by Lucy Wood
Tessa looked down at her mother’s wet face. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She supported her mother’s body and started half walking, half floating her forwards. The water took most of her weight. June shut her eyes and gripped Tessa’s arm as each wave buffeted in. They got into deeper water and then stopped. She clung tighter, but tried to lean forwards. A wave hit her and she spluttered and coughed and hacked up salt. Her arms chopped weakly at the surface. Tessa helped her mother move through the water. Her small body felt weightless, untethered, and Tessa clung to it and held her up and didn’t let go.
Blue Moon
I got down on my hands and knees and snatched at Mrs Tivoli, but she darted under the bookcase and cowered there, pressing her quivering haunches against the wall. Her eyes rolled and she let out a yelping scream that cut into the room and sent tight, cold waves running up and down my skin. ‘Come on, Mrs Tivoli. It’s all right. Just relax.’ She pressed in harder and her fur rasped against the plaster. I looked around and saw that the bedroom door was slightly ajar. You could still hear the faint, slow footsteps of her visitor going down the three flights of stairs towards reception. ‘It’s OK,’ I said, trying to be soothing. ‘You just stay right under there, Mrs Tivoli. Right under there. I’m just going to sit here and wait.’ Then I launched myself towards the door and clicked it shut. Just in time, too, because she was already mid-run at it – her long, muscular legs pushing hard against the floor. She stopped, looked wildly around the room then rubbed over her ear with a shuddering hind leg. I leaned back, trying to think about my next move.
There’s a detailed procedure for handling events of this kind but I have to admit that, at the time, it flew right out of my head. The only step I remembered was to seal off all doors and windows. It’s policy for staff to log all transformations, noting events leading up to the change, possible causes, length of time in metamorphosis – the extra admin is a drag but what job isn’t swamped in bureaucracy these days? This was the first time I’d seen Mrs Tivoli change into a hare, though, and the logbook doesn’t have any entries for her. Some of the other residents do it if the kitchen runs out of ketchup or they miss their favourite programme on the telly, but Mrs Tivoli wasn’t like that. She was usually so composed, so self-contained, as if nothing could faze her at all.
Blue Moon Nursing Home opened just over four years ago. It was the first of its kind, set up to cater for the demographic banned from regular establishments. When news of it went round there was a flurry of applications from all over the world. We got enquiries from Fiji, Cuba, and the Ural Mountains. Locals got priority, though; it paid to be in the right catchment area. We were full from the first day, with a waiting list that could have filled it again three times over. It’s a brand-new place with all the mod cons. Research showed that buildings with a history could have a detrimental effect: residents can be sensitive to lingering voices, emotions and events that embed themselves in walls. The fresh paint, MDF and the rubbery smell of new carpets seem to have a calming effect. It’s one of the reasons they want to come here.
As with any new establishment, it took a while for everyone to get settled. At first, the place was chaos – you couldn’t serve tea without someone turning it into blood or oil, and they were always in and out of each other’s rooms stealing wax and recipes. We kept finding them down at the harbour trying to sell the wind to fishermen in lengths of knotted rope. Our vacuum bags filled up with soil, twigs and fingernails. It was a nightmare cleaning out whatever they’d been mixing in their baths; bleach wouldn’t touch it. We’d scrub for hours, the stuff corroding away six pairs of rubber gloves, hearing faint shrieks coming from the smears.
Although most residents came here planning to retire, they didn’t seem to know how. In the first few months the home was full of anxious or bereaved locals wandering around looking for help and burying scraps of old beef in the garden. We had to curb practising hours to Thursday afternoons and patrol the kitchen to stop anyone filching potatoes and salt. There weren’t clear enough regulations about familiars either and none of us knew what to do with them, so they tore around the corridors and fought each other for territory. After that it was keep it in your room or lose it and mostly they stick to the rules.
I’m on reception but I do a bit of everything: cleaning, food prep, general care. Residents hardly ever get ill, which is one of the perks. I lock up after my evening shifts and make sure everything’s secure. It’s a comforting final task, going round re-enabling the smoke alarms and checking the fire escapes. Most of the time the work here is easy – everyone gets into a routine. The salary makes up for the difficult bits: finding dead men’s hands festering at the backs of cupboards; the smell of fox and badger shit lingering in your throat. People at my old place thought I was mad when I applied here but now most of them are kicking themselves that they didn’t do it when they had the chance.
Reception’s usually quiet except for Thursdays, when I book in their appointments, but even that’s slowing down now. Some have their regulars but people tend to forget about them once they’ve been in here a while. Personal visits are rare. I’d say on average most of them are visited about twice a year, usually by a grateful local, an old neighbour or a nervous relative. When somebody gets a visit pencilled into the book you can feel the jealousy oozing under the doors and soaking into the carpets.
Mrs Tivoli moved into 3B just over a year ago with her catfish, Maria. She insists on being called ‘Mrs’ even though there’s no evidence of a husband and she never talks about one. Still, all the residents have their quirks. I’m inclined to believe it’s because it made her feel less lonely; we’ve all got to deal with it one way or another, but who knows? It’s not our job to go asking questions. Her eyes skip between dark brown, green and grey. She’s short, shorter than me even and I’m no willow. Her silver earrings are longer than her hair, which is thick and bobbed and a deep chestnut colour. She looks about thirty-eight but I’d swear to all sorts of gods that she was at least seventy. Applicants have to state their age before they come to Blue Moon but I’ve always said it’s a waste of time – they don’t have a clue so they just guess. None of them have any official documents. They just keep themselves in as good shape as their powers allow. The girls in the kitchen joke that it’s all right for the residents, they can fix themselves up without touching dye or surgery. Yet, despite what they look like, their bodies and minds are giving in to most of the usual symptoms of old age. At first it’s unnerving, seeing healthy-looking people lowering themselves gingerly into chairs, clutching at banisters and forgetting words and faces, but you get used to it. Mrs Tivoli had a nasty fall which broke her hip just before she moved in and now her legs are trembly and uncertain; she walks with a stick and drops off in her chair after lunch with her head nodding into her cleavage.
She seemed to take some sort of a shine to me right from the start. We do the crossword together during my tea breaks and sometimes she lets me scatter Maria’s colourful food pellets into the water. If I get a bout of thrush she clears it up for me no problem. The staff handbook advises not to get close to residents. It says that they can easily use you, manipulate you, but most of us think that’s a load of rubbish – half of them don’t even know where they are. Mrs Tivoli barely leaves her room. She still has her old things scattered round – a hand mirror made of thick, black glass, a string of wrinkled conkers, lumps of clay going dry at the edges – but they’re slowly getting covered over with other things: marzipan wrappers, glossy magazines, TV remotes and biscuit tins.
A couple of months back, I was tidying her bedroom while she was down at breakfast when I noticed one of the drawers under her wardrobe was open. We don’t go in residents’ cupboards, we only tidy what’s out, but I thought that I might as well straighten up inside just this once. I suppose I didn’t want to go back down to the desk and the silent telephone, my pad of acrostics. I looked around. Maria was staring right at me from her tank. She’s an odd-looking thing: she doesn’t hav
e scales, just this thick skin covered in mucus. I didn’t even know there were fish without scales. Now that she’s getting older, her whiskers droop against the pebbles and her skin is flaking off in soft scabs that rise to the surface of the tank. Mrs Tivoli scoops them out with a tea strainer and keeps them in a jam jar.
‘I’m just dusting,’ I said to her. ‘Nothing to fret about.’ I opened the drawer out a bit further and Maria thrashed her tail like a mop. Inside, there were rows of bottles bedded down in newspaper: cleaned-out milk bottles, those HP sauce bottles with the slim necks, and small gold-capped ones from baking ingredients like vanilla essence and food colouring. They had white labels stuck to them. I flicked the duster around even though there didn’t seem to be a speck of anything in there. Lots of the labels had dates on them; others said things like ‘St Michael’s graveyard’, ‘R. Tavey’, ‘Withheld information’, ‘Mother’. I’ve picked up plenty of bits and bobs since working here; I could name most of the things that Mrs Tivoli keeps in jars on her shelves – arrowroot, yarrow, mandrake, curled mint – but I didn’t have a clue what was in these. The stuff inside looked grey and feathery, like ash from a bonfire but heavier somehow and more liquid. I glanced back at Maria. She was watching me very carefully. I shut the drawer.
I went back to 3B during my afternoon break. Mrs Tivoli was watching the home-shopping channel. ‘Fifty pounds for that piece of junk?’ she said. ‘That’s robbery, daylight robbery.’ I remember thinking that she’d been looking tired for the past few days; she wasn’t eating very much and I’d caught sight of one or two crinkled grey hairs along her centre parting. ‘Look at this.’ She gestured at the screen. A bronzed man was holding up a plastic mixer. ‘Do you know how much he’s selling that for?’
I shook my head.
‘Twice as much as it’s worth! And some chump will phone in for it, mark my words.’
I settled down in my usual chair and unfolded the paper. ‘One across,’ I read out. ‘Eight letters. Extremely hungry.’
Mrs Tivoli glanced at me. ‘Maria says that you cleaned one of my drawers this morning.’ Maria pressed her suckered mouth up to the tank in a fat, brown kiss.
Snitch, I thought. Out loud I said ‘starving’ and wrote it in, although later it turned out to be ‘ravenous’. ‘It was open. I gave it a quick dust.’
She nodded, still watching the screen. ‘How’s your finger?’ she asked.
I’d got a nasty burn off the toaster that morning before work. ‘It’s nothing,’ I told her.
She pointed to a vase of swan’s feathers on the windowsill and I picked one out and brushed it three times against the burn.
‘I was going to show them to you anyway,’ she said, carrying on from before. There was loud clapping from the television and the name of the caller who had bought the mixer flashed up. Mrs Tivoli pursed her mouth and switched it off with the remote, then put her hands flat on the chair and lifted herself up slowly. I knew by now not to ask if she wanted any help. She went over to the drawer and rummaged around carefully. The bottles clacked together like tongues tutting. She mumbled to herself as she did it: ‘not that one, not that one, too much, too strong, not enough time.’ She picked one out, came back over with it and handed it to me. It was a medium-sized vinegar bottle and it was strangely warm. It might even have been pulsing but it was probably just my own hands because I was suddenly nervous. The label said ‘Rita Adams’. ‘Open it,’ she said to me. My hands lingered on the cap. ‘You know that it’s against the rules for me to take part in your work, Mrs Tivoli.’
She sighed and rubbed a hand over her painful hip. ‘You’re not taking part in anything,’ she said. ‘You just have to watch.’ Her bracelets rattled. ‘But if you’re uncomfortable maybe you should go back downstairs.’
I unscrewed the lid. The air in the bedroom seemed to contract and move, as if a huge line of washing had billowed out and then been snapped backwards by the wind. Mrs Tivoli muttered something and the bottle got warmer. I waited. Nothing else happened except I noticed a strange smell that I could have sworn wasn’t there before. It was a damp, earthy smell, like a pile of wet leaves or a very old jumper. It could have been overripe fruit but there was a bitterness to it that I couldn’t place at all. The bottle cooled down in my hands and another woman appeared in the room. She was hazy. Her body looked watery and brown, as if she had been cut out of a sepia photograph. She was tracing the bobbles and dents in the wall with her index finger and had a vacant smile on her face. The woman, Rita I supposed, looked like she had been beautiful once, but now she was lopsided and awry. She wandered round the room with unfocused eyes and her head tipped to one side. She tripped over my chair and laughed soundlessly as she clawed the hair out of her eyes.
After a few minutes Mrs Tivoli muttered something else and the woman vanished. I closed the lid and took a deep breath. If Mrs Tivoli was summoning ghosts into the establishment I’d have to take it further.
‘Rita’s not dead yet,’ she said, leaning her head back on the chair.
The staff handbook advises us to close any conversations that could lead into uncertain territory. ‘What was that then?’ I asked.
‘I used to know her,’ Mrs Tivoli said. ‘She lived near me. Everyone who saw her fell in love with her. One of my customers suspected her husband was having an affair with Rita and she asked for my help. I was in a rush. I had hundreds of things to do and I didn’t do the work properly. It got messed up. She wasn’t meant to turn out how she did.’ She shrugged. ‘Still, c’est la vie. We didn’t like each other anyway.’ She was breathing a little more heavily than usual and she kept smoothing her dark eyebrows over and over. I had no idea what she was talking about but I smiled and nodded at her reassuringly. I didn’t want her getting upset. She frowned. ‘Everyone has things that follow them around,’ she said sharply. ‘Mistakes, regrets, things they wish they’d done or hadn’t done. It’s far easier to put them somewhere you can keep track of them, stop them sneaking up on you. Don’t you think?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, thinking suddenly that mine didn’t so much sneak up on me as linger around chest level.
Mrs Tivoli reached over to her wheel-in table and picked up a box of marzipan fruits. Her fingers hovered over it like a pair of moths while she chose which one she wanted. She’s addicted to sugar but her teeth are perfect. She offered the box to me but I shook my head. It was past my break by then anyway and I didn’t want to get into trouble with the duty manager.
That afternoon seemed to start something. Over the next few weeks, whenever I paid Mrs Tivoli a call, she would have picked out one of the bottles to show me. It would be there on the table, waiting. If she expected me at any point and I’d had to work over my shift because of some crisis or other, she would call reception on the internal line. ‘I was just wondering whether it was time for your break?’ she’d ask casually.
‘Gloria has gone AWOL again,’ I’d tell her. ‘It’s all hands on deck.’
‘She’s locked in the supply cupboard in the basement,’ she would say. ‘She was looking for arsenic.’ So then I’d be free to go up and see her.
I saw planes without Mrs Tivoli on board take off through the bedroom ceiling. I saw her give away one of her most treasured possessions (an extremely rare strain of seaweed from the Dead Sea) to someone who didn’t appreciate it. I watched her dig up a shallow grave at a set of crossroads to steal a silver bracelet, the reek of the grave slamming right into the room. ‘Never rob the dead,’ she said to me, shaking her head at the image of her younger self wielding a huge spade. ‘It’s a tricky business and never as useful as you’d think.’ I saw short, awkward meetings with her distant mother. I saw her pour away a bowl of gold liquid straight into her garden, turning the grass and the trees black and steaming. At one point she opened an old milk bottle and a black and white film flickered across the wall. Apparently she’d only ever watched the first half of Citizen Kane even though everyone said it was the best film ever made. ‘Ma
ria hated it,’ she told me. ‘She said that it was just a bunch of men slapping each other on the back.’
I gradually realised that the smaller the bottle was, the stronger, more potent the feeling trapped inside. Mrs Tivoli was keeping mainly to the bigger ones, though, and leaving out all those small bottles I’d seen in the drawer. I was glad about it, relieved even. The smallest one she had ventured to show me so far wore us both out in a second. We watched as she placed her hands over a young girl’s stomach, while the girl squeezed her eyes tight shut. I shuddered into my armchair and Mrs Tivoli looked so exhausted I was tempted to call in the nurse.
After that one it was back to medium bottles but I knew from the glimpse of them I’d had that they must be running out. I couldn’t get that young girl’s face out of my mind and had almost decided to ask Mrs Tivoli to stop when I walked in a few days later and saw a tiny nail-varnish bottle on the table. The lid was scarlet and the label was blank. Mrs Tivoli and Maria had their eyes fixed on it. Neither of them looked up at me. I didn’t sit down. ‘I can’t stay,’ I said, stopping in the doorway. ‘There’s a thing I have to do downstairs.’
Mrs Tivoli kept her eyes on the bottle. ‘Please,’ she said. When she unscrewed the cap the smell was instant and overwhelming. It was so strong that you could almost see it draping itself over the room like a dust sheet. I’ve gone over and over it since and the only way I can describe it is this: if homesickness had a smell then it would be that one. My eyes burned with it.
A man appeared in the room. This time, the image was so defined that I could see colours and contours. There was nothing flat or hazy about him. I could see every stitch on his green jumper. He looked like he was in his late thirties and he had dark brown hair that was sticking out in messy peaks at the back. There was something on his cheek that I couldn’t quite make out at first; it could have been a cut or a shadow. The man stared at Mrs Tivoli for a few moments then smiled sadly and went towards the door. He looked back once, fumbled with the handle and then walked through it. The whole thing played out so quickly that I nearly missed it. After he had gone, Mrs Tivoli didn’t move an inch. I leaned forwards to close the bottle for her but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. The image appeared again. We watched him walk out of the door three times before Mrs Tivoli dragged her hand up and closed the lid.