The cannabis notice had changed. I noticed it on Saturday morning because somebody had moved it from inside the lift to the wall opposite reception, where anybody who entered Oakmere Lodge would see it and be informed of our position on controlled substances.
The old notice had been quite modest. It warned residents that smoking cannabis anywhere in the Lodge could constitute an offence and might result in the guilty resident being removed. But nobody had established where an eighty-six-year-old woman in sheltered accommodation might be removed to at eleven o'clock at night, particularly if she had sold her house to move into the Lodge. This had generated considerably more discussion than the cannabis.
The new notice was larger, laminated, and written by someone who had recently discovered the phrase "zero tolerance", probably from reading The Telegraph.
OAKMERE LODGE OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY REGARDING THE POSSESSION, CONSUMPTION OR DISTRIBUTION OF CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES.
Somebody had added three exclamation marks at the end in blue biro.
Management had crossed them out.
Oakmere had thirty-eight residents taking medication capable of altering consciousness, twelve who couldn't reliably remember whether they'd eaten breakfast and one who believed Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, but Management's concern was cannabis, and this was because today was “Visitors Welcome”.
Visitors Welcome had apparently been devised by regional management after somebody there had discovered my Facebook posts and concluded that Oakmere Lodge was full of character. Mr Patel had wanted to use the phrase increased public engagement, but I preferred full of character. It sounded less like something requiring a quarterly report.
The idea was to invite relatives, friends and prospective residents into Oakmere so they could experience what regional described as “the authentic warmth of our community.”
So, for the previous forty-eight hours, staff had been removing as much authenticity as possible.
The artificial flowers had been washed. The windows had been cleaned. The dead leaves had been removed from the two ornamental trees outside, leaving them clean but still dead. A stain on the carpet near reception, which had survived several managers and at least one refurbishment, disappeared beneath a large potted palm, and someone had removed the handwritten notice from the laundry:
“PLEASE REMOVE FALSE TEETH FROM POCKETS BEFORE WASHING
CLOTHES.”
I thought that was a mistake. I believe regional should have framed it.
I had no idea whose teeth had prompted the notice, and this was probably deliberate, as Oakmere was very good at confidentiality once everybody knew what had happened. I was usually outside of those sorts of loops. I was very much in the minority.
There were other improvements, too.
The mobility scooters, normally overflowing the scooter room and parked haphazardly beside reception in a formation suggesting an unsuccessful invasion, had been arranged in a neat row, and the lost-property basket containing one slipper, two pairs of spectacles, a television remote control, and a bra, which had remained unclaimed since February, had disappeared entirely.
The bra had generated considerable speculation. Once, when there was nobody around, I had checked the label out of curiosity: 50H! I hadn't known bras could go up to that size, though I must admit the garment’s coverage of the basket had given me a clue.
By half past ten, the cafeteria smelled of furniture polish, coffee and sausage rolls. Staff moved through the corridors carrying trays, flowers and expressions of purpose. Classical music played quietly in reception until Val complained that it was depressing, so someone replaced it with Barry Manilow, until Val said that was worse. The music was changed to Greatest Hits Radio and turned down.
I had been asked to make myself available as I was now Oakmere's Resident Social Media Ambassador: a position I had neither sought nor accepted but for which I possessed photographic identification on a lanyard which remained in the top drawer of my desk.
At ten forty-five, Shanice came to find me, and five minutes later, I was wearing it.
I won't describe the negotiation except to say that Shanice asked nicely, and I discovered that my strong principles had limits.
The card hung from a blue cord around my neck:
COLIN BRIGGS
RESIDENT SOCIAL MEDIA AMBASSADOR
The photograph, taken on the day Lorna and I arrived at Oakmere, showed me looking tired and bewildered, which made it one of the more accurate identification photographs I owned. I turned it around, so the writing faced my shirt. Shanice turned it back. Then the doors opened.
For the first twenty minutes, Oakmere behaved itself, which was unnerving. Visitors signed in, staff smiled, the coffee smelled fresh, and Fred had been given responsibility for napkins, to make sure nothing he did required electricity. He mumbled for an hour, to anyone who would listen, about discrimination. Val occupied her usual chair, which at least removed one significant threat to public order. Bernard had stationed himself near reception and began welcoming people on behalf of the residents, despite having no authority to do so. Mr Patel moved him away, but moments later Bernard was back, returning by a different route, this time standing beside the visitors' book.
He’d found a clipboard somewhere. At Oakmere, possession of a clipboard confers absolute authority.
Then an elderly woman came through the doors pushing a pram. I noticed her because of the pram. She was perhaps seventy-five, or possibly older, with carefully arranged silver hair, a long cream coat and the upright posture of someone who was making an effort for the occasion. The pram was enormous, dark blue and deeply sprung, with a hood shielding its occupant from view. A knitted blanket covered the inside.
I looked away for a moment, then looked back.
The woman stopped beside reception and bent over the pram with considerable tenderness, adjusting the blanket around its occupant. “Mummy won't be long.”
I looked more carefully. Oakmere had taught me not to make assumptions about age, as people who looked ninety turned out to be seventy-three, and people who looked sixty turned out to be eighty. One resident had spent three months telling everybody she was ninety-nine and due a visit from the King next year, before her daughter pointed out that she was eighty-four.
But even allowing for these uncertainties, motherhood for this lady seemed ambitious. She looked old enough to have grandchildren who were beginning to worry about cholesterol, yet there was an unmistakable tenderness in the way she tended the occupant and murmured that Mummy was there.
I tried not to stare. Curiosity about other people's arrangements at Oakmere rarely went unrewarded, but it could lead to conversations from which escape was difficult. I was still doing some improbable arithmetic when she caught me looking and invited me to come and say hello.
Politeness left little choice, so I stepped closer and looked beneath the hood with a practised, benign smile on my face for the youngster lying there. For a moment, I saw nothing; then the blanket shifted, and a small white head emerged, followed by one cloudy eye, then another. The face was ancient, grey around the muzzle and missing enough teeth to qualify for a dental trip to Turkey.
I had just enough time to wonder whether the Lodge had begun admitting residents by pram when it barked at me.
The woman smiled. “This is Sacha. She's seventeen.”
Sacha continued staring. Seventeen years had given her arthritis, a knitted blue cardigan, and an expression that had survived several Prime Ministers and expected little from the next one.
“She feels the cold.”
I was wearing a cardigan myself, but Sacha’s was better.
The woman introduced herself as Pamela and explained that her sister Elsie lived in Rose Court. She visited twice a week, and Sacha always came with her, although from the way she tucked the blanket beneath Sacha’s chin, I suspected Elsie might be secondary to the arrangement. Pamela pushed the pram towards the lounge, where people automatically moved aside. A pram carries an authority not afforded to mobility scooters, Zimmer frames or elderly men who’ve forgotten where they’re going.
Shanice appeared beside me and watched them disappear. “You've met Pamela and Sacha, then.”
I told her I had.
“She bites.”
For a moment I wasn't certain which of them she meant. By the time I had decided it was probably Sacha, Shanice had gone.
At eleven thirty, more prospective residents began arriving, and the afternoon changed. I hadn't expected anything to trouble me, as until then, Visitors Welcome had been an Oakmere performance, with polished furniture, sandwiches waiting to curl and management pretending that a laminated warning about cannabis was a normal feature of the entrance hall, but these visitors were different.
They arrived in small family groups: often an elderly parent surrounded by adult children displaying the strained cheerfulness people adopt when they’ve discussed something privately but are pretending no decision had been made. The adult children asked most of the questions. They inspected the lifts and looked into the lounge. They wanted to know about meals, laundry, medication, activities, emergency call-outs and whether somebody would be available during the night. Their parents tended to say less.
I recognised them. Eighteen months earlier, Lorna and I had walked through the same doors carrying much the same uncertainty. We had looked at the handrails and wide corridors, asked about medical cover and nodded while somebody explained the emergency system. Somewhere during that first visit, Oakmere had stopped being a building and become a possibility neither of us wanted, but both of us needed to consider. The difference was that Lorna had needed it.
A woman perhaps in her fifties arrived with her father. He wore a sports jacket and carried a walking stick with the irritation of a man who regarded it as an accusation of frailness. While his daughter spoke quietly to Mr Patel, he stood slightly apart and surveyed the lounge. His gaze travelled over the mobility scooters, the handrails, the residents sitting beneath the television and finally the emergency pendants hanging around several necks. “I don't need somewhere like this,” he said. He hadn't said it loudly, but I heard him. His daughter touched his arm and told him they were only looking.
“I can manage,” he insisted. “I cook for myself. I can still drive, for God’s sake!”
She reminded him, quietly, that he had nearly gone straight across the roundabout on the way there.
Then he noticed me watching, and I turned away, embarrassed by the intimacy of something being discussed in public because there was nowhere private to discuss it.
It was none of my business, but I looked back anyway. He wandered over to Arthur, who was standing beside reception, examining a glass bowl of wrapped sweets as though one of them might contain instructions. The two men began talking. I couldn't hear what was said and, judging by their expressions, neither could they. It didn't seem to matter. Arthur said something, the man answered, and a few moments later, both were laughing at something that may or may not have been the same thing.
His daughter saw them, and the anxiety in her face softened slightly. There was relief there, but also something close enough to guilt that I couldn't separate the two. I knew that expression as well.
For eighteen months, I had described Oakmere as somewhere I had ended up in by mistake. Watching that man standing beside Arthur, I found myself hoping that if he did end up here, somebody would save him his preferred chair, remember how he took his tea, and never remind him that he had once said he didn't belong. Oakmere could do that to you.
At eleven forty-five, George arrived from Sainsbury's. George lived on the second floor and was one of the more independent residents. He walked without assistance, managed his own medication, cooked most of his meals and regarded organised activities as something that happened to other people.
He also refused to wear his emergency pendant. Every resident had one. Press the button, and somebody would come if you fell, became ill or required urgent assistance. George kept his hanging from the kitchen tap, which meant it was extremely well positioned should the tap ever suffer a medical emergency.
Shanice had once asked him why he didn't wear it. George had explained that he didn't need it. When she pointed out that it was intended for occasions when he might, he said he’d put it on when one occurred. There’d been no progress since.
George came through the main doors pushing a large shopping trolley covered with a thick green cloth. His trolley was always covered. One wheel squeaked, and George leaned forward as he pushed, his shoulders taking more of the weight than usual. Something metallic shifted underneath the cover. I knew what was in it.
Several weeks earlier, I had visited George's flat to borrow a bottle opener. George opened the cupboard above the sink and revealed twelve cans of lager behind the cereal box. He closed it, tried another cupboard and found more. The wardrobe contained a crate. There were cans behind the towels, beneath the kitchen sink and in a plastic storage box labelled WINTER BEDDING.
I asked how much beer he had.
George looked at me. “In total?”
I stopped asking questions.
He didn't drink particularly heavily. Usually, a couple of cans in the evening while watching television. But what would have concerned Oakmere was the quantity he bought in a single trip. And what concerned George was Oakmere knowing the quantity. “They know when I get up. They know when I go to bed. They know when I take a tablet and when I miss one. But I'm buggered if they're knowing how many cans I've got.”
At the time, I'd laughed. Later, I understood. There comes a point in institutional life when privacy no longer means having secrets. It means possessing cupboards that other adults don't feel entitled to inspect.
George pushed his covered trolley through Visitors Welcome. One of the regional managers stood beside reception telling a prospective resident's daughter how strongly Oakmere encouraged independence and personal choice. George passed directly behind her, several cans clinking beneath the cover. She smiled at him, and George smiled back.
I felt unexpectedly proud of him.
At one o'clock, Arthur disappeared with three prospective residents. This wouldn’t normally have attracted attention. Arthur disappeared several times a day, but this time three strangers disappeared with him.
They had asked where the garden was, and Halfway Arthur had offered to show them. Twenty-five minutes later, Shanice found all four on the second floor, where Arthur was showing them the airing cupboard he’d mistaken for the library. The visitors hadn't corrected him, and one had taken a photograph.
At two o'clock, Dorothy Bell arrived, dressed entirely in black, which in Dorothy's case didn’t indicate a recent death. She attended enough funerals for black to count as practical clothing, although I’d never established whether she dressed specifically for them or simply remained prepared. Today she’d added a small black hat, which tipped the balance sufficiently towards bereavement for a woman visiting with her mother to ask, with some hesitation, whether somebody had died.
Dorothy considered the question before answering, “Not yet,” which was presumably intended to reassure her. It didn't. The woman glanced at the elderly mother she was considering moving into Oakmere, while Dorothy, unaware that she had just damaged the afternoon's recruitment figures, selected a sausage roll and went to find somewhere to sit.
By half past two, Oakmere was beginning to recover from the improvements. The sandwiches had curled at the edges, the coffee had reached the stage where even Bernard declined another cup, and the bowl with the freshly washed artificial flowers had acquired a single hearing aid. The large palm continued to conceal the stain beside reception, although some of its leaves now drooped across the visitors' book and had to be lifted every time somebody signed out.
Fred, who had been entrusted with the napkins on the reasonable assumption that even he could do little damage with folded paper, had somehow lost all two hundred of them, and spent much of the next hour searching increasingly improbable places, including beneath two occupied armchairs and inside the waste-paper bin, while the rest of Oakmere adjusted remarkably quickly to the possibility of finishing the afternoon without wiping its fingers. Bernard, meanwhile, was collecting what he called residents' concerns. One visitor made the mistake of asking him where the toilet was and was still listening three minutes later.
George passed through reception with his now empty trolley, moving at a speed that confirmed my suspicions about what had made the outward journey so difficult. We acknowledged one another with a nod. It was enough. There are friendships in which trust is built through confidences; ours had reached the stage where four concealed crates of lager required no comment.
Sacha had slept through most of the afternoon. Pamela had expressly forbidden anyone to feed her because of her digestion, a prohibition Doreen respected until Pamela went to fetch tea. I happened to be looking when half a sausage roll disappeared beneath the tartan blanket. Sacha accepted it without opening her eyes, which suggested this was not the first clandestine transaction in which either of them had been involved.
The elderly man in the sports jacket was still there too, although he had stopped inspecting Oakmere by then. Earlier, he'd looked at the handrails, pendants and mobility scooters as though each represented another argument being assembled against him. Now he was talking to Arthur again. I couldn't hear what Arthur was telling him, and there seemed little point trying, because there was every possibility Arthur had begun the conversation believing they were somewhere else. Whatever it was, the man laughed.
His daughter, standing a little way off, saw him. So did I, and that should have been the end of my interest, except I found myself hoping that if he did move in, Arthur would remember him. Or, failing that, forget him in a friendly way.
I didn't know the man's name and decided not to ask. Once you knew somebody's name, you started noticing whether they came down for breakfast.
One of the regional managers found me near reception shortly afterwards and told me Oakmere had a wonderful sense of community. She was a pleasant woman with an expensive-looking scarf and an impressive ability to remain enthusiastic after several hours in the building. I was considering how best to respond when I noticed that Fred was lying on the floor directly behind her, one arm beneath a mobility scooter.
The regional manager followed my gaze and smiled. “It's lovely to see everyone helping one another.”
Before I could answer, Fred emerged holding a television remote control. Nobody knew whose it was, although it looked remarkably like the one that had been sitting in the lost-property basket since February. Fred pointed it experimentally towards the lounge television and pressed the red button. The television went off, and thirty residents shouted at him.
“Found it,” Fred said.
The regional manager seemed delighted. I was beginning to understand why she worked for regional.
By four o'clock, the last visitors had gone, and Oakmere began putting itself back together. It happened without instruction. The lost-property basket returned to reception with its slipper, spectacles and unclaimed bra. The palm remained over the carpet stain because nobody could see much point in moving it again.
The false-teeth notice reappeared in the laundry.
Someone had written beneath it: THIS MEANS YOU, ARTHUR.
Arthur's name had subsequently been crossed out, presumably in the interests of confidentiality, and beneath that, in different handwriting, someone had added:
HE KNOWS.
I stood looking at it for a while. There are moments when Oakmere achieves something close to perfection.
Fred eventually discovered the missing napkins in the large pockets of the tabard Shanice had given him that morning, specifically so he wouldn't lose them. He’d been carrying all two hundred around for most of the day. Nobody pointed this out. There seemed little to be gained from spoiling his relief.
I removed my blue lanyard and went upstairs.
Willow Walk had returned to its usual late-afternoon quiet, which wasn't silence so much as a collection of distant domestic noises: a television turned slightly too high behind one door, the rattle of a care trolley farther along and somebody laughing in a room I passed. A Zimmer frame stood unattended beside the lift. I waited briefly for its owner to appear, then carried on when nobody did.
The lanyard was still in my hand when I reached my room. Normally I put it straight into the top drawer, where it could remain until somebody invented another reason for me to wear it. This time I left it on the desk. I told myself I couldn't be bothered to open the drawer.
At half past four, Val knocked. She stayed in the doorway, as she usually did, but there was something conspiratorial in the way she glanced towards the lift before telling me she knew where the cannabis smell was coming from. Val enjoyed possessing information, particularly when other people wanted it, and for several seconds she seemed content simply to watch me realise that she knew something I didn't.
When I asked who it was, however, she refused to tell me. Apparently, she had promised somebody, which seemed a considerable weakness in her decision to come upstairs and announce the fact. I tried Doreen without success, then Fred.
“Fred would set fire to it.”
I couldn't argue with that. Mentioning George produced a look of mild contempt.
“George drinks.”
I was about to give up when something in her expression changed. Until then she'd been enjoying herself. Now she glanced along the corridor again, lowering her voice enough to make me lean closer. “You all think it's one of us.”
“Isn't it?”
“No.” She walked away before I could ask anything else.
I remained in the doorway watching her go. The cannabis notices had been funny because management cared about it so much. Now it was interesting.
Back inside, I found nineteen notifications waiting on my phone. Visitors had begun posting photographs, including one of Arthur standing proudly with the three people he'd taken to the airing cupboard. The caption described it as a lovely tour of the facilities, and I decided there was nothing to be gained by correcting them.
Another showed Dorothy in her black hat holding a sausage roll, while George crossed the background with his covered trolley.
Then I found myself. I was standing beside Pamela's pram wearing the blue lanyard. Sacha looked out from beneath her blanket, apparently unimpressed by her new public profile. Doreen stood behind us with her red mug, Bernard had his clipboard, and Fred was carrying barbecue tongs. Farther back, Val sat watching everybody.
The caption read:
Such a lovely community at Oakmere Lodge.
They had hidden the carpet stain and the lost-property basket, removed the false-teeth notice, washed the artificial flowers and spent much of the afternoon pretending nobody could smell cannabis. Yet somehow the photograph had caught the place perfectly.
Another notification appeared beneath it.
When's Part Three?
I looked at Val in the background, then at the blue lanyard I'd left on my desk instead of putting it away.
Perhaps Part Three wasn't over yet.
