Roy at the Boar gave me shifts behind the bar. I sent applications and picked up the odd translation and editing job. The rest of the time went on walks in the countryside, church and worrying about money.
One day my sister rang from Copenhagen to say our mother had had a massive stroke and was in hospital. She can’t speak, she said. After we rang off I booked a flight. When I landed the next evening I took a cab from the airport to the hospital.
It smelled of disinfectant and cooking from the kitchen. Signs pointed the way to the neurology and stroke units. A grey-faced man in a dressing gown shuffled down the corridor pushing an IV pole. My mother was in a two-bed room. One of her eyes was half open, the other shut. Her mouth hung slack and her legs were swollen under the sheet. A nurse was checking the drip and the monitor. The TV on the wall was playing a quiz show on mute. My sister looked up at me from a chair with an expression I’d never seen before.
A gaunt month followed. We got to know the nurses’ shifts. From time to time my mother’s eyes cleared, she smiled, and we made out a few words. The doctor spoke about rehabilitation. My sister didn’t believe him. She’s not coming back, she said. I know her. I spoke to the hospital chaplain and tried to pray, but the words went thin in the clinical air, as if they belonged back among stone and stained glass, not by this bed. If they couldn’t live here, I thought, what were they for?
I took the bus to the hospital in the mornings and let myself into my mother’s flat in the afternoons. I slept on the sofa bed at night. It was strange to be there alone. The cupboards were full of things that should have been thrown out years ago: a dozen plant pots, bills and letters dating back to the nineties, a jar of buttons she’d had since we were children, keys without locks. I went up to the loft, which was full of furniture and knickknacks from their years abroad. I spoke to the neighbours, called the utility companies, kept her friends updated.
Towards the end they asked us into a little relatives’ room off the ward. The consultant said there was nothing more they could do except give her morphine. They moved her to palliative care in a separate wing. The drip was removed. The room was quieter there. Just the bed, our chairs and her groans carrying down the corridor. We’d never seen pain like it. My sister was with her when she died, in the middle of the night. In the morning there was just the bed and the chairs.
*
We arranged the funeral, spoke to the family lawyer and auctioneers, contacted estate agents and started clearing the flat. When I’d done what I could, I went back to Norwich, where my plants had died and more admin was waiting for me.
The flat sold quickly. After thirty years of rocketing Copenhagen prices it fetched five times what my parents had paid. It took the lawyer several months to sort out the estate. By Christmas, which I spent at my sister’s, it was done.
I was free – in one sense at least.
Notes from a Room 