The Day I moved in

I’m a really difficult person to live with. I’m noisy, always playing my music or listening to the TV at full volume, I don’t do my share of the household chores, I keep unsocial hours and I leave my clutter everywhere. I end up spending half my life tidying up after myself and I don’t even say “thank you”.

I remember the day I moved in. I arrived on my doorstep with just a suitcase of belongings.

“Can I help you?” I asked, as I opened the door to an elderly man I didn’t recognise.

“You have any choice,” the man said in reply, stepping into my hallway.

“Sorry? Who the Hell do you think you are to come barging in here?”

“I’m you!” the man said. “I’m the future you.”

He, or should I say I, explained. As many have predicted, in the future disease and illness not quite abolished to history, but extremely rare, and living to 100 becomes the norm, with many living to 150 or beyond. However, no cure has been found for old age, even the promised treatment for dementia has failed to arrive. As a result society is dominated by a massive elderly population, with enormous health and care needs, twice as many people on pensions as there are in work and more people living in care homes than there are paying taxes. The cost of hospitals and care homes couldn’t be met through taxation, insurance or even sales of assets, the numbers of sick and frail are simply too high. Families live too far apart to care for their own elderly relatives, besides which people had too few children. Most of the centurions simply have nobody, no friends or family to care for them, they don’t even know who their neighbours have been for the last fifty years.

There appeared to be no solution. Legislation was discussed, and narrowly defeated, to routinely kill all citizens at the age of 80. Then, from nowhere, a solution was found. The discovery of time travel! This new science provided the perfect answer to a seemingly impossible situation. The elderly would simply be sent back in time, as soon as they reached their 75th birthday, for their younger selves to care for them in their dotage.

This is the story my older self explained. Of course, I didn’t believe him. It was too preposterous, the idea that a society that can find a way to travel through time can’t find a solution to caring for their elderly parents! But I was wrong! He convinced me, because he knew everything about me. Not just the external facts, but my internal thoughts, my secrets, my weaknesses, my lies. He knew everything about the me I try to hide.

“Anyway,” I said, “it doesn’t matter if you are me, I don’t want to look after you. I have a life to lead. What if a girlfriend moves in? You’ll cramp my style.”

“I’ve bad news for you, younger me”, he said, “you’ve nothing to worry about on that front, you never get another girlfriend. I haven’t had sex for over 40 years.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, “I must meet someone. I’m young, fit and handsome. I must meet someone.”

“That’s what I said,” the older me replied, “the day I moved in with me. The trouble is with an older version of myself to look after my social life dwindled away. I never did meet that special someone.”

“I could throw you out,” I said, “change my future. I don’t have to care for you.”

“You wouldn’t throw me out, I’m the future you. If you kick me out the house then you doom yourself. Besides, you don’t throw me out, I remember this conversation. You go and fetch the bottle of Talisker from the kitchen and we both get stupidly drunk.”

“We can hardly get stupidly drunk on one bottle, there’s only ¾ left.”

He opened his bag. “I brought some Laphroaig too, as a chaser.”

Whisky with a whisky chaser, it was definitely me, no doubt about it.

After he moved in the older me spent most of his time watching TV, even though he complained constantly that the “programmes aren’t as good as they will be.”

He didn’t do any of the chores, on the basis that “he did them all when he was younger.”

“You mean I’ll do them.”

“That’s right.”

“God you’re a lazy slob.”

“Well, it’s your fault. You made me what I am, all your decisions, all your actions, the choices you make now make me what I am today, forty years later.”

It was the same if I complained about the unpleasant aromas that became omnipresent in the house.

“I blame you for my bowels,” he’d say. “If you’d eaten better my bowels would never have happened.”

“Maybe I’ll change. Now that I’ve seen the pain and discomfort I’ll suffer when I’m older. I’ll stop eating crap. I’ll go on a diet tomorrow.”

“It’s true, you will go on a diet tomorrow. It lasted six days. Don’t bother telling me your plans, your dreams, I’ve seen there, done that, seen them all come crashing down. You’re destined to become me, Mr Stinker-Bowel, and there’s nothing you can do to change it.”

In spite of my various unpleasant habits, I was surprised to find that I still wrote. The old man’s stories weren’t as good, but he was prolific, and though he spent most of his days in front of the telly he wrote most days while I was out at work. He opened a separate account on abctales. Clearly my writing declines as I grow old, as he rarely gets a cherry, but it was a pleasure to read his ideas, to know that I will still be writing into my last years.

For the first ten years I lived with me, my older self was active. Messy, noisy, irritable, but active. However, I watched myself slowly age and decline. I became less and less agile, requiring a stick to walk around. My writing output dwindled, the stories I did write became rigid in structure and style. I became forgetful, forever mislaying spoons and misquoting Tennyson. My physical body deteriorated to the extent that it was rare for me to leave my bed.

I began to spend more and more time caring for my older self. I had to cook all my meals and feed myself most of them. Then, as my teeth fell out, I could no longer eat solid food and I would have to spoon-feed myself food-processed mush every meal. Even the power of speech started to leave me, at first I’d forget random words, then I lost the power of the sentence until now … now there are few words left to me. When hungry I just shout “spoon” as the aforesaid instrument meets all my needs, the fork and knife have been consigned to history.

I have no choice but to leave myself alone during the day when I go to work. Luckily I’m too frail to get up and make trouble.

I was right. I never met that girl. There simply isn’t time. Most of my non-working life is taken up caring for myself. If it’s not spooning into one end it’s clearing up the mess from the other.

The old mad me in my bed, screaming ‘spoon’.

I watch myself steadily decline; slowly die. But for all that I wouldn’t change a thing. Because this has been a unique opportunity to get to know myself, the ultimate in quality me-time. And there are still some happy moments. The thing the older me loves more than anything else is to hear my stories, his stories, our stories, read out to him as he lays there dribbling haplessly to himself/myself.

How much I understand is unclear, but I love the sound of my voice as I narrate the goings on of Jed and Alun and my other stories, all those tales that are nothing to me as I write them, simply the latest writing challenge, an idea I have to scribble down, yet these words are everything to my older self. Maybe my stories are all that I can look back on with pride, the sole thing from my life that will last, that has lasted. In my dotage at least I will still find some joy in my writing.

Once I finally die I will have just a few years left before it will be time for me to travel back in time and meet my younger self. I hope that I will be as obliging to me as I have been to me. And though I have seen the worse, not just my end but the awful, demented remnant of self that I will become, it cheers me to know I was there with me right to the bitter end.

Which is why I dedicate this story to myself.