Author: jim clayton

rita’s chairs

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In the time it takes to walk from the front door to the sitting room, Rita has recalled my name, the names of my children and their musical aspirations, the village I live in and even the breed and name of our dog.
‘I’m amazed!’ I tell her. ‘And there was me struggling to think if I’d been here before.’
‘Dear oh dear!’ she says, a little wheezily. ‘I’m obviously not that memorable, then. Or perhaps it’s because you see so many people. Yes – I think for the sake of my vanity I’ll go with that explanation.’
She’s quiet for the rest of the time it takes her to return to her chair and catch her breath. I wait until she’s settled, fetching the yellow folder and having a quick read through.
‘I’m afraid my breathing’s not what it was,’ she says, ‘but there’s nothing wrong with my brain, thank goodness.’
‘It must have been six months ago, at least.’
‘What do you remember then?’
‘I don’t know. These chairs.’
‘The chairs did you say?’
‘Straight out of the seventies. All that chrome and leather. You just don’t see them that often.’
‘Well there you are, then. I remember people, you remember furniture.’
‘When you put it like that it sounds bad.’
She laughs.
‘I’m just having a little fun at your expense,’ she says. ‘Would you like some tea?’
‘I’ll make it.’
‘Would you? I’m worn out with all that exercise. I think you’ll find it all pretty self-explanatory.’

*

When I’ve made the tea and she’s quite recovered, we chat as I take her observations and so on.
‘I don’t suppose anyone can believe the old bird is still around,’ she says as I unwrap the blood pressure cuff. ‘Least of all the old bird herself. I’ll be ninety-four next month.’
I shake my head.
‘What’s your secret?’ I say.
‘Stay away from medication! You don’t know what’s in it. You’re much safer with the odd glass of whiskey. Malted barley, spring water, a few years in an oak barrel and there you have it.’
‘Did you work for a distillery or something?’
‘Me? No! Although that sounds like fun. No – I was a teacher for many years. Loved every second.’
‘I bet you were amazing.’
She shakes her head.
‘I don’t suppose my students would have agreed with you particularly. But one did one’s best.’
She watches as I fill out the chart.
‘All okay, is it?’ she says.
‘Better than mine!’
‘Damn!’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘We-ell. That’s the thing about advanced decrepitude, y’see? It’s the practical things. All of my friends are dead. I’ve got family of course, but they’re liberally spread about in the North and Australia and what have you, and I don’t see them all that much. I’m afraid to say I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve rather outstayed my welcome.’
She smiles, and gently strokes the armrests.
‘But you like my chairs?’ she says.

out out

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When I was little we used to play a game called Jack Straws. You had a box of plastic tools – ladders, shovels, brooms, rakes and so on – you dumped them in a pile in the middle of the table, and then you took it in turns to try to hook as many away as you could. If the rest of the pile moved, you were out, and you passed the hook on.

Talking to Paula is a lot like playing Jack Straws, but instead of tools it’s walking sticks, letters, appointment cards, blister packs, items of food and then – the biggest category by far – people, dozens of them, in all shapes and sizes, some of them old, some of them young, some of them in uniform. And it’s difficult to resist the idea that the box got emptied on the table about the time her partner Eric died.

I’d been given the background story by someone else. Twenty years ago Paula and Eric had left their respective partners and children to start a new life together in a different part of the country. Paula had always been an anxious person, something that deteriorated in later years to the point where Eric had been acting as her carer. His recent, unexpected death cut Paula adrift, and everyone around her was struggling to cope. She’d been calling the ambulance a great deal. The police, too. Carers had been arranged but quickly dismissed, accused of laziness, rudeness, or the latest, making faces and going through her things. Everyone was trying to help. No-one was getting anywhere.

I’ve been sitting on the sofa struggling to think of a new angle to come at all this. It doesn’t help my situation that Paula’s friend Nigel is so aggressive. No doubt he’s stressed, too, but I don’t get the impression he’s normally easy. He has that way some men have of walking slightly back on his heels, arms out to the side, like it’s an effort to accommodate so much masculinity in such a short frame.
Right at the beginning of the meeting I’d checked Paula was okay with him being there.
‘Nige? He’s taking me shopping,’ she said. ‘Of course I want him here.’
‘That’s fine. I just needed to make sure.’
‘What’s up?’ said Nige, wobbling back into the room.
‘He says he wants you to go.’
‘Does he?’ he said, poking his glasses back into position with a finger as hard as a nail gun. ‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Don’t worry, Nigel,’ I said to him. ‘It’s fine. It’s just standard procedure when I’m talking to a patient about private stuff.’
‘Private stuff, yeah?’ he said, then thrust a doctor’s letter out for me to read. ‘Well go on, then. What are you going to do about this private stuff?’

*

It’s the end of the meeting. Physically Paula seems fine. The only positive contribution I can think of to make is a referral to social services, although I’m pretty sure they’ll already be well aware of the situation.
‘I just want to go back up north,’ she says. ‘Can’t you find me nowhere?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘A house or a flat. Back up near my daughter.’
‘Well – that’s a little beyond what we normally do. But there’s nothing to stop you or your daughter looking for properties yourself.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Online. There are loads of good websites.’
‘I haven’t got a computer.’
‘Your daughter, then.’
‘She doesn’t want me near her.’
‘She doesn’t?’
‘No!’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘So what are you saying, then? You’re not going to help me?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘But I can’t go on living here, can I? I can’t cook. I can’t look after myself. I can’t go out.’
‘I thought you said you were going shopping with Nigel?’
‘No,’ she says, taking out a cigarette, her hands trembling. ‘I mean out out.’

mum’s calculation

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Mrs Charlesworth appears to have read the book on Being Old. Her hair is as white and tightly curled as a titanium helmet; she’s wearing a thick cardigan despite sitting in a conservatory that’s as hot as a pizza oven; she has a kitchen trolley by her side with her glasses, a cup and saucer, remote control, puzzle book and pen, bundle of knitting and a dish of toffees. And she can’t resist asking the question.
‘How old d’you think I am?’ she says.
‘I wouldn’t like to say.’
‘Go on! I won’t be offended.’
‘It’s just a bit awkward if I get it wrong.’
‘Why would it be awkward? Honestly – I won’t mind.’
‘Yeah, but it depends by how much I get it wrong.’
‘It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest’ she says, illustrating the comment with a casual sideways swipe of her hand, like she’s chopping the head off something.
‘I’d rather not. I’m just not very good at these things.’
‘Come on! How old?’

It reminds me of a story mum used to tell. She worked as a cleaner and general help in an amusement arcade for a while. One of the guys there was an absolute wreck. What little hair he had left he slicked in strands across his pate, his badly-fitting false teeth were in danger of popping out when he coughed, he had bottle-end glasses, and his skin was as grooved and scarred as a whale that had been attacked by a giant squid. How old d’you think I am? he asked her, thrusting his face into the change cubicle, whilst graciously holding his fag out to the side. She didn’t want to say. He pressed her. She thought he was eighty, so to be safe she knocked off ten years. Seventy? he said, appalled. I’m fifty-eight. (The moral to this story would have to be something like: Do not under any circumstances ask anyone how old they think you are unless you have sworn testmony from someone who knows about these things to say in black and white that yes, you are indeed much younger than you look. And – by the way – not even then).
But Mrs Charlesworth is looking at me so enthusiastically that I feel my natural resistance breaking down.
I perform Mum’s Calculation: She looks ninety, so to be safe I’ll knock off ten years.
‘Eighty,’ I say.
Her smile falters.
‘So how old are you then?’ I say after a while, a little nervously.
‘Eighty,’ she says. ‘But I don’t feel it.’

redcurrant fever

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it happened overnight
or so it seemed
one day, a modest green bush
the next, a redcurrant carnival
I’d never seen so many currants
a super-abundance of currants
it was like Val, our next door neighbour
had snuck out at night
and tipped a sack of red plastic earrings over the fence
you could hardly call it picking
I only need smile in their general direction
and they hurled themselves sobbing into the colander
I’m sorry to report not all of them made it
many were spilled wastefully upon the earth
where I left them to the birds and the worms
libation I said out loud – but, come on! who was I kidding?
redcurrantscertainly not the Goddess of Soft Fruits
who, riding past on a bumble bee,
shook her head sadly
at my currant debauchery,
then spurred her mount on
to other, lovelier, more temperate gardens
(not Val’s, though. just saying.)

happy days

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Ralph reminds me of that woman in Happy Days – not the Fonzie sitcom, the Beckett two-hander. She’s buried up to her waist in a mound of crap, but seems oblivious, wittering on to a taciturn husband who sits at the bottom of the heap passing her stuff every now and again. Ralph isn’t quite buried, but it wouldn’t take much. A sneeze would do it. He’s lying precariously on his side on the very edge of a large double bed that’s piled high with rubbish. And it’s not just the bed. The whole flat is submerged, with only a trackway through the rubbish to get you from the front door to the bedroom and – at a push – to the bathroom. At least the budgie in the front room has a cage to protect its space from the rising tide of crap, although quite how Ralph ever manages to make it over there to feed and clean it is a mystery. The bird sits on its perch flicking its head in spasms of attention as I pick my way through to Ralph, who calls to me from the bedroom.
‘The bag needs changing,’ he says.
He’s right. His catheter bag is as tight as an overfilled water bottle, straining at the seams, filled with a sloughy, orange-tinged mess.
It’s hard to know where to begin. There’s nothing in the flat to clean him up, scarcely room to put my bag down let alone install equipment. We often talk about setting up a micro-environment for anyone with significantly reduced mobility. That means having all the essentials to hand – a commode, urinal, frame to help with transfers, maybe an over-bed table for food and water, a phone nearby and so on. I can’t help noticing that Ralph has already set up his own version of the micro-environment: a pile of porno mags, a remote control and a combat knife.
I’m half-way through sorting out his catheter when I hear a knock on the front door.
‘Who’s that?’ I say. He shrugs.
When no-one comes through, I go to check.
The front door is slightly ajar. Just in front of it on the floor, about an arm’s length from the threshold, a big bag of bird seed.

loki

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Mrs Ransome’s Sphinx cat Loki is aptly named. Not so much because he gets into mischief – I haven’t been here long enough to tell – but because he looks and moves like a creature from another world.

There are so many odd things about Loki it’s hard to know where to start. He’s completely hairless, of course, his skin the colour and texture of an old suede handbag; his large eyes are as luminously blue as two almond-shaped jewels, and his wiry whiskers, long tail and his great, pointed ears, together with a tiny, down-turned mouth, give him the rapt and rather melancholy expresssion of someone who can see and hear everything, even your thoughts, and wishes he couldn’t.

All this is pretty strange, but still the oddest thing about Loki is the way he moves.

To watch him leap from sofa to table to chair, you’d hardly think he was real at all. It’s all too perfect, too exact. It’s like watching an obscure Czechoslovakian animation where a stop-motion cat leaps from sofa to table to floor to the sound of a scratchy violin. And when he’s studied me from the other side of the room, when he’s paused there a while, and scanned my soul with his eyes and ears and whiskers, and decided I’m worthy of trust, in the time it takes me to click my pen he’s suddenly right there in my lap, purring so loudly the whole chair starts drilling itself into the floor.

‘He likes you,’ says Mrs Ransome. ‘Normally he hides on the roof.’

tea for two

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‘When I was too old for football I took up cricket. And when I was too old for cricket I took up golf. And I played that for thirty years. And now look.’
By way of illustration, Mr Clark fusses with his dressing-gown cord, as thick as a tail, with a frayed and fluffy end. In fact, Mr Clark has such a long and lugubrious face, his expression so melancholy, I could easily be persuaded it is a tail, and that this is in fact Eeyore, magically – tragically – transformed into a frail old man.

When Mr Clark has achieved something approximating a knot, he sniffs sadly, and then gently replaces his hands right and left on the armrests.
‘So as you can imagine,’ he says, ‘…my current situation is not what you might call an unending round of frivolity.’
‘No. You’ve got a lot on your plate.’
‘I have got a lot on my plate. In fact, I’d go as far as to say, I need a bigger plate.’

It’s true. Things are particularly difficult for Mr Clark these days. Ten years ago he had an operation to correct some crumbling vertebrae in his lower back. But the operation failed, leaving him with reduced mobility and constant pain radiating down his right leg. Surgically there’s nothing more that can be done. The only thing left is to load him up with painkillers and put in carers four times a day. He spends hours in the chair, watching sport on TV, or staring out of the window into the garden.
‘I used to enjoy all that,’ he says. ‘Gardening, I mean. But of course even that’s denied me now. Graham comes round to mow the lawn. He does what he can. But Graham’s not the man he used to be, neither.’
‘I think I met Graham last time I was here’ I say. ‘Hasn’t he got a little Yorkshire Terrier?’
‘Lucy,’ says Mr Clark, sadly. ‘Yes. He adopted her. He used to do some work for Gladys next door. But then she died, and no-one wanted the dog.’
‘That was nice of him.’
‘She’d let Lucy get terrible fat, poor thing. She never used to walk her, y’see? She could hardly walk herself. She’d let her out the back every now and again, and you’d see her gasping, waddling around with her tongue sticking out. Eyes bulging. That’s not a good look, not for anyone.’
‘Still. It sounds like she’s landed on her paws with Graham.’
‘I suppose,’ sighs Mr Clark. ‘She’s slowly getting back to normal. But he ought to watch her round that mower of his. She hasn’t got the sense to avoid it herself. Or the legs.’

The walls of Mr Clark’s front room are covered with pictures: Mr Clark in three-quarter profile with his hair slicked back; Mr Clark throwing himself into a tackle; Mr Clark swiping a bat; Mrs Clark in a Doris Day dress and pearls; Mr and Mrs Clark caught in the flash of a camera at a party; laughing and ducking through a shower of confetti outside a church; assorted babies in prams, in Mrs Clark’s arms, on picnic blankets, faces smeared with jam, waving wooden spoons, crying; kids in school uniforms, in sports day kit, at Christmas parties, red-eyed in the flash amongst piles of tinsel and balloons and wrapping paper; young men and women in mortar boards and gowns, self-consciously holding diploma rolls, or shaking someone’s hand as they accept a certificate; then more babies in more recent pictures, with Mr Clark and his wife bookending the group, and then in the centre with everyone standing round them; then smaller photos of someone sky-diving, posing on a yacht in sunglasses, raising a glass of wine. And last of all, propped up on the mantelpiece, a picture of Mrs Clark on an order of service, some dates in gold leaf, a border of lillies.
‘How did you two meet?’ I ask him.
‘I saw her and her friend Janice in the street, standing outside a jewellery shop. I liked the look of her so I went over and said did she know the way to the Hippodrome? And when she told me I repeated it back all wrong, which made her laugh, and she told me again, and I got it wrong again, and so in the end she said it would save everyone a lot of bother if she just took me there herself. So that’s what she did. And we stopped off in a Lyon’s tea shop, and we only parted company sixty years later.’
‘That’s lovely!’
‘Yes. Well.’
He looks down, fiddles with the cord of his dressing-gown again, and shakes his head.
‘I don’t know,’ he sighs.
‘What don’t you know?’
‘All this. I mean – what’s it all for?’
‘I’m sorry you’re feeling so low.’
He lets go of the cord and grips the arms of the chair again, as tightly and purposefully as someone who fully expected to be thrown out at any moment.
‘It’s just so much sitting around,’ he says. ‘It’s probably high-time I went.’

into the arena

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Mr Thomas uses his cane to move the strip curtain aside, then after staring at me levelly, thumps the rubber ferrule a couple of times against the glass, then lets the strips fall back into place.

I’m not sure what he means. Is there a keysafe round the side I haven’t seen? Is the door open and he wants me to let myself in? Or is it something else?  I’d guess from his expression – a terrifying species of imperial rage – that he wants me to clear off.

I did try to call him beforehand to warn him I was coming. But Mr Thomas’ phone rejects anonymous calls, and even though I used the 1470 function to remove the anonymity, it still hadn’t accepted the call. In the absence of an alternative number, I’d decided to call round on spec. Which is beginning to feel like a catastrophic error of judgement.

He hooks the strip curtain aside again, to see if I’ve taken the hint. When it’s apparent that I’m not leaving, the strips fall back into place again, and I assume from the isolated flashes of movement I catch that he’s decided to come to the door.

It takes a while.

Across the road, two painters have stopped for lunch. They’ve sat down with their legs happily swinging over the edge of the scaffolding, and are busy setting out their flasks and sandwiches. It’s like they’re settling down to watch a film. Gladiator, maybe.

There’s a doored porch to Mr Thomas’ house – a heavy, white, plastic-and-metal affair. Eventually the inner door opens, and Mr Thomas stands there in his dressing gown and slippers, holding a zimmer frame in one hand and a walking stick in the other, worryingly like a net and trident. He glares at me despite my ingratiating smile, then starts the precarious business of negotiating the front step. I can hardly bear to watch. In fact, the whole thing’s so alarming I try the outer door so I can go in to help. But it’s locked, so all I can do is stand there helplessly as he gets himself in a terrible muddle, trying to manoeuvre the frame with one hand whilst he waves the walking stick in the air. More by luck than skill, and with a huge amount of crashing and swearing and flailing about, he manages to reach the porch door, where he stops to catch his breath, clinging on to the handle. When he’s sufficiently recovered, he starts fiddling with the intricate locking mechanism, flashing me a look every once in a while, as if all this was my fault, and I’m going find out soon enough what he thinks about it.

I glance back at the painters on the scaffolding. One of them raises his sandwich by way of salute. I nod feebly, and then turn back just in time to see the door thrown aside, and Mr Thomas standing there in the full and unmitigated fury of his dressing gown.
Just what the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at? he says.
‘I’m Jim. From the hospital. Come to see how you are’ I say. And as bravely as I can, I hold out my hand, like a Christian martyr offering the lion something to sniff, or tear asunder, depending.

no!

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I’d been to Mrs Lustig before, about nine months ago.

It had been a wild, raw day in November then, bitter squalls of rain, and such violent gusts of wind  it was a job to hold on to the car door when I opened it. I’d struggled to find her house, tucked away in one of those streets whose numbers seem to run completely at random, tailing off down alleyways and cut-throughs, jumping back again, in such an idiosyncratic way even the postman I stopped to ask had to think hard for a minute. That wasn’t the end of it, though. When finally I’d walked up the cluttered path to the front door and knocked, and then waited, and then rung the bell, and waited, and got no reply, and rung the landline on my mobile, and heard it ringing deep inside, and still had no answer, I’d decided to go round the back to check she wasn’t on the floor or something. First of all I’d had to get past a large camellia in a large metal container that had been blown over in the wind. It was a struggle to pick it up, and then I had to try all kinds of things to brace it against the wall – a wheelie bin, an old iron patio chair, a crate of recycling. When eventually I’d made it round to the little back garden, pressed my nose up against the window and shaded it with my hand, I’d got quite a shock. There was Mrs Lustig, sitting staring out at me from a high-backed chair, frowning a little, maybe, but otherwise making no move or sign for me to come in or go away. I’d waved and smiled, knocked on the window, held up my badge, pointed to it, but she’d carried on sitting and staring out at me without appearing to have seen me at all. So I’d gone back round to the front (stopping to right the camellia which had blown over again), and tried the handle on the front door. It was open, so calling ahead to identify myself, I’d stepped inside. And everything had been fine, and that was that.

This visit is already so much easier. A warm, still day, for one thing. And because I know where I’m going this time, I drive straight there. And when I pull up there’s a space out front just exactly the right size for my little car. I find that Mrs Lustig’s front path has been tidied, the camellia has been chained up, and then, exactly as described in the referral, I find a keysafe behind it, discreetly fixed to the wall.
I retrieve the key and let myself in.
‘Hello? Mrs Lustig?’

The interior of the house is the same, though. Hundreds of books neatly lined up in ancient bookcases, ceramic dishes and bronze dogs displayed in alcoves, oil paintings in gilded frames, everything suspended in the same dusty, honey coloured light that streams in through the stained glass panels above me.

Mrs Lustig is sitting in the same high-backed chair, just as passively as before, her eyes as lucent and blue as the Delft vase on the table behind her. Someone has filled it with fresh-cut roses. Her daughter, I’d guess.
‘Hello!’ I say.
‘Hello,’ she echoes.
As I settle in to the consultation I mention that this is the second time I’ve been here. That last time the weather was terrible. I’d wrestled with the camellia, tried and failed to set it right again.
‘Camellia?’ she says, uncertainly, as if I’d just described an angel I’d found on the patio.
‘I’m glad it’s fixed to the wall now.’
‘Well – yes!’
‘So.’

Mrs Lustig’s condition has robbed her of so much, but still there’s something so beautifully poised and modulated about her, something so fine about the face, that when I ask her what she used to do for a living before she retired, I’m not surprised when she says quite slowly and firmly: ‘I was an actress.’
‘How lovely!’ I say. And then: ‘Did you have a favourite role?’
‘No!’ she says.
‘Oh! Well – I’m sure they all had their thing.’
‘Yes!’
I carry on writing for a bit, then I can’t resist trying a different angle.
‘Was it difficult, being an actress?’ I ask her. ‘I mean – I’ve always imagined it must be quite a precarious business, chasing the work, going to auditions. The uncertainty of it all.’
‘No!’ she says again, and smiles so broadly and so warmly, it’s as good as if we’d chatted about it for hours.

*

 

Later on, back in the car, my curiosity piqued, I look her up on imdb.com. A black and white picture immediately comes up of a radiantly beautiful woman in her twenties, and then on from the picture, hundreds of links to films and TV shows, glitzy shots in restaurants, paparazzi snaps on yachts and nightclubs, newspaper articles, gossip columns. A cover on Picture Post.
And I hear myself asking her that question, sounding so gauche it makes me wince: Was it difficult, being an actress?
But then her simple answer – stripped of her ability to elaborate, perhaps, but still suffused with the joy of it all: No!

badger time

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we saw the girls off on the coach this morning
a school trip to France
half past five, the sun a smeary yellow bloom,
waved, even though the windows were opaque
(‘think you’re free of them?’ the driver said, slamming the doors
‘think again; I’m bringing replacements by return’
we laughed, even though we didn’t understand what he meant)

Afterwards, back home,
Kath was settling in to do the work she hadn’t been able to do all that week
so I decided to take Lola for a walk

it was still super-early
the woods were held
in a cool blue mist
even the birds were stunned
one sharp, single chirrup from an oak
(hardly sounding like a bird at all
more like something whose batteries were out)

I followed my feet
wondering whether I might see something I wouldn’t normally see
a badger, maybe
I’d never seen a badger in the wild before
I knew there was a sett on the far side of the wood
so I drifted in that direction
until – there it was – half a dozen badger-sized
holes in the badger-worn ground

I stood and waited
still as a tree
stiller, in fact
still as a hunter
(Lola wasn’t impressed
she stared at me for guidance
then gave up and carried on with her own investigations)
I was sure that if I held my position
a badger would eventually make itself known
snouting-out of a hole
and, not sensing anything alarming
would see no harm in carrying on with whatever the hell it is
badgers do at this godforsaken hour

but as still and hunterly as I was
and as long and as patiently as I waited
nothing happened
nothing at all
no badgers
in or out or anywhere else
so I gave it up as a bad job and headed home

and for some reason
(maybe it was the early hour, maybe it was something else,
it’s difficult to say)
I was suddenly cold
cold in the way
cold gets me sometimes
crackling through the cavities of my long bones
drawing down my skin

it didn’t help that I’d started thinking about Time
Time as a Thing
spooling out behind me, infinitely
infinitely ahead, too
(and other directions, probably, if I knew anything about it, which I don’t)
which surely only leaves me
the smallest, most infinitely diminishing particle of Time
in which to see a badger

or anything else

how terrifying is that?

but then I thought about it from the badger’s point of view
I’m pretty sure badgers don’t waste any time
freaking themselves out thinking about Time
they couldn’t care less if Time was infinitely spooling or anything else
they have other, more pressing concerns
worms, maybe. roots. cows.
or whether that man and his dog are ever going to clear off.

anyway, I was warming up again
the mist was lifting

the girls were back on Wednesday