sketches

soap

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Mr Gates is dying in the living room.

Despite the name, it’s the most appropriate place. As well as being the only room big enough to accommodate the bulky hospital bed and dynamic pressure mattress, it’s also the most pleasant, with wide, sunny windows overlooking the garden, warm and well-lit by the sun for most of the day. It has a TV in the corner, too, specially raised up on a wall-mounting so Mr Gates can watch it from his bed. Unfortunately he’s deteriorated so much now that the Emmerdale repeats aren’t really anything more than comforting background noise. He lies semi-conscious, mouth gaping open, breathing in fitful gasps, hugging a pillow, his wasted legs crooked up. He doesn’t look as if he’d last till the advert break, but apparently he’s been like this for weeks. He doesn’t seem distressed, though, and his son, Frank, who’s temporarily moved back to help look after his father, is bearing up surprisingly well considering.

Everything’s in place. There are District Nurses visiting regularly, the GP has supplied the anticipatory meds, there are carers coming in four times a day to freshen him up. The only hitch is that the bed is jammed in the down position.

‘You couldn’t do it again if you tried,’ says Frank. ‘The carers threw a covered cushion on the floor when they were turning him, forgot about it, and when they lowered the bed it dragged the vinyl cover into the mechanism.’ He bends down to tug at the mess sticking out from one of the hydraulic legs. ‘See what I mean? We’ve tried everything to free it, but nothing’s worked.’

The carers can’t give bed care safely or effectively at this height, so the only option is to install a second bed alongside the first, slide Mr Gates over whilst still on the mattress, dismantle the broken bed, then push him back into position.

Four of us have agreed to rendezvous with Zac, the equipment supplies guy. Zac isn’t thrilled with any of this, not the timing, the circumstances, the interruption to his schedule, and certainly not with the number of people milling around, spoiling his routine.

Zac is covered with tattoos, even into those dangerous and anti-social areas, up the neck and the side of his face. He looks like a Maori warrior – so much so that with the stress of all this I wouldn’t be surprised if he did a war dance, flashing his eyes and poking out his tongue. As it is he gives a series of alarming sighs and grunts, and then hurries back outside to the truck to start off-loading. We follow after him in a line like so many ducklings, and immediately start getting in the way. But I suppose theoretically at least we’re some kind of help; in no time at all we’ve got the parts of the new bed carried inside and placed either foot or head end ready to assemble. Zac declines any help with this.

‘I’ve got a system, okay?’ he says, which mostly seems to be a lot of muttering and kicking.

We want to be on hand to pass things over, though, and ultimately to slide Mr Gates across. So instead of all going out into the hallway, we stand around watching Emmerdale.

I’d guess from some of the clothes and hairstyles it’s from the Eighties. The whole thing seems oddly amateurish, like a skit in a local church hall production. There’s a sad looking woman sitting on a swing, and a huge, red-faced guy in a white shirt and golden bow tie telling her how disappointed he is with her and how could she and so on. At one point she turns her eyes up to him in a pathetically pleading way, kicking herself back a little on the swing.

‘It’s no good, Janet,’ says the man. ‘Spare me the sob story. You’ve played your games for the very last time. We’re finished. Do you understand? Finished!’

He walks off.

The theme music plays, and the TV cuts to an advert – insurance for funeral costs.

We all grimace.

‘Can one of you pass me that?’ says Zac, pointing to a strange looking multi-tool on the floor.

We all go to get it at the same time, then all pull back again.

‘Jesus Christ!’ says Zac.

losing centre

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

There’s something so vague about Mrs Graham, something so detached, the view out of her living room window, across all the trees and rooftops of town, feels strangely appropriate, like she’s a balloon and someone let go of her string.
‘Wow!’ I say, putting my bags down. ‘That’s quite a view!’
‘Is it?’ she says. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
She sits neatly in her armchair and waits for me to begin.
She’s watching gymnastics on the television with the sound on mute. A female gymnast flic flacs across the mat in the floor exercise, lands, arches her spine, throws her arms high and wide in showy gestures, then takes a couple of sprung skips and hurls herself back in the other direction.
I explain to Mrs Graham who I am and what the visit is for. She listens to me carefully, but she obviously has no idea, no recollection of having been in the hospital, let alone being brought home by the Red Cross just about an hour ago.
Quite how she’s able to live alone like this I’m not sure. She has carers four times a day, and her daughters live at various points around the city, but hour to hour? It’s a mystery. Environmentally the flat is as safe and hazard free as it’s possible to be. There are no immediate trip hazards, things are neatly squared away, the medication in a locked box. My notes say that the cooker is disconnected, there’s a stairgate to discourage her from going downstairs, there are notes taped to various doors with simple instructions – but with such a poor level of recall or understanding, I can’t imagine how she gets by. She was admitted to hospital with a chest infection and not a fall, though, so that’s some reassurance I suppose.
The gymnasts have moved on to the asymmetric bars. A different competitor has just smacked chalk on her hands, acknowledged the start with a hyperflexed gesture, then thrown herself with a half twist through the air to skip across the bars and begin spinning and curling and doubling back.
I ask Mrs Graham what she used to do before she retired.
‘A biochemist. I’m Dutch, originally. I met my husband just after the war and came to England to work. It was a long time ago,’ she says, staring back at the TV. ‘I was a dancer, too,’ she says, without breaking her gaze. ‘There’s a picture of me over there…’
She gestures behind her without looking. I go over to see – and there she is, a young woman en pointe, arms arched delicately above her head, a headdress of white flowers, a tutu. She’s looking wistfully off into the distance stage left, which – given where the picture is hanging – is pretty much directly at where she’s sitting now.
‘Lovely’ I say.
‘Thank you,’ she says, then gives a little flinch as the gymnast tumbles through the air at the end of her routine, lands a little off-balance, puts a foot out to recover, draws it back when she’s found centre again, straightens, acknowledges the crowd, then strides off.

phlebotomagic

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Craig is a heavy-set young guy with even heavier-set eyes. He’s sitting in an armchair almost completely walled-in with books, some open, some being used as improvised tables for his bottles of Dr Pepper and No Sugar Sprite. Books on the occult, alien conspiracy theories, tarot. Books on the history of the horror film, on special effects, Warcraft, sorcery, sex magic. Books on PHP, C#, Javascript. And weirdly, a book on rabbits.
‘I’ve come to take your blood,’ I say.
‘Whatever,’ he says.
He’s extraordinary. A long, black pencil moustache trailing down either side of an equally long goatee, giving him the look of a sleepy catfish – except a catfish that had spent as much time in the piercing and tattoo parlours as the mud at the bottom of the lake. His tattoos are amazing. Full sleeve canvases of skulls and roses and ivy leaves, swords, flames, goblins, and here and there a portentous Latin phrase in gothic print.
‘Good luck finding a vein,’ he says, extending his right arm and resting it on the top of a book.
He’s right. It’s going to be tricky. Normally if a patient is large and you can’t see the veins, you can work by feel. In Craig’s case, the intricate lines of ink have raised the skin, so what feels like a vein is actually the stem of a rose or the ribbed hilt of a dagger. I’m prodding around for quite a while. To pass the time we talk about tattoos. I show him mine, the Tree of Life I had done on the top of my left arm. He’s polite about it but doesn’t seem that impressed.
‘There’s a lot of people doing it,’ he says. ‘Most studios can sort you out with that kind of thing.’
‘I went for hand-poked,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t know why particularly. I suppose I liked the idea that’s how people tattooed themselves before electricity.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘The whole primitive thing.’
‘I want to get another one, a bit lower down. It’s quite addictive.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he says.
‘There! What about there? That feels like something.’
He shrugs. ‘If you think. I’m okay with it.’
Amazingly, the blood flows immediately.
‘I can’t believe it!’ I tell him when I’m done, withdrawing the needle and taping on some gauze. ‘I wasn’t at all confident with that one.’
‘It’s the book I was leaning on,’ he says, holding it up so I can read the cover.
Divination for Beginners.
Then slowly strokes his feelers, like that was his plan all along.

naked maria

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The cautionary note on Maria’s record was plain enough.
Naturist.
No exclamation point or any other modifier.
Naturist.
Just that. A succinct alert, short but informative.
I think about those signs you see on beaches sometimes: Clothes may not be worn beyond this point. It doesn’t worry me, though. And I suppose it’s good to get the heads up.

What it doesn’t say – and which, in the end, is vastly more relevant – is that Maria likes to live in the dark.

‘Mind yourself,’ says her husband, John, a large, wild-haired man who holds the flat door open and makes an arch with his arm for me to duck under. Leaving the well-lit shared hallway to enter their grotto of inky black is something of an act of faith, only made possible by the thought that John surely HAS to be standing on the floor and not hovering like a malevolent angel over a chasm.

I feel my eyes widen as I struggle to adjust. The absence of light wouldn’t be so bad if the place was clear. As it is, I bark my shins a few times and stumble over – what I take to be – a mobility scooter, a box of junk and either a grandfather clock or a coffin.

‘Careful,’ says John. ‘D’you need a little light there?’
‘Would be good.’
‘Okay then.’ He snaps a switch, and a few, long seconds later a tentative orange glow emanates from a silk covered lamp.
‘Energy saving,’ he says.
‘Thanks.’

Still, it’s better than nothing, just enough to illuminate the room in front of me where Maria is waiting on the sofa. At least naked she’s easier to make out, the mass of her large pale body accentuated by the square of white muslin she’s draped over her middle. She’s like the Venus of Willendorf, on the sofa, with a remote.
‘Sorry, pet,’ she says, putting it to one side. ‘Have a seat.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep moving if that’s okay.’
I think about the torch I’ve got in my bag, and wonder about getting it out.
She shrugs, adjusts her square, then stares past me into the vast plasma TV screen opposite. I’m guessing the TV was on until recently, the images now fallen back into the magical place from whence they came. I look into it, too. It holds the faint image of her naked body, a phantom, caught in the depths of a scrying mirror.

a christmas ghost story

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Strictly speaking, Mr Jeffries is a double-up.
Not for the usual reasons – manual handling issues, a history of aggressive behaviour, substance abuse, hazardous environment or a tendency to make accusations – but for something else, something unspecified. So far I’ve been unable to get to the bottom of it, just a series of knowing smiles and nods. I’m supposed to visit Mr Jeffries to take blood, but unfortunately the nurse I was scheduled to go with has had to run out to a blocked catheter, and for one reason or another, there’s no-one else.
‘It’s okay. I don’t mind,’ I tell Anna, the Co-ordinator. ‘I’m fine going on my own,’ .
‘Are you sure, darlink? I’m so sorry there isn’t anyone to go with you. But I’m sure you’ll be fine. You used to work on ambulance before. I’m sure you’ve come across things a lot more – how should I say – strange.’
‘In what way strange, exactly?’
‘Just – you know – strange. Odd. Something different. But there’s no danger involved and you are strong person so I’m sure you’ll be fine. Just go in, get the blood and come out again.’
She smiles at me. ‘Maybe like this…’
She frowns, crossing her arms across her chest.
‘Why? Is it filthy in there?’
‘No! Is not filthy. Is very nice.’
‘What then? Is he a bit lecherous?’
‘Lecherous? What is this lecherous?’
‘You know. Hands everywhere.’
‘No, darlink. No. He is not lecherous. You’re perfectly safe as far as lecherous is concerned.’
‘So what then?’
‘You’ll see. I’m perfectly happy for you to wait until someone becomes available…’
‘It’s fine. I’ll go get the blood.’
‘You are good boy. Very erm… how you say…?’
‘I don’t know. Brave?’
‘No-ooo….’
‘Foolhardy?’
She doesn’t say what she means.

Mr Jeffries doesn’t answer his phone, which is something the notes say is typical for him. He has a keysafe, though. The only thing is to go there and take a chance he’s in.

* * *

Mr Jeffries lives on the top floor of a run-down block of flats. The architect must have designed the place in a rush over breakfast, because it’s exactly like an upturned cereal box, with a lift at either serving long, unbroken corridors of doors and security grilles. If by the day the block is austere, at night it’s perfectly bleak. The lamp out front flickers, animating the entrance in such a menacing way I can’t help zipping my jacket to the neck and shouldering my bag more squarely. Inside is worse, utterly lightless, with that heavy kind of dark you’d think was pumped in from deep underground. The corridor lights only come on when you move, and even then there’s a delay, so the effect is of a steady falling forwards, disconcerting, not at all pleasant.

I knock on Mr Jeffries door. There’s a muffled answer. I use the key and let myself in.

The flat is warm, close, unaired, filled wall to ceiling with shelves and shelves of books – art, astrology, folklore, history, that kind of thing. Mr Jeffries is sitting in his lounge on an electric wheelchair, as perfectly contained in the glow from his desk lamp as a hunched insect preserved in amber.
He spins round to face me, and the first thing that strikes me are his eyes, wide-set and unblinking, tub-water grey, with a diverging bulge that gives him an acute and predatory appearance. That, coupled with his dry smile and knowing demeanour are as unsettling as you could get, and I suddenly understand why Anna thinks this is a double-up.
‘I suppose you’ve come for my blood,’ he says, arching his long fingers together and scrutinising me over the top of them. ‘The doctor doesn’t think I need it, but I think I know more about my condition than a simple GP. If only I had more energy – and a better prognosis – I’d sue them for millions. But really – what good what that do me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘No. I don’t suppose you do.’
He parts his hands in a simple gesture of letting go, but then his attitude hardens just as suddenly.
‘Here’s what I need you to do…’ he says, and then tells me where to set up my things, what bottles to use, what the tests need to show and so on.
‘Some people find me intimidating,’ he says. ‘My last consultant actually started to shake.’
‘I don’t think I’ll shake,’ I tell him, although it’ll be a miracle if I don’t. ‘I’ll save the shaking for afterwards.’
It helps when I find out that Mr Jeffries used to dialyse in the renal department around the time I was a ward clerk there. I don’t remember him – and I feel sure I would – but it means we have a shared history of names and places I can use to distract him from focusing too much on me.
‘No,’ he says, interrupting a story about one of the PD nurses with red hair out of a bottle, ‘not that vein. Use that one, there…’
It’s annoying, but he’s right. The blood starts to flow, and I’m immediately more relaxed.
‘So you had a transplant?’ I say.
‘I’ll tell you a little story about that,’ he says. ‘The department had been having a run of deaths. A whole year of them. So much so that everyone was beginning to lose faith in their abilities. It was nothing to do with that, of course. But people divine all manner of things from simple coincidence. When it came to me, the consultant brought the kidney back himself, in a box on the backseat of his car. Can you imagine? It was a few years ago, of course. Things are different now. Anyway, I was prepped and readied. Everyone wished me luck. And that was that. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the recovery room. I was conscious of someone standing by the bed, and I thought it was a nurse. But when I turned to look, I saw a young woman, right beside me, staring down at me, with the oddest expression. Not sad – no. Not angry. Just – I don’t know – confused. She stood there for the longest while. So long I couldn’t bear it. I said Thank you for the kidney, closed my eyes, and prayed she would leave me alone. When I opened my eyes again the surgical team were standing around me, everyone smiling, waving blood results in the air, relieved the operation had been a success and their run of bad luck ended. Who was the girl who gave me the kidney? I asked them. She came to me. They dismissed my experience as post-operative hallucinations, and, of course, it was policy for them never to disclose any information about the donor. I knew it wasn’t a hallucination, though. I’ve always been able to see things. Some people can. A little while later, just before I left the unit for good, I saw the consultant again. ‘Who was she?’ I asked him. ‘Let’s just say she was a woman who was formerly wealthy.’ What does that mean – formerly wealthy? What do you think it means?’
‘I don’t know. It’s an odd expression. Maybe he was speaking metaphorically. Maybe he meant wealth as in life, and formerly because she lost it.’
I tape some gauze to the crook of his arm. He gently holds his fingers to it, as if he’s healing the wound by the power of touch.
‘I never saw her again,’ he says. ‘Which is a shame, because she seemed so lost.’
And he turns his enormous eyes up to me, and I have to look away, because I don’t want to see my own reflection contained in them.
‘All done!’ I say, shaking the vials of blood.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘You’ve been most kind.’
‘You’re welcome.’
And he watches me closely as I pick up my things and go.

how to make an impression

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‘To begin with, I’m not Cedric. I know it says Cedric on my birth certificate and all those official places, but it’s really a terrible mistake. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to be a Cedric. I think my parents must have lost at cards or had some kind of fit or something. So although it says Cedric, please feel free to ignore it and call me Bill. Everyone else does.’
He settles back in his armchair.
‘The bathroom’s through there if you’d like to wash your hands,’ he says.
‘It’s okay. I’ve got a bottle of hand cleanser here.’
‘As you wish.’
I take a small bottle out of my bag and pull the cap off. I’m a little heavy-handed, though. When I squirt some foam onto my left palm, a gob flies over and lands on the leather pad of an antique writing desk.
‘Oops,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
‘Will it stain?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘Here. Give it a dab, would you?’
He passes me a pressed cotton handkerchief and I gently pat the area. It doesn’t look great, but I’m hoping the difference in colour is due to the wetness rather than any damage caused by the antiseptic soap.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Have you got any polish? I’m sure that’ll sort it out.’
‘Hm’ he says. He takes the handkerchief back from me, folds it up and puts it on the little table next to him.
Bill is so immaculately dressed – hair oiled and combed to one side, silver moustache trimmed to an even millimetre around his mouth, a precisely knotted tie just visible at the V-neck of a treacle-coloured jumper, an ironed crease running mid-leg down to a pair of monogrammed slippers – he hardly looks real. In fact, he’s so perfect I wouldn’t be surprised if, when he stood up and turned sideways, he revealed that he was in fact a tall, beautifully illustrated, two-dimensional bookmark.
Funnily enough, Bill used to be an antiquarian bookseller, a job he strode into when his frigate docked for the last time after the war. It’s easy to imagine him, sitting at the back of the shop, reverentially turning the pages of a rare book, then swiping off his glasses and getting down to business.
‘One thing I do want you to do is look at my back,’ he says.
‘Because of the fall?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what happened, Bill? I read the ambulance report but I wouldn’t mind hearing it from you.’
‘Would you? Very well. It happened about a week ago now. I was getting out of bed to visit the bathroom in the early hours, as one does. Especially at this age. Several times. So anyway, I sat there a moment on the edge of the bed, collecting my thoughts, berating my fate and so on, and I thought – I wonder what the time actually is? So I reached forward to look at the watch I keep on the dressing table. Well – for some reason that I cannot account for, that simple gesture extended, and extended, and the critical point came and I just couldn’t help myself. I think as I rolled forwards I must have turned and caught my back on the dressing table, because apparently I have a mark there that rather supports the supposition.’
‘Okay. Let’s have a look, then.’
He stands up, and then holds on to his zimmer frame whilst I untuck him and expose his back. As well as a livid, generalised bruise across the upper left side, there’s the impression of one half of a dressing table drawer – the corner of it, mostly, with some of the ornamental handle – everything picked out in a livid red line.
‘Ouch!’ I say. ‘That’s pretty harsh! It’s so clear I could almost read you the name of the cabinet maker.’
‘Yes. Well – it is a fine piece. I bought it at auction fifty years ago. Probably paid a little over the odds but what can I say? It rather made an impression on me.’
And he gives me a perfect, stage wink as he begins the painstakingly slow process of gathering together his many layers and tucking himself back in.

almost done

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Eric used to work at Battersea Power Station.
‘I was so tall they used me as a crane, off-loading the trucks,’ he says. ‘Only kidding. I was an electrician.’
‘That’s a cool place to work’ I say, immediately thinking how hot it must’ve been. ‘Iconic. I think it’s luxury flats now.’
‘Well…’ he says, unlacing his huge fingers and holding his hands apart, illustrating with that one, broad gesture the way things go in the world.
Eric’s wife, Georgie, carefully pushes a wheelchair into the room. Even though she’s a few years younger than Eric she’s still in her nineties.
‘Old bones run in the family,’ she says, getting the wheelchair ready. ‘If you can call it running. C’mon, Eric. Chop chop. He wants you on the bed.’
I’ve come to redress Eric’s pressure sore and generally give him the once over. He’s so stiff and frail now it’s like manoeuvring an old longcase clock. It doesn’t help that we’re surrounded by tables of photo frames and ornaments, souvenirs and trophies, the random accumulation of a long and busy life.
‘There!’ says Georgie. ‘Nothing to it!’
Georgie’s tells me as brightly as she can about the nursing homes they’ve been looking at. Eric rolls onto his side and puts the flat of his right hand over his forehead. I can see how painful this is for him, the indignity of strangers coming into the house to perform such intimate functions, the prospect of moving to a nursing home where he’ll be even more dependent.
Suddenly, the light seems to dim in the room, as if there’s been a momentary interruption to the power supply.
‘Oops,’ says Georgie, and then, when it comes back up again: ‘There we are!’
I try to distract him from the task at hand.
‘Were you born here, Eric?’
‘America,’ he says.
‘America? Wow! What happened?’
‘My father was a soldier in the Great War. He fought with the Americans and ended up going over there. To see what it was like. My mother went too of course and that’s where I was born. They did alright I think, but she missed home too much and we all came back. I was only little. And now here we are.’
I’m conscious of the jump he’s just made, and how maybe I should say something about it, about the sudden and dizzying vistas that can open up between the past and the present sometimes. But I can’t think how to put it into words, and anyway, I’ve got to concentrate on the dressing. So all I end up saying is: ‘Almost done.’
Georgie squeezes me on the shoulder.
‘I’ll be out back if you need me,’ she says. ‘I like it when the nurses come. It means I get five minutes to myself.’
And she hurries out of the room.

the band

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Normally you can judge how expensive the nursing home fees are by how quiet it is. Today, though, Shaftesbury Manor is positively rowdy. There’s a birthday party in the dining room, and a sea cadet’s brass band putting on a show for the other residents in the lounge.

I’m waiting to take blood from birthday girl (awkward, but the GP was insistent). The party’s just breaking up, so to pass the time I loiter in the doorway watching the band. The conductor is sweating so much her cap is sliding off, her tunic so tight she can barely lift her arms. It’s quite a racket they’re making. Handheld xylophones, trumpets, a drum. I’m guessing the residents slumped in the armchairs are either dead or have their hearing aids turned off, because they look remarkably unmoved, given the volume. Right at the front is a tiny kid on a tuba, blowing so enthusiastically every third bar he’s at risk of putting himself through the window. The band looks confined, antsy, on the verge of something desperate. Any minute now, despite the conductor, they’ll simply have to start marching – over chairs, residents, whatever – down the corridor, out the front door, and off into the free world.

All the party guests have started making their goodbyes, putting on coats, clapping each other on the shoulders, shaking hands, kissing, laughing. I stand back but even so I’m almost drawn in to it. Maybe they think I’m the long-lost great great nephew or something, wearing a backpack because I’ve come from the airport.
‘No, no!’ I say to one of them coming out. ‘I’m a nursing assistant. I’m here to take blood.’
He does a comedy double-take, holds his hands out to the side, turns round and shouts to the others: ‘Who ordered the vampire?’
One of the carers taps me on the shoulder.
‘I’ll get Luciana and wheel her through’ she says. ‘I’m guessing you want a little privacy.’
I nod at the band.
‘I don’t know. At least you won’t hear her scream,’ I say.
The carer frowns, and hurries on.

panopticon

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If it’s hard to understand the present, the past is almost impossible.

Take Jeremy Bentham, for instance. Jeremy Bentham was an eighteenth century philosopher and social reformer. He was famous for practising ‘utilitarianism’, based on the principle that it’s the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong. Which sounds okay – until you read about one of his public works, something so nightmarish George Orwell would’ve been proud.

He designed a prison called The Panopticon – an architectural principle he wanted to roll-out into hospitals, schools and other public institutions. The Panopticon was a hexagonal building with a central observation tower and cells radiating out like the petals of a monstrous concrete and iron flower. The idea was that the guards in the tower would be able to keep an eye on the prisoners the whole time. The prisoners wouldn’t know when the guards were looking at them, so they’d be encouraged to toe the line. It was an early experiment in Big Brother culture, the state as an all-seeing, ever-present eye. Maximum compliance, minimum effort.

A prison like this was built on the mudflats at Milbank, London in 1816, a pestilential spot that almost guaranteed the majority of the prisoners would never live long enough to be transported. Added to the fact that anyone who entered the prison quickly became lost in the labyrinthine corridors, and that by some acoustic quirk the prisoners could pretty much whisper and be heard right the way round the block, it meant that the experiment failed and the prison was closed just seventy years later.

I’ve come to visit a patient in a new-build Jeremy Bentham would’ve appreciated. The only difference between Calypso Court and The Panopticon is that on the ground floor here, instead of infirmaries, laundries and mortuaries, there are shops selling candles, bikes and remaindered clothing; instead of bars on the windows there are blinds; and instead of an observation tower in the centre there’s a fountain and public seating, where a bored looking guy flicks crumbs from his baguette to a squabble of pigeons.

Not a great place to live for a paranoid schizophrenic.

Paul is dressed entirely in black, like one of those puppeteers who want to merge into the background so you only focus on the puppet. Paul is in his forties, a reserved, watchful man who stands behind the door when he invites me in. He’s lived here a while but it looks like he just moved in, things in bags and boxes, things drying over chairs.
‘Sorry about the mess’ he says, moving a stack of letters, then putting a magazine over them as a disguise.
‘That’s okay,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt and I promise I won’t keep you long. It’s just the doctor wanted us to pop by for a couple of days to see how the medication change is going.’
He shrugs.
‘It’s going fine,’ he says.
He picks a grape from a bunch in a plastic tray and nibbles at it whilst I set my things out.
‘Fruit!’ I say. ‘That’s a healthy snack!’
He stops nibbling and frowns.
‘I should eat more fruit,’ I say. ‘It’s so tempting to eat crap all day.’
He finishes the grape then wipes his hands dry on the back pockets of his jeans.
‘Where do you want me?’ he says.

* * *

When I leave, the guy and the pigeons are gone.

fifi the owl

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Jeremy is busy marching through the house. He has such a neutral style of movement, and his face is so slack and empty, it’s hard not to think of him as some kind of ultra-realistic, domesticated robot. Except, if he was a robot, it would be one that had a serious neural problem, maintaining the impulse to go from A to B, but utterly lacking the ability to make sense of anything when he got there. He marches up to my chair and stands looking down at me. Then without any change of expression he marches back across the room again, opens the door to the kitchen, goes through, and then shuts the door quietly behind him.
‘He’s like this the whole time,’ says Sheila, smiling the kind of resilient smile I imagine her beating from a metal she mined from her soul.
‘It’s really quite exhausting,’ she says, perching on the arm of the sofa, ready to go if needed. ‘It’s alright for Jeremy. He can switch off at three and have a good sleep. I try to get some time in, too, but it’s not the same as proper bedrest. Then you see he’s on the go again through the night. And I must admit I’m starting to feel the strain.’

Jeremy had a fall the other day. The ambulance came and found it was only a minor injury, so he didn’t need to go to hospital.
‘Thank goodness,’ says Sheila. ‘Jeremy in a hospital! Imagine the chaos!’
But the fall seems to have precipitated a realisation that things can’t go on as they have been.
‘I’ve done my best,’ she says. ‘I have two sons, and they’ve both been telling me I’ve got to put him in a home. And – well, I don’t know – it just hasn’t felt right for me. The son in Australia can’t do much to help, of course, but the other one comes down regularly and does what he can to give me a break. We haven’t had carers because – as you can see – he’s perfectly mobile and there’s not much for them to do. I shower him once a week and the rest of the time I’m just chasing him round the house with a sponge. He wears pads, because he’s doubly incontinent, and that’s a terrible problem. But carers? Up until recently I couldn’t see what they could do for us. I don’t want to waste anybody’s time…’

The kitchen door opens and Jeremy walks back through, straight up to the coffee table, where he picks up a magazine, flicks through it urgently, puts it down again, turns, heads back to the kitchen and slowly shuts the door.
‘But now I know I have to put Jeremy in a home,’ she carries on. ‘He’s not safe here, and I’m completely exhausted. I can feel my health beginning to go.’
‘I’m not surprised. I think you’ve done amazingly well to cope this long.’
‘Do you?’ she says. ‘I don’t know. You see – I feel so wretchedly guilty all the time. And the funny thing is, I know that if the situation was reversed, he wouldn’t hesitate. If it was me marching around the place like this, Jeremy would be outside waiting for the ambulance.’
‘Oh. Sorry to hear that.’
She shrugs.
‘You can only ever do what feels right for you,’ she says.

On the other side of the room is a large, red brick fireplace and black slate hearth. All along the mantelpiece, and standing around the hearth, are dozens of stone and ceramic owls. The largest is to the right of the fireplace – a cat-sized modern sculpture, where the owl has been reduced to the minimum details you need to identify it: plump body, pointy ears, engraved lines for the wings, and two deep-drilled and perfectly round holes for the eyes.
‘Do you like my owls?’ says Sheila.
‘I do,’ I tell her. ‘Especially that one.’
‘Fifi?’ says Sheila. ‘Yes. She’s my favourite, too. She keeps an eye on us. She doesn’t miss a trick.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I can see that.’