My heart is thumping as she tells me.
She’d been in the garden, trying to pull out the dandelions from among her sprouting forget-me-nots, when she’d started to feel a bit sick. So she’d come indoors to get some water and then her vision had started to go hazy and she was seeing wavy lines. Recognising this as classic migraine, after having them for years, and feeling her head start to ache, she’d called Mo to put her off coming round for supper. But when she tried to speak to Mo, her words came out backwards.
Mo called an ambulance and came straight round. They both now thought my mother was having a stroke, and the paramedics clearly agreed as she was whisked off to A&E – ‘such nice young people, couldn’t have been kinder’ – where she had various tests and a CT scan, which showed that in fact she hadn’t had a stroke, and they concluded, according to my mother, that it probably was just a migraine after all.
By now she could talk normally again and they told her migraines could affect speech and that if she hadn’t tried to make the phone call she might never have known. The relief made my mother feel better immediately and she went home, took painkillers and had a better night’s sleep than she usually did, feeling fine by the next day, although the hospital wanted her to have a second, different, sort of scan, just to make sure, so she had gone for that when she got back from Poole, and seen a neurologist.
‘And?’ I prompt as she is silent again. ‘What did he say?’
The room is getting darker and my mother rises from her chair and walks slowly across the carpet and turns on the standard lamp she’s had all my life. Then she sits down again and I see the distress in her eyes. ‘I had wondered,’ she says. ‘But it was still a terrible shock.’
‘What?’ I ask softly, my mind racing through the possibilities. A stroke the first scan had missed? Cancer? A brain tumour? ‘Tell me.’
‘Oh Tess,’ my mother says, with tears in her eyes. ‘I’ve got some sort of dementia.’
‘My uncle had Alzheimer’s.’ Jinni opened a cupboard with one hand and reached into the tall fridge with the other. ‘It’s an absolute bastard.’
I sat at the enormous table in her vast stone kitchen, looking in awe at the battered range, deep butler’s sink and numerous drawers, as she deftly uncorked a bottle and put a generous white wine in front of me. I swallowed.
‘It’s not necessarily that – the damage is frontal-temporal only but I’ve been Googling and it doesn’t sound good. I don’t know how quickly …’ I stopped. ‘We’re waiting for an appointment with the consultant.’
Jinni looked back at me. ‘And she’s okay at home on her own?’
‘Her friend Mo is going in and out. And her partner, Gerald. Not that we’re allowed to call him that!’
I didn’t add that Mo had said she thought the days of my mother being left alone were numbered. I was still getting my head around it. Mo, sworn to silence until my mother had told me herself, had been on the phone for over an hour.
She’d been worried about my mother’s forgetfulness, peculiar statements and occasional lack of coherent speech for some time. But Gerald had appeared unbothered (‘typical man! They don’t notice anything unless it’s in a mini skirt’) and my mother had dismissed her concerns, while insisting I was due to visit any day, so Mo had hoped I’d turn up soon and pick up on it myself.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I’d said guiltily.
‘Nothing to be sorry for, Pet,’ Mo interrupted me. ‘Wouldn’t have made a ha’pence worth of difference.’
It seemed nothing would. I was hanging onto the word ‘slow’ I’d found on the internet. A slow, degenerative neurological condition. Perhaps it would take a long time and my mother would stay at this stage, where she lost her train of thought and stood staring. Maybe all the other horrors I couldn’t bear to imagine, listed under symptoms and outlook, happened to other people’s mothers and not mine.
I hadn’t told the kids yet. I told myself it was best to wait till we’d had the full prognosis, but really I couldn’t bear to say the words out loud.
I wouldn’t have told Jinni if she hadn’t looked at me so directly and said I seemed upset.
‘She looks normal,’ I said. ‘She sounds the same, but there’s this …’ I stopped, struggling to put my finger on it. ‘Lack of interest …’
I’d shown her photos of the house, suggested dates for her to come and stay. Usually she’d have been on her diary like a tramp on a kipper.
Now she nodded with distance in her eyes.
‘She’s afraid too,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what will happen. Alice is already talking about carers but Mum says she just wants to keep everything normal for as long as she can …’
I’d read about people with mothers who’d simply gone a bit doo-lally and couldn’t be trusted with a gas supply, but who were happy enough in their own little world. I’d tried to picture my mother like this and failed.
Then I’d found horror stories of aggression and incontinence and smashed furniture, and switched off the computer, unable to bear the tales of rage and tears and family breakdown.
‘But I don’t know how long that will be …’ I said.
Jinni shook the plaster dust from her hair. ‘Come and see a fireplace.’
I followed her obediently up a wide staircase to a bare back bedroom overlooking her tangled garden. A large chunk of ceiling was missing.
‘Look!’ She waved an arm at a pretty iron grate surrounded by flowered tiles. ‘Victorian! Been boarded up.’ She kicked at the sheet of painted hardboard she’d hacked away from the chimney breast. ‘Philistines!’
She threw open one of the cupboards either side of the chimney breast. ‘It’s the third one I’ve uncovered. Don’t you just love all this storage?’
‘It’s going to be gorgeous,’ I said, looking around at the long windows and cornice work, grateful to be distracted.
‘Yeah,’ Jinni pulled a face. ‘If I don’t drop dead of exhaustion first. I’m knocking through here to make an en suite.’ She slapped a palm against the wall. ‘If you ever want a stress-buster, grab the sledge hammer.’
Back downstairs, my fingers curled around the leaflet in my pocket. The reason I’d plucked up the courage to bang on Jinni’s door.
‘Did you get one of these?’ I held out the flyer for a Wine and Wisdom evening for the local theatre group. Individuals welcome! ‘Do you fancy going?’
Jinni stiffened. ‘Eurgh. Those am-dram types get on my wick – all emoting and “getting in the zone” as if they’re Dench or Olivier – and if I see Ingrid once more this week, I might swing for her.’
She took a large mouthful of wine. ‘She’s the bane of my bloody life. Still objecting to my change-of-use application on all sorts of insane grounds and she’s been up and down the street trying to get everyone else to protest as well.’
‘She put a note through my door about it,’ I told Jinni uncomfortably. ‘Said she was worried about extra vehicles and you chopping down trees.’
Jinni scowled. ‘Don’t listen to that environmental crap,’ she said. ‘It’s sour grapes. Her creepy son tried to buy it before I managed to. I outbid him. That’s the real reason the old witch is so bitter and twisted.’
‘Oh!’ I waited while Jinni took another swig from her glass. ‘What was he going to do with it?’