Gift: A Son's Story (extract) - A day out

I've almost completed the final draft of 'Gift' - my memoir about my time spent as my mother's full-time carer during the final months of her life.  This is a short episode about one of our last days out together.

 

            The following week, I rented a car again and we drove to Deal.  Mum had often gone to Deal on a bus, with a friend of hers who'd died a few years earlier.  Since then, she hadn't been.  She liked it there.  There was a more relaxed feeling about the town than Margate or Herne Bay.  It was further around the arc of the Kent coastline, too - facing out towards Europe rather than further up the British Isles - and the sea always seemed brighter and more expansive, somehow.  Nothing was visible out in that sea, except ships and boats and sky.  We spent a while looking at the shops in the town centre.  Then I took mum up to the seafront, where she could look at the Castle, and the fishing boats drawn up on the beach.  It was a sparkling day.  The ocean - green as mint tea - looked like it was laced with diamonds.

            "Beautiful," mum said - the breeze ruffling her hair.  "I always loved it here."

            I took her on the pier and we went up to the end - weaving between the anglers ranged on either side - where we went in the café for lunch.  We found a table where mum could look out at the long expanse of seafront - the promontory of Ramsgate and the Thanet towns far off to the north, the unbroken coastline to the south with the gradual curve off towards Dover and Folkestone.  Beyond that, not visible in the haze of that day, the distant coast of France.

            With her lunch, mum ordered a cappuccino.  The waitress asked her if she would like topping on it for an extra 50p. 

            "Hmm," she smiled.  "Why not?"

            When it came, it looked like a wedding cake with a big pile of whipped cream and marshmallows.  She couldn't believe her eyes.

            "I think I might need a knife and fork with this," she said, tucking in.

            She ate a good lunch and chatted happily about different things.  The weather.  Family.  Easter coming.  Afterwards, though, she seemed a bit unsettled.

            "I think I need to go somewhere quickly."

            I helped her into the chair and wheeled her to the disabled toilets, then waited outside.  She was longer than I expected.

            "Are you alright?" I called at the door.

            "Not really.  But don't worry.  I've just got a bit of a stomach upset, that's all."

            "I'm right outside.  Call if you need anything."

            "I'll be alright."

            I waited about ten minutes, then called again.  Then she opened the door.  She was fine, but a little shaken.

            "I'm okay.  I don't know what caused that.  I must have eaten too much."

            I checked her blood sugar, which was okay.  Once we were outside in the air and sunshine again, she seemed to settle.

            "I don't know what's the matter with me," she said.  "My stomach doesn't seem as strong as it was."

            "Perhaps it was that cappuccino," I said.

            "Maybe.  I think I'll be alright now."

            "Sure you don't want to go back?"

            "Yes.  I'm fine.  Perhaps we could move on to somewhere else, if you like."

            "How about Sandwich?"

            "Yes... that would be nice.  I can't remember if I've ever been there."

            "I think you have, but a long time ago."

            I got her settled back in the car and we headed off.  She seemed alright again, but the episode had perturbed me a bit.  It was like a reminder.  Like we were being let know that things were going on, right there, just beneath the surface.  I knew it wasn't something she'd eaten.  But I left it at that, as long as she was happy with it.

            It didn't take long to get to Sandwich.  I found a place to park in town, then wheeled mum along through the narrow medieval backstreets to the Quay.  There, we went along to The Bulwark, where we sat for a while looking out at the river, sheltered from the sun and the wind by the trees along the front there.

            "It's really nice here," she said.  "I'm sure I don't remember coming here before."

            "Perhaps you didn't.  It's a long time since I was here, too."

            At half-two, we went back to the car and started off for the drive home.  At Pegwell, I pointed out the replica of the viking ship, The Hugin, on the clifftop above the bay - there to commemorate the Viking invasion of Thanet.  Further along, on the dual carriageway, were other landmarks. The imposing, almost sinister buildings of the old Pfizer complex - 'Pfizer City' as I used to call it.  And the vast rectangular shell that was all that remained of the old Richborough Power Station - its huge conical cooling towers, once a focal point on the Thanet landscape, having long since been demolished.  Mum looked at it all as if it was completely alien to her.

            "If you dropped me here," she said.  "I wouldn't have a clue where I was or how to get home again."

            As she said that, for some reason an image came into my head of her sitting in her wheelchair, alone and abandoned, at the side of the road.  I felt a lump rising in my throat.  The image haunted me for the rest of that day.  Small things like that... they hit me like hammer blows, knocking me off balance.

            We got back onto the A299 finally.  At the last roundabout before the home stretch, I took a detour towards Canterbury.

            "Let's go home the country route," I said.  "See something other than road."

            I drove down past Sarre Windmill and along towards Upstreet.  The turning came up for Grove Ferry.

            "Fancy a shandy by the river?"

            "That sounds nice," said mum.

            I took the turning, which wound down a steep hill and over a tiny railway crossing.  Then we were going over the river bridge, with the Grove Ferry Inn on our left, nestling on the river bank.

            "This looks lovely," said mum.  "I don't think I've ever been out here, either."

            She had.  Many times.  But it didn’t matter.

            "Ah, well.  Seeing all the new places today, eh?"

            I parked up at the pub and wheeled mum through the bar area to the back, where there was a quiet riverside garden.  I parked the chair at a table beneath some weeping willows, where she could look out at the river.  A ramshackle collection of cabin cruisers, house boats and rum tubs was moored along both banks - some looking like they were occupied.  A family of ducks waddled along the bankside path and quacked around mum.  She giggled at them like a schoolgirl.

            I went in to get the drinks.  It was a long time since I'd been to the pub, too, and the place had changed.  I remembered coming there with my first girlfriend, back in the early '80s.  Two young things we were, hopelessly in love - or so we thought at the time.  It shook me to realise it was over thirty years ago.  Another thirty from here, I thought, and I'll be mum's age.  Which meant she would have been my age back then.  A woman with a son in his early twenties, going out with his first girlfriend. 

            It gave me pause for reflection.  Here I was, 58 at my next birthday, divorced, with no children, living alone and quite settled with it.  I'd long since become reconciled to the fact that 'alone' was my natural condition, and the one I felt happiest in.  But it didn't stop me from looking at people like my brother Russell: happily married for over thirty years to Lynn, in a nice paid-for house, comfortably settled, with a car each, an active and vibrant social life, frequent holidays abroad, and everything else that went with it.  I'd once thought that would be my own life trajectory, too - though it was never something that I could say I aspired to especially, or even particularly wanted.  It just seemed to be the way that life was meant to go. For most people, I suppose, that would be the natural order of things: getting a career, settling down, buying a home, raising a family.  For me, though, it had often felt - for reasons I couldn't explain at the time - like something I was being channelled into by society.  Something that I was supposed to do, rather than wanted to do.  Even from an early age, when I first started work, I'd never felt any real inclination to follow that path.  I'd been drawn into it a few times - most notably when I was married.  But it had never felt right, somehow.  And I know that it was a good part of the reason why that marriage failed.  I couldn't 'fit' with it.  Or, come to that, with anything else 'conventional' or 'expected'. And for many years, I felt that there must be something wrong with me because I wasn't interested in that kind of life.  Everyone else, it seemed, was doing it.  Why not me?  It was another thing that my autism diagnosis had helped me to understand.  It affirmed for me, again, that there wasn't necessarily anything wrong with me. I hadn't failed at life.  I'd simply followed my own path through it - a path which, whilst strange to most, was the one I felt most impelled to take.  Which didn't stop me from wondering sometimes if my condition had pre-disposed me to miss out on so many of the things that life had to offer.  But I'd found my niche, and was reasonably content with it.  That was all that mattered, surely?

            And, of course, it had meant that I was able to do what I was now doing - like life had prepared me for it.  The right conditions.  The right place.  The right time.  The right abilities and temperament.

            I went back to mum with the drinks and we touched glasses.

            "Good health!" mum said.

            "Good health!"

            The irony of that toast wasn't lost on me.  It was the one thing she would never have again.