“It’s so stuffy in here,” she said to Teddy. He muttered something that might have been agreement. The heating was turned up impossibly high, intensifying the loathsome smells that made you gag the minute you walked into the building and helpfully incubating the millions of germs that must be circulating. There were the usual animal odours of urine and faeces as well as the reek of something rotted and spoiled that no amount of disinfectant could cover up. The scent of old age, Viola presumed. When she visited Poplar Hill she kept a handkerchief up her sleeve doused in Chanel that she sniffed occasionally, like a nosegay against the plague.
The doors to the rooms were kept open so that each room was a little vignette, the wreckage inside on display, like some awful zoo or a museum of horrors. Some people lay in bed and barely moved, while others moaned and shouted. Then there were those who were propped in chairs, their heads lolling on their chests like sleeping toddlers, and somewhere, unseen, a woman was meowing like a cat. As you walked along the corridors you had to slalom around the walking wounded (as Viola thought of them), the lost souls who simply shuffled up and down all day with no idea who they were or where they were going (nowhere, clearly). None of them knew the code for the security keypad on the locked door of the wing (1-2-3-4—how hard could it be?), and if they had known they couldn’t have remembered and if they could have remembered it would still have been meaningless because their brains were full of holes, like lace. Occasionally Viola had found them gathered, like zombies (slow ones, they weren’t going to be chasing anyone, paid or not), at the door, staring mutely through the wired glass at a world that was forbidden to them now. They were prisoners, serving the lees of their life sentences. The walking dead.
To intensify the unpleasant atmosphere of the wing there was a blaring cacophony of competing televisions coming from every room, all with the volume turned up high—Deal or No Deal trying to shout down Escape to the Country and no one really caring what they watched because they couldn’t make sense of any of it. There was always a buzzer going off somewhere, long and insistent, as a resident tried to get the attention of someone, anyone.
There was also a communal lounge where residents were parked in front of an even bigger, louder television set. For reasons Viola couldn’t fathom, the lounge also contained a large cage that imprisoned a pair of lovebirds that no one ever paid any attention to. She had disliked Fanning Court, the sheltered-housing complex that she had cajoled her father into almost twenty years ago now, but compared to the nursing home—oh, sorry, care home—it was a lost Eden. “Why this is hell,” she said conversationally to her father, “nor am I out of it, and nor are you.” She smiled brightly at a care assistant going past the open door. Who in their right mind could think that euthanasia was a bad thing? Shipman had spoiled it for everyone.
But however awful it was in Poplar Hill, it meant that Viola didn’t have to be the one who coped, who changed nappies and spoon-fed pap and tried to think of ways to entertain in the long hours in between. She had never been much good at that stuff with her children so it seemed unlikely she would develop the skills now for someone at the other end of life. She just wasn’t cut out to look after others.
Viola imagined herself as someone whose insides were made of a hard substance, as if soft organs and tissue had calcified at some point in the long-ago past. The Petrification of Viola Romaine. Good title for something. Her life, she supposed. But who would write it? And how could she stop them?
To be honest (with herself at any rate), she didn’t really like people. (“ ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres,’ Viola Romaine laughs lightly, yet this is clearly not true as she writes with great sympathy about the human condition.” Red magazine, 2011.) In her defence (Viola frequently thought of herself in the third person, as if presenting herself to a jury), in her defence, she was regularly moved to tears these days by tales of cruelty to animals, which, if nothing else, proved she wasn’t a sociopath. (The jury was reserving judgement.) If you read the tabloids, which Viola did—“Important to know the enemy,” she would have said to the jury, but actually the red-tops were a much better read than the smugly self-satisfied broadsheets—it seemed as though there were people all over the place who were starving horses to death or putting puppies into tumble dryers or popping kittens into microwaves as though they were snacks.