Looking back, I wonder why Sundays are often the worst day. The exhaustion of a Sunday. I remember the Tony Hancock radio sketch about the boredom of a Sunday. There is nothing to do, nowhere to go, carers, friends, family are with their families or out with their friends.
I remember a Sunday when the next door neighbours invited us, a party for their little boy’s first communion. We were sort of looking forward. We often hear the children on the stairs, or practising their music lessons. I thought we might meet some of the neighbours, show a frendly face. It would be part of the fight back against the reclusiveness that we are being forced into. But Anna got confused with the carer trying to put her into a dress, it became a struggle, so that in the end she could hardly make a step out of the front door. It took us fifteen minutes and we were still on our own front step. People went past. The father next door came out. Another man was smoking a cigarette and gave us a look, as we stood there like a tableau – Jesus and Magdalene on a day out.
‘I thought I was innocent,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired.’
And so we went back indoors. Anna has not been out more than three or four times in six months, once to the hospital, then a rare dare of a drive to cousins in the country, and a disastrous attempt to visit our local chemist, when she panicked walking the five yards across the pavement and crouched down as if caught in a sudden rainstorm.
I can always try to read the Sunday paper, I read all the comment, the latest problems of the government trying to look decisive. Holidays are not the best of times for politicians. I like my son’s analysis that Blair and Brown are a married couple, behaving like those couples you see not talking to each other in a seaside café … Anna does not like it when I rustle the paper. Inside I’m saying, so I can’t even turn the fucking page??? Let me be able to do SOMETHING. The television is on, with the sound down as it distracts Anna, a government minister is talking about the terrorist threat. I can’t hear you. Another drug - one that helps people with bowel cancer - has been found not to be value for money by the NHS. Value for money would be spending on healthy people. I pick up the sports pages. I enjoy the posturing of the players and the managers. They are like small-time Greek gods with their cheating and their feuds and their power plays. Like the politicians.
And I will be with Anna again next Sunday. It is the end of the summer and the late August holiday weekend and the next door family are still in France. I expect it will be very quiet.