The reality is, however, that she has now outlived every single person she ever knew, even her sister, who up until 95, you will be disappointed to know, still smoked forty a day, never had a days illness and only just gave up driving, if only because she couldn’t see over the dashboard anymore. She died of boredom eventually. Never were two sisters less alike. What has kept my mother alive this past half century is prescription drugs, (lots of drugs.) The NHS would be probably half a billion better off if had ceased to supply all the heart pills, gout pills, liver pills, blood pressure pills, bladder pills, balance pills, blood thinning pills, all of which she takes in a strict regime throughout the day, alongside sprays, ointments and sundry potions. Never has someone who professes to be so tired of living demonstrated such determination to outlive everyone on earth. She has survived blot clots, heart attacks, anxiety attacks, allergies (the list of things she is allergic to grows daily) and major crashes and falls. Falling is her big thing. I have personally witnessed her doing a somersault in a car park and falling between two floors and somehow getting wedged between them until the fire department came to free her. She has had pneumonia, malaria, scarlet fever, measles, and a host more illnesses, and lived through everything. She is, with the aid of the full resources of the NHS, indestructible. I am at a loss to explain this. I admit to getting the odd headache, I suspect caused mostly by having to look after my aged mother. In actual fact, I would say I must be the only member of my family who really does have a genuine deathwish. It doesn’t help me at all to know that there are 1.9 million others in the UK in the same boat. Kids and relatives having to care for an army of elderly infirm parents that the State will not accommodate. Everyone lives too long now. I shoved a copy of Logan’s Run under her nose the other day, just as a reminder that she has gone well past her expiry date. ‘I can’t read, it gives me a headache.’ But she can and does watch every episode of CSI, NCIS, Midsomer Murder, Perry Mason, Columbo and Ghost Whisperer, not to mention every ‘Friends,’ episode they ever made – all on mute! Murder by sub-title. I don’t get it myself. TV without sound is wallpaper. She is hard of hearing but, of course, refuses to wear a hearing aid. She refuses a lot of things. It is not entirely clear to me as to why people want to live so long, given that they are so ill. I just know that if I felt as badly as the women did in my family, I’d rather end it all. Perhaps this is the difference between the sexes. Men do give up faster than women, a statistical fact. Women seem to desperately cling onto life, even though it may have no meaning. My mother’s sole raison d’être is to see Prince Charles become King, but, as I point out, he is quite likely to be outlived by his mother, as indeed may I, and it will be Will or Harry, or even their kids the way things are going. However, I made a deal with my mother, back in 2006 when she was particularly frail and had to come and live with me. And this is our terrible secret. She said, ‘If I’m still here when I’m 90, take me out back and shoot me.’ She said it and meant it and guess what, she had that fateful birthday, two months ago. That’s the bargain. She got four years of me making porridge in the morning and emptying commodes and pushing wheelchairs and basically hiding myself upstairs whilst she pressed the channel changer with religious fervour, cursing Freeview because there’s ‘nothing on’ or it doesn’t have sub-titles. There is something surreal about watching someone mirthlessly watching The Simpson’s on mute. It is unnerving. When she arrived here she promptly fell, hard. Tried to pick a flower in the garden and landed smack on her face. She had concussion for a month and has never been right since. The living room is a bedroom now, and there is a new downstairs bathroom to keep her happy (although happy is a relative term). The house, being a cramped railway cottage, is neither comfortable or practical. She does not give up though. She has her hair done every week; the clothes are still smart and cared for. Pride is a huge issue and will be the last thing to go even though her feet are her greatest despair. Lack of mobility is an issue and an eternal frustration. This more than anything makes her angry. Mother came into this world as the seventh daughter to a seventh daughter, born in Calcutta to a Colonel in the British Raj. Her first twelve years were pretty idyllic. Grand mansion, hot and cold servants, summers in the mountains, Christmas at the Maharaja’s Palace. But something was amiss with the Colonel’s marriage and it was this, rather than the ‘writing on the wall’ for India that made him suddenly ship his family off to the Essex, just in time for the depression and World War Two. Note he happily went back to India, leaving all his girls completely unprepared for life in a cold climate. The mother was slightly deranged, certainly cruel and had no idea how to handle accounts and they lived like impoverished strangers in an alien world. My mother foolishly married the first man who came along to get away from her mother. As did the rest of her sisters. It didn’t last. He was obsessively jealous and paranoid. She ran first chance she could, but was already pregnant. The second marriage came after the war and although materially satisfactory, it could have been happier and my father died of a heart attack at forty-four. Apparently he had warned her he’d die young. A gypsy had foretold it and I suppose he let it come true. My mother has now been a widow for forty-three years. Back in 1965 being a widow was a lot like being buried alive. No one would let an attractive widow near their husbands and the whirl of dinner parties stopped dead. So she did something radical. Sold up and moved to Africa. For a while she found happiness in a warm climate. But now, here she is, past her ninetieth and all that keeps her alive are the pills and the memories. Some memories are good, her acting days with many lead roles in Sheridan or Wilde plays and starring in a production of ‘Showboat’. Some bad. Perhaps she regrets the time she went for Christmas at Victoria Falls and spent three days being shelled by Mugabe’s freedom fighters. She might regret the man she met and fell for, a very witty man who was killed by a drunk driver or the awkward time when her youngest daughter stole her new boyfriend. Competing with your kids takes its toll. And here’s the rub. She remembers it all. No matter how ill she gets, she has never lost her mental faculties, not for a moment. Clearly, despite our ‘agreement’ one cannot just take one’s mother out into the garden and shoot her. There are laws, health and safety for one thing and despite the advocacy of good composting, it isn’t done in Hampshire to dispose of unwanted mothers in this way So we have discussed going to ‘Holland’. It’s a solution. Mercy-killing there is painless and more importantly legal. You can go with dignity and if you have to go, dignity is best. I try to keep it light. It’s slightly ironic, but one can only go there if one is ‘well’. It would have to be between the usual bouts of whatever attacks she suffers from and there’s more than a few. This is the worm of ‘euthanasia’, that for it to be legal, the subject in question has be ‘compos mentis’ and well enough to travel. There are very few opportunities for the latter. The Netherlands is a much more humane and civilised place than the UK. They understand the importance of a painless exit from this earth. A few pills, one injection and you’re out of the picture. No anxiety, no mess. Sign here; next stop, the furnace. Shedding of tears optional. Things came to a head in January. I had booked the next July off to look after a friend’s farmhouse near Bayonne in France. She would have to come with me as no one would look after her for that length of time. I told her it would be warm; she’d love the dog and the cat and just sitting out there under the grapevine… She had just had her birthday, which hadn’t gone well due a family row over the right way to cook beef. (You’d be surprised at just how violent a family row can be over something as simple as bunging a joint in the oven). Either way, by the end of it, everyone was either in tears or sulking and I’d stormed out vowing never to let my sister back in the house ever again. (A rather too regular scenario I admit). It was the day after this event that she said, ‘You haven’t booked a place in France at all. You are planning to take me to Holland.’ At once I could see my sister had been dripping her poison. It is what sister’s are for, you might say, but bloody annoying after the beef incident. Suddenly she was now obsessed I was going to kidnap her and take her to Holland against her will. In fact everytime we got into the car to go the Doctor’s (a frequent event) or a quick spin to Waitrose, she’d grimly smile and say, ‘You can’t take me to Holland, I haven’t got a passport.’ Sometimes I’d laugh, sometimes I’d tell her I faked her signature and the passport was due back any day now. My mother had developed a serious antipathy to Holland and the Dutch by now. My sister had been working at it in her daily phone calls, around 16 a day. She only sees my mother once a year, but supervises her daily life by phone from her ivory tower in South London whilst I am at work. Anyway, it was approaching Easter, the atmosphere at home was tense, to say the least and I had to stay home because no one would come in to look after her. Even for money. Did I mention the diet? She has to have meat for every meal, green veg and mashed potato with thick gravy. Must be thick. The slices of bread must be thin. Everyday she will say, ‘you give me too much,’ and she will eat it all. Day in and day out. She is allergic to fish and yes, it would be so much more simple to slip the odd prawn in her porridge, but the doctor would know. She hasn’t eaten out since 1989, when a chef used a knife that had seen fish to cut some beef. Next thing you know, pandemonium: panic attacks, swelling and hospital. Even crisps make her lips swell and doctors have to be called. So, it was with some surprised that she spoke to me when I plonked her sausage and mash in front of her on the day before Good Friday. ‘It’s time. We’ll go on Monday,’ she said. ‘Go?’ ‘Holland.’ I blinked. Was she ill? ‘It’s time to go. I’m sick of the pain.’ ‘I’ll get your pills.’ ‘The pills don’t work anymore.’ This was a first. Alert the media, I thought. Seizing the moment, I checked ferry schedules (she wouldn’t go by the tunnel). There was one every hour from Dover. She still didn’t have a passport, but a call to the 24 hour Passport Hotline revealed that if she went to London, sat in a long queue for a day and was very visibly in a wheelchair, they might take pity on her. It was good to know the ‘premium service’ still existed in these days of cutbacks. She was entitled to a free one being born before1929, but would still have to pay for the fast service. I took Monday off. We left at 6am to make sure we got through Hindhead tunnel works in under an hour. Remarkably we arrived at the passport office thirty minutes early and there were only fifty people ahead of us. She was quite downhearted and I knew at any moment she’d want to go home, but renewing a passport isn’t as hard as getting one from scratch and by noon, we had it. She was astonished at the price younger people had to pay. ‘My first house cost less than that,’ she remarked. Rather upset at the idea that she wasn’t exactly going to get much use out of her passport. Later we ate some sandwiches in the car. We went to a coffee shop so should could pee, but she wouldn’t drink in case they put fish in it. The whole world was in a conspiracy against her and apparently every café and restaurant worldwide lived for the moment they could put fish in her tea. It took a couple of days for her to recover from going to London and adjust to the wheels she had sent in motion. It was the Wednesday, when I got home early from work and I found the TV remote lying broken at the far end of the room. ‘I’ve seen that episode of Columbo 500 times,’ was all she said. ‘It’s time to go.’ ‘You sure? What do you want for supper? Sausages or gammon?’ ‘I don’t care.’ ‘Look I know you are upset about Grissom leaving CSI but I am sure he’ll be back. It’ll just be like when Bobby left Dallas. He’ll pop up in the shower next season. I’m sure.’ She interpreted this as sarcasm. She wasn’t sure Gibbs was back for good in NCIS either and been upset for weeks about that. ‘It’s nothing but repeats. They don’t make anything new anymore. When are we leaving?’ In the end, everything is about TV. You live long enough and everything is repeated. ‘What shall I pack?’ ‘Pack as if you were going on holiday.’ ‘I never go on holiday.’ ‘I know, but if you did. Pack as if people were going to see you in restaurants.’ ‘I never eat out.’ Sadly, so true. ‘Just pack what makes you happy. That cashmere sweater.’ ‘You shrunk it.’ ‘You put it in the wrong pile.’ ‘You shrink everything.’ I ignored her and went to make the gammon. She likes it with white sauce. I realised that the tricky part was making sure she didn’t mention anything about this forthcoming trip to my sister . She’d alert the police with great satisfaction, no doubt telling them I am about to murder ‘her’ mother. I’m sure the cops would like nothing more than to pile into the house arrest me and cart my mother off to a place of safety, where, they’d put fish in her tea and that would be that. The Daily Mail would like nothing more than a good middle-class mercy killing story. ‘We’re going on holiday to France. To see friends of mine.’ This was the story she was to tell, carers, cleaners and neighbour. The one with gerbils; we didn’t talk to the other neighbour. The story would even be true – for a few miles. ‘We’re going to stop at the Chateau in Belgium on the way. Nice people. You’ll like them,’ I told her. ‘Do they eat fish?’ I fixed a smile on my executor’s face. ‘They are more pasta people. Pretty good wine cellar, though. We’ll probably stay the night. We can take our own food, saves you moaning all the time.’ ‘Chateaus are cold,’ she remarked, looking up from her TV. Inspector Barnaby had discovered yet another pile of corpses in Hampshire. Suddenly she was an expert on Chateaux, but of course, she was right. ‘Well we wouldn’t want you to catch a cold, would we.’ ‘Won’t put me down if I have a cold,’ she declared. ‘You have to be well.’ Since being well was something she hadn’t actually experienced in fifty years she was, I felt, expecting a little much. ‘Did you arrange a doctor?’ She asked, when I presented her evening whisky. ‘Had one in mind for the last three years, actually.’ ‘Dr Van de Broek. He’s very pleasant. Met him in Biarritz with his daughter Babiche. You remember Babiche?’ She stared at me for a moment. The young blonde French girl who’d come to stay, whom she had been very rude to and practically sent away in tears. Perhaps a moment of karmic realisation dawned on her. I had been very fond of Babiche but she could not withstand the force of my mother’s monumental negativity. None had. None ever would. I just had to keep her sweet until I got her in the car. It was important to get her to the other side of the channel – it would be more or less inevitable once she was off British soil. ‘What about Sissy and Lou?’ ‘We discussed that, already. We say nothing and send them a letter. Be silly to alert them. Let them be shocked and surprised that you fell so ill in France and passed away.’ ‘What about my funeral?’ Actually I hadn’t made any plans about any funeral. Who would come? No one left to mourn. ‘Just a few words . They’ll understand. Lou’s not going to come all the way back from Seattle to look at a jar of ashes. She already got her inheritance. We’ll have a drink to you when I get back, although Sissy isn’t drinking anything but hot water and lemon right now and Lou’s on carrot juice. We can scatter your ashes on the roses.’ She liked the roses. She called the hairdresser. Wouldn’t go unless her hair was done. Somehow I got her packed and into the car and even a little excited she was going to Europe. Dying was becoming something of an adventure, a last hurrah. Rather like one of those awful weepy afternoon TV movies where Shirley McLaine plays a woman dying of cancer and gets one last chance for love. There was a hiccup at the ferry. Too many steps. She nearly chickened out, but, as the man pointed out, there were a hundred cars parked behind us and there was no way we were going anywhere except France. She looked at the cars and wondered aloud about ‘how many sons were taking their mothers to Holland all of a sudden’. A helpful German guy helped me get her up the stairs. She wouldn’t use the lift, of course. Three bloody floors and she may think she ‘eats like a bird’, but a buzzard is heavy bird. We had tea from the flask she’d brought and thought of the money we just saved. She stared at the water for a while and seemed quite contemplative. ‘Last time I was on a ferry was to Jersey. A little holiday with your father when he got back from the war. He proposed to me there. The Germans had only just left. We won a hundred Reichmarks on the fruit machine. There was nothing to buy with pounds or Reichmarks.’ It was hard to think of her as young, carefree and getting engaged in Jersey. How strange that they would go there. What had it been like for all those trapped on the island by the Germans, I wondered? ‘Your father wouldn’t go back to Europe. He’d bombed so much of it, you see.’ That too was very true. Many a time as a boy I’d tried to get him to go to Italy to a Grand Prix, but he wouldn’t go. He just remembered the ruins. We arrived at the Chateau in time for supper and we were made most welcome. She was plonked in a chair, given a whiskey, shown the food so she’d know it was fish free and at the table she even laughed once or twice. Must be a decade since I’d heard that laugh. The old 17th Century Chateau seemed to stir other memories. She approved of the marble and gold. Admired the ancient pistols on the wall and enjoyed the thought of thirty-six bedrooms above her head and a vast ballroom below. I could see that she was contrasting this with my cramped railway cottage. Honest, it was all I could afford in Hampshire. In this place you couldn’t tell the time by the whoosh of trains as they hurtled past the house and shook soot from the chimney. She slept in the study on the overstuffed chaise-lounge, a rare set of Georges Morren garden pictures on the wall and a secret loo hidden behind it. The host alarmed her with the tale of a relative’s conception in this secret bathroom, the result of his grandfather’s liaison with a Norwegian chambermaid. But she felt most at home in this very comfortable, intimate space as she clutched her hot water bottle. So far - so good. Something weird happened the next day. She was smiling; she ate all her porridge and seemed most reluctant to leave. Over morning coffee she chatted with the host, discovered all manner of things in common and they found her charming. They even invited her back. This was the mother I remembered, the one who used to exist twenty years ago, the hostess, the actress, and the world traveller. Naturally we evaded the real reason of our visit but I suspect our host knew. He got onto the terrible news in the papers about granny dumping. Elderly patients dumped by the side of the M25 or in supermarket car parks in America. ‘No one wants the old anymore. We all live too long. You’re lucky to have such a caring son,’ he told her. She looked at me with penetrating eyes, but said nothing. It was a sunny morning when we left for our final destination. She was thoughtful. ‘We’re going to Arnhem? There’s a lovely little bistro there. I can’t remember the name.’ I looked at her with some surprise. ‘When were you in Arnhem? When did you ever go to Holland?’ She suddenly had a secret smile on her face. ‘Jonty took me. We met in the Georges V in Paris and he had a meeting in Arnhem.’ ‘Jonty, the lawyer, Jonty? Husband to my friend Gabriella. And when were you at the Georges V? That’s the most expensive hotel in Paris!’ It was beginning to make sense. The cruises, the adventures, the spending of the inheritance money. She always said she didn’t want to leave anything behind. ‘It was only a little affair,’ she admitted softly. ‘She didn’t really understand him. I knew he’d leave her in the end.’ I guess there was a time when one could say that and be believed. This would have been in the seventies, I supposed. She would have been in her fifties. ‘We went to Amsterdam afterwards for a week. It was lovely. Remember? I came to see you in London when you finally got a job.’ Good grief. I was ten years out. That meant she was still having affairs in her mid-sixties. Jonty must have been at least twenty-five years her junior. He ran off with a model and runs a restaurant in Vancouver now. She looked at me. ‘I had more fun than you ever do,’ she stated. ‘I don’t think your generation knows how to have fun.’ I bit my tongue. She didn’t have to look after her mother. Her mother had done the decent thing and refused to be looked after by anyone and died in her seventies. Not mine. She had enjoyed everything she could, blown all the money and was now stealing time off others. ‘Jonty kept that quiet.’ I said calmly, thinking of poor Gabby. ‘Well, that’s what affairs are supposed to be. Secret. It’s all the more enjoyable if it is secret.’ We drove on in silence for a few miles until the next bladder call. I had to stand outside the loo and keep guard because she cannot have the door closed. This is not only embarrassing, but also often deeply unpleasant. People give you strange looks, but there’s no dignity with agoraphobia. She finally came out of the autobahn café loo and collapsed back into her wheelchair. ‘Is it much longer? I really don’t think I can go on much longer.’ ‘About thirty miles. Don’t worry. He’s expecting us. It will all be over soon.’ ‘That’s what you think.’ She declared, mysteriously.
Dr Van De Broek met us at his rather pleasant farmhouse, some six miles from the town. His daughter Babiche was safely far away on holiday in Sydney, so there would be no awkwardness. I could sense my mother sizing up the place: whitewashed walls, cherry blossom trees, two shiny new Volvos in the drive and stables for Babiche’s horses. She had been a champion show-jumper when younger but now only rode for pleasure. We were made very welcome. Dr Van Broek’s wife had made fresh cookies and we gratefully nibbled on them with our coffee. It was all very civilised. ‘Do you get many English coming over?’ I enquired. ‘All the time. I turn most away.’ He turned to my mother. ‘I’d like to talk to you alone, is that alright?’ I stood up. ‘I’ll take a walk. See the horses.’ My mother was hurriedly whisked away to his study before she could object. She looked grim. I wondered if I should have said goodbye. Outside the sun was suddenly shining. The horses, two beautiful chesnut mares, stood close by the fence, their backsides in the sun, their tails swishing gently to rid the flies. One was sweating up a little and looked nervous, but the other looked at me carefully and possibly with some reproach, as if it knew why I was there. I noted that classical music was floating out of the stable doors. I had heard it soothed the animals. So sophisticated these Dutch. I avoided my conscience. I think I avoided thinking altogether. It was best. This was too close to a real memory, one of taking my first dog to be put down when she developed cancer. It was a terrible feeling, especially knowing how much that dog had trusted me. I returned to the house after an hour. He would have completed a psychological observation. Gone through her medical history, checked to see that she was in complete agreement with this procedure. The slightest hint of doubt and it would be off, I knew. He’d told me on the phone that once he’d decided it would be quick. A little ceremony of farewell and yes, it would be deeply awkward. Cash, no cheques. Imagine my surprise when I got there to find my mother on her second whisky, her eyes shining with pleasure. She was eating boterkoek met abrikozen (butter cake with apricots) and laughing out loud. She was happy and if I wasn’t mistaken she was flirting with Dr Death. ‘Welcome back. Your mother tells such wonderful stories,’ he declared, his face flushed with the liquor. That time in Paris with Omar and Albert Finney’s horse. So lucky to win so much.’ ‘It wasn’t so much, but it paid the bill at the Georges V. I couldn’t have done it without it. It was Omar who told me, bet against anything Albert recommends.’ She added, a broad smile on her face. ‘Such a wonderful Bridge player.’ Omar? Albert? My mother? I was thinking. I remember she had met him in Paris and something about going to the races. She’d briefly flirted with a racy crowd before she’d contracted pneumonia in Venice and been flown home. ‘And that terrible time in Lourenco Marques. Your Mother is right, sounds so much better than Maputo. I too have visited the hospital there. A nightmare, believe me.’ ‘On the whole I think I liked Rio best,’ my mother sighed. ‘Oh yes, Rio is so wonderful,’ the Doctor was agreeing. I looked at the woman I had brought with me. Where was the living corpse who stayed in my house in Hampshire? Hell, she even voluntarily climbed out of the wheelchair and tottered over to the loo by herself. Dr Death took my hand and shook it. ‘A wonderful woman. Wonderful. So many stories. She has been everywhere. You are so lucky. My mother she always complains about everything, but yours…!’ I looked at the empty wheelchair with incredulity. Had I brought the wrong woman? ‘Stick it out,’ I told myself. Let him see her when the whisky has worn off. We stayed for lunch. This was supposed to be a quick turnaround. He specifically told me he had two other appointments in the afternoon, but he didn’t seem concerned. My mother told stories at lunch. Even a joke or two, and she enquired about the recipe of the Rundvlees met groene currysaus (Beef stew in green curry sauce). She was completely her old charming self. It was good to see it, but disconcerting. Any moment I knew she’d run out of steam, but the thought of her impeding doom seemed to have galvanised her. By the time they served coffee it was clear they loved her and whatever Babiche had said about her was totally disbelieved. It was clear they’d rather shoot their own horses than put my mother down. ‘I met Gianni in Turin’, she was saying. ‘It took me a while to realise he was a spy. It was his mother who gave the game away.’ Half an hour later Dr Death took me aside in the garden and we stood staring at the cherry blossom trees. ‘She’s got years in her yet. Such a wonderful person. I know she must get a little down from time to time, but she isn’t ready. Believe me, it would be a crime, a terrible crime.’ We left at two. I think she invited them for Christmas. She slept like a rock all the way to France. I found us a hotel with a downstairs bedroom and wheeled her inside. ‘Where are we?’ ‘France, mother.’ ‘Am I…?’ ‘No. You are utterly alive. Here are your pills. You missed a few.’ She looked at me impassively. The smiles and stories all put away now. This was the woman Dr Van de Broek would never meet. ‘Where’s the remote?’ ‘It’s France. You wouldn’t want to watch TV here. They talk through everything.’ Nevertheless she watched Columbo in French, on mute. ‘Saw this one in 1970, ’she growled. Our return home to England was uneventful. Sissy hadn’t missed her; but the heating was off, so she had something fresh to complain about. ‘I’ll start supper.’ I said, turning the heating up. She was staring at the sky out of the window. ‘Perhaps we can do this again next year?’ she suggested. ‘Such a pleasant Doctor. Why aren’t our Doctors like that here?’ I looked at her and shook my head. ‘Next year mother, I rather think you’ll be taking me.’ She smiled, no doubt relishing the idea. She staggered up from the sofa to get the whisky bottle. ‘I think I’ll have pudding tonight. Make me a nice rice pudding.’ I checked the TV guide whilst I taped up the remote. It seemed to work again. ‘There’s a new episode of NCIS at eight forty-five,’ I remarked. ‘Gibbs is in it.’ ‘I knew he’d come back,’ she said, looking pleased with herself, reaching for the remote. She pressed mute. I went to make the rice pudding.
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