To her dismay the next morning, in what staff referred to smirkingly as the “restaurant,” seating was assigned, and she and Cyril were separated at distant tables. She only managed to crane her neck and lock eyes with him once. Rather than glint with the steely, biding-his-time subterfuge she expected, his harrowed expression evoked a circuit board struck by lightning; why, she’d not have been surprised to see a wisp of acrid smoke rise from his head. He looked fried.
The glutinous porridge arrived so cold that, overturned, the oats would have stuck to the bowl. Her appetite wasn’t improved by a stuporous lady opposite, who was smearing porridge into her mouth with three fingers as if plastering a crack in a wall. When Kay couldn’t stomach even sampling the muck, a staff member gave his tablet a disapproving poke as he removed her bowl.
During the morning’s desolate solitary, or “quiet time,” looking forward to lunch proved a mistake. The undercooked boiled potato and overcooked grey meat were physically inedible, given that the “self-harm” regime allowed her only a blunt plastic spoon. The lime jelly was made with too much gelatine and almost as hard. How many meals could you refuse here before they stuck a tube down your throat like gavage?
Slipping her an indelible Sharpie, a kindly staffer warned as she left the “restaurant” that she’d better clearly label all her clothing or it would be swallowed forever in the bowels of the Close of Day laundry. Thus during the “rest period” after lunch—though from what exertions the residents might need to recover was opaque—Kay wrote “KW 114” on the tags of her tops, trousers, and frocks, as well as on the waistband of her knickers and the rim of each sock. The exercise was tedious; the Sharpie was running dry.
Perhaps she’d soon be grateful for a task of any sort. For Kay had made inquiries: there was no library and no gym. Residents were not allowed outdoors. The sole entertainment was the television in the communal day room, open only afternoons—where she prayed she might at least spend time with Cyril.
The large, dishevelled day room put Kay in mind of the ad hoc shelters organized earlier that year for British flood victims. Its few books were all for children: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, The Smurf’s Apprentice, Mr. Grumpy. Broken-down sofas were lumpy with dog-smelling coverlets. As she scanned the room in vain for Cyril, the cacophony resembled the competing monologues of a modern-day train carriage, except that none of these people had mobile phones. “Her rose was a climber, right overgrown,” one biddy narrated to no one in particular, “and well over the fence. I’d every right to lop it off. But the daft woman rung the council! Took on airs, that Stacy did . . .” Another resident’s tuneless rendition of “Yellow Submarine” failed to overcome the TV’s blaring rerun of Come Dine with Me. Kay finally spotted a staff member whose pocket sagged with the remote.
“Sorry,” Kay said. “Might we watch something else? Say, BBC News 24?”
The gaunt young woman had the complexion of someone who actually ate this outfit’s food. “Then we’d not find out if the chicken and Parma ham beat the Nigerian pepper soup, now would we, poppet?”
“I don’t sense our friends here are terribly involved in the programme.”
“Weekdays it’s back-to-back Come Dine with Me,” the staffer declared flatly. “I’m more partial to Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares at the weekend, but that’s just me.”
“Those are the only two programmes ever allowed on this television?”
“You’re a quick study,” the woman said deadpan. “This way, there’s no fighting. Everybody love cooking shows.”
“I don’t,” Kay said, but abandoned her petition on spotting Cyril, who’d a contusion on his forehead and his wrists zip-tied in front. His large male minders pushed him to a sofa and menaced from a step back.
“What happened?” she asked, kneeling. “How did you hit your head?”
“I lost control.” His monotone implied less having regained control as having exhausted his lack of it. “I became violent. I had to be restrained.”
“That’s not like you.”
“It turns out to be very much like me. We’ve never before been thrown in the Black Hole of Calcutta by our own children. In novel circumstances we find out new things about ourselves. Apparently, in the likes of Close of Day Cottages, I become resplendently violent. Why not? What can they do to me that’s worse than this? Purgatory is liberating.”
“If we’ve learnt anything in our practice of medicine,” Kay whispered, “it’s that there may be a limit to how healthy and happy a person can get, but there’s no limit to suffering. So they can always make our lives worse. ECT?”
“I’ve already been threatened with solitary confinement.” Cyril nodded at the codger still looping repeatedly through “Yellow Submarine.” “Which might be a mercy.”
“What’d I tell you?” the Keeper of the Remote exclaimed. “Chicken and Parma ham. No way them twee wallies in Somerset was going for Nigerian pepper soup.”
“If you’re put in solitary, we won’t see each other at all, and I couldn’t bear that,” Kay said. “What are we going to do? It’s only been a day. I’d rather be dead.”
“You had your chance,” Cyril said.
One of the beefeaters who’d dragged Cyril to the day room had been idly reading an Evening Standard, which he put down to check his phone. Cyril’s bound hands snatched the newspaper to his lap, like a lizard eating a fly. As he struggled to conceal the paper under his gown, a hand clasped his shoulder from behind.
“How’s our newbie doing, treasure? A little bird told me my pal Cyrus is having a wee bit of trouble adjusting to his new home.” Dr Mimi grabbed the Evening Standard, which Cyril held onto until it tore. “Newspapers are contraband. All those terrifying stories about the coronavirus are just the sort of news our stakeholders find distressing.”
“I promise not to share what’s happening in Italy,” Cyril said.
“I’m afraid I came over to break up the party. According to our records, you two may be a bad influence on each other. Goodness gracious me, your AMHP describes you as having formed a ‘death cult.’ Let’s get up and circulate! It’s best for our mental health that we make new friends.”
Hence the spouses were kept apart again, and only filing out for dinner was Kay able to sidle beside her husband. “What sparkling fare might be on the menu tonight?” she muttered.
“Wild mushroom fajitas,” Cyril supposed. “With a side salad of buffalo mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, a sprig of fresh basil, and a balsamic glaze.”
* * *
All too predictably, after breakfast the next day they were both handed paper cups of a dozen anonymous tablets. When Kay tried to slide the medication into a lower cheek, the nurse shouted, “Pocketing!” Another staffer held her mouth open as the nurse fished out the tablets and forced her to swallow the lot. The pills made her groggy and vague. It would be easy to fall into the habit of most residents: sleeping fifteen hours a day.
Despite the arduous Sharpie exercise, the first time Kay got her laundry back not a single item was recognizable. In trade for her becoming peach blouse with a cowl neck, the neat cream knit top trimmed with tiny black buttons, and form-fitting emerald trousers from Selfridges, she was bequeathed: a vast floral house dress, black polyester sweatpants with an exhausted waistband, and a loud men’s shirt covered in golf clubs. Thereafter, she spotted a squat gentleman in his nineties wearing her cream knit top all twisted out of shape, with three of the tiny black buttons missing. Mindful of her appearance but no fashionista, Kay was surprised how personally obliterating it was to be deprived of your own clothes.
As Cyril had no better luck, before long they were both slobbing about in other people’s clashing plaids and stained hoodies. Allowed to see the barber only once a fortnight, her husband could often have fit right in with the Romanian beggars sleeping rough around Marble Arch.
After that first load, Kay knew better than to abdicate to the voracious commercial laundry her birds of paradise kimono from Kyoto or the
beloved dressing gown in black and crimson satin that Cyril had found on eBay—in which she would often swaddle herself luxuriously during long lonely evenings as a reminder of her husband. Well, so much for that. Both garments disappeared. She didn’t have a key to her room, but plenty of the staff did. Any complaint about having spotted a certain portly nurse flouncing campily down the corridor in her satin dressing gown was bound to be unavailing.
Their first big group activity was an egg hunt on Easter Sunday. As still more Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares yammered overhead, residents were corralled in the day room for a stimulating exercise of intuition, problem solving, and spatial awareness. The objects of their “hunt,” solidly coloured Styrofoam ovoids big as rugby balls, were hidden in plain view. They littered the carpet. They sat on the sofas. Curious, Kay lifted a cushion or two, but even concealing the odd giant egg under a pillow was considered too challenging. Nevertheless, the group was divided into teams, and their fellow inmates scurried round piling bright elliptical desiderata into plastic baskets with an impressive simulacrum of excitement.
“Now, princess,” Dr Mimi chided, pointing to Kay’s empty basket. “Let’s see some team spirit!”
“Blimey,” Kay said, staring at the red oval at her feet. “I’m stumped.”
At last displaying a trace of subversive gumption, the residents started throwing the footballs at one another and bouncing them off the walls, until Dr Mimi exiled the delinquents to their quarters in disgust.
Weekly “exercise” sessions were equally demanding. Residents gathered in a semi-circle as a visiting gym instructor led them through a series of seated calisthenics: waving your hands urgently in the air, as if your car had broken down on one of those lethal new “smart motorways” with no hard shoulder. Stamping the floor, with its apt suggestion of a tantrum. Circling hands above the lap to execute what the instructor called “the muff.” Jutting a leg out and rotating the foot, although this one was only for the “advanced.” As a climax, the slow-mo Mr Motivator led them in a virtually stationary hokey cokey, though the turning-yourself-about bit for the wheelchair-bound tended to be fraught.
Cyril participated to the barest degree that would spare him punitive measures (cold showers, wheelchair confinement, sleep in restraints . . . ). In the fitness sessions, he’d flap a hand two or three times like the final throes of a dying partridge. During group sing-alongs, he opened and closed his mouth in silence, with no one the wiser that he had once been the lead tenor in his men’s choir. When in Arts and Crafts they fashioned landscapes out of corn kernels, kidney beans, red lentils, and mustard seeds, Cyril piled up a succotash that was mostly paste.
For her sanity, Kay took a different route. On May Day, she helped the more impaired to weave a May pole that was competent and attractive. On Father’s Day, she assisted several residents with Alzheimer’s in constructing cards with heartfelt messages, whilst keeping it to herself that the dads whom the tributes addressed were long dead. If Cyril opted for minimal compliance, Kay’s strategy was overkill compliance. Her calisthenics were so wild and pacey that she got winded. She found she enjoyed singing—she’d always been self-conscious about the reediness of her voice in comparison to her husband’s—and belted out “Baa-Baa Black Sheep,” “If You’re Happy and You Know it, Clap Your Hands,” and “The Alphabet Song” with gusto. Kay’s bean-and-seed landscape was meticulous, with more than a suggestion of Monet.
Socially, Cyril remained aloof, but Kay latched gratefully onto one inmate, Marcus Dimbleby, who was only seventy-seven and had his wits about him. The childless former estate agent had sold his home after being T-boned on the pavement by a mobility scooter, and his injuries made independent living difficult. But the posh care home called Journey’s End he’d found outside of Aldeburgh was so expensive that it soon consumed his equity. Thrown on the mercy of the council, he’d been demoted here. She could listen for hours as Marcus detailed the fare at his Aldeburgh Club Med: freshly fried chips, steak and ale pie with button mushrooms, and proper green vegetables.
Kay took a still savvier approach to the underpaid staff, who hated their jobs. True, the worst of the carers took out their frustrations on the residents, but the employees weren’t all bad apples, and befriending the young man who’d first slipped her that Sharpie proved a godsend. Leon risked sacking by loaning her his phone, if only for the thirty seconds it took to send Simon a cryptic SOS. The orderly also provided her with sachets of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and vinegar that he pilfered from McDonald’s, thus rendering their rations, if not palatable, at least disguised. Most crucially, Leon became her dealer for the cocaine of Close of Day Cottages: salt.
Yet even sodium chloride couldn’t maintain their spirits. A single prospect kept the Wilkinsons alive in more than body. Escape.
* * *
When exactly the COVID care-home quarantine was finally lifted was unclear; the “shielding” regulations could have been relaxed for months by the time they were notified of their first visitor. Cyril was so incandescent over the children’s betrayal that only his wife’s beseeching persuaded him to meet their son. Even so, after Kay embraced their eldest in the day room, Cyril’s mere handshake was stiff and withholding. Simon must have been mortified to see his once-stylish mother drowning in some stranger’s shapeless paisley shift and his father’s wide-boy shirt blazing with palm trees and parrots. Cyril hadn’t had a shave in ten days. They both looked as if they belonged here.
“Can’t someone shut up Gordon Ramsey?” Simon implored. Scanning the day room’s petting zoo in a panic, he perched on the very edge of a folding chair. He might no longer have feared contamination by the virus, but he didn’t want to catch the despair.
“So when are you springing us from this joint?” Cyril charged, skipping any prefatory niceties. “You kids have put your parents in hell—I’d say ‘living hell,’ but there’s nothing living about it. What exactly did we do to you to deserve this? Give you life? Feed you, clothe you, care for you when you were sick, support you through university, and mind your children? Tell me, where did we go wrong?”
“I’m sorry if you’re having a rough time,” Simon said. “The online reviews of this place are pretty positive. Four and a half stars.”
“But who would write those reviews?” Cyril pointed out. “We’re not allowed access to the internet. The outside world, we’re told, is too ‘upsetting.’ You’re usually cannier than that, son. Because I’ll tell you who writes those glowing reviews: the director. Who cuts so many corners that this building must look like a geodesic dome. Your parents are surviving on salad-cream sandwiches.”
“Honey, we know this was more your sister’s idea than yours,” Kay said. For now, Simon was their only lifeline, and a barrage of hostility would not help their cause. “So never mind how we got here. The question is how we get out.”
“The problem isn’t Hayley,” Simon said. “It’s Roy. I thought at first it was a good sign that he wanted to take some responsibility for once, and I’m so busy . . . But now that he’s legally your ‘nearest relative,’ it’s a bastard to dislodge him from the position. And he’s, um. Shifted into the house in Lambeth. I think he likes it there.”
“Who gave that boy permission to live in our house?” Cyril asked in indignation.
“He doesn’t need permission,” Simon said miserably. “With power of attorney, he can do what he likes. He’s managed to keep up to date on your mortgage by tapping your pension payments, and last I heard he was planning to refinance again. Meanwhile, he’s been, ah, ‘decluttering.’ It seems to be fashionable.”
“Decluttering what?” Kay asked. “I didn’t decorate that house with any clutter!”
“I mean he’s selling stuff off. Like those two end tables in the sitting room. He claims they didn’t match.”
“They’re not supposed to match,” Kay said, having trouble controlling her own temper, which was rare.
“The point is,” Simon said, “there may be some protr
acted process by which Roy could be removed as your guardian, but I’d have to do some research, and probably hire a lawyer—which given present economic circumstances would be a stretch—and Roy would oppose it tooth and nail. There’s no guarantee we’d prevail. So for now, you’re going to have to sit tight. I can urge Hayley to visit, and maybe Uncle Percy, though I think I’ll hold off on rallying my kids. If you don’t mind. See . . . All this babbling and chaos . . . Geoff especially is fragile, and this place would mess with their heads.”
Time was short, and during what remained of the hour they pressed their elder son for news of the larger world. One revelation of this Brigadoon was how integrally those big social stories that Kay had been so ambivalent about “returning to the library” on her eightieth interwove with their small personal ones. Having lived through the Second World War, the foundation of the British welfare state, all those assassinations in America, the miners’ strikes, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the IRA bombing of Canary Wharf, the near collapse of the international financial system in 2008, their entire country being put under general anaesthesia during the hysteria over COVID-19 . . . Well, the totality of these events was part of who they were, and having observed, commented upon, and sometimes borne the brunt of this series of upheavals was for both spouses a vital aspect of being alive. So Dr Mimi having sealed them in a news vacuum like boil-in-a-bag vegetables induced a more clawing sense of starvation than salad-cream sandwiches ever did.
“I have to say,” Simon said as they parted; the nurse who’d pilfered Kay’s dressing gown was pointing sternly at her watch. “This place is way more depressing than I expected. I pictured you two, like, playing bingo—”
“Why would we have any interest in bingo merely because we’re old?” Cyril said.
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