Samantha Harvey - Dear Thief

He gave the lock of hair to me out of solidarity. This is the only reason I can think of. It was years later, at my father’s funeral in 1993, and he turned up unexpectedly having learnt about the death from Teddy, sat at the back of the church in a strange woollen brown suit, on his own, and appeared to have been crying when he came up to me afterwards to offer sympathy. I understand about tears, they fall clear but they come from a murky collection of emotions all at once — he was not crying only for my father (whom he did like) but for everything that had caught up with him at the back of the church. I think the gift of the hair — if I can call it a gift — was not a form of apology but a sharing of a loss, for which a funeral seemed to him the right occasion.

I contemplated fury. To be truthful, I was too limp with grief on that particular day. I suppose going to stay in Mrs Ellis’ back room was a form of fury, which I justified as curiosity; it was only a month after my father’s death when I went there and, when I think back to it, I probably wasn’t in a good state for such things. After a night of no sleep, of listening to the animal moans from the couple opposite, it was the breakfast that finally did make me furious. Bread as thin and cheap as the blankets, and a toaster. Some margarine, no jam, certainly no eggs. I had never in my life been further away from buttery comfort, from solace. I think Mr Ellis did not inherit his mother’s care for the human soul through a soft honeyed yolk. I took, with chilly shaking hands, a piece of bread from the mean array on the dresser and said aloud to the empty room, Is this it? And then louder, screwing the bread up in my palm like an old love letter: Can this really be it?

Lara came to The Willows yesterday evening, but I was on a late shift so there was no point in her waiting. Instead I invited her in for a cup of tea. It was a quiet time anyway, dinner, and most people were eating, so we went into the kitchen and made a drink.

She commented on the other nursing home up the road; she meant The Lodge, a thing of magnificence and luxury with en-suite rooms in the eaves, and with crescent-shaped grounds and working fountain and joyful cherub. ‘We don’t speak of it,’ I told her. ‘They have afternoon calligraphy classes and a spa bath. You must never speak of it again.’

She smiled and pinched her lips closed with her fingers. I saw she was looking at me with something new, which might have been pity, but perhaps not as strong as pity. Sympathy? In any case, a greater interest than before, one that made me think she was sorry that I worked in this care home and not that one, and that also made me think she might ask me about myself. So I said quickly, ‘That’s a beautiful necklace, where did you get it?’ It was a piece of light-blue topaz laid into silver, and looked like it might have been naturally blue and, if so, relatively rare.

‘Eighteenth-birthday present from my parents,’ she said. I got a Bechstein for my eighteenth, I was going to tell her, because I like to point out how spoilt I’d been, how smeared with love like a basted bird, in case it forgave me something. I don’t know what: a selfishness or blindness. But this seemed an unnecessary aside, so I said, ‘It suits you well’ and she held the topaz away from her neck, peered down at it and thanked me. We sat at the tiny table in the kitchen, me moving my chair back a little so I had some view of the dining area in case my colleague, Peter, needed me for anything, and I waited for her to speak. (I haven’t said anything about Peter and I won’t, he isn’t the kind of person you would be interested in.) She seemed to waver between possible starting points, and then she rested her hands loosely on the table.

‘I seemed really childish when I spoke to you last time, about giving up God.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I did mean it though. I’ve done what you said, which is to walk away, and see if God calls me back. He hasn’t, you know.’

She broke this as news; I wanted to say, Of course he hasn’t, he was never going to. God is not like this, he is an egotist, he fires himself all over the skies, he rocks the seas, he shakes the earth. It will be years before he notices your defection. In any case she sat with her shoulders tilted forward and her neck long and everything pale and soft, like a Roman bust. ‘Is life different without him?’ I said.

‘Without him?’ She pouted in thought and her dimple became deep enough to house a raisin; this is exactly what I thought, and I imagined a raisin there, and wondered if it would stay, or fall out when she smiled. ‘Paul in Corinthians: Let all your things be done with charity . I embroidered this onto a piece of cloth when I was about twelve and I have it on my bedroom wall.’

‘My grandmother had that on her wall too,’ I said, suddenly remembering it.

‘And I thought that was the whole point of being religious. But actually you don’t have to believe in God to do all things with charity, so what is the point? Why would life be any different without him?’

I swilled what was left of my tea around the bottom of the cup and told her, ‘Come with me.’ We went out of the kitchen. Peter was in the dining room seeing after everyone at dinner; when Lara and I walked through there was a chorus of greetings. You drop youth amidst old age and it is like showing food to the starved; we used to eat, you can hear them thinking, we used to know the taste of that! I took her into the corridor that led to the bedrooms, and I went into one of the rooms and asked Lara to wait outside. There was Gene on the bed, like that bull dropped on sand. He goes off to sleep in the way you used to, abruptly and completely. I covered his nudity with a sheet and whispered into his ear, ‘We have to get you ready for the nurses. I have a friend with me, do you mind if she helps?’

There was no response for a few moments, and then he murmured from somewhere near sleep, ‘I don’t mind.’ He was lying naked on top of the covers, as I said he tends to, with the window wide. I couldn’t blame him, it’s filthily hot in those rooms. Still, we have to go in, put his pyjamas on, cover him, pull the window to. We’re told we have a duty of care to do these things, and that to leave him naked with a window flung wide amounts to neglect.

There are six permanent care staff here and we are all unanimous in agreement that this is nonsense; we do it only when the nurses come in for their morning and evening rounds, as they were about to do. So I called Lara in and asked her to put cushions behind his back while I lifted him, and we propped him up. If we disturbed his sleep further it wasn’t enough for him to open his eyes. I filled a bowl of warm water and sponged the sweat off him, and went through the drawers to find a clean T-shirt, since he has made his hatred of pyjamas clear.

Lara perched on the edge of the chair by the bed, looking quite openly at the eighty-five-year-old in front of her. You would like Lara, there is something of the warrior in her — she is not one of those ‘all flower and no fruit’ girls that you used to scorn, but somehow brave and direct, a thing I noticed as she sat there with her eyes on Gene. ‘Here,’ I said, and handed her the T-shirt. ‘I’ll lift him forward and you put it on.’

She did this skilfully; let her commit her acts of charity against Gene and not me, I thought. I had the distinct impression that Ruth had said something about me to her since we last met and that she was commiserating silently over my reported losses. How, oh how (she would be thinking, because Ruth would have said) did this woman come to be working in a care home? She lives alone in that flat, she plays cards with strangers. She hardly sees her only son, then there is her breakdown and the loss of her marriage. She used to be beautiful once, before — before it all. I wanted to comfort Lara by telling her that I did not lose my so-called beauty but squandered it, and that there can be no pity for somebody who squanders what they never deserved anyway. I was left with my due, I wanted to say, and tried to say it by organising Gene’s covers and pillows in that efficient, matronly way women do when they have become their role completely, forgotten all they were once as a girl, when somebody used to do it for them.