Three Things About Elsie(35)

‘Can you remember anything? About this night you mentioned?’ Jack said.

I studied the newspaper. There was a photograph on the front page. A group of people standing around a trestle table, laughing at nothing in particular. From the way they were standing, it was obvious they didn’t know each other and the photographer had just put them all there for convenience’s sake.

‘I remember there were other people,’ I said to the picture. ‘I wasn’t on my own.’

‘Who else?’ Jack says. ‘Do you know?’

Elsie looked at me.

‘Clara was there,’ I said. ‘She didn’t hang herself, did she? She can’t have done, because she was there that night. I remember her now.’

Elsie searched beyond me to somewhere I couldn’t see. I wasn’t sure if she was looking at a point in the future, or a point in the past, and from her eyes, it was obvious she couldn’t decide either.

‘Yes, Clara,’ she said eventually. ‘Clara was there.’

‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we try asking her, see what she remembers? Do you know where she is now?’

I didn’t need to ask Elsie. It came to me like switching on a light.

I took a breath before I answered. ‘She’s in Greenbank,’ I said.





HANDY SIMON


Handy Simon tucked the pen into his clipboard. Since the potting-shed incident Miss Bissell had insisted on regular head counts, and he appeared to be the man for the job.

‘You’re dependable, Simon,’ she’d said. ‘You’re someone who can be relied upon to count.’

Simon was a big fan of quantifying things, but he couldn’t understand the purpose of measuring old people.

‘So we know where they are,’ Miss Bissell had said, ‘so we can keep track of them. Otherwise no one knows what they’re up to. They do head counts everywhere these days.’

‘They do?’

‘Oh yes. The House of Lords. Tesco. They’re all at it.’

Miss Ambrose had provided him with a clipboard and a large pen, which wrote in different-coloured ink, depending on which button you pressed. Red for names, green for location, she’d said, but Simon kept forgetting to press the buttons, so everyone was documented in a light brown. Twice a day, he had to go round, locating people, and when he found them, he could never remember who was who, and he had to ask everyone their name.

Miss Ambrose pointed to his list. ‘I think some of them might be having you on,’ she said.

‘You do?’

‘Well, as far as I’m aware, we don’t have a Roy Rogers living here.’ She scanned the page. ‘Or a Desmond Tutu. We’ve got to take this seriously, Simon. Greenbank won’t take a referral without hard evidence.’

They gave him a sheet of photographs, for ID purposes. The only problem was, the residents spent so long trying to find themselves, the whole escapade took twice as long as it had before. In the meantime, all the other jobs piled up.

‘I shan’t be responsible for the grouting,’ he said to Miss Bissell, as they met in the corridor, but she just sailed past in a cloud of indifference.

He was getting the hang of it, though. They were creatures of habit, the elderly. They frequented the same rooms, and ate the same meals at the same times. They watched the world from an identical view each day, and had the same conversations in the same corridors, with the same people. He knew exactly where to find them. Some, however, were trickier than others. Florence Claybourne, for example, busied about so much, you never knew quite where she’d be.

‘I don’t know why you waste your time,’ she said, when he found her. ‘There are people missing off that photographic sheet, and my picture isn’t anything remotely like me at all.’ She jabbed at the ID page. ‘I look like someone dug me up.’

Simon stayed quiet. He had learned, with Florence, that it was much easier to let everything come out in its own time, like drawing a boil.

‘There are leaves gathering in that guttering,’ she was saying, ‘and if someone doesn’t top up the lavatory paper in the ladies’, we’ll have a mutiny on our hands.’

‘I’ll see to it later, Florence.’

‘Why don’t you see to it now? Instead of standing here gossiping with me?’

‘It’s one o’clock,’ Simon said. ‘I always go to the staff room and sit by the window at one o’clock, and eat my Pot Noodle.’

The staff room wasn’t the best place to find sanctuary. It was an afterthought at the end of the main corridor and, like a giant fruit bowl, it had become a magnet for all the things nobody knew what to do with. There were piles of empty folders and coats people had stopped caring about enough to wear, and in the corner was a tower of back issues of Dementia Now! because no one knew how to cancel the subscription. Even the furniture was confused. It was a melting pot of leftover chairs and tired sofas, and Miss Ambrose had swathed everything in crocheted blankets, which various residents had constructed, usually on their deathbeds.

‘Heart failure,’ Miss Ambrose would say, as she held up a mixture of pinks and purples. And another. ‘Cellulitis of the left leg.’

Simon sat back on a nasty case of pneumonia and waited for his Pot Noodle to take. The only other person in there was Gloria from the kitchens. She was perched on the sill blowing Lambert & Butler out of a narrow gap in the window.