Of course, I could be totally wrong. There’s no way of proving a negative. I’m out of the Game, so what do I know? Everyone gets the same chance. That’s what I said to Emily the other day, when she reached Level 6. She isn’t much of a player, but someone might get lucky.
So—
Are you in or are you out?
PLAY OR QUIT?
It’s your choice.
Faith and Hope Get Even
The elderly are easily bullied, often neglected, sometimes by those very professionals who claim to be in charge of their welfare. We see it all too often in hospitals and care homes – old people being patronized, forgotten, denied basic care, sometimes even abused. Our society has a habit of turning away from such unpalatable realities. In this story, Faith and Hope manage to get some of their own back. If it inspires anyone else to fight back too, then all the better.
HOW KIND OF you to come and see us again. We don’t get many visitors, you know – except my son, Tom, who makes regular duty calls, but never really has anything to say. You can’t talk to him; all you can do is listen and nod in the right places. His job; his boss; house prices. And the weather, don’t forget; in Tom’s world, all old people ever want to do is talk about the weather.
I know, however, that there are things from which I ought to shelter him. The Meadowbank Retirement Home is a stage on which tragedy and farce pursue each other with Chaucerian vigour, and it takes a good sense of humour (and a strong stomach) to get by. My son, much as I love him, has neither; and so I stick to the weather. Fortunately for my sanity, I still have Hope.
Hope is my dearest friend. She was a professor of English Literature in her youth, and she still has that Cambridge manner, a certain crispness, an almost military tilt of the head, even though she has been blind for fifteen years and hasn’t had a visit since the day she came in. But she does have all her marbles – more marbles, in fact, than most people were born with – and she manages, with a little help from me in my wheelchair, to maintain the dignity and humour essential for survival in a place like this.
We used to be trusties. Not so now: since last year’s escapade to London the management has kept us under a supervision of near-Gestapo closeness. A receptionist guards the exit; another mans the desk in anticipation of trouble, or in case either of us attempts to exceed our five-minute weekly phone allowance.
Kelly, the blonde with the low IQ, has long since been replaced. In her place the governors have appointed a general manager to oversee the running of things: a large, capable woman called Maureen, who speaks to us with a relentless, Wagnerian jollity that fails to hide the metallic glint in her small, blue-shadowed eye.
The others defer to Maureen. There’s thick Claire; chatty Denise; Sad Harry, who never smiles; trainee Helen, cheery Chris (our special friend) and the new girl, Lorraine, who smokes in the staff lounge and uses Hope’s Chanel perfume when Hope is out of the room. Chris – he’s the only one who really talks to us – says the change of management shouldn’t affect us in any way. But he looks preoccupied; he isn’t as cheery as he once was, doesn’t sing to us as often as he did, and I noticed the other day that he’d even taken the gold ring out of his ear.
‘Maureen didn’t like it,’ he said when I asked him. ‘I’m already on a warning, and I really need this job.’
Well, we know that. You see, Chris was in trouble once, with the law, and now he has to be especially careful. Oh, nothing serious – just bad company and worse luck. A nine-month sentence for breaking and entering; then community service and a clean slate. But clean slate or not, these things have a habit of following you around. Even now, years later, he still can’t get a credit card, or a loan, or even open a bank account. It’s all there in his file; and people like Maureen tend to read files when they ought to be reading people.
It was Mother’s Day last month. Hope always feels a bit down on Mother’s Day, though she never shows it; it’s just that I’ve known her for such a long time that I notice these things. Her daughter Priscilla lives in California, and never writes, though we do get a postcard from time to time – cheap things, badly printed, which I read to her aloud, with a little poetic licence where necessary.
I have to be careful; Hope always knows when I go too far. All the same, she has kept them all – in a shoe-box in her wardrobe – and if only Priscilla knew how much they meant to her, she might put more thought into what she writes.
Tom came, of course. His wife never does; nor do the children. I have to say I don’t blame them; why should anyone want to sit in here on a lovely spring day, when they could be out and about with their families? He wanted to take me for a drive; but I didn’t want to leave Hope, and I knew Maureen wouldn’t allow Tom to take both of us out together. So we stayed in and ate the chocolates Tom had brought, and enjoyed the flowers – not his usual, I’m glad to say, but a very sweet-scented bunch of lily-of-the-valley, which Hope could enjoy as much as I did.
Festival days are always a bit of a chore, here at the Meadowbank Home. Too many comings and goings; too much excitement; too many thwarted hopes. The nurses are irritable, the kitchen staff edgy and overworked, trying to provide ‘celebration’ food on an impossible budget. Jealousies and tempers run high among the residents.
Mrs Swathen had a visit. Her family are regular visitors, and Mrs Swathen likes to preen, drawing attention to herself and announcing in a loud voice that very soon her daughter will be here to see her, with her husband, who works in accounting, and their two delightful children, Laurie and Jim. Furthermore, she adds, they will take her in their Volvo car to the garden centre, where she will have tea and scones and look at the spring plants.
She says this in the gloating voice of one who has only been a resident at the home for twelve months, and who believes that this special attention on the part of her loved ones will continue for ever. The rest of us know better; but that didn’t stop us from gazing hungrily after her as she left, or feeling a stab of envy at the sight of the two rosy-faced children at the back window of the car.
Of course after that, Mrs McAllister put on her coat, scarf and gloves, picked up her handbag and went to the lobby to wait. We’re not supposed to hang around the lobby without good reason, but Mrs McAllister does this every time anyone else has a visit, insisting that her son, Peter, will soon be here to take her home.
We hear a lot about Peter McAllister, not all of it entirely reliable. Already since I’ve been here, Peter has been a banker, a research chemist, a policeman, a fashion designer, a Navy commander and a teacher of Latin and Greek at St Oswald’s Grammar School, although none of us, not even the oldest residents, recall ever having seen him.
The nurses have long since given up explaining to Mrs McAllister that her son died of prostate cancer seven years ago, and nowadays they allow her to sit by the door for as long as she likes, provided she doesn’t get in the way.
This time, however, things were different. If someone else had been at the desk – Chris, for instance, or Helen – they would have let it go, but it was the new girl, Lorraine. Maureen chose her; and even though she hadn’t been with us for very long, it was clear that she was firmly on the side of the management. A surly piece – except with Maureen herself, whose arrival invariably triggered a personality change and a burst of efficiency that was as surprising as it was short-lived. When Maureen wasn’t there, Lorraine did as little as possible, took a break every ten minutes and spoke to us – when she spoke to us at all – with a sharpness verging on contempt.
Now to be fair, we have all, at some time or other, found Mrs McAllister annoying. She can’t help it, poor old thing; at ninety-two, she’s the oldest person here, and though she’s more able-bodied than either Hope or myself, she’s terribly confused. Things tend to vanish around her: chocolates; eyeglasses; clothing; teeth. Chris once told me that he found fourteen pairs of false teeth hidden under her mattress, plus two squashed doughnuts, a bag of Yorkshire Mixture, half a packet of chocolate digestives, a stuffed panda, some
war medals belonging to Mr Braun, the German resident, and a green rubber ball belonging to the common-room dog.
Of course, Chris didn’t say anything about it to the management. Instead, he just quietly restored the items to their original owners and made a note to check the mattress again from time to time. Lorraine, I sensed, would not have let it go. Nor did she in the case of Mrs McAllister’s unsanctioned presence in the lobby.
‘Now, dearie, you go back to your room,’ she said. Her sharp voice penetrated even to the morning room where Hope and I were sitting, I in my wheelchair and Hope in one of the home’s Shackleton high-seaters, eating Tom’s chocolates and enjoying the sunshine. Chris was wiping the windows near by, whistling softly to himself.
‘Go back right now,’ we heard from the lobby. ‘No one’s coming to fetch you, and I can’t have you sitting here all day.’
The reply was faint though audible. ‘But Peter always comes on a Thursday’ – it was a Sunday. ‘He comes all the way from London. He’s an account executive, you know. And today he’s going to take me home.’
Lorraine’s voice went up slightly in volume, as if she were talking to a deaf person. ‘Now listen to me—’ she began. ‘We’ll not have any more of this nonsense. Your son isn’t coming to fetch you, no one’s coming to fetch you, and if you don’t go back to your room right now I’m going to have to take you there myself.’
‘But I promised Peter—’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ There came the sound of Lorraine’s hand slapping down on the desktop. ‘Your son’s dead, don’t you remember? He’s been dead for years. How can he be coming to fetch you?’
In the morning room, Hope took a sharp breath. Chris stopped wiping the window and looked at me, his mouth turned down in an unhappy grimace.
There came, from the lobby, a silence worse than any sound.
Oh, Mrs McAllister can be annoying. She’s the one who took my favourite scarf, the silk one with the yellow edging, and a whole box of pink-iced biscuits that Tom gave me for Christmas. I got the scarf back – eventually, and with a greasy stain on it that never came off – but I had to leave her the biscuits, because by then she was sure they had come from Peter, and I couldn’t face having to explain everything to her all over again.
‘He’s such a good boy,’ she kept repeating, looking fondly at my Christmas biscuits. ‘He makes such wonderful cakes for that big restaurant of his. And do you know, he comes all the way from London?’
And so I left them. Tom’s always giving me biscuits, anyway – he thinks that’s all old ladies ever eat – and I knew he’d buy me another box sooner or later. It’s hardly a great price to pay, is it, and at least it kept her happy.
But now she came into the morning room and her face was grey and somehow caved-in-looking, like a very old apple that has started to rot. ‘She says Peter’s dead,’ she quavered. ‘My son’s dead, and no one even told me.’
Hope’s better at this kind of thing than I am. Maybe it’s her Cambridge experience; maybe just her personality. In any case, she put her arms around Mrs McAllister and let her cry it out against her shoulder, from time to time patting her poor old humped back and saying, ‘There, there, lovey, it’ll be all right.’
‘Oh Maud,’ said Mrs McAllister. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. When can we go home?’
‘Not just yet,’ said Hope, gently. ‘Come on now, sweetheart. Faith and I will get you a cup of tea.’
They say you never feel unfairness as strongly as when you’re a child. Certainly, childhood episodes – with all their accompanying emotions – tend to remain in the memory for much longer than recent events. I still remember, when I was seven years old, how a girl from my school – her name was Jacqueline Bond – would lie in wait for me as I came home for lunch and punch me repeatedly between the shoulderblades, for no reason that I could discern, as her younger sister, Caroline, watched and laughed. I still remember how it felt: my helplessness and my rage. I had no words for my hatred of them. There was certainly nothing childish about it. Even now, seventy years later, I remember those girls, their mouse-brown hair and bony, inbred faces, and I hate them still, though they must be old now – that is, if they are still alive. I hope they are not. That’s what unfairness does to you; and although the business is long done, the voice of the seven-year-old is still as strong as ever in my memory, protesting, ‘Not fair! Not fair!’ long after births, deaths, marriage and other disappointments have receded and been forgotten.
My anger at Lorraine’s casual cruelty to poor, confused Mrs McAllister was not quite of that magnitude. But for a while it came uncomfortably close. It was the unfairness more than anything else; the fact that Lorraine or any other member of the Meadowbank staff could believe they had the right to bully us without fear of complaint.
We tried, though – that very night, when Maureen came on duty – but by then Mrs McAllister was asleep, exhausted, in her room; Lorraine was on her best behaviour and Chris, who had stayed past the end of his shift to confirm our story, was looking decidedly uncomfortable.
In the staff kitchen, Lorraine was drinking coffee and pretending not to know what was going on. There was a smile on her pencilled lips, and maroon lip-marks all around the rim of her coffee cup. From the lobby desk, Maureen glanced at Lorraine, then looked back at Hope and me. She did not look at Chris, or comment on his presence.
Hope and I finished our account. Hope kept to the facts in her best cool-and-businesslike Cambridge manner, but I could not help but voice my indignation. ‘It was downright mean,’ I said, still watching Lorraine through the kitchen door. ‘Mean and unnecessary. What does it matter to Lorraine if Mrs McAllister sits by the door? What harm does it do to indulge her a little?’
‘I don’t think you appreciate all the work Lorraine has to do,’ said Maureen.
‘Work?’ I said. ‘The only work she does is when you’re around to watch her. The rest of the time she just sits in the staff lounge, smoking and watching TV.’
But this was territory into which Maureen refused to go. ‘Now, girls,’ she said with horrible archness, ‘I hope you’re not telling tales. Because, you know, if you can’t say anything nice, then it’s better not—’
‘We’re not at kindergarten,’ said Hope. ‘And this isn’t just tittle-tattle. It’s a complaint, which, if you prefer, we can put in writing.’
‘I see.’ Maureen’s expression told me everything I needed to know about the complaints system, and the likelihood of any letter of ours ever reaching the Meadowbank governors. ‘And what does Mr Er’ – she fixed her eyes on Chris – ‘what does he have to contribute to this?’
Chris explained that he too had overheard the conversation, and that he felt that Lorraine’s behaviour had been insensitive.
Maureen peered at him in blue-shadowed silence. Then, at last, she nodded. ‘All right. Leave it to me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ll be having any more trouble.’
Of course, she was wrong. Lorraine continued unchastened – rather worse, in fact, than before. It took us some time to understand the extent of her spitefulness: by then she had contrived to ingratiate herself with the management in a number of small, significant ways, as well as cleverly undermining the very people who might have alerted Maureen to her activities.
Things disappeared. Little things at first; my own teacup, the one with the pink flowers around the rim. My new stockings. A little box of Turkish Delight that Tom had given me, and that I was saving for a special occasion.
This may not seem very important to you, but we’re hardly allowed any possessions, here at the Meadowbank Home. Anything we bring is limited to what will fit in a small wardrobe and a three-drawer cabinet. I know they’re only things; but in this place, where anything not stamped with the Meadowbank logo is rare, things are all we have to remind ourselves of who we are.
I still miss my own possessions. I know I couldn’t have brought the piano, or my glass-fronted dresser with my mother’s china in it. But
some things, surely, could have been allowed? My little green-and-brown rug, perhaps; my rocking chair; my own bed. Maybe a painting or two to replace those cheap flower prints they seem so fond of. But rules are rules, they tell me. What they don’t tell me is why.
Still, I manage. When small things are all you have, then small things become important, and it was astonishing how much I’d enjoyed my tea when I could drink it from my very own cup. Now I had to use a Meadowbank cup, and it tasted different; institutional, somehow, like the tea we’d had to make do with during the War, half sawdust and half dandelion.
Hope lost things too. When you have as few possessions as Hope does, that hurts; but it was the day she went to her cupboard and found that the shoe-box, with the little bundle of Priscilla’s postcards, was gone, that we realized that this was not normal Meadowbank pilfering. It was personal.
Of course the first thing we did was to check on Mrs McAllister. But since learning once more of Peter’s death she had been listless and unwell, staying in her room and hardly speaking to anyone. Hope and I had expected her to forget, as she usually did, but this time, perversely, the memory held. Little else did – meals, toilet stops, the few television shows around which she built her life. It was as if this one truth – her son’s death, fresh in grief as in memory – had grown so large in her mind as to eclipse everything else.
‘A mother should never outlive her son,’ she repeated, when Hope wheeled me in to see her. ‘Do you know they weren’t even going to let me go to the funeral? They’re like that in the army, you know, when someone goes missing in action. Thank God you’re here, Maud.’ (This was to Hope.) ‘Now they’ll have to let me go, now you’re here to take me home.’
To which Hope always said, ‘Not just yet, sweetie,’ and wheeled me out again.
Compared with Mrs McAllister’s loss, the loss of our few bits and pieces seemed trivial, and so we let it go for a while, especially as by then we were almost certain that Mrs McAllister had nothing to do with their disappearance.