Paradise Lodge (18 page)

Mike Yu was much more my type than Miranda's. I have to be quite honest here, Miranda was shallow. Openly shallow. She didn't even want to not be. She liked Mike because he was a company director and had a car and was attentive. It was annoying because she pretty much admitted it. I said she had a father who ticked all those boxes (and hoped she'd see what I was getting at).

And I was much more Mike's type than Miranda. Mike was strange and beautiful and born in the Year of the Rabbit like his gentle grandfather—who he'd jointly nursed to death with his strong-bonded family. Even though both Miranda and I were oxen, we were different types of oxen. She seemed to have the most disadvantageous traits in oxen e.g., poor communication skills and stubbornness.

I had a feeling Mike Yu and I would end up together and that I would probably have to face Miranda in some kind of fight. I didn't want a physical fight because I knew she'd win—she'd do anything to beat me—but I couldn't think of any other fight where I'd win. My only hope was that she would dump Mike Yu and break his heart and then I could come in as a soothing friend and one thing could lead to another. I knew one thing; I wanted to lie down and go to sleep with Mike and wake up before him and look at his face. I'd imagined it so many times, it was almost as though it had already happened.

There was only one thing I didn't love about Mike Yu and that was his strong family bond. I didn't mind that we were going to have his elderly parents living with us in 2020 when they reached eighty-five and needed live-in care. I was anxious that they might expect me to pamper Mike in the years between now and then, and I wasn't that kind of girlfriend/wife. I was going to expect certain freedoms and wanted to be able to go pony-trekking and generally do lots of things with my sister and I'd be happy for him to go on long holidays to China and Hong Kong and go pony-trekking or whatever with all the Chinese cousins that he was bound to have. I'd pop over for a week just to see his heritage and see the sights, and then I'd leave him to it. But I didn't want his closely bonded parents thinking badly of me.

I told Lady Briggs snippets of this and though she was very kind about it—saying I mustn't worry about the oxen or the rabbits and that she was certain they'd sort it out between them—I could tell she didn't really get it, so I changed the subject.

Then one day Lady Briggs almost dropped me in it with Miranda.

Lady Briggs suffered with crusty blepharitis and Miranda and I had been asked to give her an eyebath before bed—and run a bicarb-soaked cotton bud round her lashes. It was a horrible job because the person whose eyes they were would always flinch away and you needed a second nurse just to hold the patient's head still. And it was all too easy to jab them in the eyeball because telling an old lady to hold still is like telling a canary. Anyway, suddenly and apropos of nothing and in front of Miranda who was gripping her head, Lady Briggs grabbed my arm and said, ‘Are you still in love with that beautiful boy from the next village?' and I said, ‘Wah? No, who, me, no?'

And she continued, ‘The one who comes into the drive in his car with the music playing?'

And Miranda butted in and said, ‘Oh, yes, that's me, he's my boyfriend. Lizzie hasn't got a boyfriend.'

‘And are you in love with him?' asked Lady Briggs.

‘Yes,' said Miranda.

After the eyebath Lady Briggs blinked a lot, took hold of Miranda's hand and turned it over and looked at her and beckoned her closer. ‘Let me see you, dear,' she said, and stared Miranda full in the eyes. ‘But you're not in love, my dear, you're not in love at all, with anyone.'

After her mental collapse after the camping trip my sister needed to patch up her ruined life and, with absolutely no encouragement from me, she presented herself at Paradise Lodge and offered to become a full-time volunteer with a view to gaining experience before embarking on nurse training at Leicester Royal Infirmary.

And, to my annoyance, she was snapped up by Sister Saleem and came in slightly above me as ‘Nursing Carer'. Which meant that while I'd be hoovering the stairs or lumbering around with the mountains of laundry, she'd be doing something more skilled, like cutting toenails or applying egg white and oxygen to a bedsore.

Sister Saleem was thrilled, of course, to have another whole extra pair of hands—for free—and she thought my sister commendable and Christian.

My sister didn't seem to be suffering with a ruined life. She seemed fully on top of everything and turned up at Paradise Lodge on her first day with a box of mini-rolls for the staff and a bunch of wild flowers for the patients. They were just grasses really with the odd flower but they did look nice in the jug and she was straight into their good books, unlike everyone else who arrived and had to slog at it for weeks.

She straight away began doing what older sisters do. She became quite popular with the staff and told funny stories about me. About my romantic correspondence with Dave Cassidy of Alice Springs and my brief belief in ghosts and the time I winded myself on a steep slide and couldn't speak for a day. And the time I rescued a kitten from dogs on one side and a swimming pool on the other and it scratched me half to death. And the time a handsome Spanish man offered me a puff of his cigarette only to turn it round so that I closed my lips on the burning end. And an awful story about the time we ran out of toilet paper.

None of these stories were particularly funny or interesting, I'm only writing them here to illustrate how and why I came to dread coffee breaks. My sister wasn't trying to undermine me. She really wasn't. She was the new girl and was trying to squeeze into a space that wasn't actually there and join in a world which wasn't as she'd imagined it—partly because I'd not explained it properly. It's a thing friends and siblings do—either that, or they're all reserved and coy (and that's worse because you're embarrassed about them)—I have been guilty of it myself.

I did one time retaliate and told about the time my sister had run away from the dentist because she was scared of the little mirror. And Sister Saleem had said, ‘Your sister is a good Christian and a very caring girl.' And I said, ‘No, she's only here because she had a faked mental breakdown in Scarborough so she doesn't have to leave home.' And I felt the whole room turn against me.

I had a lot on my mind. Mr Simmons and Miss Pitt, for a start, and Matron's pill-stealing. But I worried most about telling Lady Briggs she was going to have to move from Room 9. I worried about that so fiercely that sometimes I'd have to go to the bathroom for a cry. And I'd not get to sleep at night.

It got ridiculous. I was dreading it so much, I considered leaving Paradise Lodge completely and becoming a dedicated scholar who only reads and studies. Or, getting a job in Saxone. I even wondered briefly if the whole ‘moving rooms' thing hadn't been cooked up to get me back to school, by my mother, in cahoots with Sister Saleem.

It was time to speak to my mother—who knew all about dealing with problems, and was as kind and compassionate as you get in an English person.

The thing about having a flawed but kind mother is that you don't have to be afraid to tell them things. You can be yourself and everybody else can be just as they are. And you don't owe them anything, you just love them and they love you and you're in it together—for life. That's how it's always been with mine anyway.

First I told her I had some worries and began with Matron and the patients' pills. I thought she might be a bit cross (you know, an old bitch like Matron nicking the pills out of the old people's mouths etc.) but she wasn't. She was deeply sad and affected. Sad for Matron.

‘Christ, Lizzie, that could be you,' she said.

‘Me?' I asked.

‘Taking them for me!' she said, referring back to her years as a prescription pill addict.

And I said, ‘I suppose so.' But I didn't think I'd have stooped that low, even for her.

‘The thing is, should I tell Sister Saleem?' I asked her.

‘I don't know,' said my mother, ‘maybe you should tell Dr Gurley.'

Dr Gurley being the local doctor who'd helped my mother stop being such a prescription pill head and throwing her life away. And we had great faith in her. ‘Yeah, maybe I should,' I said, knowing I never would.

My mother settled down then, in the nicest chair in our sitting area, as if everything was sorted out. But I'd hardly begun.

I let her have a moment then told her how worried I was about telling Lady Briggs. Though she felt negotiating with a reclusive almost-ninety-year-old over accommodation was a tough assignment for a fifteen-year-old, she used the situation to serve her own agenda and asked whether I ever spent a fraction of this energy on my schoolwork or worrying about my own future.

She could see I was genuinely anxious, though, and after a short discussion about getting one's priorities right, we examined the Room 9 situation and looked for the best way forward. Best for Lady Briggs and easiest for me. We decided I should focus on the convenience aspect of being downstairs—it being the main concern for the elderly (inconvenience could be lethal). I would tell Lady Briggs how very convenient being downstairs would be—for the toilet and for meals and for any kind of attention—and it would be true.

I'd tell her that the distance, the stairs, the corridor all made the coming up to her a real pain in the neck and that she'd be much better attended to downstairs and, more to the point, she'd be able to sit in the day room with all the other patients and gaze out of the window at the bird table and birds in general, which she didn't get to see upstairs, apart from birds flying around, which weren't so appealing and charismatic as the ones fluffing their feathers in a shell-shaped bird bath. And she'd be taken to the toilet in the main sluice on the comfort rounds and be part of the great toileting half-hours—when everyone went to the toilet and talked about going to the toilet and there was much talk of the toilet (the successes and the failures, the issues, the related medication and symptoms)—and she herself might offer her new neighbours nuggets of her own wisdom and tricks pertaining to the whole prickly subject (from the whistling of ‘To Be A Pilgrim' to the little puffs). She'd be able to wave goodbye to the old commode and become acquainted with Thomas Twyford's grand old porcelain and rediscover the charms of beautifully crafted Victorian plumbing—the old chain flushes, the cascading of the water from the elevated water cisterns and the much-admired wall tiles which, according to the owner, rivalled the ones in Grand Central Station. Here, also, I was going to give her a toilet tip of my own which she could share with her new friends and neighbours to prevent needing the toilet again soon after going. Toilet Tip: just when you've finished weeing, turn as far as you can to one side and then to the other and then do two big coughs.

And, if all that didn't work, I was going to suggest that her constant need to go on the commode might be partly psychological and really because she needed to see another human being, to break the boredom of just sitting there staring at her knuckles in her lap. I wouldn't put it quite like that. I didn't want to humiliate her—after all, that's what she'd been doing for the last seven years. Literally, that's all. I was simply going to suggest she might not really need to go to the toilet at all and that was why she had so much trouble actually going and that she might just long for human interaction. It was my mother who'd come up with the ‘longing for human interaction' thing, having longed for it herself a few times before she'd met Mr Holt.

We talked it through and rehearsed it enough times I could have winkled a hermit out of a cave.

It was time to grasp the nettle and on my next duty I went straight upstairs to Room 9 and, after helping Lady Briggs on to the commode, I began.

‘There's a new patient coming next week, a fussy fellow with a small dog—to convalesce but hopefully stay forever,' I said.

‘That's good,' said Lady Briggs—she seemed genuinely thrilled with this news—‘very good for the business.'

‘Yes, but he needs a private room and his own convenience, and Sister Saleem is struggling to find one.'

‘But he could have my room, couldn't he?' suggested Lady Briggs.

‘Well, yes,' I said, ‘yes, that would be perfect. But how would you feel, going downstairs to a shared ward?'

‘I have been waiting to move closer to everything,' said Lady Briggs.

‘Have you?'

‘Yes, she was going to move me,' said Lady Briggs, ‘Ingrid, the Owner's Wife, as soon as a place became available, but nothing came up.'

She'd been the very first patient at Paradise Lodge, she told me, and had been put in an out-of-the-way place to avoid all the noise and dust of the builders. It had always been the plan to move her to a better place, maybe a downstairs room with access to the garden, once the house was fully refurbished, but that hadn't happened for some reason. And quite some time had gone by.

‘So you'd be happy to move,' I said, astonished.

‘Nothing would make me happier,' said Lady Briggs, smiling and thinking and clicking like mad.

As I left Room 9, I checked, one more time, I'd understood correctly.

‘So, you'll be happy to move downstairs—to a shared ward?' I said.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘is there room downstairs for me?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘a bed has just become available.'

Moving day was strange. For a start, Lady Briggs had a bath—usually she'd just have a flannel wash unless the doctor was coming. So I had to help her into it, lurk in case she drowned, and then help her out of it. During the bath we chatted in exactly the same way as when she was on the commode, except I was outside the little bathroom and plucking my eyebrows in her magnifying mirror. I asked her if she felt ready for the move.

‘Oh, yes,' she said, ‘it was always the plan when my son brought me up here.'

‘Seven years ago,' I said.

‘It's not seven years, is it?' said Lady Briggs. ‘Please don't tell me it's as long as that.'

‘Oh, maybe not,' I said.

The nurses had celebrated downstairs when I'd told them of Lady Briggs' eagerness to move and that she wasn't going to resist or be unhappy. They'd seen it as a good outcome. And I had too, really, because it had been so much easier than I'd expected and with no wailing or woes. But actually knowing she'd been waiting to move all this time—not a recluse at all, but lonely and longing to be with everyone—was very sad. Too sad to think about really.

I helped her out of the bath and dried her feet and chucked a tub of Johnson's all over her and rang the bell for some help in getting her downstairs.

‘I did just want to say to you, Lizzie,' said Lady Briggs, ‘I think you really should get yourself an education and not spend all your time here, now I'll be downstairs and shan't need you so much.'

‘I know, I should,' I said. ‘I'm doing my best, but I've come to hate school.'

‘
Hate
?' said Lady Briggs, admonishingly.

‘Dislike,' I corrected.

‘You'll regret it later if you don't get your certificates, I guarantee it.' She went on, ‘It'll come back to roost.'

‘My stepdad is an autodidact, I could always go that route if necessary,' I said.

‘A what?'

‘Self-taught with dictionaries and encyclopaedias and books in general,' I said, ‘and he's easily a match for any graduate.'

‘Golly, I hope it won't come to that,' said Lady Briggs, ‘but if it does, I have many, many books and you are very welcome to borrow them, you must help yourself.'

It was very kind of her. I thanked her and helped her with her stockings and Nurse Carla B arrived.

The three of us made our way to the top of the stairs and Lady Briggs rested on the chaise that was there especially for resting old ladies. And then we descended. It was very moving. Lady Briggs sang ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls' in her warbly voice and everyone gathered in the hall below and looked up, cheering gently as she took each step.

‘You know, I thought for a long time I might be in an asylum,' she called down, and a roar of laughter went up. ‘No, no, I'm not being flippant, I truly believed I had been incarcerated—you know, a sort of prison where one is punished for one's strangeness.'

And then she continued with her song and took the last tentative steps downstairs.

Lady Briggs had been allocated space in the communal wardrobes along one side of Ward 2. We brought down her stationery boxes and put them in her bedside cabinet, and her clothing and Chinese jug and bowl. But we threw away the twenty-odd bars of Cadbury's Old Jamaica we'd found in her tallboy.

That night I fished out her medical notes from the cabinet in the owner's nook.

Lady Briggs was admitted in 1969 after a small procedure at Kettering cottage hospital. She had varicose veins and a history of constipation for which she self-administered senna. In 1975 she was diagnosed with conjunctivitis and was given antibiotic eye drops.

She'd requested a room with a view over the farm—not the reservoir. Her interests were listed as reading, theology and horticulture. She declined a portable television.

Her next of kin was listed as ‘Harald T. Anderssen—son'.

I thought I'd try to track down Harald Anderssen and arrange for him to come to visit now it turned out she wasn't a recluse. But the notes were patchy and there was no address or telephone number listed, save those of Paradise Lodge.

‘Would you like us to invite your son to visit you?' I asked her as we arranged her things in the bedside cabinet.

‘Where?' she asked, ‘in here, no, I shall see him later, I expect.'

‘Do you have his telephone number?' I asked. ‘I can't find it on your notes.'

‘You'll find him in the sitting room, dear,' she said.

In honour of Lady Briggs coming downstairs, Gordon Banks finally brought his video machine and played us
The Sound of Music
on telly during the afternoon. It was a big deal, not just because of us watching telly during the daytime but because Gordon couldn't carry the machine on his own and Sally-Anne had to help and was too shy to be so close to a person, especially Gordon Banks, who might or might not have been
the
Gordon Banks—but probably wasn't, I'd decided by then (having seen the real one in a newspaper saying he was settling well in the
USA
).

I think it was an early
VHS
but it might have been Betamax. No one remembers. But we had it anyway and the ladies were thrilled to bits (not so much the gentlemen). Even the nurses on duty were allowed to sit down and watch. I sat in Emma Mills' old spot and what made it doubly sad was that I sat in her wheelchair and could smell the 4711 they all used to mask the smell of wee.

I'd seen
The Sound of Music
a few times and never thought much to it, but that day my heart was breaking. It wasn't just Lady Briggs being down among us—it wasn't Lady Briggs at all, actually—it was that Mike Yu was affecting me and changing me. I'd been a straightforward thinker before I'd looked into his tear-filled eyes when Grandpa Yu had passed. Now I was just an idiot full of stupid dreams and ridiculous fantasies, such as this recurring fantasy that evolved over a matter of weeks and went something like: I am in a big, scary warehouse and the leccy has blown, and I'm on my own and I'm terrified. There's someone or something in the warehouse with me and I can't see anything because I don't have a torch. Mike Yu drives by in his Datsun Cherry and senses something wrong (maybe he sees my bike outside). He does a safe three-point turn and pulls up outside the warehouse and by chance has a torch on him. He makes his way inside the building and finds me—slightly injured and very scared—and he lifts me up into his arms and carries me to his Datsun. I don't know what I was doing in the dark old warehouse, but there you are.

And that day, watching
The
Sound of Music
, when it got to the really awful bit where Liesl sings with Rolf and Rolf is so hideous and anyone with an ounce of sense can see he's going to turn out to be a Nazi and Liesl is putting herself down saying what a flibbertigibbet she is. But still, I could hardly stop myself crying, watching them in the gazebo and wishing it was me singing that I was sixteen going on seventeen and Mike Yu responding that he was seventeen going on eighteen, and would take care of me—except I was fifteen going on sixteen and Mike was twenty and he was a colleague's boyfriend and definitely not a Nazi. I began to get a bit fed up with ordinary things being hijacked by my love for Mike Yu. Every book I read, every song and every film I saw. It was all-encompassing.