Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

They had not phoned ahead, but Dan had: the lady at reception said she was expecting two visitors for Sid. As it happened, they had picked a good time to come: there was bingo in the main hall and Sid would have come down from his room. They should just wait here and she'd find someone to lead the way.

Tom looked around, his eye settling on the glass display-case in the lobby. Inside were a couple of the eight-branched candelabra he recognized from New York: they were everywhere in Manhattan in the lead-up to Christmas, as Jews marked the festival of Chanukah. There were silver wine goblets in there too, engraved wth Hebrew lettering. Pride of place went to a commemorative shield, the kind that had so delighted young Tom Byrne when he and his mates had brought one back following the under-13 football championships for ‘Sheffield and region’.

There were two trolleys laden with teacups, a few forlorn balloons and a noticeboard. He stepped forward to read it: ‘Don't Forget: Chair-Based Exercise with Maureen at 3pm on Thursday’. Another promised ‘Judith's Sing-Along’. Next was a condolence board, with a standard message and a blank space where the name of the latest resident to collide with mortality could be inserted.

‘Hello!’

He turned to see a large woman in her mid-fifties, her chest a rock-solid shelf, striding towards them. From her ID tag Tom could see that her name was Brenda and that she was described as a ‘facilitator’.

‘We haven't seen you at the centre before, have we?’ She sounded breathless. ‘You're here to see Sid?’

The loss of the surname; the same thing had happened to Tom's father the minute he turned frail. Tom always used to correct them – nurses, doctors, all of them – referring to his own father as Mr Byrne, but they rarely got the hint. Mostly it would still be ‘Ron's very good at his wees, aren't you, Ron?’

‘We are,’ said Rebecca, back in doctor mode. Her professional voice was deep, like a lake at night. ‘We're not family. But he and my father were very close.’

‘And has your husband met Sid before?’

‘I'm not-’

‘He's not-’

They shot each other a quick look.

‘Well, I'm glad anyway. Visitors, he doesn't get so many.’ The voice was part East London and part something else, something Tom couldn't place. It was musical, almost sing-song: a Jewish melody. ‘The sons come every now and then, but you know how it is. Everyone's busy.’

She led them through double doors into a large hall, divided by what seemed to be a wooden garden trellis. Brenda pointed at it and said, ‘This is our dining area. That side's meat, this side's milk,’ as if that made matters clearer. Apparently to Rebecca it did.

On the milk side of the divide, there were perhaps fifteen old people seated at five or six round tables arranged in café formation. At the head of the room was a man at a table of his own, clutching a microphone and, with no expression in his voice, reading out a series of numbers. Occasionally, one of the old folks would scratch away at a card. Despite the absence of patter or laughter, Tom realized the man was a bingo-caller. The electronic sign on the table at his side, flashing each number as he called it, was for the benefit of those too deaf to hear.

‘Ooh, I'm surprised,’ said Brenda, laying a hand across her vast bust. ‘I thought he'd be here. I hope he hasn't gone wandering. You know about Sid's condition? His son explained, yes?’

Rebecca flashed Tom a look of panic. ‘No. No, he didn't. He said it might be difficult to talk to his father, but he-’

‘Oh, I expect he didn't like to talk about it. But Sid's not the only one here, you know. Lots of them have it. I sometimes think it's a blessing. To protect them from remembering too much. Although the trouble is, they do remember-’

‘Can we meet him, do you think?’ Rebecca was getting impatient.

Brenda now led them out of the hall and down a small flight of stairs. ‘This is the art room,’ she announced, like a head teacher guiding prospective parents around a school. Tom saw a man with white stubble carefully add a stick to a model steam train made entirely of matchsticks. ‘That's Melvyn,’ Brenda announced. ‘He used to be a watchmaker.’

Next, Brenda poked her head around the door of a room decked out as a hairdresser's salon, just like the one Tom's mother used to visit on alternate Fridays when he was a boy. It came complete with those sit-under, helmet-style hairdryers: Tom remembered manoeuvring himself as a five-year-old into one and pretending he was a cosmonaut.

‘I didn't think he'd be here, but checking never hurt. It's mainly the ladies who come here. For a chat.’ Tom saw a price list by the door: shampoo and set £5.

They ascended two flights of stairs. ‘They do wander sometimes, I'm afraid,’ Brenda said, catching her breath from the climb. ‘When they're like that. Sometimes they leave the building altogether. And you know where we find them? Usually standing outside the house where they lived as a child.’ A sad look changed the shape of Brenda's mouth. ‘Although not in Sid's case of course.’ Suddenly her face brightened. ‘I think I can hear someone,’ she sing-songed. She pushed open a pair of double doors and they walked into a large room whose floor was almost entirely covered in a mat the colour of a billiard table. At the far end was a solitary upright piano and, hunched over it, a man with white hair on both sides of a bald head, playing scales over and over.

‘This is the room we use for mat bowls – oh, our gentlemen residents like that – and for line dancing,’ Brenda said, not to be diverted from her tour. ‘And there, at the piano, is Sid.’ She smiled with satisfaction, as if vindicated that the system worked after all. ‘Sid, visitors for you!’

The old man's gaze remained fixed on his left hand as it moved up and down the keyboard.

‘I say, Sid, these nice young people have come for a chat.’ She turned to Rebecca and Tom, her back deliberately to Sid Steiner. ‘Maybe now's not a good time. Could you come back tomorrow? Or at the weekend?’

‘We'd love to, we really would.’ The doctor voice again. ‘But unfortunately I lost my own father this week and there's something urgent that has come up. I think Sid might be the only person who can help us.’

‘I wish you long life, dear.’ Brenda took Rebecca's hand. ‘And you need to ask Sid something? You need to find out information?’

Rebecca nodded. Brenda's mouth formed itself into an expression suggesting scepticism verging on alarm. She looked at Sid, then back to Rebecca. ‘Lets see what a cup of tea can do.’

At the mention of tea, Sid halted mid-scale. He lifted his arm up and placed it back on his lap. Gently, Brenda took hold of his shoulders and turned him towards Rebecca and Tom.

His face was liver-spotted and veined but he was still recognizable as the man who had toasted the poker club's collective good health thirty years earlier. His eyebrows had become overgrown, like an unkempt hedge, and his earlobes were long and furred. He was, Brenda had reminded them, eighty-nine years old. When DIN were in their first hunting season, Sid Steiner would have been in his twenties: fit, strong and fearless.

‘Hello, Sid,’ Rebecca said gently. She gestured towards a column of stacking chairs, and Tom pulled out two of them. Once she was at eye level with the old man, she spoke again. ‘I'm Gerald Merton's daughter, Rebecca.’

‘Who?’

‘I'm Gerald Merton's daughter.’

‘What do you say?’

‘Gershon Matzkin.’

‘Gershon Matzkin? You're Gershon's wife?’

‘I'm his daughter.’

‘Gershon's a good boy.’

Rebecca dipped her head and, as it hung there, low, Tom could see the sides of her eyes: they were wet. Was it despair at the pitiful state of Sid Steiner or the notion of her father as a boy that had done that? Tom didn't know, but he felt such a strong urge to touch her, to console her, that this time he didn't fight it. He squeezed her shoulder and, in thanks, she touched his hand briefly. Even now, even here, he could feel the crackle of electricity.