by Kate Lunn-Pigula
Kirsty Myers was standing in Hashim’s room, in the care home, when she felt the first wave of exhaustion wash over her.
Hashim was speaking with his interpreter, Leila, about something quite involved. They seemed to be having a complicated discussion and Leila wasn’t currently offering any English. Both Kirsty and Leila were beside Hashim’s bed. Hashim’s room was airless and the navy curtains weren’t open. Kirsty leaned on Hashim’s metal bedframe, because she wasn’t sure that she could support all of her own weight. Hashim was sitting up in bed. He had been asleep when they’d arrived.
‘He had a fit last night, bless him,’ said Clara, as she had led them to Hashim.
‘Was that recorded?’ asked Kirsty. This care home had been lax with their records recently.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Clara cooly. The remainder of the walk had been completed in silence.
But, now, Kirsty just wants to at least sit down on Hashim’s bed. That would, of course, be inappropriate. She thinks that she must still be recovering from the chest infection. Her dad had told her to go to the doctor’s.
She had to pay attention, for Hashim. His second asylum application had just been rejected, that was why she was here. Kirsty had seen too many similar cases. She tried to smile, pay attention. Leila was ready to translate into English.
Hashim was her last visit of the day and Kirsty had her work laptop with her so she decided to write up her notes at home. Home. Dad will be ok but she lives in fear of what mum might do. Everyone she meets thinks it’s weird that she, a professional, still lives with her parents at 27, but they’re struggling and, besides, she knows better than most what institutionalised care looks like.
She smells gas as she walks through the front door. Rushes to the kitchen.
‘Mum, no!’ She turns the hob off, opens the windows. Her mum has an unopened tin of tomato soup and a pan out, but she hasn’t lit the hob or put the tomato soup in the pan yet.
Kirsty worries about mum doing something like this when she’s at work, and she worries about the people she’s in charge of when she’s at home. It’s like she must always feel pulled, caring- wise, in a direction different from the one she’s always facing. It gives her a constant feeling of dread and anxiety.
Her mum looks at her. ‘You’re always meddling,’ she says, and wanders off. Her dressing gown was once white silk. Now it is heavily stained, grey.
‘Do you want soup or not?’ shouts Kirsty.
Eventually, Kirsty lumbers upstairs to visit her dad. She knows all of the creaks in this house and knows to avoid the fourth step up, in the middle, usually. But she cannot be bothered today. Mum has spilled tea on the beige carpet, half way up the stairs. It is still wet, Kirsty can feel it with her feet. She makes a mental note to grab a tea towel on her next trip upstairs.
‘Hi dad,’ she bursts in. He has all of his marbles, but is bed-bound. She puts a bowl of soup down next to him.
‘Oh good,’ he says. ‘I thought you were your mum.’ He shifts himself. ‘I was going to text you, I thought I could smell gas.’
‘Well, at least your nose still works,’ she says. They both laugh. She wants to go to sleep.
‘That’s not great, though,’ he says, after they stop laughing.
She agrees. She knows that she needs to figure out a better solution, but she keeps hoping one will appear to her. It hasn’t yet.
‘It’s my fault,’ he says. Kirsty tells him it isn’t, but she doesn’t have the energy to go through all of that again. He isn’t useless. If only his body hadn’t given out, he could help. She needs sleep.
She looks over at the dialysis machine. She needs to make doctor’s appointments for them both.
‘I just need some sleep,’ she says.
‘You do look tired,’ says her dad. Dad needs a shave. She has a brief memory of the sponsored marathon he did, nearly a decade ago now. She needs more help, she knows it. But she bats the thought away. She should be able to do this herself. She has done all her life. Why change now?
Kirsty wakes up and automatically grabs her phone lying next to her. The phone says 10:44. But it’s light outside. The sunlight – powerfully shining through the crack in the curtain – must have woken her up. She sees the ghost of the light’s imprint – bright lights, green and red, – when she blinks. ‘Alarm’ says her phone, a big orange ‘snooze’ in the middle of the screen. What? She didn’t sleep through her alarm, did she? She’s never done that before. The alarm is loud on purpose.
Then she sees the list of notifications. She scrolls through.
Calls:
10:44: Vicky
10:32: West View Care Home
10:29: Farsi Translator Leila
+7 more
Voicemails
10:02: voicemail, Anne M
9:30: voicemail, Vicky
9:47: voicemail, Vicky
+2 more
Messages
9:10: Vicky: Apparently you’ve not shown up for a visit with WS? Can you give me a call? Vicky.
8:14: Anne M: Are you ok? You working from home today? x
7:30: Dad: Are you ok?
6:34: Dad: Is that your alarm going off?
She doesn’t have the energy to look through any further notifications. She can barely register what she just read. How did she have the energy to look at, think about, all of those calls and messages, once upon a time? It’s like she’s gone through the looking glass and is living a parallel life.
But she knows that her biggest priority – now – is her parents. She usually gets them set up in the morning; coffee, dressed, breakfast. What happened there? She feels afraid. Does she have visits today? Work visits? She can’t remember.
How did she sleep through all of those beeps?
It’s almost lunchtime, for mum and dad. This thought swims up to her and she grasps it.
Another: she can’t smell gas.
Kirsty is downstairs, somehow. Her mum is watching TV. A posh white man in a grey pin-striped suit is showing a middle-aged couple around a property.
‘You had breakfast?’
‘Mmm,’ says her mum, apparently engrossed in the programme.
Kirsty walks into the kitchen and sees that her mum has got herself some cornflakes.
She walks upstairs and dad says, ‘there you are! I was worried about you. Mum brought me cornflakes and orange juice but I thought you had forgotten about me.’
‘I was asleep,’ she says. She barely takes in what he’s saying. ‘But you’re ok?’
‘As good as can be,’ he says. He watches her closely. ‘You don’t look right.’
‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘I’m tired.’
‘Go back to bed.’
Kirsty is too tired to argue with him. She feels like she’s a teenager again, that familiar sense of grounding, of authority, comes back to haunt her. She lets it. She wonders if she’s just snapped, too much stress is bad, she tells everyone else that, but then the thought breaks off.
She thinks: must phone Vicky.
Kirsty is back in her own room and she phones Vicky. She has received three more messages since checking on her parents. They were fine.
‘I just woke up,’ she says. ‘I don’t feel right.’
‘Ok like a headache, sore throat? Shivery?’
‘No just… tired,’ But tired doesn’t even begin to cover it. It isn’t tired, it’s… there isn’t a word.
‘Right,’ says Vicky. Kirsty knows she’s at a loss as to what box to tick on the ‘sickness: reason:’ form but she can’t even be bothered to try to help her. She doesn’t even say bye. She puts her phone down and goes back to sleep.
Six days later, she’s told, Kirsty is feeling much better and leaves the house feeling full of vitality and vigour. ‘That’ll teach me,’ she’s thinking. ‘I need to prepare myself better. I need to delegate more! Wow, I learned my lesson.’ She bets that she’s the happiest person on the tram on a rainy Thursday morning. She has never been so excited to commute anymore and, just think!, all of these people were doing this when she was in bed! She felt more energised than she had in months.
She was going to help Hashim with his case, and visit Ruby and John. And that was just today! She would need to delegate some of her stuff, particularly with her parents. She might tell Vicky that she couldn’t take on another trainee social worker at this point. That would be difficult. She would need a meeting with Vicky anyway. Those six days were awful! Imagine if she got sick like that again! Hopefully she wouldn’t, but she knew that she’d taken on too much.
Kirsty listened to music on her way to work and bounded into her office, greeting everyone with relish. She tackled her mountain of emails, oldest first.
Not long later, she felt like a wave washed over her. It was 09:26, the computer said. Outlook was open. An email from Letitia about a visit was open on her screen. And all of her brain space was gone. A veil had come down. She was beyond tiredness. She couldn’t. Couldn’t continue. It was still happening. She was still tired. It had gone and come back.
She had to get home? Look after… parents? Food shop? Hashim? It was beyond tired. The idea of trying to find Vicky overwhelmed her. Tram, walk from tram stop to home. How had she had the energy to do all of that this morning? She stared at her computer screen.
It was still 09:26.
About the Author
Kate Lunn-Pigula has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham. Her work has been published by Streetcake, Flights, Aayo, Litro, Clover and White, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Idle Ink, Other People’s Flowers, Bunbury Magazine and Thresholds, amongst others. You can find her at http://katelunnpigula.wordpress.com
http://katelunnpigula.wordpress.com and on Instagram @katelunnpigula