Tuesday, 4th January 2005.

Boxing Day Ramble

We reached Tunbridge Wells after a less-than-wonderful three hour trek, down the A34 and through the billowing exhaust pipes of cold engines at the petrol station (which was full of people returning Christmas presents; a most self-centred activity when all the person behind you wants to do is gas up). Down towards the bright lights of Slough and Burnham and then onto the living hell that is the M25; the biggest ring road in the country protecting a crowded metropolis. And finally into Kent, and the snow-tinged hills, and the crest of the A21 as you push through a road-spanning arch and out onto a glorious view of the landscape spread beneath you like the world's most extraordinary oil painting. Southborough common was cold and the walk we took was subsequently brief.

My grandfather was asleep when we arrived, his tight body heaving back and forth in the armchair by the window. The television blared loudly. I woke him up gently, and his face cracked into a smile. It all began with the third thing he said.

"Are you looking forward to Christmas, then?"
I frowned, puzzled. "We've had it."
"Have we?"
"Yes, it was yesterday."
"Oh."
"Don't you remember? Dad rang to wish you a Merry Christmas?"
"Oh. I never know what day it is round here."

It was at this point that Emily reappeared from the colostomy-filled bathroom, so I dropped the subject. I wouldn't mind so much, but he'd been downstairs to eat turkey with the other residents - something that he never does normally. Such is the way of things with my grandfather these days. His long-term memory is more or less intact: he can remember Emily's name and knows that we're having a baby this summer, and perhaps this in itself has given him something to latch onto. His recollections of my grandmother are, I'm sure, as clear as ever, although due to the fact that he gets so upset it's not something I bring up very often. But short-term memories are another matter: flickering, rain-soaked flames, alight for the briefest moments before being snuffed out by a sudden gust of wind.

We handed him his presents and he put them down on the floor. "Thank you. Are there any for you under the bed?"
"No," I said. "You gave us money."
"Did I? Oh."

I peered under the bed, and found nothing within sight that looked of any interest. The bag lay at his feet, as he turned down the television. Three or four minutes went by, the three of us trying to fill in the silence with mundane conversation. Eventually I said "Aren't you going to open your presents?"
"Presents? Have I got presents, then?"
"They're in the bag down there."
"Oh."

He fumbled around, and then picked up the bag, removing both gifts. The framed photograph was placed on the table, unopened, but he tore the paper from the Conan Doyle novels and placed them down next to the large pile of unread books that sat by his three-drawer cabinet. "Thank you."

A couple of minutes later, I asked him if he was going to open the other one.
"Is there another one?"
"It's on the table in front of you."
He leaned forward and picked up the second gift, and unwrapped it. "Ah. Lovely."

I placed it on the television, while Emily opened up her bag. "And we've brought you some Christmas cake," she said.
Gingerly, he tore off a segment and placed it in his mouth. "Does this have nuts in it?"
"Yes, it does," I said. "How absent-minded of me; I'd forgotten."
"That's all right," he replied, taking them out of his mouth like cherry stones, and putting them on the table next to the empty tea cup. "I can eat the icing."

It was then that we noticed the other cake, sitting on the far edge of the table, and looking not a little stale. "You've got another piece there."
"Have I?"
"Look", said Emily, picking it up. "You'd better eat that some time."
"I will, then." He reached for the bag of Starburst Joosters we'd taken him, presumably to cleanse the palate. There was a small penknife sitting on the dresser, and as he picked it up it became apparent to me that he was going to use it to slit the bag. This wouldn't have been a problem except that the older my grandfather gets the less I trust his ability to go through the day without injuring himself. The justification for my misgivings became apparent as the two of us witnessed him hold the bag close to his groin, and I saw my wife tense up considerably as my grandfather picked up the knife and began stabbing at the bag in the direction of his thigh. You don't want to deny him the little independence he has left, which was why I left him to it, but Emily and I sat poised on the bed, ready to spring: one slip and he'd have been in the hospital.

Half an hour passed. We discussed his room-mate, Joe, who is apparently something of a ladies' man: he has taken a shine to one of the other elderly patients. Joe awoke one night in a state of disorientation, and having suffered the semi-nocturnal delusion that he was married to her, wondered why he was alone in the bed. He subsequently wandered into the corridor to find his girlfriend, and presumably climb into bed with her. This calls to mind the woman who until recently had the bedroom next door to my grandfather, and who would wander into his room in the middle of the night to see him, only to be told to "clear off".

"So where is she now?"
"I don't know," was the answer. "You never really know round here. People come and go, and I'm never sure where they are."

This was remarkably astute from the old man, to be honest. I thought about Dory in Finding Nemo, and her plea to Marlin: "I remember things better with you...It's there, because when I look at you, I can feel it. Please...I don't want that to go away. I don't want to forget."

"Joe can't read or write, you know."
"Can't he?"
"No. I have to write all his letters for him. It's silly. I don't know what to say. Same thing in the war. I had a bloke who couldn't write, and wanted me to write home for him. But what do you tell them? What do you say?"
"I know." I didn't, really, but it was the first thing that came out.
"Who are you again? In relation to David?"
"I'm his son. And your grandson. And this is my wife."
"Emily."
We should have labelled the photos.

The next day, my father visited. They found a large pile of presents under the bed, unopened. We figured he must have made the connection when we were talking to him: he had known that there was something under the bed, although it was nothing I'd seen when I'd given it a cursory glance the day before. On Christmas morning, my father had talked to him on the phone and asked him if he had opened the presents they'd reminded him every night that he'd been left, to which the answer was a certified "Yes". When they mentioned the photograph on the television he admitted that he couldn't remember where he had got it, or even that we'd visited.

This in itself is nothing new, actually: the last time we went down my father asked him later that afternoon if anyone had been to see him, only to be surprised with a negative response. It was only later in the conversation that he remembered that we had visited - a fact he considered important enough to reinforce with a second phone call, a few minutes later, to ensure that he had given my father accurate information. It's sad to see him losing his mind, becoming as forgetful and vague as my grandmother in the final months before her death. And yet he seems happy enough in his own mind, and so I do not mourn his mental deterioration the way I did that of his wife: he will, I suspect, slouch towards death with a bad back and weak bladder, but always with the gleam in his eye.

It was beginning to grow dark by the time we reached the old estate, which had changed very little over the last two years. The shops were closed, but children played in the streets on new bicycles, while dogs decorated the lamp posts.
"Which one was your grandparents' house, then?" Emily asked me.
I looked. "That one."

She burst into laughter. It was covered head to foot in lights. Excessive lightshows on council estates are nothing new, of course: it seems that those with least to spend are always the ones most likely to splash out on enormous, power-draining lights that they can't really afford, and that result in jealous / angry neighbours and a red bill from the electricity company a few months down the line. What stood out here was that no one on Woolley Road seemed to have bothered much, with the exception of the new occupants of number twenty. We have no more contact with the local council, and so have no way of knowing whether the old matriarchal house is still home to the woman who in late 2003 tried to steal my dead grandmother's identity to escape a bad credit rating.

But as we gunned the engine and drove off into the last part of what had been a slightly surreal day, I took a last glance at the house, with its five hundred-odd multi-coloured bulbs, garden-planted reindeer and the Santa sitting on the roof tile, and got a sudden picture of my grandmother looking down from heaven in her red and brown housedress, clucking with disapproval. And it's an image that amused me greatly. I squeezed Emily's hand, patted her stomach, and we drove home.