Not really, Viola thought, not at all. She burst into tears, right there on the stones of York, her expensive Wolford tights ripped, her knees raw and bloody. She couldn’t stop. It was awful. Tears retched out of her insides as if she’d suddenly tapped into some ancient aquifer of grief. But it wasn’t just the tears that horrified her, it was the words that came out of her mouth. The primeval howl, the alpha and omega of all human invocation. Not a howl but a whimper. “I want my mother,” she whispered. “I want my mother.”
“You can have mine, pet,” someone said and the hens all burst into laughter, but nonetheless, sensing a woman ruined, possibly by drink, possibly not, the hens closed ranks and clustered protectively around her. Someone helped her to her feet, someone else passed a tissue, a third passed a bottle of Evian that turned out to contain neat vodka. One of the older hens, a broiler with a wrinkled neck and a face that seemed to have collapsed and who was wearing a T-shirt declaring her to be “Mother of the Bride,” handed Viola a pack of Wet Wipes. They ascertained where she was heading and she was shepherded tenderly back to Cedar Court by her posse of Slutz. The doorman made a futile attempt to stop them breaching his defences, but they were already pouring over the threshold and spilling into the foyer. Viola fumbled for her key card and one of the hens lifted it up triumphantly and waved it at the nervous receptionist.
“She’s a bit tired and emotional,” one of the hens explained. “Poor old thing,” a young one, a spring chicken, said. Old thing! I’m only sixty, Viola wanted to protest, it’s the new forty. But she didn’t have any protest left in her.
She had an alarming vision of the hens continuing the party in her room, but eventually she managed to persuade them to leave her at the door to the lift. The Mother of the Bride pressed something into her hand, a tiny tissue-wrapped gift. “Valium,” the Mother said, “but just take a half. They’re high-strength. I’ve built up a tolerance.” A still-teary Viola hiccuped her gratitude.
In the refuge of her room she forwent her usual nightly routine—make-up off, teeth cleaned, hair brushed—and instead crawled wearily between sheets that were snapping with starch and recklessly washed down a whole Valium with two little bottles of vodka from the minibar. She feared nightmares, but instead she fell into a surprisingly delicious sleep. Golden slumbers kissed her eyes, silver moths flitted around her head and she dreamed a powerful dream.
She woke early, showered, dressed, ordered a large pot of coffee and assessed the damage. She felt as if she had been, if not in a war, then certainly in a bloody skirmish. What else did she feel? She checked herself all over. Her wrists felt mildly sprained and her knees were horribly stiff and sore, as if someone had hammered them all night. Her head felt stuffed with wool—the Mother of the Bride’s Valium, she supposed—but otherwise intact. Then she looked inside herself. Completely fucked, she concluded.
She checked out, relieved that there was no sign of the staff who had witnessed her humiliating fall from grace last night. How were the Slutz this morning, she wondered? Hopelessly hung-over, probably still asleep. (Although actually they were helping themselves enthusiastically to an eat-all-you-can full-English buffet breakfast in a superior Travelodge and getting ready to rampage through Primark. They were from Gateshead, they had stamina.)
Viola asked the doorman for a taxi to Poplar Hill. Spending the day with her father would be penance for last night. She would watch the Diamond Jubilee with him for extra contrition.
Her father was clearly exhausted, sleeping almost all the time now, like an aged dog. Why didn’t he just go? Was he hanging on for a hundred? Two more years of this? It was mere existence—an amoeba had more life. “The triumph of the human spirit,” the new nursing sister said, new enough to talk about “positive outcomes” and “enhancement programmes”—emollient management-speak, meaningless to most of the residents of Poplar Hill, who were either dying or demented or both. It was called a “care home” but there was precious little of either to be had when you were run by a profit-based health-care provider employing minimum-wage staff. And, by the way, neither poplar nor hill were anywhere to be seen. This was a particular bugbear which Viola found herself bringing up at regular intervals, when really it was the least of her criticisms and just made her seem like another mad woman to the—mainly foreign—care workers. (“Polish and Tagalog spoken,” it said in the Poplar Hill brochure.)