Pulse

sons. Do I have to spell it out?’
    ‘I think you just did.’
    A few weeks later, one Saturday afternoon, Mum phoned in a bit of a fluster. She’d driven to an antiques fair in a nearby town to get Dad a birthday present, had a puncture on the way back, managed to get the car to the nearest petrol station, only to find – none too surprisingly – that the cashiers wouldn’t leave their tills. They probably didn’t know how to change a wheel anyway. Dad had said he was going to have a lie-down and –
    ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll be along. Ten, fifteen minutes.’ I didn’t have anything else to do. But before I could hang up, Janice, who’d been monitoring my end of the conversation, shouted across at me,
    ‘Why can’t she call the fucking AA or RAC?’
    It was obvious that Mum would have heard, and that this was what Janice had intended.
    I put the phone down. ‘You can come too,’ I said to her. ‘And lie under the car while I jack it up.’ As I fetched the car keys, I thought to myself: right, that’s it.
    Most people don’t like to bother their doctor. But most people don’t like the idea of being ill. And most people don’t want to be accused, even implicitly, of wasting thedoctor’s time. So in theory, going to the doctor is a win–win situation: either you come out confirmed as healthy, or else it’s true that you haven’t been wasting the doctor’s time. My father, his scan revealed, had a chronic sinus condition for which he was prescribed antibiotics followed by more nasal spray; beyond that lay the possibility of an operation. My mother, after blood tests, EMG and MRI, and then a process of elimination, was diagnosed with motor neuron disease.
    ‘You’ll look after your father, won’t you?’
    ‘Of course, Mum,’ I replied, not knowing if she meant the short term or the long term. And I expect she had a similar exchange with Dad about me.
    My father said, ‘Look at Stephen Hawking. He’s had it for forty years.’ I suspect he’d been on the same website as I had; from which he would also have learnt that fifty per cent of MND sufferers die within fourteen months.
    Dad was incensed by the way they handled it at the hospital. No sooner had the specialist explained his conclusions, than they took Mum and Dad down to some supply room and showed them the wheelchairs and stuff which would become necessary as her condition inevitably deteriorated. Dad said it was like being taken to a torture dungeon. He was very upset, for Mum’s sake mainly, I think. She took it all calmly, he said. But then she’d worked at that hospital for fifteen years, and knew what its rooms contained.
    I found it hard to talk to Dad about what was happening – and he to me. I kept thinking: Mum’s dying, but Dad’s losing her. I felt that if I repeated the phrase enough times, it would make sense. Or stop it happening. Or something. I also thought: Mum’s the one we turn to when anything goes wrong; so who do we turn to when something goes wrong with her? In the meantime – waiting for the answers – Dad and I discussed her daily needs: who was looking after her, how her spirits were, what she’d said, and the question ofmedication (or rather, the lack of it, and whether we should push for Riluzole). We could, and did, discuss such matters endlessly. But the catastrophe itself – its suddenness, whether we might have seen it coming, how much Mum had been covering up, the prognosis, the unavoidable outcome – these we could only hint at from time to time. Perhaps we were just too exhausted. We needed to talk about normal English things, like the probable effect on local businesses of the proposed ring road. Or I would ask Dad about his anosmia and we would both pretend it was still an interesting subject. The antibiotics had worked at first, making smells come back in a rush; but soon – after about three days – the effect wore off. Dad, being Dad, didn’t tell me at the time; he said it felt like an irrelevant joke, given what was happening to Mum.
    I read somewhere that those who are close to someone who’s seriously ill often take to doing crossword puzzles or jigsaws in their hours away from the hospital. For one thing, they don’t have the concentration for anything more serious; but there’s also another reason. Consciously or unconsciously, they need to work at something with rules, laws, answers, and an overall solution; something fixable. Of course, illness has its laws and