sketches

a cussed old cat

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

‘You cat looks exactly like ours. That same splodge of white on his back, like someone threw a paint brush at him.’

The black and white cat slowly raises his head and orientates himself to my voice, his eyes tightly closed, as if he understands the insult – and would like me to see that he understands – but chooses not to respond, conserving his energy instead for the more important things in life, like sleeping. The moment passes; he gets back down to it.

‘He’s a funny old thing,’ whispers Derek. ‘A cussed creature. Does what he likes. Much like me.’

I’m glad about the cat. I mean – I like having animals around anyway, but in Derek’s case it’s a definite advantage. I’d been given plenty of cautionary notes about Derek beforehand. His new diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, coming at a time of family problems generally. His self-discharge against advice. Self-neglect. Resistance to help. I’m calling round this morning ostensibly to dress a wound on his foot, but there’s more to it than that.

‘Of course, you are the boss of you,’ I’d said to him when he eventually answered the door. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. So long as you understand what it is you’re refusing, and what the consequences might be, you’re perfectly free to say no.’
It’s a speech I’ve used before, the verbal equivalent of putting the gun on the floor and backing up a little. It’s okay. I’m on your side.
‘Yes’ he said. ‘Well. Obviously.’

He talks softly and quickly through a fixed smile, his head tipped back and his eyes half-closed. Maybe it’s a combination of his illness and his natural character, but the effect is peculiarly unsettling, as if he’s using his very last reserves of sociability to maintain a pleasant appearance, like a light bulb connected to a failing generator, flickering on the edge of darkness.
I didn’t expect I’d make it over the threshold, but he’d shown me through to the sitting room, and that’s when I saw the cat.
‘He’s lovely’ I say.
‘There are foxes in the garden,’ whispers Derek. ‘They seem to get along.’

I ask him about his time in hospital while I bandage his foot.
‘Dreadful’ he says. ‘Jabbed and prodded all hours of the day and night. No explanations. No introductions. Bullies and fools the lot of them. I’d had enough. I walked out. Probably should have stayed. So long as they leave me alone. I don’t care.’
He smiles down at me.
‘How does it look?’ he says.

Derek’s wife Barbara comes in and although she seems perfectly pleasant the atmosphere changes. He shrinks a little into himself. She unpacks her shopping bags – sandwich packs, bags of crisps, milk, snacks. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she says.
‘We won’t,’ says Derek.

There’s a knock on the front door and Barbara goes to answer it.
‘Oh God’ says Derek.

Barbara shows someone in, a tall, brisk woman with an armful of files and folders and a blue NHS lanyard round her neck.
‘Oh! Hello there!’ she says to me.
‘I’m Jim from the community health team,’ I say, ‘come to dress Derek’s foot.’
‘Great!’ she says. ‘Excellent! Well – I’m Ruby, the social worker. Do you mind if I put my stuff on the counter?’ She unloads her files and things amongst the shopping, then turns to Derek, looming over him, supporting her weight with both hands on her knees, her ID card swinging in the space between them. She speaks slowly and loudly, for some reason.
‘Hello there, Derek. I’m Ruby. The Social Worker. Lovely to meet you.’
Derek leans away, his smile even more ghastly.
He draws back his foot.
‘Just let me get this last bit of tape on…’ I say.
‘We’re done,’ he says.

and so to bed

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Community Health encompasses so much, from the acute to the chronic, the social to the medical, from the replacement of a single worn ferrule on a walking stick to the installation of a gantry hoist and a small army of carers; from a three day course of antibiotics to months of gruelling IV therapy. Work in it long enough and you’ll see countless variations, each situation particular to the individual patient and their family.

But if I was forced to nominate the one thing that caused the most problems out in the Community, I would say it was a Resistance to Change.

It’s been said before that the only constant in the world – the one thing you can be absolutely sure of – is that things change. And ultimately it’s not the specifics that matter so much as the way you embrace them. Hanging on to things that cannot possibly last, however much you’d like them to, inevitably leads to friction and unhappiness. A hard lesson to learn, of course, and one that needs constant practice and reinforcement, but no less important for all that.

Take Janice and Henry, for example.

Henry is a hundred. A simple expression of fact – impressive enough in itself, were it not for the fact that every night he goes up three flights of stairs to bed.

Janice goes up behind him, of course. Janice is Henry’s daughter. They’ve been living together a good many years, now, and they’ve got their routines. Latterly Janice has taken over the role of principal carer, a guy coming in every morning to help with washing and dressing. Janice is doing a great job in difficult circumstances, changing Henry’s pads, keeping him fed and entertained. They have a lovely relationship.

We’d been called in by paramedics, who attended a non-injury fall here the other day. Apparently Henry slipped out of his leather armchair downstairs, and Janice couldn’t get him up.
‘The footstool slid forward and he sort of jacknifed’ says Janice. ‘It was too early in the morning to do what I normally do, so I had to call 999.’
‘What do you normally do?’
‘I go out in the street and ask someone if they’d be so good as to come in and help.’
‘Isn’t that a bit risky?’
‘Oh no! People are good, you know. And I only ever ask the burly ones.’
‘Has Henry fallen a lot, then?’
‘Half a dozen times. Not falls so much as a gentle collapse. This one was different because he was in a funny position. Generally it happens on the stairs.’
‘The stairs?’
‘About half way. Occasionally his legs just give out. So he’ll sit on a step a while. And if he can’t get back up again, I’ll nip outside and fetch someone in.’

Janice has already given me a tour of the place. One of those rickety old town houses, compressed by its neighbours into a vertiginous, three-storey affair, two rooms per floor, Henry’s bedroom at the very top, the stairs leading up and up and up so relentlessly you don’t need a handrail so much as crampons and a bottle of oxygen.
‘I’m puffed and I’m half his age’ I said to her.
‘You shouldn’t be,’ she said.
We’d skated over the possibility of changing things around a bit. Maybe moving the bed downstairs. Janice was indignant.
‘Where would I sleep?’ she said.
‘I don’t know. Upstairs?’
‘Out of the question!’
‘He’d be safer.’
‘Yes – but… where on earth would I put everything?’

kung fu jack

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‘Ya would’na think to look at me now but ah used to be a kung fu master’
‘Wow! That’s amazing!’
‘I were a lot younger then, mind. Fit as a sand flea. I hitchhiked everywhere. I’d put ma thumb out an’ jes’ see where it took me. One time it was Norway, man. Norway!’
‘I’d love to go to Norway.’
‘Yeah? Well ya should. It’s still there, far as I know.’
I finish taking the blood and writing up the notes. Jack folds his arms and watches me, one thin leg hooked over the other, the foot tapping gently up and down, the laces of the boot gently trailing in the air.
‘Ah’m not kiddin’ ya. A kung fu master. One thing we had to do, to qualify, like. We had to run down this dark tunnel, wi’ no light at all except what was comin’ in the end. An’ you had to run like stink towards it, and the only thing stoppin’ yah was everyone inside, punching and kicking the livin’ crap out of you. Now look at me. If you laughed too loud ah’d fall over.’
‘So where are you from originally? Are you a Geordie?’
‘A Geordie? Well there’s no need for that. I tell you wha’. It’s a good job for you ah’ve lost ma kung fu skills. Ah’m from Sunderland, man! A Mackem! Geordie. Ah’m thinking you must be one o’ them things from the south.’
‘I am. And d’you know what? I have to admit – to my shame – I’ve never been further north than the Lake District.’
‘What? Ya dowun nah what yah missing, man! We’ve got everything yah could want. Beautiful beaches, and … and … pubs carved out of the rock.’
‘Sounds amazing.’
‘It is amazing. The most unbelievable place on earth. An’ ah’ll tell you what. I’d go back there in a second if ah could jes’ snap me fingers an’ fly.’

a loss of balance

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‘My psychiatrist is worried what effect all this is having on me,’ says Angela. For a moment I think she’s going to illustrate by pointing to her brain, but uses her finger to push her glasses back up her nose instead. She makes as if to fold her arms, then changes her mind at the last minute, puts them in her lap – and then changes her mind again, and folds them after all, leaning forwards with her shoulders hunched, rocking imperceptibly.

I’ve only been in the same room with Angela five minutes and I have to say, I’m as worried as the psychiatrist. Angela’s face is so intensely anxious, it’s as if someone had taken a cup, drawn round it with a crayon to get the circle, roughed in two permanently arched eyebrows, a pair of thick glasses, a flared nose, a downward pointing mouth, and then below it, as an afterthought, adding an incised groove like a second mouth, to amplify the sadness of the first.

‘You’ve got a lot on your plate,’ I say. ‘Anyone would be anxious.’
‘I am anxious,’ she says. ‘I’m very anxious.’
‘It’s understandable.’

Staring at us from the armchair opposite is the source of Angela’s anxiety: her father, William – an imposing figure, despite his extreme age. William is fastidiously dressed in a buttoned-up shirt and tie, bottle green cardigan, corduroy trousers with a sharp crease down the centre of each leg, his velcro-shoes box-fresh, correctly fastened. He’s so tall and gaunt, with so many edges and angles to him, you’d hardly think he was real at all. I imagine when he gets up at the end of the evening, he simply unfolds, flap by flap, like a complicated origami figure, cushion fold, chair fold, reverse-squash fold – and shuffles away to sleep in an envelope.

He must have some mass, though. He fell on the patio a week ago, taking his wife Rose with him, landing on her and fracturing her hip. Rose ended up in hospital, of course, with the prospect of a long convalescence. The only other sibling, Angela’s brother Tommy, works away from home a great deal and can’t spare the time. And as Angela is off on long-term sickness due to her anxiety, they decided – or at least, I would think, Tommy decided – that Angela should be the one who stays with William until Rose makes it home again.

‘I just can’t keep an eye on him every single hour of every single day,’ says Angela, hopelessly.
‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘What do you think, William?’
William slowly unlaces his fingers and then holds his hands apart in a sad, what-will-be-will-be kind of way.
‘It’s difficult,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to worry anyone. But it is unfortunately the case that – for whatever reason – I have something of an issue with balance.’

I turn to Angela again, who’s staring at me with such terror it’s like we’ve been dragged to the edge of a precipice.

‘You see?’ she says.

full volume

~ jim clayton ~ 4 Comments

Rita is sitting in a high-backed chair watching a veterinary programme on television. A cow is so bloated the vet is driving a cannula big as a marlinspike into its abdomen; the farmer and his wife put their hands over their noses. ‘She’ll be a lot more comfortable now,’ the vet says. They nod, keeping their hands in place.

The television is on so loud Rita hasn’t heard us come in, so as gently as I can I say Good Morning and move into her line of sight.

She screams.

I’ve met Rita before, and I’d told Andreas what to expect. It’s a particularly terrifying scream, though, and he visibly reddens.
‘It’s okay! It’s okay!’ he says. ‘We’re from the hospital. We’ve just come to see how you are and what you might need.’

She screams again – exactly the kind of sound effect you’d want in a horror film if an elderly person was being murdered. Such an open-throated and desperate noise, made worse by the slack cavity of her mouth and the two, blockish teeth, offset top and bottom.

The odd thing is, she’s not screaming because we’ve scared her coming into the flat. She’s screaming because she wants us to do something. And sure enough, when I ask what it is, she points to the kitchen trolley.

‘The remote? You want me to pass you the remote?’
She screams again.
‘There you are, Rita! And please try very hard not to scream like that if you can, because it makes it difficult to understand what you’re after.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, in a normal voice, and stuffs the remote into the cushion beside her on the chair.

My colleague Andreas looks shaken, but I think he’s reassured I’m not freaking out. He adopts a similarly calm, super-moderate tone.
‘Now then, Rita,’ he says, squatting down and resting a hand on hers. ‘I’m the physiotherapist, and you’ve met Jim before, the nursing assistant. Is it okay if we ask you a few questions to find out how we can help you after your stay in hospital? Would that be alright?’
She fishes out the remote control with her free hand again and raps him on the knuckles with it – I guess because he’s in the way of her vet programme.
‘Oh! Sorry!’ he says, rubbing his hand and standing up again. ‘But Rita – would you mind if we turned the television down a little bit? So we wouldn’t have to shout?’
She screams again, and he almost falls over.
‘Now, now!’ I say. ‘Come on, Rita! Remember what we said about the screaming? Try to tell us as calmly as you can what it is you want.’
‘Soup!’ she says. ‘I want soup!’
‘Okay. That’s okay. I’ll make you some soup’ says Andreas, ‘but first let’s get the assessment out of the way, shall we?’
She turns off the TV and grumpily stuffs the remote into the chair cushion again.
Andreas has just turned his back to open his folders when she screams again, so loudly he almost dumps the lot on the floor.
‘What is it now?’ he says.
‘Clean these!’ she shouts, handing him two filthy magnifying lenses. ‘Clean them!’
‘Okay. I’ll rinse them under the tap for you, but then I really must get on with my paperwork. Okay?’
He takes the glasses, shakes his head at me, then goes into the kitchen.
‘Whilst Andreas is doing that, d’you mind if I take your blood pressure and so on?’
She grunts, staring at the television.
A rabbit is being sedated prior to an operation. The vet says he’ll take this opportunity to clip its nails, too.
I approach with my kit, gently wrapping a blood pressure cuff round her arm, and then putting the steth in my ear. Just behind her I notice a yellowing, photocopied picture taped to the wall – a Welsh terrier, sitting with its paws on a table. The dog is wearing pince-nez specs, a red spotted neckerchief and a knitted waistcoat. ‘He’s lovely’ I say, nodding at the picture. What’s his name?’
Rita screams.
It’s completely heart-stopping, like I’ve put the stethoscope into the mouth of a roaring lion. I snatch it clear and take a step back.
‘What?’ I say, shakily.
‘A girl!’ she says, in her normal voice. ‘She was a girl’.
Then she picks up the remote control, points it at the TV, and turns it up, full volume.

beatrix splutter

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Agnes lives in the last of a series of two-roomed cottages that tail off into the privet at the far end of an obscure cul-de-sac. It’s a dead-end, deeply shaded, out-of-the-way kind of place. The kind of place you’d imagine outlaws to live – at least, a very suburban kind of outlaw, with mobility scooters instead of horses.

I pass a strange duo sitting outside the first bungalow: an elderly man and his equally elderly cat. The man has no teeth, which makes it look as if his flat cap is a plunger that’s been pressed and driven the upper half of his head further down into his neck. He’s liberally smacking his lips as he concentrates on rolling a fag, one long and skinny leg crooked over the other and spasmodically kicking up and down, no doubt in time to his heartbeat. The cat is sitting on its haunches on the rusted patio table beside him, so fixed on the fag-rolling it’s like he’s waiting for the old man to finish, and pass the cigarette to him.
‘Morning!’ I say as I walk past.
The old man nods and waves the half-finished fag in the air. The cat merely turns to stare, in one smooth, arrogant slide, and an expression that seems to say: Don’t distract him.

Agnes’s cottage is so stuffed full of junk there’s almost no room for Agnes. She’s installed in bed in a living room with just enough space to move from the end of the bed to the commode. The whole scene is like a burrow, poorly lit by a low-wattage lamp on the shelf above her that casts a febrile, enclosing kind of light. Agnes smiles at me as I introduce myself. She’s like a Beatrix Potter mouse in a bonnet and nightie, twitching her whiskers as Doctor Magpie hops in and starts flapping around, trying to figure out whether any of her problems are new or not, and what’s to be done.

An hour or so later, when I’m walking back along the path, and filling my lungs with fresh air, I can’t help wondering if I’ll see the old man and the cat again. And yes – they are there, in exactly the same position. The old man is still smoking, tipping back his head and releasing such a quantity of smoke you’d think each cigarette would be vapourised in one, deep drag. The cat has already heard me coming, and draws a bead as I walk past the gate.
‘Alright?’ I say, and then: ‘Nice day’
The man raises his cigarette in the air in the same way as before, except now he accidentally disturbs a quantity of ash into his lap. He curses, uncross his legs, leans forward, and begins urgently smacking his trousers clear. The cat watches him, then turns to look at me again, this time with an expression that seems to say: You made him do that.

a bottle of banana-flavoured drink

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No-one knew why Alf was dying, but anyone could see that he was.

And as far as I could tell (it was difficult to ask), nobody knew why he’d refused any of the tests that might reveal the cause, chance of recovery, or time left. He’d been clear about that – certainly clear enough to reassure the medical team that he understood the consequences of his actions, and that his refusal wasn’t simply another manifestation of his illness. He may have explained his decision to them in detail. I expect he did. For us, the community health team, we simply had to accept that Alf had declined any further intervention, and wanted to be cared for at home. I can only guess why that was. Maybe he knew that anything they tried would be hopeless, and he’d lose his last weeks in a fog of operations, pain, nausea, medication. Maybe he was resolved simply to wade out with his eyes closed, and let the dark waters close over him. When I met him he was as passive as an anatomical doll, frail and uncommunicative, submitting to being rolled and cleaned from time to time, and not much else.

Alf’s deterioration had been so precipitous the family had started to gather in earnest, flying in from the extreme ends of the country, and abroad. The home they came back to was as unrecognisable as their father. Everything was in turmoil. There was a hospital bed in the front room, looking like it had been beamed up from a ward somewhere and crash-landed amongst all the fishing trophies and wedding portraits and domestic ephemera of a life. And it wasn’t just the bed. There was an abundance of medical supplies and pieces of equipment, the kinds of thing you need to treat an end of life patient at home, and beyond that, every available space was now given over to the cause, to temporary put-you-ups, and suitcases, and clothes hanging over balustrades, and then extemporary family huddles in the kitchen, or the garage, wherever they could gather together, and drink tea, and whisper severely, and let the old family rivalries play themselves out, as they ever will when families get back together for any reason, but most especially now, when one of their number is dying. They’d hurried across hundreds – even thousands of miles – and now they were here they found there was little they could do. Along with their horror of the situation they had to cope with boredom, and frustration, and being separated even temporarily from their own lives and problems, for an indefinite time. They relieved each other from their vigils at the bed. They did what they could to stay afloat. But the house was an anteroom of death, and the fact that no-one explicitly knew why made it worse for them.

Leah had been the first to come down. Leah had problems of her own. She was almost as skeletal as Alf, except in her case it was an eating disorder she’d struggled with for years. She tried to encourage her father to drink some of her own supply of fortifying milkshake, holding the straw to his lips and making softly encouraging noises.
‘He doesn’t want it,’ said her sister, Mae, her arms folded.
‘It’ll do him good. It’s designed to.’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t want it.’
Leah was wearing a strappy summer top that hung down from her, revealing the cruel extent of her illness. In fact, you’d have to say that there was only a degree or two of difference between Leah’s physique and her father’s, except – Leah was clearly on this side of the line, and he was on the other, and she was reaching over with her little bottle of banana-flavoured, fortifying drink, trying to do for him what she’d been trying to do for herself all this time.
‘He doesn’t want it’ said Mae.
‘But he might,’ said Leah. ‘Give him a chance.’
Mae was right, though. Alf’s eyes were already preternaturally large, made of some dull, inferior kind of glass, whilst Leah’s were still bright, and vital, and full of tears.

pulling monkeys out of the garden

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

Jack sits in his riser recliner with his left arm in a collar and cuff sling, looking about as uncomfortable as a man could be, hyper-inflated with discomfort, the great balloon of his belly pumped to bursting with unease.

Jack’s wife, Marge fusses round the foothills of her husband with kitchen roll and baby wipes and so on. I can see that things are difficult. He fell over in the garden a few weeks ago, broke his upper arm up near the shoulder, cracked a few ribs. The codeine-based painkillers have made him constipated. He’s immobile, frustrated, and all things considered, struggling to see his way through to the end of it all. To make things worse, just a few minutes before I arrived he had an episode of incontinence.
‘Don’t worry,’ I tell him. ‘I can help get you cleaned up.’
He’s grateful and embarrassed in equal measure. Marge runs back and forth with hot water and towels. We chat whilst I work.
‘You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I really used to be somebody.’
‘You’re somebody now.’
‘Not like I was.’
‘What did you do for a living?’
‘I was in carpets.’
‘Oh?’
‘I used to travel the country, selling them. I’m not talking rugs and runners. I’m talking big volume sales. Whole businesses. Serious operations, the international guys. They used to know me at all the best hotels. They used to know me by name. Say for example my son Jimmy wanted to stay the night, too. Sometimes he’d do that. He’d come out with me and we’d drive around, see the sights. So then I’d say to this fancy hotel, I’d say to them: What about Jimmy, here? What can you do me for Jimmy? And they’d say: Of course, Mr Sackler. Even if they were full. I tell you what – it was a good life. The things I used to see and do, driving round.’
I help him back into the chair.
‘Now look at me. Falling over like a clown. See that garden?’
I look out of the patio doors, onto a grid-patterned lawn, feature borders, a grey-green summerhouse, water-feature, architectural plants – the whole thing as prepped and manicured as an illustration from a magazine.
‘It’s lovely,’ I say.
‘Yeah? Well – it used to be a wilderness. The old woman we bought the house off, she hadn’t done a thing for years. It was an absolute jungle. You wouldn’t believe what we pulled out of there. I mean – I was pulling monkeys out of there. Wasn’t I, Marge? Pulling monkeys out of the garden?’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she says, handing him some clean trousers.
‘No, not those ones,’ he snaps. ‘The other ones.’

falling to earth

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There’s a great, puckered scar running up the centre of Eamon’s chest, the kind of crimped-up seam that holds in the meat on a Cornish pastie.

‘I thought I was a dead man,’ he says, scratching his belly, good eye half-closed, false eye glaring. ‘I seen that big ol’ light descending from the heaven. But I tell you what, Jimmy. Them surgeons up the hospital, they know a thing or two about pumps, that much I can tell you.’

Despite all his problems, Eamon’s still as ruggedly optimistic as the man who used to sit all day in a mechanical digger, all weathers, gouging out pipe trenches.

‘They used the veins out me leg, there – look!’ he says, hitching up his trousers, showing me the scar. ‘It’s a miracle what they can do nowadays.’ He finishes his sentences with a sharp little intake of breath, something like a yes, but only half-made, like he’s tasting the air for agreement.
‘Now – be honest wi’ me. Wha’d’ya make of this whole Brexit business?’
‘I think it’s a mess, Eamon. I think it was badly run. People didn’t really know what they were voting for. It was all based on emotions rather than facts. It certainly didn’t help they had buses driving around with lies about the millions extra we’d have to spend on the NHS.’
‘That’s true. I seen that bus. In the papers. Not the street.’
‘They should have a second referendum. You wouldn’t decide to buy a house, find out it’s got subsidence, and carry on and buy it anyway just because you said you would. And this is way more important than buying a house.’
‘You might have to if you signed a contract, though.’
‘But if you hadn’t.’
‘No. I suppose not. Not if you hadn’t. You’d be crazy to buy a house like that.’
‘At least with the General Election you get another go in four years. This is so final, I don’t think it would hurt to run it again.’
‘Yes, but – Jimmy. Imagine if you had another referendum, and the answer come out as Stay. What would all the Leave people do about it? They’d straight away be wanting another vote. And then another vote. And there’d be no end to it. We’d get nothing done, ‘cos we’d be spending all our time voting.’
‘Maybe. It’s a mess, that’s all I know. Just hold still for a minute whilst I take this ECG…’
Eamon holds his position, glaring at me with his glass eye whilst dozing off with the other.
‘Okay. That’s it. Done,’ I tell him, and start packing up.
‘It’s all that there David Cameron’s fault,’ he says, tentatively peeling off the dots. ‘He only done it to clear out all them right wingers. Didn’t work so well for him, though, did it, eh? It’s like a beater going in to beat out the pheasants, and then getting torn to pieces by a tiger. A big blue one, wi’ stars on its tail.’
He sticks the dots together in one sticky mess, and hands them to me.
‘What makes it worse – they don’t seem to care what happens to Ireland,’ he says. ‘Mind you. Did they ever? It’s al’ays been the same, now. From that bastard Cromwell to the DUP. But that’s the British for you. They talk the talk and they throw their weight around like the bullies they are. It was the same with America. The same with India. Bullies, the lot of ‘em. All you can do is stand up for what you believe – that’s it! That’s all there is!’
His glass eye shines. ‘Present company excepted,’ he says.
‘Thank you. So how are you feeling now, Eamon?’
‘Never better!’ he says. ‘Tip top! Ignore the needlework.’

I chat to him whilst I fill out some forms.
‘I bet you found a few things when you were out digging trenches,’ I say.
‘Oh plenty!’ he says. ‘Bottles. Pottery. Bones. You name it. Not much in the way of gold coins, but plenty other stuff.’
‘What was the oddest thing you found?’
‘Well now – I suppose – that’d be a meteorite.’
‘Really? How d’you know it was a meteorite?’
‘It was all glittery inside. And anyway, the man said so.’
‘What man? An alien?’
‘No, I don’t think he was an alien. I think he was the man jes’ owned that there particular stretch of land. I’ll show you it, if you’d like?’
‘I would! I’ve never seen a meteorite.’
‘Well you’re in for a treat’
He pulls on his shirt, then shuffles out to the kitchen. In the cupboards under the sink are rows and rows of neatly stacked Tupperware boxes, each one filled with an assortment of things. I stand next to him as he pokes through one: a pink yo-yo, a plastic soldier, a nodule of flint with a perfect hole through the middle, a conch shell, the side of a Victorian marmalade jar.
‘Nah. I thought the meteorite was in this one,’ he says, clipping the lid back on. ‘Most o’ this stuff is Gloria’s. She passed when she was sixty, some year ago now. You know what she used to do? She used to tuck the legs of her trousers into her socks and then drop what she found inside.’
‘That’s quite a technique.’
‘It was! You should’ve seen her fill up when she hit pay dirt. That was something to see, alright.’
‘I bet it was.’
‘It was. It was something to see.’
He puts the box back with the others, as carefully and precisely as if he were re-interring a saintly artefact.
‘Now then. What the hell’ve I done with that meteorite?’

bad eggs

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We were talking about difficult neighbours we’d had to put up with over the years.

‘First time we moved to Bristol, we rented a couple of rooms in Bedminster. It was alright, except the bathroom was out on the landing and we had to share it with the flat downstairs. Kind of a bedsit, really, come to think about it. Anyway, the couple downstairs were difficult. They were both drinkers. She was a nervous type – pale and trembly, eyeliner and lipstick all over the place like she’d done it on a trampoline. Her husband was the worst, though. He looked like he was made out of tyres, love and hate on his knuckles, bike chain round his neck. They used to sleep all day, go out, then come back and fight. One night I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed and I heard them come in. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, saw the light on, and screamed: I am NOT using the bucket again.’
‘Classy.’
‘We moved out pretty quick.’
‘I shared a flat with this guy once. Henry. He was lovely. Bit of a stoner. He was a self-employed gardener. An expert on wisteria – so he said, anyway. He used to come home, throw his receipts under the bed, put the Fall on the record player and we’d smoke skunk all night, staring into the fire and laughing. It was lovely. Then he crashed his bike and fell in love with the nurse who stopped to help. She moved in the next week and took over. She had this thing about crocheting bags with string. I came down to breakfast and there were hundreds of little crochet string bags hanging everywhere, a bulb of garlic in one, half a lemon in another. And she really started to freeze me out, too, like she wanted Henry all for herself. I had this nightmare where I got wrapped in a big string bag by a giant spider in a nurse’s uniform. Anyway – in the end they sat me down and had the conversation. Shame. I liked living with Henry.’
‘Yeah? Well – we lived next door to this couple. Young professionals. I can’t remember what he did, but she was something in travel. She was really into magic eggs.’
‘Wha’d’ya mean, magic eggs?’
‘Eggs. You know. Made of crystal. You power them up with psychic energy, and then use them for healing and protection and whatnot. It’s that bullshit thing where you hold out your arm and ask someone to push it down – which they easily do – and then you hold an egg in your hand, and ask them to try again, and they can’t? You get different sizes of egg, depending on the job. I never believed it – although I thought maybe I might benefit from some overflow egg power, because we were living right next door, and the auras aren’t password protected, are they? Anyway, she was nice enough. We went out for drinks a couple of times. It was all good. But a couple of months later we came back and there was this letter waiting for us, pushed under the door. It was written in a real psycho font – y’know? – shaky green sentences, wandering all over.’
‘Saying what?’
‘Saying how she was sorry for thinking all these bad things about me, apologising for all the things she’d done.’
‘Like what?’
‘I couldn’t make it out. But the page was covered in it. And then worst of all, there was a clump of hair in with the letter.’
‘Euch! What did you do?’
‘We went round. It was all dark, so we thought maybe they were out. But we knocked anyway and after a minute he came to the door. We showed him the letter, and said as gently as we could that we were a bit worried about her, and was she okay and everything.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That was the other weird thing. He didn’t seem particularly surprised or phased about it. He just kinda waved it in the air and said: Ah – yeah! The letters! – and that was it. We saw her a couple of times after that and it was like nothing happened. We didn’t bring it up again, and moved a few months later.’
‘Sounds like it might’ve been a regular thing.’
‘Yeah. Bad eggs. Who knows? I never did experience the power myself. But then again, apparently you have to wear a special receiver on your head to really get the benefit.’