It was the same with the trees in the local park. As evening shadows flowed between the tower blocks, young men would bring their Staffordshire bull terriers out to be exercised. They tacked back and forth along the spore-smelling streets, human leaning away from canine as if hauling on a rope attached to a wayward boom. Then, in the park, the boys would complacently observe the dogs as they shat, before urging them on to attack the trees. The dogs broke the boughs’ necks, they gored the wrinkled hides — when they were done the oaks, rowans and birches looked as if a shell had exploded nearby, stripping long, white-green slats from their trunks. Eventually, these fell away, leaving only a necklace of dead bark immediately beneath the crown of the tree — and it was this that I forgot to record.
I couldn’t remember names, faces, places I had been and books I had read — but there was also a sinister awareness of estrangement from my immediate vicinity. London, the city of my birth — which I knew, not exhaustively, but well enough to set out from home and find my way almost anywhere intuitively — was becoming alien to me. Weaving among the lunchtime joggers along Rotten Row, then rounding Wellington’s old gaff at Number One, London, I would find myself in uncharted waters, with the effortlessly oriented gulls wheeling insultingly overhead: ‘Heeeere! Heeeere! Heeeere!’ That middle-aged Italian couple — he with puff of smoky beard, she with too youthful T-shirt and bum-bag — would it be too perverse to enquire if I might consult the map they held stretched between them? For I no longer recognized this city, this Londra.
At home, every day I expected to be exposed: my wife or children to arrest me on the stairs and cry, ‘I do not know you!’ Or, worse still, ‘You do not know me, do you?’ Basic mnemonics, long used by me to recall PIN numbers, or the name of the man in the bike shop, now had to be contrived for my nearest and dearest: she is not fat; fat people are D-shaped side on — therefore, her name begins with a D.
I linked the amnesia and the facial agnosia with my growing myopia. Print wasn’t attending to personal grooming: the index of the A-Z began to grow stubble; next it was the turn of the thesaurus. There seemed some logic to this: first I became disoriented — then I was unable to check my orientation; first I failed to recognize my interlocutors — then I was unable to search for synonyms, and so all shades of meaning were balled into monism. ‘This,’ as De Niro’s character in The Deer Hunter philosophized upon a bullet, ‘is this.’ But what did ‘this’ mean? I’d forgotten and could no longer consult the dictionary without glasses.
Still, I kept writing. I was correcting the proofs for a storycycle that was to be published that autumn. For all that I professed — to friends, colleagues, whoever would listen — that I was no longer focused on producing books (like tables, or bullets), but rather thought of the work as my fundamental praxis, my way of mixing my mind with the world and so extending my being — bits of text still had titles, the author’s name and my mugshot on the jacket.
The only memory I could summon with complete clarity was of a series of events that hadn’t happened to me at all, scenes from a documentary about a woman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s that had been made — simply and affectingly — by her daughter. The woman was still feisty at the beginning of the film; thrice-married, but now on her own, she was only in her late fifties. She had her house, her garden, a job as a librarian in the university town where she lived. After her diagnosis, with sickening rapidity, she tipped backward into the coalhole of amnesia.
To begin with she was giddy with the fall — amused by her own forgetfulness. Like me, she devised mnemonics and stuck up Post-it notes; she kept a laboriously calibrated chart attached to the fridge, so she could discover what she should be — or actually was — doing. At first she checked this from day to day, then hour to hour, and eventually moment to moment. Soon enough she became depressed — and this coincided with her trips to a daycare centre, her raven hair nestling on the minibus beside all those snowy cowls.
Depressed and distressed. She sought alleviation, and throughout her miserable deterioration kept asking her daughter to take her to Southwold on the Suffolk coast, a picturesque resort where they had often holidayed and she had loved to sea bathe. But her daughter — in frank asides to the camera — explained that this was a wish she felt unable to accede to, for fear that her beloved mother would simply swim out to sea and submerge her own incomprehension in the liquid unknown.
Mercifully, the woman’s memory quickly became so circumscribed that she was encased in a mere droplet of self-awareness, a permanent Now, the silvery surface tension of which gifted her once more with girlish high spirits. Purged of foresight and all but a few dregs of sensual recollection, she was free to simply Be; and it was then, finally, that her daughter no longer fearful that she would commit suicide, for she lacked the capacity to formulate a plan — granted her boon.
The last we, the viewers, saw of the woman was her entering the glaucous waters, looking baby-like in her one-piece black bathing costume, and striking out for the horizon through the gentle swell. The entire film was unutterably poignant, but what struck me most forcibly was that she swam with the same idiosyncratic stroke as my father used to; a sort of sideways doggy paddle, hands pawing at the water, feet ambling through it. And like my long-dead father, the senile woman had an expression that was at once effortful and seraphic.
This image, the woman’s joyful face as her mind swam in the Now, and her body in the enduring sea, as I say, returned to me again and again, breaking the silvery surface of the bathroom mirror on the mornings when I remembered to shave; and, had I known of the malaise termed ‘paramnesia’, I would’ve understood that these things — the checklist on the fridge, the trips to the Cambridge daycare centre, the awkward hobble down over the Southwold shingle, my adipose body, seal-black and seal-slick in its nylon skin — hadn’t happened to me at all.
Someone had sent me — in the way that kindly people do — a book on coping with Alzheimer’s. I read it and wondered if my wife had read it as well. Either she had, or she understood intuitively that the way to deal with people who are confused and upset is to provide them with simple cues from their concretized past that match currently baffling situations.
Who is that child?
Why, it’s your friend julian. You love playing with your friend Julian, don’t you? Riding your bikes through Sandy Wood, climbing trees and making secret dens.
She stopped asking me questions and only provided answers: You’d like to go upstairs now and do some typing.
She grasped that properly managed I could spend all day existing solely in the manifold of those things that I had once enjoyed: typing in my secret den, while prattling to childhood companions who were, in fact, my own children.