Arms and the Women. Reginald Hill

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       PROLEGOMENA

      When I go to see my father, he doesn’t know me.

      He’s away somewhere else in a strange land.

      I tell myself it’s not all bad. He missed all that suffering when we thought Rosie was going to die. And all those refugees in Africa, and in Europe too, that we see streaming across our television screens, he doesn’t have to worry about them. Global warming, AIDS, the Euro, none of these impinges on his consciousness. He doesn’t even have to feel anxious about his roses when gales are forecast in July.

      He sits here in the Home, like ignorance on a monument, smiling at nothing.

      At least he’s content, the nurses tell us, and we tell them back, yes, at least he’s content.

      Content to be nobody and nowhere.

      But I have seen him outside of this room, this cocoon, with memories of somebody and somewhere still intermittent in his mind, staring in bewilderment at the woman who is both his wife and a complete stranger, pausing in the hallway of his own house, unable to recall if he’s heading for the kitchen or the garden and ignorant of which door to use if he does remember, crying out in terror as the dog which has been his most obedient servant for nearly ten years comes bounding towards him, barking its love.

      Seeing him like this was bad.

      But worse was waking in the night during and after Rosie’s illness, wondering if perhaps what we call Alzheimer’s – that condition in which the world becomes a vortex of fragments, a video loop of disconnected scenes, an absurdist drama full of actors pretending to be old friends and relations – wondering whether perhaps this is not a disease at all but merely a relaxing of some psychological censor which the self imposes to enable us to exist in a totally irrational universe.

      Which would mean that dad and all the others are at last seeing things as they really are.

      Unvirtual reality.

      A sea of troubles.