“Mum! Where are the tablets?”
“. . . In the fridge. A black box, top shelf, back left.”
Having dashed through the kitchen and scuttled up the back stairs, Cyril was crouched at the door of the master bedroom listening to his daughter’s screeching below. He was quaking with rage. Imagine, not only had his own wife grassed their plans to the one child certain to make a maximum palaver over the disputable but much-touted sanctity of human life, but now Kay had given up the decades-long hiding place of their magic beans without a fight.
“It’s not there,” came accusingly from downstairs.
That’s right, he thought, clutching the bottle in his pocket. It ain’t.
“Then ask Cyril,” Kay said. “He’s the master of ceremonies.”
“You mean Dad is the homicidal maniac, from the sound of it!” Hayley exclaimed. “Another Dr Kevorkian! Or Harold Shipman! He’s obviously brainwashed you into going along with one of his blinkered, fanatical socialist fixations! This whole nonsense is so like him I could be sick!”
Cyril felt a great welling up from a place in himself with which he was little acquainted. The force arose unbidden; so involuntary was its eruption that the closest comparison he could contrive was to vomiting, although the sensation was not so unpleasant. This—quantity, this—substance, this—enormous, formless thing wasn’t outside of him, or alien to him; it was him. And this deep very-self was affronted. How dare these women stand in his way? Should these weaker-willed creatures be allowed to defeat his plans of some thirty years? Should these soft, maudlin pussycats be allowed to hinder the courageous, honourable climax of an illustrious career? The consternation was blinding. He would show them what he was made of: fire, not their women’s water. For they had no right to thwart him, no right to demand he, too, wither, crumble, and evaporate like every other addled old cretin clinging to the thinnest excuse for being alive, raging in hackneyed, over-cited poetry against the dying of the light. Those two had no right to compel Dr Cyril J. Wilkinson to implode into one more gibbering, palsied parody of his formerly formidable person, becoming one more burden on the state, one more burden on family, one more source of resentment, boredom, mockery, pity, and endless eyeroll. With all their sentimental wittering, they had no right to insist that he demean himself like all the others, conspire in his own ridicule, and obliterate all he had been and all he had achieved by growing witless, dependent, and enfeebled! He had the tablets and he had the power.
Yet amidst his flaming indignation, Cyril had not altogether lost his capacity to think methodically. In his panic of a few minutes before, he had hesitated in the kitchen, torn between fleeing upstairs and absconding out the back door to conceal himself in the garden. His choice of upstairs had made emotional sense, for he associated their bedroom of nearly half a century with safety, succour, and refuge. But, in practical terms, the unlit garden would have been more strategic. There was the tool shed, or he might have hauled himself over the back wall and into the great big wonderful world in which a freeborn Englishman could do with his own life whatever he pleased.
Yet it was too late for that Plan B. He could hear his “saviours” storming up both staircases. He might secure this door from the inside, but those meddlesome emergency personnel had the booming voices of bruisers. A cheap domestic doorknob lock—it wasn’t a bolt—wouldn’t keep them out for long. If he took the overdose now, they’d be sure to haul him off to A&E and pump his stomach. As a GP, he was familiar with standard procedure: he’d still feel unwell, he would not be dead, and they’d keep him in hospital under observation. They’d force him to see one of those lame, prying psychiatrists. He’d have to promise never to do it again. No one would believe him.
He was fucked.
* * *
Cyril stood as straight as his back allowed. Under the stern eye of the paramedics, he’d no choice but to relinquish the bottle of Seconal into Hayley’s outstretched rubber-gloved palm, though he kept his gaze steely, and rather than look to the floor with a suggestion of embarrassment he locked eyes with his daughter. “That is not your property,” he said, “and this is none of your business.”
“I think it’s very much my business,” Hayley said primly. Her mask was adjusted so poorly that it wouldn’t be doing any good, and that was dubiously assuming that any of those preening badges of purity and conformism ever did any good. “I’m the one who’d have had to clean up the mess if your warped scheme had succeeded.”
His daughter was enjoying the whole drama enormously. She’d cast herself as the heroine of this tale, and that was not a role she’d frequent opportunity to fill as a neurotic, under-occupied housewife.
Once they’d all trooped back downstairs, Hayley assured the paramedics covered in protective gear that she had matters in hand. She promised to stay overnight to keep an eye on her disturbed, sadly diminished parents. When one medic provided her with the number of the local Community Mental Health Team, she tucked the slip of paper into her wallet with elaborate care, giving her bag a brisk zip.
After the young men left, Hayley marched to the downstairs loo, head held aloft in a posture of sacrifice and resolve. As Cyril eyed her from the hallway, she located a bin bag under the basin and proceeded to empty out the entire contents of the medicine cabinet. There went the ibuprofen, aspirin, antacids, cold-sore cream, anti-fungal toenail treatments, and constipation tablets with which her gaga parents could no longer be trusted. By the time Hayley finished child-proofing the two loos upstairs, they should have counted themselves lucky to have retained a spare toilet roll—and not because of the nationwide shortage due to hoarding, but because, theoretically, they might have looped the paper multiple times round the shower-curtain rail and used it to hang themselves.
Struck dumb by Kay’s treachery, when the spouses went to bed Cyril couldn’t bring himself to speak to his wife. Not one word. Once they arose in silence the next morning, it was as well that they’d no fruit or baked goods for breakfast. Their daughter had removed all the knives.
* * *
All day, they were effectively under house arrest—even more so than their compatriots, who could at least still go to the supermarket. That evening, Simon and Roy arrived; as the new head of household, Hayley let them in. Typically for a bloke who never got with anyone else’s programme, Roy alone was not wearing personal protective equipment. Although Roy was just the type to contract COVID-19 and spitefully cough and sputter his way about town as a “super-spreader,” Cyril gave their middle child begrudging credit for resistance to suffocatingly self-righteous social pressure. Once the parents were exiled to the sitting room, Simon went presumptuously upstairs; as the floorboards creaked overhead, Cyril could hear him nosing about the study and unashamedly slamming file drawers containing not a single document that should concern the boy. Thereafter, their children’s collusive muttering round the kitchen table was punctuated by unkind-sounding bursts of laughter. The couple’s situation recalled those movies in which Nazis invade a local’s home, billeting in the bedrooms and making free with the wine cellar, all the while expecting the frightened inhabitants to be nice to them or else.
At last, the three siblings filed into the sitting room an ostentatious two metres apart, as Boris would have instructed. They rearranged the chairs in a “socially distanced” semi-circle around their misbehaved progenitors on the sofa. The pulled-back seating seemed to indicate less a consideration for the dangers of contagion than a wholesale withdrawal of familial warmth.
“We want you to understand,” Hayley began, clasping her gloved hands piously in her lap. “We’re all here out of concern, and we only want what’s best for you. It’s not like we’re putting you on trial.” Whatever people go out of their way to tell you that they are not doing is a reliable indicator of what they are doing. “It’s obvious you’re having emotional problems, like, depression and that. And maybe you’re having trouble living on your own. Naturally you value your independence, but we can’t elevate independence above safety. I’m afraid you’ll have to consider this an intervention. You’ve clearly become a danger to yourselves.”
If some children of geriatric parents found generational role reversal uncomfortable, Hayley wasn’t one of them. Twisting in his chair, Simon was the one who looked uncomfortable. Cyril was accustomed to seeing his firstborn in nothing but the smart dark suits he wore in the City, but during this lockdown folderol he was trading from home; a shabby flannel shirt and ill-fitting jeans compromised the investment banker’s usual air of authority. After all, the eldest ought logically to be presiding, but this was his sister’s show. Roy was slumped with his signature smirk, tipping the chair back on its hind legs as if to remove himself from the festivities an extra few inches. He always placed himself outside the family unless he was looking for money. The trendy short beard he’d sported in recent years had sprouted in patches. A bald section on his chin was the shape of Norway.
“It’s not as if we set the kitchen on fire because we can no longer tell the difference between vinegar and white spirit,” Cyril said levelly, disliking the fact that in his own home with his own children he felt compelled to control his temper—and not to spare their feelings, but to protect his interest. He didn’t care for the texture of this encounter one bit. “You interrupted the execution of a plan of many years’ standing, made in a state of rationality at an age younger than Simon is now.”
“Mum wasn’t into it,” Hayley said.
“If your mother was having second thoughts, she should have told me, not you,” Cyril said.
“Yes,” Kay said, looking to her writhing hands. “I should have put my foot down with your father myself and not dragged you into it, dear. I put you in an untenable position, for which I apologize awfully.”
“That last-minute text was a cry for help, and I’m glad you sent it,” Hayley said.
“The point is what we’re going to do now,” Simon said, clearly accustomed to meetings in which digressions had to be contained. “The three of us can’t keep popping by to make sure you aren’t trying to kill yourselves again.”
“It’s called being put on ‘suicide watch’ in the nick,” Roy said.
“You should know,” Hayley said curtly.
“Legally,” Simon added, “we’re not meant to be popping by at all.”
“Indeed,” Cyril said. “So however delighted we are to see our three lovely children, your well-intended ‘intervention’ entails the mixing of multiple households. Your best mate Boris, Simon, wouldn’t approve a-tall, a-tall. In the nicest way possible, then, I’m going to have to invite you all to go home.” This absurd and profoundly un-English lockdown was a time of hair-splitting legalism, line-toeing, tattle-taling, and censorious tsk-tskery. But Cyril wasn’t above his own procedural pedantry if it served his purpose.
“To the contrary, I looked it up,” Hayley said, pulling a Post-it note from her bag with the satisfaction of out-nitpicking a nitpicker. “One of the four legitimate reasons to leave the house is ‘to attend to a medical need or provide care for the vulnerable.’ Stopping two vulnerable people with mental health problems from topping themselves certainly qualifies as a ‘medical need.’”
“We’re terribly grateful for your concern,” Cyril said. “Still, what your mother and I decide to do or not do is up to us. Thank you kindly for your offer of support, but we’re of sound mind, and we don’t require your assistance, or even your advice.”
“Actually, I’ve been reluctant to say anything,” Hayley said. “But Mum has become, you know, pretty forgetful.”
“In what way?” Kay asked in astonishment.
“Just the other day,” Hayley said. “You couldn’t remember that author—”
“What, L.P. Hartley? That was a perfectly normal tip-of-the-tongue—”
“But it was the author of, you know, what’s-it, one of your favourite books—”
“See?” Kay said. “You can’t remember the title The Go-Between yourself—”
“It’s not one of my favourite books!”
“I live with your mother,” Cyril said, “and if she were becoming demented I would have noticed.”
“Not if you were demented as well,” Roy said. “You’d forget she was demented.”
“It’s impossible to prove a negative, so we can never conclusively demonstrate that we’re not insane,” Cyril said through his teeth. “Nonetheless, not only do I remember what year it is and who’s prime minister, but I can recite every PM, in order, since 1945. Winston Churchill! Clement Atlee! Winston Churchill—!”
“You already said Winston Churchill,” Hayley said with an eyeroll.
“Bloody hell, Dad, even I can remember Winston Churchill,” Roy said. “Make it a bit harder on yourself.”
“Anthony Eden! Harold McMillan! Alec Douglas-Home!”
“You’ve made your point, dear,” Kay said, patting his knee.
She was right, this recitation was undignified, and Cyril pulled up short.
“I think we should cut to the chase,” Simon said heavily. “We’ve decided it’s in everyone’s interest, especially yours, that you . . . get help. And we’re not presenting that as a choice.”
“What does that mean?” Cyril snapped.
Simon wouldn’t look his father in the eye. “We’re having you sectioned. For your own good.”
“What?” the spouses said in unison.
“Under Section Three of the Mental Health Act,” Hayley said officiously, “you can be detained if you ‘pose a threat to yourselves or others,’ even against your will. We all think it’s the only answer.”
“Hey, you haven’t heard the best bit!” Roy said. “Then you qualify for this, whatever—”
“Section one-seventeen aftercare services,” Hayley filled in.
“It’s not means-tested!” Roy said cheerfully. “The state pays all your care-home fees and you get to keep the house! Fucking hell, you get to keep everything! Most of the time Hayley’s bat-shit crazy, but this time she’s come up with a corker.”
“You have no evidence that would stand up in court,” Cyril said.
“We have evidence up to the eyeballs,” Hayley countered. “Mum’s text. Your bottle of poison. Not to mention that lunatic memorial service. Mum’s tearjerker farewell, which is longer than your average doctoral thesis. Two separate essays extolling the merits of self-euthanasia.”
“And then there’s the spending,” Simon said with a sigh. “I’ve gone through your bank records, and your expenditures are almost manic. You’d paid off the original mortgage years ago. Why refinance? What happened to all the money? This degree of fiscal irresponsibility isn’t going to look good to an AMHP.”
The fact that these kids were already au courant with the abbreviation for the Approved Mental Health Professional who could put them away for eternity was not a good sign. Worse, Cyril remembered with a thud that their buffoon of a prime minister had revised the Mental Health Act earlier this very month to require one physician, not three, to sign off on sectioning. A backhander to a single quack, and your inconvenient parents could be disappeared.
“For one thing, not that it’s your business, son,” Cyril said, “we spent a great deal on keeping your Nanna Poskitt and Grandpa Norman comfortable and cared for.”
“But you also made huge contributions to the People’s Vote campaign. Look how constructive that turned out.” Simon was a Tory Brexiteer and didn’t even have the good sense to be ashamed of himself. It was a miracle that he and his father were still on speaking terms.
“At the risk of the self-evident, we earned our money,” Cyril said. “So it’s up to us how we spend it. Furthermore”—he was winging it, but starting to panic, and they needed every scrap of ammunition that lay to hand—“locking up a qualified GP during a national health crisis would be criminally wasteful. The NHS has already appealed to retired physicians to return to active duty and help keep the service from being overwhelmed—”
“Dad,” Hayley said. “Please. You’re eighty-one. Exactly the demographic most endangered by this disease. On the front line, you’d only be a liability. Wanting to put yourself in the way of a killer virus is just one more sign that you need protection from your own destructive impulses.”
“But never mind that our money belongs to us,” Cyril said, returning to first principles. “Our lives belong to us, whether or not we’re your mum and dad, and it’s up to us how we choose to end them. We may decide, in our wisdom, to stick around until a hundred and ten. Equally, we’d be within our rights to jump off Blackfriars Bridge tomorrow.”
“That’s not how the law sees it,” Simon said, pained.
“And that’s not how we see it,” Hayley said triumphantly. “We promise to come and visit.”
* * *
The council van in which they were bundled out of Lambeth had no windows—it was effectively a paddy wagon—which meant that Kay and Cyril had no idea where in the country they were driven to, giving this nominal adventure a Kafkaesque texture from the start. On their arrival at Close of Day Cottages, there wasn’t a cottage in sight; the facility looked more like an Amazon warehouse or a Tesco distribution hub. In compliance with one of the many capricious but ironclad rules that would soon govern their lives, they were pushed to the administrator’s office clutching their hastily packed bags in wheelchairs, though they were both capable of walking unassisted and carrying their own luggage. The hallway to the office was lined with elderly residents slopped to the side with mouths open, their unseeing gazes so stony that they might have been carved into the architecture like gargoyles. For Close of Day Cottages’ newest admissions, a basket of emotions hit all at once: claustrophobia, horror, depression, and hysterical desperation to abscond by whatever means possible. Both spouses registered with a gut punch that being methodically determined to end their lives at a time and on the terms of their choosing and feeling genuinely, frenetically suicidal were chalk and cheese. At a stroke, involuntary institutionalization managed to induce the very urge to seek oblivion that sectioning was meant to cure.
“Well, now, what have we here?” The plump, fifty-ish woman behind the desk crisply stacked papers that didn’t appear to need straightening, smiling with her mouth but not her eyes. She sported a bold statement necklace reminiscent of Theresa May. Her tight checked suit was a brand of ugly that only high-end designers can conjure, and she exuded a malicious cheer. “Kate and Cyrus! I’m Close of Day’s director, Dr Mimi Mewshaw—though I don’t stand on ceremony, and you can call me Dr Mimi.”
“Kay and Cyril Wilkinson, thank you,” Cyril corrected. “And are you a medical doctor?”
“I’m fully accredited, if that’s what you’re worried about, poopsie.”
“I take that as a no,” Cyril said. “I am a medical doctor.”
“Sure you are, treasure,” Dr Mimi said smoothly. “We have all kinds of super-important residents at Close of Day. Napoleon, Batman, and Jesus, to name a few. Now, I take it you two are sweethearts?”
“We’re not ‘sweethearts,’” Kay said. “We’ve been married for nearly sixty years.”
“It’s just that we don’t have any double suites available at the minute, so I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with singles.”
“You mean we can’t even sleep in the same bed?” Cyril asked, eyes popping.
“No, sweetie, afraid not. And you’re one-seventeen council charges, meaning the compensation is quite inadequate—below cost, to be honest—so if a double does become available, we have to prioritize private self-paying guests. Beggars can’t be choosers! But at your age, treasure, really. What does it matter? We find our clients sleep more soundly in separate beds anyway. Less chance of getting agitated.” Dr Mimi turned to her computer screen and clicked away. She had one of those monster terminals that could have been twenty years old, which didn’t speak well for the rest of the facilities. “I see here you’re classified as in danger of self-harm? That’s a special regime, but don’t you worry. Safety first! Lance, could you search Kate and Cyrus’s bags, please?”
The tall black orderly who’d been lurking by the door took Cyril’s bag and splayed it open on a nearby table. The carefully folded button-downs and trousers with their creases lined up all got pitched willy-nilly in a rumpled pile.
“What is this, airport security?” Cyril asked incredulously.
“Medication,” Lance announced, holding up one of the only bottles left in Lambeth once Hayley was through protecting her parents from themselves; the laxatives had been tucked away in Cyril’s travel toiletry kit.
“That’s only over-the-counter senna,” Cyril objected. “Surely I can be trusted to manage my own bowels.”
“We control all your medication,” Dr Mimi said. “If you overdosed on that, think what a mess you’d make for our staff. Speaking of which, Cyrus—”
“I think I’d prefer ‘Dr Wilkinson,’ if you don’t mind.”
“Why, funnily enough, I do mind,” Dr Mimi said, clapping her hands in delight. “All our stakeholders are on a first-name basis, and I’m sure you’ll be with us long enough to get used to the friendly atmosphere! But like I was saying, treasure: when was your last poo?”
“I can’t see why that’s any of your concern,” Cyril said coldly.
“I’ll put you down for an enema, then,” Dr Mimi said sweetly. So when she asked “Katie” the same question, Kay was quick enough to say, “This morning.”
“Sharps,” Lance said robotically. He’d found the Swiss Army knife, metal nail file, fingernail clippers, and corkscrew that Cyril had checked into airline holds for decades. The razor and razor blades got pitched on the director’s desk, too. Yet the confiscations became less logical: felt-tip pens, a blank spiral notebook, his laptop, the iPad from Simon, a copy of the most recent New Statesman, and his hardback of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, which being chained in Dante’s nine circles of hell should at last have provided him the leisure to plough all the way through.
“I would like to request the return of my reading material, please,” Cyril said, and this sadistically jolly glorified lollipop lady couldn’t have appreciated the degree of self-control required to remain civil.
“We find militant political magazines and big, boring books about how terrible the world is, well,” Dr Mimi said. “They’re a wee bit dark for a self-harmer. The material might also get into the hands of other stakeholders, who could find it upsetting.”
“So what are we supposed to read?” Kay asked with alarm, doubtless anxious about her copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which was definitely “dark.”
“I’m sure you’ll find our community activities so exciting, princess, that you’ll be too knackered to read any old books. Katie, my poppet, I see here from your GP that you’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure?”
Cyril shot Kay a look of surprise.
“Because that means we have to put you on a no-salt diet.”
“I’m sorry,” Kay said in a panic; she was very fond of olives and pecorino. “But according to more than one massive study, low-salt diets have significantly worse outcomes for coronary disease and stroke than diets with moderate sodium levels, and a no-salt diet would probably kill you.”
That smile finally mirrored by a sparkle in her eyes, the director seemed pleased that fatally bland food would be received in the punitive spirit she intended.
“Contraband,” Lance said in a monotone, having moved on to Kay’s bag.
“Now, that was naughty,” Dr Mimi admonished, reaching for the litre of dry Amontillado and placing it on the shelf behind her desk. “And suggestive of a dependency problem.”
“No alcohol?” Kay asked meekly.
“Heavens no!” Dr Mimi exclaimed with the same genuine pleasure. “No caffeinated beverages; no smoking or e-cigarettes; no overstimulating spices; no cream, butter, or full-fat milk; and no sexual relations amongst the stakeholders. We have an eight-thirty p.m. curfew, after which you’re to retire to your private suite. Breakfast is at seven, lunch at eleven, dinner at five—and attendance is compulsory. If you’re ever tempted to be babyish and turn up your nose at the fine nutrition this establishment provides, we reserve the right to force-feed. The council has placed your wellbeing in our hands, and we take our duty of care ever so seriously. Ordinarily, visiting hour is between one and two p.m. on Saturdays. But just to be extra, super-cali-fragilistic careful during the coronavirus outbreak, we’ve banned all visitors until further notice. Even if visitation rights resume, you poor dears shouldn’t get your hopes up. We find that after a handful of token appearances, friends and family make themselves scarce. We’re our own special village here, and outsiders can feel a bit left out. Oh, and lastly: participation in group activities is required. We don’t want you turning inward. Socializing is in the interest of your mental health, and we all want to help you get better.”
“Those people collapsed in the hallway,” Kay said. “They’re getting ‘better’?”
Feeling compelled to assert himself as a person and not a human drool bucket, Cyril had meantime gone to Settings on his smartphone. “Mrs Mewshaw, could you give me the WiFi password, please?”
Dr Mimi chuckled. “Oh, poopsie, you won’t be needing any password! But that does remind me.” She held out her hand. “We have to confiscate your phones.”
* * *
The brutal decontamination was justified, as so many tortures these days, by COVID-19. Perhaps the allusion was OTT, but Kay’s associations with being led stark naked into a big cement room for a “shower” had inevitable associations with the Second World War, and the disinfectant with which they hosed her down left her skin reeking nauseously of bleach. The thin gown provided thereafter opened at the back and exposed her buttocks. Although she was assured that, natch, cupcake, her clothes would be returned after they’d been washed and pressed, she watched her smart navy frock tossed carelessly atop a snarled laundry cart with a forlorn presentiment that she’d never see it again. As she saw poor Cyril being led away for his humiliating enema, Kay was shown to her room. Down a dismal neon-lit corridor, the shrill perfume of cheap detergent vied with an underlying stench of excrement. “So,” she remarked dryly to her minder. “Where’s the pool?”
Her “private suite” was grey and confining, with a minimal toilet and basin, a flat mattress that seemed to have absorbed a whole Waitrose luxury assortment’s worth of human effluents, and only one ornament on the walls: a digital display that declared, TODAY IS WEDNESDAY; THE DATE IS 1 APRIL 2020; MY NAME IS KATE WILKINGSIN; I AM HAPPY. April Fool’s Day. Too perfect.
The windowless room had neither a TV nor a radio. In all, the amenities were worse than Wandsworth Prison, which was at least awash in illicit mobiles and Class-A drugs piloted into the facility by the drones of organized crime. Surely crooks could have turned an even higher profit smuggling contraband into care homes. Just now, Kay would have paid hundreds of quid for that supermarket Amontillado.
Kay spent her first night tossing in self-recrimination. This debacle was all her fault. If she hadn’t sent that text to Hayley, they’d never have ended up in Close of Day Cottages. What had possessed her to go behind Cyril’s back and tattle? Why hadn’t she simply stood up to him and said, “I’m afraid I can’t go through with this”? For that matter, given the alternative of ending up here, why hadn’t she simply gone through with it? Was she that much of a wuss?
And there was no discernible end to this incarceration. Of all people, Roy had volunteered to serve as their “nearest relative,” whom statute designated as the sole person who could file a legal appeal for their discharge from detention. Per convention, the court had also awarded Roy power of attorney, which gave him carte blanche command of their finances, including their pensions. Why he might ever be motivated to release his parents from this purgatory was not altogether evident. Chillingly, she recalled the lone comment Cyril had passed in the paddy wagon on the way here: “We should never have had children.”
Her greatest torment was separation from her husband, to whom she might at least have poured out her remorse. She worried about him, too. Kay herself was hardly enthusiastic about being persecuted, treated like an idiot child, and deprived more indefinitely of her liberty than the average murderer. (And for what? Criminally, they’d contemplated sparing both family and the NHS the price of their protracted decline.) But Cyril put even greater store in dignity than she did, and the man would be crazed. Righteous fury could get him into trouble. That enema was a warning: the slightest resistance would be met with crushing retribution. They made films about this stuff, and in retrospect it was ominous that Cyril had ardently watched Cool Hand Luke five times.
To her dismay the next morning, in what staff referred to smirkingly as the “restaurant,” seating was assigned, and she and Cyril were separated at distant tables. She only managed to crane her neck and lock eyes with him once. Rather than glint with the steely, biding-his-time subterfuge she expected, his harrowed expression evoked a circuit board struck by lightning; why, she’d not have been surprised to see a wisp of acrid smoke rise from his head. He looked fried.
The glutinous porridge arrived so cold that, overturned, the oats would have stuck to the bowl. Her appetite wasn’t improved by a stuporous lady opposite, who was smearing porridge into her mouth with three fingers as if plastering a crack in a wall. When Kay couldn’t stomach even sampling the muck, a staff member gave his tablet a disapproving poke as he removed her bowl.
During the morning’s desolate solitary, or “quiet time,” looking forward to lunch proved a mistake. The undercooked boiled potato and overcooked grey meat were physically inedible, given that the “self-harm” regime allowed her only a blunt plastic spoon. The lime jelly was made with too much gelatine and almost as hard. How many meals could you refuse here before they stuck a tube down your throat like gavage?
Slipping her an indelible Sharpie, a kindly staffer warned as she left the “restaurant” that she’d better clearly label all her clothing or it would be swallowed forever in the bowels of the Close of Day laundry. Thus during the “rest period” after lunch—though from what exertions the residents might need to recover was opaque—Kay wrote “KW 114” on the tags of her tops, trousers, and frocks, as well as on the waistband of her knickers and the rim of each sock. The exercise was tedious; the Sharpie was running dry.
Perhaps she’d soon be grateful for a task of any sort. For Kay had made inquiries: there was no library and no gym. Residents were not allowed outdoors. The sole entertainment was the television in the communal day room, open only afternoons—where she prayed she might at least spend time with Cyril.
The large, dishevelled day room put Kay in mind of the ad hoc shelters organized earlier that year for British flood victims. Its few books were all for children: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, The Smurf’s Apprentice, Mr. Grumpy. Broken-down sofas were lumpy with dog-smelling coverlets. As she scanned the room in vain for Cyril, the cacophony resembled the competing monologues of a modern-day train carriage, except that none of these people had mobile phones. “Her rose was a climber, right overgrown,” one biddy narrated to no one in particular, “and well over the fence. I’d every right to lop it off. But the daft woman rung the council! Took on airs, that Stacy did . . .” Another resident’s tuneless rendition of “Yellow Submarine” failed to overcome the TV’s blaring rerun of Come Dine with Me. Kay finally spotted a staff member whose pocket sagged with the remote.
“Sorry,” Kay said. “Might we watch something else? Say, BBC News 24?”
The gaunt young woman had the complexion of someone who actually ate this outfit’s food. “Then we’d not find out if the chicken and Parma ham beat the Nigerian pepper soup, now would we, poppet?”
“I don’t sense our friends here are terribly involved in the programme.”
“Weekdays it’s back-to-back Come Dine with Me,” the staffer declared flatly. “I’m more partial to Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares at the weekend, but that’s just me.”
“Those are the only two programmes ever allowed on this television?”
“You’re a quick study,” the woman said deadpan. “This way, there’s no fighting. Everybody love cooking shows.”
“I don’t,” Kay said, but abandoned her petition on spotting Cyril, who’d a contusion on his forehead and his wrists zip-tied in front. His large male minders pushed him to a sofa and menaced from a step back.
“What happened?” she asked, kneeling. “How did you hit your head?”
“I lost control.” His monotone implied less having regained control as having exhausted his lack of it. “I became violent. I had to be restrained.”
“That’s not like you.”
“It turns out to be very much like me. We’ve never before been thrown in the Black Hole of Calcutta by our own children. In novel circumstances we find out new things about ourselves. Apparently, in the likes of Close of Day Cottages, I become resplendently violent. Why not? What can they do to me that’s worse than this? Purgatory is liberating.”
“If we’ve learnt anything in our practice of medicine,” Kay whispered, “it’s that there may be a limit to how healthy and happy a person can get, but there’s no limit to suffering. So they can always make our lives worse. ECT?”
“I’ve already been threatened with solitary confinement.” Cyril nodded at the codger still looping repeatedly through “Yellow Submarine.” “Which might be a mercy.”
“What’d I tell you?” the Keeper of the Remote exclaimed. “Chicken and Parma ham. No way them twee wallies in Somerset was going for Nigerian pepper soup.”
“If you’re put in solitary, we won’t see each other at all, and I couldn’t bear that,” Kay said. “What are we going to do? It’s only been a day. I’d rather be dead.”
“You had your chance,” Cyril said.
One of the beefeaters who’d dragged Cyril to the day room had been idly reading an Evening Standard, which he put down to check his phone. Cyril’s bound hands snatched the newspaper to his lap, like a lizard eating a fly. As he struggled to conceal the paper under his gown, a hand clasped his shoulder from behind.
“How’s our newbie doing, treasure? A little bird told me my pal Cyrus is having a wee bit of trouble adjusting to his new home.” Dr Mimi grabbed the Evening Standard, which Cyril held onto until it tore. “Newspapers are contraband. All those terrifying stories about the coronavirus are just the sort of news our stakeholders find distressing.”
“I promise not to share what’s happening in Italy,” Cyril said.
“I’m afraid I came over to break up the party. According to our records, you two may be a bad influence on each other. Goodness gracious me, your AMHP describes you as having formed a ‘death cult.’ Let’s get up and circulate! It’s best for our mental health that we make new friends.”
Hence the spouses were kept apart again, and only filing out for dinner was Kay able to sidle beside her husband. “What sparkling fare might be on the menu tonight?” she muttered.
“Wild mushroom fajitas,” Cyril supposed. “With a side salad of buffalo mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, a sprig of fresh basil, and a balsamic glaze.”
* * *
All too predictably, after breakfast the next day they were both handed paper cups of a dozen anonymous tablets. When Kay tried to slide the medication into a lower cheek, the nurse shouted, “Pocketing!” Another staffer held her mouth open as the nurse fished out the tablets and forced her to swallow the lot. The pills made her groggy and vague. It would be easy to fall into the habit of most residents: sleeping fifteen hours a day.
Despite the arduous Sharpie exercise, the first time Kay got her laundry back not a single item was recognizable. In trade for her becoming peach blouse with a cowl neck, the neat cream knit top trimmed with tiny black buttons, and form-fitting emerald trousers from Selfridges, she was bequeathed: a vast floral house dress, black polyester sweatpants with an exhausted waistband, and a loud men’s shirt covered in golf clubs. Thereafter, she spotted a squat gentleman in his nineties wearing her cream knit top all twisted out of shape, with three of the tiny black buttons missing. Mindful of her appearance but no fashionista, Kay was surprised how personally obliterating it was to be deprived of your own clothes.
As Cyril had no better luck, before long they were both slobbing about in other people’s clashing plaids and stained hoodies. Allowed to see the barber only once a fortnight, her husband could often have fit right in with the Romanian beggars sleeping rough around Marble Arch.
After that first load, Kay knew better than to abdicate to the voracious commercial laundry her birds of paradise kimono from Kyoto or the beloved dressing gown in black and crimson satin that Cyril had found on eBay—in which she would often swaddle herself luxuriously during long lonely evenings as a reminder of her husband. Well, so much for that. Both garments disappeared. She didn’t have a key to her room, but plenty of the staff did. Any complaint about having spotted a certain portly nurse flouncing campily down the corridor in her satin dressing gown was bound to be unavailing.
Their first big group activity was an egg hunt on Easter Sunday. As still more Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares yammered overhead, residents were corralled in the day room for a stimulating exercise of intuition, problem solving, and spatial awareness. The objects of their “hunt,” solidly coloured Styrofoam ovoids big as rugby balls, were hidden in plain view. They littered the carpet. They sat on the sofas. Curious, Kay lifted a cushion or two, but even concealing the odd giant egg under a pillow was considered too challenging. Nevertheless, the group was divided into teams, and their fellow inmates scurried round piling bright elliptical desiderata into plastic baskets with an impressive simulacrum of excitement.
“Now, princess,” Dr Mimi chided, pointing to Kay’s empty basket. “Let’s see some team spirit!”
“Blimey,” Kay said, staring at the red oval at her feet. “I’m stumped.”
At last displaying a trace of subversive gumption, the residents started throwing the footballs at one another and bouncing them off the walls, until Dr Mimi exiled the delinquents to their quarters in disgust.
Weekly “exercise” sessions were equally demanding. Residents gathered in a semi-circle as a visiting gym instructor led them through a series of seated calisthenics: waving your hands urgently in the air, as if your car had broken down on one of those lethal new “smart motorways” with no hard shoulder. Stamping the floor, with its apt suggestion of a tantrum. Circling hands above the lap to execute what the instructor called “the muff.” Jutting a leg out and rotating the foot, although this one was only for the “advanced.” As a climax, the slow-mo Mr Motivator led them in a virtually stationary hokey cokey, though the turning-yourself-about bit for the wheelchair-bound tended to be fraught.
Cyril participated to the barest degree that would spare him punitive measures (cold showers, wheelchair confinement, sleep in restraints . . . ). In the fitness sessions, he’d flap a hand two or three times like the final throes of a dying partridge. During group sing-alongs, he opened and closed his mouth in silence, with no one the wiser that he had once been the lead tenor in his men’s choir. When in Arts and Crafts they fashioned landscapes out of corn kernels, kidney beans, red lentils, and mustard seeds, Cyril piled up a succotash that was mostly paste.
For her sanity, Kay took a different route. On May Day, she helped the more impaired to weave a May pole that was competent and attractive. On Father’s Day, she assisted several residents with Alzheimer’s in constructing cards with heartfelt messages, whilst keeping it to herself that the dads whom the tributes addressed were long dead. If Cyril opted for minimal compliance, Kay’s strategy was overkill compliance. Her calisthenics were so wild and pacey that she got winded. She found she enjoyed singing—she’d always been self-conscious about the reediness of her voice in comparison to her husband’s—and belted out “Baa-Baa Black Sheep,” “If You’re Happy and You Know it, Clap Your Hands,” and “The Alphabet Song” with gusto. Kay’s bean-and-seed landscape was meticulous, with more than a suggestion of Monet.
Socially, Cyril remained aloof, but Kay latched gratefully onto one inmate, Marcus Dimbleby, who was only seventy-seven and had his wits about him. The childless former estate agent had sold his home after being T-boned on the pavement by a mobility scooter, and his injuries made independent living difficult. But the posh care home called Journey’s End he’d found outside of Aldeburgh was so expensive that it soon consumed his equity. Thrown on the mercy of the council, he’d been demoted here. She could listen for hours as Marcus detailed the fare at his Aldeburgh Club Med: freshly fried chips, steak and ale pie with button mushrooms, and proper green vegetables.
Kay took a still savvier approach to the underpaid staff, who hated their jobs. True, the worst of the carers took out their frustrations on the residents, but the employees weren’t all bad apples, and befriending the young man who’d first slipped her that Sharpie proved a godsend. Leon risked sacking by loaning her his phone, if only for the thirty seconds it took to send Simon a cryptic SOS. The orderly also provided her with sachets of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and vinegar that he pilfered from McDonald’s, thus rendering their rations, if not palatable, at least disguised. Most crucially, Leon became her dealer for the cocaine of Close of Day Cottages: salt.
Yet even sodium chloride couldn’t maintain their spirits. A single prospect kept the Wilkinsons alive in more than body. Escape.
* * *
When exactly the COVID care-home quarantine was finally lifted was unclear; the “shielding” regulations could have been relaxed for months by the time they were notified of their first visitor. Cyril was so incandescent over the children’s betrayal that only his wife’s beseeching persuaded him to meet their son. Even so, after Kay embraced their eldest in the day room, Cyril’s mere handshake was stiff and withholding. Simon must have been mortified to see his once-stylish mother drowning in some stranger’s shapeless paisley shift and his father’s wide-boy shirt blazing with palm trees and parrots. Cyril hadn’t had a shave in ten days. They both looked as if they belonged here.
“Can’t someone shut up Gordon Ramsey?” Simon implored. Scanning the day room’s petting zoo in a panic, he perched on the very edge of a folding chair. He might no longer have feared contamination by the virus, but he didn’t want to catch the despair.
“So when are you springing us from this joint?” Cyril charged, skipping any prefatory niceties. “You kids have put your parents in hell—I’d say ‘living hell,’ but there’s nothing living about it. What exactly did we do to you to deserve this? Give you life? Feed you, clothe you, care for you when you were sick, support you through university, and mind your children? Tell me, where did we go wrong?”
“I’m sorry if you’re having a rough time,” Simon said. “The online reviews of this place are pretty positive. Four and a half stars.”
“But who would write those reviews?” Cyril pointed out. “We’re not allowed access to the internet. The outside world, we’re told, is too ‘upsetting.’ You’re usually cannier than that, son. Because I’ll tell you who writes those glowing reviews: the director. Who cuts so many corners that this building must look like a geodesic dome. Your parents are surviving on salad-cream sandwiches.”
“Honey, we know this was more your sister’s idea than yours,” Kay said. For now, Simon was their only lifeline, and a barrage of hostility would not help their cause. “So never mind how we got here. The question is how we get out.”
“The problem isn’t Hayley,” Simon said. “It’s Roy. I thought at first it was a good sign that he wanted to take some responsibility for once, and I’m so busy . . . But now that he’s legally your ‘nearest relative,’ it’s a bastard to dislodge him from the position. And he’s, um. Shifted into the house in Lambeth. I think he likes it there.”
“Who gave that boy permission to live in our house?” Cyril asked in indignation.
“He doesn’t need permission,” Simon said miserably. “With power of attorney, he can do what he likes. He’s managed to keep up to date on your mortgage by tapping your pension payments, and last I heard he was planning to refinance again. Meanwhile, he’s been, ah, ‘decluttering.’ It seems to be fashionable.”
“Decluttering what?” Kay asked. “I didn’t decorate that house with any clutter!”
“I mean he’s selling stuff off. Like those two end tables in the sitting room. He claims they didn’t match.”
“They’re not supposed to match,” Kay said, having trouble controlling her own temper, which was rare.
“The point is,” Simon said, “there may be some protracted process by which Roy could be removed as your guardian, but I’d have to do some research, and probably hire a lawyer—which given present economic circumstances would be a stretch—and Roy would oppose it tooth and nail. There’s no guarantee we’d prevail. So for now, you’re going to have to sit tight. I can urge Hayley to visit, and maybe Uncle Percy, though I think I’ll hold off on rallying my kids. If you don’t mind. See . . . All this babbling and chaos . . . Geoff especially is fragile, and this place would mess with their heads.”
Time was short, and during what remained of the hour they pressed their elder son for news of the larger world. One revelation of this Brigadoon was how integrally those big social stories that Kay had been so ambivalent about “returning to the library” on her eightieth interwove with their small personal ones. Having lived through the Second World War, the foundation of the British welfare state, all those assassinations in America, the miners’ strikes, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the IRA bombing of Canary Wharf, the near collapse of the international financial system in 2008, their entire country being put under general anaesthesia during the hysteria over COVID-19 . . . Well, the totality of these events was part of who they were, and having observed, commented upon, and sometimes borne the brunt of this series of upheavals was for both spouses a vital aspect of being alive. So Dr Mimi having sealed them in a news vacuum like boil-in-a-bag vegetables induced a more clawing sense of starvation than salad-cream sandwiches ever did.
“I have to say,” Simon said as they parted; the nurse who’d pilfered Kay’s dressing gown was pointing sternly at her watch. “This place is way more depressing than I expected. I pictured you two, like, playing bingo—”
“Why would we have any interest in bingo merely because we’re old?” Cyril said.
“No, I mean, maybe meeting with book groups and going to guest lectures and, I don’t know, even going to wine tastings—”
Kay guffawed.
“But I won’t lie to you. I can’t promise I can get you out of here. I was surprised how easy it was to get you sectioned, and I only went along with it because I assumed it would be temporary. You’d get some therapy, come round to the view that you both still have plenty to live for, and then come home. I didn’t realize it was only easy in one direction. Once the state sinks its claws into you—not to mention Roy—it’s a bitch and a half to prise them out.”
Simon’s purported helplessness was disappointing, for it now looked as if no one would rescue them from the outside. But then, amongst Cyril’s favourite films wasn’t only the tragically messianic Cool Hand Luke, but The Shawshank Redemption.
Triumphing over distaste, Kay steadily ingratiated herself with Dr Mimi. Breaking the director down was tricky, because the woman was ensconced in multiple layers of phony sweetness, like a sugar-free jawbreaker. So Kay started with the obvious, admiring the garish designer suits and gaudy jewellery. She remarked in concern, “Are you eating all right? You look like you’ve lost weight.” At Halloween, she feigned enthusiasm for the pumpkin carving contest, and never complained about having to sculpt her own entry with a plastic spoon. She commiserated over how wearing it must have been to lavish so much compassion on a population that rarely even said thank you. She bemoaned the fact that Dr Mimi was still so young and vibrant, and here she was exhausting her youth amongst the aged and infirm. She made collusive comments about a rebellious new admission who refused to participate in group activities but who would soon learn who was boss. After suggesting a print (something slashing and pretentious from Abstract Expressionism) and choice of rug (something shaggy with bits hanging off that feigned to be fabric art), Kay became her advisor on the redecoration of Dr Mimi’s office.
The lubrication of obsequiousness soon loosened the administrator’s tongue.
“It seems we’re to be invaded Sunday week by a band of Smurfs, of all things!” Dr Mimi said, as Kay measured her window for blinds on the cusp of spring. “Some silly Belgian comic book has triggered a rage for fancy dress, and some of these groups have taken pledges for charity. I’m told all they’ll do is leap about the corridors flinging sweets. I’d refuse permission, except they’ll also make a substantial financial contribution to Close of Day Cottages. I don’t mind telling you: I’ve often to reach into my own pocket to make ends meet, and a refund is more than overdue.”
“That’s frightfully generous of you to put up with such antics for our sake,” Kay said. “In your place, heavens, my patience and good will would run clean out.”
* * *
With the aid of The Smurf’s Apprentice in the day room, Kay had her template. During Arts and Crafts, she pocketed pots of red and blue poster paint, as well as a packet of black pipe cleaners for the outsize glasses. She nicked cotton wool from a medical trolley; from housekeeping, she filched a yellow mop head. The foreign laundry circulating through their chambers netted two blue shirts, one pair of red men’s trousers, and a pair of white leggings. For the hats with distinctive bloops at the tips, she swiped a couple of watch caps from the staff coat cupboard and bound a ball of socks in each crown. She drilled Cyril in advance that if they were caught, they were only participating in group activities, like good senior citizens.
The day the Smurfs descended, residents were allowed from their private suites to gawp along the corridors. As the costumed troupe exuberated down the hall singing, the youngsters tossed boiled sweets on either side, for which fitter residents happily scrambled. Face and hands painted blue, mouth smeared red, head draped with the yellow mop head and topped with the watch cap and its dangling sock bloop, Kay slipped into the visitors’ manic parade wearing the white leggings and blue top. The hardest part at eighty with toe arthritis was to spring along the corridor in a convincing imitation of still being twenty-two. But the “la-la-la!” lyrics were easy enough to master, and she’d been practising her intonation in sing-alongs.
Once Kay threaded out with the rest of the troupe into the sunshine, the challenge was not to cry. But there wasn’t time for exhilaration. When she spotted Cyril in his sagging white beard and ill-fitting red pants, it was obvious that their ad hoc getups wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny in broad daylight. Besides, the young people piling garrulously into a coach all knew one another. And throwing themselves on the mercy of the revellers would be too risky. These innocents knew nothing of Close of Day Cottages; assuming the old dears had lost their wits, the Good Samaritans would turn them in. Shooting a bitter glance at the institution whose exterior she hadn’t laid eyes on since they arrived, Kay grabbed her husband and pulled him behind a skip. The coach drove off.
They had no idea where they were. But by five p.m. they’d be missed at dinner, so time was short. Battling to the other side of a hedge, they struck across a patch of scrubland towards the drone of traffic. They scuttled up a hillock, to discover the very epitome of Western liberty: the motorway. But Kay’s heart sank. With no services in sight, it was a smart motorway, whose hard shoulder, once a refuge, was an active lane. That made pulling over for hitchhikers the kiss of death, and that was assuming anyone would stop for an elderly couple painted blue.
“We have to get out of this vicinity double quick!” Cyril said, trying to catch his breath. Seated hokey cokey hadn’t improved his stamina. “Or they’ll send out the goons and haul us right back! After all, we hardly look inconspicuous.”
“And how would you feel about being trapped there again?” Kay shouted over the rush of traffic, looking into his eyes.
“I think you know.”
She kissed him deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and withdrew from his lips at last with the same reluctance she remembered from those days as well, when they had to get back to their medical studies. That kiss sent a tingling shimmer through the entirety of their lives together, as if their marriage were a crash cymbal whose rim she’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.
When they glanced behind at the scrubland, a posse of Close of Day Cottages staff was advancing fast.
Kay hollered as an articulated lorry boomed past, “Remember Thelma and Louise?”
It was awkward, what with Cyril’s stenosis, but she kept Cyril from stumbling as she helped her husband over the barrier. Hand in hand, they rushed into the loving arms of the archetypal White Van Man.