sketches

detour

~ jim clayton ~ 5 Comments

Sometimes a detour is what you really need. Almost always, come to think of it.

The day hadn’t started well. I’d checked my email over breakfast and found a reply from the last literary agent I’d contacted. A succinct but polite rejection of my manuscript: Thanks for the submission, but I’m afraid it’s not for us. I’d had rejections before, of course. Not enough to paper the walls of the room, but enough to decorate a modestly-sized writer’s coffin. And though I’d trained myself to withstand the sting of it all, inoculating myself with peppy articles describing how rejection is as much a part of the writer’s life as the writing itself; how every rejection is an opportunity to learn what could be done better; listing all the famous writers who’d been turned down, how casually, brutally, indifferently, comically; how you can tell a real writer more by the scars they bear, the piles of rejection slips as much as the piles of scripts. Articles that said ‘Get back on the horse. Re-submit. Be working on new things.’ And above all, write, write, write. Because that is what a writer does. You’re only a failed writer if you quit.

I thought a brisk dog-walk would help. I took Lola over the woods.

As I followed the usual paths and track ways, the idea took hold that this latest rejection might be a terminal sign I just wasn’t getting. I was like a sailor in a leaky bucket, grimly clutching the tiller, head down, hood up, doggedly following the wrong star, refusing to believe that the sounds of cataracts up ahead were actually the end of the world, even as I tipped down over it (this being typical of the ludicrously apocalyptic thinking I fall into in the hours after a rejection). What I mean to say is, more rationally and sensibly, is that maybe ‘learning from your mistakes’ can and sometimes should extend to ‘knowing when it’s a good idea to change course’.

I’d already devoted almost ten years to writing. Deliberately subordinating any sense of a career or progression at work to learning how to do it, and most importantly, to finishing a book. I’d had some success. When I was an EMT in the ambulance service I’d written a blog of my experiences, and over time I’d picked up quite a few followers. A book – of sorts – had come out of that. And then whilst I carried on with the blog I’d written other things. A time-travelling ghost story. A thriller about a cult. A fantasy book about a boy with a mysterious affinity for whales. I hadn’t found a publisher for any of them, but it didn’t matter. I’d self-published, been happy with the result, carried on writing. And then came this next book. The Fabulous Fears. An epic story of love and loss, starting in the Hungarian Revolution of ’56, and ending on a canal boat in London. I put everything into it. I re-wrote it seven times. I cut far more than I kept. I shaped it ruthlessly to explore as simply as I could the relationships between the main characters, not telling but showing, leaving the reader to make up their own minds. And when it was done I could actually see it in print. A paperback of average size, with a dramatic and colourful cover – ropes, handcuffs, escapology equipment, canal boat art, soldiers smoking in the foreground. I’m always hopeful when I send submissions off, but this was a different species of optimism, brighter, harder edged, one that might really happen.

They say, semi-helpfully, that the last rejection is as tough as the first. But I think it’s probably tougher, because Time starts to stack up the other side, and you start to worry that you’ll run out of road.

This was the tenor of my thoughts when I took Lola over the woods. She sensed my negativity. She picked a fight with the most perfect Labrador you’re ever likely to see this side of a Dog Calendar. I apologised, put Lola back on the lead, and we headed for home.

And it was then that I met Jack.

Jack is one of those people who are naturally positive, in the same way that some people are tall or short, or good with figures. Even though in his long life he’d suffered more than his fair share of tragedy, still he’d always found a way to pick himself up. He had two rescue whippets, Stella and Pippin, and there was something about their expression – level brown eyes, slightly sad mouth – that reminded me of him.

Jack knew about my writing. After a while I came round to telling him about the latest rejection, and how badly it had thrown me.
‘I’ve got a story about that,’ he said, just as we reached a fork in the path. ‘At least, I think it’s about that. Anyway – it takes some telling, and I know you normally go the other way from here. It’d be a bit of a detour.’
‘I don’t care,’ I told him. ‘I’d like to hear it.’
‘Okay then.’
Stella and Pippin both stared up at me sadly.
Lola fell in beside them as we all carried on.

Jack is retired now. He’d been an engineer, designer, entrepreneur. These days he divides his time between family, dogs and then helping out as a conservation volunteer for the woods I’d just walked through, maintaining the bridges and the paths, coppicing, cutting back, keeping things in order. It wasn’t surprising. Jack’s the kind of man who takes care of things.

‘It’ll be okay,’ he said. ‘Everyone gets knocked back once in a while. Sometimes it’s worse than others. I remember this one time – I was properly down and out, on the ropes and the rest of it. Almost bankrupt, actually. I’d spent the last two years developing this software for ships, a new way of managing dangerous cargoes. It was a good product. I knew it was. At least, I started off that way. But then I’d spent so long on it, making it the best I could, in the end I wasn’t sure. And what made it worse was the fact no-one was biting. I was constantly writing to the big players, faxing them, calling them up. I wasn’t getting anywhere and I couldn’t understand it. It was quite a setback. I didn’t know what else to do. But then, this one particular day, I got a fax from one of the biggest shipping companies in the business. They wanted me to come in to see them, to discuss things further. I can’t tell you how excited I was. I mean, I hardly had the money for the fare, but I caught the next train up to London, in the one good suit I had left to me. So I went in to this meeting, and I sat down with the manager, wondering where everyone else was. And he said to me: Jack. I’ve called you in to ask you to stop pestering us. I said What do you mean? And he said I admire your persistence, so I wanted to tell you face to face. The fact is, we don’t need your product. We’re perfectly able to take care of our cargoes, thank you very much, but  – please – if you wouldn’t mind – never, ever contact us again. So I stood up, shook his hand, and came all the way home again.’
‘That’s terrible!’
‘It was a blow, that’s for sure.’
‘So then what happened? How did you keep going?’
‘The next three months were tricky. But then one of their ships upped and sank. A whole load of toxic chemicals were lost overboard, stuff they couldn’t account for. The entire management was sacked, and the new lot called me up, and they said Jack. About that software…’

swifts!

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Getting out of the car, I stop to look up.
Swifts! Swooping and screaming round the high buildings of the old hospital.

It’s incredible to think how far these birds have come, thousands and thousand of miles, up from Central and Southern Africa to spend just a few months of the summer here before flying back. I read about them the other day. Apparently they only land to breed, making nests from any material they can snatch from the air, gluing them together with saliva high up in the eaves of old buildings, where they can drop straight back into flight from the entrance. Their whole lives are lived on the wing, eating, drinking, mating. When they need to sleep, they rise ten thousand feet or more, and close their eyes, riding the isobars so expertly that when they open their eyes again, they’re pretty much in the same spot.

I watch them for a while, then lock the car and head inside.

With creatures like these flying above us – well, it feels wonderful! A benediction!

the gabby gene

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Violet doesn’t say hello when she answers the door so much as seamlessly include me in the conversation she’s been having with everyone, and herself, these past few years. It’s how I imagine being subsumed by an extra-terrestrial blob in one of those fifties’ sci-fi films. (A theramin plays in the background; you open the door; you throw your hands back helplessly as a formless blobby mass rolls over you and wobbles on, leaving nothing in its wake but a bag, a diary and a shoe).

I imagine Violet was always chatty. It’s a gene some people have, like being able to roll your tongue. My brother Mick, for example. He’s never stuck for something to say. For example, if you were to ask me how I got here, I’d probably say something dour like ‘I drove down; it was okay’; Mick, on the other hand, Mick would tell you everything, every last detail, from the confusing new road layout at the top of his road to the number of hawks he spotted and what happened when he ordered coffee at the service station. It’s like someone playing the didgeridoo; he practices circular breathing to maintain a continuous note.

You have to pick your time as well as your question when you talk to Mick. And aways know your exits.

Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not being born with a gabby gene so much as being born without the gene that lets you know your conversational partner is only pretending to get a text saying they have to go home immediately.

In Violet’s case, though, no doubt her natural chattiness is exacerbated by stress. It’s how she’s coping with life, now that her husband Ronnie has suffered a number of debilitating strokes, needs constant attention, hoisting from bed to commode to sofa and back again, with a small army of carers and nurses and other health care professionals trooping through the flat all hours of the day and night. It’s painful to see the contrast between them, how busy with everything she is, with appointments and supplies and deliveries and relatives and diagnoses and medications and the weather today and the news this morning and the fact the plumber didn’t show and where she’s going to have her hair done – whilst Ronnie sits on the sofa, in his wearable sling and pad, only able to clear his throat in an approximate way when I sit down next to him, give his hand a squeeze, and ask him how he is.

mr stabby

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The worst blocks have the loveliest names.

Carnelion House. By rights it should be bold, angular, cut from a solid block of plastic. Not a few, desultory storeys thrown like a bad cap over a huddle of failing shops.

You’d never know it was there. Even the SatNav’s embarrassed, blindly and hurriedly planting its red-button flag somewhere in the general area. The name of the block had fallen away years ago, so even if you parked exactly at that spot, and looked around, you’d never see it. And if you asked someone walking by in the street, no doubt they’d say: ‘Nah mate. Never heard of it. Unless they lived there. In which case they’d say: ‘Who wants to know?’

I only know Carnelion House because I went there once on an ambulance call. It was one of those addresses we tended to know, an ambulance lore of warning, passed from person to person in the way that a knowledge of obscure and dangerous reefs are communicated naturally between sailors. We used to have a lot of calls to Carnelion House, domestic abuse, assaults, overdoses and so on. The last time I was there the patient who’d taken too much heroin threatened us with his needle. I can picture him now, slumped on the edge of the bed, a line of drool shining from his bottom lip as he gripped the needle in his fist, point-down, like a dagger.
‘You come near me an’ I’ll stab yer in the fuckin’ EYE’ he said.
He obviously wasn’t quite as unconscious as reported, so we let the police go ahead of us with their vests and gloves and no-nonsense demeanour.

‘Wow! I’m impressed you knew where to go!’ says Connie, as I park up and lead us both to the discrete front door.
‘I’ve been here before.’
‘In the ambulance?’
‘In my dreams.’
I buzz the buzzer.

It turns out to be the same flat as Mr Stabby. I recognise his flat mate, Paco, an extraordinary guy holding himself painfully, in a semi-crouch. With his haunted eyes and his long greasy hair partially obscuring his face, he reminds me of that drawing of Nebuchadnezzar by Blake.
‘Hello,’ he says, gruffly, then letting go of the door, lurches precariously back towards the bedroom.

It may only have been two or three years, but things have headed south at a pace. These days Paco barely makes it out of bed. He has a bucket by his side for toileting. Someone on the same landing brings him food now and again. Maybe pays his TV licence, rates and so on, I don’t know. He’s been deemed to have capacity to make decisions for himself, so any attempt to engage by various services have met with little or no success. It’s only a recent ambulance call that’s brought him back into focus. And it feels as if maybe things have changed enough to convince him to accept help.

‘I’m sorry it’s such a mess,’ he says, collapsing back on the bed, the same bed Mr Stabby was sitting on when he made his vow to me. ‘But you see, my carer died.’

rita’s chairs

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

In the time it takes to walk from the front door to the sitting room, Rita has recalled my name, the names of my children and their musical aspirations, the village I live in and even the breed and name of our dog.
‘I’m amazed!’ I tell her. ‘And there was me struggling to think if I’d been here before.’
‘Dear oh dear!’ she says, a little wheezily. ‘I’m obviously not that memorable, then. Or perhaps it’s because you see so many people. Yes – I think for the sake of my vanity I’ll go with that explanation.’
She’s quiet for the rest of the time it takes her to return to her chair and catch her breath. I wait until she’s settled, fetching the yellow folder and having a quick read through.
‘I’m afraid my breathing’s not what it was,’ she says, ‘but there’s nothing wrong with my brain, thank goodness.’
‘It must have been six months ago, at least.’
‘What do you remember then?’
‘I don’t know. These chairs.’
‘The chairs did you say?’
‘Straight out of the seventies. All that chrome and leather. You just don’t see them that often.’
‘Well there you are, then. I remember people, you remember furniture.’
‘When you put it like that it sounds bad.’
She laughs.
‘I’m just having a little fun at your expense,’ she says. ‘Would you like some tea?’
‘I’ll make it.’
‘Would you? I’m worn out with all that exercise. I think you’ll find it all pretty self-explanatory.’

*

When I’ve made the tea and she’s quite recovered, we chat as I take her observations and so on.
‘I don’t suppose anyone can believe the old bird is still around,’ she says as I unwrap the blood pressure cuff. ‘Least of all the old bird herself. I’ll be ninety-four next month.’
I shake my head.
‘What’s your secret?’ I say.
‘Stay away from medication! You don’t know what’s in it. You’re much safer with the odd glass of whiskey. Malted barley, spring water, a few years in an oak barrel and there you have it.’
‘Did you work for a distillery or something?’
‘Me? No! Although that sounds like fun. No – I was a teacher for many years. Loved every second.’
‘I bet you were amazing.’
She shakes her head.
‘I don’t suppose my students would have agreed with you particularly. But one did one’s best.’
She watches as I fill out the chart.
‘All okay, is it?’ she says.
‘Better than mine!’
‘Damn!’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘We-ell. That’s the thing about advanced decrepitude, y’see? It’s the practical things. All of my friends are dead. I’ve got family of course, but they’re liberally spread about in the North and Australia and what have you, and I don’t see them all that much. I’m afraid to say I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve rather outstayed my welcome.’
She smiles, and gently strokes the armrests.
‘But you like my chairs?’ she says.

out out

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When I was little we used to play a game called Jack Straws. You had a box of plastic tools – ladders, shovels, brooms, rakes and so on – you dumped them in a pile in the middle of the table, and then you took it in turns to try to hook as many away as you could. If the rest of the pile moved, you were out, and you passed the hook on.

Talking to Paula is a lot like playing Jack Straws, but instead of tools it’s walking sticks, letters, appointment cards, blister packs, items of food and then – the biggest category by far – people, dozens of them, in all shapes and sizes, some of them old, some of them young, some of them in uniform. And it’s difficult to resist the idea that the box got emptied on the table about the time her partner Eric died.

I’d been given the background story by someone else. Twenty years ago Paula and Eric had left their respective partners and children to start a new life together in a different part of the country. Paula had always been an anxious person, something that deteriorated in later years to the point where Eric had been acting as her carer. His recent, unexpected death cut Paula adrift, and everyone around her was struggling to cope. She’d been calling the ambulance a great deal. The police, too. Carers had been arranged but quickly dismissed, accused of laziness, rudeness, or the latest, making faces and going through her things. Everyone was trying to help. No-one was getting anywhere.

I’ve been sitting on the sofa struggling to think of a new angle to come at all this. It doesn’t help my situation that Paula’s friend Nigel is so aggressive. No doubt he’s stressed, too, but I don’t get the impression he’s normally easy. He has that way some men have of walking slightly back on his heels, arms out to the side, like it’s an effort to accommodate so much masculinity in such a short frame.
Right at the beginning of the meeting I’d checked Paula was okay with him being there.
‘Nige? He’s taking me shopping,’ she said. ‘Of course I want him here.’
‘That’s fine. I just needed to make sure.’
‘What’s up?’ said Nige, wobbling back into the room.
‘He says he wants you to go.’
‘Does he?’ he said, poking his glasses back into position with a finger as hard as a nail gun. ‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Don’t worry, Nigel,’ I said to him. ‘It’s fine. It’s just standard procedure when I’m talking to a patient about private stuff.’
‘Private stuff, yeah?’ he said, then thrust a doctor’s letter out for me to read. ‘Well go on, then. What are you going to do about this private stuff?’

*

It’s the end of the meeting. Physically Paula seems fine. The only positive contribution I can think of to make is a referral to social services, although I’m pretty sure they’ll already be well aware of the situation.
‘I just want to go back up north,’ she says. ‘Can’t you find me nowhere?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘A house or a flat. Back up near my daughter.’
‘Well – that’s a little beyond what we normally do. But there’s nothing to stop you or your daughter looking for properties yourself.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Online. There are loads of good websites.’
‘I haven’t got a computer.’
‘Your daughter, then.’
‘She doesn’t want me near her.’
‘She doesn’t?’
‘No!’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘So what are you saying, then? You’re not going to help me?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘But I can’t go on living here, can I? I can’t cook. I can’t look after myself. I can’t go out.’
‘I thought you said you were going shopping with Nigel?’
‘No,’ she says, taking out a cigarette, her hands trembling. ‘I mean out out.’

mum’s calculation

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Mrs Charlesworth appears to have read the book on Being Old. Her hair is as white and tightly curled as a titanium helmet; she’s wearing a thick cardigan despite sitting in a conservatory that’s as hot as a pizza oven; she has a kitchen trolley by her side with her glasses, a cup and saucer, remote control, puzzle book and pen, bundle of knitting and a dish of toffees. And she can’t resist asking the question.
‘How old d’you think I am?’ she says.
‘I wouldn’t like to say.’
‘Go on! I won’t be offended.’
‘It’s just a bit awkward if I get it wrong.’
‘Why would it be awkward? Honestly – I won’t mind.’
‘Yeah, but it depends by how much I get it wrong.’
‘It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest’ she says, illustrating the comment with a casual sideways swipe of her hand, like she’s chopping the head off something.
‘I’d rather not. I’m just not very good at these things.’
‘Come on! How old?’

It reminds me of a story mum used to tell. She worked as a cleaner and general help in an amusement arcade for a while. One of the guys there was an absolute wreck. What little hair he had left he slicked in strands across his pate, his badly-fitting false teeth were in danger of popping out when he coughed, he had bottle-end glasses, and his skin was as grooved and scarred as a whale that had been attacked by a giant squid. How old d’you think I am? he asked her, thrusting his face into the change cubicle, whilst graciously holding his fag out to the side. She didn’t want to say. He pressed her. She thought he was eighty, so to be safe she knocked off ten years. Seventy? he said, appalled. I’m fifty-eight. (The moral to this story would have to be something like: Do not under any circumstances ask anyone how old they think you are unless you have sworn testmony from someone who knows about these things to say in black and white that yes, you are indeed much younger than you look. And – by the way – not even then).
But Mrs Charlesworth is looking at me so enthusiastically that I feel my natural resistance breaking down.
I perform Mum’s Calculation: She looks ninety, so to be safe I’ll knock off ten years.
‘Eighty,’ I say.
Her smile falters.
‘So how old are you then?’ I say after a while, a little nervously.
‘Eighty,’ she says. ‘But I don’t feel it.’

happy days

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Ralph reminds me of that woman in Happy Days – not the Fonzie sitcom, the Beckett two-hander. She’s buried up to her waist in a mound of crap, but seems oblivious, wittering on to a taciturn husband who sits at the bottom of the heap passing her stuff every now and again. Ralph isn’t quite buried, but it wouldn’t take much. A sneeze would do it. He’s lying precariously on his side on the very edge of a large double bed that’s piled high with rubbish. And it’s not just the bed. The whole flat is submerged, with only a trackway through the rubbish to get you from the front door to the bedroom and – at a push – to the bathroom. At least the budgie in the front room has a cage to protect its space from the rising tide of crap, although quite how Ralph ever manages to make it over there to feed and clean it is a mystery. The bird sits on its perch flicking its head in spasms of attention as I pick my way through to Ralph, who calls to me from the bedroom.
‘The bag needs changing,’ he says.
He’s right. His catheter bag is as tight as an overfilled water bottle, straining at the seams, filled with a sloughy, orange-tinged mess.
It’s hard to know where to begin. There’s nothing in the flat to clean him up, scarcely room to put my bag down let alone install equipment. We often talk about setting up a micro-environment for anyone with significantly reduced mobility. That means having all the essentials to hand – a commode, urinal, frame to help with transfers, maybe an over-bed table for food and water, a phone nearby and so on. I can’t help noticing that Ralph has already set up his own version of the micro-environment: a pile of porno mags, a remote control and a combat knife.
I’m half-way through sorting out his catheter when I hear a knock on the front door.
‘Who’s that?’ I say. He shrugs.
When no-one comes through, I go to check.
The front door is slightly ajar. Just in front of it on the floor, about an arm’s length from the threshold, a big bag of bird seed.

loki

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Mrs Ransome’s Sphinx cat Loki is aptly named. Not so much because he gets into mischief – I haven’t been here long enough to tell – but because he looks and moves like a creature from another world.

There are so many odd things about Loki it’s hard to know where to start. He’s completely hairless, of course, his skin the colour and texture of an old suede handbag; his large eyes are as luminously blue as two almond-shaped jewels, and his wiry whiskers, long tail and his great, pointed ears, together with a tiny, down-turned mouth, give him the rapt and rather melancholy expresssion of someone who can see and hear everything, even your thoughts, and wishes he couldn’t.

All this is pretty strange, but still the oddest thing about Loki is the way he moves.

To watch him leap from sofa to table to chair, you’d hardly think he was real at all. It’s all too perfect, too exact. It’s like watching an obscure Czechoslovakian animation where a stop-motion cat leaps from sofa to table to floor to the sound of a scratchy violin. And when he’s studied me from the other side of the room, when he’s paused there a while, and scanned my soul with his eyes and ears and whiskers, and decided I’m worthy of trust, in the time it takes me to click my pen he’s suddenly right there in my lap, purring so loudly the whole chair starts drilling itself into the floor.

‘He likes you,’ says Mrs Ransome. ‘Normally he hides on the roof.’

tea for two

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‘When I was too old for football I took up cricket. And when I was too old for cricket I took up golf. And I played that for thirty years. And now look.’
By way of illustration, Mr Clark fusses with his dressing-gown cord, as thick as a tail, with a frayed and fluffy end. In fact, Mr Clark has such a long and lugubrious face, his expression so melancholy, I could easily be persuaded it is a tail, and that this is in fact Eeyore, magically – tragically – transformed into a frail old man.

When Mr Clark has achieved something approximating a knot, he sniffs sadly, and then gently replaces his hands right and left on the armrests.
‘So as you can imagine,’ he says, ‘…my current situation is not what you might call an unending round of frivolity.’
‘No. You’ve got a lot on your plate.’
‘I have got a lot on my plate. In fact, I’d go as far as to say, I need a bigger plate.’

It’s true. Things are particularly difficult for Mr Clark these days. Ten years ago he had an operation to correct some crumbling vertebrae in his lower back. But the operation failed, leaving him with reduced mobility and constant pain radiating down his right leg. Surgically there’s nothing more that can be done. The only thing left is to load him up with painkillers and put in carers four times a day. He spends hours in the chair, watching sport on TV, or staring out of the window into the garden.
‘I used to enjoy all that,’ he says. ‘Gardening, I mean. But of course even that’s denied me now. Graham comes round to mow the lawn. He does what he can. But Graham’s not the man he used to be, neither.’
‘I think I met Graham last time I was here’ I say. ‘Hasn’t he got a little Yorkshire Terrier?’
‘Lucy,’ says Mr Clark, sadly. ‘Yes. He adopted her. He used to do some work for Gladys next door. But then she died, and no-one wanted the dog.’
‘That was nice of him.’
‘She’d let Lucy get terrible fat, poor thing. She never used to walk her, y’see? She could hardly walk herself. She’d let her out the back every now and again, and you’d see her gasping, waddling around with her tongue sticking out. Eyes bulging. That’s not a good look, not for anyone.’
‘Still. It sounds like she’s landed on her paws with Graham.’
‘I suppose,’ sighs Mr Clark. ‘She’s slowly getting back to normal. But he ought to watch her round that mower of his. She hasn’t got the sense to avoid it herself. Or the legs.’

The walls of Mr Clark’s front room are covered with pictures: Mr Clark in three-quarter profile with his hair slicked back; Mr Clark throwing himself into a tackle; Mr Clark swiping a bat; Mrs Clark in a Doris Day dress and pearls; Mr and Mrs Clark caught in the flash of a camera at a party; laughing and ducking through a shower of confetti outside a church; assorted babies in prams, in Mrs Clark’s arms, on picnic blankets, faces smeared with jam, waving wooden spoons, crying; kids in school uniforms, in sports day kit, at Christmas parties, red-eyed in the flash amongst piles of tinsel and balloons and wrapping paper; young men and women in mortar boards and gowns, self-consciously holding diploma rolls, or shaking someone’s hand as they accept a certificate; then more babies in more recent pictures, with Mr Clark and his wife bookending the group, and then in the centre with everyone standing round them; then smaller photos of someone sky-diving, posing on a yacht in sunglasses, raising a glass of wine. And last of all, propped up on the mantelpiece, a picture of Mrs Clark on an order of service, some dates in gold leaf, a border of lillies.
‘How did you two meet?’ I ask him.
‘I saw her and her friend Janice in the street, standing outside a jewellery shop. I liked the look of her so I went over and said did she know the way to the Hippodrome? And when she told me I repeated it back all wrong, which made her laugh, and she told me again, and I got it wrong again, and so in the end she said it would save everyone a lot of bother if she just took me there herself. So that’s what she did. And we stopped off in a Lyon’s tea shop, and we only parted company sixty years later.’
‘That’s lovely!’
‘Yes. Well.’
He looks down, fiddles with the cord of his dressing-gown again, and shakes his head.
‘I don’t know,’ he sighs.
‘What don’t you know?’
‘All this. I mean – what’s it all for?’
‘I’m sorry you’re feeling so low.’
He lets go of the cord and grips the arms of the chair again, as tightly and purposefully as someone who fully expected to be thrown out at any moment.
‘It’s just so much sitting around,’ he says. ‘It’s probably high-time I went.’