and cried a bit, and then performed a rather innocuous pole-dance live, which resulted in one of the glamour agencies signing her up. I watched the show in the office with half an eye, busy signing contracts to secure a drug-addled celebrity set to reveal her addictions on a show next week for an awful lot of money. Suddenly I thought I heard my name. I took a swig of coffee and turned the volume up.
‘Yes. As I say, I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for my new friend. Good comes out of bad, you know, I think that’s always true. I’m so glad that I got the chance to meet her.’ Fay looked right into the camera, practically caressing the lens with those melting eyes. ‘Maggie, I’d like to thank you – not only for saving me on that coach, but for showing me the way. Here’s to you.’ She raised an imaginary glass to the screen.
The phone on my desk rang as I almost choked on my coffee, but by the time I’d mopped up and answered it, the caller had rung off. On the show, Renee moved swiftly away from Fay’s pseudo-psychology; if she had any idea it was me that Fay was celebrating, the bitter old bag sure as hell wouldn’t dwell on it. And neither would I.
I had an odd feeling somewhere deep inside. I felt guilty about Fay, about the fact that she made my skin crawl. I hoped this would be the last I saw of her. But I soon forgot her. There were more serious things on my mind by then.
Since I’d split up with Alex, Sundays haunted me. They were long and lonely; they reminded me of far happier times. However much I tried to celebrate my freedom, I just felt sad and empty as I dragged myself around the hills of Greenwich Park with Digby, or played gooseberry at Bel’s.
This Sunday, as my father dropped me at the nursing home on his way to Jenny’s, I was suffused not just with self-pity but with guilt too. I hadn’t visited much since the accident, since I’d utterly lost myself in the summer. I’d kept away while I tried to recover. Now, though, I wanted to be with my grandmother, searching for some calm and serenity. I needed to step out of time for a moment.
The staff were as welcoming as ever when I arrived; relieved to see young blood in these corridors of doom, I always guessed.
‘How’s the wicked Renee?’ joked Susan, her broad face still jolly despite the smell of decay and urine that pervaded the air; the perpetual smell that Susan lived and worked in. They thought I was so glamorous because I worked in the TV industry, and I played along with the lie because it was a nice job when you compared it to what they did: shovelling food and drink into slack old mouths, listening to the same feeble moans, to the hysteria of the senile and the ramblings of the lonely, the interminable wiping and dressing and wiping again. How could I possibly complain? They didn’t know that I hated myself a little more each day.
Angelic in her green dressing-gown, Gar looked as fragile as a powder-puff about to float away. Her soft hair was tied in a bun, silky under the dim light of her room. Someone had tuned her stereo into Radio 3 and she was nodding off to the strains of Strauss, her last cup of tea cold and cloudy before her on the table. I didn’t want to wake her – there was little point. Gar was going gaga, that was the awful truth. She was clamped in Alzheimer’s relentless jaws, and there was no snatching her back.
I held her hand as she slept, her wrinkly old hand that was so light these days, and gazed almost unseeing at the familiar photos on the wall: me as a toothy baby; me as a fat and naked toddler in a pink sunhat on the beach in Cornwall; me aged about five in my mother’s strong, freckled arms – skinny now, just a little curving belly of baby-fat left, our hair as brilliantly red as one another’s, my mother beaming with love and my dad just off to the side looking on proudly, very tall and thin, before his stoop began. Before the sadness started.
Susan popped her head round the door.
‘Fancy a cuppa, lovie?’
‘I’d rather have a whisky,’ I joked.
‘Vera’s got some sherry in her cupboard, I think.’ Susan did a double-take. ‘Ooh, you’ve had all your hair cut off. I didn’t notice with that beret on before. Very nice. You look a bit like Twiggy used to. All eyes.’ She wiped her red nose on a cotton handkerchief. ‘Only she was blonde, of course.’
‘Thank you.’ I rubbed my bare neck self-consciously. ‘I’m still not used to it. I just thought it was time for a change.’
‘A change is as good as a rest, that’s what they say.’ Susan nodded her approval. ‘I’ll get you that tea.’
While I waited, I had a hunt for the sherry.
Gar woke just before I left. ‘Did you have some porridge?’ she asked politely, and I knew she wasn’t sure who I was today, her blue eyes watery and confused – but she let me keep holding her hand, which was something. I stroked it gently and waffled on about this and that.
‘I’ll fetch that porridge, but don’t let it burn,’ my grandmother mumbled, and then nodded off again. I gave her a long hug, feeling her frame so frail beneath my arms, and headed back to Dad’s.
There was a half-hour wait at the cab office so I attempted a bus, but they were rare at the best of times and it was late on Sunday, so in the end I decided to walk across Blackheath. The physio had said I needed to keep moving as much as possible – but God, I was deathly slow at the moment.
In the middle of the deserted heath it suddenly seemed horribly dark. A breeze sniggered through the trees; there was no sight of the moon, no stars, just clouds scudding across a dark sky. Although I fought it, a knot of apprehension tightened as I walked.
However hard I tried not to, I found myself constantly glancing behind me, disturbed by the notion that someone might be following me. But I was alone each time I turned; of course I was alone. I hummed something jolly, something made up, and wished fervently that Digby was here to bark at my imaginings. I tried to walk a little quicker, but my foot was really hampering me now.
A fox barked in the thicket by the pond, a terrible sound like a baby crying, and I jumped. The leaves rustled and shivered in the wind. Then a car drove by very fast, blinding me with its lights, and I stumbled on the uneven grass. Righting myself, I thought I heard voices but I couldn’t work out from where. I picked up my pace as best I could.
Eventually a couple of kids dragging a fat Pekinese came into sight under the lamppost on the corner by the pond. My sigh of relief was audible. I shuffled along, keeping them in my sights until I finally hit the main road.
* * *
The next day I raced home from work to collect the car I could finally drive again, and was about to head out when my dad called me into the sitting room. He was immersed in The Times’ crossword.
‘Beautiful flowers, love,’ he said, waving his pen vaguely in the direction of the sideboard. ‘I stuck them in a vase. You might need to do something with them.’
‘Lilies,’ I said stupidly, gazing at them. The exact same bunch as last time. ‘Bloody lilies again.’ I crossed the room to see if there was a card with them, but I couldn’t find one. I gazed at the top of my father’s bent and balding head. ‘Do you know who brought them?’
‘Fourteen across. Eight letters. Unwelcome pale beast.’
‘Dad!’
‘Sorry. No. They
