...Which means, every night, when the pains get too bad, and her legs jerkspasm like a crazed marionette, her excruciation wakes my Dad. Bent over with sleep, groaning leonine yawns he is sliced from softwarm dreams by the cold metal of the hoist and the wheelchair and the lift it takes to get her useless body downstairs, to the electric armchair where he can tie down the st vitus dance of her legs and slide bitter pills under her tongue without her choking.
He, exhausted by getting up every 20 minutes to move her (yet still her bedsores weep and crust into black blood pustules), falls back upstair and downbed and indream. But she, strapped down like a lunatic in a Victorian asylum, sits painwracked in the dark, making out the familiar shapes around her, the television and the piano and the framed photo of their wedding, when she stood so proud, so independent, and she cries, softly yet with such relentless despair that it saws screeching through my sleep.
In cotton nightie I tiptoe down the stairs to her, dragging my duvet behind me. I curl up against the side of the chair, resting my cheek where the electric motor hums gentle warmth, and arrange her hand, hanging cold and dead, so it rests on my shoulder. And there I whisper fairy tales into the dark: stories of witches and princesses and silken slippers and ghosts and white rabbits.
Together the words and the drugs soothe her; but they also break with a clean branchsnap her hold on who is the adult, who the child. Every night she asks me what I think she should do; and as tears she can't wipe away flow down her twitching face she urgently enquires how I, at eight years old, think she should end her destructed destructive life.
