“No, I mean, maybe meeting with book groups and going to guest lectures and, I don’t know, even going to wine tastings—”
Kay guffawed.
“But I won’t lie to you. I can’t promise I can get you out of here. I was surprised how easy it was to get you sectioned, and I only went along with it because I assumed it would be temporary. You’d get some therapy, come round to the view that you both still have plenty to live for, and then come home. I didn’t realize it was only easy in one direction. Once the state sinks its claws into you—not to mention Roy—it’s a bitch and a half to prise them out.”
Simon’s purported helplessness was disappointing, for it now looked as if no one would rescue them from the outside. But then, amongst Cyril’s favourite films wasn’t only the tragically messianic Cool Hand Luke, but The Shawshank Redemption.
Triumphing over distaste, Kay steadily ingratiated herself with Dr Mimi. Breaking the director down was tricky, because the woman was ensconced in multiple layers of phony sweetness, like a sugar-free jawbreaker. So Kay started with the obvious, admiring the garish designer suits and gaudy jewellery. She remarked in concern, “Are you eating all right? You look like you’ve lost weight.” At Halloween, she feigned enthusiasm for the pumpkin carving contest, and never complained about having to sculpt her own entry with a plastic spoon. She commiserated over how wearing it must have been to lavish so much compassion on a population that rarely even said thank you. She bemoaned the fact that Dr Mimi was still so young and vibrant, and here she was exhausting her youth amongst the aged and infirm. She made collusive comments about a rebellious new admission who refused to participate in group activities but who would soon learn who was boss. After suggesting a print (something slashing and pretentious from Abstract Expressionism) and choice of rug (something shaggy with bits hanging off that feigned to be fabric art), Kay became her advisor on the redecoration of Dr Mimi’s office.
The lubrication of obsequiousness soon loosened the administrator’s tongue.
“It seems we’re to be invaded Sunday week by a band of Smurfs, of all things!” Dr Mimi said, as Kay measured her window for blinds on the cusp of spring. “Some silly Belgian comic book has triggered a rage for fancy dress, and some of these groups have taken pledges for charity. I’m told all they’ll do is leap about the corridors flinging sweets. I’d refuse permission, except they’ll also make a substantial financial contribution to Close of Day Cottages. I don’t mind telling you: I’ve often to reach into my own pocket to make ends meet, and a refund is more than overdue.”
“That’s frightfully generous of you to put up with such antics for our sake,” Kay said. “In your place, heavens, my patience and good will would run clean out.”
* * *
With the aid of The Smurf’s Apprentice in the day room, Kay had her template. During Arts and Crafts, she pocketed pots of red and blue poster paint, as well as a packet of black pipe cleaners for the outsize glasses. She nicked cotton wool from a medical trolley; from housekeeping, she filched a yellow mop head. The foreign laundry circulating through their chambers netted two blue shirts, one pair of red men’s trousers, and a pair of white leggings. For the hats with distinctive bloops at the tips, she swiped a couple of watch caps from the staff coat cupboard and bound a ball of socks in each crown. She drilled Cyril in advance that if they were caught, they were only participating in group activities, like good senior citizens.
The day the Smurfs descended, residents were allowed from their private suites to gawp along the corridors. As the costumed troupe exuberated down the hall singing, the youngsters tossed boiled sweets on either side, for which fitter residents happily scrambled. Face and hands painted blue, mouth smeared red, head draped with the yellow mop head and topped with the watch cap and its dangling sock bloop, Kay slipped into the visitors’ manic parade wearing the white leggings and blue top. The hardest part at eighty with toe arthritis was to spring along the corridor in a convincing imitation of still being twenty-two. But the “la-la-la!” lyrics were easy enough to master, and she’d been practising her intonation in sing-alongs.
Once Kay threaded out with the rest of the troupe into the sunshine, the challenge was not to cry. But there wasn’t time for exhilaration. When she spotted Cyril in his sagging white beard and ill-fitting red pants, it was obvious that their ad hoc getups wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny in broad daylight. Besides, the young people piling garrulously into a coach all knew one another. And throwing themselves on the mercy of the revellers would be too risky. These innocents knew nothing of Close of Day Cottages; assuming the old dears had lost their wits, the Good Samaritans would turn them in. Shooting a bitter glance at the institution whose exterior she hadn’t laid eyes on since they arrived, Kay grabbed her husband and pulled him behind a skip. The coach drove off.
They had no idea where they were. But by five p.m. they’d be missed at dinner, so time was short. Battling to the other side of a hedge, they struck across a patch of scrubland towards the drone of traffic. They scuttled up a hillock, to discover the very epitome of Western liberty: the motorway. But Kay’s heart sank. With no services in sight, it was a smart motorway, whose hard shoulder, once a refuge, was an active lane. That made pulling over for hitchhikers the kiss of death, and that was assuming anyone would stop for an elderly couple painted blue.
“We have to get out of this vicinity double quick!” Cyril said, trying to catch his breath. Seated hokey cokey hadn’t improved his stamina. “Or they’ll send out the goons and haul us right back! After all, we hardly look inconspicuous.”
“And how would you feel about being trapped there again?” Kay shouted over the rush of traffic, looking into his eyes.
“I think you know.”
She kissed him deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and withdrew from his lips at last with the same reluctance she remembered from those days as well, when they had to get back to their medical studies. That kiss sent a tingling shimmer through the entirety of their lives together, as if their marriage were a crash cymbal whose rim she’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.
When they glanced behind at the scrubland, a posse of Close of Day Cottages staff was advancing fast.
Kay hollered as an articulated lorry boomed past, “Remember Thelma and Louise?”
It was awkward, what with Cyril’s stenosis, but she kept Cyril from stumbling as she helped her husband over the barrier. Hand in hand, they rushed into the loving arms of the archetypal White Van Man.
8
Even More Fun with Dr Mimi
Shooting a bitter glance at the institution whose exterior she hadn’t laid eyes on since they arrived, Kay grabbed her husband and pulled him behind a skip. The coach drove off.
They had no idea where they were. But by five p.m. they’d be missed at dinner, so time was short. As they battled through a thick hedge, Kay’s mop-head wig snagged. Cyril’s cotton-wool beard also snarled on the thorny bracken. By the time they extricated themselves, the door to the car park had opened. Spring hadn’t quite sprung, and the budding hedge provided slight cover. They did escape beyond the property line of Close of Day Cottages, all right—about three feet.
Yet three feet was sufficient to establish that the Wilkinsons had not been impishly participating in a group activity. Thereafter, all Kay’s sucking up to the director only heightened Dr Mimi’s sense of betrayal—and she despised “Cyrus” already, if only because he insisted on calling her “Mrs Mewshaw.” Her retribution would test Kay’s theory that “there may be a limit to how healthy and happy a person can get, but there’s no limit to suffering.”
They were both consigned to lockdown, brought meals in their rooms. Out of some peculiar aesthetic sadism, the fare they were fed resembled the food one consumed in preparation for a colonoscopy: it was all white. Potatoes, rice, cream crackers, dry chicken breast, blancmange, all without adornment; even the fish fingers had the breading scraped off. They were given access to a shower only once
a fortnight, and it was surely thanks to Dr Mimi that they were allowed to run out of loo roll for weeks on end. That summer, during a heat wave, the radiators in their quarters mysteriously warmed and clanked; that winter, the air conditioning kept coming on. If group activities were their own torture, banishment from group activities was even worse. Outside visitors were forbidden.
In protracted isolation, most people go insane. Kay held up longer than most. For months she kept up a routine of pacing, jogging in place, circling her arms, standing on one leg, and doing somewhat enfeebled star jumps. She recited Gerard Manley Hopkins. She sang what verses she could recall of Lonnie Donegan’s “I Wanna Go Home,” the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” and Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” She repeated the theme song of Come Dine with Me: “do-do do-do DOO! Do. Do.” She even belted out “Baa-Baa Black Sheep,” “If You’re Happy and You Know it, Clap Your Hands,” and “The Alphabet Song” with gusto.
But over time, she began to talk to herself, and the ceaseless monologue soon grew as disjointed and associative as the chronic mutterings in the day room. Her rose was a climber, right overgrown, she’d repeat word-for-word, and well over the fence. I’d every right to lop it off. But the daft woman rang the council! Took on airs, that Stacy did . . . Or she’d murmur urgently, Mummy is jealous of Adelaide, so she has to be assured that there’s nothing between Daddy and this poorly wisp of a girl, who’s not long for this world anyway . . . Her head swam with a grab bag of miscellany, like those big snarled bins in charity shops whose every item cost a quid. Suddenly that poofy green sofa in Rotherhithe would float across her consciousness like a cumulous cloud, and she would remember with a sly secretive grin what she and her husband had got up to on those pillows in the early days of their marriage. A funny little soap-dish box would loom in her mind pulsing with outsize powers, and the fact that for some reason the black box was always cold made it seem all the more excitingly sinister.
Without the aid of a computer or even his confiscated felt-tip and spiral notebook, Cyril was more successful in clinging to his own sanity by composing his memoirs, either Fit for Purpose or Duty of Care (he’d all too much time to decide on a title). He committed the text to heart as he wrote it, and ritually began each day by reciting his most recent chapter from the beginning. Reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451, in which memorists become walking banned books, the demanding exercise argued for concision. Thus to his own surprise he elided altogether the once-consuming debate over the EU—the better to skip to all the ways in which that bumbling, bovine Boorish Johnson had mishandled COVID-19.
Their solitary confinement was finally lifted three years later. The first time Cyril laid eyes on his wife again, she was slack and cadaverously thin, like a marionette slung on a hook. Her skin had turned the colour of their colonoscopy-prep diet, and she kept mumbling the plot of Lawrence of Arabia. When she said politely on their first afternoon in the day room, “You seem like a very nice gentleman,” his heart fell.
At last allowed to visit, Simon explained that he, his siblings, Uncle Percy, and their grandchildren had been repeatedly turned away, because the care home’s director always asserted sorrowfully but implacably that his parents were “unwell.” Their eldest had, he claimed, made a stupendous effort to replace Roy as their nearest relative and so get the section lifted. But considering everything else that was going on in the UK, British functionaries couldn’t be bothered about two modest burdens on the social-care system whose problems at least seemed sorted. The judge turned Simon’s application down flat, and there was no mechanism for appeal.
Having learnt to trap his daily meds against the back of his throat, thereafter Cyril was able steadily to stockpile a reserve of tablets, which in quantity might grant him and his wife the merciful non-existence that appeared to be their only sure protection from Mimi Mewshaw. Once he’d probably accumulated a sufficiency but planned to store up one more handful just to be on the safe side, staffers did a room search and discovered his stash.
From there on in, rather than resist what was known as chemical cosh, both spouses gladly swallowed the tablets provided and slept most of the day. He and Kay had their chance to escape in March of 2020. The opportunity to call their own shots was not coming back.
9
You’re Not Getting Older, You’re Getting Better
When the high-handed policeman demanded her details and got to the phone number, Kay drew an unprecedented blank. It was fairly commonplace not to recall your own mobile number, which one tended to communicate to others by texting or ringing up, and she’d misplaced her iPhone all morning (perturbing in itself). Of course she didn’t know Cyril’s; her phone knew Cyril’s. Yet now she couldn’t even retrieve the landline. When a selection of likely digits eventually danced in her head, she struggled to remember whether the last four numbers were 8406 or 8604. It is strangely difficult to locate your own phone number, and she excused herself upstairs to Cyril’s study, rifling water bills and annual TV licences and finally scrounging a hard copy of a tax return from three years ago that included the landline. Aside from changes to the London prefix, they’d had the same phone number since 1972. Rattled, she no longer gave a toss about the silly summons, and when she returned to the foyer the officer, who when she’d suffered her so-called senior moment had seemed to vacillate between pity and contempt, had clearly made up his mind. He went with contempt.
The sure sign that the peculiar lapse bothered her on a profound level was that she did not tell Cyril. Once the coronavirus upheaval finally settled down to some semblance of normalcy, she also did not tell Cyril that after a former colleague from St Thomas’ reached out to her, she enrolled in a large double-blind drug trial being funded by the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The researchers were specifically looking for subjects with no substantial comorbidities (happily, successfully treated hypertension did not count as substantial) who were over the age of seventy-five.
The likes of blanking out over their landline number did not recur. Not only could she rattle off those familiar digits—ending in 8406, by the way—but she could effortlessly produce her mobile number and, after giving her contacts list an idle glance, Cyril’s as well. Why, she was able to rat-a-tat-tat through her every phone number since she was five. Furthermore, she’d no trouble reciting her favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins poem word-perfect. Cleaning the kitchen after dinner, she sometimes sang “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” or “Save the Last Dance for Me”—sotto voce, because she was always self-conscious about the reediness of her voice—and she correctly recollected the lyrics to the last stanza.
That strange cerebral seizure with the patronizing policeman had obviously been brought on by anxiety over being given a summons for the first time in her life, and perhaps as well by the larger emotional trauma of having come so close to calling it quits in perpetuity three days earlier; heavens, had she not experienced that sudden visitation of feminist agency in the loo (Take back control!), perhaps she’d have downed those tablets after all. Or maybe the explanation was more mundane: the temporary blockage of a neural pathway that happens to everybody. She really had to stop leaping to the conclusion that she was going bats just because her benighted parents had set such an unpropitious precedent.
Throughout her fifties and sixties, Kay had coloured her hair, covering the expanding streak of grey down the middle and returning her browning locks to the tawny gleam of her youth. But by her seventies, the discipline of monthly home treatments had grown tedious, and the lighter colour looked less natural. Thus for some years she’d let her hair go salt-and-pepper, a more seemly and not unattractive look for her age, and owing to the depressing follicular thinning of the menopause she always wore it snugly pinned in a French twist.
Yet removing the pins one night before bed, she noticed a surprising glint at her temples. Leaning towards the mirror, she flicked at a host of
tiny sprouting hairs, very fine, altogether new, and strangely golden.
Over time, they grew longer and stronger. With no help from L’Oréal, her hair developed a brightening sheen, whilst it also grew softer and, though the transformation could credibly be all in her mind, thicker; regarding even delusional improvements to one’s physical appearance at eighty-one, she would take what she could get. So one morning Kay impulsively refrained from binding the rope of her diminished tresses, but allowed the locks to flow free to her shoulders.
“You’ve not worn your hair down in donkey’s years,” Cyril commented. “It looks nice. Gentler. More feminine, if we’re allowed to use that as a compliment any more. You should wear it down more often.”
The new tufts were not only on her head. Those young women who fanatically lasered their nether regions had no appreciation for how bereft one becomes when most of those squiggly hairs down there disappear of their own accord. Kay herself hadn’t realized that she rather cherished the coy disguising furze until bit by bit post-fifty it nearly all fell out. Now the undergrowth surged back: kinky, exuberant, and honey blonde.
Not only the hairs felt kinky. It had been a while, more than a while, and with this racy new frizz Kay couldn’t resist taking it for a test run.
“You’re frisky tonight,” Cyril remarked in surprise, once she’d seized his joystick and shoved their bedtime reading up a gear. In the end, the experiment in nostalgia wasn’t wholly a success, but no one was keeping score, and over the years they’d developed techniques for crossing the finish line by a variety of resourceful means. By custom, these improvisational encounters would mutually suffice for weeks thereafter. Consequently, on the following night, Cyril was begging to be allowed to sleep.
Although one always notices the arrival of the unpleasant, one often fails to notice the alleviation of the unpleasant. Hence Kay blithely thought about other things until finally realizing that she hadn’t needed to tweeze out those ugly coarse dark hairs on her upper lip for months. If she picked up on the brightening at all, she dismissed the radiance of her teeth as a trick of the light, or attributed the sparkle to a reformulated toothpaste—as she also attributed the fading if not disappearance of the unsightly brown mottles on her hands to a rare beauty cream that actually worked. She’d certainly grumbled a fair bit to Cyril about how arduous it had become simply to arise from a seated position, but she went back to popping up effortlessly from her chair without remark. Kay had been consternated when she was diagnosed with hypertension, but when in taking her own blood pressure she discovered that it had dropped much too low, she simply stopped taking the medication, and once she regularly tested at below 120/80 she didn’t give the matter a second thought. Months must have gone by before she did a double-take whilst brisking about the back garden: her toes didn’t hurt. Her shoulder didn’t hurt. After weeding, her knees didn’t hurt when she stood. So she reinstated her original Sunday walkabout along the Thames, skipped the restorative coffee, covered the distance more quickly, then added an extra mile.
Should We Stay or Should We Go Page 17