Swan Songs

5th October 2005:

Norman Bates Strikes Again

There was absolute pandemonium at home this morning. Twinkles found a grey hair and went ballistic, plucking it out without mercy. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it wasn’t even his grey hair. It was mine and it wasn’t attached to my head. I went from enjoying one kind of blissful stroke to almost suffering an altogether different kind of stroke when our sexy morning shower together turned into something resembling a scene from a Hitchcock Horror. Terrifying screams suddenly erupted into the region of my groin and were quickly followed by an excruciating pain. I feared a homophobic and invisible Norman Bates had stabbed first him and then me in the unmentionables.

I came damn close to disgracing myself in the bowel control department and my poor balls just about drew up to join my Adam’s apple with the shock. He shot out of the shower cubicle holding something between his fingers. Taking it across to the window he examined it and then shrieked, ‘it is, Tarn, oh my God it is, it’s a grey hair!’

Once my eyes had stopped watering and the pain had passed I sharply swatted his damp buttocks and told him to stop the hysteria immediately. Anyway, it was not grey, it was just a lighter shade than its brethren and it did not mean I was going, as he dramatically put it, ‘Prematurely Grey.’ Though God knows I’ve had enough stress lately to send me snow white, never mind grey. I wouldn’t allow him to check for any others, either down there or on my head. He gave me an especially close and affectionate hug as we parted for work, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew he was slyly perusing my scalp for signs of a colour decline.

He had a present for me when I picked him up from work this evening, a bottle of Grecian 2000. He’d bought it just in case a dramatic downstairs decline happened overnight and spread to my head. He’d also had a word with the lady pharmacist in Boots who said she didn’t think one grey hair down there was anything to worry about. It was quite common and it could be years before I got another one. She did say it was true that some men went grey early, but then again some didn’t. He’s a rotten little toad. I’ll never be able to face going in that branch of Boots again not knowing my pubes had been a topic of discussion.

The last straw was when I overheard him chatting to Lulu about it on the phone. Lulu is as big a gossip as he is. By Friday there won’t be a soul on earth, and certainly not in the PP, who doesn’t know I had a grey hair down there. Only it will be like Chinese whispers and the one will have become many. I told him I was going to buy one of the ball gags favoured by the bdsm crowd and make him wear it. I also told him that living with him was guaranteed to turn me grey before my time. He primly informed me I wasn’t exactly a picnic to live with, and I’d likely turn his hair grey with my brutish, domineering ways before he turned mine grey.

He’s stark naked and sitting cross-legged on the floor at the moment. He’s meditating and getting in touch with his inner self, though he’s the only person I’ve ever heard of who meditates while stuffing their face with chunks of Terry’s chocolate orange. If he eats much more of it his inner self will explode. I know what he’s really up to. He’s actually indulging in a fit of sophisticated sulking. He wanted Teddy and Maurice to come round tonight and continue the lip-synching tuition, but I refused. I’m not ready for another session of dancing torture with nurse Teddy and doctor Maurice.

I’m going to lay down my electronic quill now. He’s looking a bit dejected. I don’t suppose it will kill me to do some lip miming practice with him. I hope I can manage to keep a straight face. He got vexed last time we tried it because I was so self-conscious and felt so silly I kept cracking up. He takes his art very seriously and I shall get my wrist slapped if I don’t follow suit.


8th October 2005:

Family Bereavement

My dad called me on Thursday morning to tell me Nana had died in the early hours. He said, ‘your’ Nana, almost like she was nothing to do with him, like she wasn’t his mother. It bothered me a bit, as if he’d distanced himself from her. Of course I’m being unfair. What else could he say? She was indeed my Nana. It’s funny how things can bother you sometimes, inconsequential things. Perhaps it’s just a way of coping with, or possibly avoiding, deeper feelings? I’ve been thinking about family relationships. It seems to me that men and women who become parents lose their identities several times over in the process. It happens first when they become a parent and then again should they become a grandparent. I think it’s probably a more pronounced experience for women. My Nana’s birth name was Lillian Granger. Marriage changed her surname and then child bearing took her Christian name, and she became not so much a person as an office: mother, mummy, mam or mum, or variations on the theme. Then when her children had children, she became Nana. Lillian was lost somewhere, and in the end she was even lost to herself when Alzheimer’s slowly claimed her mind.

Lillian Granger Swan, wife, mother, grandmother, spent the last eighteen months of her life in a nursing home. It wasn’t too bad at first. She was a little bit confused, but she still recognised us all, though she was convinced mum and dad were still married. None of us dissuaded her; there didn’t seem any point. She was also convinced the ornamental cat standing on a shelf in her room was real. She would talk to it, stroke it and feed it, a sight that was simultaneously funny and heartbreakingly sad. She had always been slightly bemused by my relationship with Twinkles, never quite certain as to whether I was hitched up with a woman or a man or both. Nevertheless, she liked him and enjoyed his visits. He made her laugh and he made her feel important and pretty by manicuring and painting her nails and dressing her hair, things I could never have done for her, nor my dad.

Her condition gradually deteriorated and she would hold conversations with people who had been dead for years, including my Grandpa, while forgetting the names of the living. I can’t describe what it feels like when someone you love no longer remembers who you are. As her confusion deepened she became more and more agitated by a world she didn’t understand anymore.

Finally, my Nana, who had been the most gentle of women became aggressive and violent and poor dad had to agree to her being given what amounted to heavy sedation to calm her. It was then I suppose that our visits lessened. She didn’t know who we were and our presence seemed to distress rather than comfort her. We were strangers and somewhere deep in her mind lingered a warning against strangers. She would sit fastening and unfastening the same button on her cardigan until the button inevitably came loose, and then she would scream. It was unbearable on many levels, not least because you couldn’t console or comfort her. She had loved to be hugged by her grandchildren, but now she reacted like someone under attack, fighting, biting and scratching. I would look at her and try to see something of the Nana I once loved, and still did love, but she was gone, lost.

Twinks told me that she could never really be lost, because the real her was forever held within my memory and my heart.

Dad said in a way she had been lucky because her death had been quick. She had a fall and suffered a heart attack, or maybe it was the other way round, we’re not sure yet. It meant at least she was spared more suffering, as her condition deteriorated further and her ravaged brain denied her body the memory of how to swallow, and to breathe.

Her funeral has been arranged for Monday. Twinkles is also upset. He was fond of my Nan. He’s trying to be strong for me, but keeps disappearing into the bathroom to have a quiet cry. He then reappears with a pink nose and red eyes. Smiling brightly he pats my shoulder and asks if I want a nice cup of tea. He is the sweetest man.