It was getting late and I reassured her, we are at home, it is the best place.
‘Don’t be funny,’ she said. ‘Very good. Very funny,’ she repeated, with heavy irony. She did not think she was at home. She did not say where she thinks we are. These are some of the worst moments, when we are in different places, it seems.
We have a very good system now, with good carers. They are very different, Scottish Catholic, Irish, Jamaican, Ugandan Muslim, and it would be a good study, how they bring their cultural identities to bear on the task, with a sense of duty and care. The trouble is that at the moment Anna is giving them all a hard time, and however experienced they are and say that it’s water of a duck’s back, I can see how they also get hurt and don’t like it at all when she tells them to get lost.
‘Who is that little girl? What does she think she’s doing?’ The little girl is in her forties, with two children of her own and expecting to be a grandmother soon.
The carers try to hold their own – ‘don’t talk to me like that.’ Later Anna was bemused, can’t remember what she said. I don't know why she has become so worried about other people and whether this is a temporary phase or what. So for the last two nights the carer has gone and I have helped her to bed. She is tired out. I have sat at the end of the bed, with a glass of whiskey, as she has slowly settled down. After a dozen times of her getting up again, I was also feeling bleary, compassion masking the rage.
Between times, I was reading a novel by Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black. A story of ‘sensitives’ who can communicate with the dead but can’t tell the punters that people are just as obnoxious when they have passed on as when they were alive.
‘You start out, you start talking, you don’t know what you’re going to say. You don’t even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don’t know anything. Then suddenly you do know. You have to walk blind. And you walk slap into the truth.’ (p.262)