Three Things About Elsie(92)

I shook my head. ‘I only wanted it to take my mind off things,’ I said. ‘Sometimes that’s what a cup of tea is for.’

I looked at the criss-cross of walking sticks around the waiting room and all the people, drawn in grey and beige, with whispers of white where their hair used to be and shoes too big for their feet. My father always said distraction was the best way to address anxiety, but the magazines all appeared to have been disembowelled and divorced from their staples, so I picked up a leaflet instead.

Living With Dementia, it said.

It was filled with statistics. Handy Simon would have had a field day. See, I remembered his name! It told you how likely you were to get dementia, and how old you might be when you first welcomed it into your life. There were lots of photographs of elderly people with full heads of hair and rosy cheeks, and relatives overflowing with patience and understanding. On the second page, there was a list of symptoms written in bold, and held within a box.

Elsie fought around in the bowels of her handbag for a pair of glasses, but she gave up. ‘What does it say?’

‘Problems with reasoning,’ I said. ‘Although that’s never been one of my strongest suits.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Communication problems,’ I said.

‘You never have any trouble communicating.’

‘Quite the reverse,’ I said.

‘What’s the third thing?’

I looked at the little box. ‘Mood swings.’

Elsie started to laugh, and I laughed along with her. We laughed so much, Natasha was forced to put down her mobile telephone for a moment and ask if we were all right.

‘Perfectly fine, thank you. Do you ever have mood swings, Natasha? Do you find yourself struggling to reason?’ I looked at the mobile telephone. ‘Do you have problems communicating with other human beings?’

Natasha frowned and decamped to the far corner. She was still staring at us over the top of the screen when a nurse appeared from one of the rooms and waved us inside.

‘This is us then,’ I said, and gave a very big sigh.

The room was quite pleasant, considering it had a doctor inside of it. There were flowers on the windowsill, although I strongly suspected they were of the pretend variety, and a display of the same leaflets I’d been reading just a moment before, only they were arranged in a little fan on the coffee table, like after-dinner mints. Instead of hard plastic seats, there were armchairs. There was even a cushion, although I put it straight on the floor, because cushions always play havoc with Elsie’s lumbar region.

The doctor smiled at us. He sat in the armchair opposite, with a pile of notes and a stethoscope swaying from his shirt.

‘Are they listening to my heart as well?’ I said.

‘I don’t think so.’ Elsie frowned at the stethoscope. ‘I think it’s just to make sure everyone knows who they’re supposed to be.’

The doctor smiled again and asked for our details, and I answered for both of us, because Elsie said I needed the practice.

‘And you?’ I said.

The doctor stared at us.

‘Hello My Name Is?’ I said. ‘I’ve watched Holby City, I know the rules.’

His name was Dr Andrews, and when he’d washed his hands and rolled his sleeves above his elbows, he told us he was going to ask a series of questions.

‘Is there a time limit?’ I said. ‘For us to answer?’

Dr Andrews glanced at the clock above our heads and said that it was quite a busy clinic.

‘The mini mental-state examination doesn’t usually take long,’ he said.

‘Mini?’ I frowned at him.

He told us there were thirty questions, which didn’t sound very mini to me. The world of medicine appears to be littered with understatements – small scratch, slight discomfort, minor abrasion. I offered him a selection of examples I’d experienced, although I didn’t venture into my bowels, or we’d have been there all day.

‘Shall we begin?’ said Dr Andrews, and Elsie and I sat up a little straighter.

It’s strange how easily you can become flustered when someone is watching you. If they were casual questions, asked at a bus stop or in a supermarket queue, I’m sure the answers would come to us easily, but when Dr Andrews is staring down at you with his pen waiting over a piece of paper, you begin to doubt even your own name. He started out by asking the day of the week. Of course, I knew it was Tuesday, but going to Whitby threw me off and I plumped for Thursday before either of us had even really thought about it. Elsie said she was going to choose Tuesday, but she waited for me to answer first, because she wanted to know what I’d say. We were so confused by the days of the week, by the time he got to the month and the year, we just blurted out the first thing we thought of. Of course it wasn’t 1997. 1997 was the year Diana died. I told Dr Andrews, and asked if we could have an extra point for knowing it, but he shook his head.

‘There isn’t a box for the Princess of Wales,’ he said.

Neither of us could remember the name of the hospital, either. It’s not something you notice, is it? And Natasha pressed the button in the lift, so how could we know what floor we were on? I told him Natasha would fill him in, and should I go and get her, but Dr Andrews just moved on to the next question.

‘Take seven away from a hundred,’ he said. ‘And keep taking seven away, until I tell you to stop.’