Undoctored, page 13
My paternal grandfather’s mind plumped primarily for the gentle option, so he drifted away with minimal fuss until he could no longer be cared for in his house and was transferred into a nursing home, albeit one with cushioned vertical surfaces. Every few months, however, his neurons would somehow magically reconnect for a few hours and he’d find himself, for reasons he couldn’t possibly understand, horribly alone in a terrifying and unfamiliar prison cell. He’d generally use these windows of lucidity to attempt his escape. On one such occasion, he asked if he might be allowed to take a walk down the high street as a special treat. He dressed himself very smartly in a three-piece suit, as he would always do, and a young male healthcare assistant was assigned to chaperone him, and have him back in his room an hour later.
‘Do you mind if I pop in here?’ my granddad asked, signalling to a motorcycle showroom midway through his walk. The healthcare assistant nodded and waited by the entrance as my granddad wandered around inside, admiring the dazzling chrome of these machines that he would, in all likelihood, never get this close to again. Then he approached the burly man behind the till and in a perfectly pitched tone of reasonable concern, said something along the lines of, ‘I’m very sorry to bother you, but would you mind calling the police? That young man in the doorway has been following me. I’m afraid he might want to harm me in some way.’ Unfortunately, though understandably, the shop staff chose to take the word of the well-spoken, smartly dressed elderly gentleman over the acne-scarred, unkempt school leaver in a tracksuit, and while the latter was detained by a couple of retired Hells Angels, my granddad was free to wander the streets of East London for nearly ten hours before he was recaptured.
Although the healthcare assistant only spent a very short while in police custody before his story was verified and a search party dispatched, the nursing home was furious with my parents. They essentially acted like this was some kind of meticulously planned Ocean’s Eleven-style heist in which the whole family was complicit. In return, my parents were even more furious with the nursing home for their sloppiness.
‘You realise he could have died?’
But, in a sense, my grandfather already had. Certainly by the time of his physical passing, I’d already done my mourning for the man I knew, who’d kiss the top of your head and berate everything you were wearing, reminding you that, as a former tailor, ‘I could make that better myself.’
When you reach your mid-thirties, the chances must be salami-thin that you have any remaining grandparents. I know this because of the surprise that was always expressed when people found out my grandmother was still kicking around. ‘And she’s sharp as a tack,’ I’d always add. Until, of course, she wasn’t. Unlike my granddad, whose dementia was, for the most part, a seemingly painless befuddlement, my gran’s was a deeply scary, angry time, full of confusion, delusion and hallucination.
‘They’re back!’ she screamed, when I visited her at home for the final time. I asked her who was back. ‘The police! They’re upstairs.’
‘Ah, OK,’ I said. ‘Let me go check for you.’ I nipped upstairs and, like I was looking under the bed for monsters, popped my head into the airing cupboard and the avocado bathroom in search of armed response units.
I couldn’t persuade her she wasn’t under siege, so I reverted to medical mode – nodding, smiling, asking straight-faced follow-up questions. ‘Why do you think there are so many police officers here? What do you think they want?’
Talking about it made her less agitated, so I kept going – it felt like I was helping rather than humouring her. The human brain is quite incredible. Even while malfunctioning so badly that she couldn’t remember my name, she was still able to construct a dramatically satisfying narrative about a rota of police officers staking out the spare bedroom to spy on an international drugs ring in the house across the street. I marvelled at her brain’s impressive improv – they had names, backstories and bad habits.
I felt more comfortable trying to deal with this as a doctor rather than as a grandchild. A doctor always gets to walk away and not think about it afterwards. But of course I still thought about her – a sickness in the pit of my stomach that she had retreated so far into this nightmare fantasy world. I channelled my inner Vulcan, cauterised my tear ducts and reported back to my parents as if I were a specialist they’d asked to assess the patient. ‘She is increasingly thought-disordered, with evidence of visual and auditory hallucinations.’ I advised them a home would probably be more appropriate at this point than her home.
A few weeks after I performed at the dementia benefit show, my grandma had her own final gig. Orthodox Jewish funerals lean needlessly towards the bleak – they’re no celebration of life, no New Orleans jazz send-off. Just a morbid, miserable reminder that no matter how we live our lives, we’re all simply waiting to feed the worms. Death, like life, is no excuse for a party.
She lay plonked in a plain, unadorned coffin in the middle of a functional, joyless building with the design aesthetic of a recycling centre. There would be no music and no singing. The rules dictated men and women must be segregated and forced to stand on opposite sides of the room, to prevent husbands and wives from consoling each other and escaping any of the necessary, character-building anguish. No heartening hymns, just impenetrable, monotonous Hebrew prayers that I pretended to join in with, mouth opening and shutting like a garage door – a footballer blagging the national anthem.
But Judaism’s best efforts were no match for my family’s iron resolve, half of whom had also received further training at medical school, and a regional Kleenex shortage was avoided.
This was the first Jewish funeral I’d been to that was in any way pimped up – my grandmother had written her own eulogy and, after some moderate kvetching, the rabbi eventually agreed to read it out.
‘I was born in 1926,’ he began, unsettlingly, his thick Israeli accent giving the whole thing a definite séance vibe.* Despite the weirdness of it, it was fascinating to hear what Grandma had to say from the other side. There were vast swathes of her life I had no idea about, such as the many years she spent as a foster carer. Then there was the story of how she met my granddad, a meet-cute I would have otherwise never known about. Then there was the time the police staked out her spare bedroom to spy on an international drugs ring in the house across the street. Hang on, what?!
I spent the remaining forty minutes of the service trying to make sense of what I’d just heard. If this police story was true, did I unnecessarily expedite her hospital admission by saying she was more demented than she actually was? I must have looked particularly traumatised because J squeezed my hand and flashed me a comforting smile. I batted him away. I’m not sure what god’s views on homosexuality are but given the segregation arrangement, it felt like even if this was technically allowed then it really wasn’t in the spirit of the law.
Due to a longstanding family rift that even death could not heal,* my corner of the family didn’t attend the main wake and instead decamped to a greasy spoon down the road. I ordered an omelette and chips, but then my mum told me that my suit was looking tight on me so I just stared at my plate in silence instead. When I’d got over my funereal fat-shaming, I questioned her about the contents of the auto-eulogy. The police had indeed staked out my grandmother’s spare bedroom but not a few weeks ago as her dementia had claimed, rather, back in the mid-1970s.
The boys in blue bell bottoms had cottoned on to a vast drugs enterprise, based out of a fairly inconspicuous house in Seymour Road, Hampton Wick, directly opposite my grandparents’. And so, day and night for a very long time, a pair of officers took turns camping out in their spare room with a set of binoculars. The cover story was that my grandparents were having building work done, so at every change of shift, a new duo replaced the last pair, all wearing workmen’s overalls and carrying identical metal tool-boxes. This apparently raised lots of eyebrows among the curtain twitchers of Seymour Road. What kind of building work, they wondered, went on for months at a time but was utterly silent and resulted in no discernible improvements to the house? Why had this previously sociable couple closed their doors to their neighbours? And – weirdest of all – what kind of silent construction necessitated twenty-four-hour-a-day shiftwork? As far as their neighbours were concerned, there was only one reasonable explanation: they were clearly kinky sex perverts, whose appetite for unthinkable activities was so insatiable that they required a constant supply of young men dressed as builders.*
After a full year of staking out, the police finally had the evidence they needed and decamped from upstairs. Although they never offered any financial compensation to my grandparents for the use of the room, they did cough up a few quid when my grandmother pointed out that the mattress was completely ruined, thanks to an entire year of 24/7 chain smoking. No doubt when my granddad dumped a stained and knackered mattress in the front garden it did little to dispel the street’s working theory. I asked my mum questions till she ran out of answers. ‘Oh, look it up!’ she eventually cried, exasperated. ‘It’s called Operation Julie. It’s quite famous.’*
Of course Grandma would have housed a famous drugs sting. How could she not? I was slightly ashamed that I hadn’t believed she was telling some version of the truth, or at least investigated a little further than checking behind the out-of-date matzos in the kitchen cupboard.
My agent was more than a little surprised by my 180-degree change of heart regarding the Operation Julie project. Not only did I now definitely want to meet the producers but I was certain I was the perfect writer for the job, and had already constructed a detailed B-plot concerning the mild-mannered sting-enablers across the street. Unfortunately, by the time of my turnaround, they’d already found another writer. (Probably Russell T Davies.)
It’s just as well – I would have had a thousand questions about what happened and no one to answer them, only the recurring guilt that I never had these discussions with my grandmother while she was alive. What an uneven distribution of interest we had in each other’s lives: she followed every aspect of mine, from my birthweight to my postgraduate exam results, and I’d barely thought to ask her anything. There are always uneven relationships in life – one partner not quite feeling it so much; selfish friends who go to ground whenever you have a problem but expect unlimited counselling if they stub a toe – but perhaps the most cruel and unjust of all is the disservice we do to those who’ve waited all their lives to meet us. What a wretch of a grandson I was. I guess things evened out right at the end though, when she was alternating between calling me my granddad’s name, my brother’s name and Alvin, whoever the fuck Alvin is.*
There’s a clear invisibility to the very elderly, where we fail to see them as people with at least twice our lived existence. We forget, as they dribble onto their misshaped cardigans, drink their hyper-sweetened tea and keep the doily industry going, that they were and are real people. Like the light coming from a long-dead star, they once laughed, sang and kissed strangers; fought, lied and kept secrets. Medicine is often guilty of letting the elderly blend into an amorphous homogeneity – wrinkled bags of skin and warfarin.*
My parents will be next up, as they shuffle into their position as ‘final generation’, like the Snickers edging a step forward in the vending machine, the void waiting beneath. It was inconceivable that they weren’t thinking this at the funeral, behind their blank faces. I decided to properly speak to them and build a stronger bond, one to last after they’ve gone. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with the first thirty years of their eulogies. And if we’re all the products of our childhoods, maybe that would give me a glint of the emotions that I knew must be sloshing around inside them somewhere.
The next time I saw my dad, I sat him down and asked him a few questions. What was his childhood like? Did he have any pets? Where did he go on holiday? He stopped me after about three minutes.
‘This isn’t going in a book, is it?’
* * *
* This analysis is based on personal experience, rather than any kind of actual knowledge. At medical school, you have to take your holiday as annual leave rather than in official term breaks. I took a fortnight of leave in one go, managing to skip the whole of psychiatry and most of neurology in the process.
* J pointed out afterwards that it would have been much better if she’d started with a nice long ‘WooOOOOooo!’.
* Were I to disclose it here, it would result in the immediate double-suicide of my parents, so I’m saving that reveal for when I really need it.
* In truth, this predilection skipped a couple of generations.
* The amateur chemists spilled so much LSD on the carpet, literally dropping acid – no, you can’t have a refund on the book – that when the rozzers left my grandparents’ spare room and raided the lab, they ended up tripping their faces off. The raid knocked out most of the LSD in the UK, sending the price of the humble acid tab up 500 per cent and causing untold misery in halls of residence and swingers’ parties across the country.
* There is a chance, of course, that the Seymour Road Residents’ Association was right all along and ‘Alvin’ was one of dozens of gentlemen callers. This is going to open up another rift within the Kay family, isn’t it?
* At one hospital I worked in, there was a rather wonderful idea that above every elderly patient’s bed there should be a photograph of them in their youth. On stage at the Coliseum. At the bottom of a ski slope. It was meant to serve as a reminder of their individuality, and a fun conversational amuse-bouche before getting onto the main course of their bedsore management. But at the same time, there was a slight emptiness to it – the idea that hard evidence of their former youth was the only way we could humanise them. Maybe one day geriatric patients will seek validation through recordings of TikTok dances they performed in their twenties. Regardless, the hospital’s vintage photo system went to shit after a couple of months, coming to a head when a patient’s wife wondered why her elderly husband had a photo of a lithe young woman in swimwear taking pride of place above his bed. She took some convincing to believe this was a real initiative and that they’d just forgotten to take down a previous patient’s youthful portrait.
Chapter 15
Lunch with my mum in London. This is Going to Hurt was lukewarm off the press and had debuted in the Sunday Times bestsellers list. Not at number one, as she didn’t hesitate to remind me, but it was there. A mere seven years since I left medicine, she even managed a full meal without asking if I’ll need to get my stethoscope serviced before reapplying for a registrar post, or sharing news clippings of heroic doctors. She wasn’t quite pointing to me and saying ‘My son, the author!’ but I could detect a flicker of pride. Sometimes the biggest plaudits come from words not said.
It occurred to me that the reason we never spoke much about my job writing for telly wasn’t just the fact it represented my escape from medicine. It simply wasn’t her world. She hadn’t heard of any of the shows I’d written for (in fairness, nor had 97 per cent of the country) and even if she were to watch them, they really wouldn’t have been her cup of camomile. But books! She read books. I mean, she hadn’t read my book, but she told me she intended to.*
The bill arrived and she said that as I was now a famous author, surely I was able to pick up the tab? I started to spit my excuses and she laughed slightly too hard and got out her credit card. She told me she’d love to see my book in the window of a bookshop – should we wander past one? I’d love to see my book in the window of a bookshop too, pal. I explained that I couldn’t promise a window but there was a decent chance we could find one on a shelf somewhere, so we wandered to a slightly swanky bookshop around the corner.
I was killing two birds with one brick, actually: my publisher would have wanted me to pop in. Any time you pass a bookshop, head in! Introduce yourself! Offer to sign any copies they’ve got! A signed book is a sold book!
Maybe other authors are more shamelessly outgoing than me, but the very thought of wandering into a shop and proclaiming myself the grand originator of something they may or may not actually have in stock makes my anus constrict to a pinhole and my pulse thrash out the drum fill from ‘In the Air Tonight’. After announcing myself to a few bookshops who didn’t have a copy, I’d learned that the safest procedure for my self-worth was not to introduce myself as an author but to go full JR Hartley and simply make a casual enquiry as an interested punter. ‘Do you happen to have any copies of This is Going to Hurt by … I think it’s … Adam Kay?’ If so, I would then – surprise! – announce myself as the author like I was jumping out of a birthday cake and offer to scribble on them with a Sharpie. At this point, they would presumably wonder why I struggled to remember my own name.
We walked in and I scanned the shelves for a copy. Nope. ‘There’s probably been a run on them,’ suggested my mum.
I made my way to the till to have an excruciating conversation. ‘Do you happen to have any copies of This is Going to Hurt?’ The lady behind the till thought they had it out the back and wandered off to check. I was about to do my big reveal to the man still behind the counter when he told me he’d already read it and it wasn’t really his thing – he didn’t know why it had been bothering the charts. It tries a bit too hard to be funny, he said, and fails entirely on that score.* And that endless swearing, how very clever. He’s all for an unlikeable protagonist, he wanged on, but the author of this book just seemed a little bit too much of an arsehole. In short, he concluded, in a field of a thousand medical memoirs, I could do a lot better. Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, perhaps? I couldn’t face turning around to see my mother’s face.
