Having learnt to trap his daily meds against the back of his throat, thereafter Cyril was able steadily to stockpile a reserve of tablets, which in quantity might grant him and his wife the merciful non-existence that appeared to be their only sure protection from Mimi Mewshaw. Once he’d probably accumulated a sufficiency but planned to store up one more handful just to be on the safe side, staffers did a room search and discovered his stash.
From there on in, rather than resist what was known as chemical cosh, both spouses gladly swallowed the tablets provided and slept most of the day. He and Kay had their chance to escape in March of 2020. The opportunity to call their own shots was not coming back.
9
You’re Not Getting Older, You’re Getting Better
When the high-handed policeman demanded her details and got to the phone number, Kay drew an unprecedented blank. It was fairly commonplace not to recall your own mobile number, which one tended to communicate to others by texting or ringing up, and she’d misplaced her iPhone all morning (perturbing in itself). Of course she didn’t know Cyril’s; her phone knew Cyril’s. Yet now she couldn’t even retrieve the landline. When a selection of likely digits eventually danced in her head, she struggled to remember whether the last four numbers were 8406 or 8604. It is strangely difficult to locate your own phone number, and she excused herself upstairs to Cyril’s study, rifling water bills and annual TV licences and finally scrounging a hard copy of a tax return from three years ago that included the landline. Aside from changes to the London prefix, they’d had the same phone number since 1972. Rattled, she no longer gave a toss about the silly summons, and when she returned to the foyer the officer, who when she’d suffered her so-called senior moment had seemed to vacillate between pity and contempt, had clearly made up his mind. He went with contempt.
The sure sign that the peculiar lapse bothered her on a profound level was that she did not tell Cyril. Once the coronavirus upheaval finally settled down to some semblance of normalcy, she also did not tell Cyril that after a former colleague from St Thomas’ reached out to her, she enrolled in a large double-blind drug trial being funded by the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The researchers were specifically looking for subjects with no substantial comorbidities (happily, successfully treated hypertension did not count as substantial) who were over the age of seventy-five.
The likes of blanking out over their landline number did not recur. Not only could she rattle off those familiar digits—ending in 8406, by the way—but she could effortlessly produce her mobile number and, after giving her contacts list an idle glance, Cyril’s as well. Why, she was able to rat-a-tat-tat through her every phone number since she was five. Furthermore, she’d no trouble reciting her favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins poem word-perfect. Cleaning the kitchen after dinner, she sometimes sang “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” or “Save the Last Dance for Me”—sotto voce, because she was always self-conscious about the reediness of her voice—and she correctly recollected the lyrics to the last stanza.
That strange cerebral seizure with the patronizing policeman had obviously been brought on by anxiety over being given a summons for the first time in her life, and perhaps as well by the larger emotional trauma of having come so close to calling it quits in perpetuity three days earlier; heavens, had she not experienced that sudden visitation of feminist agency in the loo (Take back control!), perhaps she’d have downed those tablets after all. Or maybe the explanation was more mundane: the temporary blockage of a neural pathway that happens to everybody. She really had to stop leaping to the conclusion that she was going bats just because her benighted parents had set such an unpropitious precedent.
Throughout her fifties and sixties, Kay had coloured her hair, covering the expanding streak of grey down the middle and returning her browning locks to the tawny gleam of her youth. But by her seventies, the discipline of monthly home treatments had grown tedious, and the lighter colour looked less natural. Thus for some years she’d let her hair go salt-and-pepper, a more seemly and not unattractive look for her age, and owing to the depressing follicular thinning of the menopause she always wore it snugly pinned in a French twist.
Yet removing the pins one night before bed, she noticed a surprising glint at her temples. Leaning towards the mirror, she flicked at a host of tiny sprouting hairs, very fine, altogether new, and strangely golden.
Over time, they grew longer and stronger. With no help from L’Oréal, her hair developed a brightening sheen, whilst it also grew softer and, though the transformation could credibly be all in her mind, thicker; regarding even delusional improvements to one’s physical appearance at eighty-one, she would take what she could get. So one morning Kay impulsively refrained from binding the rope of her diminished tresses, but allowed the locks to flow free to her shoulders.
“You’ve not worn your hair down in donkey’s years,” Cyril commented. “It looks nice. Gentler. More feminine, if we’re allowed to use that as a compliment any more. You should wear it down more often.”
The new tufts were not only on her head. Those young women who fanatically lasered their nether regions had no appreciation for how bereft one becomes when most of those squiggly hairs down there disappear of their own accord. Kay herself hadn’t realized that she rather cherished the coy disguising furze until bit by bit post-fifty it nearly all fell out.
