The Stone Gallows (18 page)

‘That would be great, thank you.'

She showed me out of the office and into a corridor that was painted a dark, uriney yellow. ‘Inch Meadows is actually shaped a little bit like a capital “H”. The bit we're in just now is the horizontal bar, and it includes such things as the dining room, the hairdresser's, the laundry, the admin office. . . stuff like that. The residents' rooms make up the legs of the “H”, and like I said, there's thirty on each side. At the top and bottom of each leg is a large and small sitting room. Once they're up and dressed, most of our residents like to spend time in the sitting rooms.'

‘Do they all have their own rooms, or are there shared rooms?'

‘We used to have a few double rooms and a couple of triple rooms, but the law changed recently, so now every room is a single with its own en suite bathroom.' She stopped outside a door and took a large bunch of keys out of her pocket. ‘There's nobody staying in here just now, so nobody's going to mind if we have a wee peek.'

The room itself was about as big as a moderately sized bedroom. A single bed ran down one wall, and a large armchair faced a portable television that stood on top of a chest of drawers. A few faded pictures of nothing in particular graced the wall. I wondered if the reason there was nobody staying in the room was because the most recent tenant had died of depression, and they had yet to move somebody else in.

‘Of course, if your father had a favourite item of furniture, we'd encourage him to bring it with him, as long as it fitted.' Maureen said.

‘We try to do whatever we can to make it seem like home. You wouldn't be able to tell me whether or not he would be privately funded or if the DSS would be helping to meet his fees?'

I gave her the answer that Joe and I had agreed. ‘He'd be privately funded. He has a fair amount of savings, and I could help out. How much would it cost if he was to become a resident?'

‘Six hundred and fifty pounds a week,' Maureen said, without the slightest hint of embarrassment. ‘I know that it seems like a lot, but the amount is actually agreed with the local council. Of course, a lot of our residents are funded by public money.'

It did seem a lot. But I wasn't there to judge. I made a show of looking around. ‘It's a nice enough room, anyway.' I gestured at a door at the far end of the room. ‘And is this the bathroom?'

‘It is.' Maureen opened the door, revealing a small water closet. A large yellow object that looked like a Nan bread made out of cotton wool lay on the floor. There was a yellow stain in the middle of it. She stepped forward quickly, peeled a disposable plastic bag from a small roll that was on top of the toilet cistern, and stuffed the Nan bread inside it. ‘I'm so sorry about that. I'll need to speak to the girls and tell them to be more careful.'

To be honest, I wasn't exactly sure what I had seen, but I nodded and shrugged non-commitedly. Then the smell hit me and I realised that the Nan bread was actually a used incontinence pad. ‘Don't worry about it. I'm sure things like that can't be helped.'

‘Yes, well.' Her mouth was turned down, her eyes sour. ‘It's always annoying when something like that happens.' She breathed heavily through her nose and led me out of the room. We made our way towards the end of the corridor, me trailing behind like a dutiful student. Maureen kept up the sales pitch, such as it was. ‘Of course, there's plenty of bathrooms and things like that. I'm taking you to the large lounge for this wing so that you can see what it's like. We've just had it painted, so it looks lovely.'

Trying not to pass out from excitement, I followed her into a room that was large enough for at least thirty people. “Lovely” turned out to be a slight exaggeration. Whoever had been in charge of the decorating was either completely colour-blind or a big fan of the worst aspects of daytime television makeover shows. The walls were almost the same shade of yellow as the corridors, but in an attempt to inject some life into the mess, somebody had painted large pink and orange spots every few inches. The effect was enough to have any normal person reaching for the paracetamol, so Christ knew what it would do to somebody whose grasp of reality was already tenuous.

‘It's very. . . bright.'

‘Isn't it,' Maureen said. ‘I chose the colours myself. You wouldn't think they would work, but they do, don't they?'

I was unsure if I would be able to keep my tone neutral, so I nodded as I looked around. Warm rugs for cold knees were thrown casually over the back of armchairs that had been arranged in groups of about four or five. I brushed one of the chairs with my hand and realised that although they looked like they were fabric, they were actually made of some non-absorbent plastic. One wall was dominated by a large screen television, and beside it I saw a cheap stereo unit. Beside that was a stack of CD's. Daniel O'Donnell, Sydney Devine, Foster and Allen. God save me from getting old, if it meant having to live in a place like this. Listening to Daniel singing
Danny
Boy
while trying to avoid looking at the seizure-inducing walls would destroy whatever was left of my sanity.

‘Albert, are you not going through for your lunch?'

The tone was friendly, but the pitch was at least ten decibels above normal. I turned to see Maureen addressing a man who sat in one of the armchairs. He was in his eighties at least, wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on his elbows. He looked briefly at me before facing the woman in front of him and shaking his head. ‘No. Not today.'

‘Why not?'

‘Don't want to.'

‘Stewart won't be there. He's out with his daughter.'

‘I don't like Stewart.'

‘Well, he's not going to be there,' Maureen said patiently. ‘He's out.'

‘He chews with his mouth open. It's a vile habit. Vile.'

‘He's
out
, Albert.'

The old man shook his head resolutely.

‘How about I get the girls to bring you something on a tray then?'

The old man nodded. ‘That would be acceptable.' His eyes crossed briefly over to me again before returning to her. ‘Who's that then?'

‘This is Mr Hill. His father might be coming to live with us.

Wouldn't that be nice? Another man for you to talk to?' She lowered her voice and turned to me. ‘We've got forty-six female residents and only twelve men. He's a wee bit outnumbered here.'

‘It depends,' Albert said. ‘If he behaves the way some of them behave. . .' He muttered something unintelligible to himself. I doubted it was friendly.

I held out a hand to the old man. His grip was surprisingly firm, and I made sure to raise my voice. ‘It's nice to meet you. How are you today?'

‘I'm fine. Fine. But I want to go to bed. It's getting late.'

‘It's lunchtime, Albert,' Maureen said. ‘You'd spend all day in bed if you could. Anyway, Mr Hill, we best be getting on.'

We headed back to her office. The dining room was completely full by now. Staff milled from table to table as they fetched and carried for the residents. I watched as one girl tried to feed three people at the same time. One old lady sat at a table by herself, a male member of staff spooning something from a bowl into her mouth. As I watched, she spat the whole mess back out onto the floor. The boy patiently wiped her mouth with a napkin and tried again. The window was open a fraction, and the noise was a cacophony of dozens of unrelated conversations. People howled and gibbered for no apparent reason.

It was awful. A hellhole. I couldn't imagine condemning somebody I cared about to a place like this.

Both my parents had died nice and quickly, Dad from his heart attack, Mum from one of those evil but incredibly polite cancers that waited until it had sank bony fingers into every single internal organ before announcing its presence and then spreading through the body like wildfire. She survived for two weeks from diagnosis to death, eventually shuffling off her mortal coil while she slept in a private room in a seven bedded hospice that seemed to have twice as many staff members as Inch Meadows.

Maybe I was being unreasonable. This was a world I had never seen. I never had to sit and watch somebody I loved deteriorate slowly, their personality being stripped away layer by layer, until there was nothing left but the shell. I never had to clean up piss and shit, I never had to see the way that Death sometimes teases his victims, not taking them cleanly but toying with them, stealing pieces of them a little at a time, their minds, their bodies, their dignity, their souls.

Yeah, maybe I was being naive.

I turned my eyes away to find Maureen watching me. She said quietly, ‘I know that it's not very nice.'

I tried a weak smile. ‘You know, you're a terrible sales person.'

‘I don't believe in lying to people.We're committed to trying to give our residents the very best we have available, but it can be very hard sometimes.'

Suddenly there was a shriek. I looked over Maureen's shoulder to see the elderly lady that was being fed by herself reach over and claw at the boy's face. ‘You bastard bastard BASTARD!'

‘It's alright, Bessie, it's just lunchtime.' The boy soothed her as best he could, stroking her hand and speaking gently to her. Eventually she calmed.

I said, ‘Are all care homes like this?'

‘Some of them aren't as good, I hate to say. I know that you will probably think I'm biased, but I genuinely believe that Inch Meadows is the best care home in the area. Every other day you see something on the news about how life expectancy has gone up? Twenty years ago a woman would live until she was seventy-three, and now the average age of death is eighty-one?'

I nodded.

‘Thing is that although people are living longer, they're not enjoying good health. There's more dementia, more strokes, more cardiac problems. Of our fifty-nine residents, only five of them can walk without using a stick. Forty two of them need two people or more to lift them. And that, I'm afraid, is about average. It's a lot of work.

Nursing homes are becoming more and more like long-term stay hospital wards, except that we have much fewer trained staff available.' She seemed to realise she was dragging on. ‘I'm sorry. I'm drifting off at a tangent. I promise you that if your father were to become a resident, he would get the very best of care we could offer.'

Another shriek came from the dining room. It was accompanied by the sound of crockery smashing and a yelp of pain from the male care assistant. Maureen looked over her shoulder. ‘I better get out there.' She was already getting to her feet. ‘Before Bessie kills somebody.'

7.5.

Five minutes later I was back in my car, glad to see Inch Meadows disappearing in my rear-view mirror. The time was nearly half past one, and despite having two breakfasts, my own stomach was growl-ing. I stopped at the same petrol station that I had asked directions at earlier in the day. It was one of these large rural places that sell everything from disposable barbecues to emergency plumbing supplies.

The
Kerrang
-reading assistant had been replaced by a bored looking girl with bright pink nails and enough chewing gum to choke a donkey. Wary of petrol station food, I bought a packet of crisps and a chocolate muffin, working on the principal that as neither of them required to be refrigerated, they were unlikely to be a suitable breed-ing ground for salmonella.

Pink Nails held out her hand. ‘Two forty-four.'

‘You're kidding me.'

‘The muffin's one ninety-nine.'

I forked over the money. ‘What, does it unwrap itself?'

A smile crossed her face. ‘You'd think so, at that price.'

She seemed to be a little bit more on the ball than the fellow she had replaced, so I decided to cast a line and see if anything came back.

‘I was looking for a nursing home that's meant to be near here?

Inch Meadows?'

She nodded and pointed in the direction I had already come from.

‘It's about a mile.'

‘Do you know it?'

‘My cousin works there.'

‘Any good?'

‘What, my cousin?' Again, she smiled. She was in her twenties, quite pretty if you could get past the cud in her mouth. ‘Very, if you believe what the graffiti on the bus shelter says.'

‘I meant the home,' I said. ‘I'm looking for a place for my father.'

‘Gemma says it's alright.' Her nose wrinkled. ‘Don't know if I would fancy it, though.'

‘Why not?'

She shrugged non-committally. ‘You know. Old people moaning about how cold it is in the middle of summer. And the money's crap.'

I wondered how much Pink Nails made an hour. ‘Suppose you could be right.'

‘She says that the matron's a bit of a bitch.'

‘What, to the residents?'

‘To the staff. Mind you, Gemma's a lazy cow, so maybe she needs a good kick up the bum.'

I pretended to think. ‘My dad's social worker said the owner was a woman called. . . Margaret Brown? Black? Something like that?'

‘Maureen. And I think she's just the matron. The owner's a man.

Sometimes he stops on his way there. Drives a big Range Rover.'

‘I was at a nursing home in Clarkston where the matron was married to the owner. The whole place was a big family business.'

The girl was shaking her head. ‘Don't think so.'

I waited. If there was any local gossip about the relationship between Maureen Black and Ian Sloan – or even Sophie, for that matter– I had given Pink Nails a perfect opportunity to fill me in.

She said nothing. Either she didn't know or she wasn't telling.

7.6.

Lunch was a solitary affair.

I ate in the car. The hubbub of the dining room had left me craving some calmness and serenity, and I had eventually found some on a farm-track a couple of miles outside the village of Eaglesham. The main road was a quarter-mile behind me, the silence broken only by the occasional drone of a distant car. I was surrounded by nothing but fields and sky, the breeze ruffling the grass and rolling the clouds slowly toward the horizon.