Chapter 8: Wednesdays
Willow Bank is a red brick house from 1890 with two wings added in 1974 that do not match it, and a car park where the tennis court used to be.
It is the oldest of the four homes the family owns.
Forty-one beds.
It smells of floor polish, warm laundry and, faintly, of the pond at the bottom of the garden.
I went every Wednesday, two till four, for two and a half years.
I had asked to go.
Nobody suggested it to me.
That matters later.
The corridors are the thing I know best about that building, and I knew them the way I know rooms, which is dimensionally.
The main ground floor corridor is thirty-one metres from the fire door at the east end to the double doors by the day room, with a slope in the middle where the 1974 wing meets the old house.
The slope is about one in eighteen.
It does not look like anything.
Push a wheelchair up it with a fourteen-stone man in it and you will find out it is there.
There are handrails on both sides, oak-stained, and a strip of carpet, and eleven doors on the left and nine on the right, because the last two rooms on the right were made into the sluice and the store.
Two till four.
I did four things.
I pushed people to places.
I read out loud.
I cut fingernails.
I made tea in the little kitchen at the west end where the kettle had a limescale filter that nobody ever changed.
That is the whole job.
Nobody asked me to do anything medical and I would not have been allowed to.
The staff were seven that year, on a rota that never had seven on it.
Most days there were four.
Ruth Okonjo had been there nineteen years and knew every resident's Christian name, their children's names, and which of the children actually came.
Stevie was twenty, did nights, and slept in his car between shifts because he lived an hour away.
They were extremely good at their jobs and they were extremely tired, and those two facts sat side by side, and I did not think anything about the second one for a long time.
I want to describe the wheelchairs, because that is where the two hours actually went.
A standard chair with an occupant weighs between eighty and a hundred and thirty kilos and it steers from the back, which means you are not pushing, you are managing a lever.
On a corridor with a one in eighteen slope you take it at an angle, not straight up, and you keep your elbows in and you use your legs.
My right shoulder does not like a straight push.
It is fine on a pull and fine on a carry and it complains on anything overhead or extended.
So I learned to walk with my hands low on the grips, close to the hips, and drive with the back foot.
It is the same weight transfer as walking a heavy opponent backwards across a mat, and I noticed that in my second week and then I stopped noticing it, which was a relief.
Nine residents used a chair.
I could do all nine in a session if there was nowhere anyone needed to be.
Mr Hollis, room four, wanted to be by the west window at half past two because that is when the light came onto the wall.
Mrs Deveraux wanted to be nowhere near Mr Hollis, for reasons that predated me by about six years.
Eileen Prosser, room fourteen, wanted to go to the front porch to look at the car park, in all weather, and would not have a blanket.
Eileen was ninety-one.
She had been a district nurse for thirty-eight years and she had hands like a bundle of dry sticks and she was the sharpest person in the building.
Her fingernails were the reason I first learned to do it properly.
Nobody's nails get cut in a care home unless somebody has forty minutes, and nobody has forty minutes.
Ruth showed me.
You soak the hand first.
You take the corners last.
You cut in three small bites, never one, because one bite splits the nail down into the bed and then you have hurt a person who cannot easily tell you so.
You hold the hand from underneath.
You never grip the finger.
You let the hand rest on yours and take its own weight.
I was better at this than I have been at almost anything, and I would like that written down somewhere, because there is no medal for it and there is no record of it in any file about me.
Two hours.
Nine chairs.
Ten fingernails.
That was Wednesday, and Wednesday was what the rest of the week was arranged around, and I did not tell one person in that house what happened in it.
I was not asked.