sketches

into the arena

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

Mr Thomas uses his cane to move the strip curtain aside, then after staring at me levelly, thumps the rubber ferrule a couple of times against the glass, then lets the strips fall back into place.

I’m not sure what he means. Is there a keysafe round the side I haven’t seen? Is the door open and he wants me to let myself in? Or is it something else?  I’d guess from his expression – a terrifying species of imperial rage – that he wants me to clear off.

I did try to call him beforehand to warn him I was coming. But Mr Thomas’ phone rejects anonymous calls, and even though I used the 1470 function to remove the anonymity, it still hadn’t accepted the call. In the absence of an alternative number, I’d decided to call round on spec. Which is beginning to feel like a catastrophic error of judgement.

He hooks the strip curtain aside again, to see if I’ve taken the hint. When it’s apparent that I’m not leaving, the strips fall back into place again, and I assume from the isolated flashes of movement I catch that he’s decided to come to the door.

It takes a while.

Across the road, two painters have stopped for lunch. They’ve sat down with their legs happily swinging over the edge of the scaffolding, and are busy setting out their flasks and sandwiches. It’s like they’re settling down to watch a film. Gladiator, maybe.

There’s a doored porch to Mr Thomas’ house – a heavy, white, plastic-and-metal affair. Eventually the inner door opens, and Mr Thomas stands there in his dressing gown and slippers, holding a zimmer frame in one hand and a walking stick in the other, worryingly like a net and trident. He glares at me despite my ingratiating smile, then starts the precarious business of negotiating the front step. I can hardly bear to watch. In fact, the whole thing’s so alarming I try the outer door so I can go in to help. But it’s locked, so all I can do is stand there helplessly as he gets himself in a terrible muddle, trying to manoeuvre the frame with one hand whilst he waves the walking stick in the air. More by luck than skill, and with a huge amount of crashing and swearing and flailing about, he manages to reach the porch door, where he stops to catch his breath, clinging on to the handle. When he’s sufficiently recovered, he starts fiddling with the intricate locking mechanism, flashing me a look every once in a while, as if all this was my fault, and I’m going find out soon enough what he thinks about it.

I glance back at the painters on the scaffolding. One of them raises his sandwich by way of salute. I nod feebly, and then turn back just in time to see the door thrown aside, and Mr Thomas standing there in the full and unmitigated fury of his dressing gown.
Just what the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at? he says.
‘I’m Jim. From the hospital. Come to see how you are’ I say. And as bravely as I can, I hold out my hand, like a Christian martyr offering the lion something to sniff, or tear asunder, depending.

no!

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

I’d been to Mrs Lustig before, about nine months ago.

It had been a wild, raw day in November then, bitter squalls of rain, and such violent gusts of wind  it was a job to hold on to the car door when I opened it. I’d struggled to find her house, tucked away in one of those streets whose numbers seem to run completely at random, tailing off down alleyways and cut-throughs, jumping back again, in such an idiosyncratic way even the postman I stopped to ask had to think hard for a minute. That wasn’t the end of it, though. When finally I’d walked up the cluttered path to the front door and knocked, and then waited, and then rung the bell, and waited, and got no reply, and rung the landline on my mobile, and heard it ringing deep inside, and still had no answer, I’d decided to go round the back to check she wasn’t on the floor or something. First of all I’d had to get past a large camellia in a large metal container that had been blown over in the wind. It was a struggle to pick it up, and then I had to try all kinds of things to brace it against the wall – a wheelie bin, an old iron patio chair, a crate of recycling. When eventually I’d made it round to the little back garden, pressed my nose up against the window and shaded it with my hand, I’d got quite a shock. There was Mrs Lustig, sitting staring out at me from a high-backed chair, frowning a little, maybe, but otherwise making no move or sign for me to come in or go away. I’d waved and smiled, knocked on the window, held up my badge, pointed to it, but she’d carried on sitting and staring out at me without appearing to have seen me at all. So I’d gone back round to the front (stopping to right the camellia which had blown over again), and tried the handle on the front door. It was open, so calling ahead to identify myself, I’d stepped inside. And everything had been fine, and that was that.

This visit is already so much easier. A warm, still day, for one thing. And because I know where I’m going this time, I drive straight there. And when I pull up there’s a space out front just exactly the right size for my little car. I find that Mrs Lustig’s front path has been tidied, the camellia has been chained up, and then, exactly as described in the referral, I find a keysafe behind it, discreetly fixed to the wall.
I retrieve the key and let myself in.
‘Hello? Mrs Lustig?’

The interior of the house is the same, though. Hundreds of books neatly lined up in ancient bookcases, ceramic dishes and bronze dogs displayed in alcoves, oil paintings in gilded frames, everything suspended in the same dusty, honey coloured light that streams in through the stained glass panels above me.

Mrs Lustig is sitting in the same high-backed chair, just as passively as before, her eyes as lucent and blue as the Delft vase on the table behind her. Someone has filled it with fresh-cut roses. Her daughter, I’d guess.
‘Hello!’ I say.
‘Hello,’ she echoes.
As I settle in to the consultation I mention that this is the second time I’ve been here. That last time the weather was terrible. I’d wrestled with the camellia, tried and failed to set it right again.
‘Camellia?’ she says, uncertainly, as if I’d just described an angel I’d found on the patio.
‘I’m glad it’s fixed to the wall now.’
‘Well – yes!’
‘So.’

Mrs Lustig’s condition has robbed her of so much, but still there’s something so beautifully poised and modulated about her, something so fine about the face, that when I ask her what she used to do for a living before she retired, I’m not surprised when she says quite slowly and firmly: ‘I was an actress.’
‘How lovely!’ I say. And then: ‘Did you have a favourite role?’
‘No!’ she says.
‘Oh! Well – I’m sure they all had their thing.’
‘Yes!’
I carry on writing for a bit, then I can’t resist trying a different angle.
‘Was it difficult, being an actress?’ I ask her. ‘I mean – I’ve always imagined it must be quite a precarious business, chasing the work, going to auditions. The uncertainty of it all.’
‘No!’ she says again, and smiles so broadly and so warmly, it’s as good as if we’d chatted about it for hours.

*

 

Later on, back in the car, my curiosity piqued, I look her up on imdb.com. A black and white picture immediately comes up of a radiantly beautiful woman in her twenties, and then on from the picture, hundreds of links to films and TV shows, glitzy shots in restaurants, paparazzi snaps on yachts and nightclubs, newspaper articles, gossip columns. A cover on Picture Post.
And I hear myself asking her that question, sounding so gauche it makes me wince: Was it difficult, being an actress?
But then her simple answer – stripped of her ability to elaborate, perhaps, but still suffused with the joy of it all: No!

sleep

~ jim clayton ~ 6 Comments

Arthur is about as cold and severe as it’s possible to be without actually being struck from a block of granite. Tall and broad, a little stooped at the hip, he slowly wheels his wife Pat into the kitchen, parks her at the table, fusses some things on the tray in front of her – a box of tissues, a beaker of cold tea – then sits heavily in the chair opposite.
‘What do you propose to do now?’ he says.
I explain why I’ve come. He listens, frowning, hardly able to meet my eye he’s so cross.
‘How long will it take?’ he says, cutting me off. ‘I’ve got things to do, you know.’
‘I’ll be as quick as I can. I should think about twenty minutes.’
‘Twenty minutes? Couldn’t you make it fifteen? She’s got her feet at one.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
My best is obviously not good enough. Impervious to my attempts to soften him up and win him over, Arthur folds his arms and watches me prepare my things. Every now and again he releases a quantity of air through his nose, like it’s a safety valve easing the pressure in his head.
‘You should come like you arranged,’ he says.
‘Yes. I’m sorry I was delayed. But it’s not that far off. Is it?’
‘You shouldn’t make appointments if you don’t intend to keep them.’
‘I know, I know. It’s just really difficult to judge. Things happen.’
He grimaces.
‘An appointment’s an appointment,’ he says.
‘Absolutely. You’re right. I could always come back later…’
I hope he won’t take me up on that, because then I’ll really fall behind. But, luckily for me, all he does is check his watch and wave me on.
‘So long as you’re quick,’ he says.

Pat, on the other hand, is almost completely inert. Her dementia has made her childlike – or, if not that, exactly, then animated by a disquieted kind of wonder at her own condition, looking at me and Arthur and the room we’re in without any apparent differentiation.
‘I don’t know what good you think any of this will do,’ says Arthur, as I take her obs. ‘The doctor did it all last week.’
‘Things change,’ I say, pulling the stethoscope from my ears and unwrapping the blood pressure cuff. ‘You have to take a few readings over a period of time, so you get a good picture of what’s going on. But in this case, everything seems fine.’
He grunts, sighs, rubs his face, checks his watch again.
‘So that’s that,’ I say, filling in the last of the figures. ‘Now. What about you?’
‘Me?’
‘How are you coping?’
He shrugs.
‘Are you getting the help you need?’
‘What kind of help?’
‘Carers. You know. That kind of thing.’
‘I’m her carer. What would a carer do?’
‘I don’t know. Help get Pat washed and dressed in the morning. Take care of her meds.’
‘I do that.’
‘Okay. Great!’
‘I do everything. I get her up in the morning, I put her to bed at night, and everything in between. Not that she sleeps. Last night I was up at half past twelve, half past two, half past four, half past six…. I’ve not had a decent night’s sleep in years. She calls out in the night, you know. All the time. And I have to take her to the toilet. And then bring her back. And wash her down when she doesn’t make it. I don’t know how I’ve been getting through the day, I’m so tired…. I don’t know how I’m going to ….I don’t know…’
And suddenly he leans forward, puts his face in his hands, and cries.

Pat watches him from her wheelchair, then slowly picks up the beaker from the tray and takes a sip. A dribble of tea falls down the front of her dress.
‘Here, love. Sorry. Let me get that for you,’ he says, and wiping his nose on his sleeve, he hauls himself up, pulls a handful of tissues from the box, and starts dabbing her dry again.

the very model of gentleness

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Midday, and the sun is the blinding centre of everything, scorching every surface, every car bonnet, brick wall, bare arm; blazing over the city; bubbling in the gooey tack of the road; dry-frying the leaves on the trees; flaming across the intersection of every street, irradiating everything with its vast and pitiless eye. It feels as if the sun has moved in close, into some newer, more punishing orbit – on a grudge, on a whim – and it absolutely will not quit until the last squeak of moisture has been drawn from the cell of every living thing.

Which is to say, I’m hot and thirsty.
Even winding up the car windows when I park feels like an act of madness.
In the seconds it takes to step out, I’m sweating.

Agnes’ daughter Janice meets me at the door.
‘Gosh, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ she says.
Inside the house is dark and cool.
‘The doctor’s still here,’ she says.
‘Great!’
I follow her upstairs.

Doctor Middleton is sitting on a blanket chest quietly fanning himself with a magazine supplement.
‘Hello Doctor,’ I say, putting my bag down and reaching out to shake his hand. ‘I’ve been sent to take some blood.’
‘Excellent!’ he says. ‘I suppose you know the circumstances?’
‘Just the basics.’
‘Well let me fill you in. Agnes has taken to her bed the last couple of weeks. Nothing specific. A little abdo pain perhaps but you could probably ascribe that to diverticula disease. No diarrhoea, no nausea or vomiting. No distressing symptoms particularly, other than this loss of energy and appetite and general decline. The weather’s not helping, of course – it certainly is warm – but let’s just say it’ll be interesting to see what the bloods show. If you’d be so kind as to throw the net wide – kidney, liver function, infection, anemia, that sort of thing. And put it in as urgent, if you wouldn’t mind. And we’ll take it from there. Okay? Great.’
He looks from me to Janice then back again, smiling broadly, shining in the close heat of the bedroom. Then he puts the magazine down, picks up his things, and with a large, friendly wave, heads for the stairs.

I turn my attention to Agnes. She’s lying on her side on furthest edge of the large bed, her left hand crooked under her head, her right hand resting on the point of her elbow. She’s staring at a small, white fan that’s been set on the floor, angled up so that a current of air plays gently across her face.
Janice sits down on a wicker chair just opposite – a position I’m guessing she’s held these past few days – as I kneel at the side of the bed and gently stroke the back of Agnes’ hand. When she opens her eyes and looks at me I explain who I am and what I’ve come to do. She listens passively, allowing me to straighten her right arm, put on the tourniquet, and tap up a vein. She barely reacts as the needle goes in and I draw off two phials of blood.
‘There! All done!’ I say, taping a little wad of gauze over the wound.
‘What do you think’s wrong?’ says Janice.
‘I don’t really know,’ I tell her. ‘The observations the doctor took don’t seem to point to anything. Has it been a marked decline, would you say? Or was it more gradual?’
‘A bit of both,’ she says, and by way of illustration raises her hand in the air and swoops it back down again, like she’s describing a rather lacklustre ride she took at the fair.
‘I wish I knew what was wrong.’
‘Well the bloods will certainly give a good indication. You’re doing the right things. though. Keep Agnes cool, give lots of fluids – doesn’t matter so much about food at this point. And we’ll take it from there.’
The phone rings, so I mime a Goodbye. She waves and smiles, and I see myelf out.

The first thing I do when I get back to the car is open all the windows. The seat is uncomfortably hot when I sit down, but at least there’s a scrap of breeze now, so I don’t need to drive off immediately and find somewhere shadier.

My habit is to make sure I have all the details I need for these phlebotomy jobs, take the sample and then fill in the form and the labels on the phials when I’m back in the car. It’s a long and fiddly bit of admin, and I don’t want to bother the patient any more than I have to. So it’s only when I settle in to do the paperwork that I notice Agnes’ date of birth.

She’s well over a hundred years old.

It makes me think of my friend Jo and his old sheepdog, Lewis. When Lewis reached the very end of his life, he took to lying by their garden pond. The last time I saw him, in fact, the day before he died, he was in his usual spot, his head between his paws, staring with his eyes half closed at the ripples in the water his fading breath made. And I think of Agnes, upstairs on the bed, quietly staring at the little white fan spinning round and round.

I drop the bloods off at the hospital.

It’s only at the very end of my shift, when I’ve arrived back at base to handover my caseload, that I hear Agnes died – an hour or two after I left. Apparently an ambulance was called, and because there was no DNACPR, the crew had to go through the resus protocol.
‘Unsuccessfully, surprise, surprise,’ says the co-ordinator, clicking her pen and pulling a fresh report sheet towards her. ‘I’m amazed there wasn’t one in place, but who knows? Maybe the family refused. You never know with these things. Shame though.’
‘I certainly wouldn’t want anyone jumping up and down on my chest when I was in my hundreds,’ I say, taking a seat next to her. ‘Or sticking me with needles, come to that.’
‘No. Me neither,’ she says. ‘Maybe it was you taking blood that pushed her over the edge.’
But she immediately smiles, and pats me on the arm.
‘Only kidding,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you were the very model of gentleness.’

to rinse or not to rinse

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Ken is sitting in his pants, sprawling out of the armchair, his long arms and legs pointing east, west, south east, south west, as startling to look at as a giant species of starfish unexpectedly brought up in the nets.
‘Hot, in’t it?’ he says, just managing to lift a hand to acknowledge me as I come in. ‘I think I might actually be melting…’
At least he has a fan, though. It rattles away on a nearby table, surprisingly little air moving despite the racket, just enough to tease a few strands of hair from the top of his balding head.
‘Take a seat,’ he says. ‘Yellow folder’s just there.’
‘Thanks.’

I’ve come to give his daily Tinzaparin injection.
‘They showed me how to do it,’ he says, struggling to sit up, ‘…but when it came to it, y’know, to actually putting the needle in, I just couldn’t. My nerve completely went. So I’m sorry you’ve been dragged out to take care of business.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Ken. It was good of you to try.’

I chat to him as I get things ready.
‘I know what you’re doing,’ he says, tapping a finger on the side of his nose. ‘You’re taking my mind off what’s coming next. I know all the tricks.’
‘Yeah – but the other thing is I’m actually quite nosy.’
‘You’re in the right line of work, then.’
‘I suppose so.’
He tells me he’s originally from Warwickshire.
‘That’s a beautiful county,’ I say. ‘Sharp scratch.’
‘It is,’ he says. ‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry, Ken.’
‘No need to apologise. You’re doing a grand job.’
‘There! All done!’
‘Not too bad,’ he says, a little subdued, rubbing the spot on his abdomen. ‘These days I feel like a bloody pin cushion.’
‘I went to Statford-upon-Avon for the first time a couple of years ago,’ I tell him, popping the used needle into the sharps bin. ‘I thought it was an amazing place.’
‘It is an amazing place,’ he says. ‘It’s where Shakespeare was born.’
‘Yep. We did the usual things. Went round the house. Saw a play at the theatre.’
‘He was definitely what you might call a genius,’ says Ken. ‘I don’t think that’s too strong a word. Some people are clever, like, but he was in a whole other league. Have you seen pictures of him, with his forehead bulging out like that, like a bloody balloon? That must’ve been the pressure of all them brains. And the thing was, it all come from nowhere. His dad was some kind of businessman. I don’t know what his mum did. And suddenly they have this kid who’s writing all these poems and plays all over the place. Amazing, when you think of it.’
‘It is.’
Ken laces his fingers across his belly and watches me write in silence for a while.
‘What would-a happened to me, in the past, like?,’ he says eventually. ‘Before all these injections?’
I shrug.
‘I don’t know, Ken. Maybe nothing. But I suppose people didn’t tend to live so long in the past, did they? I mean – look at Shakespeare. He was dead by the time he was fifty-two.’
‘I ‘spose. I’m not sure how much good it does any of us, all this jabbing and poking, all these whatnots, these pills. It’s just dragging it out. I mean, take my old mate, Bill. Not the Bill you’re thinking of, another one. He weren’t that old when his kidneys packed up. So every other day he had to go to the hospital to be plugged in to a big machine that rinsed ‘em out and kept him going a while longer. I said to him, I said Bill! Is it worth it, mate? Wouldn’t it be better to let nature take its course? So he came off the machine and he was dead by the weekend. I said to the doctor, I said Did you give him a kick, to make sure? And the doctor give me a look like this…’
He widens his eyes, straightens his mouth and leans towards me out of the chair. Then after a funny kind of pause, relaxes back again.
‘Didn’t bother me,’ he says. ‘Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. But by Christ! It ain’t half ‘ot today…’

horrific honorific

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I can’t remember the last time someone called me ‘sir’.
It makes me feel officious, remote, about a hundred years old.
I check Stan for intention (sarcastic? hostile? guarded?), but I don’t get a sense of anything other than an eagerness to show how much he appreciates the visit. Still – it’s oddly deferential, and I can’t help squirming.
‘The good lady wife’s just through here, sir,’ he says, showing me along the hallway to the lounge, and then standing aside, nodding and closing his eyes. All he needs is a pair of white gloves and a silver tray under his arm. ‘She can’t go far, I’m afraid. You’ll see why.’
Vera has been discharged from the hospital with home oxygen. She sits on the sofa, working her shoulders like a landed carp, her eyes just as large and round and glassy.
‘Oh – hello, dear,’ she gasps. ‘And what – have you – come for?’
I introduce myself. She pats the sofa cushion next to her for me to sit down.
‘Can I fetch you a drink, sir?’ says Stan. ‘A tea, perhaps? Or something cool?’
‘That’s very kind, Stan, but I’ve just put one out.’
‘Oh!’ he says, raising his eyebrows and tipping back on his heels. ‘Like a cigarette, you mean! Yes. Very good. Well – let me know if you need anything. Is it all right if I…?’
He gestures to an armchair the other side of the room.
‘Of course! If Vera doesn’t mind.’
‘We’ve been – married – forty-five years,’ says Vera. ‘It’s a bit – late in the day – if I do.’

the tree’s revenge

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

Lionel has the same birthday as me, minus forty years.
‘So you’re the twenty-ninth of December, too?’ he says. ‘How interesting! I don’t know about you, Jim, but one thing I noticed was the tendency to get rather a lot of suspect Christmas and birthday present combinations.’
‘Me too. I was always tempted to ask for the receipt so I could work it out.’
‘Yes!’
‘But there were consolations. I never used to mind it when I’d finished opening my Christmas presents because I knew I’d be getting some more in a few days’ time.’
‘There was always that consolation. And then it’s New Year’s Eve…’

It’s interesting, meeting patients with the same birthday. Sometimes it’s best not to say anything, though, tempting as it is, especially if the patient shares the same year, too, and hasn’t fared so well. The last patient I met who was my exact astrological twin was an alcoholic whose career had ended, wife run off with his best friend, been made homeless, and fallen down a flight of stairs. I’m pretty safe with Lionel, though. There’s the great age difference, to give us a tactful margin. And then there’s the fact that Lionel is one of the most inspirational ninety-five year olds I’ve ever met.

‘I would never have guessed you were ninety-five,’ I say to him, reflecting on his dates. ‘If you’d have said eighty I’d have said no way.’
‘You’re too kind!’ he says. ‘But carry on…’

Lionel’s been referred to us because he fractured his arm gardening.
‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ he says, shifting awkwardly in the armchair. ‘I was out there pruning back the fuchsia when I took a step back to see what needed to come off next. But the trouble was, you see, I’d forgotten about the laburnum stump. I’d taken the thing down about five or six years ago, something like that, pretty much to ground level, but I’d put off grubbing up the roots. It’s quite a tough job as you know, and I was working up to it. So what happened was I caught my foot and over I went, flailing around like Charlie Chaplin on a bad day, landing on my arm and causing the injury you see before you. An absolute bloody nuisance, but there you are. You make the best of these things.’
He settles back in the chair.
‘I suppose you’d have to say it was revenge,’ he says. ‘That poor tree! I expect it’s been waiting to get me all this time…’

going native

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Quite how the conversion was done or how it all hangs together it’s impossible to grasp. All you can say with any certainty is that at some point in the last twenty years a substantial Georgian house was designated as hostel accommodation, completely gutted and then divided up into numerous studio flatlets. The effect is of a grand old bee-hive. If I was a giant, I could take the roof off and lean in to inspect the interior, layer on layer of compact cells, each divided by nothing more than paper (and all the bees looking up at me, shaking their fists).
The cards describing the flat numbers give you a flavour. Random, hysterical groupings, arrows pointing left and right and round the corner – which is where the door to the staircase leading up to Terry’s flat is located, in an alleyway that funnels the wind so furiously it makes my ID lanyard flap backwards over my shoulder and snatches the sunglasses from the top of my head.
Hello?
Hello. It’s Jim, from the hospital. Come to see Terry.
Hello?
I put my mouth to the intercom.
Hello! It’s Jim, from the…
The door buzzes and I step inside.
A steep staircase, something of a cubist spiral, steeply rising up and up past flat doors whose numbers seem completely random.
By the sixth floor I’m slowing up and breathing hard. Terry is waiting for me by the door.
‘Why didn’t you say anything when I answered?’ he says, clutching his bathrobe around him.
‘I did… but the… wind was so strong…phew! That’s a long haul!’
‘I suppose you’d better come in,’ he says, and retreats into the flat.

I’m astonished to see how much IT equipment Terry has in his living room. There are laptops, desktops, a 3D printer the size of a small family car, plus shelf after shelf of spare parts, manuals, odds and ends, and then miles of cables of every colour and size, looped chaotically over hooks and hangars and any other appendage that might take them. It’s like climbing to the top of a great pine tree to find a crow’s nest with a fully-stocked workshop, fridge and snooker table.
‘Wow!’ I say. ‘I’m exhausted just carrying my bag’ dropping it down and then sitting in a chair. ‘This is amazing!’
‘I didn’t do it all at once,’ he says.
I want to say that doing any of it at any time would be inconceivable, but I let it pass.
‘I’ve come to see how you are,’ I say. ‘To do your blood pressure and that sort of thing.’
‘What – again?’ he says.
‘I know it’s a pain, but it’s good to get a picture over a period of time.’
‘I suppose,’ he says. ‘I just don’t think it means anything.’

Terry is an extraordinary figure. He’d be a shoe-in for Ben Gunn, if his robe had been woven from grass and not cotton towelling. Terry hasn’t cut his hair in years; it stands out in long, grey strands that, back-lit in the harsh light from the window, looking like the splayed ends of a fibre-optic cable. His thick glasses enlarge and dilute his eyes, holding their rather lost expression regardless of the wild changes of emotion Terry expresses.
‘It would help if it bloody worked’ he says, suddenly enraged, picking up a tablet and then crashing it down on the table again. ‘Windows 7,’ he says, his whole body trembling. ‘All I wanted was to download the driver for my printer so I could bloody well use the thing, but will it do it? Yes, it will.’
‘Oh! Good!’
‘No – but just wait a minute. Yes, it will download the driver, but it won’t let me load it!’
‘That must be frustrating…’
‘Frustrating? It makes me want to… I want to….’
He tails off, overwhelmed by the injustice of it, his whole head wobbling, as if the sudden change in pressure in his brain had loosened something critical in his neck.
‘What about getting advice on a forum…’
‘Forum? Don’t make me laugh! I haven’t got time for forums. They don’t want to… I can’t…’
It’s simply too much; he runs out of breath.
‘Unfortunately I’m not the one to advise you on this sort of thing,’ I tell him. ‘I struggle to find my way around my phone. I’m a bit hopeless, to be honest. If my daughters were here, though…’
‘Ah. Well,’ he says, blinking hard. ‘Digital natives.’
Terry seems so tortured by his environment it’s strange to think he’s responsible for it. I couldn’t be more confused than if I saw a mouse deliberately lower itself into a vivarium and then sit on a rock, quivering.
‘Try these on,’ he says, in a tone of voice suddenly balanced and conversational. He reaches behind him and hands me a pair of hi-spec glasses, connected to a handheld device that turns out to be some fantastically ergonomic controller. Through the glasses I’m presented with a virtual desktop, so vibrant and unexpected I’m momentarily lost for words.
‘Wow!’ I say, moving my head around and gently experimenting with the controls. ‘That’s – amazing!’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It is – or it would be if my hands didn’t shake so much I can’t work the damn thing!’

 

making the collar

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

You wouldn’t need the commemorative display on the sideboard (whistle & chain, stripes, badge, photograph, certificate) to know that Ray is a retired copper. Despite his great age and his various ailments, he still has that Dixon of Dock Green posture, that certain way of looking at you with his hooded eyes that’s both warm and sad at the same time. And when he sniffs – which he does, frequently, bunching-up his lips and twisting them off to the right along with the tip of his aquiline nose – you wouldn’t be surprised to see him pull a notebook from his pyjama pocket, lick the end of a pencil and say Right, then.
‘Shame you didn’t have your whistle when you got stuck behind the bed,’ I say, nodding at the sideboard.
‘Yes!’ he says. ‘They’d have come running, all right.’
He waits patiently as I unpack all my stuff, then adds:
‘But you know – everyone’s been so good. I can’t fault them. The ambulance girl who showed up. On that rapid response car. She was wonderful. Just a little scrap of a thing. But fiery! A real pocket rocket. She couldn’t get me out on her own but she made me comfortable, and then called for back-up. Yes – I’ve had such good attention. Honestly, I couldn’t ask for more.’
‘So what happened when you fell?’
‘We-ell. It was just one of them things. I’d been feeling a little – shall we say – under the weather? Completely lacking in oomph. I don’t know why. My daughter Jenny had just gone off to work. I went to go to the bathroom, toppled over backwards and ended up wedged between the bed and the wall. I was like that for ages. I called out for help but o’course, no one could hear me. I cried with the pain, at one point. In my shoulder. Thank God Jenny rang midday to ask what I wanted for lunch, and when I didn’t answer, she came over. That’s when she called the ambulance. And they got me up and carted me off to hospital. So what with one thing and another, you could say I’ve been in the wars, poor old sod.’
We carry on chatting as I run through the tests.
‘I don’t want her to worry,’ he says, offering out his arm. ‘I tell her, I say Jenny – I’ve had my life. You can’t hang around here. You’ve got to go out and live yours. But I suppose it can’t be helped.’
‘How long were you a policeman?’
‘Forty years. I did pretty much all of it. Beat bobby, CID, crime scene, fingerprints and all that. Ye-es, I had a wonderful life. Mind you, you get to see the other side of things. I’d go to the most appalling crime scenes, murders, every conceivable abomination. People can be wonderful, but they can be dreadful, too. It makes you think. Post mortems. I lost count of the post mortems I went to. And it’s hard to put that lot behind you. You can’t help carrying it round. It gets to be a bit them and us. One minute it was Good evening, constable – how are you? would you like a cup of tea? The next minute they’re jumping on your back trying to cut your throat. But I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I enjoyed my work. And I always had my family to come back to.’

After I’ve finished taking his blood pressure and packed my gear away, I write up the notes and then pause to talk some more.
‘Here’s something you might be interested in,’ I say.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘My mum doesn’t have any fingerprints!’
‘No? Why’s that then?’
‘Well – my youngest sister was convicted of fraud and did some time in prison, unfortunately. Eighteen months – although she didn’t serve all of that.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Anyway, when mum went to visit her in prison, they went to take her fingerprints, as part of their protocol.’
‘Yes’
‘They couldn’t get them! It caused a hell of a fuss.’
‘I bet it did.’
‘No-one had ever heard of it. Apparently it’s quite a rare genetic disorder.’
‘Is that so?’ he says. ‘Well – she missed her calling, then. She could’ve been a world famous cat burglar.’
He smiles, then sniffs, with that brilliant, sideways twist of the lower half of his face. And then vigorously rubbing his index finger under his nose like a violinist energetically working his bow, he settles himself again, and adds: ‘Although – I’d have still made the collar.’

cat & man

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

It’s so hot, even Reg’s cat Lionel barely has the energy to look up as I come into the little back yard. Don’t mind me he seems to say, just go ahead and ring the bell and he’ll be with you presently. Then blinking once, to seal the deal, and yawning broadly with a funny little snap of his jaws, he collapses back into the shady patch beneath the cotoneaster, and immediately falls asleep again. He’s a magnificent animal – just like Orlando, the marmalade cat, rich stripes of apricot and orange flowing down his sides.

If Lionel is an object lesson in glamorous health and vitality, his owner Reg is the complete opposite. In fact, Reg is so banged up, with so many wounds and dressings, he looks like an extra in a horror movie unexpectedly called to the door of the make-up wagon. The worst is a palm-sized gash to the right of his forehead, stitched up as vigorously as a rugby boot, the hair shaved around it in a punky and free-ranging kind of tonsure. He has two black eyes, swollen cheeks, a thick wodge of plaster over the blackened steri-strips holding his nose together, a split lip, and bruises in every hue and colour between black and yellow roiling up and down his arm.

‘Yes?’ he says, pulling his dressing gown together and swaying in the doorway. ‘Can I help you?’