The End is Where We Begin by Maria Goodin (open ebook .txt) 📕

I shoot him a warning glance and he rolls his eyes defiantly before wandering over to inspect the paint pots and brushes that have been laid out on old sheets.

I shake my head despairingly at Libby and we both snigger a little as if to say Kids! Again, I wonder how we got to this point, to this age where we’re the grown-ups.

“So…” I open, taking a sip of hot tea and trying to hide the fact I’ve just scalded my lip.

Libby smiles at me, waiting. I nod towards the half-painted wall, unable to swallow.

“Oh! Right!” she exclaims, remembering why I’m here. “So, just grab a brush and get stuck in basically!”

I place my tea down on one of the tables. Breadcrumbs, bits of gherkin and smears of tomato sauce still litter the terrace from last night, the barbecue now cold in the corner.

“How much needs doing?” Josh asks, his eyes following the line of the wall as if this is a Herculean task.

“All of it,” I tell him, in a tone that implies this should be obvious.

He stretches his arms up high, revealing a pale, lean midriff that doesn’t match the rest of the tan he’s picked up over the summer. “Seriously?” he mutters through a yawn.

“He hasn’t seen half nine on a Sunday morning for a while,” I tell Libby in a low voice.

“Yeah, I think I could have done with more sleep myself,” she says, rubbing her temple. “And much less wine. I hope I didn’t say anything… I mean, you know, if I said anything weird, then just forget—”

“No,” I tell her, reassuringly, “you didn’t say anything—”

“Oh good, ’cause I have a tendency to talk rubbish after one glass of wine, let alone three. Well, I have a tendency to talk rubbish all the time, but… Oh! How was your dad?”

We crouch down next to each other and start painting, while Josh takes a paint pot and brush to the other end of the wall, as far away from us as possible.

“He was… umm…” Violent? Aggressive? Offensive? “… He was okay. It was just a bad evening.”

“Is he…?”

“He has Alzheimer’s.” I spit it out quickly, the words still carrying their sting even after all these years.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she says, stopping what she’s doing and looking at me.

I paint silently, staring straight ahead, my grip tightening on the brush, pushing down my own anger and sadness, willing her to stop looking at me. After a while, she resumes her own painting.

“He was diagnosed when Josh was four,” I tell her, wondering why I always measure my life by my son’s age, as if my own existence is merely a shadow of his. Do all parents do that? “It had been clear for a while things weren’t right, though. I think I was just in denial. But we’re sort of at the stage now… well, it’s getting harder.”

“Does he live by himself?”

“No. He’s still in the house. I mean, you know, our family house. But he has a partner. Brenda. They got together not long after my mum left. She moved in after he got his diagnosis. Josh and I had to move out at that point, so she kind of stepped in.”

“You moved out because he was ill?”

For a moment it sounds like an accusation, but when I glance at Libby’s face, I see nothing but concern and a desire to understand. No one’s accusing me of abandoning my dad but me.

“I couldn’t have Josh around him,” I rush to explain. “Having a young child around… All the noise and chaos, it wasn’t doing my dad any good. He’d get angry and flustered. Plus, he’d get confused. He’d think Josh was me when I was little, and then he’d get confused about who I was, and who everyone else was… In the end, he started doing dangerous things: leaving the gas on, leaving the front door open… He started a fire in the kitchen one day, that was pretty much the final straw…”

I trail off, guilty for revealing these details about my dad who’d always been such a calm, private, capable person. In his rare moments of lucidity, he’d always been mortified by his own behaviour, and so I kept his secrets for him, told no one who didn’t need to know. Or at least that was normally the case.

“I’m so sorry,” says Libby again, her voice full of sympathy, “it must so hard for you all. Your dad was always so competent, wasn’t he? I mean, with all the things he used to build, and his teaching… he was so clever. And so patient. I remember how he taught me all about a car engine, took it all apart, showed me how it all worked.”

“Yeah, we were meant to be going to the cinema to see X-Men and we missed the start,” I say, smiling at the memory.

“And you were annoyed.”

“I thought you were just trying to get out of seeing it.”

“No, I was genuinely fascinated by what he was teaching me!”

“I realised that later.”

“And we ended up running to the cinema with me covered in grease and oil!”

“And you spent the whole film asking what was happening because we’d missed the beginning.”

“I did that with every film—”

“Yes, you did! Every film we ever watched, you spent the whole time asking who everyone was and what was going on and I always wondered how someone so clever—”

“It used to really irritate you!”

“Because I couldn’t concentrate and then I didn’t know what was going on!”

We laugh at the memory of it.

“I’m still just as bad with films, you know. It drives Will crazy. I don’t know what it is. He says I just have appalling concentration.”

We fall silent for a moment, the mention of Will bringing us back to the present time.

“Nah, you were just bored by most of the mainstream crap that was out there,” I tell her. “You used to like all that