It’s so hot, even Reg’s cat Lionel barely has the energy to look up as I come into the little back yard. Don’t mind me he seems to say, just go ahead and ring the bell and he’ll be with you presently. Then blinking once, to seal the deal, and yawning broadly with a funny little snap of his jaws, he collapses back into the shady patch beneath the cotoneaster, and immediately falls asleep again. He’s a magnificent animal – just like Orlando, the marmalade cat, rich stripes of apricot and orange flowing down his sides.

If Lionel is an object lesson in glamorous health and vitality, his owner Reg is the complete opposite. In fact, Reg is so banged up, with so many wounds and dressings, he looks like an extra in a horror movie unexpectedly called to the door of the make-up wagon. The worst is a palm-sized gash to the right of his forehead, stitched up as vigorously as a rugby boot, the hair shaved around it in a punky and free-ranging kind of tonsure. He has two black eyes, swollen cheeks, a thick wodge of plaster over the blackened steri-strips holding his nose together, a split lip, and bruises in every hue and colour between black and yellow roiling up and down his arm.

‘Yes?’ he says, pulling his dressing gown together and swaying in the doorway. ‘Can I help you?’

We’ve all had a turn at going in to see Jasper. He’s one of the regulars, an intractable alcoholic, a serial self-neglecter whose M.O. is to get drunk, take too many pills (by mistake or design it’s impossible to say), fall over, be admitted to hospital and then discharged with a referral to the community health team. He’s had numerous multi-disciplinary team meetings, everyone from the psychiatrist to the CPN, physio and occupational therapists, pharmacists and social workers, everyone doing their best to come up with a workable plan. But inevitably Jasper ends up back in hospital, and the whole thing starts again.

This time was different, though. I heard about it from Carla, one of the carers, the next day.
‘It was the same old thing,’ she said, settling in to the story. ‘Door locked, curtains closed, no answer when I buzzed or called his phone. I mean – that’s always the way it is with him. He’s hardly ever there.’
‘It’s so frustrating.’
‘Anyway, I thought – right – I’ll just try one more thing and then call it quits. The curtain was a little caught up in the corner, so I shielded my hand over the glass like this, and had a good, long look. That’s when I saw the boot. You know those dreadful things he wears? There was just the suggestion of it, poking round the end of his bed. And it was difficult to tell, but I got the impression that there was a foot in there, too, the angle it was keeping. So I banged on the window a bit, and when nothing happened, called the police. They came pretty quick. Put the door in, and there he was, wedged down the side of the bed. We had to see if he was alive or not – and I know it doesn’t sound very caring – but what we did, we dragged him out by the leg. And you didn’t need a doctor to tell you he was dead, because he kept the same position he was in when we got him clear, all crumpled up on his side, poor thing, and a look on his face – I don’t know – like he was falling down a great big hole, which in a way, I suppose, he was.’
‘Sounds horrible.’
‘It wasn’t nice. Still…’ she says, taking another generous bite of her sandwich, and dabbing at the corner of her mouth with a napkin. ‘you’d have to say, it was a long time coming.’

Graham pulls his top up to show me his scar – a flap fully half the size of his abdomen, the edges as puckered as the crimped edges of a pasty.
‘Wow! That’s impressive!’ I say.
‘Yeah. The surgeon wanted plenty of elbow room’ he says. ‘I think he pretty much climbed inside’
He lowers his top again and sits on his bed, suddenly forlorn. Jake, his friend, is standing next to him, fidgeting from side to side. He takes a step forward.
‘Look at this, then,’ he says, joining in the display of medical horrors. An angry-looking rash extends up both his arms, bubbling up through his tattoos.
‘Horrible, innit?’
‘It looks pretty sore. Is it itchy?’
‘Yeah, it’s itchy. Itchy as fuck. So what d’you think?’
‘I don’t know. They look like bites.’
‘I think you’re right,’ he says. ‘This place is crawling with bed bugs.’
I can’t help glancing down at the bed Graham’s sitting on, but if he heard or already knows about the bugs, he makes no sign.
Over Graham’s bed is a poster of Bruce Lee, in the famous fighting pose from Enter the Dragon.
‘He was amazing,’ I say. ‘It’s such a shame he died so young.’
‘Thirty-two,’ says Graham, looking up. ‘Same age as me.’
‘What about all those rumours? You know – Triads and death touches?’
‘Nah. That’s just conspiracy theory bullshit. He’d gone round Betty Tingpei’s house to talk about his next film, Game of Death, and she give him a pain killer for a headache. Only it turned out Bruce was sensitive to the Meprobromate in it, his brain swelled up, and that was that. Game Over.’
‘Ask Graham anything you like about Bruce Lee,’ says Jake, still swaying from side to side. ‘Anything at all.’
‘Yeah. Or drugs,’ says Graham.

There’s a note on Mrs Layland’s file to say that her daughter, Ellie, has to be contacted before any visit. Mrs Layland gets extremely anxious the notes says. Make sure you ring first before going in. It gives Ellie’s mobile number, underlined, twice.

‘How about one?’ I say.
‘Perfect.’
‘See you then.’

I have three patients to see that end of town. As it turns out, one of them has been admitted to hospital, and the other is surprisingly quick. My remaining visits are some distance away, so I won’t be able to go to them and make it back for one o’clock – so I call Ellie to see if she can make it any sooner, perhaps eleven?
‘That… should be okay,’ she says, after a pause which sounds like she’s flipping through a diary. ‘That should just give me time to make it down there. Okay – fine. Let’s make it eleven.’
‘Thanks. I’ll give you a call when I arrive.’
‘Lovely.’

Just before eleven I pull up outside the apartment block, and after writing down my arrival time, take out the mobile and call Ellie. It rings six times and goes to voicemail. I leave a message to say I’ve arrived and asking her to call me back so we can go in together. Then I spend the next ten minutes going over what visits I’ve got left, and figuring out the routes.

When there’s still no call-back from Ellie, I ring her again. Straight to voicemail.
‘I wasn’t sure whether I left my number or not,’ I say, ‘…so just in case…’
I read out the number, then end with something like  ‘looking forward to meeting you soon’ and hang up.

Time starts to drag. I keep checking the phone, to see if it’s registered any calls that for some reason I may not have heard. I hold the phone in different places in the car, just in case. I start watching the road ahead, and the road behind in the rear view mirror, wondering if each car that passes is going to be Ellie. Maybe she’s cycling? Is that Ellie, walking along the pavement, checking her phone? Is this a signal blackspot? Anyway, it’s almost half past now, so I’m guessing if it was Ellie she’d be walking a little more quickly – unless she’s very relaxed about appointments. But then again, maybe she’s forgotten about the second call? Maybe she thinks we’re still meeting at one? The woman talks animatedly on the phone as she walks past. I check mine again, then drop it on the passenger seat and wonder what to do.

I think about going to the intercom and buzzing Mrs Layland’s flat. The instructions were pretty clear, though. In fact I’d go as far as saying they were emphatic, written in block caps, in haste, as if something bad had happened last time and there was no room for error. If I rang the buzzer, and Mrs Layland let me in, what would I do? Wait in the flat for Ellie to arrive, whilst Mrs Layland got more and more anxious, and I struggled to reassure her? And then what would I say to Ellie? That I left two messages, and thought I’d go in anyway? But then she might say: ‘What messages? I didn’t get any messages!’ and ‘You should have waited. I thought I made it clear…’

So I wait some more.

Eventually, at twenty to twelve, I ring again, and Ellie picks up.
‘Where the hell are you?’ she says.
‘I’m outside, in the car.’
‘I thought you said you wanted me here at eleven?’
‘I did. I was waiting for you to get here.’
‘What do you mean, waiting for me to get here? I live on the next floor.’

‘Granddaughter? No! I’m actually his daughter, believe it or not,’ says Rose, dropping her bag on the floor and herself into a chair. ‘He had me late. When he’d finished all his tomcatting around. Isn’t that right, Dad?’
Charlie laughs, and tips me the kind of wink you might expect from a pantomime dame leaning out across the footlights: folded arms, a discreet bob of the head inclined to the closed eye, and a wry, downward tilt of the mouth.
‘You’re a cheeky monkey,’ says Rose. ‘But don’t push it.’
Charlie is ninety-five, Rose around forty, but I’d have put them both at least twenty years younger. Charlie is immaculately dressed in a suit and tie, Rose in a crop top that shows off her tattoos.
‘I almost didn’t make it,’ she says. ‘The ferret’s sick.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘He’s just kind of all … blurrrhhhh.’
‘Could be the heat. I wouldn’t fancy wearing all that fur in this weather.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s a design flaw.’
She watches patiently as I examine Charlie, checking his blood pressure, temperature and so on. Everything seems fine, though. There’s still the issue of his unexplained collapse a few days ago, but none of the tests done point to anything.
‘Could just be one of those things’, I say as I complete the observations chart.
‘What? Like Rose’s ferret?’ he says, and tips me another wink.

Mr Rostov is in his nineties and has trouble with his legs. As I walk up the drive he’s ineffectually prodding around with his trowel in a raised flowerbed, somehow managing to stay upright with his legs as splayed as a giraffe at a water hole.
‘I’ve got so many pins and plates in me,’ he says, using my arm as support and struggling upright, ‘…last time I went down the scrap yard I ended up swinging from the magnet.’
He takes the cap from his head and breaks into a smile so deep and gappy I wouldn’t be surprised if he waggled his ears. ‘Still,’ he says, wiping his forehead with a hankie, ‘so long as I don’t go for a swim, I’ll be all right.’
Despite his legs, Mr Rostov still has the wherewithal to take care of his garden. It’s obviously difficult for him, though. The garden is looking pretty wild, with only traces of the original planting struggling through, marigold, fuschia and lupin flowers lost amongst the general tangle of weeds and seeding grass.
‘Just look the other way,’ he says, as if I’d said something out loud. He waves his trowel in the general direction of everything. ‘I may be slow, but I’m stubborn, and I’ll get there in the end.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ I tell him. ‘Anyway, I’ve always preferred a more relaxed garden.’
‘You’re very kind and you can most definitely come again.’
He puts his cap back on, more like a beret, come to think of it, with a winged badge off to the side.
We stand there looking over the garden for a moment.
‘Here’s a question’ I say.
‘Go on.’
‘How do you keep the slugs off if you don’t want to use pellets?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Get some animals in that eat the damned things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Frogs, hedgehogs, that sort of chap.’
‘I can’t remember the last time I saw a hedgehog. I think everyone using pellets has killed them off.’
‘Oh, I don’t think it does them any harm.’
‘No?’
‘No. They changed the recipe. I don’t think it’s that.’
‘It can’t help, though, can it? I haven’t seen a hedgehog for years, and you used to see them all the time.’
‘There just aren’t the gardens for them like there used to be,’ he says. ‘Still, you can always get some at the pet shop.’
‘What – hedgehogs?’
‘Absolutely! Depends on the shop, of course. You can buy yourself half a dozen and send them in to fight the slugs. Operation Market Garden! How about that!’ But then he suddenly seems to think better of it, and sucks his teeth thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Although maybe that’s not quite the analogy,’ he says, repositioning his beret. ‘Poor bloody hedgehogs.’