But then Daphne says something that snaps me out of my despair.
‘Yeah, she’s a good chick, my mum. Mind you, she’s with a right motley crew in the home. There’s one woman there who reckons she’s so old she was born in the reign of William the Conqueror! She should be in a psychiatric ward, really.’
I stop in my tracks. My first thought is Marion. This is irrational. If Marion was alive she wouldn’t look like an old person. She’d look younger than me. And she was born in the reign of King James, not William the Conqueror.
‘Poor Mary Peters. Mad as a box of frogs. Gets scared of the TV. But a lovely old dear.’
Mary Peters.
I shake my head at Daphne, even as I remember the gossip that surrounded the disappearance of the Mary Peters we knew in Hackney. The one who Rose knew at the market. Who used to get Hell-turded by Old Mrs Adams and had arrived ‘from nowhere’.
‘Oh. Oh really? Poor woman.’
When Daphne has gone I leave my trolley in the aisle and walk with brisk determination out of the supermarket. I get out my phone and start looking up train times to Surbiton.
The care home is set back from the road. There are trees crowding out the whole front of the place. I stand outside on the pavementand wonder what I should do. There is a postman on the other side of the road, but other than that – no one. I inhale. Life has a strange rhythm. It takes a while to fully be aware of this. Decades. Centuries, even. It’s not a simple rhythm. But the rhythm is there. The tempo shifts and fluctuates; there are structures within structures, patterns within patterns. It’s baffling. Like when you first hear John Coltrane on the saxophone. But if you stick with it, the elements of familiarity become clear. The current rhythm is speeding up. I am approaching a crescendo. Everything is happening all at once. That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, ‘I can’t do this life any more, I need to change.’ And one thing happens that you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no say over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.
I take a deep breath, inhale the air.
Ash Grange Residential Care Home. The logo is a falling leaf. A generic leaf. The sign is pastel-yellow and blue. It is one of the most depressing things I have ever seen. The building itself is nearly as bad. Probably only twenty years old. Light orange brick and tinted windows and a muted quality. The whole place feels like a polite euphemism for death.
I go inside.
‘Hello,’ I say to the woman in the office after she has slid the Perspex window open for me to speak. ‘I’m here to see Mary Peters.’
She looks at me and smiles in that brisk efficient way. A modern professional smile. The kind of smile that never existed before, say, the telephone.
‘Oh yes, you called a short while ago, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. That was me. Tom Hazard. I knew her when she was younger, in Hackney.’
She stares at her computer screen and clicks the mouse. ‘Oh yes. She wants to see you. Through there.’
‘Oh good,’ I say, and as I walk over the carpet tiles I almost feel like I am walking backwards through time.
Mary Peters looks at me with eyes made pink and weak by time. Her grey hair is as frail as dandelion seeds and the veins under her skin like routes on a secret map, but she is recognisably the woman I met in Hackney, four centuries ago.
‘I remember you,’ she says. ‘The day you came into the market. The fight you had with that slimy bastard.’
‘Mr Willow,’ I say, remembering him disappear in a cloud of spice.
‘Yes.’
There is a rattle to her breath. A kind of scraping sound on every in-breath. She winces a little, and her crooked fingers faintly caress her brow.
‘I get headaches. It’s what happens.’
‘I’m starting to get them too.’
‘They come and go. Mine have come back recently.’
I marvel at her. How she can still care enough to speak. She must have been an old woman for two hundred years now.
‘I don’t have long,’ she says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘That is why I came here. There is no risk for me.’
‘No risk?’
‘I only have about two years left.’
