How could people be so stupid and ignorant? (“Why are you angry all the time?” Sunny asked her long ago. “Why not?” she snapped.) And why didn’t her children love her? Why did no one love her? And why was she so lonely and bored and, let’s face it, downright wretched and—
She went flying, tripping on a paving slab, landing heavily, bone on stone, on her hands and knees, like a leaden cat, everything in her head silenced by the shock for a moment. Her knees hurt so much she didn’t want to move. Were her kneecaps broken? A stag made some ribald comment about the position she was in and a ripe Geordie accent, a woman, told him to fuck off. Viola sat back, kneeling on the pavement, knees screaming. A pink T-shirt appeared at eye-level. Rhinestones spelled out “Slutz Go Nutz in York.” A woman—a girl really, younger than her smoker’s voice, her face smiley and concerned—hunkered down next to Viola and said, “Are you all right, pet?”
Not really, Viola thought, not at all. She burst into tears, right there on the stones of York, her expensive Wolford tights ripped, her knees raw and bloody. She couldn’t stop. It was awful. Tears retched out of her insides as if she’d suddenly tapped into some ancient aquifer of grief. But it wasn’t just the tears that horrified her, it was the words that came out of her mouth. The primeval howl, the alpha and omega of all human invocation. Not a howl but a whimper. “I want my mother,” she whispered. “I want my mother.”
“You can have mine, pet,” someone said and the hens all burst into laughter, but nonetheless, sensing a woman ruined, possibly by drink, possibly not, the hens closed ranks and clustered protectively around her. Someone helped her to her feet, someone else passed a tissue, a third passed a bottle of Evian that turned out to contain neat vodka. One of the older hens, a broiler with a wrinkled neck and a face that seemed to have collapsed and who was wearing a T-shirt declaring her to be “Mother of the Bride,” handed Viola a pack of Wet Wipes. They ascertained where she was heading and she was shepherded tenderly back to Cedar Court by her posse of Slutz. The doorman made a futile attempt to stop them breaching his defences, but they were already pouring over the threshold and spilling into the foyer. Viola fumbled for her key card and one of the hens lifted it up triumphantly and waved it at the nervous receptionist.
“She’s a bit tired and emotional,” one of the hens explained. “Poor old thing,” a young one, a spring chicken, said. Old thing! I’m only sixty, Viola wanted to protest, it’s the new forty. But she didn’t have any protest left in her.
She had an alarming vision of the hens continuing the party in her room, but eventually she managed to persuade them to leave her at the door to the lift. The Mother of the Bride pressed something into her hand, a tiny tissue-wrapped gift. “Valium,” the Mother said, “but just take a half. They’re high-strength. I’ve built up a tolerance.” A still-teary Viola hiccuped her gratitude.
In the refuge of her room she forwent her usual nightly routine—make-up off, teeth cleaned, hair brushed—and instead crawled wearily between sheets that were snapping with starch and recklessly washed down a whole Valium with two little bottles of vodka from the minibar. She feared nightmares, but instead she fell into a surprisingly delicious sleep. Golden slumbers kissed her eyes, silver moths flitted around her head and she dreamed a powerful dream.
She woke early, showered, dressed, ordered a large pot of coffee and assessed the damage. She felt as if she had been, if not in a war, then certainly in a bloody skirmish. What else did she feel? She checked herself all over. Her wrists felt mildly sprained and her knees were horribly stiff and sore, as if someone had hammered them all night. Her head felt stuffed with wool—the Mother of the Bride’s Valium, she supposed—but otherwise intact. Then she looked inside herself. Completely fucked, she concluded.
She checked out, relieved that there was no sign of the staff who had witnessed her humiliating fall from grace last night. How were the Slutz this morning, she wondered? Hopelessly hung-over, probably still asleep. (Although actually they were helping themselves enthusiastically to an eat-all-you-can full-English buffet breakfast in a superior Travelodge and getting ready to rampage through Primark. They were from Gateshead, they had stamina.)
Viola asked the doorman for a taxi to Poplar Hill. Spending the day with her father would be penance for last night. She would watch the Diamond Jubilee with him for extra contrition.
Her father was clearly exhausted, sleeping almost all the time now, like an aged dog. Why didn’t he just go? Was he hanging on for a hundred? Two more years of this? It was mere existence—an amoeba had more life. “The triumph of the human spirit,” the new nursing sister said, new enough to talk about “positive outcomes” and “enhancement programmes”—emollient management-speak, meaningless to most of the residents of Poplar Hill, who were either dying or demented or both. It was called a “care home” but there was precious little of either to be had when you were run by a profit-based health-care provider employing minimum-wage staff. And, by the way, neither poplar nor hill were anywhere to be seen. This was a particular bugbear which Viola found herself bringing up at regular intervals, when really it was the least of her criticisms and just made her seem like another mad woman to the—mainly foreign—care workers. (“Polish and Tagalog spoken,” it said in the Poplar Hill brochure.)
“It’s so stuffy in here,” she said to Teddy. He muttered something that might have been agreement. The heating was turned up impossibly high, intensifying the loathsome smells that made you gag the minute you walked into the building and helpfully incubating the millions of germs that must be circulating. There were the usual animal odours of urine and faeces as well as the reek of something rotted and spoiled that no amount of disinfectant could cover up. The scent of old age, Viola presumed. When she visited Poplar Hill she kept a handkerchief up her sleeve doused in Chanel that she sniffed occasionally, like a nosegay against the plague.
The doors to the rooms were kept open so that each room was a little vignette, the wreckage inside on display, like some awful zoo or a museum of horrors. Some people lay in bed and barely moved, while others moaned and shouted. Then there were those who were propped in chairs, their heads lolling on their chests like sleeping toddlers, and somewhere, unseen, a woman was meowing like a cat. As you walked along the corridors you had to slalom around the walking wounded (as Viola thought of them), the lost souls who simply shuffled up and down all day with no idea who they were or where they were going (nowhere, clearly). None of them knew the code for the security keypad on the locked door of the wing (1-2-3-4—how hard could it be?), and if they had known they couldn’t have remembered and if they could have remembered it would still have been meaningless because their brains were full of holes, like lace. Occasionally Viola had found them gathered, like zombies (slow ones, they weren’t going to be chasing anyone, paid or not), at the door, staring mutely through the wired glass at a world that was forbidden to them now. They were prisoners, serving the lees of their life sentences. The walking dead.
To intensify the unpleasant atmosphere of the wing there was a blaring cacophony of competing televisions coming from every room, all with the volume turned up high—Deal or No Deal trying to shout down Escape to the Country and no one really caring what they watched because they couldn’t make sense of any of it. There was always a buzzer going off somewhere, long and insistent, as a resident tried to get the attention of someone, anyone.
There was also a communal lounge where residents were parked in front of an even bigger, louder television set. For reasons Viola couldn’t fathom, the lounge also contained a large cage that imprisoned a pair of lovebirds that no one ever paid any attention to. She had disliked Fanning Court, the sheltered-housing complex that she had cajoled her father into almost twenty years ago now, but compared to the nursing home—oh, sorry, care home—it was a lost Eden. “Why this is hell,” she said conversationally to her father, “nor am I out of it, and nor are you.” She smiled brightly at a care assistant going past the open door. Who in the
ir right mind could think that euthanasia was a bad thing? Shipman had spoiled it for everyone.
But however awful it was in Poplar Hill, it meant that Viola didn’t have to be the one who coped, who changed nappies and spoon-fed pap and tried to think of ways to entertain in the long hours in between. She had never been much good at that stuff with her children so it seemed unlikely she would develop the skills now for someone at the other end of life. She just wasn’t cut out to look after others.
Viola imagined herself as someone whose insides were made of a hard substance, as if soft organs and tissue had calcified at some point in the long-ago past. The Petrification of Viola Romaine. Good title for something. Her life, she supposed. But who would write it? And how could she stop them?
To be honest (with herself at any rate), she didn’t really like people. (“ ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres,’ Viola Romaine laughs lightly, yet this is clearly not true as she writes with great sympathy about the human condition.” Red magazine, 2011.) In her defence (Viola frequently thought of herself in the third person, as if presenting herself to a jury), in her defence, she was regularly moved to tears these days by tales of cruelty to animals, which, if nothing else, proved she wasn’t a sociopath. (The jury was reserving judgement.) If you read the tabloids, which Viola did—“Important to know the enemy,” she would have said to the jury, but actually the red-tops were a much better read than the smugly self-satisfied broadsheets—it seemed as though there were people all over the place who were starving horses to death or putting puppies into tumble dryers or popping kittens into microwaves as though they were snacks.
These stories left Viola in a state of unresolved horror that wasn’t quite matched by how she felt about, for example, cruelty to children. She had to keep this fact to herself, it was a taboo, like voting Tory. Not even Gregory, her therapist, knew. Especially not Gregory as he would have had a field day with it. Her Secret Self: How to Hide Your True Nature by Viola Romaine.
Her excuse (Did she need one? Yes, probably) was that she had been exiled from love after her mother died. “After I lost my wife,” was the way her father would have put it, as if he had accidentally mislaid Nancy. Exile from Love, that was the title of one of Viola’s early novels. “A poignant tale of struggle and loss,” according to Woman’s Own. That was where the best of her was to be found, in her books. (“Almost as good as Jodi Picoult,” Mumsnet.) Her readers (almost exclusively women)—and she had many, devoted, etcetera—all thought she was a nice—nay, wonderful—person. It was alarming. It made her feel guilty, as if she had made promises that she could never live up to.
She had been making this visit to Poplar Hill every week for three years now and would have been quite happy never to set foot in the place, but didn’t want to be seen as neglectful. Viola derived no pleasure from being with her father. She had always been wary of him for one reason or another, but now that he was a wreck, more child than colossus, he felt like an utter stranger. The Ancient Mariner was lucky—his albatross was already dead before it was hung round his neck.
She had come from Harrogate by train today because she was on her way to somewhere else. She made a mental note. On the Way to Somewhere Else—good title. Harrogate was the kind of place that won Britain in Bloom competitions and where what poverty there was was swept neatly out of sight. Viola still harboured a regret that she had never made it beyond the borders of Yorkshire, never lived a London life, sophisticated and metropolitan (or so she imagined).
Her brief sojourn in a squat with deadbeat Dominic hardly counted. That had been in Islington, before it was fashionable, and she had hardly left the house. “Postnatal depression,” she told people afterwards, a legitimate badge of suffering to parade, although really it was just straightforward depression. (“I think I was born depressed,” she tells Psychologies magazine. “I think it’s given me a greater understanding of people.”)
If she lived in London these days she would be invited to parties, to lunches and “do”s. She sold too well (“international bestseller”) to be embraced by the glitterati, but it would be nice not to feel that she was a populist barbarian knocking on the gates. (“I’m a northerner and proud of it,” Daily Express interview, March 2006. Was she? Not really.)
She would rather have been brought up in the plush Home Counties, at Fox Corner, semi-mythical now in her memory, everyone’s memory. She was six when Sylvie died and the house was sold. Her mother’s childhood home, Jackdaws, followed a few years later when Mrs. Shawcross succumbed to genteel senility and lived out her days in Dorset with the tolerant Gertie. It was her father’s fault, he had chosen to settle up here after the war. She had never asked why. Too late now. Too late for everything.
The Queen sailed on heroically, through wind and rain. “Her Diamond Jubilee,” Viola said to Teddy. “She’s been on the throne for sixty years. That’s a long time. Can you remember her Coronation?” Viola was barely a year old when the Queen was crowned and had never known another monarch. She would see Charles ascend to the throne, she supposed, possibly William if she lived long enough, but she wouldn’t see that fat baby become George VII. Life was finite. Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand, even that fat royal baby. Nothing beside remained. Hotels, maybe.
Viola fell into (an admittedly self-indulgent) existential gloom and was only pulled out of it when her father started to choke. She panicked and tried to help him sit up. There was hardly any water in the jug on his table even though it was supposed to be kept topped up. The “residents” (a ridiculous word, as if they had chosen to live here) were probably all suffering from dehydration. Not to mention starvation. “Three nutritious meals a day” it said on the Poplar Hill website. There were menus pinned to a noticeboard every day—shepherd’s pie, fish and sautéed potatoes, chicken casserole. They made it sound like real food, when in fact every meal that Viola had seen was a kind of beige slop and jelly for afters. Her father didn’t seem to eat any more, a Breatharian by default. Viola had been briefly (very briefly, obviously) attracted to Breatharianism, as she was to all things cultish. Living on air had seemed like a good way to lose weight. It was an absurd idea and in her defence—she turned to the jury—she had been going through a particularly “bad patch” in her life. That was before she discovered that all you had to do to lose weight was to eat less. (“Svelte,” according to the Mail on Sunday, “and still the proud possessor of a good pair of pins, even though she’s got a bus pass now.” She hadn’t. She took taxis. And chauffeur-driven cars. And she would have preferred it if the “good” had been “great.”)
Viola poured the dregs of the water jug into a plastic cup and stirred in the thickener that turned any liquid into disgusting gloop but was supposed to prevent her father from choking. She held the cup to his lips so that he could take a sip of the gloop.
“Do you find old age in itself repellent,” Gregory asked, “or just your father’s?” “Both,” she said. “And your own?” Yes, all right, she was terrified of growing old. (“You are old,” Bertie said.) Was this going to be her fate too when she reached the endgame? Lunch clubs and chairs for the elderly and then finally being administered gloop by someone who spoke Tagalog? Not someone who truly cared. You reap what you sow, her father used to say. Bertie certainly wouldn’t take her in. Perhaps she could go and live in Bali with Sunny. He was a Buddhist, his religion obliged him to be compassionate, didn’t it? “It’s more a state of mind than a religion,” Bertie said.
Imagine if that was a law and everyone had to obey it. Smiley, concerned faces everywhere asking if you were all right. Would it be utopian or just rather irritating?
It was ten years since she had seen Sunny. A decade! How had that happened? What kind of mother let a decade go by without seeing her child? She had tried a couple of times over the years. When she was on a book tour in Australia, for instance, but he said he was “going to be in Thailand” while she was there. Perhaps she could stop off in Thailand on the way
out, she suggested? He was “hiking in the north,” she wouldn’t be able to get to him, he said. “I wouldn’t call that trying hard,” Bertie said. Righteous, like her grandfather, of course.
“You gave him up,” Bertie said. It was true, she had handed him over to the vile Villierses. “But in my defence—” But the members of the jury were not listening.
The Spirit of Chartwell had moored near Tower Bridge. “The Queen’s stopped,” Viola informed her father. “It’s still raining cats and dogs. You, in particular, would admire her stoicism if you could see her.”
He mumbled something. It sounded as if his mouth was full of stones. He could no longer see well enough to watch television and even if he had been able to see he found it difficult to connect one moment to the next, as if everything fragmented in the moment of trying to hold on to it. Books were out of the question. Before the last bout of pneumonia, when he’d still been able to see large-print books, she discovered that he’d been reading the first chapter of Barchester Towers over and over again, looping round and coming to it fresh each time. Perhaps his brain was becoming economical with time, conserving what little was left as it approached its last days. But time was an artificial construct, wasn’t it? Zeno’s arrow staggering and stuttering its way to some fictional end point in the future. In reality that arrow had no target, they weren’t on a journey and there was no final destination where everything would suddenly fall transcendentally into place, the mysteries revealed. They were all just lost souls, wandering the halls, gathering silently at the exit. No promised land, no paradise regained. “It’s all so pointless,” she said to her father, but he seemed to have nodded off. Viola sighed and replaced the untouched gloop on his overbed table.
A God in Ruins Page 37
