As I type, the cat is busting my balls. Figuratively speaking. “Miaow,” she says. Her claws are locked into my jeans as she stretches herself up imploringly. She is trying to make herself as thin as possible. She has even made her face look thin.
“Look at me,” she is saying. “I’m starving.”
“You know as well as I do that it is not dinnertime. And that I fed you an hour ago. And that there are still some crunchies in your bowl.”
“The lights are growing dim,” she says.
“Goddamnit,” I say, and get up, open a sachet of Felix and squeeze half of its contents on top of the crunchies.
“Happy now?” I ask. I have now completely lost my train of thought.
Yes, I’m back on cat-sitting duty while my mother, after another fall, takes up her usual suite at the Whittington. It’s her right wrist this time.
The Cloudesley Ward is where the Struldbruggs go. They’re segregated by gender but there’s a man who keeps hobbling into the women’s section on his walking frame. He pretends to be gaga but I’m not fooled. He’s after some of the action. I salute his spirit but I don’t fancy his much.
Unlike the last time our mother was packed off to the hospital, my brother is in the country. This means I don’t have to be here looking after the cat, but I don’t like the thought of it being alone all the time. Our visits often coincide, for some reason.
There was an old geezer sitting by his wife’s bedside. For long periods of time they just held hands in silence, their gazes somewhere far away. But when they talked they were perky enough. He had that north London/Jewish accent I love: it always makes you think a joke is in the offing.
“Are you twins?” he asked me and my brother. I smiled; my brother sighed.
“No,” he said, mournfully. Is he going to say it or am I?
“See if you can guess which one of us is older,” he said.
“You, I suppose,” said the old geezer to my sibling, “but that’s probably because of the beard.”
“I’m five years older than him,” I said, beaming.
“Blimey,” said the geezer.
“I look after myself,” I said. (Actually, I don’t. Earlier, just by the lifts on the ground floor, a piece of egg and bacon McMuffin went down the wrong way and I had a coughing fit so loud and long that a woman gave me a bottle of water.)
The hospital visits are wearying, though. Yesterday my eldest son joined us, as well as a member of the Highgate Choral Society, to which my mother belongs. My mother is not like other mothers: she went to Juilliard on a scholarship and starred on Broadway. Her marriage to my father made the front page of the Evening Standard and her voice has been trained to reach the back row of Carnegie Hall without a microphone. Before she met my father, she had an affair with Yul Brynner.
“I’m sorry I’m not being very entertaining,” my mother said.
“No, no, we’re here to entertain you.” I put down the Telegraph crossword puzzle. I got 1-Across immediately but the other clues were proving resistant to solution. My brother was trying to buy train tickets to York for the weekend on his phone.
“I could always sing for you,” said my mother. “Would you like me to sing?” It is impossible to stop her. “Summertime,” she sang, “and the living is easy.” But her voice quavered at the end and she gave up.
“Phooey,” she said. My brother and I were beyond embarrassment. The day before, the pharmacist had come round and had asked my brother and I about her medications.
“What are you talking about? I can’t hear what you’re saying,” said my mother, who is also rather deaf.
“It’s a rather complicated conversation, and it’s hard to summarise,” replied my brother.
“Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” said my mother.
“I SAID: IT’S A RATHER COMPLICATED CONVERSATION AND IT’S HARD TO SUMMARISE,” said my brother again.
After a few hours of this I suddenly felt compelled to leave.
“I’m off,” I said. I am not sure why I chose this moment to go, and a bit of me felt bad for leaving my brother behind, but then he’s off to York for the weekend. The lift stopped on the third floor and in walked Deborah Levy, whom I had met two weeks or so ago. I tried to calculate the odds of bumping into an award-winning novelist in a hospital lift but the mathematics defeated me. Maybe I’m just getting old.
[Further reading: I’ve had a disappointing week, salvation-wise]
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This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats