Wernicke’s Aphasia it says in the notes. Minor right-sided deficit.

Of course, Mr Girondello still has capacity to make decisions for himself, even if some of those decisions – to be discharged home to this run-down caretaker’s lodge in the middle of a run-down park, for example – seem less than ideal. He has carers three times a day, and they do a good job, making sure he’s clean and fed, and that nothing untoward happened between calls. He has an emergency button, too, and if it’s true he probably wouldn’t think to push it if he got into trouble, it’s some reassurance.
He took a fall recently, and the GP sent us in to review the situation.
‘How are you today, Mr Girondello?’
‘…dello right! It happened, it just happened like that, and the place it was there, and so on…’
‘Well it’s good to see you, Mr Girondello. I’m from the hospital and I’ve just popped in to see how you are, to take your blood pressure and so on. Is that okay?’
‘…s okay. Good. Ahm…Wednesday around and oh boy!….they took it there and it was something else….’
‘Would you like me to make you a cup of tea before we start?’
‘…up tea… start. Yes, that was another trial right in there, that and they thought… and so the box was open… and so…. sugar.’
‘You’d like some sugar?’
‘Ahm…I think horse.’
‘There you go.’

It’s a sunny morning outside, not that you’d know it. Mr Girondello’s kitchen looks out onto what used to be the depot yard, a narrow, high-sided quadrangle, with broken down sheds opposite, and poplars rising high over the slates. If that wasn’t bad enough, someone has hung some heavy green material across the window as a makeshift curtain, nailing it in position so you can’t draw it back. Even with the kitchen striplight on, and a little light coming in through the frosted transom window over the door, the overall effect is of a cold and soupy aquarium. I can hear voices far away across the park, and for some reason it makes the whole place gloomier.

Mr Girondello seems happy, though.
‘There you go!’ I say, carefully passing him the mug. ‘That’ll put hairs on your chest!’
He takes it in both hands, and after taking a sip, looks up at me and says: ‘Ah! That’s how it is..and…and soon… and…and I just hope the water comes down for you, too.’

Mr Epstein is taking a shower. His skin has so many growths and curious moles, so many fascinating patches and bumps and lumpy swellings, that, along with the furrows of his ribs and the wide, satisfied downturn of his mouth – he reminds me a little of a humpback whale. In fact, he’s loving being in the shower so much, I’d go so far as to say that the only real difference between Mr Epstein and a humpback whale is that Mr Epstein used to work in the rag trade.
‘It was a fabulous business. Fabulous,’ he says, vigorously working the loofah. ‘I had my own fleet of vans, running up to the city and back. We used to supply all the big fashion houses. Uh-huh – it was really something to see, I tell you. Now – just a minute…’
All in all, the shower takes an hour. Mr Epstein is perfectly sanguine about the whole thing. I can’t see that he really needs much help. He has a set routine, he follows it meticulously. His recent fall knocked his confidence, no doubt. But on the basis of this morning’s performance, I’d say he was coping perfectly well.
‘See that towel? No, not that one – the big blue one? Harrods. They don’t sell them anymore. Put it over the stool, would you? And then put the smaller one on the floor. That’s it. Now, I’ll just move over here…’

If Mr Epstein is a humpback whale, his wife is a clown fish.
‘I just don’t know what to do,’ she says, trembling down in the kitchen, after I’ve helped Mr Epstein safely in to the front room and deposited him into his favourite armchair in a cloud of talcum powder. ‘He thinks he can do these things but he can’t.’
‘I don’t know. He seemed to be managing quite well…’
‘Quite well? What about the other night? He got up to go to the toilet, fell over and cracked his head. Quite well? There was blood everywhere. I thought he was dead.’
‘So … erm … what happened?’
‘The paramedics came and patched him up, that’s what happened. I wanted him taken to hospital but he’s stubborn and said he didn’t want to go. He can’t stay here, though. What am I supposed to do if it happens again?’
‘You’d just have to call the ambulance again.’
‘I can’t keep calling the ambulance.’
‘No. But this is the first time in a while. And he seems pretty stable. It may well have been a one-off…’
‘A one-off?’
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘He should go in a nursing home.’
‘Myself? I think you’ve a long way to go before that’s necessary. You’re really well set-up here. But anyway – that’s something the two of you can discuss.’
‘No. I don’t think you understand. I’m saying he has to go in a nursing home.’
‘Well – so long as someone has mental capacity to make decisions for themselves, you can’t just put them in a home.’
‘What about me? How am I supposed to cope?’
‘If it’s a question of getting some help – you know, getting him up in the morning, showering and dressing, and getting to bed at night – we can always look at the care aspect.’
‘And what about if he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the loo and falls over and cracks his head again? What am I supposed to do then?’
‘That’s when you’d call for an ambulance. But there are lots of practical things you can do. Maybe we could look at putting a commode in the bedroom, so he hasn’t got so far to walk.’
‘A commode?’
‘Maybe. It’s worth considering.’
‘I just don’t know how you think this is going to work.’
‘And then of course it might be worth looking at giving you some time away, Mrs Epstein. Some respite. There are two of you in the relationship. It wouldn’t help if you got sick as well.’
‘No. It wouldn’t.’
In the pause that follows we can hear a noise coming from the sitting room.
‘What’s he doing now?’ she says.
‘I don’t know. It sounds like singing.’

Eric is propped up in bed, smoking a cheroot and watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly at top volume.
‘All right?’ he says, raising a skeletal hand.
‘Fine, thanks, Eric. How’s it going?’
‘All right, son.’
‘The usual?’
‘If you would.’
I take his empty bowl, cup and tray and go through to the kitchen; he stubs out his cheroot and gets himself into position.

Eric’s easy to cater for. Breakfast, lunch, supper – it’s always the same: two banana Weetabix with three spoonfuls of sugar and a splash of hot water, and a mug of raspberry and rosehip herbal tea (also with three sugars).

‘Lovely!’ he says when I come back through and put the tray on his lap.
It happens to coincide with that scene in the film where Lee Van Cleef walks in to a Mexican casa to eat supper with an old guy in beard and braces. It’s pretty tense, everyone bent over their bowls, slurping away, including Eric.
‘Looks like I’m the only one not eating,’ I say.
‘Get yourself a bowl,’ says Eric.
Suddenly, Lee Van Cleef draws his gun and shoots the old guy.
‘Not enough sugar, I expect,’ I say.
‘No, no,’ says Eric, licking his spoon clean then waggling it at the TV. ‘They’re eating beans.’

They’d warned me about Gloria’s house, but really, when I get there, it isn’t too bad.
The Extreme Cleaning team has been working most of the morning and they’ve made good progress. There’s a pile of debris in the front garden, the kind of festering mess you might see after a terrible flood, or a swamp exhumation. The teams are obviously hard-working and well-prepared. They have two hi-tech vans, both with side-opening door like tiny fire trucks, one with an aluminium ramp to off-load heavy equipment, the other with a length of industrial hose leading in to a jet wash. The team itself is dressed CSI-style – white polyester overalls, latex gloves, clear plastic face guards and blue hair nets. Before I go in I stop to put on some overshoes and a plastic apron, but I must admit I feel a little under-dressed, like I’m wandering into a slaughterhouse with a cook’s apron and a wooden spoon.
‘Hello? It’s Jim, from the hospital.’
One of the cleaners is hard at work in the front room, operating a stainless-steel cylinder vacuum cleaner so powerful I’m in danger of being sucked up myself when I tap her on the shoulder. She flicks the switch and turns round.
‘I’ve come to see Gloria’ I shout as the noise subsides, as impressively as a hovercraft coming in to port.
The cleaner nods to the far end of the room, then turns the machine on again.

Gloria is sitting on the wreckage of her sofa, a blanket draped over her shoulders. The windows are open either end of the room and there’s a significant through-draft, but despite all this, twenty or so fat and frowsy-looking flies are still dotted round the walls, too stunned by the assault on their home to move.
‘Hello, Gloria. My name’s Jim. I’m from the hospital – come to see how you are.’
‘Wha-at?’
I hold out my hand for her to shake. Hers is crabbed-over, the nails rimed with filth.
I make a gesture for her to wait, then go back over to the cleaner, tapping her on the shoulder.
She switches off the machine again.
‘Can you give us a minute?’ I shout.
‘Sure,’ she says, pulling down her face-mask and wiping her forehead on her arm. She’s ludicrously attractive, dark eyeliner, clear blue eyes. ‘Of course!’ she says, smiling. Then nodding at Gloria, she steps outside for some fresh air and a cigarette.
‘That’s better! So – Gloria – how are you?’
‘Fine!’ she says.
‘Good!’ I say, ‘That’s good!’ although I hardly need take any readings to know that Gloria’s only about as fine as you’d expect from someone who’d been living in squalor for years, and hadn’t moved from the sofa since Christmas.
‘Could you get me another blanket for my legs?’ she says. ‘It’s a bit chilly with these windows open.’
‘Of course.’
Suddenly, the noise in the kitchen subsides, the door opens in a cloud of steam, and the other cleaner comes in, holding the dripping jet-wash nozzle in front of her.  When she sees me there she pulls her face mask down, and for a moment I wonder if this Extreme Cleaning outfit isn’t really just a bunch of super-models making a little extra money on the side.
‘Can I help?’ she says, and when I don’t immediately reply – as a threat or a prompt, I’m not entirely sure – she gives the nozzle a little shake.

The terraced houses running either side of the street are all of Regency vintage – narrow, three-storey town houses, many with the original bow windows and filigree iron balconies, heavy oak doors, leaded fanlights and pointed black railings. But whilst it looks as if they’ve all managed, more or less, to hold on to these features, time and the vagaries of the housing market have both had an effect. There’s scaffolding up at three of the houses; the rest are either restored or falling to pieces, so that the overall feel is of a street going through a significant change, a street that doesn’t quite know what it is yet.

For example, the house opposite Zelda, the patient I’ve come to visit, is now a boutique hotel. Zelda’s house has yellowing net curtains sagging in the window; the hotel has a series of fine, egg-blue painted shutters. To the side of Zelda’s door is a mish-mash of doorbells, sellotaped names, no names at all, and clear signs of forced entry on more than one occasion; the hotel – a five-star plaque.

I knock, then let myself in with the key safe.

Zelda is in the drawing room – smoking room, these days.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll put it out,’ she says, dabbing her fag into the side of a pyramid of butts in the ashtray beside her.
‘Thanks’ I say, but it doesn’t make any difference, as there’s probably more smoke in the room at the minute than a test facility at Philip Morris.
‘How much do you smoke a day, d’you think?’ I ask her. It’s a moot point, especially given her breathing problems.
She screws her face up.
‘I dunno. Fifty, sixty maybe?’
‘Wow! It’d be cheaper doing heroin.’
‘Don’t get me started,’ she says, and laughs, such a loud and sludge-wracked thing, it’s almost enough to drown out the noise of all the renovation work next door.

George is ill, that much is clear. For years he’s been caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of his failing heart and kidneys, struggling to navigate a way through on meds that push him disastrously first one way and then the other. George has suffered frequent spells in hospital with low blood pressure, low SATS, deranged bloods and so on, the last time ending up with a week on ITU. I’m not surprised he greets my suggestion of an ambulance with complete horror.
‘I really don’t – want to go – to that damned – hospital again,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’
‘I completely understand,’ I tell him. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t want to book a holiday there. But the thing is, George, with your blood pressure this low, I can’t see how we can safely treat you at home. Look – best case scenario – you go in, they stabilise you, and then they turn you back home again in short order. They won’t keep you in unless they absolutely have to. What d’you say?’
‘I would really – rather not.’
‘The other thing to bear in mind is that right now is the perfect time to go in. The doctors haven’t started sending patients in yet; it’s too early for the pubs and clubs. The day’s just beginning. This is the quiet time.’
‘Quiet?’
‘Quiet-er.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Okay, then. How about I ring your GP and we all discuss it over the phone?’
‘Fine. If the doctor says so – I’ll go.’
‘Great.’
He hands me the phone. I ring the surgery, leave a message with the receptionist for the doctor to call me back urgently, then spend a moment writing out my notes.

On the opposite wall there’s a cute, A4 sized photo of a cat, a long-haired tabby, in extreme close-up, its head angled to one side, frowning with such exaggerated concern you’d think it was an election poster for a cat MP.
‘Who’s that in the picture?’
‘Nelson.’
And right on cue, Nelson wanders in.
He’s very much older than his photo now, moving as stiffly as a puppet cat made of sticks.
‘Nelson!’ he says. ‘Good boy! C’mon Nelson!’
Nelson gives a strangulated meow – like someone forcing the door on a rusty tin shed – then teeters towards George’s legs, his ragged tail in the air.
‘I knew I wasn’t right – when I got out of – puff this morning – giving him – his brush,’ he says, struggling to reach down.
‘Would you like me to call anyone to come and look after Nelson?’
Nelson looks across at me; so does George.
‘Let me speak – to the doctor first,’ says George, straightening. Nelson takes that as his cue to jump up on George’s lap, and would have fallen straight off if George hadn’t stopped him.
‘There we go!’ he says. ‘Good boy.’
He works his right hand down Nelson’s back, the cat slowly raising its hips to meet the end of each stroke.
‘I bet – I know – what the doctor – will say,’ says George, after a minute or two. ‘And I bet Nelson – does, too. Don’t you?’

‘Oh. I thought you were the fish man.’
‘The fish man?’
‘Come to clean the tank.’
‘No. I’m from the hospital. Come to see how you are.’
Vera backs up, and lets me in to the narrow hallway. There are two doors to the left, and behind her, a steep set of stairs leading up to the maisonette. The chair to Vera’s stair-lift is waiting for her where she left it.
‘Sorry it took so long to answer the door,’ she says, carefully climbing back onto it. ‘That’s why I put that notice on the door. Right! Here we go!’
And ignoring the seat belt, she flicks the switch and begins the slow journey up.
‘I think you’ve got that about right,’ I say, following on behind, ‘…getting someone in to clean the tank. It’s such a chore. I remember when the girls were small and they insisted we got some fish. Guess who ended up soaked to his elbows in dirty water every weekend.’
‘I know. It is a bit of a job. John used to do it when he was alive, but I don’t have the knack. Or the patience, to be honest.’
‘Hamsters, too. I don’t see the point of hamsters. They only come out at night.’
‘But they’ve got such funny little faces, haven’t they?’
She peers down at me, pursing her lips and raising her eyebrows.
‘Well. Yes. That’s true.’
At the top of the stairs she raises the handle and steps onto the landing.
‘This way,’ she says.
I follow her into the sitting room, one whole side of which is entirely given over to an enormous aquarium, rounded at one end like the prow of a ship, the base meticulously crafted in burr walnut, the tank itself a faithful recreation of a coral reef, with gently undulating plants, and a circulating crowd of exotic fins.
‘Wow! When you said tank I thought you meant a goldfish or two.’
‘It was John’s thing, really. But I like to see them lit up at night, swimming about. I find it quite comforting. D’you see?’
The doorbell rings downstairs.
‘That’ll be him,’ she says. ‘That’ll be the fish man. Would you mind popping down and showing him in? Only I’m worried by the time I make it down again he’ll have thrown his buckets in the van and gone home.’

Mr Cooper looks dead, hunched over in his armchair, his dressing gown gaping, his wasted chest waxy in the meagre light filtering through the curtains.
‘Mr Cooper?’
I flip the bakelite switch on the wall, which fizzes and snits with blue sparks.
‘Shit.’
I flip it off again.
Mr Cooper makes no movement. The only sound in the room is from the gas fire, purring gently next to him.
‘Hello?’
I go over to him and crouch down, placing a hand on his arm.
‘Mr Cooper?’
He nods, and opens one eye.
‘What is it? Why don’t you go back to sleep?’
‘Mr Cooper – it’s Jim, from the hospital. I’ve come to see how you are.’
He closes his eye again.
‘Mr Cooper…?’

Even if I hadn’t been here several times in the last few months, I’d know he’d been on our books before. There’s a perching stool over in the corner, buried beneath a pile of junk; a pressure relieving cushion and a walking frame dumped on the unused bed along with a mountain of discarded clothes and bags of assorted creams and bandages, and through the open door to the adjoining bathroom, a bath-board acting as an extemporary shelf for a stack of buckets, boxes and blister packs of medication. There’s been a marked deterioration, though. The flat was always a mess, but in the six months since I was last here it has slumped into something worse. The only signs of clarity, of humanity, are an emergency shop in a cleared space in his filthy little kitchen, the barest essentials to keep a person going, and by the side of his armchair, a green drugs bag with his TTOs, discharge summary, and a DNACPR in a clear plastic folder, neatly signed and dated.

Because, of course, the difficulty with Mr Cooper is, well, Mr Cooper.

It had always been an uphill struggle to get him to agree to anything. A little shopping from time to time, the barest minimum of wound care, the occasional knock on the door – these were only ever achieved in the face of his unrelenting refusal to accept help. The dangers had been explained, of course, with sufficient checks to show that yes, Mr Cooper did have mental capacity to make these decisions. And the result was that despite everyone’s best efforts, over the months and years the scenario had played out with a cruelly inevitable decline. The best any of us could ever do was try not to lose touch completely.

Like a sly, slow-moving, community health chameleon, I try to persuade Mr Cooper to let me take a few observations. Still, it’s more a testament to his failing health than any social skill of mine that he agrees to the barest minimum, and lets me put some barrier cream on his sore areas.
‘There!’ I say, peeling off my gloves. ‘That’ll be a little more comfortable.’
The readings aren’t good, though. And my luck certainly doesn’t stretch to an ambulance.
‘Hmm. I must admit I’m worried about you, Mr Cooper.’
He starts in the chair, as if someone had given his wasted shoulders a gentle shake, then he slumps back into his mausoleum-grade torpor.
‘Just go to sleep,’ he says.
It sounds as if he’s talking to a naughty child, and for a minute I wonder if it’s a sign of increased confusion. If it was, his capacity would be compromised and I could get him forcibly admitted. But as soon as I explore that option, it becomes apparent that it’s just a figure of speech. He’s referring to himself in the third person. He knows exactly what he’s about.
I explain to him as clearly as I can why I’m worried, why I’d like to re-admit him to hospital, and what might happen if he doesn’t go.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’
There’s nothing more to be done.
I put some food and water by his chair, move the commode a little closer, and let myself out.
After I’ve put the key back in the keysafe, I phone the office and let them know how things stand, my concerns about the faulty light switch, the gas fire, the environment, the whole dismal scenario.
‘Sounds depressingly familiar,’ says Michaela. ‘I’ll get the council on to the electrics. In the meantime – Jim – I’ve got another job for you…’

*

Later that day I’m asked to go back to Mr Cooper for a welfare check.
It’s completely dark when I let myself into the flat. I don’t want to use any of the light switches, so get out my torch.
‘Hello? Mr Cooper…?’
I train the beam on his armchair.
Empty.
‘Hello…?’
It’s strange, how different the place is by torch light. I hadn’t noticed that behind his armchair is a workbench, with vices, a scattering of fine tools, and a dismantled model train.
‘Mr Cooper…? It’s Jim, from the hospital…’
Two rooms I’d not been in before. One filled floor to ceiling with books, the other with metal shelving, neatly lined with old glass storage jars, their yellowing contents indistinguishable behind a coating of dust.
‘Mr Cooper…?’
But the flat is empty.

Going back to the front room, I notice for the first time that Mr Cooper’s emergency button has been unfastened and draped neatly over the back of his chair. Seeing it there, isolated like that, in the direct light of the torch, that precise circle of red in its plastic ellipse, talismanic, an upturned eye, it’s easy to think that after all those years of resisting and signing forms and saying no and just go to sleep and please leave – the very instant Mr Cooper gave in and pressed the magic button, without any further hesitation or debate about the matter, he completely and instantly vanished.
And that was the end of the matter.

David is in bed – has been, for the last few weeks – a slow, ineluctable decline. He’s got everything he needs, though, as many adaptations and pieces of equipment as the little bedroom will accommodate. There’s really little else to be done. His wife Sara shows me through, then hurries back into the lounge to answer the phone. David holds out his hand. We shake.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he says. ‘It’s all a bit of a how-de-do.’
David and Sara are both artists. The flat is filled with their paintings and those of their contemporaries. Pride of place on the wall immediately above David is a small, full length, black and white photograph of Sara, taken back in the fifties, I would guess. She’s dressed in overalls and a headscarf, turning to smile at the camera from the easel she’s working on.
‘Of course, I’m dying,’ he says, placing his hands across his chest, by way of illustration.
‘I’m very sorry to hear it,’ I tell him.
He holds the position for a moment, then parts his hands and holds them out to the side, like the effigy on the tomb of the unknown stand-up suddenly coming to life to make one last joke. ‘Not as sorry as me,’ he says. ‘But you know what?’
‘What?’
He struggles to push himself up into more of a sitting position. I give him a hand, and re-arrange the pillows. When he’s settled and recovered his breath, he says:
‘I’m not afraid of death.’
‘No?’
‘No. And you know why?’
‘Go on.’
‘The way I see it, death is just like going back to how you were before you were born.’
‘I suppose so. That’s a nice way of looking at it.’
‘You think so?’
‘Yeah. I do.’
He laughs, pushes his fringe back in a boyish way, and then looks at me with a wide and gummy grin. ‘It’s the getting there that worries me.’

When I eventually find the place – a shambling Victorian pile on a tributary tuck of the main street, denuded limbs of Virginia creeper sweeping up over the porch and across the roof, flowerbeds overrun with weeds and yellowing grass, ancient roses fighting up through the tangle – it feels like the place is under a spell, and it’s an act of wild optimism to reach out and ring the bell. But it does ring, incredibly, sounding somewhere off in the distance, years away, and when Catherine eventually opens the door, it wouldn’t surprise me to see her dressed in crinoline.
‘Yes?’ she says.
I introduce myself.
‘And you’ve come to see William?’ she says, after a pause that her grey eyes hold for a worrying length of time. ‘What for?’
‘To see how he’s doing. His blood pressure, temperature and so on.’
She stares at me.
‘But you came round this morning.’
‘Ah – no. That was the physiotherapist.’
‘And now you want to see him?’
‘Yes, please. I won’t keep you long.’
She sighs, lets go of the door and walks away. Taking that as an invitation, I wipe my shoes on the mat and follow her inside.

William is standing in the middle of a cavernous room, irritably shuffling through the piles of newspapers and letters strewn across the dining-room table.
‘Where is it?’ he says. ‘What have you done with it?’
‘Done with what, darling?’ says Catherine.
‘You know perfectly well. The thingy. The remote control. For the television.’
‘Isn’t it by your chair?’
‘If it was by my chair why would I be asking you about it?’
‘I don’t know. Because if I did do anything with the remote control I’d have put it by your chair.’
‘But it’s not there.’
‘Well where is it, then?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’
‘What are you asking me?’
‘Because you were the last one to use it.’
‘Was I?’
‘Yes! You turned the television off when you went to bed.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes!’
Catherine mumbles something then goes over to the sofa to start looking. She picks up magazines, moves books, gives the cushions a thump, gets distracted by that, and starts tidying up in a desultory kind of way.
I put my bag down to help.
There are a stack of remote controls under the television, but it turns out the stack is a remote control graveyard; none of them have batteries.
I carry on looking.
‘Maybe you still had it in your hand when you went through to the bedroom?’ I say, then go out of the room to check. And there it is, on the table between the two beds, along with a glass of stale water and an alarm clock.
I take it back in to the sitting room, and hand it to William.
‘Thank you!’ he says, reverently holding out both hands to take it, then hobbling straight back to his riser-recliner. As soon as he’s settled in, he powers up the TV, and then placing the remote carefully in the pocket of his chair, smiles at me and says: ‘For that I will agree to any of your requests.’
‘Well done all!’ says Catherine, smoothing down her skirt and then quickly resuming the position on the sofa I would guess she was in when I rang the bell. ‘I told you it would be in the bedroom.’

There’s a sudden roar from the TV. It’s the Rugby League championships, Wigan Warriors versus the Cronulla Sharks. I expected William or Catherine to change channels, but it looks like they’re both as keen as each other to watch the match, instantly absorbed, responding with scandalised tuts and ohs! when anything happens. It’s a bizarre contrast between the images on the screen – sharp, super-fit, super-aggressive – and the derelict, grandiose but somewhat down-at-heel atmosphere in the house.
I wonder how much hard contact sport they watch together, and whether it helps.

Luckily, it’s half-time. William and Catherine’s interest in the game doesn’t extend to the commentary, so I seize the moment.
‘Is this a good time to get that sample of urine?’ I say to William, waving a grey, papier mache bowl in the air. ‘Look! I’ll put this in the pan, and all you’ll need to do is sit and go as normal. Just don’t flush! And then if you leave it where it is, I can dip it and see if you have a urine infection. Okay?’
He seems happy with that.
I offer to help him walk through, but he flaps his hands for me to go on ahead.

The toilet looks to be an original fixture: an iron and porcelain affair, with a long chain hanging from the cistern, terminating in a black, coffin-shaped mahogany handle. Down in the water are two perfectly formed stools, as round and buoyant as net floats. I pull the chain, there’s a tumultuous rush of water, flashes of brown through the foam.
The water settles, and there they are.
‘Oh,’ says Catherine, peering over my shoulder. ‘What have you found?’
‘I just need to flush these characters away.’
‘What on earth are they?’
‘Faeces. Poo. You know. They’re just a little bit – floaty.’
‘Floaty? Well where have they come from?’
I pull the chain again. With another, cataclysmic clonking and crashing, the pan floods once more, a white-water rapid of a flush – but still, through it all, riding the plumes like two plucky kayakers…
‘I need a bucket,’ I say, as the water subsides.
‘A bucket? What on earth for?’
‘To supplement the flush.’
Catherine directs me to one in the kitchen. I fill it with water, and then carry it back through to the toilet.
‘Watch this!’ I say, pulling the chain, whilst at the same time emptying the bucket of water into the pan. Nothing could possibly survive such an onslaught – we’re hardly safe standing here like this – except… there! … as the water settles… impossible! The two floating stools.
‘Ah,’ says Catherine, peering over my shoulder. ‘Now what?’