Paradise Lodge (10 page)

‘So what's been happening here?' Mr Simmons asked.

I told him the catering grocer had given up on us and we were living off apple and raisin pies, and the owner had apparently been slipping in and out of a mild coma. Mr Simmons grimaced and said as soon as he felt up to it he'd resume quartermaster duties and he'd run errands to the wholesale supermarket. Meanwhile, we could scrump some of his early plums for the pudding pies to give everyone a break from apple.

I told him about the laundry crisis and my having been taken off the teatime duty, and I mentioned the death of Elvis but he already knew about it, which I thought a good sign until he asked what room Elvis had been in.

One of the golden rules I'd learned on day one was the importance of not making it obvious who your favourite patient was, nor your least favourite. Nurses must be like parents towards their offspring and never let it be known or felt—by anyone, not even the favourite. I was dubious because I could always tell whose favourite I was—or wasn't. There'd been a teacher at my primary school who'd liked me best in the class and I could tell by her little soft-eyed giggle after everything I said, and there was a riding instructor we'd had whose favourite I definitely
wasn't
. I could tell by a tiny hard-eyed sneer. Ditto our first piano teacher.

I knew instinctively and fundamentally and totally that I was my mother's favourite, not by any facial giveaways but just by the fact that I knew her so well. She'd never admit it, of course, and was adamant that she liked us all the same. She often said that if we all fell into the river she'd be really stuck as to whose life to save first. In fact, it was a constant worry for her.

Anyway, however imperative it was not to have favourites, I couldn't help liking one patient above the others. In spite of her age and difficulties Miss Mills was fun-loving and sweet, and even had a Leicester accent—and for that reason seemed ordinary, as well as normal. She was on the ball and had a keen interest in Mr Callaghan and the trades unions and so on. All in all, she might have been an old woman you'd meet in the street, or someone's granny. Her legs were set hard, bent at the knee due to some joint-seizing condition—like arthritis, but permanent and constant. Miranda used to say it looked as though she'd been squatting for a wee and the wind had changed direction.

I'd first met Miss Emma Mills on day one when I'd been asked to do the comfort round on my own. Miss Mills had been snoozing in a wheelchair with a crochet blanket over her knees. As I'd leant over to ring her bell for assistance, she'd woken and clapped her hands to her heart.

‘Fanny-Jane!' she cried. ‘Well, I never did,' laughing a calm little laugh, ‘Fanny-Jane!' And she scrabbled her knobbly fingers through her hair, fished out two kirby grips and patted her hair.

‘Hello, Miss Mills, I've come to take you to spend a penny,' I said. ‘I'm just waiting for help to come.'

‘Oh, Fanny-Jane, you still look like Miss Moppet the wide-eyed kitten.' And saying it made her chuckle. It was the kind of joke old people made—completely unfunny but a bit personal. And for all the time I knew her, she fully believed me to be her sister, and to begin with I used to tell her I wasn't Fanny-Jane, but every time she saw me she'd light up and say, ‘Ah, Fanny-Jane.'

At first I hadn't known whether or not I should go along with the Fanny-Jane thing. Nurse Eileen said it was kindest not to contradict her, but not to enrich the delusion either. So, as time went on, if Miss Mills said, ‘Oh, Fanny-Jane, look at the summer moon,' which is the kind of thing she'd say, I'd gaze up at the moon and say, ‘Oh gosh, it's lovely tonight.' I never went ‘into role' as Fanny-Jane, though Fanny-Jane became my nickname for a while.

After Nurse Hilary and Nurse Gwen left, the staff shortage at Paradise Lodge got considerably worse—obviously. Matron, being too chaotic and gloomy to sort the problem out properly, simply put Miranda and me on the rota more and more often. Miranda started to feel at home at Paradise Lodge, and as long as she kept patient contact to a minimum, she was happy. Mike Yu—after the egg fu yung success—had started to be a sort of unpaid helper and hanger-around too, which was very nice.

It all suited me down to the ground. Paradise Lodge was where I liked to be and the more I went there, the less I liked the idea of going back to school after the summer—back to being patronized and belittled and asked to spit out your Mint Imperial in front of the class when, the day before, you'd powdered a lady's under-bust area with Cuticura to prevent fungal infection and earned £2.80 towards a quirky mechanic's boiler suit—with Castrol
GTX
and
SPT
badges—you'd seen in Chelsea Girl for £6.99.

However much I liked Paradise Lodge, I never fancied doing a night shift, and knew my mother wouldn't like the idea of it either, but one day a crisis arose and there was apparently no one else available.

‘You'll not mind doing a night shift, will you?' said Nurse Eileen.

‘On my own?' I asked.

‘Yes, well, except we'll all be upstairs in our quarters watching telly or doing whatever we all do,' she said, ‘or at the pub.'

‘Perhaps I should do it with someone first so I know what I'm doing?' I said.

‘No, you'll be fine. Just do the milky drinks and collect the teeth and then the night's your own,' she said. ‘You can watch
The Streets of San Francisco
or whatever's on.'

‘
The Streets of San Francisco
isn't on any more,' I said.

‘The night's your oyster really,' Matron butted in.

So it was that the following Saturday night, when Nurse Eileen had gone off to the pictures with her boyfriend—who was trying to grow a moustache and looked vile—and the others had spilt out into the lane to go to the Piglet Inn, I was standing on a low stool stirring a cauldron of milk on the Aga (which we'd got going again thanks to Mike Yu sourcing some coal) to make the Horlicks and cocoa.

The 5 till 8 staff had put everyone to bed who needed putting. The sprightly patients were watching
The Val Doonican Show
with Matron—who was mad on Val Doonican and said he was the most relaxed television presence she had ever encountered and that was down to his having confidence and pride in his hair. Or they were relaxing out of bounds in the owner's conservatory with an Ulverscroft Large Print.

Doing nights was like starting all over again. I went round with the bedtime drinks and realized I should've made them that bit hotter because I had a few complaints about them being lukewarm.

I had to feed Miss Lawson with a spouty cup and that took ages because she was lying down already and I didn't want to choke her. In the end I had to fetch Matron to help me lift her up on to her pillows.

Afterwards Matron was annoyed. ‘I don't want you bothering me when I'm watching my programme just because you're too puny to lift a patient,' she moaned.

And I didn't say anything but felt helpless and told off.

Mr Simmons could tell I was a bit anxious and downcast and followed me into the kitchen to offer some clear and sensible advice, a thing he was very good at.

‘You want to get the spouty drinks done before you start the main drinks. Then you get the milk good and hot and then take the upstairs drinks round and then the downstairs. And then you have a drink yourself,' he said, ‘that's how the real night nurses do it. Then you collect the cups, wash them up and get the breakfast trays ready for the morning.'

Matron had come back into the kitchen and seemed irritated by Mr Simmons' advice-giving, and took over.

‘I thought you were convalescing, Mr Simmons,' she said in a snippy tone, ‘off you go now.'

She tapped the breakfast tray list that was stuck to the side of the big fridge. The list detailed exactly what each patient had requested for breakfast when they'd first arrived. One patient, for instance—Miss Tyler—had asked for a kipper and a cup of Earl Grey. But Matron was only showing me the list to tell me to completely ignore it.

‘Just give everyone the same and make life a lot easier for yourself,' she said.

She suggested a small dish of tinned grapefruit segments, bread and butter with marmalade and a cup of tea. She even helped me butter and marmalade the bread, ready for the morning.

‘Now go and get settled in the lounge, Nurse,' she said, ‘I'm off to bed. Night, night.'

At about 10 p.m. I was helping Miss Mills with her corset. We'd forgotten to take it off before getting her on to the bed and it had twisted round the wrong way and she was stuck on her back with a hundred tiny corset hooks all grabbing the counterpane.

‘Keep still,' I said, ‘I have to roll you over a bit.'

After I'd released half of the hooks an upstairs bell rang and rang. I sped up the job in hand but the bell still rang and rang. I hurried out to see who was ringing. It was Mr Merryman in Room 7, a convalescent patient in a private room. I couldn't ignore him—him being quite normal and with a broken wrist in plaster and a telephone by his bed. It would be just my luck if he ended up ringing the police. Which he'd done once before—apparently mistaking Matron for an assailant—and a constable had arrived and we'd had to explain it was a false alarm.

I asked Miss Mills to hang on and took the stairs two at a time. When I got to Mr Merryman's room the door was locked. I knocked and called and knocked again. Eventually, the door opened a bit and there stood Matron looking like something out of a
Carry On
—all flustered and as if she'd been having sex under the covers—while Mr Merryman lay in bed looking as if he'd seen a ghost.

‘Thank you, Nurse,' said Matron, trying to block my view of the room. ‘Mr Merryman is fine now, he just needed some help with his cot-sides.'

Matron reminded me of my mother briefly and I gave her a slightly puzzled look—not deliberately, but while my mind sorted out what I was seeing.

‘Go on, fuck off, you nosy little bitch,' she whispered.

I went back down to the ladies' ward to untangle Miss Mills and got another telling off.

‘You go running upstairs, Fanny-Jane, like they're royalty up there,' she moaned, ‘and I'm left here, stuck on my back like a cast ewe.'

A while later Matron came down to make herself and Mr Merryman cups of Ovaltine. She apologized for swearing at me. ‘I'm sorry, Nurse,' she said, ‘I'm suffering from terrible mood swings, it's the change. No hard feelings?'

‘It's fine,' I said and left her to it.

I settled back in Mr Freeman's corduroy Parker Knoll in flat-out mode and watched telly for a while…

… and woke to see Mr Simmons looming over me.

‘You're cutting it a bit fine, Nurse, if you don't mind my saying.'

I jumped up and saw the telly flickering and the clock showing nearly seven; I'd had a full night of uninterrupted sleep. Mr Simmons, seeing I was a bit groggy, switched the telly off and opened the curtains.

He continued to be exceedingly helpful and, between us, we got the breakfast ready. I was surprised at how easily he lifted the ten-pint catering teapot, walked across the kitchen with it and filled the cups, not all at once, but dipping and lifting and in full control without a single drip.

‘I fell asleep,' I told him, ‘I've been asleep all night.'

‘Yes, so I gathered,' he said.

‘I feel so guilty,' I said.

‘It's all right, you'd have woken if a bell had gone,' he said.

‘Yes, I would,' I said. ‘I definitely would, I'm a light sleeper.'

I felt relieved to have been honest and then so reassured. It was an unusual feeling for me.

We took the trays round to the wards and rooms together but Mr Simmons didn't like to come into the ladies' ward because of them being ladies, in their nighties, and because Miss Brixham had taken a shine to him and would call out obscenities and do her smutty laugh, which embarrassed him.

I took a tray to Miss Mills first—her being my favourite—and she was in a very grumpy mood. She said they'd been ringing their bells on and off all night. They'd had night creatures in the ward—two foxes, she reckoned—scampering around and rummaging through her corsets.

I said it must have been a dream but Miss Boyd had had the same dream and I couldn't deny there was a foul smell in there and the French windows were wide open.

I decided I hated night duty. I suited daytime shifts, when other people were around and nothing could go wrong.

On my next day shift, Matron—who was supposedly in charge—had gone off to an agricultural show with a convalescent patient called Mr Dallington, and that left just Miranda and me on duty with Sally-Anne on call upstairs with the telly and a cucumber face pack on.

During the second part of my split shift, around 7ish, I was getting the upstairs patients ready for bed—and particularly helping Lady Briggs, who'd got a hairbrush tangled in her hair—and the downstairs bells were all ringing like mad. I ignored them for a while but eventually had to go down and investigate. All hell had broken loose in the ladies' ward. Miss Mills had been left on the commode—she said for over an hour—and was wailing and shrieking that the pot was cutting into her buttocks and she was in agony. Half her insides were hanging out, she said, she'd been there so long, and there was a fly buzzing around her. Some of the other ladies were telling her to be quiet and others were trying to lift her off and she was hitting them with her handbag.

I rang for help and waited. I rang some more and then went to look for help. There was no one around. The owner was either asleep or dead on his settee with some awful choral music on the gramophone. Sally-Anne wasn't in her room. I finally tracked Miranda down but she was on the drive in Mike Yu's Datsun Cherry doing the face kissing. I was too embarrassed to approach and interrupt. To be fair, it was that time between bedtime and when the night nurse came on duty—the thirty minutes or so when nothing much happened, usually.

Miss Mills was heavy (maybe twelve stone) and unwieldy but in spite of this I decided to lift her off the commode single-handed. I knew it was against the rules but I didn't feel I had any choice. I'd tried to find help, I'd even run over to the pub to see if Gordon Banks was available. He was playing a darts match.

In my defence, Miss Mills looked smaller and less heavy in her chair, all held in with corsets, and it wasn't a lift so much as a chuck from commode to bed. I put the screens round her bed, waited until the other ladies were in bed and whispered to Miss Mills, ‘I'm going to lift you on to the bed.'

I rang the bell a few more times just on the off chance and waited, but still no one came. I hooked my arms under hers.

‘Oh, Fanny-Jane, you can't lift me,' she said.

‘I thought half your innards had fallen out, I've got no choice,' I said.

And she said, ‘Very well then, Fanny-Jane, but I'm damned heavy, don't hurt your back.'

I took a deep breath, I lifted her forward and slightly up and swung her round so that her bottom was on the very edge of the bed, and we remained like that while I got my breath. I tried to slide her back on the bed, to safety, but the little tufts on the counterpane worked against me.

Her great big knickers were tangled around her ankles and her hard, bent legs wouldn't let her sit down properly. It was like working with Action Man or Sindy—she didn't quite fit the real world.

‘Just, shuffle your bum back, if you can,' I panted.

‘I can't shuffle it,' she said, ‘I'm crippled from the waist.'

And then she toppled forward and her face was up against my face and I was holding her weight but my feet were slipping and we both went down and even though I cushioned her fall, she took it badly—not that she shouted out or cried, but I could tell.

We lay together on the floor, her pinning me like a wrestler, and she said quietly, ‘Oh, oh, I'm a goner, Fanny-Jane,' and I said, ‘No, you've got years yet.' And she said she wished I were right because she longed to see the mauve lilac tree just one more spring and smell its lovely scent in the evening air.

And her wishing about the lilac was unbearable because I had no idea what she was on about but thought it meant she was going to die and the lilac was a heavenly vision before death.

I tried to wriggle out from underneath her but she did cry out then and I saw her leg was at a funny angle—sort of the wrong way round—and the words from a hundred telly programmes rang in my head, ‘Don't move the patient.'

‘Are you all right, Nurse?' called Miss Boyd from the far end of the ward.

‘Yes, thanks, Miss Boyd, the hot drinks will be through soon.'

‘Shall I ring my bell?' she asked.

‘Yes, yes please, that would be good,' I said.

I knew not to try and get up but I grabbed hold of the bell cord and pulled the bell to me and rang it and rang it. I held my finger on it and heard it tinkling weakly from the bell board in the hall. We lay there for what seemed like hours.

Miss Mills didn't cry or call out. I spoke soothing words to take her mind off the situation and I waited. I looked at the room from this new angle. The leggy metal-framed beds on their knobbly casters. The underside of the mattresses and the erratically tucked-in sheets—some tucked, tightly, all the way under, others bunched up and messy. I saw Miss Lawson's waffle blanket dripping off the bed and, in the other direction, I saw a dry triangle of bread and marmalade under Miss Mills' bedside cabinet. Miss Mills saw it too, ‘Ooh,' she said, tutting, ‘look at that, what a clumsy old thing, I must have dropped it, I
am
sorry, Nurse.'

I saw where the floor covering ended under the skirting and noticed a long tear in it. All this chaos bothered me. I ran my finger underneath and prised the khaki lino away; I pulled hard and tore it more and lifted it up to see the floor beneath. Underneath were the most beautiful tiles. I think I went slightly mad and wanted to see the tessellations, so I ripped it further. Miss Mills' eyes swivelled in their sockets and I thought she'd died but she hadn't, she was just trying to see the tiles and, like me, she'd gone mad.

‘Look at the tiles, Miss Mills,' I said, ‘you won't see nicer in the Alhambra.'

‘Fanny-Jane,' she groaned, ‘fetch that old piece of bread out that I've dropped down there, I'm so ashamed of it.'

‘I'll get it as soon as we're up,' I said.

The screen shielded us from the other ladies, except for Miss Lawson who grinned at us. The bell tinkled weakly in the hall and Miss Mills stopped looking at the tiles. Nobody came.

Miss Mills was in a bad way and getting worse. I could feel the drops of perspiration on her frozen skin and her mouth was shaking so much her teeth were clacking together; she was like a cold little child. Her cheek against mine. At one point her teeth fell right out of her mouth and lay on the floor like a joke in front of us—not together neatly but wide apart like a Monty Python cartoon.

After a while, I realized I'd stopped ringing the bell, so I began ringing again. I'd pulled the counterpane off the bed and arranged it over us as best I could, and I cushioned the side of her head with her pretty crocheted blanket all bundled up, but she was cold.

No one came. I paused and then started ringing again. Eventually, Miranda's voice came from the doorway. ‘What!' she snapped in an angry and annoyed voice.

I was so frightened I just said, ‘Help.'

She came over and peered at us and asked what had happened. I told her to call an ambulance. Miranda looked horrified, she dragged another blanket off Miss Mills' bed, flung it over us and dashed away. I started to cry.

‘No, Fanny-Jane,' said Miss Mills. ‘It'll be all right, I promise.'

Miranda came back. ‘Shall we try to lift her?' she wondered.

I said, ‘No, definitely not, let the ambulance men do it.'

And Miranda was wonderful then and started chatting like you do when something awful has happened and you want to take a person's mind off it. She said she was so sorry she hadn't answered the bell but she'd been kissing Mike Yu in the car (at least she was honest) and after that she'd been making him a birthday card and just needed to get it finished, and the problem was she'd committed herself to bubble writing.

She chirruped on and on and it was perfect.

Mike hated shop-bought things, especially the fake greetings in shop-bought birthday cards, but really appreciated a gesture. She'd drawn the card herself—a horse rearing up in a heart meadow—and had written:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIKE YU
.
ALL MY LOVE MIRANDA
X.

All in bubble writing, each letter a different colour and coloured in with shines and shadows. It did sound impressive and I pictured it in my mind, but I wished she'd answered the bell before Miss Mills' teeth had dropped out of her mouth. And then I wondered why she hadn't done it in Cantonese or Mandarin or whatever his language actually was.

‘Keep talking,' I said, ‘please, keep talking.' Because it was true, it did take your mind off the situation.

Miranda continued, quite like a maniac, and it was perfect and much needed and the best thing she could possibly have done and I'll never be able to repay her for it.

She told us that she'd offered to have sex with Mike for a special birthday treat but that he'd turned her down. Not because he found her unattractive, far from it (they'd had numerous dry rides and kissing marathons), but Mike Yu didn't believe in sex before marriage because he was afraid of losing something. Something long term, important, philosophical and possibly Chinese.

I wondered briefly, out loud, if he might have that phobia where the man imagines the vagina has teeth like a shark's mouth, or even a hamster's. Miss Mills murmured ‘vaginas'. And Miranda said she'd heard of it but didn't think Mike had it. He was phobic about cows and daren't go for a country walk in case he got trampled, but he seemed fine with vaginas.

I agreed with Miranda. I couldn't see Mike Yu having a phobia of vaginas either. Why would a man with that particular phobia keep picking a girl like Miranda up in his Datsun Cherry? Surely you'd keep away from girls in short nurse's dresses, wouldn't you?

After some time, the talk got less interesting. I mean, no one could keep it up forever and soon Miranda was dredging up stuff about her family. The time her mother tried to kill her father with a Flymo and once, when her father had accidentally unplugged the deep freeze, she'd called him a ‘bandit', which made me rock with laughter, and that had hurt Miss Mills and that made me cry. Miranda carried on, though, like a hero. About her sister, Melody, my ex-best friend who'd gone manly in puberty, as previously mentioned, and thanked God for punk arriving so that she could join in with fashion and feel she belonged without trying to look girly.

Eventually, we heard the telltale clanking of the cattle grid and knew the ambulance had arrived. Somehow Matron appeared at the same time and acted professional. Miss Mills was lifted off me by two big men and strapped on to a stretcher on wheels.

Miranda helped me up and I leant on her as we watched Miss Mills being wheeled away—one of her bent legs sticking up, as usual, and the other not—and heard the clanging of the doors and then the clanking of the cattle grid. No one went with her in the ambulance. She went on her own. I was relieved not to have been asked to go but soon became troubled at the thought of her alone without her teeth or her blanket. I think I ranted about it for a while.

‘She's not alone,' said Matron, ‘she's got the medics with her.'

‘But she doesn't know them and they don't know her. And what about her wheelchair,' I whined, ‘and her teeth?'

‘She won't need a wheelchair at the Royal, she'll go straight on to the ward,' said Matron. And because I was worrying, it was decided I must be in shock so they poured me a large glass of sherry, and lit me a Consulate.

Later, someone rang from Leicester Royal Infirmary to inform us that Miss Mills had a suspected fractured femur and concussion and would be staying in hospital for the time being.

‘I'll go and visit her in the Royal on Saturday—I'll take her teeth,' I said.

‘I thought we were going roller-skating Saturday?' said Miranda.

Matron butted in. ‘She'll be dead by Saturday anyway.'

I didn't want a lift in Mike Yu's Datsun. I walked the mile and a half home—slightly downhill all the way, until you got to my actual road and then it was a short, sharp uphill climb.

I tried to keep my mind busy. I noted that the hawthorn and blackthorn hedges along the Collington Hill for a quarter of a mile, which had been brutally layed the winter before—when the sap was down—now looked wonderfully thick, neat and safe. The village had been shocked by the loss of so many trees in the lane but it had worked well and the animals were safe from the road. You had to admire the farmers.

‘She'll be dead by Saturday.'

I hated Matron. Why did she say things like that? Miss Mills was going to be fine—she'd only broken a leg. We'd talked about lilac and lino and she'd seemed intrigued by the vagina phobia. But Matron saying that had frightened me. It seemed so true-sounding.

At home one of my mother's relatives had called in. It was most unusual for him to be at our house; relatives never called on us and we only ever saw them at family occasions. I didn't feel up to seeing him. He was one of those over-educated, soft-spoken types who don't seem to mind that everyone's uncomfortable around them just as long as they're always in the right—like a killjoy kid who won't jump on the furniture even though there's a wonderful game in full swing, and it spoils the fun for everyone.

I crept upstairs, lay on my bed and smoked two cigarettes, one after the other. Then, looking out at the empty space behind our house where three beautiful elms used to be and the line of greyish washing that had been there, hanging from mildewed pegs, since Monday, I prayed and prayed that I hadn't just killed my favourite old lady.

I must've been in shock or, more likely, tipsy from all the anti-shock sherry, because I crept downstairs into the hall and did the most extraordinary thing. I took the telephone out on to the front step—as far as the lead would reach—and vandalized it swiftly with a boot heel, until the dial-prevention lock fell off. And then, sitting on the step, I dialled Good Luck House—whose number I knew by heart.