Free Blood Relative by David Thomas

really don’t. But I’ll tell you one thing for sure. I’ve bloody well got to do something.’

12
     
    The home we’d found for my mother when she could no longer fend for herself was meant to be a good one. It charged accordingly. But that didn’t make it any less depressing. There were jaunty little posters on the notice-board in the front hall, announcing days out and special events; blaring televisions, volume turned up to penetrate deaf ears; a day room filled with shrivelled, snowy-haired figures, staring blankly into space. It was enough to make me want to kill myself, rather than end up anywhere like it. But this was where I’d put my own mother.
    The shaming thought struck me that I’d been trying to get my own back. Mum might have lost her mind, but she hadn’t lost the ability to make me feel inadequate. It wasn’t really about me. I understood that as an adult, even if I hadn’t as a child. To my mother, my existence was a reminder of something and someone she would much rather have forgotten: the man who got her pregnant, then left her to raise a child alone, at a time when single motherhood was still a long, shame-filled way from the acceptable, state-subsidized lifestyle choice it had since become.
    You see, Andy was actually my half-brother: the child of John Crookham, the man who had married Mum, given me his name and been the only real father-figure in my life. From the moment he was born he’d been the apple of Mum’s eye, the symbol of everything that was good, and after Dad’s death he became the living memory of the one man she’d truly loved. I’d tried frantically to earn her approval, but my best had never been enough. My A grades would be trumped by Andy’s latest poem. If I won a long-distance race, she’d say, ‘But of course your brother swims like a fish.’
    ‘You’ll never be handsome, but you’ve got a funny face,’ she said to me once, when I was fifteen, covered in spots and paralysed with self-consciousness. ‘Andrew’s got all the looks in this family, bless him.’
    The bias was so blatant that Andy and I were able to treat it as a joke. I think that’s what kept us from falling out. We just drifted into a sort of lazy, affectionate, somewhat distant acceptance of each other. We were never going to be bosom buddies. He was seven years younger than me, living at the opposite end of the country and no better at keeping in touch than I was. There didn’t seem to be any need to make any big effort to be any closer. We weren’t in any hurry.
    And now it was too late.
    As for Mum, her attitude towards us had never changed. She’d never liked Mariana, either. Just after we got engaged we invited Mum to Sunday lunch. Mariana pulled out all the stops, cooking up a storm, dressing like the perfect demure bride-to-be and doing everything she could to charm her future mother-in-law. But Mum didn’t bother to disguise her instant, visceral dislike.
    I called her the next day and asked her what the problem was. ‘There’s no problem,’ she snapped. ‘I just didn’t take to her. She’s German. That’s probably what it is. I never liked Germans.’
    Mariana was upset for a couple of days, but we were both so caught up with the excitement of falling in love that other people’s disapproval simply drew us even closer together. Over the next couple of years, as my mother’s behaviour became progressively more erratic and the rages that seem to be an inescapable part of dementia became more frequent, we looked back on that disastrous lunch as an early symptom of her problems. It seemed to demonstrate what I sincerely believed: you actually had to be mad to dislike Mariana.
    But mad people can be extraordinarily perceptive, perhaps because they say what they really think, without any self-control or inhibition. And so, as I walked down the nursing home corridor towards my mother’s room, I thought back to that lunch and wondered whether there was something my mother had