Dadisms

‘What are you doing Dad?’ I asked.

Dad was bent over in the garden outside the kitchen window, holding the end of the long pole used to prop up the washing line with one hand while with his other hand he picked something up from the ground. He was sniggering quietly.

‘Shhh…’ he said, and pointed up to his and Mum’s bedroom window, where I could see Mum’s elbows leaning on the sill. The summer sunlight shone on the leaves of the apricot tree, the soft, pale orange fruit ripening around the window, and Mum’s hands holding a paperback.

I looked back at Dad, who was draping a wriggling brown worm over the end of the pole. By this time Annabel and Ellie were standing around me, eyes wide. With a look combining glee, concentration and triumph Dad raised the pole carefully up until the top of it was level with the sill, then jerked the pole so that the worm landed on the sill. Mum shrieked and dropped her book into the garden.

As much as he enjoyed teasing Mum, Dad relished making his audience of four delighted children laugh. Whether he was coming up behind Mum as she washed up, pretending to cuddle her, then dropping a bloody plastic finger from the joke shop into the soapy water, or sitting at the kitchen table after our evening meal with the smallest of us on his lap, telling terrible jokes, these times were when he seemed happiest. As we grew older his favourite joke could still be relied upon to make us giggle, if reluctantly: ‘What happened to the boy who stood on a hot cross bun? A current ran up his leg’.

We also realised that Dad had a strange way with words sometimes, and would answer the question ‘what’s the weather like there?’ with something like ‘oh, blue clouds,’ not hearing his error. We lived in a ‘three-florey’ house, he said, and once mentioned that he wouldn’t go to India with a barge pole. We began to call these unconscious slips and muddles of speech Dadisms, and collected them to enjoy together later.

******

Now they are coming thick and fast. As the spring goes on and his confused state settles into permanence, every call or visit from him contains something absurd. Bodgana and he have had another argument about money, he says on the phone, and he’s told her she needs to get a job.
‘I’ve told her there are big adults and small adults, the small ones eat less food so they get paid less, and the big ones have to work for a living. She bridled at that but I said to her that’s how it is.’ He pauses for a second.
‘By the way, how did it all come about, how did we get her, this Polish girl? She seems to have a semi assistant role, does some cleaning around the house for money. How did it all start?’
‘Well… you married her Dad. You met her at the tennis club and you married her.’
‘Ah of course’, he says, pretending he had known all along. ‘So it all built up from there, right.’ I put the phone in my bag and walk along platform 2 at Victoria Station, unable to stop myself laughing out loud.

He calls again.
‘It’s been suggested to me that Beata and Olly are my kids. I must say I’ve had a suspicion about that. Now the thing is, where are they going to go to school? Bodgana wants them to go to a Catholic school round here, what do you think about that?’
‘Err, which school is that, Dad?’ I ask, on the spot.
‘St Trinians’, he replies.

He comes over, bringing all his Income Bonds statements, even though he wanted my advice about a tax bill. He spreads them out in front of him and I take a thorough look, noticing that in 2007 he had £86,000. He complains about Bodgana.
‘Oh god, she’s a foul-tempered creature,’ he says. ‘She stomps around the house like a corpse with no ears and no eyes. You know,’ he gestures around his body vaguely, ‘no pleasant attachments’.

Even for Dad this is unexpected. Irrepressible laughter forces up inside me and I try desperately to keep a straight face, covering my mouth with my hand, feeling miserable. I think this is the first time I have laughed at him without his knowledge.

You have no idea

I’ve had dinner with a friend and we are wandering past the Royal Festival Hall in the evening sun when Dad rings. He sounds distressed and tells me that he’s been struggling to get hold of anyone. The problem is that the TV has broken, Josh has been round to try and fix it but failed, he has had a row with Bodgana and she has gone out in a huff. ‘I’ve been trying to, what’s the word, collate everyone’s numbers,’ he says, ‘it’s taken me ages, I can’t seem to find them.’ Then he pauses and says, ‘Tell me Chloe, just help me out a little bit here, who is the father of Josh?’
‘You are,’ I say, and he laughs apologetically.
‘Oh, yes.’ He pauses. ‘The kids don’t seem to want to… fraternise with me.’

The next morning I try calling Dad on his mobile and on the landline but there’s no answer. It’s unusual for Dad not to return my call straight away and I start to worry. I call the landline one last time and Bodgana answers with her impatient ‘Yes, hello?’
‘Bodgana, it’s Chloe,’ I say, ‘Dad phoned me in a state last night saying that the TV was broken -’
‘Chloe.’ She interrupts me. ‘Do you have any idea what he is going through?’
‘Of course I do -’ I say, baffled, but she talks over me.
‘The TV is the least of his worries, the TV is nothing, he is very unwell. Do you think I am incapable?’
‘Of course not!’ I say.
‘I suggest that you try to get hold of him directly,’ she continues, putting the phone down as I am explaining that this is what I have been doing all morning.

I look at my phone, trembling with anger. Without thinking about it I decide to drive round to the house. Fifteen minutes later I walk up the steps and see Bodgana through the kitchen window, filing her nails on the sofa. I knock on the door. She opens it, draped again in her long black dress patterned with red flowers. She looks at me, expressionless.
‘Is Dad there?’
‘No.’
‘Are you going to tell me where he is?’
‘Yes, come inside.’ She holds the door open for me. ‘He has gone to Hackney Town Hall to renew the parking permit,’ she says, closing it. ‘I was too afraid to get in the car with him, the state he was in. You have no idea what is going on, how unwell he is. You don’t know what we are living with. I don’t need to be harrassed about something so trivial as this TV business, the TV is not broken. Listen, I would not try and come between you and Daniel, but there are these constant interventions, you hear there is something wrong with the TV, you come round like a knight in shining armour saying you want to fix it, but there is a lot more wrong than this TV, he is not going to get any better…’

She carries on and on, her voice raised. I stand by the door to the sitting room and find myself stretching my arm across the doorway, as if widening my body will help me withstand her attack. She asks me again and again if I know what Dad is going through. I stare at her, repeating, ‘Of course I do,’ but she talks over me and every time I try to interject, telling her that I just wanted to help, she talks more loudly. She tells me that last night they had an argument about the remote control and which channel to watch and that he had got upset. All of a sudden she abruptly changes tack.
‘Look, I have calmed down. I will give you some tea.’

Dazed, I sit at the kitchen table and ask for a glass of water. Bodgana talks on, about how hard things are every day, bringing up her visit to the doctor to report Dad for hitting Olly last summer, justifying her actions. ‘Olly was severely attacked, I am telling you,’ she says, then mentions that there were no bruises, cuts or any other sign of an attack, and that no one witnessed it.
‘Listen, Brian uses these little things, this TV thing, to create havoc, he rings you up just to create havoc, that is what he is trying to do. Every day he asks us where he is. We cannot win, if we tell him he is at home he doesn’t believe us, he becomes aggressive, verbally aggressive, if we try to avoid the question he becomes aggressive anyway. Every day, every other day, he packs his bag and says he going to his ‘real’ home, we just let him go, we have become used to it. He questions our relationship, he asks me who is the father of Beata and Olly, in front of the children, they are part of it, I cannot keep them out of it.’

She tells me that she is making efforts to get him seen and diagnosed.
‘But I am not trying to hurry them up. There is very little that can be done; it is atrophy of the brain. A doctor came on a home visit but Brian was very suspicious. Unfortunately he answered all of their questions about memory very well. I have to do many things for him. I have to go to the cashpoint with him because he cannot use it. We keep him in a routine, that is the best thing, that is what helps him. We cannot leave him by himself.’

We hear the front door close and Dad’s footsteps on the stairs to the kitchen.
‘Ah, Chloe!’ he says coming into the room, surprised but smiling, then, ‘wow, look at that!’ as he gestures to my bump. He is in a good mood. He has managed to renew the parking permit despite the idiocy of the Hackney council employee who asked him for the same details over and over again. Dressed in a smart new jumper, he holds the permit in his hand and shows us the expiry date on it, grinning proudly and almost boyishly. Through some strange unspoken agreement, Bodgana and I pretend that I was just passing and have only been there for five minutes. I want to get out of the house and I tell Dad my car is on the meter. He walks me up to the front door, suddenly looking worried.
‘Was Bodgana OK?’ he whispers anxiously, standing close to me with his hand on the door. ‘How did she react when you came round?’
‘Oh fine, fine,’ I say.

While we can

I mention Dad’s illness to a colleague and she emails me offering support; her mother had dementia. She writes:

In some ways I think the early stages are hardest because you don’t ever know what’s coming next. If I had to live through it again with my eyes open to what was happening I think I might try and take things more one day at a time rather than worrying about what was around the corner, because in reality we just don’t know about how long things will take or what the next stage will look like.

As Dad’s condition deteriorates I think about this advice and decide to make an effort to enjoy time with him as much as I can. Daniel and I invite Dad over to watch a BBC documentary about tennis which, being an expert on the subject, he was filmed for last year. We sit on the sofa with cups of tea and Dad happily gives us a running commentary, providing background on all the talking heads with occasional anecdotes about the various characters he encountered in the sport. When he appears briefly on the screen our eyes meet and we grin at each other, and it’s good to see how immersed he is in the programme, the experience and his memories. Afterwards Daniel and I ask him questions about his career, keeping him talking about better times for a while, before his anxiety about what Bodgana and the children are doing takes him prematurely home.

Another day I take Dad out to lunch at his favourite Italian restaurant.
‘Aha, how’s the mum?’ he says when he sees me, patting my emerging bump and smiling delightedly. We eat pasta and I try and keep the conversation away from Bodgana and money. Dad asks about Daniel and his job, how my new tenants are getting on and whether we have chosen any names for the baby. It surprises me again how well his short-term memory is working. We have noticed that when he isn’t in an anxious state or fretting about arguments with Bodgana, Dad is more solicitous than he used to be, showing his interest in our lives and his concern for us more openly than he ever used to. During lunch he slips in and out of confusion, muddling up names, people, circumstances and subjects, and I follow the threads in what he is saying, picking up on clues and relying on what I know about his life to guess what he means. I gather that he has sent a copy of his autobiography to the recent widow of an old friend of his, hoping that the descriptions of time spent with this friend would comfort her. Dad sits facing the large window, squinting slightly in the bright spring light.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ he says, looking outside at the traffic and shoppers, ‘it feels like England, but I know it isn’t. But it doesn’t feel like anywhere else, either.’

Another day I pick him up and bring him to our house for dinner. He is relaxed and chatty and tells us about some of the international coaching work he has done. I drive him home again when he wants to leave, letting him give me accurate directions even though I know the route well, enjoying the feeling of taking care of him and not having to worry about how he gets back. He thanks me again for the meal, saying how much he enjoyed it, and tells me to look after myself. There is something so simple and gentle about him at these times, as if he has shed some layers of adulthood and responsibility.

I watch him climb the steps to his front door through my wing mirror, see him open the door and go in. I wish I knew that he was going to be treated with kindness inside.

The slide

Things change early in the spring. At first it seems as if Dad is having one of his bad patches. One Monday I speak to him and he sounds completely confused. He’d suggested coming over for dinner on Tuesday, but he doesn’t remember that and now he is doubtful that he can make it. I ring him again the following morning to try and confirm and we have the same conversation, almost word for word. He is stressed and flustered and says there is too much happening at home. He doesn’t come over.

On the Friday afternoon I go round to Dad’s house. I’m fed up with looking at the children’s dusty Christmas presents on our kitchen table and waiting for an opportunity to see them, so I ring Dad and turn up twenty minutes later. He is wearing his coat and looking for his hat. I give the children their presents and they begin tearing off the wrapping paper, but Dad stands by the door and says he needs to go home.
‘You are home Dad,’ I say, ‘why don’t you sit down and see what the kids have got?’
‘No, no,’ he says crossly. He looks agitated. ‘I don’t like driving in the dark and I need to get back’. He puts his hat on and picks up his scarf.
‘But I’ve just got here,’ I say, casting round for distractions. ‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’
‘I’m fed up with people arguing with me!’ he says, ‘I told you, I’ve got to get home before it gets dark.’ He addresses Beata, who starts visibly. She looks pale and withdrawn. ‘Tell Bodgana I’ve gone home.’

He goes out and shuts the front door behind him. Bodgana comes upstairs from the kitchen and paces up and down, looking out of the window. ‘I am very stressed,’ she tells me. None of us know what to do. Later she calms down and the children finish opening their presents. She becomes friendly, almost manically so, asking me about my recently announced pregnancy and talking over my replies, relating her own experiences.

I ring Dad when I get home. He’s back home himself and seems to have some awareness of what’s happened. ‘I was driving along and suddenly wondered where I was going. Maybe it’s a relapse of that thing that happened in the summer.’

But his moments of clarity are now much less frequent, and we’re forced to admit that confusion and disorientation are the new daily reality. One day he arrives unannounced at Daniel’s and my house, saying that he doesn’t think the children are his. Annabel calls him at home and he puts her on the phone to Beata’s cello teacher, much to everyone’s bafflement. He is meant to meet up with an old friend, Peter, but Bodgana rings Peter and says Dad is too ill to travel by himself. When we try and talk to Dad about appointments at the hospital or the memory clinic, he complains that two doctors came round to the house but that they were dodgy, trying to sell him medication. ‘I know a high pressure sales job when I see one,’ he says.

In April he calls me and tells me that he had a bad day yesterday. ‘I thought I was going to die.’
‘Why, Dad?’ I ask.
‘I googled this di-mentia thing and read up about it. But I’ve cut back drastically on coffee and sugar and I tell you what, I feel much, much better. Definitely been having too much caffeine.’

We can’t tell from what Dad says if he is being seen by anyone or having any treatment, but it’s impossible to get hold of Bodgana for information. She has no mobile and never seems to answer the landline, and we eventually realise that she has trained Beata to pick up and pretend that she is out. Ellie rings the memory clinic and they tell her that Dad has missed several appointments. Then one day she rings Dad’s home phone and Bodgana picks up. Realising that we have no choice but to be conciliatory to stand any chance of regular communication about Dad, Ellie makes a big effort to seem friendly. Bodgana talks in detail about their daily life. She says that she and the children know that Dad is not going to get any better, but that they have been trying to get him to appointments just in case there is any medication he can take.
‘We are really concerned about all of you,’ says Ellie, ‘and we want to help if we can.’
‘Oh, there has never been any hostility between us,’ replies Bodgana. ‘Sometimes there has been coldness… when Brian and I have an argument and he goes to you to back him up. But there is no hatred. Listen, we are doing everything we can to make him comfortable, we want to make his life easy, we keep him in a routine every day, this helps him. We want him to live with us for as long as he can.’

The budget III

One Saturday afternoon in early March, Annabel bumps into Dad at the HSBC cashpoint on Stoke Newington High Street. It’s obvious that he is having trouble using the machine, unsure if any money has come out of it. Annabel suggests that they go inside the bank and request a mini statement. He gratefully agrees.

The statement shows that there is about £150 in Dad’s current account. There are several recent payments to online retailers such as John Lewis, which puzzle Dad. Annabel asks if they have bought things for the house or the children recently, but Dad cannot recall anything. Annabel wonders if Bodgana has been using Dad’s debit card. Despite Dad’s problems with confusion, his day to day memory is reasonably reliable.

Shortly after this encounter Dad receives confirmation from his bank that he has around £8000 left in his savings and decides to transfer all of it into his current account. A period of calm ensues. For a number of weeks there are no frazzled phone calls about arguments. Dad and Bodgana appear to be getting on rather well. Dad turns up for dinner in new clothes bought for him by Bodgana; the family acquires a flat screen TV.

For Annabel, Ellie, Josh and me, it’s as if an egg timer has been turned over. We speculate about how long the money will last and when the loan requests will start in earnest. There is something like relief mixed in with the anticipation. A stale old situation will finally have to change, even if it’s for the worse.

The D word

It’s hard to remember exactly when Dad first mentions divorce, but it isn’t long after Bodgana moves in with him that his complaints about her begin.

Bodgana tells Dad that she gave up her job in the financial sector just before she met him, blaming ‘burn out’, and seems to have no interest in finding further employment. After all, Dad provides a large four bedroom house with a big garden in Stoke Newington and pays for everything else. But for Bodgana, the house is shabby and the area suburban and embarrassing; she would prefer to live somewhere fashionable like Notting Hill or Kensington. She buys designer baby clothes from Harrods for Beata and fills up the fridge with the best of Waitrose, which is often thrown away. Initially Dad sets up a shared bank account but when this is consistently emptied, Dad cancels Bodgana’s card, closes the account and begins to give her a daily cash allowance. A decade-long argument begins, with Bodgana insisting that they need at least £40 a day for food and Dad haggling with her about how much they can get by on, seeking advice from Ellie to back him up. Bodgana begins to trick money from Dad, saying she needs it for food or some essential for the children, then spending what he gives her on theatre tickets or expensive make up and going back to him for more.

Inside the house, according to Dad, Bodgana is untidy. Washing up accumulates, arguments about the housework proliferate. Pets are bought, vets bills start to come in, animal droppings mingle on the carpet with dust, mud from the garden and plastic children’s toys. When they disagree about money, Bodgana retaliates by refusing to speak to Dad for days or even weeks on end. Dad calls this the ‘Siberian frost’. Sometimes during these periods they go separately to school to collect the children, not knowing if the other one is planning to turn up. Beata and Olly go to bed late and watch 18 certificate horror films with Bodgana, who stays up most of the night and sleeps in late. When Dad protests that children need a good amount of sleep and a regular routine, his opinions are dismissed – apparently the fact that he has already brought up four children is of no bearing. When my siblings and I go round to the house we start to notice desperate little print-outs pinned to the wall by Dad, including one headed ‘A Good Wife,’ which lists the attributes Dad would like to see in Bodgana, such as being a team player, being careful with money, contributing to the family purse and being supportive of her husband. Dad complains that he can never get any work done because he is constantly required to drive Bodgana and the children to various shops and activities. For several years Dad takes the children to school and picks them up every day, because Bodgana claims that Dad doesn’t give her enough money to buy clothes and she is ashamed to be seen at the school gates. Their arguments increase over the years and become angrier and more vicious, taking place more and more often in front of the children.

When Dad talks to Ellie, Annabel, Josh and me on the phone, at lunch at his favourite café or at our places for dinner, he talks endlessly about all of these problems and more. Eventually divorce is suggested and discussed. Despite Dad’s fear of Bodgana walking away with half of what he has spent a lifetime accumulating, sometimes he seems close to accepting that divorce would be the best option. At one point he even has a consultation with a renowned divorce lawyer, who tells Dad that he has plenty of evidence for requesting the divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. The solicitor is horrified by Dad’s list of complaints, especially the loan Bodgana takes out by faking Dad’s signature, and suggests to Dad in the strongest possible terms that he gets out of the situation as soon as he can.

But always, always, the conversation comes round to the children. ‘They’re cute little things,’ sighs Dad, ‘I like having them around, you know? If she took them back to Warsaw I suppose I’d never see them again.’ The look on Dad’s face tells us that all of these discussions, all of our suggestions, all of our insistence that he needs to really put his foot down with Bodgana, are futile. He cannot risk this. And so Dad is well and truly trapped, and Bodgana, we think, understands her power very well.

Selves

I arrive at the café and find Dad already waiting outside. It’s cold so I take out the five £20 notes he has asked for and hand them over. ‘Thanks Chlo,’ he says. ‘I’ll pay you back in a few days.’ He shrugs his shoulders up and shivers. ‘Do you want to have a coffee or something?’

‘I can’t Dad,’ I say, and just then my friend arrives. ‘Remember I told you I’m meeting someone?’

‘Right, right,’ says Dad, still holding the notes in his hand.

Inside, the café is warm and crowded full of people seeking refuge from the bitter white February afternoon. My friend and I choose a savoury pastry each, order pots of tea and settle at a table. My friend hasn’t met Dad before and because I didn’t introduce them and I’m embarrassed at my own embarrassment, I feel I need to briefly explain who he is and what we were doing. We drink tea and eat our pastries and we talk about work, creative projects, our families and ideas for collaborating, and as usual with this friend I am caught up with enthusiasm, and with enjoyment of our food, our talk and our good fortune.

I want to tell my friend that my dad is becoming ill and I tell her a little about his situation and the changes we have seen in him. She listens without interrupting. Then she tells me about caring for her mother, who has suffered a major stroke. The stroke has left her with aphasia and very limited speech, but she tells me about the ways in which they communicate nowadays and how their relationship has changed and deepened.

‘You know, I was thinking the other day that people don’t just have one self, they have many selves,’ she says, ‘throughout their lives.’

I think about this after we’ve said goodbye and left the cafe and it comes back to me in the following weeks. I think about the different selves Dad has been, or has appeared to be, including the selves he was before I was born. I think of them as transparent, overlapping, falling away quietly. It feels as though I can accept his present self a little more easily.

Walking

I walk in the January dark through the neighbouring streets. It’s a habit I’ve caught from Dad, to walk before bed, burning off excess energy in the hope of a good night’s sleep. Like Dad I choose the roads with the interesting houses – the ones I will never be able to afford to own but like to admire.

When we all lived in the family home, Dad and I would go out for walks together at night. Dad would take a sturdy oak stick with him. It was slightly irregular and knobbled and he seemed to have had it forever, keeping it in the house more for its potential as a weapon against burglars than for its use as a walking aid. Apart from the exercise, I think Dad also enjoyed the idea of patrolling our local streets, stick in hand, checking whose lights were on and keeping an eye out for mischief-makers. I would link my arm through his and try and time my footsteps with his slightly uneven pace.

Dad would talk about the houses we passed, speculating on their owners and how much they were worth. He would analyse his and Mum’s property choices over the years and wonder if they should have pushed themselves further, buying yet another bigger, older, more dilapidated house and doing it up to make money. Dad would talk about the news, politics and the economy, and as I grew older I began to understand more of his opinions. Sometimes he would ask me about school or university life and sometimes I would confide in him and tell him I was worried about which course to do next, or was fed up with being single. He would listen and then give me advice, all of which was unexpected. ‘What you need to do,’ he would say, ‘is a course in the history of warfare.’ This leftfield suggestion took no account of my abilities or indeed my interests, but to Dad it made perfect sense: ‘I think you’ll find there aren’t many women in that field, so if you work hard you’ll stand out. You could become a world expert.’

I am thinking about Dad on my walk, when suddenly I am acutely, physically aware of the empty space by my side and it feels like my breath has been taken. I will probably never walk with him in the evenings again, I think, but it’s more than that. Somehow the space beside me is the loss of Dad as he used to be, the father I had.

A good driver

I sat between Ellie and Annabel on the back seat of the car, straining to hear Mum and Dad’s interesting-sounding conversation about the family we had just been on holiday with. Ellie’s dozing head leant against my right shoulder and Annabel’s back pressed into me on the other side as she drew shapes on the window with her finger. We were travelling in the slow lane of the motorway, as usual, at a steady 60 miles an hour. ‘Right kids,’ said Dad suddenly from the front of the car, ‘it’s time for crash practice!’

We all sat up straight and alert. ‘You know what to do, don’t you kids?’ said Dad. We assured him that we did. Crash practice was fun.

‘One… two… three…’ Dad counted. There was a pause. ‘CRASH!’

Giggling and squealing we threw ourselves down into the area between the front and back seats, a tangle of limbs squashed and folded into the narrow space.

‘Very good,’ said Dad, ‘just try and make it quicker next time.’

******

Two days after Christmas I’m sitting at the kitchen table when there’s a knock on the front door. It’s Dad again, full of a tangled explanation about having a row with Bodgana in the car, Bodgana insisting on being let out, and then storming off with the children.

‘Things got a bit heated,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know where I was going at one point and I even ended up driving the wrong way down a one-way street.’ He smiles as if this is funny. But the one-way street he goes on to describe isn’t a quiet backstreet, it’s part of a fast system giving access to the nearby A-road. Two weeks earlier, Dad mentions in passing to Ellie that he’s done a U-turn on a roundabout.

Dad has run out of petrol and asks for my help to find the way to the nearest garage, even though it’s 100 metres up our very straight road. I get in the dirty car with him, which is littered with food wrappers, empty drinks bottles, leaves and crumbs. Dad mutters under his breath about putting the indicator on, as if he is giving himself instructions. We pull away very slowly and the car barely picks up speed. He’s hooted at twice in the short journey to the garage, once as we approach a green light and he hesitates, putting his foot on the brake.

‘Why are they beeping at me?’ he asks crossly.
‘You’re driving very slowly, Dad,’ I say.
‘Well, it’s safer,’ he replies.

I sit in the car like a waiting child and watch Dad put £7 of petrol into the tank. I watch him paying at the kiosk, the bald back of his head, his stooped shoulders, his limp back to the car. He puts the key in the ignition and checks the dials.

‘Hmm,’ he says, surprised, ‘there’s not much petrol in it!’

As Bodgana refuses to drive, Dad is the family chauffeur and criss-crosses London with his wife and children several times a week, taking them to ballet lessons, cello tuition and Polish school. In the coming week, Annabel manages to speak briefly to Bodgana and tries to express some of our worries about his diminishing ability to drive, manage his bookselling business or handle money. But although Bodgana uses the word ‘dementia’ for the first time, and says she has been talking to her GP about Dad’s health, apparently his driving is not a problem.

‘He gets lost sometimes,’ she says, ‘he has trouble with directions. But he is a good driver. I am not worried.’

Ghost at the feast

Daniel sits down with his own plate of food and the table is complete: Mum, Ellie, Ellie’s three children, my oldest friend Rob, Josh, Annabel, Annabel’s boyfriend Sam, Daniel and me begin tackling our plates which are piled high with turkey and all the trimmings. ‘Compliments to the chef!’ Mum says, and just as we’re tilting our glasses towards Daniel there’s a knock on the front door.

It’s Dad, hours early. He’s wrapped up in his battered black jacket, an old pair of corduroy trousers with saggy, rubbed-bare knees, a grey scarf and his pointy black woollen hat, which gives him a strangely gnome-like outline. As he pulls off his hat his appearance shocks me. His skin is very pale and apart from their red rims his eyes are colourless, and his temples are so sunken that you can clearly see the shape of his skull. He is flustered; not by arriving just as we are sitting down to eat, but by the situation he has left at home.

Not missing a beat, Daniel jumps up and finds an extra chair for Dad, Mum and my niece Lara shuffle round the table to make space for him and I fill a plate with food, while Dad frowns and complains to the room generally about Bodgana chopping and changing her mind as to whether she gave her permission for the children to come with him – or not, as it turned out.

‘I tell you, Christmas is very complicated,’ he says, ‘having to be in three places at once and all that kind of thing.’ He looks at me as if I can help.
‘Where else do you have to be, Dad?’ I ask, but he’s confused and mutters something about how he’ll have to go over to ‘Bodgana’s place’ at some point.
‘Are you going to eat something?’ I say, and he falls to silence, devouring the meal as quickly as possible.

I hope Mum is OK, unexpectedly sitting beside Dad for Christmas lunch, but she looks fine. The conversation and jokes pick up again and flow around Dad. Glasses are refilled, people start protesting that they can’t eat another thing, second helpings are served and seemingly oblivious to everything Dad concentrates on his plate, eating without signs of relish or enjoyment. As soon as he is finished he stands up.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’d better be off, better not be away too long. I don’t know what’s going on over at Bodgana’s place but there’ll probably be a meal of some sort.’ We can’t work out if Bodgana is cooking lunch and he doesn’t know what the plans are. I try and persuade him to stay for a bit longer, but he’s putting on his coat and hat and looking for his shoes.

‘Don’t you at least want your presents Dad?’ Ellie asks him, and he pauses by the front door, long enough for Annabel, Josh, Ellie and I to gather round him with the presents we’ve bought together – clothes, as usual, because he never buys them for himself. He looks at each of us in turn and smiles, then pretends to look very serious.
‘Are you all still growing? You look taller!’
‘You’re just shrinking,’ says Josh, while Ellie puts the presents in his hands.
‘Who are these for then?’ Dad says.
‘They’re for you, Dad,’ says Annabel. He opens the presents in a hurry, looks briefly at the shirt and trousers and then tries to worry them back into their wrappings.
‘Ah, thank you all very much, very good,’ he says, smiling almost shyly at us. He looks small and uncertain, almost embarrassed. ‘Well, better scoot, Happy Christmas to everyone.’

I close the door behind him as he hobbles away down the path.