Chapter 101: The Car Park
On the Wednesday I went anyway.
Not inside. I want that clear, because it mattered to Ruth for about nine days and it matters to the rest of this.
I stood in the visitors' car park at Willow Bank, on the tarmac, forty metres from the main door.
Ten past two. At ten past two I would have been coming out of the day room with the tea trolley.
The building is nineteen-sixties, two storeys, brick, with a nineties extension along the west side that never matched.
Twenty-two rooms on the ground floor, nineteen upstairs. A lift that takes one chair and one person.
The clinical room is the third door past the nurses' station, and the medication trolley lives in it on a wall chain.
The folders sit on top of the trolley in a plastic wallet. Blue for the ground floor, green for upstairs.
I know all this the way you know a room you have walked through a hundred and fifty times.
That is the whole of my expertise. I pushed chairs and filled kettles and read what was in front of me while I waited for a nurse to unlock a door.
I did not go in.
I stood on the tarmac in the wind and looked at a window on the ground floor, second from the end, which was Cynthia Okwe's.
The curtain was open. The bed had been stripped.
A stripped bed in a care home means one of three things, and only one of them is good.
At twenty past, a girl came out of the side fire door in a tabard with a cardigan over it and lit a cigarette.
Anisa Fenwick. Twenty-three. Fourteen months on the floor. She saved me the good tea bags.
She saw me and did the thing people do now, which is look back at the door she had come out of.
“You're not meant to be here.”
“I'm in a car park.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean. I'm not coming in and I'm not going to ask you for anything.”
She smoked about a third of it before she said anything else.
“Cynthia died on the ninth.”
I had known since the bed. Knowing and being told are two different weights.
“Where?”
“Hospital. Chest. She went in on the second and didn't come back.”
“Since the fall?”
“Since the fall. She never really got up after it.”
I said her name back to myself. Cynthia Okwe. Eighty-six. Retired auxiliary nurse, forty-one years at St Brendan's.
She corrected my grammar and had opinions about how a bed should be made, and she was right about all of them.
In November she went over sideways out of a chair in the corridor at eleven in the morning and fractured the neck of her femur.
I was not there that day. I heard about it the following Wednesday from the woman in the next room.
What I had seen, in the blue folder, on the Wednesday before that, was ten milligrams of diazepam signed for at ten forty by initials that the rota had off duty.
I did not know it meant anything then. I filed it the way you file a number plate.
Anisa said, “They changed the folders in January. It's all on the tablets now.”
“All of it?”
“Everything from January. The paper ones went in a box.”
“Where's the box?”
She looked at the door again.
“I'm not doing this,” she said. “I've got a kid.”
“I know. I told you I wouldn't ask, and I'm not.”
That was true when I said it. It stopped being true nine weeks later, and she is the reason any of it happened at all.
She put the cigarette in the sand bucket properly and went back in.
Then she came out again four seconds later and said one more thing through the gap in the door.
“There's a woman been ringing. From the Commission. Denise says it's routine.”
The door shut on the second word of my answer.
I stood there long enough to be certain I was not going to walk towards it.
Then I walked home.
It is six kilometres from Willow Bank to Carrow Street along the towpath.
I did it in an hour and ten with the wind off the water the whole way.
A body tells you things on a long walk that it will not tell you sitting down.
The right shoulder was cold by the second kilometre and dull by the fourth.
Everything else was better than fine. Twelve years of not touching anybody had left the legs entirely unused.
At the third bridge I stopped and put my hands on the rail.
I had traded my way into that building for the right to talk about it.
The trade was already made. Cynthia had died in February and I was standing in a car park in March.
Whatever came next was not going to arrive in time for her.