husband and wife

carp in a cap

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Bill is standing so close to me I can feel his breath. With his thick, downturned mouth and straggling beard, he looks like a specimen of ancient carp, navigating the river by use of feelers.
‘D’you know what this badge is?’ he says, rolling his eyes upwards, directing me to his cap.
I have to pull away to focus. Right in the middle above the brim is a tiny enamel pin badge, two flags leaning out either side of a date.
‘I don’t know. A civil war thing?’
‘Nine eleven,’ he says. ‘The day the towers came down.’
‘Ah!’ I say, frowning a bit closer. ‘Of course.’
‘We used to sit up there, me and Rita. They had chairs and tables and everything. You could look out, right across the city. The Empire State. You could look down on it.’
‘Was that on the North tower or the South?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘One of them.’

I feel a little cornered by Bill, if I’m honest. I’m waiting to bring the hoist back in whilst the physio and another carer make Bill’s wife Rita ready for the return journey from the armchair to bed. Rita has advanced dementia. When we hoisted her from the bed she held the straps as lightly and happily as a child in a fairy story being carried off by a balloon.
As soon as there was room, Bill had shuffled in from the kitchen.
‘I travelled a lot, y’know.’
‘Did you?’
‘The Far East. Russia. United States. Everywhere.’
‘What were you? A spy?’
‘No. I was a courier. I took the job when I retired. They paid me to carry important letters round the world. I don’t know what was in ‘em. Could have been anything. Egypt. Japan. You name it. All the security people got to know me. They’d see me coming and they’d be like…’ He nods slowly and raises a finger in the air.
‘Sounds great,’ I say.
We both watch as the physio and carer make a few final adjustments to the sling.
‘Sixty years we’ve been here,’ says Bill, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets and leaning in to speak directly into my ear, as if this was a thing as confidential as any of the letters he carried. I’m tempted to say: what – leaning on this hoist, d’you mean? but instead say: ‘Have you really? I bet you’ve seen some changes.’
He leans back.
‘There used to be an abattoir next door.’
‘Oh yes? How was that – living next door to an abattoir?’
‘They killed pigs. Cows. Mostly pigs.’
‘Oh.’
‘You could hear them screaming. They used a fixed bolt, y’know? Through the head.’
‘And if that didn’t work I suppose they let them off,’ I say, nodding at the physio who’s waving me over.
‘Oh but it did work, though,’ says Bill, taking off his cap and slowly pushing his fingers backwards through his greying hair. ‘It worked a treat.’

alice in careland

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If Gerald was anything he’d be the caterpillar.

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

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

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

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

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

where you sleep

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‘Anchored off Syracuse. Everyone fucker below deck drowned. Boom. Gone. That was a hard business. ‘Course – I was sleeping on top, so at least I had a chance. At least I could make a swim for it.’

Frankie’s eyes are so hooded, and the way the light is in the room, it’s almost as if he doesn’t have eyes at all. That, and his habit of moving his bottom jaw from side to side when he’s not talking, makes him seem like a statue chewing over the hard facts of his life.

‘Them kind of things mattered, where you slept and everything. I’ve always been a good sleeper. I could sleep upside down on a washing line. I used to sleep under the truck, so long as the ground was hard enough. Gave you a measure of protection. Here, they said. Frankie. Take these trucks up the coast for us. We drove from Port Said to Damascus. Had a whale of a time. We used to mix it up, course. Well – we was young, mate. We had nothing to lose. We knew we was basically cattled.’

He narrows his dark eyes at me and grinds his teeth.
‘D’you know what I mean? Cattled? That’s cockney slang, mate. Cattle trucked. Fucked.’
He laughs, settles back in the chair.

‘My missus was the brains of the operation. She was in the Waaf. There weren’t nothing she couldn’t do. Ride a motorbike. Shoot down a plane. Unscramble a secret message. I tell you what, I landed on my feet all right the day I met Junie.’

He grinds his teeth again and shifts his position in the chair.

‘She’s in a home now. I don’t see her all that much. Even when I do she don’t recognise me. That’s the dementia for you, mate. Still – I keep her bed made up. That way I reckon there’s a chance she might come back.’

buy one get one free

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

The new database was live, and the office was crammed with people – nurses, nursing co-ordinators, therapists of one sort or another, health care assistants, admin staff, pharmacists, and running around and over them all, a team of floor-walkers, problem solving, straightening things out, or trying to, like a team of super-motivated, superintendent, super-capable ants.

It felt good to get out.

* * *

Mr and Mrs Carter live in a cold little house at the bottom of a steep flight of concrete steps. Mrs Carter opens the door. A tall, grey, anxious woman in tracksuit bottoms and baggy black jumper, she greets me neutrally, as if I’m just the last in a long line of Things That Will Go On Happening.

She turns to walk unsteadily back into the bare sitting room, taking her seat by the heater that has just one bar on.
‘Cold today, isn’t it?’ I say, self-consciously setting up my laptop. ‘By the way. Apologies in advance. We’re using these things today. It’s all pretty new.’
‘Oh?’ she says.
‘God knows if I’ll get it right.’
‘Do your best,’ she says, folding her arms. ‘You can’t do more.’
‘No. That’s good advice. You can worry about these things too much.’
‘Yes,’ she says.

Mr Carter bursts through the door. He’s as tall and grey as his wife, but much more energised, with wavy white hair bursting from under his cap. He has one blue eye and one that’s completely filmed over, which intensifies his blustery bonhomie, somehow, and makes him look like some wild, superannuated robot just back from shopping.

‘Nearly fell over running for the bus,’ he says, dumping the bags, tearing off his cap and throwing it like a frisbee off into the corner. ‘That’ll be the next thing. There’ll be the two of us on your list. Buy one get one free.’

He glares and gapes at me, then strides over to the heater.
‘Let’s have this up,’ he says. ‘We’ll freeze otherwise.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, then tap enter to start the examination.
‘Fancy…’ says Mr Carter, nodding at the laptop, then throwing himself down onto the sofa next to me and pushing his fingers back through his hair. ‘The things you have these days.’
But I’m not sure if I’m on the right screen or not, and for a second I’m tempted to pick it up and throw it into the corner like Mr Carter’s cap.
‘Anyway,’ I say, turning to his wife. ‘Ignore all that. The most important thing is – how are you?’

making faces at the fishes

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Hans seems too full of life to be dying of cancer. With his bald head, handlebar moustache, fierce expression and thick wrists, all he needs is a leopard skin tunic and he’d be a cinch for a circus strongman. As things stand though Hans is confined to bed, his lungs corrupted with secondaries, metastasizing like acquisitive weeds from the seed pod of his liver. When Hans talks he has a curious habit of repeating certain phrases at double the volume, and sitting up a little at the same time. It’s a funny thing, like a verbal sneeze. I guess he’s done it all his life, because his wife June doesn’t seem to notice.
‘I cannot believe zis thing,’ he says, his German accent somehow adding to the strongman effect. ‘I cannot! Y’know? Listen. Just the other month I was swimming in the sea in Spain. In Spain! Making faces at all the little fishes there. Now look at me. Hopeless. Hopeless.’
June is putting a brave face on it, though – her and the family dog, Boney, a bichon frise made entirely of clouds, who sits by my bag and frowns anytime I take something out.
‘What do you make of it, Boney?’ she says, brightly.
‘Well – vat can the poor dog make of it?’ says Hans. ‘Apple pie? I say apple pie?’

freddy

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Elsa has a history of falls and unexplained blackouts, so when she doesn’t answer the phone I drive straight over to investigate.

The house is a low white building set back from the road, a dark garden to one side with contorted sculptures dotted about and random things strung from branches, giving the place a watchful, witchy feel. I fetch the key from the keysafe and let myself in.
Hello? It’s Jim, from the hospital…
There’s uncollected post right by the door. I pick it up and put it on a stool.
Hell…oooo
Nothing.

Last time I was here the house was full. There was Elsa’s husband, Freddy, his carer, a carer for Elsa, and then two therapists whose visits had unexpectedly clashed. Freddy had been shuffling excitedly up and down the hallway, stirred by all the commotion, presenting random things after looking for them with great enthusiasm, tugging on his braces, marching on the spot in his slippers like a seagull paddling for worms. Elsa had been the quiet centre of it all, sitting on an armchair in her nightie, overwhelmed.

Now the hallway is silent, what little light there is reflecting dully off the parquet flooring.

Hell…ooo. It’s Jim … from the hospital…
Every door leading off from the hallway is shut, which I take as a sign the place is empty. Still, I have to open each one and check that Elsa isn’t on the floor.
Kitchen.
Bathroom.
Closet – ( a shock, to be confronted by coats on hooks, close-up).
Which leaves the door to the sitting room at the furthest end of the hallway.
Hell…ooo
I knock and open the door.
Utterly silent except for the honeyed tocking of a longcase clock. A saturating green light spills in from the garden through the patio windows illuminating an empty leather sofa, dark paintings on the walls, a carved mirror and dining table, a leather bucket armchair with its back to me. And as if my entrance has stirred everything up, the clock suddenly gives a shuddery kind of cough and a kick, and starts grinding out the quarter. And that’s when Freddy decides to swing round in the bucket armchair, his hands spread, his eyes wide.
‘Oh my Jesus Christ!’ I say, falling back.
‘Har hah!’ says Freddy.

locked away

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It’s like the motorboat was dragged ashore some time ago to avoid a hurricane, and then forgotten.

The whole thing sits on two substantial wooden structures like trestle table legs. The deck is covered by a sagging, blue nylon tarpaulin secured by a single length of rope that crisscrosses from cleat to cleat like the threadbare lace of a giant boot, and the propeller is fixed in the up position, spotted, corroded. And if by some catastrophic tidal anomaly the boat suddenly found itself in the water again – and you found yourself in the water, too – and you tried to get on board using that aluminium ladder at the stern – well, who knows? You’ll try anything when you’re desperate. Scattered around the boat in the long grass are several heavy iron wrenches, lengths of rusting chain, and standing guard over the whole collection, a massive cylinder of pressurised gas the birds at least feel safe enough to use as a perch.

Judging by his beard, cable sweater and tan, I’m guessing it’s Henry who owns the boat. He’s so vague and repetitive, though, I have no doubt it wasn’t a hurricane that saw the boat laid up all those years ago, but a disturbance of a subtler though no less damaging kind.

‘Thank you so much for coming,’ he says. ‘It’s so kind of you to bother.’ He shows me inside to a wooden rocking chair, and then immediately asks again who I am and why I’ve come. Luckily, Henry’s wife, Jean hurries in, wiping her hands on her apron, her smile as taut as the tarpaulin on the boat.
‘Don’t you remember, darling? I told you. This is Jim, from the hospital. Come to see if we need any help.’
‘Well that’s so kind! Help, d’you say? I don’t think we do, though, do we Jean? I think we run a pretty tidy ship.’

Jean talks me through the key points of the referral. The long stay in hospital, the memory loss and other problems, the struggles of the last few years. And at every point in the story, she carefully includes her husband, who receives the information with a wistful expression, as if he’s hearing it all for the first time, the sad decline of a well-meaning but doomed mutual friend of theirs, someone he’d love to help if he could, but doesn’t know where to start.

One of my jobs today is to run a dementia blood screen. I chat to Henry as I locate the vein, taking his mind off the needle. He tells me he used to be a locksmith.
‘You’ll like this story then,’ I say. ‘Sharp scratch.’
‘Oh yes?’ he says.
‘I was brought up in a little market town called Wisbech. Out in the Fens.’
‘Yes?’ he says, as if it’s the most extraordinary thing he’s ever heard. ‘My goodness!’
‘I remember – years ago – there’s was a big fuss. They were renovating an old shop or something, and they found an old safe in the basement. Hadn’t been opened in years. So they got the local locksmith in, and HE couldn’t open it, because it was so old and fancy…’
‘Open what?’
‘This safe they found. In the basement.’
‘Goodness!’ says Henry. ‘Go on.’
‘But the locksmith knew this other locksmith who was an expert in old safes. And he came to have a look. And by this time it was quite an event. The local paper was there. Police. You name it. Because everyone wanted to know what they’d find when they finally managed to get it open.’
‘Well – fancy that!’ says Henry, flashing a look at Jean, standing in the kitchen doorway overseeing the whole thing.
‘So finally, after a lot of drilling and cutting and banging, they finally managed to crack the door and open it up. And you’ll never guess what they found inside.’
‘What?’ says Henry – commenting more on the fact I’ve stopped talking rather than anything to do with the safe.
‘Green shield stamps! Books and books of them!’
Jean laughs.
‘I remember them,’ she says. ‘You’d save forever and end up with a clothes brush.’
‘I suppose they were an early form of reward card,’ I say, withdrawing the needle from Henry’s arm and pressing down on the gauze for a minute or two. ‘There! All done!’
‘They used to have pink stamps, too,’ says Jean, taking her apron off and hanging it behind the door.
‘Did they? I don’t remember that!’
‘I do,’ says Henry.

a picture of aileen

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

‘I used to like doing puzzles until my hands got too bad and I couldn’t manage the pieces. Now I have to make do with giant sudoku.’
Aileen is sitting beneath a large colour studio photo of herself and husband Ian taken taken fifty years ago. Maybe Aileen is sitting there because of the light, or maybe it’s because she likes being as close as possible to an image of her life as it used to be. Whatever the reason, it would be difficult to imagine a harsher illustration of the effects of ageing. Portrait Aileen has a pile of golden hair banded at the cloudy peak with a tiara. She’s wearing a tartan skirt and sash, a silken blouse with ruffles, sparkling earrings and a pearl necklace. There’s a radiance to her that the blurry lens and the fancy drapes translates into something soapy but brilliant. Her husband Ian is just as enhanced, plump and red faced as a russet potato, packed into a kilt, waistcoat and bolero-jacket combination, medals and ribbons and pins, and one hand resting on Aileen’s shoulder, maintaining the transfer of power, one to the other. Real-time Aileen is somewhat reduced, of course. She’s sitting in a similarly demure posture, except now she’s in a fluffy blue dressing gown, the bouffant hair has collapsed into sparse threads of grey, and the rings on her fleshless hands hang loose.
‘We ran a restaurant together. For years – oh, way back,’ she says. ‘I loved it. Ian ran the kitchen side of things, I did the books. We both liked to entertain. Burns night we’d have the haggis piped in. You couldn’t wish for a better life. We had all kinds of celebrities. You wouldn’t have heard of them, of course. Then the lease got bought up by a city type, the rent doubled and we had to move on. Still – things change. No-one can help that.’
She coughs a few times. It sounds like someone shovelling rocks. When it passes, she settles herself again.
‘I get so terribly bored,’ she says. ‘Bored. Bored. Bored. Just sitting here.’
‘I bet. What about your family, though? Are they nearby?’
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘They’re spread about the place. They’ve got lives of their own.’
‘Here’s an idea,’ I tell her, warming to the theme. ‘Have you ever thought about putting your memories down? Writing about your grandparents, your mum and dad, that kind of thing? Not just the war – I mean how you and Ian met, all about the restaurant, who came in and out, what you got up to.’
‘I can’t hold a pen, love.’
‘You could get some kind of recording device. They’re pretty cheap these days. The thing is, I bet your grandchildren and great-grandchildren would love to read about these things, in a kind of family history way, with photos and everything. It’d be like one of your puzzles, only you’d be in all the pieces. It’s nice to know where you come from, how it all fits together. What do you think?’
Aileen is silent for a while.
‘No,’ she says at last. ‘Boring.’

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.’

weetafix

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For some reason Jean’s taken her hearing aid out. It squeals alarmingly on the sideboard beside her, an ethereal soundtrack to the scene, like I’ve wandered onto the set of a 1950s Sci-Fi movie. Instead of an egghead alien with pincers for hands, though, it’s her husband, Ted who slowly shuffles in from the living room.
‘Put your hearing aid in!’ he bellows, jabbing a finger at the carpet, for some reason. ‘Your hearing aid! Put it in!’
Jean ignores him, waggling her hand towards the medicines on the table.
‘ I need the new one!’ she shouts. ‘I haven’t had the new one yet!’

I feel sorry for Ted. Jean isn’t the easiest patient in the world. She’s recently back from hospital after a hip replacement, and though I’m sympathetic, and can quite understand how uncomfortable she must feel, how frustrated by her reduced mobility, still – there’s a waspish quality to the way she talks that makes you want to take a step back, or better still, leave the room and quietly close the door.

‘Not that one!’ she yells. ‘The new one!’
Ted grumbles over to the table, clears his throat, slowly lifts his glasses, and starts methodically pressing each bottle to his nose.
‘He’s a fool!’ says Jean – not exactly to me, but to the bench of invisible judges behind her who must surely be recording all these injustices. ‘He doesn’t understand…this is hopeless… NO! THE NEW ONE!’

Quite why she doesn’t have her meds next to her and do them herself, I’m not sure. This way she’s definitely at risk of under or overdosing. The new scrips are for heart problems and pain relief. It’s all in solution because of her difficulty swallowing, and needs careful measuring out into a dispensing cup. But Ted’s sight is poor, his hands are shaky, and when he should be sitting down, calmly figuring out that four times five mls four times a day means a dose of 20 mls now, (and which of these little lines means 20mls…?), he’s flicking his attention between the bottle and the cup, the cup and the bottle, as panicked as if he’d suddenly found himself holding a ferret and a rabbit.
‘Would you like me to do it?’ I say.
‘Yes please!’ he says, almost throwing them at me. Then he shuffles over to the counter to make Jean’s breakfast instead.
‘Do you want Weetabix or Cornflakes?’ he shouts.
‘What?’
‘Weetabix or Cornflakes?’
‘Oh dear God!’ says Jean.
‘Right! You’re getting Weetabix,’ he says, turning away.