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9
Rebecca
I stood outside the entrance to Greenhill Lodge and rang the bell, waiting for one of the office staff to buzz me in.
‘Morning,’ I said, putting the bunch of yellow tulips I’d brought with me on the desk and signing myself in.
‘Hello, love,’ replied Barbara, one of the care assistants. She bent down to sniff at the flowers, inhaling deeply. ‘Your nan’s doing ever so well. She even came down to play bingo last night. Won herself a box of Quality Street.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘No way!’
‘She had a whale of time,’ said Barbara, handing me a visitor’s lanyard. ‘I’ve never heard her laugh so much.’
‘She used to love it back in the day,’ I commented, thinking back to my childhood, when next-door’s teenaged daughter would come and babysit every other Saturday night so that Nan could go out. She’d get all dressed up, usually in something bright, glittery and adorned with sequins.
‘She was telling me she had a big win, once,’ said Barbara.
I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Five hundred pounds, I think it was. It was more money that we’d ever seen in our lives.’
An image popped into my head of Nan counting out her wodge of notes the following morning, shaking her head in disbelief. She’d treated me to a new doll from the expensive shop on the high street and I’d treasured it for years. Still had it somewhere.
‘I could do with winning five hundred pounds,’ said Barbara wistfully.
‘I know the feeling,’ I agreed, hooking the lanyard Barbara had passed me around my neck. ‘Am I OK to go straight down?’
‘Course, love,’ she smiled.
I headed off through the reception area, waving at a couple of the residents I’d got to know as I passed the entrance to the dining room. They were involved in a heated card game, by the looks of it, so I left them to it and made my way down the brightly lit carpeted corridor of Marigold Wing, knocking softly on the door of Room 31. When there was no answer, I poked my head inside.
‘It’s only me, Nan,’ I said.
‘Hello, love,’ she answered, her voice not carrying as far as it used to. ‘Come on in.’
She was sitting in the armchair by the window, looking out at the garden. The lawn was covered in a sparkly white frost and I wondered whether she was longing for spring, when she could sit out on her favourite bench again and boss the gardeners around. Even at eighty-two she had a feisty spirit.
‘Here,’ I said, passing her the flowers. ‘Thought these would look nice on your windowsill.’
‘Ooh, lovely,’ she cooed, taking my hand and squeezing it.
I kissed her on the cheek and then shrugged off my coat, laying it on the end of the bed.
‘How’s things?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, you know. Not bad,’ she said.
The care assistants had helped get her dressed and she was wearing one of her neat, cream blouses with the Peter Pan collar, tucked into a pair of shapeless peach trousers. She had a blanket thrown over her knees, and on the trolley table next to her was a glass of water, the TV remote and a vial with various pills in it. She was on medication for all sorts of things and it felt as though I was in a constant battle with her GP about whether they were all strictly necessary or whether one simply cancelled out the other.
‘I hear you’ve been playing bingo,’ I said, opening up the cupboard under the TV and getting out the vase she’d brought with her when she moved in. It had been a wedding gift, she told me, and was over sixty years old. I held it carefully; I’d always dreaded breaking it, I knew she’d be devastated if I did.
‘I have indeed.’
She’d been reluctant to join in with any of the on-site activities when she’d first moved into the home eighteen months ago. The manager had told me that was perfectly normal, that it took some time for people to adjust to having some of their independence taken away. Nan had lived in the same house for fifty years, and it had been all tied up with memories of my grandad, of my mum, and me, as a child and then a teenager and then an adult, right up until I left for uni in Sheffield when I was eighteen. Her tiny, terraced house had been the social hub of the street once – she and Grandad would be the ones organising barbecues for the neighbours in the summer and Christmas parties in their front room. I remembered our house being jam-packed with half-drunk revellers and the frenzied plucking of cheese and pineapple on sticks out of a foil-covered potato and the clinking of glasses of cheap, sparkling wine. I’d usually watch the action from the top of the stairs, straining to see through the banisters, too cool to join in, but fascinated by the increasingly erratic behaviour of my neighbours – who had all seemed so old to me then – who would get merrier and merrier, before cramming themselves onto the makeshift dance floor (which was basically the middle of the lounge when the sofas had been pushed back) and swaying their hips to Nan’s Soul Classics CD. If Nan spotted me on the stairs, she’d come and drag me down and make me dance with her. Then Grandad would whirl me around the room as though we were doing some kind of funky Viennese waltz and I’d be laughing so hard I was nearly sick.
‘Work all right is it?’ asked Nan.
I shrugged. ‘Same as always.’
Nan looked at me, her glasses reflecting the light from the bay window. ‘You said you’d look for something else, Beccy. You ought to, you know, if your heart’s not in it.’
