The Fragments of my Father. Sam Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ an adult, whenever I came home to visit my parents, Dad would hover in the background in silence. A friend of mine who stayed with us later recalled: ‘I remember your dad not saying a single word to me. It’s as though he wasn’t there.’ I know now that this is a symptom of schizophrenia: an indifference, an ephemeral, unengaged absence. But at that time all I knew was that my mum was like a best friend to me, while my relationship with my father was virtually non-existent.

      One year, we all went to the cinema on Boxing Day. We saw the film Australia, and as the credits rolled and we emerged from the dark, I was surprised by the animation on my dad’s face. When I asked him if he’d enjoyed it, he said it was one of the best films he’d ever seen. Later, my mum explained: ‘His voice suddenly stopped speaking to him – he had two hours of freedom.’ Freedom: the word jolted me. Because he had stopped vocalising his battle, I often forgot that he was imprisoned in that cell, where a hostile figure talked at him all day. Whatever conversational tug of war was going on inside him had become a private anguish.

      On the mantlepiece in our living room sits a photographic triptych of my mother, looking shy, smiling and pensive. After I’d returned from visiting my father at St Helier hospital, I found myself looking at her frozen expressions, wishing I could ask her for advice. Had she ever seen my father descend into catatonia? How would she have handled it?

      We had lost my mother just over four years ago. Since she’d gone, I had not seen my father cry once.

      My brothers and I had waited and watched him, always vigilant for signs of a breakdown. But he just carried on in his set routine. Over the years, the bandwidth of his attention and interests had narrowed down. He had no friends, only his family. He had no ambitions. Taking a trip to somewhere he didn’t know would cause his hands to tremble with anxiety. Routine held him together. He slept the same sort of hours as a cat. At night, he would spend twelve hours in bed and often napped in the daytime. His day was bookended by the taking of medicines – Lansoprazole and Lactulose first thing in the morning, Amisulpride and Clozapine last thing at night. His physique was also shaped by them: he put on a huge amount of weight, a side effect of his pills. He went to the local supermarket several times a day, but rarely ventured beyond the town, except for hospital appointments; the parameters of his existence were more akin to those of someone who lived centuries ago. The only dramatic change after Mum died was that he stopped watching EastEnders, (he and Mum had always watched it together). My brothers and I were divided as to whether this was a sign of an improvement in his mental health.

      When I was away in Appley Bridge I would call him every night. Our talks would last ten minutes or so. We always had the same conversation, cheerful and superficial: I would ask him how the weather was; he’d reply that it was sunny/rainy/grey. I’d ask him if he’d eaten/fed the cat/gone out. He’d reply yes/yes/yes. Then I’d say goodnight. He always seemed pleased that I had rung. When I was back living with him, I would cook him the occasional meal. There was a companionable warmth between us, in that we shared the house but didn’t speak much. This continued for three and a half years, before suddenly, dramatically, things deteriorated.

      September 2015 brought the first signs of trouble. My dad was taking weekly trips to the GP for remedies for corns, a tickle in his throat, a fit of dizziness, a small rash on his hand. Initially I felt anxious, because I knew from loved ones I’d lost that a tiny symptom can belie an illness that slashes and burns; and then I became immune to worry, because it seemed that minor illnesses were becoming my dad’s hobby, something to collect, to fuss and turn over and label. Then his tendency to hypochondria became manic. Stefan took him to the GP over an indefinable illness; on their way out, Dad began to weep. He was taken to hospital, discharged a few days later. He seemed strange, blurry, slowed-down, tasks taking twice as long as usual. I thought if I cooked for him it might help. I thought that rest was the answer.

      That day in September, when it first happened, I remember setting down plates on the dining-room table for lunch. My eyes skimmed a stain on the carpet. My mother had lived her last days in this room, and the stain had been created by – a spilt drink? – a splash of urine? – now faded to a watermark.

      I went into the hallway and called upstairs: ‘Dad, it’s ready!’

      Two plates on the table. The empty place where she once sat, at the head. My appetite was always sharp. Still standing, getting impatient, I speared a potato and chewed it quickly. I called to Dad again. When there was no reply, I hurried up the stairs. ‘Come in,’ his quavery voice replied to my knock. He was sitting on the bed, looking at the clothes neatly laid out next to him – trousers, braces, shirt – as though he had been given a set of bad letters at a turn in Scrabble and couldn’t make a word out of them.

      Kneeling down, I busied myself with peeling off his socks, pulling on taut crisp ones. But when I reached for his pyjama shirt, my hand paused. I hadn’t seen my dad naked since I was a child.

      ‘Why don’t you have lunch in your pyjamas?’ I suggested.

      As he lumbered down the stairs, I thought: hang on, has he even taken his morning medicines? One of our kitchen cupboards now functioned as a medicine cabinet: I found a jumble of white boxes with scientific names and labels giving instructions for doses. In the dining room, Dad sat down before his plate of cooling chicken and vegetables. I passed him his pills. Silence; stasis. I poured him a glass of water and put the pills on a spoon. I raised them to his mouth. He opened it. I slipped them in and passed him the water.

      I started to cut up his food. A piece of chicken on the end of my fork came up against his closed lips. He looked at me as though he couldn’t hear the words I was saying: Dad, it’s good to eat, you need to keep your strength up. For one surreal moment, I felt as though I was an apparition he did not believe in. When I called 999 they asked if he was breathing, if he was in pain, and I had trouble explaining his state: he seemed as though he was in a coma, yet he was awake. After I hung up, I took solace in the sound of him breathing in and out, but I could not make his eyes connect with mine. The fading light in them chilled me with a grief-flash: my mother lying in this room, on a makeshift hospital bed, the life seeping out of her. It was as though he was in a liminal state, body half-dead, mind in purgatory.

      It took eight weeks for him to heal. Due to a lack of beds at the local psychiatric hospital in Tooting, he was transferred from St Helier to Tolworth hospital, where he shared a ward with elderly patients suffering from dementia. There he was medicated and nourished back to walking, talking, speaking health and discharged for Christmas. I had assumed then that the catatonia was a blip, a one-off. Perhaps he’d just got tired, run down, needed rest. Now that it was happening all over again, I could no longer dismiss it as an anomaly. This was the start of something new, a pattern I could neither name nor explain. I thought of all the years that my mother had looked after him. Why, after decades of stability, had he collapsed again – and why into such a strange state?

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