A bad night

Jeremy Clarke -Vou're so far into the closet, Uncle

1 Jack,' I told him, 'you're in Narnia.' We were standing in the hall at four in the morning trading insults. Every night this week Uncle Jack has woken up in a kind of Existential panic. He doesn't know who he is or where he is or what time of day it is or even whether he's alive or dead. When I worked for the local council rodding sewers, cutting grass, and emptying dustbins, I mixed with pleasant, relatively young people for whom this was an acceptable and quite normal state of affairs, But Uncle Jack lost touch completely only in his 93rd year. If, during his active years, he made an occasional leap of faith into the unknown, he's found himself living there permanently now.

Unfortunately for those of us at home who prefer their rejuvenating eight hours of dreamless sleep uninterrupted by mauve

faced old men smelling of ammonia banging on doors with walking sticks, it's taking him a while to get acclimatised. If he wakes in the night he panics, and he goes hobbling round the house in search of a fellow human being who can at least give him the starting prices. Finding the house silent and apparently deserted, his panic rises, and the volume of his cries and the violence of his knocking increases exponentially.

It's usually me that wakes up. Most of the time I go downstairs feeling sorry for him. It must be awful. I say to myself, not knowing where you are or whether it's day or night. He's usually in the hall, leaning on his sticks, in his stripy pyjamas, bewildered and breathless. I tell him it's night time, that this is his home, then I offer to put the kettle on while he makes his way back to his room. His relief at seeing a friendly face is so great that it's almost worth getting up in the middle of the night for. But if it's the second or third time his banging and shouting downstairs has woken me up, and I've had to come back suddenly from somewhere very remote, I can be very rude to him.

Now, everything else that used to comprise Uncle Jack's psychic sense of himself might have surrendered or fled, but make no mistake, fighting to the last man from behind its mealie bag redoubt is his amour propre. Even a disparaging look is never wasted on Uncle Jack. Insult him and you've got a fight on your hands. So if you're going to insult him, you might as well make it as monstrous an accusation as you can think of and irrespective of the truth.

'In the closet?' he said. It was a silly thing to say. I know, and so far out of Uncle Jack's comprehension, it stopped him in his tracks. He lowered his stick and made a huge mental effort to remember whether he had in fact, for whatever reason, spent any length of time inside a closet recently. He couldn't. 'I must be going barmy,' he said sadly. 'I don't know what the hell you're talking about.'

After I'd got him back to bed I was too angry to sleep. I went upstairs and started ripping and tearing and scraping at the wallpaper in the spare bedroom. With the benefit of hindsight, I now regret this. It must have been sheer what psychologists call 'displacement activity'. Almost immediately there was this intransigent patch of wallpaper that would only come away from the wall if the inch of plaster beneath came with it. The plaster was very old, with some kind of hair, horse perhaps, mixed in with it. It fell away from the wall in a broad crumbling slab. Taking stock after this, it looked to me as if the whole wall was going to have to be replastered anyway (using Uncle Jack's hair all being well), and I smashed the rest of the plaster off the wall with a claw-hammer. A cloud of very fine brown dust rose about me to approximately head height.

As the dust settled I saw that the force of my hammer blows had been excessive, and that the dry-stone wall behind it had partially collapsed. Behind the collapsed wall was a dark space, and putting my hand in I found a Manchester University Rag Mag for 1926.

A good laugh was just what 1 needed. I sat down on the rubble at the foot of the wall and began to read. Here's a joke on page one: 'What's the difference between a bank and a beehive?'

-Dunnor

'The bank takes in notes and the piano gives out notes.'

'But you said beehive.'

'Well, that's where you get stung!'

I can't say I roared.

And then I could hear Uncle Jack out in the hall again, crying, 'Anyone about? Can anybody help?' But that was a particularly bad night. Sometimes he doesn't wake up at all.