We’ve all had a turn at going in to see Jasper. He’s one of the regulars, an intractable alcoholic, a serial self-neglecter whose M.O. is to get drunk, take too many pills (by mistake or design it’s impossible to say), fall over, be admitted to hospital and then discharged with a referral to the community health team. He’s had numerous multi-disciplinary team meetings, everyone from the psychiatrist to the CPN, physio and occupational therapists, pharmacists and social workers, everyone doing their best to come up with a workable plan. But inevitably Jasper ends up back in hospital, and the whole thing starts again.

This time was different, though. I heard about it from Carla, one of the carers, the next day.
‘It was the same old thing,’ she said, settling in to the story. ‘Door locked, curtains closed, no answer when I buzzed or called his phone. I mean – that’s always the way it is with him. He’s hardly ever there.’
‘It’s so frustrating.’
‘Anyway, I thought – right – I’ll just try one more thing and then call it quits. The curtain was a little caught up in the corner, so I shielded my hand over the glass like this, and had a good, long look. That’s when I saw the boot. You know those dreadful things he wears? There was just the suggestion of it, poking round the end of his bed. And it was difficult to tell, but I got the impression that there was a foot in there, too, the angle it was keeping. So I banged on the window a bit, and when nothing happened, called the police. They came pretty quick. Put the door in, and there he was, wedged down the side of the bed. We had to see if he was alive or not – and I know it doesn’t sound very caring – but what we did, we dragged him out by the leg. And you didn’t need a doctor to tell you he was dead, because he kept the same position he was in when we got him clear, all crumpled up on his side, poor thing, and a look on his face – I don’t know – like he was falling down a great big hole, which in a way, I suppose, he was.’
‘Sounds horrible.’
‘It wasn’t nice. Still…’ she says, taking another generous bite of her sandwich, and dabbing at the corner of her mouth with a napkin. ‘you’d have to say, it was a long time coming.’

Graham pulls his top up to show me his scar – a flap fully half the size of his abdomen, the edges as puckered as the crimped edges of a pasty.
‘Wow! That’s impressive!’ I say.
‘Yeah. The surgeon wanted plenty of elbow room’ he says. ‘I think he pretty much climbed inside’
He lowers his top again and sits on his bed, suddenly forlorn. Jake, his friend, is standing next to him, fidgeting from side to side. He takes a step forward.
‘Look at this, then,’ he says, joining in the display of medical horrors. An angry-looking rash extends up both his arms, bubbling up through his tattoos.
‘Horrible, innit?’
‘It looks pretty sore. Is it itchy?’
‘Yeah, it’s itchy. Itchy as fuck. So what d’you think?’
‘I don’t know. They look like bites.’
‘I think you’re right,’ he says. ‘This place is crawling with bed bugs.’
I can’t help glancing down at the bed Graham’s sitting on, but if he heard or already knows about the bugs, he makes no sign.
Over Graham’s bed is a poster of Bruce Lee, in the famous fighting pose from Enter the Dragon.
‘He was amazing,’ I say. ‘It’s such a shame he died so young.’
‘Thirty-two,’ says Graham, looking up. ‘Same age as me.’
‘What about all those rumours? You know – Triads and death touches?’
‘Nah. That’s just conspiracy theory bullshit. He’d gone round Betty Tingpei’s house to talk about his next film, Game of Death, and she give him a pain killer for a headache. Only it turned out Bruce was sensitive to the Meprobromate in it, his brain swelled up, and that was that. Game Over.’
‘Ask Graham anything you like about Bruce Lee,’ says Jake, still swaying from side to side. ‘Anything at all.’
‘Yeah. Or drugs,’ says Graham.

There’s a note on Mrs Layland’s file to say that her daughter, Ellie, has to be contacted before any visit. Mrs Layland gets extremely anxious the notes says. Make sure you ring first before going in. It gives Ellie’s mobile number, underlined, twice.

‘How about one?’ I say.
‘Perfect.’
‘See you then.’

I have three patients to see that end of town. As it turns out, one of them has been admitted to hospital, and the other is surprisingly quick. My remaining visits are some distance away, so I won’t be able to go to them and make it back for one o’clock – so I call Ellie to see if she can make it any sooner, perhaps eleven?
‘That… should be okay,’ she says, after a pause which sounds like she’s flipping through a diary. ‘That should just give me time to make it down there. Okay – fine. Let’s make it eleven.’
‘Thanks. I’ll give you a call when I arrive.’
‘Lovely.’

Just before eleven I pull up outside the apartment block, and after writing down my arrival time, take out the mobile and call Ellie. It rings six times and goes to voicemail. I leave a message to say I’ve arrived and asking her to call me back so we can go in together. Then I spend the next ten minutes going over what visits I’ve got left, and figuring out the routes.

When there’s still no call-back from Ellie, I ring her again. Straight to voicemail.
‘I wasn’t sure whether I left my number or not,’ I say, ‘…so just in case…’
I read out the number, then end with something like  ‘looking forward to meeting you soon’ and hang up.

Time starts to drag. I keep checking the phone, to see if it’s registered any calls that for some reason I may not have heard. I hold the phone in different places in the car, just in case. I start watching the road ahead, and the road behind in the rear view mirror, wondering if each car that passes is going to be Ellie. Maybe she’s cycling? Is that Ellie, walking along the pavement, checking her phone? Is this a signal blackspot? Anyway, it’s almost half past now, so I’m guessing if it was Ellie she’d be walking a little more quickly – unless she’s very relaxed about appointments. But then again, maybe she’s forgotten about the second call? Maybe she thinks we’re still meeting at one? The woman talks animatedly on the phone as she walks past. I check mine again, then drop it on the passenger seat and wonder what to do.

I think about going to the intercom and buzzing Mrs Layland’s flat. The instructions were pretty clear, though. In fact I’d go as far as saying they were emphatic, written in block caps, in haste, as if something bad had happened last time and there was no room for error. If I rang the buzzer, and Mrs Layland let me in, what would I do? Wait in the flat for Ellie to arrive, whilst Mrs Layland got more and more anxious, and I struggled to reassure her? And then what would I say to Ellie? That I left two messages, and thought I’d go in anyway? But then she might say: ‘What messages? I didn’t get any messages!’ and ‘You should have waited. I thought I made it clear…’

So I wait some more.

Eventually, at twenty to twelve, I ring again, and Ellie picks up.
‘Where the hell are you?’ she says.
‘I’m outside, in the car.’
‘I thought you said you wanted me here at eleven?’
‘I did. I was waiting for you to get here.’
‘What do you mean, waiting for me to get here? I live on the next floor.’

‘Granddaughter? No! I’m actually his daughter, believe it or not,’ says Rose, dropping her bag on the floor and herself into a chair. ‘He had me late. When he’d finished all his tomcatting around. Isn’t that right, Dad?’
Charlie laughs, and tips me the kind of wink you might expect from a pantomime dame leaning out across the footlights: folded arms, a discreet bob of the head inclined to the closed eye, and a wry, downward tilt of the mouth.
‘You’re a cheeky monkey,’ says Rose. ‘But don’t push it.’
Charlie is ninety-five, Rose around forty, but I’d have put them both at least twenty years younger. Charlie is immaculately dressed in a suit and tie, Rose in a crop top that shows off her tattoos.
‘I almost didn’t make it,’ she says. ‘The ferret’s sick.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘He’s just kind of all … blurrrhhhh.’
‘Could be the heat. I wouldn’t fancy wearing all that fur in this weather.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s a design flaw.’
She watches patiently as I examine Charlie, checking his blood pressure, temperature and so on. Everything seems fine, though. There’s still the issue of his unexplained collapse a few days ago, but none of the tests done point to anything.
‘Could just be one of those things’, I say as I complete the observations chart.
‘What? Like Rose’s ferret?’ he says, and tips me another wink.

Mr Rostov is in his nineties and has trouble with his legs. As I walk up the drive he’s ineffectually prodding around with his trowel in a raised flowerbed, somehow managing to stay upright with his legs as splayed as a giraffe at a water hole.
‘I’ve got so many pins and plates in me,’ he says, using my arm as support and struggling upright, ‘…last time I went down the scrap yard I ended up swinging from the magnet.’
He takes the cap from his head and breaks into a smile so deep and gappy I wouldn’t be surprised if he waggled his ears. ‘Still,’ he says, wiping his forehead with a hankie, ‘so long as I don’t go for a swim, I’ll be all right.’
Despite his legs, Mr Rostov still has the wherewithal to take care of his garden. It’s obviously difficult for him, though. The garden is looking pretty wild, with only traces of the original planting struggling through, marigold, fuschia and lupin flowers lost amongst the general tangle of weeds and seeding grass.
‘Just look the other way,’ he says, as if I’d said something out loud. He waves his trowel in the general direction of everything. ‘I may be slow, but I’m stubborn, and I’ll get there in the end.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ I tell him. ‘Anyway, I’ve always preferred a more relaxed garden.’
‘You’re very kind and you can most definitely come again.’
He puts his cap back on, more like a beret, come to think of it, with a winged badge off to the side.
We stand there looking over the garden for a moment.
‘Here’s a question’ I say.
‘Go on.’
‘How do you keep the slugs off if you don’t want to use pellets?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Get some animals in that eat the damned things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Frogs, hedgehogs, that sort of chap.’
‘I can’t remember the last time I saw a hedgehog. I think everyone using pellets has killed them off.’
‘Oh, I don’t think it does them any harm.’
‘No?’
‘No. They changed the recipe. I don’t think it’s that.’
‘It can’t help, though, can it? I haven’t seen a hedgehog for years, and you used to see them all the time.’
‘There just aren’t the gardens for them like there used to be,’ he says. ‘Still, you can always get some at the pet shop.’
‘What – hedgehogs?’
‘Absolutely! Depends on the shop, of course. You can buy yourself half a dozen and send them in to fight the slugs. Operation Market Garden! How about that!’ But then he suddenly seems to think better of it, and sucks his teeth thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Although maybe that’s not quite the analogy,’ he says, repositioning his beret. ‘Poor bloody hedgehogs.’

I’m a captive audience. Mr Munroe has positioned his wheelchair, unconsciously or by design, right in the middle of the doorway, and the only way I’ll be able to leave the house now is if he scoots back a foot or two, or I do the scooting for him.
Mrs Munroe is just as stuck in her armchair, beneath a black and white, poster-sized print of their wedding photo, taken sixty years ago. Throughout the examination Mrs Munroe has been as happily smiling as the young woman in the picture behind her, in a vague kind of way, but there’s a sharp edge of irritation to her voice now as her husband puts the brakes on and starts telling me about Dinah Shore.
‘Now there was a singer,’ he says. ‘Classically trained, of course. You can hear it in her voice. There’s a purity there and a… and a clarity that you just don’t get with other singers. Simple arrangements help enormously. Violin. Piano. A little clarinet, with a mute…’
He does a mime for each instrument.
‘Oh do be quiet John!’ says his wife. ‘He hasn’t got time.’
But Mr Munroe carries on as if his hearing aid doesn’t extend to that corner of the room.
‘They’re selling a CD pack of her most famous songs down at that record shop on Market Street. D’you know the one I mean? In the little parade. Eight ninety-nine for a hundred songs. Twenty-five on each disc, which I think works out at about nine pence for each song, which is pretty good value, considering.’
‘Sounds amazing! I’ll check her out on YouTube.’
‘John!’ says his wife. ‘Please!’
The only acknowledgement Mr Munroe makes is to take his weight on his elbows and shift his position in the chair.
‘Now – take that girl from Manchester,’ he says. ‘The one in the news. Where the bomb was.’
‘Ariana Grande?’
‘Her. Now she’s got a voice. I wouldn’t mind betting she knows a thing or two about Dinah Shore.’
‘It was great, that benefit gig she did,’ I say, picking up my bag and taking one hesitant step in his direction. ‘Anyway…’
‘You know something?’ he says.
‘What’s that?’
‘I had a cousin who worked on the radio. A big job he had, something high up, in charge of all the music. And I was talking to him on this particular occasion…’
‘John!’ says Mrs Munroe.
‘…and he said to me, he said Tell me honestly. What do you think is the best vocal performance of any female recording artist of the last fifty years? And d’you know what I said?’
‘Dinah Shore?’
‘Peggy Lee. Her version of “The Folks who Live on the Hill”. Arrangement by Nelson Riddle, with the orchestra actually conducted by Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was a good conductor and arranger, you know. Not just a singer. He learnt his craft from Axel Stordhal. And if you see his name on a record, you’ll know you’re in safe hands.’
‘He has got to go, John…!’
‘So why Peggy Lee?’ I say, helplessly.
‘Well, it’s interesting. The song itself is pretty cheerful. Quite sweet, in a sugary, romantic kind of way. But when Peggy Lee sings it – with that arrangement – the whole thing becomes a little – I don’t know – creepy. And I said to my cousin – you know, the one in charge of all the music – I said to him: it makes you think of all those poor chaps who went off to war and never came back. And he completely agreed with me.’
‘John! Honestly…’
But you see, Peggy Lee could do that. She’d suffered in her life. She had a way of bringing it to the music.’
‘Hmm. Well I’ll certainly look out for it. Now – I’m really sorry, but I’m going to have to say goodbye to you now. I’ve got a few more patients to see.’
‘Of course! My apologies. I’m holding you up.’
He makes a show of looking for the brakes, paddling his arms either side of the wheelchair, but gives up just as quickly, and folds them bacl in his lap again.
‘What d’you think of that Theresa May?’ he says.
‘Do you mean as a singer?’
‘As a politician. A prime minister. Isn’t she extraordinary?’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘I think she out-Thatchers Thatcher.’
‘Well – I have to admit I’m not a fan.’
‘I think women – when they get power – are better than men. They just seem to crack on with things.’
He illustrates the thought with a plucking motion of his hand, then takes advantage of the fact that his hand is near his face to reposition his glasses.
‘You certainly have to be thick-skinned to be a politician,’ I say, checking my watch. ‘Look – I’m really sorry, Mr Munroe. I’d love to stay and chat, but I’m going to have to squeeze by and leave you to it.’
‘Of course. Of course.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake let him go!’ says his wife.
‘Just a minute…’ he says, and fusses with the brakes again, putting them off, then on, then off – and then on again.
‘Here. Allow me,’ I say, reaching over to take them off, and gently guiding him back.
‘I can manage!’ he says. When I straighten up and let him go, he makes a series of ineffectual manoeuvres that only succeed in jamming him sideways across the doorway.
‘Blast!’ he says.
‘John! He’s got people to see!’ says his wife. ‘He can’t stop here all day listening to you.’
‘Now look…’ says Mr Munroe, suddenly out of breath. He makes as if to push himself completely out of the chair, but then subsides just as suddenly, putting his hands in his lap and looking up at me with a slack kind of expression. ‘She has Alzheimer’s,’ he says. ‘But I expect you knew that.’

‘They’re all self-build,’ says Malcolm, showing me into the sitting room. He’s a trim and capable figure, even now. I can easily imagine him laying down the bricks, tapping them into place with the heel of his trowel, one after another.
‘It was hard, though. We all had jobs to go to. And when we came home – there you go, more of the same. Weekends, too. Five years of it. I hardly knew what to do with myself. But it was worth it in the end.’
‘It certainly was. They’re beautiful houses.’
‘Thank you. We’ve been happy here.’

We stand together, looking out of the bay window. It’s like standing on the deck of a ship – except, instead of an ocean, there’s a lush vista of trees running out in front of us, sycamore, aspen, whitebeam.

‘Where were you staying when you worked on it?’
‘A council place. The whole thing was arranged with them.’
‘So did they have a stake in the finished houses?’
‘It’s complicated – but yes. It was a way for them to increase their stock, y’see? Free up existing houses,  get a few more. It worked out pretty well. And we got a say in how they were built.’
‘How did you decide who went where?’
‘We put the numbers in a hat. There was a bit of swapping after that. I was supposed to get one further down that way, but the guy there wanted to swap because that place was the first to get finished and he needed to move quickly. We were happy to wait. This was the better plot.’

A couple of labradors run out of a gap in the undergrowth, followed by their owners, who glance up towards the window and wave to Malcolm. He nods, and waves back.

‘None of that was there when we started,’ says Malcolm, putting his hands in his pockets. ‘You wouldn’t think to look at it now. It was all just barren ground, a few allotments, that kind of thing. It’s all come up since. In fifty years.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘I know. I can’t believe the change. Still – life goes on. I don’t know how much longer I’ll stay here. Jean died last year, and the kids are all grown up and moved away.’
‘Where d’you think you’ll go?’
He takes a deep breath.
‘Don’t know,’ he says at last, rubbing the back of his neck and screwing up his eyes, like a craftsman figuring out a tricky cut of timber. ‘Probably up near one of them. So they can keep an eye on the old crock.’

Mary’s window overlooks the block car park, the street beyond that, the recreation centre, and then a housing estate. There’s plenty going on, what with the cars and buses, kids messing about outside the centre and so on. The leaves of the young trees in their planters flash silver when they ruffle in the wind, and small clouds hang in the sky, so perfectly formed they hardly seem real.

Mary spends quite a bit of her time in a chair in front of the window, dividing her attention between what’s going on outside, a small television screen, and a large gerbil cage. The cage, like the block, is on two levels. The bottom half is generously filled with straw and shavings, and there’s a syringe of water hooked on the bars, poking in. There’s a ladder leading up to the top half, which is essentially a separate, suspended cage, filled with brightly coloured plastic toys. There’s also a narrow yellow tube that feeds out of the upper cage, runs round the outside of the whole thing, and exits back into the straw and shavings at the bottom. Currently, there’s no sign of the gerbil.
‘He’s normally out and about in the morning,’ says Mary, settling back into her chair after letting me in. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he wore himself out last night.’
‘We used to have hamsters,’ I tell her, putting my bag down. ‘They only seemed to come out at night. You could hear the wheel squeaking sometimes.’
‘Gerbils are different,’ she says. ‘More social.’

We chat about this and that through the assessment. Mostly about her late husband, Alan.

‘We weren’t together long,’ she says, passively surrending a finger for me to jab. ‘I hardly saw him. He was off out a lot, running around. I used to hear a lot of stories. He was more interested in his cars. You know – doing deals. In the end I thought enough was enough and I gave him his marching orders. Funny thing was, we got on a lot better when we separated. I could see what I saw in him first time round. I remember the last holiday we took together. We went to this holiday park on Hayling Island. I spent the morning tidying up the caravan. ‘Course – Alan was nowhere to be seen. Anyway, eventually there was a knock on the door, and I thought What’s he playing at, knocking on the door? Only it wasn’t Alan, it was the park manager, a woman called Irene. Beautiful hair, all piled up. I said to her ‘I thought you were Alan’. She said ‘No. He’s stuck under my bonnet, trying to get me started. No – he sent me round with this.’ And d’you know what it was?’
‘No. What was it?’
‘A lettuce.’
‘A lettuce?’
‘A lettuce. I said to Irene, I said ‘What on earth did he mean by that?’ And she turned round and said ‘I don’t know. Maybe he thinks you’d like it.’

As I pack my things away there’s a tentative rustling in the straw at the bottom of the cage.
‘Oh – watch out!’ says Mary.

Mrs Moretz lives with her husband in a narrow, brightly-painted terraced house in the centre of town. Mr Moretz opens the door to me. He’s a hunched and shuffling figure, warmly dressed despite the heat in a fisherman’s jersey, corduroy trousers and dilapidated brown moccasins. He has one of those faces you think you see sometimes in the trunk of an old tree, or a volcanic plug.
‘Who’ve you come for?’ he says. ‘Or is it buy one get one free?’

Mrs Moretz is sitting at an angle on the sofa, her hands neatly folded in her lap, like she’d been expecting me all along, or at least, heard me talking to her husband on the step and quickly dropped into an innocent pose.
‘Nice to meet you,’ I say, shaking her hand. She smiles up at me – and the smile carries on way past the point at which I’d expect something else. It becomes a little unnerving.
‘Well – your pulse feels pretty regular to me,’ I say, writing down the figures. ‘It must have been what they call paroxysmal AF.’
‘Yes,’ she smiles. ‘It must have been.’

Behind me, dominating the room, is a gigantic fish tank. There’s a pump on the go, a few desultory bubbles, but nothing to any great effect. The water is a primordial, soupy green, almost completely opaque, with just a few splodges of rotting weed here and there to differentiate the gloom.
‘Nice tank,’ I say, then, struggling to back that up, add: ‘It’s relaxing, having bubbles.’
Mrs Moretz carries on smiling.
‘There aren’t any fish,’ says Mr Moretz, as if I thought there was the remotest chance there might be.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well – I suppose that’s the thing about aquariums. They’re a lot of work.’
‘You’re telling me,’ says Mr Moretz. ‘That’s why I keep the pump on.’
‘Why?’
‘It keeps the water moving. Cuts down on the slime.’

‘Please – call me Johnny’ he croaks, ‘And by the way, before you ask, yes, I am allergic to rubber. Hurr hurr hurr.’

He reminds me of those make your own creature flip-books you used to get, where each section is something different, a duck’s feet, a crocodile’s body, a giraffe’s head, and so on – except in Johnny’s case it’s the feet of Bernard Bresslaw, the body of Charles Hawtrey, the laugh of Sid James.

His bedroom is strangely bare except for a bed, a television, and a stack of CDs, hopeless old British smut, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Adventures of a Taxi Driver, On the Buses. On the wall to Johnny’s right is a full-sized colour poster of a naked woman, straddling a canoe or something. I’ve seen plenty of pornographic images in patients’ houses, of course. It’s mostly either elderly men with pictures of naked women, or elderly men with pictures of naked men. Sometimes it’s creepy, sometimes it’s poignant,  but suddenly and for the first time I’m struck by just how downright odd it is. It’s probably just the juxtaposition of the skeletal man on a bed beneath such a hack and potentiated version of the female form. The woman has one arm crooked behind her head, sleepily gazing down at the camera, the areola of her breasts as perfectly defined as the drops of sweat standing out on her shoulders, her other hand draped over her iliac crest, fingers resting against the upper line of that dark triangle of hair. There’s a tension in the composition, a power that starts between the sleepy twin points of the woman’s eyes, running down her body through the points of her breasts to the stark presentation of her pubic hair. And it’s this, particularly, this blatant presentation of the woman’s vagina – particularly in this context, this bare and rather cold little room, with Johnny lying on his bed, a few weeks from death, propped up on cushions, sipping tea through a Tommee Tippee beaker, that strikes me as acutely and profoundly odd. Because of course that’s where Johnny started. It’s where he came from. Not that particular vagina (although anything’s possible), but no doubt one very like. He was conceived and carried in a woman just like this (or close), and when the time was right, he rode those uterine contractions head down, eyes shut, arms and legs tucked in, a nude and grimacing alien, braced for impact, wrung out into the world.

‘Gorgeous, in’t she?’ says Johnny.
‘Yep. She’s pretty lovely.’
‘Oh yes. One hundred per cent woman,’ he says. And laughs. Hurr hurr hurr.