black shoes and prawn sandwich competition.

The telly had been left on watching Annie’s mum blink, watery-eyed, and slip sideways into her high-backed chair, while her daughter, footered and fretted over the latest beep from her iPhone and waited for the carer to come. Annie’s mum was a three- times-a-day priority, prone to jump up and wander, picking up and putting down ornaments on the mantelpiece. Tat, really. Ceramic dogs and cute little shepherd girls that did nothing but herd dust and jostle with photographs. Dad’s bush-hair was still alive in them and scowled down at her with beetling eyebrows as if asking, ‘what’s it all about Madge?’ Her brother’s weddings and Annie’s. In Stephen and John’s case, it was, of course, more than one, until they were bald looking and slightly bewildered in their later photos, as if they too were asking, ‘what’s it all about?’ And graduations bred with other photographs that seemed to weigh down the dimpled yellowing Anaglyptic walls and fall, open mouthed, onto any flat piece of furniture and right themselves, smiling cheeky grins at their luck. It would have been far better to put them all safely in a cardboard box and get the place redecorated. Mum wouldn’t know the difference. She scuttled from place to place, tripping forward, on the edge of falling; butterfly- blue bands of bruising tattooed onto her thin wrists, clinging onto people and the sharp edge of memory. The carer was always late. Annie didn’t want to complain, because it was The Council, and with the cutbacks, well, she didn’t want to get on the wrong side of them, but she had been up and down, up and down, countless number of times, folding her mum back into the imprint of her chair.

‘Mum. Mum.’ Annie raised her eyes to heaven. Her mum’s powder blue irises were watered down with flecks of gold and weighed down with anorexic pupils, small prisms of darkness; the drills of her eyes flickered, but never seemed to focus on Annie. She needed to catch her mum on the bounce, before she got up and lopsidedly sprinted around the room. ‘I’ve got something for you.’ She drew the last part out as if talking to a child and held up the packet of sandwiches she’d bought in the Co-op as if they were trading trinkets. She had a quick look. They were prawn. Annie’s face did a little meow in exasperation. Her mum didn’t like prawn sandwiches, or any kind of fish, or dead thing. She liked Lurpark butter, plain white bread with the crusts cut off, Farleyfarm cheese and a little pickle, with some strong tea. She peeled back the plastic wrapping. They smelled fine. Even if the carer didn’t like it, mum smelled a bit whiffy. Madge was too old for her body. New clothes hung on her angular frame like sloppy seconds, pulled this way and that, and her no-nonsense black shoes were more sensible than her now. Annie was determined to mention giving mum a bath. Mum pushed up out of her chair just as Annie heard the front door opening and her iPhone bleeped. She already had her coat on. It was perhaps best if the carer gave mum her sandwiches. There weren’t any tea-bags, but mum hadn’t been that great with hot drinks lately and she needed a day off. She texted John. It was her brother’s turn to worry.

John let out a sigh. He had to drive his mum twice a week in his new Audi, during rush-hour to The Southern, and not just up the mile from her house to Clydebank Health Centre. Stephen had been on the internet and explained it all and Annie had been very keen. It was some kind of trial involving injections of nerve growth factor directly into the brain, and adding extra genes to cells with specially designed enzymes called zinc finger nucleases to cut strands of DNA. Stephen said it was so precise a single letter spelling of a nuclease bond could be corrected. Mr Felmant, the biogerontolgist consultant, called this quackery ‘cut and pasting,’ but he always laughed nervously afterwards. The Clyde Tunnel entrance to The Southern was only five minutes away, but invariably took half an hour to clear, but with mum strapped in and wittering above the sound of the radio, it seemed much longer and John had been doing it twice a week for eight weeks. He wasn’t prepared to put up with it much longer and got angrier and angrier, determined to phone his elder brother, and ask him to do his bit. The fact that he was abroad shouldn’t really matter. He was always using that as an excuse, but had a bit of money and owned mum’s Council house. It was all kind of hush-hush, with the Council also paying mum’s rent to him as landlord. He could pay for a driver. It just wasn’t fair. It was his damn duty to do something for a change and not just order everybody else’s lives around.

Mr Felmant usually asked to speak to John after he’d tested mum. He did that, tried to get everyone involved, though there was little point really. The consultant went through the boring stuff about baselines and memory tests and blah, blah, blah. Then he’d put on his maternal voice and ask prying questions about John’s emotional state and if he’d noticed any differences in his mum. John played along, but when asked about specifics about the woman sitting rag-dolled in the chair beside him, he could never remember anything, and besides, the longer he spent with Mr Felmant the worse the traffic would be when they got out.

‘Well,’ Mr Felmant cleared his throat to signal the end of their consultation. ‘Your mum’s muscle tone and coordination has shown a remarkable recovery. And her focalization on memory tasks has been first class. We’re very excited. You must have noticed.’

John looked across at his mum. She was sitting rapt listening, so that John stumbled forward even though he was sitting down. And when he thought about it she had clipped her own seatbelt into place and hadn’t whined like static in the back seat of his Audi for quite some time. ‘Yes. We’re very pleased.’ He looked at his mum and out of the corner of her eye a little tear trickled down, but she had been prone to be lachrymose.

John took a chance, he’d a black plastic bag down in the back seats of his car, but for a change he let his mum sit in the front. He reached across to put her seatbelt on, but instead of buckling her in, let the seatbelt hover above the clasp and placed his mum’s hand on the strap. His mum clicked it into place and patted his hand, as if to say ‘there, there’. She seemed calm, composed even, as she looked straight ahead. ‘Can you talk mum?’

‘I could always talk son. You should know that better than anyone else. I was always speaking up for you, saying it wasn’t your fault.’

John jumped back and bumped his head on the ceiling of his car and he flung his arms around his mum. ‘Jesus, mum, how did you no’ say something before?’

‘Because you never listened.’

‘I’ve got a million questions.’

His mum’s eyes never left the hospital car park, staring straight ahead and her arms stayed by her side. ‘Well, son, you can maybe keep them for later. Am bone tired.’

‘Mammy, I’m glad that you’re back.’ He pushed his seat back so that he could get a good cry.

‘I’ve never been away son.’

‘Wait to I tell the others. They’ll be overjoyed.’

‘Just get me home son.’ The old bite was back in her voice and that made her son blubber even more. He tried three times to start the engine before he felt fit and able to drive.

Sometimes at night when Madge couldn’t sleep her mind went wandering back to when Stephen, Annie and John were wee and she’d find herself smiling and crying. Annie wanted her to go and stay with her and she’d agreed to think about it. John had also said that him and Sharon would love for her to come and stay with them, but he’d always been a poor liar. Stephen had flown in from London, or wherever else he was based, and brought yellow crocuses. He made a big play of pulling out his wallet and putting £2000, in twenties, on top of the fridge as if he was empting out pocket change from his paper-round. He’d forgotten that when it had been too cold, or too wet, or too dark, to deliver his papers, she had trudged round for him. ‘More fool you,’ her husband had said and ‘spoilt rotten’. Stephen hadn’t stayed long. He looked through her and up to the ceiling where a crack was appearing and would need to be plastered. And he’d laughed at her kitchen.

‘Mum,’ he said, ‘these are antiques. How can you live like this? You’ve still got a double-sink, for god-sake that’s about fifty- years- old’. There was a jaunty smile on his face as his neck craned this way and that, taking in what it would cost to replace his childhood home, and bring it up to scratch. He was always on his way to somewhere else.

Madge’s alarm went off at six a.m. She fumbled for the light pull on the little bedside lamp, with the beaded fringe; she had to pull out of Stephen’s hands. ‘That’s going straight in the bin,’ he’d said. ‘It’s dangerous. Look at it.’ She’d won that battle. Her medication for the day was all set out on a tablet with a Perspex screen. There were tablets to help her immune system and tablets to boost her electrolyte balance and tablets to help her to pee and tablets to help her sleep and to keep awake and there were smart tablets and stupid tablets, but they were all one to her. They were a cocktail that looked like a handful of Smarties. The nurse came in at nine prompt to measure her blood pressure and to take a blood sample. And every three weeks a black Hackney would take her over to The Southern were she would get CAT scans and fMRI scans and she would be tested and retested. All of this was paid for by the Intex drug companies involved and she didn’t mind, in fact, treated like a little day out, with a free lunch flung in. And she’d grown especially close to one of the nurses, Mary, on the CAT team, who made her a cuppa and took time to chat.

The cold mornings were always the worst. But once she was up and running she always felt better. She could no longer manage to bath herself, but a cat-nip with a soppy sponge in the wee sink was all she needed at her age. She ran herself a glass of fresh cold water and sat it on the cistern. The tray for medication was idiot proof, but with arthritic fingers it was still a fumble. She dropped the first one, with a little nick on the end, bent upward like a white boomerang with the pharmaceutical logo embossed on it. It bounced straight into the water of the toilet pan. The next one was pinkish and round with what looked like a candy coating. She heard it plop satisfactorily into the water of the pan and she could see it lying there with the other. She could remember, of course, lying in her own muck, whilst her sons and daughter argued about whose turn it was and the front door clicking shut behind them. She could remember everything all too well. The Perspex lid hid the geometric beauty of the forms her medication took. She watched them swirl around the pan and disappear when she flushed.