‘D’you know, the last medical I had was in ninety-forty nine, when I was called up for National Service. I remember the doctor there. A quiet individual. Very cold hands. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the sergeant major jumps up and shouts Drop ‘em! so of course that’s what I did. He fumbled around like they do and then jabbed me in the bottom with a needle. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He turned round to get something off the table and I thought he’d finished so I pulled my trousers up. But the needle was still there and I pushed it further in. I screamed and flew headfirst out of the door. When I came back in and handed the needle over, I didn’t get an apology. In fact, the sergeant major said it was a good thing I came back because otherwise he was going to put me on a charge for stealing government property. And that was my introduction to the army.’

The garages are gone at the end of the terrace. In their place is a chrome and glass building, appearing almost overnight, one flat on top of another at a playful angle, brushed steel numbers on heavy front doors. It looks out of place, a lifestyle machine, or an explorer from another part of the galaxy sent to gather information and start the re-colonisation process.
The Drumlins’ house is five doors up from it. They moved here after they were married seventy years ago, and like them, the house is starting to feel the weight of all that time, the paint lifting in rumpled strips from the windowsills, weeds growing up through blown plaster and concrete, a settling air of neglect about the place.
It’s almost twelve. My last call of the morning.
I’ve rung the bell a few times but heard nothing. There’s a key safe on the inside of the garden wall, but I haven’t been given a number. Just as I get out my phone to call the office and see if they have it, I hear shuffling from behind the door, a rattle of chains, mumbling.
Celia opens the door.
‘Hello. My name’s Jim, from the hospital avoidance service. Come to see Derek.’
Celia has an engagingly lop-sided smile, her hair so fixed and fine and white it could be made from spun coconut.
‘He’s downstairs in the living room,’ she says. ‘We haven’t even had our cornflakes!’
‘Sorry to disturb you.’
She turns and leads me through the house. It’s dark inside, the only light filtering in through the jungle of the back garden, the whole place so narrow and gloomy and closed-in it’s like I’m being led by an ancient mouse through her nest in the trunk of a tree.
Derek is planted in his favourite chair. He gives me a furious stare as I announce myself and go over to shake his hand.
‘I won’t be long,’ I tell him.
‘We haven’t h-h-h-h-ad our c-c-c-c-c-cornflakes yet,’ he says, at high volume.
‘He has trouble with his words,’ says Celia, dropping into the opposite chair. ‘Ever since the war.’
Derek tuts and flaps a hand across the front of his face.

I chat to them whilst I read the notes and unpack my bag.

‘Oh – we’re the only ones left here now,’ she says. ‘I don’t recognise anyone. D’you know who I used to work for?’
‘Who?’
‘The Borough Surveyor!’
She plants her hands flat in her lap and laughs, as if she’d said something outrageous, like Winston Churchill or Bing Crosby.
‘Was that at the Town Hall?’
‘The Town Hall? No. It was…. where was it?’
She leans forward and looks right and left, like she’d put it down by her feet.
‘That building. Down there on the front. Come on, Derek. You know…’
He tuts again.
‘Anyway – it’s gone now!’
‘Do you mean demolished? Or you can’t remember?’
She leans back and smiles at me happily.
‘The Borough Surveyor!’ she says again.
‘Sounds like a nice job.’
‘It was a nice job.’
‘What kinds of things did he survey? Or she. The Borough Surveyor?’
‘Oh. You know. Things.’
‘Sounds lovely.’
She stares at me.
‘Did you used to work there?’ she says.
‘Me? No. I wish.’
She chuckles, picks a thread from her skirt.
‘We haven’t even had our cornflakes!’ she says, waggling her fingers and dropping it off to the side.
‘Who d-d-d-d-did you s-s-s-say you w-w-w-ere?’ says Derek.

And now – LUNCH! says the next PowerPoint slide.
I’m too stunned for a moment to react. I rub my face, worried I may actually have fallen asleep and been talking. But if I did everyone’s too kind or busy to care. They’re hurriedly finding money, checking phones, pressing forwards for the exit in a rush that’s only two steers short of a stampede.
By the time I reach the little volunteers’ café in the foyer, it’s been trampled flat, stripped of everything but a ham and pickle baguette, sobbing quietly to itself at the back of the cabinet.  I take it out and put it on the counter.
‘…and a cup of tea, please.’
‘Lovely,’ says the elderly woman behind the counter. ‘Are you eating in?’
‘Actually I think I’ll go and sit outside.’
‘Outside?’
‘Yep. I need a bit of sun.’
‘Do you want a plate with your food?’
‘No, thanks. I’ll be fine.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she says. ‘I’ll get you a paper plate anyway. And I’ll tell you why in a minute.’
She ducks down behind the counter and starts rootling around. Eventually she stands up again and hands me a paper plate.
‘There!’ she says – then leans forward.
‘The inspectors are due in this afternoon and there’s a rat in the garden.’

Rose is slumped in her chair, asleep.
‘She just finished a big, big lunch,’ says Pearl, the live-in carer. And to emphasise the point, she puffs out her cheeks, widens her eyes and makes a ‘heap’ mime with her hands.
I know what she’s had for dessert, at least, because Rose’s husband Lonnie is still patiently working his way through it, his bulbous nose a half-inch from the skin of the custard. He’s chomping and lip-smacking so loudly I could shut my eyes and imagine I was in a stall with a donkey – that, and the range of other farmyard noises that roll out of him every now and again.
Pearl shakes her head.
‘It is always the same at mealtimes,’ she says. ‘Loud.’
I stroke Rose gently on the hand to wake her up, then set to work taking her blood pressure, temperature and so on. The whole while, Lonnie shovels his way through his bread pudding and custard. He finishes about the same time as me, wearily pushing the bowl aside, leaning back in the chair, sighing and belching and pawing at his straining belt like a sad troll who’d eaten one too many villagers.
I sit down to write up my notes. Rose is asleep again.
‘Exciting life, ‘ain’t it?’ says Lonnie, staring at me with a pouchy hang to his face.
‘Depends what you’re used to.’
‘Desert fox,’ he says, tapping his chest.
‘Dessert fox?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
He stares at me balefully, then carries on.
‘He was a madman, n’all’ he says at last.
‘Who was?’
‘Montgomery.’
‘Oh?’
‘He comes strutting up like the cock o’the walk, and he says to us Good news chaps. You’re going home. Only trouble is, you’ve got to fight your way through Europe to get there, starting in Sicily.” Mind you, they were all like that. You had two enemies, the Germans and the officers. And of the two of ‘em, the officers were the ones you had to watch the most. Thing was, if you was rich in them days, you had three ways to go. If you were bright you went in the Church. Not so bright, the Civil Service.  Absolute idiot, your family bought you a commission in the army.’
‘Nothing changes.’
He laughs, but I’m not sure he heard me.
‘I was a gamekeeper before I got called up,’ he says.
‘Good shot, were you?’
‘What?’
‘Gamekeeper. A good shot. I bet they liked that in the army.’
‘I shot a few people. We all did. It was the war. That was our job.’
‘Must have been awful.’
He sighs again.
I carry on writing.
‘Someone said I should write a book about the whole thing,’ he says after a while.
‘Why don’t you?’
‘Why don’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nah!’ he says. ‘I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.’

‘I really want to change my last name,’ says Annette over coffee. ‘I’ve never liked it. Annette Abbot. Annette Abbot. Ah! Ah! Ah!’ She waggles her jaw up and down. ‘Sounds like I’ve got something stuck in my throat.
‘How long’ve you been married?’
‘Twenty years.’
She takes a sip of coffee.
‘He might need a little reassurance then, your husband.’
‘Maybe. He knows how I feel about it, though. And now the kids are grown up, does it matter? I’ve no idea how to go about it, though. It’s probably more hassle than it’s worth.’
‘What was your maiden name?’
‘Swansborough. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Annette Swansborough. Like one of them film stars from the Thirties.’
‘You could have some pictures taken.’
‘Well I will. When I get my passport renewed.’
She finishes her coffee and starts getting her things together ready for the afternoon visits.
‘Why don’t you have it hyphenated? That way you’d get the best of both.’
‘Abbot-Swansborough? That’s no better, is it? I’d sound like a village in Dorset. No, I think I just need to go back to my maiden name. It’s who I am.’
She shoulders her bag, pats her pockets, checks her glasses are still on top of her head, and turns to go, just pausing long enough to tell me one last thing.
‘That reminds me when I was at a patient’s house,’ she says. ‘I was working with Anne, that lovely new nurse, you know? The patient had an unusual name, can’t remember what. Anyway, Anne said she was the same, her last name being Pratt. Which means when you write her name down it comes out A. Pratt. She said she’d always hated that, but she was married so what could she do? And I was like you. I said why don’t you hyphenate it? With your husband’s surname before yours? It might soften the blow. But she said no, absolutely not. Why? What’s his name? Wright, she said. A. Wright-Pratt. God, we laughed so much I got cramps. And the rest of the visit every time we caught each other’s eye we’d start up all over again.’

‘How long’ve you lived here?’
Dorothy laughs and nods towards the other end of the room.
‘I was born over there,’ she says. ‘in that corner.’
I turn to look, even though it was ninety years ago, and the nappies and towels and pillows and bed have long since gone, along with the partition wall.
‘I’ve lived in lots of different places since then, of course,’ she says, ‘but I came back to look after Mum in her last years,  and then when David was demobbed after the war we just kind of stayed on. And that was that.’
Dorothy is as trim and bright as a woman half her age. She sets the tray of tea things down and pours David’s cup first.
He’s sitting by the window, an imposing figure still, despite his age and illness.
‘If your hair gets any longer I’m going to plait it,’ she says, handing him a cup of tea with a biscuit balanced on the saucer.
‘I’d like that,’ he says. ‘I always thought I’d make a good pirate.’
‘I’ll just finish writing up my notes and then I’ll be off,’ I tell them.
‘No rush,’ says Dorothy.
David stares out of the window, into the street.
‘I was very glad to come home,’ he says. ‘I’d joined up before the war. Couldn’t think what else to do, you see? And I went all through it. India. Europe, the whole invasion thing. Ended up on a boat heading for Japan. Then they dropped the bomb, and turned us round again.’
‘Wasn’t it the anniversary recently? The dropping of the bomb?’
‘Seventy years. A terrible business, but I must admit, we were all pretty relieved. Our lot were heading for this particular bay – nothing special, not like one of the main ports – and yet still we were told to expect around forty thousand casualties. We knew the Americans had suffered badly at Okinawa. We had no illusions about what lay ahead for us. I certainly didn’t expect to come home.’
He finishes his tea in a couple of gulps, then holding the empty cup, stares out of the window at the traffic moving sluggishly backwards and forwards in the bright afternoon sunshine.
‘A nasty, nasty business,’ he says, coming back to the moment, and putting his cup back on the saucer. ‘I just don’t know where the time goes.’
‘No, but your hair does,’ says Dorothy. ‘More tea?’

I’m running a commode out to a patient as a favour to a colleague. I’ve got another call to make before I’m off, and if I’m to finish on time it’ll be a close-run thing, but at least this is simple enough. My only worry is the address. Old Nonesuch Road is about the longest road in the county, possibly the country. Number Twelve doesn’t sound all that credible, given that my satnav has placed the postcode somewhere in the middle. Still, I take it on trust, and eventually turn off the Nonesuch into a little drive that runs between twelve and fourteen.
I ring the bell.

No answer.

It’s not unusual for a patient or their relative to take time coming to the door. They need a commode, after all; they’re bound to be slow. After a while I press the bell again. Maybe I didn’t push hard enough. I listen closely, and hear it ring deep inside the house.

No answer.

I look around for a key safe, check my notes. Ring the bell again, knock.

Nothing.

Just as I’m about to call the office and ask for clarification, the front door flies open and an extraordinary woman stands there. She has a pile of hair as woolly and full as the fleece from an Angora goat, painted eyebrows in two thinly arched lines, bright pink eye-shadow, a scarlet rosebud mouth, all above a shabby cerise top and holed slacks.
She smiles, her teeth pasty with the remains of a sandwich.
‘Ye-es?’ she says.
‘Hi! I’ve been asked to drop round a commode…?’
‘Got one!’ she says, folding her arms and looking me up and down. ‘District nurse came round about an hour ago!’
‘Oh! Well! That’s good, then!’
‘Who sent you?’
‘Who sent me? The hospital avoidance team. They said you needed a commode, for erm..’
‘My mum, yes. But no, the district nurse was only just here and she gave us one. Thanks anyway.’
‘That’s all right. I was in the area, as they say.’
‘Who does?’
‘You know. People. Who say that sort of thing.’
‘Who do you work for?’
‘The hospital avoidance team. We help people with bits and pieces, to erm… keep them out of hospital.’
‘Lovely.’
There’s a pause, which I feel obliged to fill.
‘I was a bit worried about the address,’ I tell her.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Number Twelve, Nonesuch. Given that it’s a long road.’
‘It is a long road. You’re right. That’s why they have to start the numbering again at various points. Otherwise by the time you reached town you’d have house number twenty thousand and something. It’d take up the whole envelope. If you look just up there, by the bus stop? That’s where it starts at number one again. And we’re number twelve.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you knew that didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
She smiles at me, her teeth crackling slightly.
‘Yes.’
She holds me there for a moment, still smiling, then glances behind her, as if she’s heard something that needs attending to.
‘When the traffic goes quiet it means the lights have changed,’ she says, taking a step back. ‘You can reverse out then if you’re quick.’
And with that she slams the door.

‘Do you want me to turn it off?’
‘No, no! Keep it running. Looks good.’
I lay my kit out, open the folder, uncap my pen. ‘What are you watching?’
‘Oh – some old sixties crap.’
A woman in a peach baby doll negligee is exploring the mad scientist’s catacombs by candlelight.
I put a cuff round Ken’s arm and start to take his blood pressure, one eye on the sphyg, one on the screen.
‘You wouldn’t do it, would you?’ I tell him, finding the systolic. ‘You just know it’s not going to end well.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘That nightie would go up in a second. Not to mention her hair.’
‘Your blood pressure’s fine,’ I tell him, ripping off the cuff.
‘Lovely.’
‘Just a couple more things and I’ll leave you alone.’
The woman is in the main chamber now. There’s a talking head covered with wires in a jar, various arms hung on the wall, and the mad scientist confronting her with a pistol.
‘What the hell is this film?’
‘I dunno,’ says Ken. ‘Frozen Nazis or something. That guy with the gun is bringing all the Nazis back by putting their heads on spare bodies. That head in the jar controls them all.’
‘Nazis, eh?’
‘I know. They never learn.’
I take his temperature.
‘Normal,’ I say, writing it down.
‘Lovely.’
It looks like the head in the jar controls all the arms on the wall. For some reason they grab the mad scientist and strangle him.
‘Why are all mad scientists German?’ says Ken as the scientist slumps to the ground – not before shooting the woman in the negligee.
There’s a close up of the head in the bottle.
Bury me! it says, in despair. Bury me!
‘That’s how I felt last time I was in hospital,’ he says. ‘Have you finished?’

Douglas doesn’t seem able to work the door opening mechanism. I ring three times to ask him to buzz me in; each time he says Hello? like it’s the first time we’ve spoken; and each time he mumbles some stuff then hangs up without letting me through. In the end I have to ring the woman who lives in the flat next door.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ I tell her. ‘I’m from the hospital avoidance team. I’ve been ringing Douglas’ number but he doesn’t seem able to…’
The door buzzes before I can finish.
‘Thank you!’
She’s peering out of her door as I make the landing.
‘Thanks for letting me in,’ I say to her. ‘I think he’s been having a little trouble working the intercom.’
‘Douglas? I think he’s been having a little trouble with something else.’
She lifts her right hand to her mouth, gives a disdainful little drinking mime, then slowly closes her door.

Douglas is waiting just inside his flat.
‘Uh – oh! Hello!’ he says, almost falling over. ‘I … er… wha’ d’you want?’
‘My name’s Jim, I’m from the hospital avoidance team. I’ve come to see how you are and to do your blood pressure and whatnot.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Please do.’
He shows me into a small dining room, barely furnished, with a neglected and yellowing air about it. There are some reproductions of famous paintings on the walls: some women and a child in a poppy field by Monet, and one of some cypress trees by Van Gogh.
‘Nice paintings,’ I say to him, putting my bag down and getting the paperwork ready.
‘Not the originals,’ he sniffs, clearing some papers from a hard-backed chair and sitting down.
Illness and alcohol have ravaged his body. He’s quite emaciated, leaning back and slowly straightening, the prominences of his spine working on the wooden backrest to sit him upright like the teeth of a worn old cog.
‘How are you feeling today?’ I ask him.
‘How am I feeling? Bloody awful.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I’m sorry to say it.’

His observations come back surprisingly normal for someone in such poor condition.
I write them down, making conversation as I go, finding out who comes in, does what, when and how often.
‘Did she let you in?’ he says, nodding towards the door and the neighbour across the way.
‘She did. You didn’t seem able to work the release.’
‘She’ll be proper made up about it,’ he says. Then leans forward and whispers confidentially: She’s a nosy old bag. He straightens again. ‘Until the screaming starts. As it will. She has dementia, you know.’
‘Oh?’
I listen to his chest. An interesting collection of clicks and rasps and wheezes.
‘I could hardly hear with all these clocks in the room,’ I say, taking the steth  out of my ears.
The room has at least a dozen clocks of different sizes – a pendulum clock on the wall, and then various novelty clocks, tin alarm clocks and smaller, travel sized efforts, all of them busily clicking away the seconds.
‘I couldn’t figure out which was your heart,’ I say.
He shakes his head.
‘See them there?’ he says, pointing to an identical couple of clocks, heavy, moulded, bright yellow plastic things, a vision of the future that seems so dated now. ‘Five pounds a pair. So I thought – okay then. Right! You’re coming home with me!’
I say some complimentary things about the clocks, then finish the paperwork and pack my things away.
‘There’ll be someone else to see you later on,’ I say. ‘Will you be all right till then?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he says, looking a bit lost.
‘It was nice to meet you.’ I shake his hand. ‘Don’t get up. I’ll see myself out.’

As I hurry across the landing and down the stairs I check my watch – which strikes me as ridiculous, because haven’t I just been in a room filled with clocks, and still I don’t know what the time is.

There’s a framed picture of Sonia on the wall. It’s an unusual black and white shot, taken when she must have been in her late twenties. I wonder if Sonia was in the theatre or vaudeville or something, because the picture is so bold and strange. She’s leaning forwards in an off-the-shoulder gown, her eyes crossed, laughing. Either that, or she was a debutante at a studio session where she goofed-off for a moment and it gave them the image they liked the best, the one that conveyed the essence of her. Either way it’s a good picture.
You can still see the young woman in the ninety year old busy eating porridge on the opposite sofa. She’s a formidable presence, and I don’t feel able to ask her if she was on the stage or not. After all, I’m here to see her husband, not her, and anyway, I’ve got so much to do this morning I don’t really have time.
‘Just a couple more things and I’ll leave you to it,’ I say to her husband Oscar.
‘Hah?’ he says, turning his face in my direction. ‘Wha’dya say?’
I lay my hand on his and speak a little more slowly.
‘Pah!’ he says. ‘Leave me to what, exactly?’
‘Oh now don’t start off on that,’ says Sonia, laying down her spoon and studying us both with equal frostiness. ‘Give the man what he wants and we can all get about our business.’
The TV is on. A Spanish tenor performing arias with the Los Angeles  philharmonic.
‘It’s lovely, being serenaded whilst I work,’ I say. Although the truth is it makes taking a blood pressure much more difficult.
‘Yes? Well, don’t get used to it,’ says Sonia, scraping the last of her porridge from the bowl.