‘It hasn’t changed, has it?’ I said. ‘It looks just as unpleasant as it always has.’
I hadn’t seen Greenbank for years, and yet as we turned into the driveway, it felt as though I’d just looked back at it after glancing away. It’s the kind of stout, Georgian house that never seems to change. Whilst the rest of the world decays and rebuilds and reinvents itself, places like Greenbank watch and wait, and gather up memories.
There were four of us. Me, Elsie, General Jack and Jack’s son, Chris, who’d been persuaded by his father to chauffeur us on our little outing. Chris underwent deep interrogation by Miss Bissell. She walked around him a full three hundred and sixty degrees with her clipboard, and asked enough questions to satisfy two sides of A4. We watched through the chessboard glass, Jack leaning on his walking stick as though we were at a sheepdog trial.
Chris was the only hope we had. Miss Bissell would never let us escape into the world on our own.
When he left the office, Chris had acquired a layer of sweat and a new set of creases in his forehead, but he gave us a sideways thumbs-up and bobbed his knees.
‘He’s a maths teacher,’ said Jack.
We sat in the back of the car, Elsie and I. Chris was driving and Jack shouted instructions from the passenger seat at the top of his voice. I became a child on a seaside holiday, and read out all the road signs as we passed by.
‘Give way, two hundred yards,’ I said. ‘It’s a red triangle.’
‘Shall we just let Chris do the driving?’ Elsie pointed through the gap between the front seats. ‘I’m sure he’s more than capable.’
‘Toilets, two hundred metres. Ladies and gentlemen.’
She lowered her voice. ‘Do you want the toilet?’
‘Not especially, thank you,’ I shouted.
We passed retail parks, sprouting like broccoli at the edge of towns. Empty high streets with injured shops, boarded and bruised, shouting their red messages at no one in particular. People who pulled their world behind them in a trolley, and waited whilst pelican crossings counted down their lives in orange seconds. Groups of teenagers, who stretched their afternoons out on street corners. All those small lives, acting out their purpose in a strange solitude. I passed the time by describing everything in detail, and Elsie stopped ignoring me after a while and joined in. Every so often, Chris looked at us in the rear-view mirror and frowned.
We passed a sports shop. Plastic people in green and orange stared out from the window. ‘I don’t recognise anything,’ I said. ‘Where’s the little place that sells sweets in paper bags?’
Elsie looked over. ‘I’m not sure people buy sweets in paper bags any more.’
‘And every other shop is a hairdressers. I never realised people had so much hair.’
We stopped at a set of traffic lights and I craned around Elsie to see the churchyard. The gravestones waited in rows, and they watched Marks & Spencer through a gap between a bank and a building society.
‘I’ll end up in there,’ I said. ‘As sure as eggs is eggs.’
‘Have another sucky sweet and don’t be so morbid.’
I reached into the bag. ‘I’m only being realistic.’
She took the empty wrapper and put it in her pocket. ‘Well if you want to be completely realistic, you won’t end up in there at all. You’ll end up in the cemetery at the other end of town.’
‘They’ve built a cemetery?’
‘They have,’ she said. ‘Too many old people, so they had to make an overspill. Like a car park.’
‘That’s a shame.’ I looked out of the back window as we drove away.
‘It is,’ she said. ‘I was hoping we could both have a corner spot, near the chancel.’
I took another sweet for later. ‘Now we’ll end up in the middle of a field, overlooking the bypass.’
We reached Greenbank. There was low cloud, a cliff-top of a sky, and it started to spit down at us. The building waited for us through a windscreen crowded with rain, and the edges of it blurred against the clouds until the chalk white of the bricks vanished into nothing.
‘We’re here,’ said Chris, quite unnecessarily.
No one moved.
I reached for the door handle, but then I changed my mind and put my hand back on my lap.
‘Shall we head inside?’ Jack nodded towards the rain. ‘Are you coming, Chris?’
Chris took a CD and a Boots meal deal out of the glove compartment. ‘I think I’ll wait here. Listen to a bit of ABBA. Pass the time.’
‘It’s warmer inside,’ Jack said.
Chris looked up at the glass mouths of the Georgian windows and shook his head.
‘I’m going in,’ Jack said. ‘I’d rather face Greenbank than sit here and watch you eat a prawn sandwich.’
The woman who opened the main door was dressed in varying shades of beige, as if her wardrobe had been selected entirely from a row on a paint chart. Small eyes. Thin lips. Elephant’s Breath.
She made an ‘o’ without a sound to go with it, and stepped back to allow us inside, where we fell into a world of beige carpets and beige wallpaper, and weighted velvet curtains. It was the air you noticed first, though. Still and polished with age, like walking into a room that is only used at Christmas, and each time you breathed in, your lungs filled up with the past.
‘You’ll find Clara in our west wing,’ said the woman, and she turned down a long corridor. It was less than a minute before she launched into the brochure.
‘And on the left, we have our secondary day room, with a forty-eight-inch plasma television screen and a constant staff presence.’
I glanced in. The television was switched off. All forty-eight inches of it.
‘And on the right, our award-winning gardens can be enjoyed through the French windows.’
‘Award-winning?’ I whispered to Elsie and tried the handle.
‘Which are locked at all times, for health and safety purposes.’ The woman turned and smiled at us, and I smiled back and lifted my fingers away from the glass.
I looked into each room as we passed. They were silent and empty, except for the occasional glimpse of a distant uniform. ‘Everyone must be on a trip,’ I said.
We arrived in another hallway, which drifted with lavender and old age. ‘Visitors are not usually permitted in residents’ rooms,’ said the beige woman, ‘but Clara is –’ She consulted her notes. ‘– not comfortable in communal areas.’
‘She never was,’ I said. ‘She was terrified of people, especially her father.’
‘It took us ages to persuade her to come to the dance,’ said Elsie.
‘The dance?’ I pushed my thoughts into a frown.
‘Florence, that’s why we’re seeing her. To ask about the dance,’ Elsie said.
The woman looked at her notes. ‘Dance? It doesn’t say anything about a dance in here.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’
‘We’re on the third floor.’ The woman looked at Jack. ‘Would you like to use the lift?’
The lift waited for customers in the corner of the hall. It had an iron gate and a very complicated pulley system, which appeared to be suspended from the ceiling.
‘I think I’ll go with the stairs,’ said Jack.
‘Don’t mind the stick,’ I said. ‘He only uses it to boss people about.’
Jack was still laughing when we reached the first landing.
As we climbed, the scent of lavender disappeared, and was replaced with the wipe-clean fragrance of a waiting room. Its aroma was rather like a doctor’s surgery or how you would imagine an operating theatre to smell. The furnishings altered, too. Vases of flowers were exchanged for cages of bedsheets, and the oil paintings became health and safety notices, drilled into the plaster and yellowed with age. Even the carpet turned to lino beneath our feet, as though gravity had pulled all the soft furnishings to the ground floor.
The woman turned right down another corridor. The doors became numbered, and the brochure descriptions disappeared along with the dried flowers. Within each room was a small piece of torment. Eyes were glazed with vacancy. Mouths gaped. Limbs rested on angry, twisted sheets, although perhaps worse were the ones who lay silent in perfectly made beds. The ones who had run out of arguing. I stared into each room, and a parcel of life stared back. Outside each door was a photograph, and the corridor looked as though a giant family album had been unfolded along its walls. People posed in gardens and on seafronts. They lifted children on to their hips and looked out at us from beneath Christmas trees. The woman saw us staring.
‘It shows the staff who they used to be,’ she said.
I tried to match the people in the rooms with the people under the Christmas trees. The ice-cream people on promenades, creasing their eyes in the sunshine, the people smiling at me from their black-and-white lives. But they had all disappeared.
‘Here we are.’ The woman waited outside a door numbered forty-seven. Further down the corridor, I heard singing.
‘“Onward, Christian Soldiers”,’ I said.
‘Onward indeed,’ said Elsie.
The woman coughed. ‘Shall we?’
Room forty-seven was filled with light. As we’d walked through Greenbank, the clouds had hurried across a September sky, exchanging the rain for a watery sunlight. The harsh lines, the sharp edges of a windowsill, the white stare of a pictureless wall, were all diluted with a butterscotch kindness. On the bedside table were a box of tissues and a beaker of water. The room had an echo.
The woman said, ‘She has everything she needs,’ before all of us were even inside.
I looked up at the ceiling, and it looked back at me with a magnolia indifference.
‘We couldn’t trace any family.’ The woman ran a finger down a page in her notes. ‘She used to live in Wales. Husband died years ago.’
‘Husband?’ I said.
‘She married Fred. From the dance,’ said Elsie.
‘The one who always smelled of fish?’
‘He worked in the fishmonger’s, Florence. I keep telling you, but you don’t take it in.’
The woman looked through her notes. ‘Fish? It doesn’t say anything about fish in here.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’
‘We went to his funeral, don’t you remember?’ said Elsie. ‘Clara stood by the grave in the pouring rain, because she couldn’t bear to leave him behind. You persuaded her to get in the car. No one else could.’
‘She was still swinging when they found her,’ I said.
‘No.’ Elsie took hold of my coat sleeve. ‘Don’t you remember? Measure twice, cut once. Trim the thread at an angle.’
She waited for a few minutes.
‘I helped her?’ I said.
We both looked at the clock on the wall, measuring out the seconds. ‘You did.’
A door opened and a girl in a brown uniform armed an old woman back to a seat. It took me a moment to realise the old woman was Clara. Her shoulders were too small. Her eyes were too quiet. Her hands were worn and shot through with veins. All I could see were the crumbs of a person, the leftovers of a life, but then she smiled, and I wondered how I could have failed to recognise her in the first place.
‘Here’s Clara,’ Elsie said. ‘Talk to her, Florence. She knew you best of all.’
The old woman frowned at us. ‘Who is it?’
I looked at Elsie, and I looked at the old woman and I took a step forward. My shoe leather squeaked on a mopped floor and I folded the belt on my raincoat.
‘It’s Florence,’ I said. ‘Florence. From the factory. Do you remember?’
I watched the woman’s eyes, milky with too much seeing. I watched the question tread through her mind, and the confusion steal away her answer.
I said, ‘Florence,’ again, then I took another step and said, ‘Flo.’
There was a touchpaper silence.
Clara clapped her hands and a happiness filled all the spaces in the room. ‘Flo!’ she said. ‘Have you come to take me home? I’ve been waiting ever such a long time.’
Clara moved between the past and the present, like slipping a coat on and off. We struggled to follow her. Jack was completely lost. She stole between the two, taking what she needed from each. Cherry-picking the past, until it became one that kept her warm and secure, in the room with a blank ceiling and pictureless walls. We tried to manage a conversation. We tried to guide it past anything dark and unsafe.
The woman in beige looked at her watch.
‘Do you remember Beryl?’ I said.
Clara repeated the name.
‘Elsie’s sister.’ I searched for an explanation. I looked at Elsie and said, ‘How would you describe her?’
‘Try three things,’ Elsie said. ‘You’re good at three things.’
‘Dark hair.’ I hesitated. ‘Bit of a temper. Always looked like she’d rather be somewhere else. She died, do you remember?’
Clara looked up at us, and her eyes began to fill. ‘Beryl died?’ she said.
‘She did,’ I said, ‘but it was a very long time ago. She used to dance with Ronnie. Do you remember him?’
We waited. A search was clearly being conducted in the corners of Clara’s mind.
‘Drowned,’ she said eventually. ‘Washed up on Langley Beach. The fish ate most of him.’ She smiled. ‘My Fred would have been so proud.’
‘Do you remember the night Beryl died?’
My words fell into a silence, and in the silence, I could hear my own breathing. The shift of Jack’s walking stick. The woman in beige turning a page in her folder.
‘At the dance?’ Clara said.
I nodded, and held on to my breath.
‘I’d love to hear Al Bowlly again.’ Clara looked up at the ceiling, as though Al Bowlly himself were floating right above her head.
I turned back to Elsie and Jack.
‘I don’t suppose you remember anyone called Gabriel Price?’ said Jack. ‘Was he at the dance with you?’
Clara thought for a moment, and then she began to sing.
Midnight, with the stars and you …
‘The night Beryl died,’ I said. ‘Can you remember anything?’
Midnight, and a rendezvous …
The woman in beige closed the folder. ‘You’ve lost her now. Once she starts singing, she can go on for days.’
But as we turned to leave, Clara stopped singing and she called out: ‘What did you say your name was again?’
‘It’s Florence, Clara. From the factory. Flo.’
When we reached the door, she shouted, ‘You’ll come back for me, won’t you, Flo? You won’t forget?’
Her words followed us all the way down the corridor.
We returned in silence. Just the shuffle of Elsie’s shoes and the tap of Jack’s walking stick on linoleum. When we reached the ground floor, the feel of carpet beneath her feet seemed to give the woman in beige a newly found optimism, and she began to hum.
‘What’s the difference between humming and singing?’ I asked Elsie, but she didn’t have an answer.
The woman in beige opened the front door and stepped on to the porch. ‘Well, that went splendidly,’ she said.
‘Did it?’ I took a bodyful of September air.
‘Much better than the last visitor. She was very calm this time.’
I’d just reached the last step when I heard Jack’s voice. ‘The last visitor? Who was that, then?’
I waited.
‘Elderly chap. Healthcare assistant said he whispered something in Clara’s ear and Clara became quite hysterical. No idea what it was, although it never needs much. Took us days to calm her down.’
‘What did he look like, this elderly chap?’ said Jack.
I turned to listen. Although I don’t know why, because I already knew what she was going to say.
We walked back to the car in a knot of thinking. When we got inside, Chris wiped mayonnaise from his mouth with the back of a hand.
‘Get what you want, then?’
Jack looked straight ahead, somewhere into the distance. ‘Oh, I think we got a little more than that,’ he said.
I pushed at the condensation on the window with the sleeve of my coat.
‘Let’s just get back home,’ Elsie said.
I spoke through the smear of breath on the glass. ‘Wherever that may be.’
The journey was quiet. I’d given up reading road signs, and Jack decided Chris was trustworthy enough to drive the car all by himself. The rain started again, but it was slight and indecisive, and every so often, the windscreen wipers shouted out in frustration, as they ran out of things to wipe.