Dimitri Verhulst: The Latecomer

I’m crossing the Styx and taking: a tube of toothpaste

(just for a joke) …

Although it’s completely deliberate, night after night, I loathe shitting in bed. Debasing myself like this is the most difficult consequence of the somewhat insane path I’ve taken late in life. But holding back in my sleep could only arouse the suspicions of my carers. If I want to continue to play the role of a senile old man, I have no choice but to regularly soil my nappies. Because that’s what this is: a role. I am nowhere near as demented as those around me believe!

The acid in my urine has started to eat away at my buttocks, which is not the most pleasant sensation I’ve experienced. The salves and ointments Aisha and Curvy Cora smear between my cheeks while swooning over the tasty body of the Kukident adhesive cream rep, who comes to this home to peddle his wares, provide no relief at all. But as I’ve said, under no circumstances can I cut incontinence from my script. Just imagine what would happen if they suddenly discovered that for several months now I’ve been successfully feigning dementia! That for weeks and weeks on end I’ve been babbling nonsense or wobbling apathetically in my chair when really I am still quite capable, for example, of explaining things like contemporary political issues. The health service would feel robbed and take me to court. The staff, especially the female staff of Winterlight Geriatric Care, would feel exploited, as if their integrity has been compromised, and happily bash my brains in. The pity my children still manage to feel for me would be transformed into boundless shame. And my wife (the bitch), assuming she survives me (and she will), would scatter enormous amounts of bird feed over my grave to keep the pigeons shitting on my memory.

So, no, I don’t have any alternative. I’ve burnt my bridges, there’s no going back. Once in the old gits’ home, always in the old gits’ home. I knew what I was getting myself into. But that doesn’t change the fact that, of all the tasks that come with the plausible simulation of a completely senile senior, incontinence is the one I find most difficult. Many times I’ve lain here at night with tears in my eyes as I squeeze my guts out in bed. No one can accuse me of a lack of willpower these last few months, but sometimes, lying in my own sticky filth, I’ve begun to question the whole enterprise. Those were the rare moments, the ripe moments, when I asked myself, ‘Is it worth it? Haven’t I gone a tad too far?’

But now the solution has presented itself. To my relief.

The vast quantities of pills the nurses here shove down our throats will have something to do with it, but last night I didn’t wake up once. Slept like a corpse. Which meant I wasn’t able to force myself to treat our healthcare providers to a big fat turd.

However …

Curvy Cora rushed into my room this morning, as hurried as ever (unbelievable how that girl stays so plump when she’s so fidgety), opened the curtains and cried, ‘Rise and shine, Désiré! It’s a brand-new day and everything’s going your way!’

That’s when I felt it. To my surprise, I’d shat the bed! Spontaneously and without any effort! Hallelujah! My metabolism had taken over the task that was proving too onerous for my will.

‘Désiré, did you hear me? Time to get up!’

I exclaimed, ‘Mother, Mother, the cows need to calve!’ And Curvy Cora had to laugh; Curvy Cora can laugh beautifully. A lot of fat people have beautiful laughs. She said, ‘The cows have already calved, Désiré. Shall we go to the cowshed later and have a look? After breakfast? And we’ll take some stale bread to feed the birds in the garden, they’re already warbling away for you! But first, I need to freshen you up, so the girls in the dining room will all say how handsome and well-preserved you are again.’ And she tossed my legs up in the air and dipped her flannel in a warm bowl.

‘Impropria est ut salutaret aliquis qui est cacas,’ I cried. Not altogether appropriate, perhaps, for someone who was going senile. But I still whooped it out, as happy as the child I was meant to resemble more with every passing day.

Impropria est ut salutaret aliquis qui est cacas: it is unseemly to greet someone who is just having a shit. Erasmus.

Whereupon, Curvy Cora replied, ‘So, Désiré, you’ve impressed me now! Is that the Bible?’

It really was a brand-new day and definitely going my way.

Clean and naked and smelling of disinfectant soap, I lay on the bed. Curvy Cora assessed my wardrobe with a pretence of solemnity and bellowed at me. That too is a difficult aspect of premature admission to an old people’s home. The horrific, never-ending shouting. The staff assume for convenience’s sake that all old fogeys are as deaf as a post and after a few years on the job their vocal chords are like steel cables. Some geriatric workers are so used to bawling and bellowing that conversation at an acceptable volume is completely beyond them. They yell constantly at their partner and kids too. Lovingly, most of the time, but still.

And so Curvy Cora shouted, producing a hazardous level of decibels. ‘Today we’re going to put on our best suit, Désiré! And you know why?’

‘Whazzat?’

‘We’re going to put on our best suit today!’

‘Oh.’

‘And you know why?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Why, Désiré?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because it’s our birthday! And how old are we today? Do you know that?’

I could get very annoyed at her for her bizarre habit of speaking in the first person plural. Was it something she’d been taught during her training? If so, I was very curious about the philosophy behind a rule like that.

‘Seventy-four, Désiré! Isn’t that a grand old age!’

With my seventy-four years, I’m definitely one of the babies at Winterlight Geriatric. Everyone under the age of eighty is seen more or less as a hard-luck case. A person who may have received a respectable dollop of grey matter from Mother Nature, capable of deciphering the most complicated codes or storing all kinds of useful information, but never thought to check the use-by date.

Take Etienne Thijs in room 18. He’s under seventy-five too. An egghead his whole life, a professor of biology, pioneering research into antibiotic resistance, and now as loony as a baboon. He puts his clothes on back to front and keeps a scrapbook with pictures he’s cut out from Miaow! , the cat-lovers’ monthly. Sad. And meanwhile his wife, who’s a thousand times thicker but fit as a fiddle mentally (where have I seen that before?), has found another bloke, a retired butcher. When she comes to the home to visit her husband, she brings her lover with her. Professor Thijs doesn’t even realise, and for that we can be truly thankful.

Winterlight’s craziest character isn’t Prof. Thijs, though, not by a long shot. That honour is reserved for Walter De Bodt, more than a century old, bald and bony, an archipelago of liver spots, often to be seen sitting in a wheelchair in his khaki-coloured ex-army pyjamas. (I’d like to honour him with the nickname Camp Commandant Alzheimer, but when there’s next to no one apart from yourself to talk to, a nickname doesn’t get you very far.) The only person Walter De Bodt respects is the head of geriatrics, the ‘care manager’, as he is tendentiously known, who Walter invariably greets with a rigid right arm and, if his false teeth are properly inserted, a cry of ‘Heil!’

Having to relive your younger years is seldom something to crow about.