But he nods at me and turns away to the spare room and soon I hear him paddling around among books and papers. He comes out with an untidy bundle and holds it out to me, mumbling. A string of saliva wets his bottom lip and descends in a slow cascade to his chest. He wipes at it with the papers in his hands and that’s when I see that he’s holding pages of maps, and when I take them from him I discover there’s also a battered paper folder.
He manages to say, Just to be on the safe side.
The folder is labelled Group Leaders Information Pack: Overdale Outdoor Education Centre. I open it and find a mass of photocopied drawings of birds waiting to be coloured in, some homemade booklets, loose pages, and stapled sheets. Arthur starts sifting through it all. He lifts out a sheet headed
Arthur moves off down the stairs. He hasn’t finished; I hear his feet sifting through the papers littering the hall and sitting room. When I’ve finished packing I follow, bumping the luggage down the stairs. There is a note for us in the kitchen. I find it on the floor; it must have been swept off the table in a draft from the door.
ARTHER
PHONE ME WHEN YOU GET THIS (07834 793922) OR BETTER COME AND KNOCK ON MY DOOR, I’LL BE IN.
V worried to know you are alright. Couldn’t find you and doctor wasn’t notified so Tony called police. They sent someone but as no sign of forced entry they can’t do anything. Told them you NEVER go out but they say adults entitled to leave own home without notice and to wait another 24 hours. Tried to make doctor talk to them re yr mobility, legs etc. but no go. Well later on nurse turned up for yr legs, she said not to worry as it’s not Alzhimers, you’re a bit confused but still independent, also they’ve been encouraging you to get out so you probably have.
ARTHUR WE WANT TO KNOW YOU’RE ALRIGHT, IT WILL WASTE POLICE TIME IF YOU DON’T LET US KNOW, I’M SUPPOSED TO LET THEM KNOW IF YOUR STILL AWAY BY TOMORROW. WILL KEEP EYE OUT FOR YOU.
HOPING YOUR ALRIGHT Rosemary (Mrs. M)
Arthur has nodded off, waiting for me in the conservatory. While I was packing he has been round the house collecting up more papers, and now he sits with them clutched against his chest; clearly he won’t be parted from them. Even asleep he looks fierce, like a little boy ready to put up a fight if the adults try to say it isn’t sensible to bring his stamp album to the seaside.
I’ve never touched the car keys but I know they’re hanging on the line of hooks just inside the kitchen door. We leave by the conservatory and enter the garage from the back garden. There’s an old-fashioned mechanical smell of oil and linseed and rags and grass. When I’ve loaded the boot Arthur lets me help him into the passenger seat. There isn’t enough room to open the door properly and several parts of his body encumber him. His left leg is uncooperative; once he is seated half in, sideways, he drags it after himself as if it were made of wood. The shin scrapes slow and hard against the door edge and his foot flaps about uselessly, but he doesn’t flinch.
I’m trying to think methodically. The car hasn’t been driven for months. What if it won’t start? I climb in and turn the ignition, and it does. With the engine running, I get out again and open each of the garage doors as quietly as I can. But the bottom of the first one screeches in its worn semicircle in the tar of the drive, loud enough, possibly, for people to hear. Now there is no time to waste. I don’t bother fiddling with the hooks and brackets in the ground that hold the doors open, so I shove them back as far as they’ll go and throw myself back into the driver’s seat. Before I can move forward they are already shuddering and swinging back on us but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Our departure is announced by two loud
Four hours later we drive into the canopied artificial daylight of a service station on the M6. As I fill up the tank I study the docile shuffling of people inside, queuing at the registers and swaying among the shelves and cabinets. I wonder that they seem unembarrassed to be so lumpy and dark and heavy in a place so garish and streamlined. They appear quite undisturbed by the lights, and I want to learn how they do it so that I will look, when the time comes for me to go in, not as though I belong there (because none of them manages that) but just enough like one of them to pass without notice.
But before I’m ready, Arthur is wheezing his way out of the car. He needs a bathroom, he says, and sets off across the forecourt in a bizarrely careful way as if he thinks he is elsewhere, perhaps walking sideways down a flight of stairs. He’s lost one of his slippers. I retrieve it from the foot-well of the car and catch up with him at the entrance and we go in together. He halts, flinching, overawed by the piped music and excruciating light. He seems about to collapse under the glare. The toilets are at the back. Once I’ve got his slipper back on I steer him across the floor, concentrating on finding the shortest route between the stands of magazines and banks of candy and bins of DVDs and thermos flasks on special offer. Through the music and the plopping of the cash registers I sense people in mid-transaction going quiet and turning their eyes on us, but maybe I am only imagining it.
I push Arthur in the direction of his place and take myself to the ladies’ room. There’s a long mirror at the entrance that I can’t avoid, and that’s when I realize I probably wasn’t imagining that people were staring. I haven’t seen my own reflection in a while. I’ve changed. My face has puckered and turned a bready white, and my eyes are different, too, both faded and darkened. Rings have appeared around the irises, which are now a filmy watercolour blue. The pupils are sunk and tiny, like punctured holes. My mouth has the clamped, institutional look of someone whose incarceration, wherever it is, is chronic but no longer open to question, like a sanatorium patient or a life prisoner. Most dramatic though, is my hair. It’s grown, of course, and looks like grey, drought- stricken grass, but I hadn’t realized how flatly it sticks to my skull or how it sprouts up at the ends for being left unbrushed. The clothes could be better, too. They are plain enough and should not attract attention in themselves, but I am now aware my proportions have changed. The trousers flap at half-mast and the sweater seems empty in front and the sleeves hang over my hands to my fingertips. I see that I am wearing earrings, and the very idea of a surface such as mine being decorated in any way is preposterous. And being indoors so much has made me careless about footwear; the sandals don’t fit and never would have fitted, and the brown socks practical enough for an evening in the house seem here both to demand and to defy explanation.
Arthur’s getup, as I notice when I come out and find him leaning for support on the plastic dome of a pay phone bolted to the wall, is filthy. In this light I see that his purple sweatshirt with
His free hand is fumbling with his trouser front and he’s oblivious to all else. I grab his other hand and pull him away, and he sets his eyes firmly on his feet and concentrates on getting them to move. We’re conspicuously slow. The attention we’re attracting is unmistakable now, and all I want is to get us through the door and back into darkness where the car is waiting. I’m trying unsuccessfully not to drag Arthur faster than he can go. We very nearly make it.
Hey!
I look up and see that the boy in the red T-shirt behind the register is talking to us. He has cinnamon skin and lustrous eyes. He can’t mean any harm.
Yes, what? I say pleasantly.
’Scuse me a minute!
Now the whole queue is turning to look at us-why? We’re not doing anything wrong, I know that, so the best thing we can do is ignore them. I grip Arthur’s arm and tug at him so hard he nearly falls over, but I have to get us
