Should We Stay or Should We Go

outside; good gracious, “fixer-upper” didn’t begin to describe it. Now that nineteen years of cost overruns and inconvenience were at last rounding on a habitable property, the kids tended to forget having to step over clatters of raw lumber on the way to the loo or shaking crumbles of plasterboard from their hair before school. They put out of mind, too, the warnings in their childhoods about hurrying home from the Tube, because the neighbourhood in those days was beyond dodgy. No, they didn’t see a financial stretch for a young couple on the public payroll, who took on a considerable risk that the whole tumbledown interior would collapse ceiling-to-floor like a portable coffee cup. All the children saw now was the imposing, respectable edifice of Mum and Dad’s House, a conventional projection of the establishment that they’d never afford for themselves, what with interest rates at fifteen percent; and Roy, if she didn’t miss her guess, already saw a kip he might inherit. Roy was always looking for shortcuts.

Now with Dad gone, presumably she’d the spare time to finish the conservatory, yet her appetite for the project had fled. She was already fifty-one. How much longer would they live here? More starkly, how much longer would they live? Kay had imagined that she’d crossed the signal threshold of fifty with aplomb—Look at me! I’m sophisticated about the passage of time, and this new decade doesn’t bother me in the slightest!—but such morbid thoughts had never entered her head in her forties.

“I wonder if I should have gone back home with my mother, after the reception,” Kay said with misgiving. “Percy said he’d go back to keep her company, but I know my brother. He won’t stay long.”

“Haven’t you had enough of all this sacrifice?” Cyril said. “You women! You complain about how you’re always the ones taking care of everybody. Then when you get a single moment to yourselves, you hop up and volunteer to take care of someone else.”

“We only, as you put it, ‘volunteer’ because no one else will do it!”

Her anger took them both aback. Kay regrouped. “I’m sorry. You know it’s not as if I never asked Percy to help. But he lives that bit further out in Tunbridge Wells, and of course he was terribly busy betraying his wife and children.”

“That’s not entirely fair.”

“I’m not saying that he contrived to be gay purely to escape his filial duties. But he’s definitely used being gay. ‘Oh, I can’t mind Dad this weekend because he’s obviously uncomfortable with my coming out.’ Well, of course he’s ‘uncomfortable,’ you git, the man was born in 1897!”

“The problem is much more institutional than sticking the women with bedpan duty,” Cyril said, drawing up and sounding more like his regular authoritative self. “Central government needs to take fuller responsibility for social care. It shouldn’t fall on you, your mother, or your extended family—”

“Well, it did, and it does, and it will when you and I fall apart as well. Even the slightest helping hand from your local council—like making up your bed, never mind chasing you down the street when you’re raving? Qualification for homecare is means-tested, and my father was a solicitor.”

“True, the means-testing is pretty brutal—”

“The savings threshold above which the council won’t wipe your bum is a measly twenty grand—which is far more cash than Mum has left after all those carers, but she still wouldn’t qualify for any benefits because she has the house. If you’ve stashed nothing away, or next to nothing? The council picks up the whole tab. How do you like that, Mister Socialist? You slave away your whole life like my father, carrying your own financial weight and supporting your family, and then when you collapse the state says you’re on your own. Do nothing, earn nothing, and save nothing—make absolutely no provision for yourself—and the state takes care of you for free, soup to nuts. Talk about moral hazard! Obviously, anyone who does anything, earns anything, and saves anything is a berk.”

“You’re ranting. And you know I think social care should be a universal benefit, just like the NHS.”

“Uh-huh. Make it universal, and then the same responsible people who earn anything at all will still pay for their own social care, as well as everyone else’s social care, with such sky-high taxes that they can’t afford a pot of jam. You’re the one who had to go to that big Trafalgar demonstration against the poll tax—which would have raised money for social care and a great deal else.”

“Don’t start. The poll tax was regressive and you know it. And thanks to protests like Trafalgar, the ‘community charge’ is well dead and buried. Besides, I doubt on this of all evenings you’re in the best frame of mind to design complex government policy.”

“All that grooming—clipping those thick, gnarly toenails, pinching the mucus from his hairy nostrils, going through whole boxes of wet wipes cleaning his bum . . .” Kay had started to range the slate floor, for one of the advantages of having opened up the kitchen and dining area was its improved capacity for pacing. “I can’t tell you how awkward it is to brush someone else’s teeth, and then he’d bite . . . The chasing and corralling and undressing . . . I was halfway between a daughter and a sheepdog. The eternal surveillance, because we had to watch him like a two-year-old, lest he cut himself, or drink Fairy Liquid, or set the house on fire . . . The spoon-feeding, the wiping the muck from his beard . . . The cajoling, for hours on end, to coax him down from the ladder to the loft, of all places . . .

“Well, paying for all that care for my father alone would have cost the state a fortune. Collectively, caring for all the other train wrecks like him would cost the state the earth, and that’s why it’s not a universal benefit. Honestly, in order to control him, it took the three of us, me, Mum, and the hired helper—that is, to barely control