearly a week
off, and unless I could cold-store this thing somewhere it wouldn’t be fit to
eat. I checked our small freezer: it was also full. (I established this by
quickly pulling out the three drawers, one after the other, seeing they were
stacked, and shoving them closed again, without examining their contents. Only
later did I discover it was actually packed with 50 packets of chocolate
biscuits; but that’s another story.)

I thought about the people I knew who might
have a fridge large enough to take a giant goose, but I couldn’t think of
anyone. I began to walk about the house looking here and there for inspiration,
and found myself in the garage. Like so many people, we never put our car in
there, even through the harshest winters; instead, we left it sitting all night
in the street, and filled the garage instead with a lifetime’s collection of
useless junk and worthless memorabilia. My old school reports (must try
harder), rolls of carpet (must get this cleaned), a mostly cracked, china
dinner service (must glue this all back together one day), my dad’s tools (you
never know when you’ll need an Allen key), the lawnmower we no longer needed
after dad had paved the lawn...

Dad’s tools! I spun around and spied his old
saw; it was a bit rusty now, but if I sawed the goose into quarters, perhaps
people would be able to store it for me then? I picked up the rusty saw and
waved it about me like it was Excalibur. Then a little voice in my head told me
I would probably poison the both of us if I used it on the bird. Back to the
drawing board.

It was bitterly cold at night that winter…

A few moments later I stood back and admired
my ingenuity. The goose was sitting on a wooden garden chair next to a small
round garden table. We used to take our meals out there in the summer. It could
sit outside, the temperature would be cold enough and the meat wouldn’t go off;
it was too big for a stray cat to drag away in the middle of the night. I
smiled: another problem solved.

* * * * *

After supper in the evenings, mum and I
would watch television together and chat. I remember our talks together as
being some of the nicest times we shared, even if the conversations were a bit
off the wall.

She would tell me all the events of her day,
while I had been at work – about the cowboys on their magnificent horses who
had driven great herds of cattle past our window as they went up the street,
about the burning plane that had crashed in our front garden, and about the
great ship that had sunk in the middle of the road outside.

At first, I thought these stories were
simply the Alzheimer’s sharpening her imagination, and presenting her with
fascinating delusions. Later – after the
Jaws
incident – I realised she
was only relating to me whatever she had been watching on the television
earlier in the day. The cowboys were from an old western movie, the plane crash
from a war film, the ship was the
Titanic
, and so on. When she watched a
movie she lost the ability to separate fact from fiction, and the events of
those films became real to her, as though they had actually played out for
real, in the street outside, or even inside the house itself. It got to the
point where I would listen carefully to her account of the events of her day
and then try to guess the film she had been watching. After she had gone to
bed, I’d check the TV listings in the paper; I was right more than once.

It is terribly emotionally draining to watch
the daily mental deterioration of a person you have loved all of your life.
It’s like witnessing a daily robbery, where each time another precious piece of
their mind is stolen, and no matter what steps you take it can never be
recovered. It’s irreversible: once it’s gone, it’s gone. To watch a once-keen
and sharp mind become steadily confused and blunted, to witness mental
dexterity disappear like the water from a leaking pot, tears your soul in two.
The anger and frustration you feel as a helpless bystander to this awful crime
leaves you in shreds.

We were watching TV after supper one
evening, and mum leaned over and looked at the radiator which ran the length of
the back wall of the living room. I watched as she smiled lovingly at it, and
nodded once or twice. Her lips moved as though she were saying something, and
then she nodded her head again. Then she looked back at the television. I had
seen her do this before but had never remarked upon it. Whereas in a healthy
person it would have caused a mild alarm, with mum it was almost insignificant.
But her attention to the radiator had been growing in frequency as the weeks
had passed, and I thought I needed to say something.

‘What are you doing, mum?’ I asked, gently.

Her cheeks flushed red in embarrassment, and
she shook her head but did not reply: she looked as though she had been caught
doing something she shouldn’t, something that was to be kept secret even from
me.

‘What’s wrong with the radiator?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Then why are you talking to it?’ I said, trying
not to make the question sound like an interrogation.

She shook her head again, and said nothing.

We continued to watch television that night,
programme after programme. Out of the corner of my eye I would secretly watch
her move her head ever so slightly towards the radiator, and smile. She would
whisper something I couldn’t hear, and then suddenly turn back to the TV if she
thought I was watching. It became a game between us: could she talk secretly to
the radiator more times than I could catch her?

In the end I had to get to the bottom of
this.

‘Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with
the radiator, mum?’ I asked.

She shook her head again.

‘Go on, tell me. I won’t tell anyone else,’
I whispered. I think by now this radiator game had become a fascinating battle
of wills.

‘She’s asked me not to!’ exclaimed mum, with
tears filling her eyes. ‘When you give your word to someone, you should always
try and keep it.’

‘Who’s asked you not to say anything?’ I
said.

Again she shook her head.

‘You can tell me, mum,’ I urged.

‘The little girl in the radiator,’ she said.

I thought about this for a moment.

‘Why doesn’t she want you to tell anyone?’

After a long silence, in which mum seemed to
be weighing a problem in her mind, she turned away from the television to face
me.

‘Because she’s all alone in there,’ she
said, the tears springing from her eyes. ‘She’s trapped and she’s frightened,
and I don’t know how to help her.’

I went across the room and put my arm around
her. She sobbed into my shoulder.

‘What can I do to help?’ I whispered.

‘You’re not supposed to know,’ she sobbed.

‘Tell her you’ve told me,’ I said, ‘and tell
her I can be trusted not to tell anyone else. Tell her I might be able to
help.’

Mum nodded and wiped her eyes, but continued
to face the television. Then I saw her turn her head, and have a long
conversation with the little girl in the radiator. I pretended not to notice.
Then she turned back to me.

‘She says it’s all right for you to know,’
said mum, quietly.

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘How can I help her?’

‘You could let her out!’ cried mum, and the
tears came again.

‘Tell her, I said it’s okay, she can come
out,’ I replied.

We hugged again.

Mum put her hand on the lukewarm radiator
and began to whisper to the little girl trapped in there.

Eventually she looked back at me. ‘It’s not
that simple,’ she whispered.

It’s funny how easily you can get caught up
in another person’s delusion, especially if you happen to live with them. After
that night, I found myself talking to the little girl in the radiator with mum
on many occasions. We would have three-way conversations, mum, the little girl
and I, although the little girl never once spoke directly to me, always
addressing me through mum.

I have no idea whether this practice was
good for my mother’s mental wellbeing or not. A psychiatrist might say that I
was strengthening the delusion by playing along with it, but what was my
alternative? If I told mum there was no little girl living inside the radiator,
that a child could not possibly be trapped inside a hot water system two inches
wide, she would have thought I was either too blind to see or too insensitive
to care; the delusions of Alzheimer’s do not require logic in order to grip
their owner and hold them fast. The little girl
was
trapped in there,
and mum had agreed to help her; if I was to help mum, then I had to join in
too. To do otherwise would have driven a wedge between us, and that was
something I did not want to risk; this way, at least, we were able to share our
time together. So together, we spoke every night to the little girl in the
radiator, and slowly over the following weeks, the little girl’s sad and
pitiful history began to unfold.

Mum went to bed around nine-thirty that
particular night, which was very early for her. She said that talking to the
little girl in the radiator had tired her, and made her upset. It was a
terrible thing to be so cruel to a child, she said, and she couldn’t understand
how anyone could do such a thing.

I watched some more telly, and then surfed
the internet for an hour or so, chatting online with friends. When I felt
sleepy, I began my nightly inspection of the house before retiring. I made sure
all the windows were closed, and locked the front door. I stood on a chair to
take down a pair of socks from the woollen forest festooning the living room
ceiling to wear tomorrow for work, and I looked out into the back garden and
made sure the goose was still sitting in the garden chair.

It was there: everything was normal.