Sunshine tells me over the phone that it’s only been three days, but it feels like it’s been longer. I wonder if she’s rounding down the number, trying to make me feel better. I just want to be back home.
Nights are the hardest, when I hear the neighbours having nightmares and the nurses bustling in their loose cotton trousers and rubber-soled shoes. I try blocking my ears to the screams, but that doesn’t help much and I’m always startled when the pipes in my room begin to creak and wheeze. Sometimes I have nightmares of my own. I dream that someone’s attacking me, and when I scream for help, no sound comes out. I awake, suffocating and gasping for breath. They’ve given me a panic button, supposedly for things like this, but I don’t know who’ll come if I press it, so I don’t use it. I only wish they’d let me lock my door. Better still, that I were strong enough to push some heavy furniture against it. I know I ought to be safe here but I also know that you can never be sure.
There’s a very nice woman called Bella and I wish she worked nights. It would make me feel safer if she did, but because she doesn’t, I stay alert through the darkness. I think of all my friends in the city and others around the world who don’t know I’m here. I don’t want people visiting me in this place. It feels too depressing, which is why I’ve only told Sunshine. So I wait for the blue of night to fade into dawn, and only then, when the warm smell of maple syrup slips through the gap at the bottom of my door, do I let myself rest.
To comfort myself and stop my mind going round and round in circles, I close my eyes and inhale deeply, summoning the smell of moin-moin and akara. ‘Or porridge might be nice,’ I whisper to myself, reimagining Goldilocks as Afrolocks, just before Bella arrives with the pancakes and their accompaniments – miniature packets of grape jelly and pats of butter so cold they sit, like hard-boiled sweets, refusing to melt on the hill of pancakes.
‘Mind the gap,’ I repeat, wishing for the doors to slide open.
I think sometimes that I’m losing my memory. I’m more forgetful these days, and lying in bed all day, I worry. Will I become just another old woman with Alzheimer’s? And who will look after me? As a child I only remember one mad person – man or woman, I forget. Was it a bare-breasted woman who removed her wrappa to reveal a torn and dirty petticoat? Did she shriek and scratch her head? Or does this memory come from the book of my imagination? Or was it a man with thick, knotty, lice-infested hair? He was the only bearded man I saw in those days. I never dared to look too closely for fear that his curses might land on me. All the children knew that somewhere between this madman’s legs hung a large penis. Swinging. Menacingly.
At lunchtime and dinner, it’s the smell of boiled potatoes that first fills the air here. It reminds me of my boarding school days where cod and boiled potatoes were served on Fridays. Shepherd’s pie on Saturdays, and roast lamb and boiled potatoes on Sundays. All followed by wobbly Bird’s custard or Rowntree’s jelly. I don’t think mother ever cooked potatoes. She used to cook rice – sifting it carefully before she boiled it, letting me run my fingers through the tray of white pearls in search of small brown stones that needed to be discarded. I remember that the rice came from India and sat in a huge white sisal bag in a dark pantry with the serving calabash resting on top. It was only from boarding school then that I remembered the smell of boiling potatoes along with the forlorn cry of Eastbourne’s seagulls, and the matching greyness of its skies and pebble beaches. Now it feels not unlike those lonely evenings lying face up in my school bunk bed, crying because my mother had died and my father was so far away.
On my first night they wheeled me into the dining hall, but I haven’t been back since. I keep remembering the man who repeatedly lifted an empty fork from his plate to his toothless mouth. One of the aides would sometimes come to his rescue, but as soon as the aide left to help someone else, he returned to shovelling air between his gums. I’ve named the poor man, Santiago. The one who tries not to think, only to endure. That’s why I find it better to stay in my room, in the company of my own thoughts with my one book of poetry, delighting in Satin-Legs Smith.