by Adam Thorpe
‘Dementia.’
‘The Devil crawled into my ear, that’s what he did. And where was Jesus? Down at the betting shop, that’s where.’
Cosmina would like very much to keep the new iPhone, but she doesn’t want to be in this man’s debt. He said he would find someone to mend the old one, that’s all, although it was unmendable. After the excursion in the garden there is very little time left. She opens the box to check the contents just in case it’s a joke, and finds an envelope containing handwritten instructions on how to activate the phone, the address of the shop and some more instructions. The phone is indeed brand new. Her old SIM card is also inside because it was not damaged. She can keep her old number, say Mike’s instructions, but she will have lost anything she didn’t back up onto the SIM. She is annoyed at the way he has taken over this little aspect of her life.
Cosmina writes something very quickly. A scribble. No correcting.
Dear Mr Watkins, I don’t know what is your motive for this gift except kindness, but I am sure to not accept it, sorry. It is TOO kind! I will look your web library and buy a book. Your mother is actually doing great. Take pity please for my English. With best regards, and so much thanks to you, Cosmina Dalca.
Sa aveti o zi buna! (Have a nice day!)
She folds the paper neatly and places it in the box, sealing it again in the wrapping paper after removing the old SIM card. She has to hunt about for Sellotape. She tries the Christmas-and-birthdays drawer, but someone – probably Bronwen – hasn’t put it back. They have just celebrated a hundredth birthday: Amy, born 20 May … in 1912. She isn’t missing a single stave – the full barrel! Poor Janie kept thinking it was all for her and choked on the Amandine pra-jitura- that Cosmina had made.
‘Totally unsuitable for the residents,’ says Bronwen, chocolate smeared around her mouth, cutting another slice out of the sponge. You can always tell a bird by its feathers.
She finds the Sellotape in one of the kitchen drawers, among graters and serving spoons. Bronwen is so lazy, moving the minimum she can get away with. The iPhone is now in Janie’s cupboard, properly wrapped in the Shakespeare paper. She lets the matron know, the one called Esperança, who always looks as if you are talking Russian and yet her own accent is quite strong. She is about to retire, thank God.
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ Esperança says.
‘Just tell the son that it is lying in his mum’s cupboard for him to take. I have put a message on it.’
‘What?’
‘A message. Writed on it.’ When Cosmina is nervous, her English starts to disintegrate.
‘Written on it. You mean a text message? Look, tell him yourself. I’m busy actually.’
‘OK,’ Cosmina agrees. It is always worth agreeing with Esperança. In fact, there is no other choice. ‘When he comes, if you can tell him, please. I don’t know when he comes here this week, and I don’t have his contacts.’ Esperança is taking wipes and pads out of the storage-room cupboard, tutting. Cosmina is not going to get any further without being snapped at by the old crocodile. People very often don’t listen in life. ‘I am off to home now, Matron. Bye.’
No answer. No answer is like a slap on the face. Like the slaps Esperança gives the old folk, saying Shut up your mouth. When Diane whines like a dog, like one of those big shepherd dogs back home when you wave a stick at them to keep them off, Esperança slaps her on the shoulder or the head.
But the memory of Janie’s smile softens the impact.
She sleeps badly that night, partly because Anca told her she was mad refusing the present, but also because it is suddenly much warmer. ‘Did you think he’d go asking to stick his dick in you, or what?’ Anca probably would have accepted. She is a simple, hardbitten girl from Buzău. Give her an inch – or five inches! – and she’d turn into a hooker tomorrow. Two thousand pounds a week. Although she isn’t that good-looking, really. Teeth, scarred chin. The thought makes Cosmina shudder. Her headache has not evolved into a migraine, at any rate. She feels she has been interfered with in some way, although she did give him the phone to mend in the first place. She wakes up with sweat on her face, the blanket thrown off.
When she comes to start her night shift the following evening, arriving as usual fifteen minutes early so that she can discuss any problems (or issues, as the staff call them) with the previous shift, she is surprised to see Janie’s door wide open; it lets in a draught from the front door whenever it’s open. Even though it has suddenly turned really warm today, to old folk a draught is a draught and will swirl around Janie’s ears like a lot of little devils, and she will catch cold and maybe pneumonia. But Janie isn’t there to catch cold. The drawers are empty, the cupboards bare, the bed stripped not only of its linen, but also of its mattress. There is just the bare base and its springs. Nurse Bronwen, who is finishing her afternoon shift, confirms that Janie ‘passed away’ around supper time – at least Bronwen came in with the trolley and found her staring up with her mouth open. It was obviously very quick – she looked ‘astonished’. The son has been and gone, taking what he wanted, which amounted to the dented and faded biscuit tin that was a part of his childhood, along with a few photos and some necessary papers.
The clothes could go to charity, he said. ‘Be incinerated, more like,’ Bronwen snorts, pulling a face, ‘although I didn’t tell him that. I’m back at six tomorrow morning and I’m not even finished. Barely enough for a decent kip, by the time I’m home. Ellen’s sick; I’m standing in. Well, someone has to save the day, don’t they?’ Bronwen always stirs from her sleepy fatness when one of the inmates passes away. This energy usually gives out after a few days, as if the last breaths have entered her slow-moving body to be gradually used up.
Cosmina checks the drawer for the phone in its reused wrapping. Of course, it isn’t there. He has read her note and taken it back.
She is glad she chose to wheel Janie out into the garden to experience the flowers during the poor old sweetie’s last week on this earth. Janie smelt the red roses with closed eyes and a big smile. What could be more special, while life was still yours to enjoy? A vivid yellow-and-black butterfly she knew from home settled for a moment on a blue zambilă, folding its wings. Each wing had a white and a black spot that Cosmina pointed out. Then it flew off. Janie was delighted. ‘That’s my private angel,’ she joked. ‘Look at it go, the bugger.’
‘What’s these flowers, sweetie?’
‘Bluebell, dumbo.’
The dead must grieve for such simple pleasures; she was sure they never miss the expensive pleasures.
She is alone in the nurses’ room; the others are still chatting in the corridor, where the two shifts have exchanged information. Now they are just gossiping, even though it is ten o’clock at night. She understands only half of what they say when it’s gossip or jokes. She tidies her hair in the mirror, smooths her blue nurse’s top and tightens the drawstring of her comfortable trousers, removing from her many pockets any debris from her last shift – balled-up tissues, a folded bunion plaster. The soft hum that the care home always generates (perhaps the giant industrial boiler, or the giant industrial dishwasher, or the giant industrial washing machine down in the basement, now dealing bravely with Janie’s wardrobe) reminds her how life always carries on, skirting past death and actually unstoppable, except that as individuals we fall away from this ineluctable process. She doesn’t know why she’s feeling so philosophical so late in the evening, with her bed wondering where she is.
Her thoughts are interrupted by a faint, angry sound. It is a kind of whispering anger. Sss-sss-sss-sss.
It’s not that little voice again, she realises, because it’s coming from the floor-to-ceiling metal cupboard where they deposit their civilian clothes and shoes and bags. Heart thumping, she opens the cupboard door. It’s her cheap new pay-as-you-go mobile calling for her attention from the depths of her yellow shoulder bag, whose leather still faintly smells of Bucharest, of sharp cigarettes and of the slimy green
water of the Dâmbovit¸a. A silent call. She’s been getting quite a few recently. She’s relieved that it is not bad news from home, where it is now nearly midnight. The ringtone is ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’. She got it for free, following some complicated steps on the Internet. She hates heavy metal, it sounds like a lot of dustbins crashing together with someone screaming as if they are having their arm cut off, but this tune means a lot to her father, who heard it on a smuggled cassette one day in 1986 and thought, That’s the anger we need to change things. It makes her think of her father and warms her heart. It is better than the default ringtone on her iPhone, Marimba. Whenever she hears it, it reminds her of her first days here, when she started in the fields cutting cabbages and broccoli all day with the Poles and Latvians under Ted the gangmaster (who wasn’t so bad, when he wasn’t eyeing her bottom), because Marimba was her alarm. Hearing it even now makes her sweat, heart racing. If she’d slept through it, she would have been sacked, got a bad reputation among the other gangmasters.
Her eyes stray towards Bronwen’s horrible leopard-print handbag, completely plastic. It is bulging, and the zip is not quite closed. She has to close it or something terrible will happen. She gets these thoughts several times a day: that door must be closed, that jam-jar lid screwed on properly, that knife and fork straightened, or else a call will come from home with dreadful news … The zip is sticking, the bag is just so cheap, and as she struggles with it she notices a bulky whiteness inside the bag. Without hesitating, she tugs the zip open the other way and sees what she knew she would see. The box no longer in its gift wrap. Take care of me.
‘Y’all right there then, Cosmina?’
She whips round, startled. Nurse Bronwen’s small eyes in her piggy face, complete with white piggy lashes, are glaring at her. It is past ten o’clock, but she is still in her nurse’s top and trousers, maxi-size, bags under her eyes.
‘Get your dirty bloody foreign mitts out of my bag this moment, if you please.’
Then she yells for Matron down the corridor, as if Cosmina is an inmate herself, who doesn’t let go of the box in a guilty fashion but opens it. She wonders whether Janie’s son gave Bronwen the phone simply because the nurse was present and he was upset at his mother’s sudden death (a huge stroke over her Horlicks, they said), or whether Bronwen took it for herself before the son arrived, like a filthy thief. Cosmina believes it was the second because her letter is still inside. She just has time to check before Esperança arrives, squeezing past Bronwen hovering by the door and practically rolling up her sleeves with a triumphant gleam in her black eyes.
Bronwen claims that she was dead scared that Cosmina might stab her. That’s what they do in Romania. Gypsies. Knives. Dirty thieves. Roma. ‘I would’ve fetched her one, otherwise.’
‘I am not Roma,’ Cosmina snaps, really annoyed with the stupid woman. Fetched her what? A knife? ‘I am Hungarian-Romanian. You should learn some history.’
Of course Esperança calls the police, even though it is ten at night and they’ll have other more urgent problems to deal with; she won’t listen to any explanation. Cosmina places the iPhone box on the table.
When the policeman and the policewoman arrive in their bright yellow jackets, Cosmina tries to explain but she is shaking and her English has collapsed like old Bucharest before she was born (the dust billowed over us for days, her parents would say). Bulldozers. Demolition balls. All she wants is her soft pillow, to float away into sleep.
‘Where are you from, madam? Romania? Let’s have a look at your ID. Righty ho.’
They look in her bag. All in order. The policeman picks up the iPhone box and turns it in his hand then puts it back on the table. Bronwen says nothing, leaves the talking to the matron.
Then something amazing happens: the police have an argument with Esperança, a sullen Bronwen contributing the odd word. Esperança wants Cosmina to be taken to the police station. ‘She’s Romanian.’ The police say that the accused is not in possession of any stolen goods so they can’t take her in; they can’t even give her a caution as it is only one person’s word against another’s. ‘Two people,’ snaps Esperança. Then she is raising her voice and soon she is almost shouting like she shouts at the old folk, and the police tell her to stop getting ‘irated’ or they will start getting ‘peeved’. What a strange country! Esperança’s anger is echoed from some of the rooms, and a nurse also on night shift pops her head round the door, curious.
The police ask to speak to Cosmina in private, outside. The main door swings shut behind them with a clunk. The moonlight is streaming through the trees like a painting in a church.
‘I’m not saying you were stealing anything here,’ the policewoman says, ‘but do think twice before adopting a modus operandi that involves petty theft. That’s my advice.’
‘I was not stealing. I have never stolen anything except once, a stale loaf of bread. It was a hard time. My father couldn’t work for six month after he fall down a … a …’
‘Staircase?’
‘Liftshaft?’ suggests her colleague, chuckling.
Cosmina shakes her head. It is coming. Let it come.
‘Ladder!’ she cries. ‘He fall down a ladder!’
‘Or slid down a snake?’ says the policeman, smiling. In the eerie grey of the moonlight something strange has happened to his bright ginger hair and blue-green eyes. According to her grandfather, such hair and such eyes mean that he will return after death as a vampire.
The policewoman turns to her. ‘Know that game, do you? Snakes and Ladders? Very English.’
‘Ah yes. I think it come from India, really.’
‘Climb a ladder, slide down a snake. More snakes than ladders, in real life …’
Supposing someone kicks the ladder away? Someone powerful, who doesn’t even know you. But say nothing.
When Cosmina goes back into the home to start her shift the matron is still furious at the way the police reacted. ‘Completely ridiculous,’ she spits over her cup of coffee, eyeing Cosmina with real venom. ‘Now get a move on. You’ve wasted half an hour. It’ll be docked off your pay. That is clear, yes? Docked off!’ Bronwen is nowhere in sight. Scuttled off back home, the iPhone safe in her ugly, cheap bag.
‘No problems,’ Cosmina couldn’t help saying. ‘No problems at all.’
At around dawn, towards the end of the shift, as Cosmina is wheeling the trolley full of dry pads and wipes, the plastic bag for the wet ones dangling like a bulging bladder, the Spanish monster comes up to her in the corridor. ‘We have taken our decision. I have talked to the manager. She won’t give you any more shifts. Thanks God! You’ll never get another post like this anywhere in England, understand? No letter of recommendation. The opposite, in fact.’
Cosmina looks at her, straight into those two eyes, black as night is at home. ‘You see, I am so upset, tears are down all my face. You know what? I don’t care. One day they will catch you hitting the old people, and it’s yourself they will arrest and they will send you back to Spain.’
Esperança goes white. ‘Get out of here,’ she hisses, ‘you stupid whore of a Roma bitch! And I am from Portugal!’
The woman smells. It is peculiarly like Bucharest in the heat of summer: old fish and cinnamon, a urine stench from the craters in the pavements, each one filled with litter. Or maybe this is just Cosmina’s own homesick projection.
* * *
The sun is shining. It is still hot. Cosmina, after a fitful sleep in her room, is settled on a bench on the cathedral’s lawn, facing the statue of Tennyson. She likes this statue because Tennyson was a poet and his dog is gazing up at him and he’s holding a ragged flower in his hand, looking at it as if he’s checking his messages. She sits a while, thinking, and then phones Madalina in Grimsby. Is there a job for her in the 2 Sisters Food Group? Snowdrops – the care home – owe her a month’s work but they will never pay it. A month’s hard work for nothing. She doesn’t tell Madalina why she has been sacked; she just says that she’s had
enough of incontinent old folk. She hopes that 2 Sisters Food Group won’t need a letter of recommendation.
Madalina is delighted. There are vacancies going in Five Star Fish in the coldstore, or for fish-packing operatives. There always are. ‘Not in 2 Sisters Food Group?’
‘Five Star Fish are part of 2 Sisters Food Group,’ says Madalina as if everyone ought to know this. ‘Like almost everything to do with processing food in this country. It’s run by Mr Ranjit Singh Boparan. The coldstore is at minus twenty degrees Celsius, but they provide you with thermal clothing.’
‘Aoleu, I don’t think it sounds all that tempting,’ Cosmina sighs, although it is very warm outside on this peaceful bench.
‘What do you expect? That’s how I started. Mr Ranjit Singh Boparan himself started out by cutting up chickens in a butcher’s at the age of sixteen with no qualifications. Now he’s a multi-millionaire with a heap of chicken-cutting sites in the UK and Europe, apart from all the other divisions. Pizzas, biscuits, fish, chilled meals, sandwiches, red meat. You could be part of a really great enterprise.’
‘Madalina, you make it sound like a religion. Mr Singh as the pope. The grand imam.’ She laughs at her own joke.
There is silence at the other end of the phone. It was the cathedral’s great stone walls that made her think of religion.
‘Madalina, I’m sorry, it was a joke.’
There is a click, then silence. Cosmina tries ringing again, but gets cut off twice. She can’t even leave a voice message. Two ambulances wail past on the road the other side of the low brick wall: she has to block her ears.
Madalina sounded different. She sounded as if brainwashed by some cult. Ready to drop her friend for insulting her beliefs.
The policewoman explained, afterwards, what she’d meant about there being more snakes than ladders in life. Cosmina had not agreed.
‘Only if you get yourself into the wrong company,’ the policewoman said.