Chapter nine #2
‘Living with dementia? Yes, he has an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, but he’s fit as a fiddle, bless him.
There’ll come a point when we should really move him upstairs to the Memory Wing but .
. .’ Pam shook her head. ‘Linda takes such good care of him. They’re like swans, those two.
Mates for life. I’d hate to separate them now. ’
I felt suddenly very sad at the thought of Bill sitting alone in silence, cut off from Linda’s energetic torrent of memories.
Pam pushed open the door to the lounge. Inside, an excited buzz was centred around Gayle Burton, who had returned, majestic in a peacock cardigan, to deliver a pep talk about our conversation-starting skills, as well as advice about writing up our notes.
‘Use their actual words, if you can,’ she said, once we’d loaded up on tea and cake and sat down to listen.
‘Especially if they’re using their local dialect.
That’s a great starting point, if you get stuck – what other words haven’t they heard since they were kids?
What’s their favourite dialect word for something – bread rolls, earwigs, playground games.
People love talking about different words for things. ’
I scribbled that down, along with ‘JFK?’ and ‘the best advice you’ve ever had’. I didn’t think Linda Horrobin would need prompts, though; the hard part had been finding a gap in her stories to ask a question.
Pam looked round the group. ‘Does anyone have a specific query about what they’ve done today?’
A couple of volunteers raised their hands, with questions about contradictions and what to do if someone became distressed by a sad memory. Or if they didn’t want to speak at all.
Gayle answered everything with admirable patience and then redirected us to the tea table.
I was hanging back, trying to resist a second slice of lemon drizzle, when Gayle herself approached me with a big smile.
‘Hello, Beth!’ she said.
‘Um, hello.’ I was amazed she’d remembered my name, then remembered I was still wearing the badge we’d been given to reassure the residents that we weren’t a relative they’d momentarily blanked.
‘I’m going to come clean.’ Gayle raised her hands. ‘I need to ask a favour. Can I persuade you to join the writing-up team? I haven’t been able to persuade anyone to join me, and there’s just too much for me to do on my own.’ She tilted her head to one side. ‘Lewis tells me you’re a writer!’
I felt my cheeks burn. Had I told Lewis? I definitely hadn’t mentioned it. My never-ending work in progress wasn’t something I brought up in public, because it was too embarrassing to admit how long it had taken me to fail to finish it.
Then I remembered that Martine had told him I was a writer when I’d rescued her. Of course. Lewis struck me as someone who noticed everything.
‘No, no, no. I wouldn’t say that!’ A woman standing near us was giving me a curious look. ‘I mean, I’ve, um, I’ve got something I’ve been working on for a while.’
‘How interesting! Are you in a writing group?’
‘God, no! It’s not anything I’d show anyone. It’s . . . well, it’s terrible.’
‘I bet it’s not.’
‘It is. If it was any good, I’d have finished by now.’ That was the most unintentionally truthful thing I’d said about my writing in years.
‘Are you stuck?’ Gayle managed to sound sympathetic, even though she’d probably heard this a million times. ‘Do you need a brainstorm?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Don’t be shy – everyone needs a bit of help now and again.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I’m stuck.’
Gayle smiled. ‘OK, well, here’s the deal: if you don’t mind writing up a few of these stories, I’ll give you an hour of coaching. Email me what you’ve got so far, and we can have a chat after one of these sessions? Work out what’s blocking you.’
‘Would you?’ I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear all the things that were wrong with it.
‘Don’t look so scared! In my experience, everything you need to finish is already in there. You just can’t see it yet.’
I wasn’t so sure about that, but it was nice of her to say so.
I left soon after, citing the dog waiting for me in the back of my car, but had hardly reached the car park when I heard someone shouting my name, and the clatter of footsteps.
‘Beth? Beth!’
I turned. Lewis was sprinting towards me, covering the ground with long strides, waving urgently, his tie flapping over his shoulder. ‘Beth! Wait!’
Instinctively, I checked in my pocket – yes, I’d got my phone, my bag. Had I left something? Was there a confidentiality thing I was supposed to sign?
He reached me in a matter of seconds, and wasn’t even out of breath.
‘Thank goodness I caught you before you left,’ he said.
‘Is everything all right?’
Lewis nodded. ‘Yes, of course. I just wanted to ask, how is Mrs Henderson? Martine?’
‘Martine? Um, she’s very well, thank you.
’ I wondered if Jackie had made a call to discuss a visit.
Or if he was subtly asking if she’d turned up in any more unexpected places lately.
‘That was an honest mix-up with the hospital transport the other day – she was just unsure about how she was going to get home. She’s perfectly fine now. ’
‘Ah, I see.’ The smile intensified. ‘Glad to hear it.’
‘In fact,’ I went on, feeling rather protective of her, ‘she’s very keen to hear more about this story project.’
I was about to tell him some of Martine’s connections with the town – in the unlikely event he hadn’t already heard them – when a long nose shoved its way through the gap I’d left in the car window. It eagerly sniffed the air around Lewis, who jerked backwards.
‘Tomsk!’ I said. ‘Sorry, that’s my dog. He’s been so patient, waiting for his walk. We’re going up to Coneygreen Wood.’
Tentatively, Lewis peered into the back of the car where Tomsk was now sitting up, swishing his tail. He filled the entire space with enthusiasm and hair. ‘Big chap, isn’t he?’
‘Massive. He’s a softy, though. Do you want to say hello?’
‘Um, no, I . . .’ Lewis coughed. ‘It’s fine, I don’t want to, er, delay you. He looks lovely! Lovely chap!’
I wasn’t one of those dog owners who thinks everyone should worship their hairy friend, but I’d mentally classified Lewis as a dog person. He had that outdoorsy vibe going on. Maybe he’d been knocked off his bike by a dog. Or run one over.
He certainly seemed uncharacteristically flustered now, and Tomsk was still firmly harnessed in.
Lewis took a step back. ‘Beth, I have to confess something.’
‘Oh?’ The sudden change of tone threw me. Was this about the Horrobins? Had I done something wrong? ‘What?’
‘I tried your mug cake recipe at the weekend.’
‘Really?’
‘It was . . .’ Lewis mimed a chef’s kiss with a theatrical flourish.
‘Exceptionally good. And so quick! I had it mixed up and baked before my ice bath had finished running. I have an ice bath after cycling,’ he added, while I was still struggling to get my brain around ‘ice’ and ‘bath’ in the same sentence.
‘It’s good for preventing cramps. Not that you devised your cake around ice baths, of course.
But perfect timing! I just wanted to let you know. ’
I shifted awkwardly. I’d never told anyone about my mug cake experiments, apart from Ashley, who’d benefited from some trial runs.
There was something slightly shameful about them, that urgent need for sweetness, so urgent you couldn’t even wait half an hour for a normal cake to bake.
Mug cakes were one of the few uncomplicated childhood memories I had – that cosy, safe feeling of Mum pressing a warm cup into my hands, curling up next to me with her own.
Both of us shutting out the world, teaspoons clinking against china as we scraped out every last bit.
Lewis was still talking. ‘I wasn’t sure about the mug – you didn’t specify a size – but I borrowed a range of options from the kitchen and it worked! Well.’ He paused. ‘Bit of overspill initially, but that was my fault.’
He grinned, and his sincerity melted something inside me. ‘Try it with a spoonful of crème fra?che on top,’ I suggested. ‘It cuts through the sweetness.’
‘I will try that!’ Lewis made it sound as if I’d just gifted him the formula for liquid gold.
‘You know, I’ve heard a lot of “what is your greatest achievements?” over the years, and they’re usually tedious and frankly self-aggrandising – but your mug cake is the only one that I can give an actual, personal, thumbs-up to. ’
‘It’s not really my greatest achievement,’ I said, unable to let it go. ‘What I meant to say was that I got the highest mark in the region for my tax qualification. Second highest in the country. That’s my greatest achievement. Not the cake. I don’t know why I said the cake. My mind went blank.’
‘Really? OK.’ He nodded. ‘That’s also very impressive.’
‘I just don’t want you to think that . . .’ That I am the kind of uncontrolled, greedy person who only thinks about scoffing cake, ideally as quickly as possible.
‘That what?’ said Lewis, baffled.
I looked away, anywhere other than into Lewis’s face. My eye fell on the flowerbed nearest my car. It had been dug over and planted up with red and pink busy Lizzies, hopeful microdots of colour in the expanse of brown soil. Lots of room to grow. Maybe slightly too much room.
‘That, you know, I just think about cake,’ I mumbled.
‘Why on earth would I think that?’
‘Well, because—’ I started to make a gesture at my body but managed to stop myself.
Lewis continued to look at me, as if I was talking some strange language, and then shook his head and smiled, holding my gaze for a long second.
The shiver it gave me took me by surprise.
I’d seen Lewis beaming before, with that jolly Labrador positivity that he sprayed around the place like an out-of-control hosepipe, but this was different.
There was an unexpected vulnerability in his eyes, once you got past that ludicrous moustache, and it made him seem closer to his real age.
Which was about the same as mine, except he was running a high-turnover business with responsibility for vulnerable lives, and I was emotionally bullied by my own security pass.
I didn’t know what to say. When Lewis smiled like that – as if all he wanted was for me to smile back at him – he looked so different, a whole other person revealed without warning, that I could only nod in response. After so long in my own company, I found his directness unsettling.
To be honest, I found any directness unsettling, but Lewis’s even more so.
I would probably have continued nodding if his phone hadn’t pinged and Tomsk hadn’t barked at it. It was a snippet of Lewis’s own voice saying, ‘Chop chop!’
‘Ah, that’s my ten-minute warning for our health and safety meeting.’ He gestured at the house, and shook his head, baffled. ‘Would you believe we’ve got a lightbulb thief now? Anyway, please let me know if you have any more recipes to try. I have an appallingly sweet tooth, for my sins.’
‘Really?’ It was hard to believe, given how athletic he was.
‘It’s why I cycle so much. Got to burn it off somehow!’
I found myself nodding – again – and stood watching him as he strode up the drive, radiating positive energy in every direction.
Lewis was moving forward, but as he went he waved to a resident watching from an upstairs window, then bent to pick up a discarded plastic bottle, diverted to an overflowing recycling bin, repositioned the bin to its rightful place, flipped up the lid and disposed of the bottle, opened the door for a cleaner coming out, and then vanished inside Rosemount.
I stared for a moment, not sure what I was feeling. Normally dynamism like that made me feel squat and defensive, but Lewis didn’t provoke that reaction. It wasn’t performative, designed to make others feel inadequate, it was just who he was.
Instead I felt . . . I hunted for the right word. Boosted?
But maybe that was the sunshine, I thought, as I set off with Tomsk for our walk.
The spring sunshine, and hearing long and happy marriages were a real thing, and the daffodils, and the fact that I’d made Bill speak, and Gayle offering to read my screenplay, and resisting a second slice of cake. Not a bad morning’s work.
I found an oldies station on the radio, and sang all the way to Coneygreen Woods.