sketches

two from the queue

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Maybe in the future they’ll have an AI coordinator. Something with a wipe-clean face and a decent range of expressions. Something that can reply to an email, accept a referral, schedule a visit, settle an argument, make a clinical decision, take a note, make an amendment, triage a patient, liaise with a pharmacist, sort out an IT problem and laugh sympathetically at the struggles of a new member of staff – whilst at the same time keeping tabs on the thirty or so patient visits that are happening at any given moment. Until they do, though, they’re stuck with us.

Coordinating makes you crazy. Uncoordinated. Or, if not that, exactly, more hyper-coordinated, so that everything you do, even the little things, are done so intensely and with such purpose, you feel a little shaky by lunchtime – something which all the coffee you drink does nothing to ease.

You’re besieged by nurses and therapists, managers and carers, cleaners and admin staff, a constant coming and going, everyone wanting something, from a shift swap to an update to a pencil sharpener. I’m so conscious of the noise levels I’ve toyed with the idea of wearing a Daft Punk-style helmet – maybe with a light on the top that’ll flash when I’m available. I feel sorry for whoever it is I happen to be speaking to on the phone. They must think I’m calling from a bus station or a call centre. It can’t sound good.

There are some perks, though. Limitless coffee is one. The buzz of getting things in order is another. But one of the best are the random conversations you overhear when people are waiting to handover.

For example:

A: I went on that dating app you told me about.
B: Yeah? How d’you get on?
A: Alright. I struggled a bit with my profile. I thought I sounded a bit boring, so when it said hobbies I put chess.
B: Chess?
A: Yeah. Why?
B: Can you even play chess?
A: No.
B: Aren’t you worried you’ll get found out?
A: We’re hardly likely to be playing chess on our first date, are we? Unless they’re a complete perv.
B: But what if they ask you about it?
A: I’ll just say I like to play it now and again and that’s it.
B: But what if they ask you stuff?
A: Like what?
B: I don’t know. Who your favourite player is.
A: (laughs) They won’t.
(pause)
B: Don’t you think it might put them off?
A: I’ve already had two dates.
B: Two?
A: Two.
(pause)
B: They must be desperate.
A: Thanks a lot.

And another:

A: I was at the doctor’s the other day and there’s this kid with his hoodie up standing in front of me in the queue, shuffling about. And I think to myself – hang on a minute, that’s Tiffany’s youngest, Brandon. So I tap him on the shoulder, and he turns round, and fuck me, it was! So I says to him “What are you doing here, Brandon?” – but then I think – No! Noooo no no! That’s naughty. I can’t be asking him that. I mean, he might go and tell me, and that’d be awkward. For both of us. I mean – I’m best mates with Tiffany and I might struggle not to spill the beans. But do you know what he says? He says “I’m too embarrassed”. So I say “Well you gotta tell me now.” And he goes: “No. You’ll just think I’m a dullard.”
B: A dullard?
A: A dullard. That’s what he says. A dullard. I didn’t even know what it meant. I thought it was a kind of duck.
B: What teenage boy uses a word like dullard?
A: A Brandon-type boy, obviously Shell. Anyway, I say to him: “Whatever it is I won’t think any the worse of you. Promise.” So he says: ‘I’ve got a fingernail stuck in my throat”.
B: A fingernail?
A: He bites his nails and swallows it. And a bit got stuck in his throat.
B: Urgh! Who bites their nails and swallows it? Gack!
A: Yeah? Well – sorry to ruin your world, Shell, but a lot of people do. And not everyone who picks their nose flicks it, neither.

a ghost called alf

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

I’m looking through Judy’s notes, the last time someone listened to her chest. I can’t help laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’ she says.
‘Well – I think the nurse who wrote this must’ve been hungry. She’s written bilateral crepes.’
I show her the little drawing in the notes. The rough sketch of her lungs, a line of little crosses at the bottom of both, an arrow pointing to them.
Judy’s expression doesn’t change.
‘What does that mean?’ she says.
‘It should say creps.’
‘Craps?’
‘Creps. Short for crepitations. I think that’s what it stands for. Anyway, it’s that crackly sound you get sometimes when there’s gunk in the lungs.’
Judy shrugs.
‘I know all about that,’ she says. ‘I’ve had enough of that.’
‘You’re sounding better today, though.’
‘I’m not dead yet, then?’
‘No! Alive and kicking.’
‘I’ll kick you in a minute.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
She stares at me.
‘Where are you from?’ she says. ‘Or-stralia?’
‘Australia? No! I was born in London but brought up in the Fens.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That explains it.’
I shut the folder and carry on with the examination.

Judy is ninety-eight but looks older. In fact, with her quilted housecoat, netted, silvery hair, enormous slippers, stiffly jointed movements – the way she wobbles along clinging to a kitchen trolley loaded with toast, Tommy Tippee beaker and emergency button – it feels like I’m in a marionette update of the Red Riding Hood story, where the Big Bad Wolf works for a Community Health Team, and lets himself in with the keysafe.

‘Are you going to be much longer?’ she says.
‘No. Almost done.’
She takes a toot of tea from the beaker.
‘Would you like me to freshen that up for you?’
‘No – thank you,’ she says. ‘I shall need the lavatory.’
There’s a pause whilst I add my notes to the folder.
‘What did you do – before you retired?’ I say.
‘Shorthand typist,’ she says.
‘How lovely!’ I say. ‘I like typing. It’s one of the most useful skills I ever learned. That and driving.’
‘I worked in a brewery,’ she says, moving on. ‘That’s where I met Alf.’
‘Did he work in the office, too?’
‘Nah. He was in and out. But we’d throw things at each other and we sort of went on from there.’
‘Sounds brilliant.’
‘It was hard during the war, though. Terrible hard. There were these Ack Ack guns on the roof. You should’ve heard ‘em when they went off. Boom! Boom! Boom! The whole place shook like it was gonna fall in. They were having a pop at all them German bombers comin’ over. It was a terrible business. Terrible.’
‘How long were you married, Judy?’
‘A long time. So long I couldn’t tell ya. But Alf’s been gone for years now and – well – that’s that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for? It’s not your fault. Is it?’
‘No. I suppose not.’
‘Well then.’

I put the finishing touches to the notes.

‘Why don’t you go upstairs and have a lie-down if you’re tired?’ she says.
I look up from the folder.
‘Sorry, Judy – what?’
‘Not you,’ she says. ‘Him.’
She narrows her eyes and nods at the empty chair behind me. I turn to look.
‘My old man,’ she says, sighing and leaning back again. ‘If I don’t keep talking to him he might go orf’ with someone else.’

fuzz

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t help that Moira takes out her hearing aid the moment I put it in.
And when I kneel down next to her chair to shout in her ear and explain why we’ve come to see her, I kneel on a tack strip.
‘Are you alright dear?’ she says as I swear and leap up again.
‘Fine. I’m fine,’ I say, rubbing my knee, tentatively exploring the small hole in my trousers.
Moira stares at me, her jaw bobbing up and down, like a ventriloquist’s doll on satellite delay.

It’s not a great hospital discharge, that’s for sure. It’s going to take a while to figure out what’s what, and even whether it’s safe for Moira to be here. For a start, her landline’s out of action, which means the Carelink alarm box is also redundant. Not only that, the phone is in the middle of the carpet, the power line one side of her chair, the phone line snaking across the carpet and off into the socket in the hall. Not so much a trip hazard as a trip trap. Someone’s obviously taken the view that Moira should stay downstairs. There’s a bed in the corner, a commode and a zimmer frame, but the bed’s unmade, the bedrail on its end against the wall, and the commode in the middle of the room. She’s wearing pads but no sign of any fresh ones. The fridge has the barest minimum – a loaf of bread, a tub of spread, a pack of cheese slices, a pint of milk. The freezer has a pizza and a few oven meals whose date I haven’t checked but from the packaging look fairly antique. All in all, it doesn’t seem as if much has happened since Moira was taken into hospital two months ago. And although we’ve arranged for carers to come in four times a day, it’s debatable whether that’s sufficient. In fact, looking at Moira sitting in her chair, surrounded by not much, I’m wondering if they’ve started outsourcing the discharging of patients to an online delivery company. Although, I’m sure if they DID, at least you’d need a signature, and in this case, she’d have gone back to the depot.

‘What’re you going to do now?’ she says.
‘I need to sort your phone out.’
‘My what?’
‘Your phone. It’s not working, Moira. It’s too dangerous left on the floor like this.’
‘Don’t you go breaking it.’
‘I won’t.’

The first thing I do is call the Carelink people. They say they’ll send a technician round within the hour to install a box that works off the mobile signal until the landline is up again. Luckily there’s a power socket in the hall, so I plug the phone in there and put it safely on a table, ready to be fixed.

‘What’s your son’s number?’ I shout.
‘My what?’
‘John. What’s his number?’
‘Who’s it you say?’
‘John…’
I make the international sign of the phone.
She immediately races through the number.
‘Oh – hang on a minute,’ I say, getting out my mobile. ‘Okay. What’s it again?’
‘The what?’
‘John. His number.’
She stares at me.
I go to kneel down by her but stop myself at the last minute.
I lean in and shout in her ear.
‘WHAT’S JOHN’S NUMBER?’
She races through it again. I repeat it to myself as I put in the area code.
‘What about the telly?’ says Moira, pointing a crooked finger Grim Reaper style at the screen. But John’s picking up, so I hold up my hand as if to say ‘shan’t be a second’ and walk into the kitchen to speak to him.

The man that answers sounds utterly spent.
‘I was round there for hours and she never showed,’ he says. (I want to ask him what he did for all those hours, but I let it ride). ‘I’m in my seventies myself,’ he says. ‘I’ve got my own problems.’
‘It’s difficult,’ I say.
‘I give her some of the stuff outta my fridge, but she wouldn’t have it. Mum’s not easy – I don’t know if you’ve found that out yet? She was always difficult. Old age hasn’t done nuffin’ to improve on things.’
‘She won’t put her hearing aids in.’
He laughs.
‘Yep. And that’s the least of it. I could go on, but you don’t want to hear it, and I don’t particularly want to say it.’
‘We’ve got to get her landline fixed,’ I tell him. ‘Without it, the personal alarm won’t work.’
‘My son’s sorting that out,’ he says. ‘Or should be. I’ll give him a nudge. ‘Course – he’s busy with his own life.’
‘There’s the TV as well. It doesn’t seem to be working.’
‘Yep. He’s looking at that n’all.’
‘Great. We’ll be putting carers in four times a day, and we’ll have various clinicians and therapists coming in and out. Can I give them your number?’
‘Why not?’ he says. ‘Although I’m not sure what I can really do.’
I ask if he’ll do a shop to stock up on the things she might like, microwave meals and so on, plus a supply of pull-up pads.
‘Righto,’ he says. ‘I’ll drop them round tomorrow morning.’
He rings off.

Back in the sitting room Moira is staring at the blank TV. I turn it on, but it just goes to a fuzz and nothing I try makes it any better.
‘John’s sorting it out,’ I tell her.
She holds out her hand and makes a flapping motion with her fingers.
‘Where is it?’ she says. ‘What’ve you done with it?’
I hand her the remote.
She points it at the screen, flips it on and off. On, off. On, and then off.
Fuzz.

who wakes the lion?

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Mrs Kerridge isn’t at all how I imagined her from the phone call a couple of days ago. Instead of a velociraptor in wig and slippers, shreds of flesh trembling from her teeth, I shake hands with a trim, short-haired woman in her sixties. Her smile does seem a little flat, though, like those masquerade half-faces on a stick – but to be fair, mine probably looks just as forced. We’re both doing our best.
‘Good to meet you!’ I say, holding out my hand.
‘You too!’ she says, shaking it.
‘Sorry for the confusion.’
‘Can’t be helped.’
‘No.’
We stand in the hallway, smiling, swaying slightly.
‘Lovely house!’ I say, shoving my hands deep into my pockets.
‘Thank you! We do try.’
‘Amazing.’
‘Yes.’

Greg, the equipment technician saves us, wiping his boots hard on the mat.
‘Mind if I check the lie of the land?’
‘Not all!’ beams Mrs Kerridge. ‘It’s going to be quite a house full!’

We go through to the living room where Mrs Kerridge’s father has been installed on a hospital bed. His mobility has deteriorated to the point where he needs a dynamic, pressure-relieving mattress, but because he’s non-weight bearing – and a hoist had been ruled out due to the distress it causes him – the only solution is to assemble the replacement bed and mattress next to him, slide him across, strike the old bed and then move him back into position. I’d tasked two of my colleagues to help with the transfer. They arrived in good time, and we stand around making chit-chat whilst Greg puts the new bed together.

Mr Kerridge snr is oblivious to the whole procedure. Opposite, half-way up the wall, is a large, flat screen TV. It’s currently playing a Zoo Vet programme. There’s a ventilated lion on the operating table, vets in scrubs standing around with their gloved hands in the air, like no-one wants to be first to start.
‘A lion!’ says Mrs Kerridge.
‘Imagine!’

For some reason, what it makes me think of is the last time I’d spoken to Mrs Kerridge. She’d rung the office to complain, and even though I didn’t know anything about the case and had had no contact, I was the only one available to take the call. She’d been furious, incandescent. There were a number of things that had gone wrong since her father had been with our service. Promises made and broken. Conflicting advice. Disruptive appointments. It was a list that spooled out furiously as I held the phone slightly away from my ear. And even though I had the patient record open in front of me, and tried as hard as I could to make sense of what she was saying, there was nothing I could come up with that would placate her. In fact, it was less of a complaint and more of an audio onslaught, a release of verbal steam, and the best I could do was lob-in the occasional I’m sorry to hear that or let me look into that for you. The advice in these situations is never to take it personally. The complainant feels aggrieved, so just hear them out, make notes, and resist the urge to promise to fix things that might only end up making the situation worse. It was difficult to bite my tongue, though. I could see from some of the narrative entries on screen that she’d been hostile in the past, refused help and then complained when it didn’t arrive, turned equipment away, and generally made life difficult for the therapists and clinicians.
‘I think there’s some sort of family rift,’ said Anna to me afterwards. ‘Best not go there. Once the bed’s in he’s open to the district nurses, so…’

Of course, it just so happened that the bed was late. There was a misunderstanding between the therapist who ordered it and the senior therapist who signed it off (it’s an expensive piece of kit). So the delivery date got bumped, and I was tasked to call Mrs Kerridge to tell her we couldn’t make the appointment but would be there the following day at the same time. I was fully expecting her to reach through the phone and throttle me, but it went to voicemail. I left a message. I heard nothing back. Everything was eerily quiet. The kind of quiet that falls on a lush rain forest in the lee of a volcano before it blows.

I was dreading the appointment. I’d volunteered to be one of the three, not just because I felt mean off-loading it onto someone else, but because I was curious to meet the woman who’d been so vile on the phone. What would she look like? How would she be? How well would I be able to withstand that kind of assault in person? It was something of a morbid fascination, like feeling drawn to the edge of a cliff to look down on the wild sea raging below.

But no. Here we are, perfectly calm, half watching Greg assemble the bed, half-watching a lion having its gall-bladder removed.
‘Amazing!’ I say to Mrs Kerridge.
‘I wouldn’t want to be the one who wakes it up, though. Would you?’
And she nods at me, and smiles.

ozymandias

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Each patient record has a reminder area on the home page. It’s supposed to draw your attention to essential details or dangers, such as the need for double-up visits, the contact numbers of the relatives you must liaise with first, the keysafe code, any environmental dangers you should be aware of. So the first thing I write is:

Two small dogs – friendly, but bark when you knock

It’s only when I read it out loud I see the problem with the sentence. So I delete and write instead:

Two small dogs. Loud to begin with, but soon settle down.

*

Mrs Albright is ninety-seven. She lives alone in a ramshackle bungalow, top of a narrow lane of cottages and heavily-buttressed flint walls leaning out at extraordinary angles, an ancient church under scaffolding, and a strange, round building with worn stones and arrow slits standing alone in a paddock, that looks like maybe it’s the last thing standing of a castle, currently serving as a chicken house.

Like most of everything else down the lane, Mrs Albright is old and falling down. But although physically she’s reaching the end of her ability to cope, intellectually she’s as formidable as ever.
‘Apart from the carers coming in twice a day, and your family popping in when they can, do you manage to see anyone else?’
‘Anyone else? Do you mean socially?’
‘Well – yes, I suppose I do.’
‘I run an ancient history group once a week, if that counts. Does that count?’
‘I think that counts.’
‘Excellent. Then – yes. Every Wednesday I have a dozen or so people round and we discuss a broad range of topics. Last Wednesday Sally did the Assyrians. This Wednesday it’s Margaret on Alexander the Great.’
Whilst we’re talking, Mrs Albright’s dogs – two bug-eyed pugs – have plopped themselves down to sleep around her feet.
‘Yes – I’m afraid they do that a lot,’ she says, peering down. ‘They like to be near me in case I drop anything overboard, a bit of crumpet or what have you, which I’m afraid to say does happen from time to time. The problem is I forget the damned things are there and when I get up to spend a penny, I go flying. It’s a miracle I’ve lasted this long without breaking anything. Not so much as a cup.’
Mrs Albright’s son Richard is sitting with us at the table. He’s already mentioned that the family are looking at residential care, something Mrs Albright seems happy to think about.
‘I’ll miss the old place,’ she says, planting both hands firmly on the table and looking around. ‘But – you know, one thing that became very apparent to me very early on in my career, is that nothing lasts forever.’

into the hive

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Highdale Lodge sounds like a golfing hotel. Truth is, the nearest it will ever get to a fairway is the smear of grass in the middle of the road running by it, and the only shots the residents make are into-the-vein.

You’d never know it was there if you didn’t know it was there. When the weather’s better you might wonder about the people hanging around, leaning against the wall, but you’d probably think they were something to do with the Magistrate courts in session a few doors down. Because otherwise, Highdale Lodge is ruthlessly, determinedly anonymous, no nameplate or number, utterly forgettable. The building itself seems to sit up from the general run of the street, the first row of windows higher than usual, like the road was subject to flooding or riots. The main door is set back at the end of a narrow recess four or five feet deep, an odd architectural feature, somewhere between an alcove and an alleyway. The door – if you paused long enough to look into the recess – is severe, thickly-painted, double-hinged, more like the fortified entrance to a private citadel than the front door to a hostel. There’s a single, metalled button to the left of it to talk to the staff, linked to a security camera so sturdy it could take a swing from a lump hammer and still be looking down at you.

Everyone who enters the Lodge has to go up a half dozen steps and pass the office counter on the left. It would be a cliche to describe the Lodge as a hive – even though the layout is exactly like a hive, with endlessly bifurcating, shoulder-width corridors leading to a bewildering number of tiny rooms, and everyone who takes you to each particular room seems to do a little wiggle to let you know how to get back – but if I DID feel tempted, and DID describe it as a hive, I’d have to say it would be a particularly busy hive, administratively confusing and always at the point of failure, the kind of hive where every bee has to sign in and out, and many are tagged, and have their stings monitored, and the farmer is at his wits end, desperate for more hives, but you’d have to think there’s no money in honey.

My patient, Keith, seems happy enough, though. To begin with, at least. He stubs out his cigarette and turns on his nebuliser.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ he gasps.
There’s a great smear of damp in the corner, spreading upward like a malignant wave. It’s a poor situation for someone with COPD.
‘I’m hoping to get ah’t of ‘ere soon,’ he wheezes through the mask. ‘It’s a shit’ole. I ave’da go upstairs to the kitchen. Me like I am it may as well be the moon. So it’s not like I even get a decent meal.’

I check him over. Unsurprisingly, his SATS are lower than you’d expect.
‘I don’t need to tell you the smoking’s not helping,’ I say, writing in the folder.
‘Oh – here we go!’ he says. ‘It’s all my fault! Yeah – I know! But listen, mate – it weren’t so long ago they give you a fag with yer bottle a’milk at school. Everyone smoked everywhere, all the time – on the buses, the tube, the pictures. Saturday night, you couldn’t see the cowboys for the smoke! So don’t come round ‘ere blaming me for everything…’
‘I know it’s difficult, Keith. I just meant it’d be better if you could cut down, given how bad your lungs are. Even a little bit. That’s all. There are things around to help, patches and whatnot.’
‘Patches!’ he says. ‘Don’t talk to me about patches! What about them patches over there, eh?’

And he turns away to nod at the damp, and then turns back again, and glares at me over the rim of his mask.

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

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

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.