sketches

sunset terrace

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‘I’m just finishing off my mother’s rectal area but you could come over at a quarter past five if that would be acceptable?’
I check my watch. It’s ten to.
‘Okay. Fine. I’ll see you then, Jeremy.’
‘Lovely, James. Looking forward to seeing you at a quarter past five, then. Goodbye.’
I don’t know what’s more disconcerting – the formal description of the personal care Jeremy’s giving or the way he changed ‘Jim’ to ‘James’. Either way, I’m intrigued to meet him.

The house is in the middle of a long terrace, the only thing marking it out being an atmosphere of general neglect. Nothing too awful; more like a disaffected giant leant in with the eraser end of an enormous pencil and rubbed it out a little. The number is a rusted iron affair, the black paint long since flaked off, hanging on a skew so it’s only possible to make out by taking it in sequence with the numbers on the houses either side. I ring the bell and take a step back. After a long pause Jeremy comes to the door, wiping his hands on some kind of souvenir tea towel.

‘Oh hello, James!’ he says, draping the tea towel over his shoulder and reaching out to shake my hand. His feels icy from the water, soft and broad, too; if I closed my eyes I could imagine I was shaking flippers with a seal.
‘Don’t just stand there!’ he says, flapping me through. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
‘It’s freezing – but at least it’s bright.’
‘Yeees! It’s surprising what you can tolerate with a little light. She’s just through here, James. Excuse the mess.’

The house still follows the original two-up, two-down floor plan – a small front sitting room and back parlour, a tiny kitchen and downstairs toilet, and two rooms upstairs. Jeremy has set his mum’s bed up in the parlour, just about managing to squeeze it in along with a commode and a comfy chair. The front room is for watching TV, and this is where his mother is sitting, wearing a short fur jacket and a beige turban – a little at a slant – fixed at the front with a brooch. Jeremy’s paintings cover the walls: swirling life studies in reds and browns and yellows, so thickly done I imagine he uses both ends of the brush, and then maybe his feet.

I introduce myself to Jeremy’s mother, but although she smiles contentedly she makes no sign that she’s really understood who I am or what I’ve come to do. Jeremy leans in and bellows in his mother’s ear – much more of a shock to me than it is to her – then leans out again.
‘She’s a little hard of hearing,’ he says, gently. ‘Would you like me to make you some tea whilst you take her readings?’

I run through the obs, and I’m pretty much done by the time he brings through two mugs and a beaker for his mum.
‘Everything looks fine,’ I say, looping the stethoscope over my neck and taking the mug.
‘Well that’s a relief.’
‘Yep. I think all we need to do is book some physio to get your mum back up to strength, have someone come in a couple more times to make sure she stays on the level, and maybe have an OT come round to see if there’s any more equipment you might find useful.’
‘I don’t know where it would go,’ says Jeremy. ‘I mean – look at the place. But we’re in your capable hands. We’re really very grateful.’
I write up my notes on the laptop whilst he sits on a stool and watches.
‘I love your paintings,’ I tell him.
‘Thank you!’ he says. ‘I use their old front bedroom as a studio. The light’s much better there, you know. Painting’s my thing. It’s what keeps me sane.’
‘Everybody should definitely have a thing. But how would you say you’re bearing up generally? It must be quite a strain.’
‘Oh. That’s kind of you to ask. It has been hard, that’s for darn sure – but I’m fine. As I say, I have my art.’
‘Do you need any care support?’
‘What would they do? I do it all.’
‘Well – I don’t know. Give you a bit of a break? Maybe you could consider some respite care at some point. You’ve got to look after your health, too.’
He laughs.
‘Me? I’m alright. You have to be, don’t you? I must admit it was hard at first, though. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. But the rest of the family live abroad and they’ve got their own families so there wasn’t really anyone else. I’ve just had to learn as I went along. And now look at me – nurse, domestic, pharmacist, accountant. Electrician! But like I say. I still have time to paint. And we watch a lot of black and white films together, don’t we mum? We’re going to watch one when you go. A good one. Sunset Boulevard. Mum’s favourite. We’ve seen it I don’t know how many times. Norma Desmond…’
He puts his mug on the floor, jumps up, straightens, widens his eyes, snarls, throws the tea towel over the opposite shoulder and says Ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille.’
He holds the pose a few seconds, then sits back down on the bed again and picks up his mug.
‘And – scene!’ he says, taking a sip.

eek emoji

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Mrs Geraldo is tidily stretched out on the bed, fully and immaculately dressed in a tartan bolero jacket, frilly white blouse with a rope of pearls around the ruff, corduroy skirt, thick black stockings and black court shoes, her hands neatly folded over her tummy, her legs crossed, her head supported by two crisply laundered pillows. It’s a double bed, the right side taken up with a collection of unusual cuddly toys – a horned goat, an octopus, a snail and so on. The room itself is as immaculate as Mrs Geraldo, bright paintings, silk drapes, silver framed photographs, richly coloured rugs on a polished wooden floor. It was one of these rugs that tripped her up a few days ago, which is why her hair is a little wild; the abrasion on the back of her head needs some undisturbed time to fully heal.
Standing at the foot of the bed is Gillian, her carer.
‘He wants to talk to you,’ she says, handing me the phone.
Mrs Geraldo’s son, Peter is calling from Darmstadt. I tell him how his mother is, what her observations are today, what the plan is. He takes all this on board then asks me how I got access.
‘Oh – erm – Gillian happened to be here. I phoned earlier to agree a time but no-one answered so I came round on spec. I’ve got a record of the keysafe but no-one seems to know the number.’
‘That’s right. You’re not supposed to know. That number is for the emergency services only.’
‘Okay.’
‘I don’t want any old person traipsing through the house stealing things.’
‘Right.’
‘If you need to visit my mother you make an appointment with Gillian. She must be there at all times.’
I glance at Gillian. She can’t hear the conversation, but from the face she pulls – essentially the eek emoji – I can see she understands.
‘That’s fine,’ I tell him. ‘Obviously it makes it more difficult for the nurses and therapists to come in and help your mother. Generally speaking we’d be using the keysafe in the same way as the emergency services – because that’s kind of what we are, too…’
‘Let me stop you there. If mother falls over and needs picking up – fine, the ambulance need to know the number. Everything else is to go through Gillian. Is that understood?’
‘Absolutely. Let me hand you back to her, Peter. Good to speak to you.’
Gillian takes it from me and talking very quickly and earnestly carries it off into the kitchen.
‘Was that Peter?’ says Mrs Geraldo.
‘Yes. All the way from Germany.’
‘He does worry.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Oh dear!’ she says, reaching up with her right hand to pat her hair. ‘You must forgive me. I look an absolute fright.’

alice in careland

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If Gerald was anything he’d be the caterpillar.

He’s sitting very, VERY upright, hands placed just-so on the arms of his riser-recliner, which, with the addition of a pressure-relieving contour mattress, does look a bit like some enormous, super-squashy mushroom. He’s not smoking a hookah, unfortunately, although he does have a Ventolin inhaler amongst his things on the cantilever table to his right. The long years of his illness have given him a pale and haughty appearance, so that when he leans forwards a little, staring at me over the rim of his glasses, and says ‘Who are you?’ I’m tempted to put my hands behind my back and curtsy.

None of this would’ve occurred to me were it not for the fact that his wife, Judy, is obviously both an artist and an Alice in Wonderland fan. She’s made stuffed hares in trippy, paisley fabric; pottery plates and vases with motifs of cards, clocks, mallets, falling Victorian girls; a carved wooden flamingo with a hedgehog at its feet; a couple of dioramas, silvered twigs for a forest or an intricate parlour scene, with a large or a small Alice doll in various dramatic postures; a marionette Jabberwocky, and so on and on, placed all around the room or hung on the wall, so that the whole house feels like a collector’s shrine to Lewis Carroll.

Judy herself makes an adult and very careworn kind of Alice. She’s sitting in the opposite chair, absent-mindedly tearing a tissue to pieces in her lap as we go through what’s been happening lately and what we can do to help. There are so many issues to bear in mind – the specifics of Gerald’s illness, the way the house is set-up (or not), the practical difficulties of making all the follow-up appointments at the hospital, the level of care they currently have and whether that could be increased, the stress all this is having on the family, primarily Judy, of course – but essentially it boils down to whether Gerald has reached the point where he needs to go into residential care. It’s such a dreadful and difficult decision to make, and I can quite understand the desire – conscious or otherwise – for someone else to make it for them. More often than not these things edge forward with sadistic increments of stress until something snaps and the whole thing changes at a clip. The best you can do is to support as best you can, be available to clarify and facilitate, and step in to pick up the pieces.

I wish it were easier. I wish I could just lean forwards, snap a piece off either side of the mushroom chair and hand them to Judy.

‘This will make you taller, this will make you smaller,’ I would say, and then smiling enigmatically, shuffle off with all my bags into the undergrowth.

feresteh and the big blue owl

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Feresteh tells me about a recurring dream that’s been troubling her.

‘I think it’s because of the drugs they pumped into me in ITU,’ she says, tentatively shifting her position in the bed so she’s more upright against the pillows. Her face looks scooped, her eyes preternaturally large. ‘I was very ill,’ she says.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘But you know the worst thing about it all is the dream. It comes to me most nights, even sometimes during the day if I sleep a little. It is always the same thing. I am in the hold of sailing ship, with hundreds of girls all my age. And I realise I am being trafficked, about to be taken away across the sea to some faraway place, a place no-one will ever be able to find me. There are heavy pieces of furniture there, too, gaudy, richly decorated. And I come to see that this is how they intend to smuggle us out of the ship – inside the furniture, locked in the chests and the cabinets. I see my father and my uncle looking down at me from the hatch, silhouetted against the light. I call out to them but all they do is wave sadly, and withdraw slowly, and the hatch slides shut, and everything goes quiet. And then the worst thing. From out of the darkness comes a big blue owl. It flies low over our heads, its eyes wide – like THIS – its claws out. And it is so terrifying I put my hands up and I say No! NO! And if I am lucky, I wake up.’

She raises her chin to track the invisible bird, her left arm straight with the fingers of that hand spread, the right arm bent so the hand is level with her face. Her mouth is slightly parted, her breath coming quickly, and her eyes – her eyes are shining.

the walkers

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

Norman and Diane have walked a very long way. They’ve walked the Pennine Way, Glyndwr’s Way, The Pilgrim’s Way and The Ridgeway. They’ve walked Hadrian’s Wall and the coast of Devon & Cornwall. They’ve walked the length of the Thames from Trewsbury Mead to estuary. They’ve walked from Land’s End to the other end, and they’ve got journals filled with watercolours and photographs to prove it. But today Norman faces one of the most challenging journeys he’s ever undertaken – the short ride in a hoist from chair to bed.

‘Don’t worry, darling. It’s okay,’ says Diane, stroking the backs of his hands as the hoist rises up a little and the sling straps tighten. Norman wriggles anxiously from side to side and kicks out his legs. ‘Try just to relax and go with it,’ she says.

It’s a manual handling dilemma. Norman isn’t so debilitated that bed care is the only option – which would lead to further deconditioning, the risk of pressure damage and so on – but then again, after his recent illness, neither can he transfer safely with just a zimmer frame and the assistance of two. A stand-aid would be the only other option, and that’s certainly on our minds as we try to reassure him before we lift him out of the chair. If it fails, we’ll be forced to get him back to bed by some other means, and then try to build up his strength and confidence over time with a home exercise programme. For now, the hoist is the best option.

‘It’ll help when he has regular carers, a routine and so on,’ says Brigit, the Occupational Therapist. ‘They’ll be a lot slicker than us.’
‘I think there’s just been a lot going on today, hasn’t there, darling?’ says Diane. ‘I think you’re just exhausted.’
He looks up at her, his legs sticking out, his hands gripping the brightly-coloured straps in front of him.
‘Where are we off to now?’ he says.

room for a couple

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The place looks more like a film set than a family home.

There are two men struggling to unload an enormous new fridge from their van; a man in a woolly hat re-glazing a shattered front door; a woman with a giant poodle arguing with the builder about glass on the floor whilst the dog barks and hops excitedly from paw to paw; a woman with a kettle in her hand trying to get everyone’s drink order right; a woman with an armful of clean sheets excusing her way from the linen cupboard to the bedroom; a woman arguing with someone on her phone, turning on the spot from left to right, her other hand over her ear to block all the noise; a young girl idly swiping her phone with her legs up on the sofa – and then Jean, the woman dying of cancer, sitting upright on her hospital bed in the centre of it all, as watchfully imperious as an Egyptian mummy roused by tomb raiders.

‘Busy, isn’t it?’ she says as I pick and excuse my way past all the chaos further into the room. ‘If it gets too much, just do what I do and bathe your eyes in the garden.’
It’s certainly a wild and lovely view. A small front garden with an elaborate bird-feeder, an ancient apple tree, an overgrown hedge, and beyond it, uninterrupted miles of misty downland.
‘Tea?’ says the woman with the kettle, looking in after me.
I say thanks but no.
‘Right then. So…’ She heads for the kitchen, staring at the splayed fingers on her right hand, rehearsing the tally. The dog barks. The sound of more shattering glass. Somewhere nearby a beeping van reverses.

I’d been told the story before my visit, of course. How Jean’s twin sister had died unexpectedly. How the ambulance crew had had to smash through the front door to get in – to no avail, unfortunately. Friends and family had converged on the house to help – including re-fitting the front door – at the same time as the kitchen appliance people arrived with the new fridge, and I arrived to supervise moving Jean from the bed so a more suitable mattress could be installed.
‘I’m no weight, but it’s not just you, is it?’ says Jean.
‘No. I’m expecting two more.’
‘Ah!’ says Jean. ‘Well. That should prove interesting.’

character lines

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Ellie is a clinician with years of experience in hospitals, hospices and the community. Everything she does comes from a simple love of humanity, in all its mess and interest. And like all people skilled in their art, she practises it with a glorious kind of flow, intuitively adapting her stance to events, almost like a dance, making it look effortless and free. I’ve never seen her lose her temper. I’ve never seen her fail.

Which is why I’m glad we’re visiting Mr Coulsdon together.

There are so many exclamations, warning triangles and block caps on Mr Coulsdon’s record, it would be tidier if they simply replaced them all with a picture of a snarling beast and the words Here be dragons. Mr Coulsdon is notoriously, emphatically, tirelessly bad-tempered – a situation exacerbated by ill health, both mental and physical, of course, and his social situation. But it has to be said the starting point was maybe never that propitious.

Mr Coulsdon’s lounge window is just to the right of the entrance to the block. He has a tatty sheet permanently taped across it, bowed down in the middle. The TV is on full volume – Formula One, by the sound of it. We ring the bell a couple of times, but nothing happens.

‘He’s definitely at risk, so we’d better go in and see he’s okay,’ says Ellie. ‘A quick in and out. I’ll do the obs, you do the typing. How’s that?’
‘Fine by me.’
We let ourselves in using the ‘tradesmen’ button. His flat door is always open – taped up, dented, the scars of many forced entries in the past.

‘Hellooo? Mr Coulsdon? It’s Ellie and Jim – from the hospital. Come to see how you are…’

Other than a plain leather sofa in the far corner, the room is surprisingly, resonantly bare. No carpet, shelves or decorations, no pictures or home comforts. Mr Coulsdon is sitting in the middle of the room in an office chair, his bandaged, ulcerated right leg up on a stool. Just beyond it is the TV, cars screaming round a track. His foot is right in the middle of the screen, and you’d think Mr Coulsdon would angle things – the telly or the foot – so he could get a better view. But it’s hard to shake the idea that like a dodgy off-peak boiler, Mr Coulsdon will find a way of keeping the needle in the red.

‘Mind that!’ he snaps. I’m not sure what he means, because there’s really nothing to mind. ‘These people!’ he says, and links his fingers across his belly.

‘We won’t keep you long’ says Ellie, standing where he can see her, tilting her head on one side as if he’s the most fascinating thing she’s seen so far this morning. ‘How’re you feeling?’
‘How d’ya think I’m feeling?’ he says. Then he flicks me a sly glance and waggles his fingers in the air. ‘With my hands!’
‘Oh – that old chestnut’ says Ellie, putting her bag down. ‘Now then Mr Coulsdon. First things first. Can we turn the TV down a touch, please? Only I can’t hear myself think’
‘Who’s taken the bloody remote?’ he says, scratching his enormous beard as if he thinks it might feasibly be in there. He catches me watching him.
‘What’ve you done with it?’ he snaps.
‘Found it!’ says Ellie, picking it off the floor beside him and flourishing it in the air. The furious yowling of the racing cars eases up.
‘There! That’s better!’
‘For you!’ says Mr Coulsdon. ‘How long’s this nonsense going to take?’
‘Oh not long. Of course – you don’t have to have it at all if you don’t want.’
‘Well I don’t want it! All these people coming round here, messing me about. And nothing ever gets done!’
‘About what?’
‘This!’
‘What – the foot or your flat?’
‘The flat! The flat!’
‘What’s the matter with the flat?’
‘It’s a dump. A trash heap. I wouldn’t keep a dog here.’
‘It looks pretty tidy to me. Do you have people come round to help?’
‘If you can call them people.’
‘Well – look. That’s another matter. I can have a word with one of our social workers about it if you’d like?’
‘Social workers? Scum of the earth.’
‘I’m sorry you feel like that. I think they do a great job under difficult circumstances, Mr Coulsdon.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. Absolutely. But look – I’m not here for that. I’m here to do your obs and make sure your leg is okay. That’s it. I won’t if you don’t want me to, but I have to know you understand the consequences of saying no before we leave. Do you follow me?’
‘Jesus Christ! Just get on with it, will you? I haven’t got all day.’
‘All right, then. Thank you. Jim’s here to write the facts and figures down.’
‘Hi’ I say, perching on the edge of the sofa and opening the laptop.
‘I did wonder,’ he sniffs, his chair creaking dangerously as he shifts position. ‘I can see it wasn’t for his looks.’
‘No – you see? That’s what they call character lines,’ I tell him.
‘Oh is that right?’ says Mr Coulsdon. ‘I thought it just meant you were old.’

rosemary & june

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Rosemary sits at her kitchen table sipping a cup of coffee.
It was quite a business making it.

‘The pots there! The pots!’ she said, jabbing a bony finger in the general direction of the cluttered work surface.
‘What pots?’
I thought she meant a coffee jar. There was one with tea bags in it, one with sugar and another with receipts and coupons, but no coffee jar.
‘There! Where I’m pointing! Oh for goodness sake! What’s the matter with you?’
And finally I understood. She meant the foil wrapper of plastic coffee containers, the kind that fits over a cup and you fill with hot water. Like mini-percolators. It had been right in front of me all the time, but because it wasn’t what I was expecting, I hadn’t paid it any attention. So anyway – I made her a cup and set it in front of her.
‘That’s absolutely marvellous. Thank you,’ she said.
‘You’re welcome.’

The kitchen isn’t cold, but even so, Rosemary is sitting in a huge puffa jacket that completely swamps her. She’s not wearing anything else, though, other than a pair of Christmas socks with grippy soles and about a hundredweight of rings and bracelets. She has the kind of sharp features and Bloomsbury haughtiness that makes you think of Edith Sitwell or Virginia Woolf. Every time she goes to raise the coffee cup, she gives her right hand a peremptory little shake in the air – like the Queen waving from a carriage – and all the bangles slide down her arm, disappearing under the sleeve of the puffa.

Apart from some meals on wheels she has no carers or domestic help, which is worrying, given her reduced situation. It would have been a beautiful town house half a century ago. Now it’s sadly reduced, with the slumped and rickety feel of a place poised on the edge of serious disrepair. I can imagine it in a few years time, stripped to the bricks, airing out, radio on and a skip in the flattened garden, the snapping of tarpaulin on the stripped roof, whistles, shouts, nail-guns, boots. For now, though, it’s perfectly, eerily quiet, just me, Rosemary and the clicking of the kettle as it cools.
‘Do you have family nearby?’ I ask her.
‘Family? Good God, no!’ she says. ‘I’m ninety-five! No – it’s just me.’
She takes a sip of coffee.
‘And my sister, June, of course,’ she adds, shakily setting the cup down again.
‘Oh! You have a sister? That’s nice!’
‘It isn’t,’ she sniffs. ‘We don’t get on. Now – if you’d kindly finish your examination. And don’t try to kid me. I know all the terminology.’

boomerang

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Brenda’s daughter Emma shows me in. She’s polite but thin-lipped, pale and precise, like someone with a hundred other things to do and none of them as stressful.

‘Mum has dementia and doesn’t know it,’ she whispers in the kitchen after letting me in the back door. ‘It’s been getting worse this last year. She’s been found wandering in the street a few times, brought back by neighbours and police. She lives with my brother, Tom, but they don’t get on. Tom had a Jack Russell, Billy. Mum used to look after him when Tom was at work, but she kept tripping over it so we…erm… we made other arrangements.’

It sounds ominous, but I don’t get a chance to ask what she means, because Emma turns and walks through into the lounge.
‘The nurse is here, mum.’
‘Nurse? What nurse?’

Brenda is still sitting in the chair she was helped into by the ambulance when they brought her back from hospital. She’s resolutely straight-backed, like someone who got delivered to the wrong house by mistake and doesn’t feel able to tell anyone.

The way the seats are arranged means that Emma is on the right and I’m on the left, with Brenda the focus of our attention. It’s an unfortunate set-up, the community health version of good cop / bad cop, with me smiling and nodding and making encouraging noises, tapping away on the laptop, and Emma perched quietly on the opposite side, picking her mother off every time she glosses over the facts, which is all the time, of course. Even though I’ve got every sympathy for Emma, still I’d rather she was in another room. I can’t help glancing at the empty dog crate with a photo pillow of a Jack Russell at one end, Billy transmuted from pet to soft furnishing.
‘Where’s Billy?’ says Brenda. ‘I’ll take him for a walk later.’
‘Billy’s gone,’ says Emma.
‘Gone? Wha’d’ya mean, gone? Gone where?’
‘We talked about this, mum He kept pulling you over.’
‘Don’t be so soft.’
‘Don’t worry about Billy, mum. He’s out of the picture. Okay? When you went into hospital. He’s been taken care of. We’re talking about you now.’
‘I don’t care about me.’
Emma sighs. Zips her fleece higher up her neck. Pushes her hands deep into the belly pockets of it.
‘No,’ she says. ‘And that’s the problem.’
‘I’m sure there’s some way you can get to walk…erm… the dog, Brenda. With someone else, maybe? You know? To hang on to?’
I glance at Emma. She closes her eyes and twitches her head from side to side.
I smile and look back at Brenda.

If she heard any of this she doesn’t let on. She’s switched her attention to an old, dented, dark-wood boomerang that’s hanging from a nail on the opposite wall.
‘D’you know what that is?’ she says.
‘A boomerang! Looks like a proper working one. Not the souvenir type.’
‘My father brought that back for me. He was in the merchant marine.’
‘Was he!’
‘Yes. The merchant marine. And he brought that back for me. A lovely boomerang.’
‘Did you ever take it over the fields and throw it?’
Brenda laughs.
‘What? It’ll take the top of your head orf! Like a boiled egg!’
‘I think you’re supposed to catch it.’
‘Are you? Well I’m sure I don’t know’
Emma sighs. When I look at her she raises her eyebrows.
‘Anyway. Let’s get back to seeing how we can help,’ I say.
Brenda looks sad again.
Stares at the dog crate.
‘I think I’ll take Billy out later,’ she says.

mr carrington’s cosy

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Talking to Mr Carrington on the phone, I imagine him to be something like Mr Banks from Mary Poppins, sitting in a wing back armchair by an open fire, glass of brandy in one hand, phone in the other, hospital discharge summary on his tartan-rugged lap.
‘It’s the most extraordinary thing’ he says. ‘And to cap it all I have to wear this blasted boot.’
‘I’ll be over in about half an hour.’
‘Splendid! D’you know where I am?’
‘Roughly. How far down is number seventy?’
‘Stand in front of the old pub, turn to your right, stride up the hill three lampposts, turn and fire. Can’t miss.’
‘Great. See you shortly.’
‘Righto. Let yourself in. You’ll find me upstairs. Downstairs is rather out of bounds at the moment.’

* * *

I’m sorry to say that even Mary Poppins, with all her grit and sparkle and domestic magic, would take one look at number seventy, blush and pretend to have an appointment the other side of town.

It’s a deeply unprepossessing row, one house leaning against its neighbour up the hill like drunks on a tipping bench. Number seventy is probably the worst, with its gappy tiles, hanging gutterings, cracked windows, rotten fascias, peeling paint, and a particularly malign-looking buddleia standing like a giant spider by the broken gate, arching its branches over the steps.

I don’t open the door so much as lift it delicately to one side. In front of me is a damp and gloomy hallway, a precipitous flight of stairs.
‘Up here!’ shouts Mr Carrington.
‘Okay…’
The stairs creak and give alarmingly. When I put out a hand to grab the rail, it wobbles with such a wormy shudder I decide to take my chances and pick my way spot to spot with my hands free.

Onto the landing, and another vista of neglect. Whole sections of wallpaper rolling off the walls. A scattering of junk. Skeins of old web. A spotted smell so rich you can hear it muttering.
‘First door on your left,’ says Mr Carrington. ‘If there was a door.’
Astonishingly, someone’s managed to cram a hospital bed into the room, squeezing it in at the only possible angle that could work. Behind it is a bookshelf filled with dusty books and crowned with a leather briefcase that looks like it’s just been fished out of a pond.
‘Good to see you!’ says Mr Carrington.
We shake hands.

If this is Mr Banks, he’s been marooned on an island for a good many years – which I suppose, in a way, he has. His mane of ash gray hair flows into an equally vast beard, so wild I only see he has a mouth when he laughs.

After my examination – which he passes easily, with nothing concerning in any of his observations – I try to talk to him as tactfully as I can about his circumstances, the trip hazards, the damp and so on. Each point he bats away with the practised ease of someone who’s had the same conversation many times before.
‘Don’t worry. I’m quite used to it,’ he says. ‘Honestly. I’m quite happy as things are. Once my foot is better I’ll be able to tootle down the shops as before. So long as someone can fetch me a few essentials in the meantime, I’ll be absolutely fine.’
The room is freezing, though. When I tell him how worried I am about that he laughs.
‘Oh for goodness sake!’ he says, swatting the air between us. ‘I like it cold. Always have. It keeps me sharp! And if I get a bit chilly – well! I’ve got my cosy.’
He roots around under his pillow, produces a filthy hat and pulls it over his head, squashing his hair out to the side.
‘See?’ he says. ‘What d’you think?’
‘Well. It certainly looks – warm.’
‘Exactly!’ says Mr Carrington, snatching it off again, his hair springing back. ‘So there we are, then. Now. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about you.’