When they glanced behind at the scrubland, a posse of Close of Day Cottages staff was advancing fast.
Kay hollered as an articulated lorry boomed past, “Remember Thelma and Louise?”
It was awkward, what with Cyril’s stenosis, but she kept Cyril from stumbling as she helped her husband over the barrier. Hand in hand, they rushed into the loving arms of the archetypal White Van Man.
8
Even More Fun with Dr Mimi
Shooting a bitter glance at the institution whose exterior she hadn’t laid eyes on since they arrived, Kay grabbed her husband and pulled him behind a skip. The coach drove off.
They had no idea where they were. But by five p.m. they’d be missed at dinner, so time was short. As they battled through a thick hedge, Kay’s mop-head wig snagged. Cyril’s cotton-wool beard also snarled on the thorny bracken. By the time they extricated themselves, the door to the car park had opened. Spring hadn’t quite sprung, and the budding hedge provided slight cover. They did escape beyond the property line of Close of Day Cottages, all right—about three feet.
Yet three feet was sufficient to establish that the Wilkinsons had not been impishly participating in a group activity. Thereafter, all Kay’s sucking up to the director only heightened Dr Mimi’s sense of betrayal—and she despised “Cyrus” already, if only because he insisted on calling her “Mrs Mewshaw.” Her retribution would test Kay’s theory that “there may be a limit to how healthy and happy a person can get, but there’s no limit to suffering.”
They were both consigned to lockdown, brought meals in their rooms. Out of some peculiar aesthetic sadism, the fare they were fed resembled the food one consumed in preparation for a colonoscopy: it was all white. Potatoes, rice, cream crackers, dry chicken breast, blancmange, all without adornment; even the fish fingers had the breading scraped off. They were given access to a shower only once a fortnight, and it was surely thanks to Dr Mimi that they were allowed to run out of loo roll for weeks on end. That summer, during a heat wave, the radiators in their quarters mysteriously warmed and clanked; that winter, the air conditioning kept coming on. If group activities were their own torture, banishment from group activities was even worse. Outside visitors were forbidden.
In protracted isolation, most people go insane. Kay held up longer than most. For months she kept up a routine of pacing, jogging in place, circling her arms, standing on one leg, and doing somewhat enfeebled star jumps. She recited Gerard Manley Hopkins. She sang what verses she could recall of Lonnie Donegan’s “I Wanna Go Home,” the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” and Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” She repeated the theme song of Come Dine with Me: “do-do do-do DOO! Do. Do.” She even belted out “Baa-Baa Black Sheep,” “If You’re Happy and You Know it, Clap Your Hands,” and “The Alphabet Song” with gusto.
But over time, she began to talk to herself, and the ceaseless monologue soon grew as disjointed and associative as the chronic mutterings in the day room. Her rose was a climber, right overgrown, she’d repeat word-for-word, and well over the fence. I’d every right to lop it off. But the daft woman rang the council! Took on airs, that Stacy did . . . Or she’d murmur urgently, Mummy is jealous of Adelaide, so she has to be assured that there’s nothing between Daddy and this poorly wisp of a girl, who’s not long for this world anyway . . . Her head swam with a grab bag of miscellany, like those big snarled bins in charity shops whose every item cost a quid. Suddenly that poofy green sofa in Rotherhithe would float across her consciousness like a cumulous cloud, and she would remember with a sly secretive grin what she and her husband had got up to on those pillows in the early days of their marriage. A funny little soap-dish box would loom in her mind pulsing with outsize powers, and the fact that for some reason the black box was always cold made it seem all the more excitingly sinister.
Without the aid of a computer or even his confiscated felt-tip and spiral notebook, Cyril was more successful in clinging to his own sanity by composing his memoirs, either Fit for Purpose or Duty of Care (he’d all too much time to decide on a title). He committed the text to heart as he wrote it, and ritually began each day by reciting his most recent chapter from the beginning. Reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451, in which memorists become walking banned books, the demanding exercise argued for concision. Thus to his own surprise he elided altogether the once-consuming debate over the EU—the better to skip to all the ways in which that bumbling, bovine Boorish Johnson had mishandled COVID-19.
Their solitary confinement was finally lifted three years later. The first time Cyril laid eyes on his wife again, she was slack and cadaverously thin, like a marionette slung on a hook. Her skin had turned the colour of their colonoscopy-prep diet, and she kept mumbling the plot of Lawrence of Arabia. When she said politely on their first afternoon in the day room, “You seem like a very nice gentleman,” his heart fell.
At last allowed to visit, Simon explained that he, his siblings, Uncle Percy, and their grandchildren had been repeatedly turned away, because the care home’s director always asserted sorrowfully but implacably that his parents were “unwell.” Their eldest had, he claimed, made a stupendous effort to replace Roy as their
