Jude

         My wife, Judy, is fifty four years old, with the breasts of a twenty five year old. I know this, because I paid for those breasts on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday. I was initially flabbergasted by her request for such a gift since Jude has never been vain, has always been practical and careful and highly competent in all fields of life. But when she turned fifty, she decided she wanted to do something stupid and irresponsible. I suggested a six month trip around the world but she decried the carbon footprint and, besides which, what she really wanted was larger, firmer breasts.
         It was her birthday and I had offered her the choice of whatever she wanted within reason, so she had the surgery. Once she had recovered, I remember her skipping round the bedroom like a teenager, completely naked and admiring her chest in the mirror, absolutely thrilled to bits. I had no complaints myself and found myself looking forward to our crazy older age.
         Eight weeks later, she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.
         Despairing and in need of something amazing, we went on a foreshortened world trip anyway. She laid on the beach in PhuKet and joked that had the breasts of a woman half her age and the brain of a woman twice her age and we laughed like idiots at the surrealism of it all. Four years on, the disease has progressed with such startling speed that she cannot summon the mental capacity to manage a knock-knock joke. I am suffering the despair by myself these days and mostly Jude just appears to be suffering, full stop.
         I am no longer surprised to be woken at odd hours of the night. Jude’s mind is a maze of dead-end corridors with monsters hiding round the corners to jump out at her at odd moments. This morning, at five am, with the light just over the horizon, she started screaming.
         “Snake. Charlie. Snake. Charlie. Snake. Charlie.” At such a shrill pitch, her failing, repetitive speech is, unsurprisingly, a particularly effective alarm.
         We used to be lucky, and with that luck, we had enough success to afford a beautiful house in the country. I had to leave Jude’s bed just over a year ago because otherwise I couldn’t get enough sleep to look after her, and I left her in the room with the picture window that framed the sunrise over the lake behind the house. It was a view she had always loved and I thought it might keep the power to calm her when many other comforts started to fail.
          I rushed into her this morning to find her sitting bolt upright on the end of the bed, staring straight out of that enormous window. It’s difficult these days to tell what she’s looking at, because she sees things that aren’t there and doesn’t comprehend the things that are. Thankfully, she did seem to acknowledge my presence and the shriek diminished in tone somewhat.
         “Snake, Charlie. Charlie. Snake.” She was almost matter-of-fact.
         I brushed her damp hair back from her brow. “Shh, Jude, there’s no snake, I promise.” I didn’t even look out of the window. “You did get me in here though. What shall we do? Put the TV on for a bit, listen to some music. What do you think?”
         “Snake, Charlie.”
         “Come on, my love, let’s get you back to bed, eh? It’s a bit chilly, yet.”
         Again, thankfully, for she wasn’t always so, she passively allowed me to shift her around on the bed, so that she lay against the pillows with the covers over her, but her eyes stayed on the window.
         “Snake, Charlie.”
         I didn’t try to argue with her, there was often no point, she would forget the snake soon enough when something else turned up in her head to torment her. I went to make tea and buttered crumpets for an early breakfast, and carried them back up the stairs and into her room, preparing to settle down next to her, feed her and maybe persuade her into another hour’s rest.
         “Snake, Charlie.”
         “Yes, love. Here’s your tea.”
         With coaxing she managed a couple of sips as I held the plastic beaker to her mouth. The sun was fully risen, promising a bright summer’s day. We might make it to the lake edge for a picnic later, perhaps. Jude still seemed to appreciate the lap of the waves as a calming influence, but the sun was too bright for her now and she was creasing her eyes against it. I got up to draw the blind.
         There was an apple tree in the middle of our lawn, gnarled and ancient, an iconic presence in our family life for both our daughters had been married under it. I had once suggested that it might be Eve’s tree, supplanted from Eden, and Jude had tended it for years with such veneration that I joked she had taken me a bit too seriously.
         This morning it was more formidable than usual. There was a huge snake coiled in the branches.
         I collapsed back on to the bed myself.
         “Snake, Jude, snake!”
         She laughed at me. “Snake, Charlie, snake!” It was a giggling, gorgeous laugh, like the old Jude. There was what looked like a nine foot python in our back garden, which we would both have greeted with screaming hysterics four years ago, demanding to know how it got there and how we would get rid of it. For now, though, I would wait to call the emergency services, just until Jude stopped laughing.