‘What’s the third thing?’
I looked at the little box. ‘Mood swings.’
Elsie started to laugh, and I laughed along with her. We laughed so much, Natasha was forced to put down her mobile telephone for a moment and ask if we were all right.
‘Perfectly fine, thank you. Do you ever have mood swings, Natasha? Do you find yourself struggling to reason?’ I looked at the mobile telephone. ‘Do you have problems communicating with other human beings?’
Natasha frowned and decamped to the far corner. She was still staring at us over the top of the screen when a nurse appeared from one of the rooms and waved us inside.
‘This is us then,’ I said, and gave a very big sigh.
The room was quite pleasant, considering it had a doctor inside of it. There were flowers on the windowsill, although I strongly suspected they were of the pretend variety, and a display of the same leaflets I’d been reading just a moment before, only they were arranged in a little fan on the coffee table, like after-dinner mints. Instead of hard plastic seats, there were armchairs. There was even a cushion, although I put it straight on the floor, because cushions always play havoc with Elsie’s lumbar region.
The doctor smiled at us. He sat in the armchair opposite, with a pile of notes and a stethoscope swaying from his shirt.
‘Are they listening to my heart as well?’ I said.
‘I don’t think so.’ Elsie frowned at the stethoscope. ‘I think it’s just to make sure everyone knows who they’re supposed to be.’
The doctor smiled again and asked for our details, and I answered for both of us, because Elsie said I needed the practice.
‘And you?’ I said.
The doctor stared at us.
‘Hello My Name Is?’ I said. ‘I’ve watched Holby City, I know the rules.’
His name was Dr Andrews, and when he’d washed his hands and rolled his sleeves above his elbows, he told us he was going to ask a series of questions.
‘Is there a time limit?’ I said. ‘For us to answer?’
Dr Andrews glanced at the clock above our heads and said that it was quite a busy clinic.
‘The mini mental-state examination doesn’t usually take long,’ he said.
‘Mini?’ I frowned at him.
He told us there were thirty questions, which didn’t sound very mini to me. The world of medicine appears to be littered with understatements – small scratch, slight discomfort, minor abrasion. I offered him a selection of examples I’d experienced, although I didn’t venture into my bowels, or we’d have been there all day.
‘Shall we begin?’ said Dr Andrews, and Elsie and I sat up a little straighter.
It’s strange how easily you can become flustered when someone is watching you. If they were casual questions, asked at a bus stop or in a supermarket queue, I’m sure the answers would come to us easily, but when Dr Andrews is staring down at you with his pen waiting over a piece of paper, you begin to doubt even your own name. He started out by asking the day of the week. Of course, I knew it was Tuesday, but going to Whitby threw me off and I plumped for Thursday before either of us had even really thought about it. Elsie said she was going to choose Tuesday, but she waited for me to answer first, because she wanted to know what I’d say. We were so confused by the days of the week, by the time he got to the month and the year, we just blurted out the first thing we thought of. Of course it wasn’t 1997. 1997 was the year Diana died. I told Dr Andrews, and asked if we could have an extra point for knowing it, but he shook his head.
‘There isn’t a box for the Princess of Wales,’ he said.
Neither of us could remember the name of the hospital, either. It’s not something you notice, is it? And Natasha pressed the button in the lift, so how could we know what floor we were on? I told him Natasha would fill him in, and should I go and get her, but Dr Andrews just moved on to the next question.
‘Take seven away from a hundred,’ he said. ‘And keep taking seven away, until I tell you to stop.’
I looked at his clipboard across the coffee table.
‘You have the answers.’ I pointed. ‘Printed at the side.’
Dr Andrews curled his arm around the sheet of paper, like a child in a classroom. ‘You shouldn’t worry about what I know,’ he said.
‘But of course I should worry about what you know. You’re the person deciding which one of us is going to be sent to Greenbank.’ I craned my neck. ‘Spell WORLD backwards. D-L-R—’
Dr Andrews sprang from his seat like a jack-in-a-box and conducted the rest of the test from the far corner of the room, next to the window. Elsie struggled to hear what he was saying, because it’s her bad side, and I had to repeat everything to make sure she understood. The last thing he did was hold up a piece of paper. It said, Close Your Eyes on it.
‘Why would we want to do that?’ I said.
‘Because I’m asking you to.’ Dr Andrews held the instructions a little closer.
‘Is it a surprise?’ I said.
I heard Dr Andrews sigh. ‘Do you not usually do as someone asks?’
I frowned. ‘Not if I can help it.’
When we’d finished the test, we watched Dr Andrews fill out an entire side of A4. We buttoned ourselves into our coats and I turned to him and asked what we’d got.
He said he would be forwarding on the results to Cherry Tree in due course. He still didn’t look up. Not even when I said, ‘They’re our scores, though, aren’t they? Shouldn’t someone tell us first?’
The nurse herded us back into the care of Natasha and her mobile telephone, and we were marched through the hospital – past the League of Friends – and shuffled on to the back seat of a taxi. I looked out of the window.
‘I didn’t really enjoy that little chat very much, Elsie,’ I said.
When the taxi pulled in at Cherry Tree, it struggled to do a three-point turn, because there was a police car sitting right in the middle of the car park.
Natasha looked up from her mobile telephone for the first time in twenty minutes and stared. It’s strange how we always stare at emergency vehicles. Whenever there’s a siren, everyone appears at their windows to watch it whip past, even though no one has the first clue where it might be going. Perhaps it’s reassuring to hear the sound of an alarm disappear into the distance and away from our own lives. Although the police car at Cherry Tree was silent, it was parked at a peculiar angle, in the way only police cars seem to be able to get away with.
Of course, Elsie and I headed straight for the residents’ lounge, to watch through the glass. Jack had already taken up his position on the sofa, and nodded at us when we walked in.
‘Something’s afoot,’ he said. ‘Although no one is saying what.’
There were two policemen in Miss Ambrose’s office, and their uniforms seemed to take up all the space. Miss Ambrose was crowded into the corner, squeezed up against her desk, watching them lift everything out of the filing cabinets.
‘Fraud, do you think?’ Jack said. ‘Has someone been cooking the books?’
‘Miss Ambrose doesn’t look the type, does she?’ I said. ‘She buys all her clothes from Marks & Spencer.’
Jack wandered over to the noticeboard and lingered by the door.
‘Does shopping at Marks & Spencer offer some kind of indemnity?’ Elsie said. ‘Because if that’s the case, half of Cherry Tree must be sainted.’
Jack wandered back. ‘Can’t hear a bloody word,’ he said.
We sat in a row on the sofa. After a few minutes, Handy Simon appeared through the double doors with a clipboard, but as soon as he saw the policemen, he took three steps backwards and disappeared again.
‘Do you think they’re after the handyman?’ I said. ‘It’s usually the handyman, isn’t it? Or someone in the background, someone you’ve not noticed very much.’
Elsie stared at me. ‘Life isn’t an episode of Columbo.’