~
Strapped into the back, the taxi purring down empty wet streets, Alex does what he can to shut out the scenes he’s just witnessed. He tries not to see the worktop swept clean and the plate rack knocked flying with a single swipe of an arm, a drawer torn from its runners and hurled to the ground in an explosion of cutlery. But the deafening din of it all wells up between the strokes of the wipers; the banished images coalescence once more behind rain trails at his window. Gulnaz sits beside him, tense and unyielding. He doesn’t dare look at her face.
The taxi takes them out of town, to a grand avenue lined with trees, and pulls into the driveway ahead of the brightly lit porch of an imposing house. The cabbie unloads the chair and helps him out; Gulnaz lets herself in through the door. This place is as far removed from Daniel’s flat as one could possibly imagine, everything so palatial and tranquil. He’s an earthquake victim pulled from the debris and taken up to paradise. Within minutes, Gulnaz has him stripped and cleaned, into fresh pyjamas and tucked up in a bed laid with satin sheets. But none of it touches him, none of the luxuries, none of her tenderness. Nothing connects.
Words are now writing themselves across a gossamer veil of sleep; voices, blowing in softly from the street, or being conjured purely from imagination. A cloaking, deeper sleep follows, and then Gulnaz is back, dressing him and taking him through to an enormous kitchen. He sits at the table, watching a hundred muscles working her face as she toils. They distort her mouth and constrict her breathing. There’s a rage burning beneath that calm exterior, yet she barely says a word. Until now, he’s been carefully avoiding her eyes, but when at last she sits down he allows himself to meet her gaze, and reaches a finger towards the angry swelling on her forehead.
“No, no, Alex, that’s not… I, got that at the care home,” she says, pulling back. In a more considered voice she adds, “Don’t misunderstand me. Nobody there was out to hurt me. It was just me being careless. You’ve no need to worry; it’s a perfectly safe place to stay.”
But even Gulnaz can’t engineer a smile to make the story stick. Her failure to convince only stresses her further. She is back on her feet, the detached professional again, insisting that this is the best arrangement for everyone. “You should think of it more as a hostel than a hospital,” she lectures him. “And it’ll only be for a short time. I’ll be there to look after you.”
On a sudden impulse she takes his hand. “Please believe me, Alex, I’m sorry; I truly, truly am. God only knows what’s been going on since I last visited you. I had no idea he could behave like that.”
Again Alex hears the echo of blows behind closed doors, and knows exactly what Daniel is capable of.
“I should never have let it come to this. I know Daniel meant well when he first took you in – we wouldn’t have released you to him otherwise. Please believe me when I say that.” The words set her busying around the stove. “He just… Well, clearly he just couldn’t cope. I warned him. I should have stopped it sooner. These terrible things that have happened to you – that gave you those cuts on your back, the marks on your neck; the mud on your clothes; this man from the pub; Daniel’s outburst…” She brings a hand to her face as if to silence herself, but lays the palm over her left eye.
She’s starting to cry. She hides it well, but the little quiver in her voice before the swallowed words is enough. Alex only wishes he could say something to comfort her. Forcing back her shoulders, she turns and presents the table with a plate of scrambled eggs. Just the one. Nothing for herself.
The eggs stick in his throat. They put him in mind of oral feeds. He thinks of saline drips, feeding tubes and gloved fingers that delve into forbidden areas. The irony. He had indeed been raped. Only, not by Daniel’s uninvited caller, but by her very own colleagues. And here is Gulnaz, wanting him back in institutional care. Then again, he’d wanted it too – it was why he’d tried to escape. And the escape had been to blame for Daniel’s misunderstanding, which in turn had brought Gulnaz running…
It all sets his mind in a spin. He picks at the edges of the plate until Gulnaz takes it away. Already she’s apologising for the things she’s just said about his brother, suggesting the impossible – that they try to put what happened in the night behind them. She finishes up in the kitchen, returning it to its pristine state, jots something down on a pad to their unnamed host, puts her hands together and suggests they get going. After that, everything moves at great speed. She wheels him out onto the front drive, through the gates, past poplar trees and privet hedges, on towards a park on the corner and across the road to an imposing, red-bricked building. Two square pillars mark its gateway. ‘Newlyn House’ the plaque says. ‘Residential and Short-Stay Care Home’. The receptionist at the door is waving them in. She smiles at Alex as though she knows him. Maybe he knows her too. They’re navigating awkward corners, trundling along wood-panelled passageways and uneven flooring, and pulling up before a plain white door.
“I think you should try to get some rest,” Gulnaz suggests, raising him from the chair. “I have to attend to a few other residents for a while, but I’ll keep dropping by. I’ll take you round later and introduce you to people.” She closes the door as she leaves.
Alex sits motionless, his head dizzied by all the activity, his brain too full to take in the room. It takes a firm rap on the door to force a way through the inner noise. Expecting Gulnaz again, he looks round, but is met by a squat, middle-aged man with thinning hair and a paunch. His excuse for the intrusion is curt and to the point.
“Alex George? I’ve come to give you a tour of the facilities.”
Alex shrinks back on the pillow. He doesn’t give a shit about facilities. He wants only to stay put until Gulnaz is free and then just sit alone with her for the remainder of the day. But the carer is already advancing with his chair at the ready, as though no isn’t an option. Alex turns away and reaches for his crutches. He’ll give the man a run for his money at least.
Grumbling about the other jobs on his list, the man walks him back the way he’d been brought. “Residents’ lounge,” he announces, as though it were a station platform. Alex sees tables laid with food, balloons and tinsel hung from the ceiling, poppers and crackers. He hears music and laughter, the dull clunk of plastic glasses, sees swirling gowns. He drops his eyes and looks again and finds another world entirely. Empty, bleak and unloved. A room without colour. A room without joy.
Their next stop is the dining room, Alex half expecting Gulnaz to be there at every turn, but knowing deep down that she won’t be.
“Supper is at five-thirty. We’ll come for you at five.”
More corridors and they are back at his door. The carer points out his nearest toilet and gives him a quick rundown of the fire drill, then takes him inside. Suddenly Alex is facing another stint of solitude, another block of time with only his own mind as obsessive companion. More pointless thinking, taking him round and round the houses. The flat, for example, what is Daniel doing at this moment? Would he be able to receive a message putting him straight about the rape? Or does Alex let him stew in that delusion as punishment for what he’s done to Gulnaz? Do they even connect at this distance? It’s hard to say – the image of a ransacked kitchen is unchanged from before. The eyes through which he studies the scene stay fixed upon a single point. More a caught memory than a live feed; a snapshot outside of time. But then Alex too has lost all sense of time. This new room has no clock. Maybe it’s deliberate. Here, it seems they are not to be encouraged to count the minutes and the hours. Or even the days. Here, time is not to be carved up that way, only into units of food, toileting, medicine, sleep – and death. Here, he must learn to play by the rules and simply wait. And make the most of the stillness…
…Because supper, when it eventually arrives, proves to be a whirlwind of chaos. By the end of the meal a hundred things have been dropped, thrown or broken. And still everyone somehow gets fed. Everyone gets cleaned up. Everyone gets led away.
No sign of Gulnaz all evenin
g.
And then it is night.
She’s abandoned him to the madhouse. The bed is hard and slightly damp. And creaks when he rolls over. Which he does for most of the night.
Woken by daylight, at first Alex can’t place his whereabouts – a cobweb of netting, framed by faded brown curtains tied back with string. Where is this place? His attention wanders from the window to the loud, floral wallpaper. As a child he’d known a carpet like this. His eyes are pulled to the corners, where the migrainous shapes dissolve into mould stains, paper peeling from its edges. A wardrobe with ill-fitting doors, a solitary table and hard wooden chair, and the bed he lies in. It’s something like Daniel’s flat, and yet it isn’t. He smells damp and stale fabric, disinfectant and incontinence. They turn his thoughts to the hospital.
One by one, the faces from the day before are etched into the dust-filled sunlight: the smiling woman at reception, the terse and balding orderly, the rabble of dysfunctional diners, until it has all fallen into place. The only character still missing from the crowd is Gulnaz. She finally makes her appearance as the room’s own smells begin mixing with hints of cooked breakfast. At first glance, Gulnaz looks to be her old self; smiling, cheerful, seemingly revived by rest. Only when she comes closer does he see the magic she’s had to work with foundation and powder to lift her complexion, to smooth out the exhaustion lines and to conceal the spreading bruise over her eye. Her one effort to cover her absence is a brief apology for having been called away, and a hope that Stanley had taken good care of him while she was gone.
She has with her some of Alex’s clothes from the flat. It alarms him that she’d risked returning so soon, but nothing is said of the matter; she leaves them on the little table, helps him dress and strolls patiently at his side as he shuffles his way towards the dining room. Breakfast is the same mayhem he’d witnessed at supper. Finding him a vacant seat at the end of one of the long tables, Gulnaz makes a point of introducing him to his immediate neighbours.
“Everyone, this is Alex. Alex will be staying with us for a little while. I want you all to make him feel welcome.”
The man opposite grunts, sets down his spoon and tries to raise himself from the chair before conceding defeat.
“Non sum qualis eram,” he wheezes. “More’s the bloody pity.”
“This is Professor Bagshot,” Gulnaz says. Alex can’t help but smile. The pompous Latin, the baggy face and vocal cords shot through – the man could not have been better named. The professor gawps at him through tiny spectacles, his forehead puckering into a frown. “To pepromenon phygein adynaton!” he declares. It sounds like a warning.
Gulnaz moves on hastily. “And this is Amelia. Amelia’s great-granddaughter is coming to visit this weekend for the very first time. We’re going to make her especially welcome, aren’t we Amelia?”
“I’m ninety-seven,” the old woman roars gleefully through her porridge. Her gummy mouth reminds Alex of Scoff’s yawns.
He’s been conscious throughout of the intense gaze of the third member of the group. Before Gulnaz can speak her name the woman’s hand stops her. “And I am Margaret Shenton-Stevens,” she announces, rising rake-like and radiant from her seat; a princess in the skin of an old witch. The hand she extends for Alex to kiss might have come straight from a museum of natural history but for the gaudy fake diamond on one finger.
“On Friday, we’re having a party for Margaret’s birthday.” Gulnaz says. “Twenty-one again, Margaret?”
“Don’t be childish, dear. Anyway, that would be telling,” she purrs. The hand is withdrawn as she returns to her seat. And then it is as if these exchanges had never been. The group’s attention drifts back to their food, all efforts focused on reacquainting fingers with utensils, their faces resetting as though each sits alone in some cold, loveless prison.
With breakfast drawing to a close, the carers begin lining themselves up into ranks, the vanguard gathering dishes, the second wave herding residents out through the main doors, and the third sweeping the tables with damp cloths, cleaning sprays and plastic caddies. When their turn comes, Alex and his group are goaded towards the lounge.
The room, deserted when he’d last seen it, has now come alive with activity. In one corner, a withered old man is being helped into a high-backed wing chair, a newspaper slotted in between his fingers. Even from the far side of the room the headlines of frustration are readable across his brow. With those claw-like hands, he has little hope of ever turning the pages. His buckled frame suggest he might never even rise again from that chair. Alex’s heart goes out to him a little; a fellow traveller whose active mind no doubt rages against his useless, broken body. On the other side of the room, an energetic old lady hurries pointlessly from one empty chair to another, chattering feverishly to an invisible friend – her body appears sound enough; it’s her mind that betrays her. The fear and confusion in her eyes says it all.
And then Alex sees, having so nearly missed altogether, another woman right before him, knotted so tightly into a ball by arthritis that her shrunken frame is all but eaten up by the chair. Her gaze seems locked onto a jaw-dropping infinity, both mind and body long destroyed, yet the oblivion in her face suggesting she knows nothing of it.
Is hers the greatest torment? Or the least?
Bagshot, meanwhile, has parked himself down in front of the TV, his doting lady friend Amelia faithfully following suit. The Shenton-Stevens woman has already excused herself. Alex decides to stay. He’s drawn by the snooker. And it’s either this or be faced with his own room again.
As the snooker highlights hand over to horseracing, the room is suddenly overrun by swathes of green lame, flashes of cherry-red lipstick and cascades of fake golden curls. Transformed by her new outfit, Margaret Shenton-Stevens – like some faded Hollywood actress from the Golden Age – comes swishing across the floor towards them. The pancake she wears must have been trowelled into the cracks with a palette knife.
“Well, well, well, so you came back to me,” she coos at Alex, false lashes beating like butterfly wings. “I always knew you would.” He recoils slightly from the intoxication of her perfume. “You wicked boy; sweeping me off my feet at the ball like that. Don’t think I don’t know that you’re stepping out with Miss Gulnaz.”
She sighs. “Of course I don’t really blame you, my dear. You’re not exactly the first young soldier whose head I’ve turned.”
Mad. Quite mad. But this is the kind of gibberish Alex guesses he’ll need to get used to for a while. She spots the crutches beside him, raises her eyes to the heavens and then casts him a most pitying look. “Oh, dear boy, be brave now. Service to the King. They’ll have you fighting fit in a few weeks.”
A twinge of affection towards this woman catches him unawares. “Oh, it’s nothing, I… just slipped on the stairs,” he fibs to reassure her. Immediately his skin begins to flush. Had he really said that – had he? Or did he simply imagine it?
“Careless boy. Too busy eyeing the pretty girls to watch your step, I’ve no doubt.”
Christ, he really had spoken out loud. Not yet quite his true voice, the words were still slurred, but a real sentence, not just garbage or random fragments. It scares him even to try again in case nothing happens.
Gulnaz and another care worker appear at the door and march over, the Stevens woman’s outfit making light work of their searches.
“Ah, there you are, Margaret,” Gulnaz says. Mrs Shenton-Stevens’ eyes light up, as though seeing her for the first time.
“Miss Gulnaz! Are you better now, my dear? I hear you went home sick yesterday. Was it the professor? Did he upset you again?”
Bagshot swears quietly in what sounds like Greek.
“I’m fine, Margaret.” Gulnaz’s laugh is a little too enthusiastic to convince. “And no, it wasn’t the professor.”
Sick. Gulnaz had gone home sick. That’s why he’d not seen her all day yesterday. In his heart, Alex had known it all along.
“Harlot!! Whore!! In
nomine diaboli. Mulier est hominis confusio!”
Bagshot again. Miraculously rejuvenated, he’s up on his feet, his little round face apoplectic with fury. He looks certain to strike the Stevens woman for her rudeness. His unbuttoned dress-shirt falls open as he lurches forward, unlinked cuffs dangling from the wrists. Amelia starts to squeal, duly summoning male nurse Stanley from the next room. Mrs Shenton-Stevens herself stands resolute. Bagshot reaches out, grabbing – not at her throat as Alex expects – but at the aerial cable behind the TV, his white-haired chest thwacking against the screen as he yanks the lead from its socket. Amelia is silent again, as transfixed by flickering snow as by hooves over flying turf.
“Give me that!” demands Stanley. Bagshot begins to howl and curse. He hugs the cable to his chest and sticks the metal plug in his mouth, antics that look set to incite a general riot. The running woman is clapping and dancing on the spot. Her invisible friend is probably doing likewise. The man in the high-backed wing chair starts shaking his newspaper. The curled up woman curls up all the tighter.
“Now that will do, Professor,” Gulnaz chides gently. Manoeuvring herself into the standoff, she carefully withdraws the aerial from Bagshot’s fingers and teases the wire from his teeth. “Why don’t we just put this back where it belongs?”
Everyone applauds. Insurrection has been thwarted. Bagshot is led away. A trail of classical obscenities follows him out.
Gulnaz looks around at Alex. “The professor doesn’t approve of women sports presenters,” she explains. Alex is quite shaken. He hadn’t expected such aggressive behaviour in a place like this. That bruise over her eye; maybe Gulnaz didn’t invent her story after all. Bagshot or some other nutcase could have taken a swipe at her while she was feeding or dressing them. Surely this can’t be allowed. Surely the home has a duty of care towards its staff as well as its residents.
“What are you doing dressed like that?” the other nurse hisses at Mrs Shenton-Stevens. “You were supposed to go straight back to your room after breakfast.”
Mrs Shenton-Stevens pouts and runs a hand through Alex’s hair. “I was reacquainting myself with our young soldier here.” Her scowl becomes the most wistful of smiles. “Oh, how we danced and danced at the ball. Danced until our feet could take no more.”
“No, Margaret,” Gulnaz says. “This isn’t Daniel. This is Alex, his brother. And you shouldn’t touch people without their permission.”
The Stevens woman scoffs. “Don’t be silly my dear, of course he is Daniel. Just look at his face, his exquisite hair. Can’t you see that?”
“Listen to me, Margaret.” Gulnaz speaks firmly but kindly. “They are twins. It was Daniel you met at the party, not Alex. Daniel is not staying here with us. Daniel has his own home.”
“Oh, I know that. But you’re quite wrong, Miss Gulnaz. You see, this is Daniel. The other Daniel. The Daniel from the other side.”
The nurse grunts irritably. “Now stop all your nonsense and come with me. You know perfectly well it’s time for your medication and visit to the bathroom.”
Mrs Shenton-Stevens narrows her eyes tellingly at Alex and indicates his crutches. “Don’t run away,” she quips. With a quick preen to the curls and a shuffle in her bosom she gives the gathering a martyred look – it isn’t easy being the object of everyone’s desire – and turns her back. Gulnaz smiles after her, and the smile is still there when she takes Alex’s arm and leads him from the lounge.
“Poor Margaret. I do feel sorry for her. Schizophrenia and dementia. Most of the time she’s perfectly delightful, but she does get confused and can sometimes become upset and abusive. So don’t be alarmed if and when she doesn’t recognise you, or gets you mixed up with Daniel. I’ll tell you her story, if you like.” She giggles. “Looks like she’s set her heart on telling you anyway. Come on. Let’s go somewhere quiet.”
She shows him into a more private space; a room perhaps where the staff themselves take their breaks. She sits him down and pulls up the armchair beside him, sinking into it like a deadweight.
“We’re all on this cruise liner, you see – that’s what she believes. It’s her honeymoon, and every day she’s waiting for her husband to turn up. The story goes that she’d once met this merchant seaman. They’d been head-over-heels in love and had decided to marry the moment he was back from his next voyage. He’d promised to show her the wonders of the world with a honeymoon cruise. Then came the war and one assignment became two, became ten and then twenty. Instead of being away just for a few weeks, it stretched on for months.”
Her story stirs echoes of another. ‘Daddy won’t be home for Easter because he has to go to sea… Your dad won’t be here for the holidays because he’s away at sea…’
“Then the letters stopped arriving. News came through of these terrible merchant shipping losses at the hands of the U-Boats. And his ship was on the list.”
‘Your father won’t be coming home… Your father has been lost at sea.’
“So their life was not to be. Poor Mrs Shenton-Stevens – she probably never even married. She’s probably just plain Miss Shenton, or Miss Stevens. But now she’s trapped in this time bubble, forced to relive the past over and over. But it’s not her real past. More like a recurring bad dream. Here she is, on this luxury liner.” Gulnaz takes a moment to look around, as if in awe of the mind’s powers of reinvention. “She’s all dressed up for the party, but her darling, dashing young husband never comes. She’s inconsolable. Sometimes she convinces herself that he’s run off with another woman. Sometimes she believes he’s been abducted by spies, or is terrified that he’s got himself drunk and fallen overboard.”
‘We both know how cruel the sea can be. She nearly took us both. But your father, and the others, they weren’t so lucky that day.’
“She might just sit and cry for hours, or become rebellious and flirtatious. And often she’ll believe he’s come to her – I think she thought Daniel might have been him when he helped out at the New Year’s Eve Ball. Margaret took to him at once. She wouldn’t let him dance with anyone else. Not even me! Of course it only made the next day all the more heart-breaking for her.”
She has been telling him all this, Alex suspects, mostly as a polite warning not to go humouring the woman or encouraging her delusions.