‘Not especially, thank you,’ I shouted.
We passed retail parks, sprouting like broccoli at the edge of towns. Empty high streets with injured shops, boarded and bruised, shouting their red messages at no one in particular. People who pulled their world behind them in a trolley, and waited whilst pelican crossings counted down their lives in orange seconds. Groups of teenagers, who stretched their afternoons out on street corners. All those small lives, acting out their purpose in a strange solitude. I passed the time by describing everything in detail, and Elsie stopped ignoring me after a while and joined in. Every so often, Chris looked at us in the rear-view mirror and frowned.
We passed a sports shop. Plastic people in green and orange stared out from the window. ‘I don’t recognise anything,’ I said. ‘Where’s the little place that sells sweets in paper bags?’
Elsie looked over. ‘I’m not sure people buy sweets in paper bags any more.’
‘And every other shop is a hairdressers. I never realised people had so much hair.’
We stopped at a set of traffic lights and I craned around Elsie to see the churchyard. The gravestones waited in rows, and they watched Marks & Spencer through a gap between a bank and a building society.
‘I’ll end up in there,’ I said. ‘As sure as eggs is eggs.’
‘Have another sucky sweet and don’t be so morbid.’
I reached into the bag. ‘I’m only being realistic.’
She took the empty wrapper and put it in her pocket. ‘Well if you want to be completely realistic, you won’t end up in there at all. You’ll end up in the cemetery at the other end of town.’
‘They’ve built a cemetery?’
‘They have,’ she said. ‘Too many old people, so they had to make an overspill. Like a car park.’
‘That’s a shame.’ I looked out of the back window as we drove away.
‘It is,’ she said. ‘I was hoping we could both have a corner spot, near the chancel.’
I took another sweet for later. ‘Now we’ll end up in the middle of a field, overlooking the bypass.’
We reached Greenbank. There was low cloud, a cliff-top of a sky, and it started to spit down at us. The building waited for us through a windscreen crowded with rain, and the edges of it blurred against the clouds until the chalk white of the bricks vanished into nothing.
‘We’re here,’ said Chris, quite unnecessarily.
No one moved.
I reached for the door handle, but then I changed my mind and put my hand back on my lap.
‘Shall we head inside?’ Jack nodded towards the rain. ‘Are you coming, Chris?’
Chris took a CD and a Boots meal deal out of the glove compartment. ‘I think I’ll wait here. Listen to a bit of ABBA. Pass the time.’
‘It’s warmer inside,’ Jack said.
Chris looked up at the glass mouths of the Georgian windows and shook his head.
‘I’m going in,’ Jack said. ‘I’d rather face Greenbank than sit here and watch you eat a prawn sandwich.’
The woman who opened the main door was dressed in varying shades of beige, as if her wardrobe had been selected entirely from a row on a paint chart. Small eyes. Thin lips. Elephant’s Breath.
She made an ‘o’ without a sound to go with it, and stepped back to allow us inside, where we fell into a world of beige carpets and beige wallpaper, and weighted velvet curtains. It was the air you noticed first, though. Still and polished with age, like walking into a room that is only used at Christmas, and each time you breathed in, your lungs filled up with the past.
‘You’ll find Clara in our west wing,’ said the woman, and she turned down a long corridor. It was less than a minute before she launched into the brochure.
‘And on the left, we have our secondary day room, with a forty-eight-inch plasma television screen and a constant staff presence.’
I glanced in. The television was switched off. All forty-eight inches of it.
‘And on the right, our award-winning gardens can be enjoyed through the French windows.’
‘Award-winning?’ I whispered to Elsie and tried the handle.
‘Which are locked at all times, for health and safety purposes.’ The woman turned and smiled at us, and I smiled back and lifted my fingers away from the glass.
I looked into each room as we passed. They were silent and empty, except for the occasional glimpse of a distant uniform. ‘Everyone must be on a trip,’ I said.
We arrived in another hallway, which drifted with lavender and old age. ‘Visitors are not usually permitted in residents’ rooms,’ said the beige woman, ‘but Clara is –’ She consulted her notes. ‘– not comfortable in communal areas.’
‘She never was,’ I said. ‘She was terrified of people, especially her father.’
‘It took us ages to persuade her to come to the dance,’ said Elsie.
‘The dance?’ I pushed my thoughts into a frown.
‘Florence, that’s why we’re seeing her. To ask about the dance,’ Elsie said.
The woman looked at her notes. ‘Dance? It doesn’t say anything about a dance in here.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’
‘We’re on the third floor.’ The woman looked at Jack. ‘Would you like to use the lift?’
The lift waited for customers in the corner of the hall. It had an iron gate and a very complicated pulley system, which appeared to be suspended from the ceiling.
‘I think I’ll go with the stairs,’ said Jack.
‘Don’t mind the stick,’ I said. ‘He only uses it to boss people about.’
Jack was still laughing when we reached the first landing.
As we climbed, the scent of lavender disappeared, and was replaced with the wipe-clean fragrance of a waiting room. Its aroma was rather like a doctor’s surgery or how you would imagine an operating theatre to smell. The furnishings altered, too. Vases of flowers were exchanged for cages of bedsheets, and the oil paintings became health and safety notices, drilled into the plaster and yellowed with age. Even the carpet turned to lino beneath our feet, as though gravity had pulled all the soft furnishings to the ground floor.
The woman turned right down another corridor. The doors became numbered, and the brochure descriptions disappeared along with the dried flowers. Within each room was a small piece of torment. Eyes were glazed with vacancy. Mouths gaped. Limbs rested on angry, twisted sheets, although perhaps worse were the ones who lay silent in perfectly made beds. The ones who had run out of arguing. I stared into each room, and a parcel of life stared back. Outside each door was a photograph, and the corridor looked as though a giant family album had been unfolded along its walls. People posed in gardens and on seafronts. They lifted children on to their hips and looked out at us from beneath Christmas trees. The woman saw us staring.
‘It shows the staff who they used to be,’ she said.
I tried to match the people in the rooms with the people under the Christmas trees. The ice-cream people on promenades, creasing their eyes in the sunshine, the people smiling at me from their black-and-white lives. But they had all disappeared.
‘Here we are.’ The woman waited outside a door numbered forty-seven. Further down the corridor, I heard singing.
‘“Onward, Christian Soldiers”,’ I said.
‘Onward indeed,’ said Elsie.
The woman coughed. ‘Shall we?’
Room forty-seven was filled with light. As we’d walked through Greenbank, the clouds had hurried across a September sky, exchanging the rain for a watery sunlight. The harsh lines, the sharp edges of a windowsill, the white stare of a pictureless wall, were all diluted with a butterscotch kindness. On the bedside table were a box of tissues and a beaker of water. The room had an echo.
The woman said, ‘She has everything she needs,’ before all of us were even inside.
I looked up at the ceiling, and it looked back at me with a magnolia indifference.
‘We couldn’t trace any family.’ The woman ran a finger down a page in her notes. ‘She used to live in Wales. Husband died years ago.’
‘Husband?’ I said.
‘She married Fred. From the dance,’ said Elsie.