At precisely the moment that Wendy Deere was sitting down to review CCTV files with Mr. Granger, Eve pushed the button and smiled at the entryphone camera of a very different institution. It was a false smile, a brittle layer of ice covering the black waters beneath—waters in which she was drowning. But she kept coming back out of a sense of duty: filial piety, if you wanted a euphemism, although guilt was closer to the mark.
The buzzer sounded. Eve stepped into the lobby, then signed the guest book, starting her twice-a-month routine. The lobby was well lit, with padded armchairs and a touching floral display on a side-table—a memorial to a former resident, recently departed. The manager’s office was empty, as it was most of the time over the weekend, but the CCTV monitor showed views of the main corridors. Eve turned left from the lobby, entered the PIN to unlock the door, and walked past a dining room (currently empty, the tables set for dinner) towards her mother’s bedroom.
Pay no attention to the TVs blaring through open doorways, the occasional repetitive chime of a call button. Ignore the bad-tempered bitching from Room 11’s resident, who shouted every five minutes for her long-dead mummy and daddy to take her home to a house she’d moved on from two-thirds of a century ago. This was a good home. One of the signs of a good home was that it didn’t reek of piss and shit. Her mother’s nursing home passed this test: the carpets were clean, the paintwork bright, the orderlies friendly and patient and just a little bit dull. Dull was good, dull didn’t get bored or abusive or take liberties. The regular nurses were middle-aged and experienced, sensible and on the ball, although at the weekend there tended to be fresh faces, agency staff covering gaps in the rota.
Nursing homes were expensive, and most people stayed out of them as long as possible. Consequently there was a lot of churn, a lot of residents in the late stages of dementia or infirmity who checked in for the last few months until the end, with a leavening of bedbound and chairbound folks with longer-term prognoses. Mum was unusual: she was long-term stable but profoundly disabled, bedbound and fed through a gastric tube, clutching repetitively at the side of her hospital bed. Helplessly dependent, in other words. The Bigge Organization paid the bills as long as Eve worked for Rupert. It was another of the barbed hooks he’d caught her on, so that she must dance whenever he pulled her puppet strings.
Eve hated nursing home visits, and not just because of her guilt and shame over Mum. She hated them because they were a reminder that no torment she could possibly inflict compared to the artistry of dementia, the king of torturers.
Rupert had once made her slowly skin an arms dealer alive, over nearly three days. The arms dealer had stiffed Rupe over a consignment of lewisite—second-generation mustard gas—for the Syrian government. Not only did the dealer have to pay, he had to be seen to have paid by his replacement. Rupert made her wear a torturer’s mask and fetish gear—a leather corset and thigh-high stiletto boots—and recorded the vivisection in full HD video.1 But the delicate Mona Lisa brushwork of Alzheimer’s disease beat any pain she could inflict as thoroughly as Leonardo’s masterpiece outshone a toddler’s finger painting.
Mrs. Morris in room 18 was a Holocaust survivor. The electric chair couldn’t hold a candle to the incandescent terror she experienced whenever they showered her, for her past had imploded into the present: this was her eternal Auschwitz, and her kindly but slightly dull carers were camp guards who’d escaped from her nightmares. Eve had once tried to settle her, grounding her in the present—but five minutes later she’d forgotten again, and was sucked right back into her private final solution.
Eve did not—could not—believe in a loving God because she visited Hell every second Sunday of the month to take tea with the damned. No loving God could possibly allow a place like this to exist. Hell came with beige carpets, en suite bedrooms, and satellite TV. But through every open bedroom door the screaming of souls in torment could be heard. And the worst thing about it was that there was no reason for it. There were no capering demons with pitchforks to enumerate the sins of the damned, no mercy for the virtuous, and no justice for anyone. Just endless suffering for all, trapped in the swirling mists of the eternal present.
The nursing office door was ajar. Eve knocked, then smiled stiffly at the occupant. Marcia was a middle-aged professional, one of the regular staff nurses. She held up a finger for a moment as she finished writing in a fat lever-arch file, then closed it and returned it to a lockable file cabinet. Eventually she met Eve’s gaze and nodded, acknowledging her. “Miss Starkey? Have you seen your mother yet?”
Miss Starkey. She knew her name. Eve was a regular here.
Eve shook her head. “I just arrived and saw you were in,” she said. “How is she this month? How’s her weight?”
“I’ll just check for you.” Marcia pulled her mother’s file from the cabinet. “Let’s see … hmm. Down five hundred grams since your last visit? Oh dear. I need to look at the feeding records, we may need to add another supplement dose to her meals.”
Eve’s smile froze over. “I thought the nutritionist was booked to see her last Tuesday?”
“Hmm, let’s see—you’re quite right, of course. As usual. Looks like Linda dropped the ball—I’ll action it at the staff meeting on Monday and book another appointment.”
“That would be good, yes.” Eve’s smile warmed slightly. “I’ll go and see her now. I don’t suppose there’ve been any changes?”
Marcia’s expression melted into sympathy. “I’m sorry, love.”
Eve
