‘What’s your mum’s name?’ she asks, a small, genuine smile playing across her beautiful face.
I brace myself before I say it– a habit. ‘Gilly.’
‘Gilly,’ she repeats to herself, her smile growing and blossoming as she does until it lights up her whole face. ‘I’d love to meet her.’
I honestly nearly cry on the spot. I miss people asking about her like she’s a person and not a problem that I have. Even the people who know me the best tend to avoid the subject completely, which I understand, but that makes it feel as if she’s slipping even further away from me. And the further she slips, the more I’m forced to remember all the things I’ve lost trying to keep her here. My money. My mind.
My mortality.
Lucy reaches for my hand and squeezes it gently, and that gives me the burst of strength I need to get up. As we walk into the entrance hand-in-hand, I feel the familiar rush of anxiety creeping up my spine. It’s the same questions which run through my mind every time.
Is she sad?
Has she managed to eat?
Will she remember me?
I blow out some of the nerves with my breath and smile over at Mandy behind the desk as I sign us both into the visitors’ book. I’m a regular here, and I’ve got to know the staff pretty well over the last decade. Mandy’s eyes widen a touch as she takes in Lucy beside me, but she doesn’t say anything about it.
‘She’s in the day room,’ the older woman says warmly. She has a soft spot for me, I think, or else she’s just this nice to everyone. I’d believe either.
I smile my thanks. ‘You’re a star, Mandy,’ I say, and she beams back at me.
Lucy’s hand is warm in mine as I lead her down the corridor to the big room at the back of the building, and I’m grateful for it. It’s beginning to feel like my anchor.
When we round the corner, I see Gilly immediately. She’s in her favourite spot: a tall-backed armchair by the window, which looks out onto a small patio. In the middle of the square of paving stones there’s a bird table with a cluster of feeders hanging from the pole in the centre. It’s always been there, but since I moved her here the staff have gone to great lengths to keep it stocked with as many different types of feed as they can find, and now this little patio is visited by more varieties of bird than I’ve seen in my life.
Gilly has always loved her birds. Sometimes they’re the only things she can remember. She’s studying them closely, her good hand resting against the pink fibreglass cast on her other arm.
We’re almost all the way to her before she turns. She looks thinner than I remember, even though it’s only been a few days, and there’s a pinched expression on her face like she’s worried about something.
‘The coal tits are hiding the food,’ she says, a shake in her voice, which confirms it. ‘They do that so they have stores for winter, but I’m worried that the others won’t have enough.’
Unlikely, I think, though I don’t voice it. There’s enough feed out there on the patio to keep every bird in Britain fed for the next few years.
‘Mum. It’s me,’ I say, pulling up one of the footstools from the other side of the wall and plopping down next to her. I reach out and touch her gently on her good arm. ‘It’s Liam.’
She stills then, eyes wandering off to one side, like she’s thinking about it.
‘I have a son called Liam,’ she says after a while, her fingers twisting into the blanket in her lap. My chest tightens with the familiar drop of disappointment. She’s not here. Not yet.
‘I’m your son Liam,’ I tell her, the same way I tell her every time, and at the sound of my name again her face lights up. It makes her look younger– closer to her fifty-eight years than usual.
‘It’s his birthday next month,’ she says, excitement brightening her voice, and when she reaches a hand out for me, I take it. ‘He’s going to be eight.’
It goes like this, the rise and the fall. The highs of the things she remembers, and then the grief for the parts that are lost. But I hold back my feelings– smile past them. She knows me, even if she doesn’t know menow.
‘That’s me,’ I remind her. ‘I’m older now. I grew up.’
And then she looks right at me, her eyes as clear and bright as I’ve ever seen them. For that moment, her face relaxes out of the lines she’s frowned into it, and she’s like her old self again.
‘I don’t remember,’ she says, so painfully aware of what she’s lost that it breaks my heart.
‘I know.’
And then, just as fast, it’s gone. Her eyes drift back away from me, and she adjusts the blanket that someone has tucked over her knees.
‘I haven’t seen this little nuthatch before,’ she says. Her voice sounds small, like it’s coming from far away. ‘You don’t normally see them around here. They’re very territorial.’