a.m. at handover – I could think of nothing else. I knew it off by heart. I’d read it so many times.
I turned away from my computer to find the whole office waiting for me to start and Jeremy – our team Manager, perched on the edge of a desk, wearing one of his ‘five for a tenner’ shirts.
‘Yes, it was eventful,’ I stuttered. ‘Really, really busy actually.’
In fact, there must have been something in the planets – something in the full moon, which hung like a mint imperial over south London – because, as well as receiving Joe’s Facebook message, the first contact I’d had from him in five years, it had been one of the busiest night shifts I’d ever done. Everyone was going mad.
John Urwin – one of Kingsbridge Mental Health Trust’s most notorious clients – had been arrested after being caught having sex in Burgess Park.
‘And all you need to know about that,’ I said, when I finally got myself together enough to join in handover ‘is that he was butt naked when arrested but still wearing his Dennis the Menace wig, and I think you have to love John for that.’
Kaye, Parv and Leon, also CPNs (community psychiatric nurses), had an affectionate giggle, but Jeremy was not amused. ‘If you could just stick to what actually happened, Robyn.’
And so I told them how John was a little ‘agitated’ when I arrived at Walworth Police Station. (This was a distinct downplay of events. I’d been able to hear him shouting as soon as I got there.)
‘WHY CAN’T A MAN HAVE SEX WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND IF HE WANTS TO? IT’S AN ABUSE OF MY HUMAN RIGHTS, DOCTOR! MY HUMAN RIGHTS!’
But Dr Manoor and I had managed to calm him down. Dr Manoor has been John’s psychiatrist for years, and thankfully knows him as well as I do.
John is perhaps one of the more extreme clients I work with (although there’s not really such a thing as ‘extreme’ in this job) and institutionalized now. I find people like him the absolute saddest. It’s as if they had their breakdown aged 18 and stayed that age – arrested development. John has been sectioned more times than most people have had hot dinners. Still, if you talked to John when he was well, he talked a lot of sense. He was a bright man – he could tell you every single species of butterfly – and he was in a relationship.
Because the night shift had been so full on, handover ran over. As well as John Urwin baring all in Burgess Park, Levi Holden was admitted with an overdose. I really don’t mean to sound glib when I say this happens quite often.
Of the thirty people on my caseload, Levi is probably my favourite: six feet of utter gorgeousness for a start. He’s also hilarious, when he’s not suicidal. And even when he is suicidal, he’s probably funnier than the average person. He has a little job washing cars in the Dulwich Sainsbury’s car park. The other day, he was making me laugh so much, slagging off all the Dulwich mums in their four-by-fours and their two-hundred-pound weekly shops.
‘Those mo-fo dull witches wid der massive wagons and their whining dollies in the back and enough food to feed the whole of Peckham. It’s a wonder they’re not more mo-fo wide, the amount of money they spend on food!’
I laugh a lot in my job. I guess, with darkness has to come light, and you’d be amazed how gallows the humour can get. ‘You don’t have to be mad to do this job, but it helps,’ they say. But I wonder if we’re not all a bit mad already, and it’s just a question of when, not if, the lid comes off.
I find it hard at the best of times going home and straight to sleep after a night shift. Your body is exhausted but your mind is on overdrive: Will Levi take another overdose? Will John be on the psychiatric ward, yelling for his Dennis the Menace wig? These are usually the things I am thinking as I leave the office for my bed. Today, however, it was Joe’s Facebook message.
We were having one of those freak, early spring warm spells – Peckham’s teens had already stripped to their Primark hot pants – and so I decided to walk to Oval rather than get the bus. Camberwell was alive and kicking: African ladies in tropical-shade headdresses, stalls piled high with okra and plantain, spilling onto the street. A watermelon rolled onto the pavement. As I put it back, I could just make out the wiry form of Dmitri, the owner of the shop, sitting like a drying chilli on his deckchair at the back. I passed Chicken Cottage and the launderette, where the aroma of fried chicken turned into the heavy, bluebell notes of Lenor. Across the road, in the park, a group of teenagers were dancing to some rapper blasting from a pimped-up beatbox. The heart of South London couldn’t have been beating harder if it tried, and yet, amidst all of this life, I was thinking about death – of Joe’s mum, and my mum, and everything that happened in Kilterdale, and how I really didn’t want to go back there, for a funeral of all things. The question now, of course, was how the hell was I going to get out of it?
Eventually, I caved, and went into Interflora in Camberwell. The woman behind the counter was eyeing me up over her half-moon glasses, as if she knew my game.
‘Can I help you, madam?’ she said eventually.
I smiled at her. ‘No, I’m just looking, thanks,’ and continued pretending to browse around the shop, which didn’t take long since you couldn’t swing a cat in there.
‘Okay, well if you need any help …’ she said, going back to her book, but I could feel her eyes on me; they were following me round the shop. Eventually, I felt compelled to speak.
‘Uh, actually, could you recommend flowers to send to a funeral, please?’
She perked up at this and took off her glasses.
‘Well, the classic of course is the lily,’ she said, getting up from her seat behind the counter and coming round to the front. She had a matronly bosom and was wearing a lilac, pussy-bow blouse. ‘But you can have bouquets arranged with carnations, roses; anything you like.’
I nodded, remembering the carpet of bouquets left outside the crematorium at Mum’s funeral. The messages that all started, ‘Dearest Lil …’ and finished, ‘Always in our thoughts.’ I remember being so depressed that Mum had now become merely a thought in people’s heads. How long before she wasn’t even that?
‘May I ask who it’s for?’ asked the woman. She was much more friendly now. ‘Is it a close family member? Do you know what sort of flowers they liked?’
‘Roses,’ I said, ‘peach ones.’
I must have spent more time with Marion up at the vicarage that summer than I remembered.
‘We do a lovely wreath with peach roses,’ she said. ‘Some irises, green foliage … When is the funeral?’
‘A week on Friday.’
‘In London?’
‘No, up North. A little village near the Lake District.’
She let out a little gasp. ‘Which one? My son and daughter-in-law live up there.’
I hesitated. Nobody had ever heard of it. ‘Kilterdale,’ I said.
‘No … my son lives in Yarn!’
I was genuinely shocked. In fifteen years of living in London, I could count on one hand the number of people I’d met from anywhere near my home village, it was so back of beyond.
She
