Mum is a bit paranoid about
doors. She doesn’t like doors left open
at night so she is not too happy down south when the outside door is left open
in the evening to allow the cool area to circulate. There are three dogs (one
looks like a scary alsation who of course isn’t) so if a stranger was to come
into the garden and up the path, you would certainly know about it.
Towards the end of her stay in her
own house in Scotland she had an extremely complicated way of locking the front
door at night which involved numerous elastic bands and 4 separate locks (it
was so complicated I worried about being able to get out quickly in a fire when
I stayed there – especially when I was on crutches!) This was because of ‘the boys’. She had a
thing about ‘the boys’ breaking into her house, stealing from her and using her
shower. (‘The boys’ was the term she used to use for my brothers when they were
small but these boys were not my brothers).
She would get herself into a state
because she had to cook for ‘the boys’. She frequently called the local police
to report ‘the boys’ banging on her door or wandering around the house. The
police would dutifully come out, visit, check the premises and declare there to
be no boys in the neighbourhood. One
time the police arrived and she had the gas rings on the cooker all on because
she was cooking for ‘the boys’. Consequently
social work came and did something to the cooker so that she couldn’t operate
it. The police must have got a bit fed up of being called out. This figment of
her imagination was one of the symptoms of her Alzheimer’s.
The outside door in the apartment in
Colombo needs to be locked (and the key hidden) to prevent mum’s escape if she
is in one of those moods. The internal doors though definitely do not need to
be locked. The problem with them is that if mum locks them there is no
guarantee she can unlock them so in the flat Shamalee has stuffed most of the
locks with wads of paper to prevent the locks working. Unfortunately mum’s bedroom door slammed the
other day because the balcony door in the bedroom was open and there was a gale
blowing. After this, the handle turned
on the door but the snib did not react. It just stayed put.
This happened in the afternoon. By
evening I had completely forgotten about it. I put mum to bed and went to watch
some comedy on the TV. She got up to check I was still in the apartment and
then went back to bed. I pulled the door to and instead of it being a bit stiff
and stopping before it shut, like it usually did, it just pulled shut. Then of
course I tried to open it. And then I remembered what had happened in the
afternoon. The handle just turned and
nothing happened.
I didn’t want to make a big deal of
it as if she had realised she was locked in a room and I couldn’t open the door,
she could have panicked. Luckily I have
a very understanding and practical landlord. He answered the phone on his road
home from work and he must have heard the panic in my voice. He said he would
go home, get his toolbox and come right over. By the time he came over an hour
later I was a nervous wreck and mum was fast asleep. I had managed to remove
two screws from the top of the handle but couldn’t budge the one at the
bottom. He and his helper managed to get
the handle off easily. But they still couldn’t open the door. He fiddled about
inside the lock and pulled out lots of little bits of it – it was all smashed
inside – eventually the door opened. Mum
woke up to find me and two strange men in her bedroom taking the lock and
handle off the door. She asked what we were doing, I told her, and she went
back to sleep. She now has neither lock nor
handle on that door.
Strangely, when we came south that
weekend and I went to give her a shower, I pushed her bedroom door shut – it is
usually very stiff to close. It shut too and locked and I couldn’t get it open
from the inside. Luckily someone was in the house and could get it opened from
the outside.
I’m now waiting to lock her in the car as these
things do tend to happen in threes.