A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin. Helen Forrester

Чтение книги онлайн.

      NINE

       ‘Old Folk’s Home? Feels More Like a Bleeding Gaol’

       1965

      ‘You know, Angie, when I had to go down to the corner shop that night, I was more worried than I’d been in years.’

      Angie acknowledged the remark with an absent-minded nod. She was attending to Pat, the comatose patient in the next bed who had to be turned every two hours. She impatiently whipped back the curtain drawn round her and pulled the bedclothes off her.

      Martha was sitting up in her bed watching her, while she gratefully sipped the illicit mug of tea which Angie had brought up for her. Nowadays, every time the grossly overworked nursing aide came into the bedroom, which held five invalids, Martha would remorselessly continue the story of her life: it was as if, by doing so, she gave some meaning to her current existence.

      Today was no different.

      ‘For one thing, Angie, I was real worried about Them pulling down the wall between us and the main road. It meant that any stranger could walk in on the court. We’d always been safe in that court ’cos you knew everybody. You knew who to warn the kids about, who’d steal, even which women was giving the men the eye. And all the women watched out for the kids.

      ‘And that was the evening I realised that me Number Nine – that’s James – was the last kid born there: no new tenant had come in for years. It would only take two empty houses in Norris Green or Dovecot or some other place to rehouse Mary Margaret’s and my families. Then all the single people living there would be told – legal, like – that they must find themselves places to live, and, bingo, They could empty the whole court and pull it down.

      ‘I didn’t feel safe at all, I didn’t. Not about nothing.’

      She paused to take another slurp of tea, while Angie braced herself, heaved and successfully turned over the hapless Pat. Despite her coma, Pat screeched with pain.

      Martha winced. She carefully put her empty mug down on the smelly Victorian commode next to her bed.

      Then she went on more vaguely, as if anxious to justify the growth of old fears, ‘They’d been closing off the courts in the north end of the town for years: them houses in the north end was only ten feet by ten feet, one room to a floor. They was much more crowded than us – and they was a long way off from us.

      ‘But when George and Maria in the very next court to us was to be moved, it suddenly seemed as if me hour had come.’

      She flung her arm across her heart, as if to indicate her shock. ‘And I knew I’d have to go and see Maria, poor dear, fight or no fight. Couldn’t leave a sister to face eviction alone. In the end, I didn’t have time, I were that harassed. Weeks later, I walked all the way to Norris Green to see her in her new house.’

      Angie did not respond. She looked down at Pat, and hesitated: her undersheet was soaked; the bed should be stripped. Then she pulled the woman’s blankets over her. Leave the bedding to the night nurse, Mrs Kelly, to change. Let her do something for once, other than sleep on the visitor’s settee in the hallway – ignoring the cries of the patients, according to the sufferers themselves.

      Martha watched Angie with the same fascination as a rabbit might exhibit if faced with a snake about to eat it; she dreaded becoming entirely helpless, as were the rest of the women in her room. How would she bear the pain?