Rokitansky

Chapter Three

THREE

Mrs Brown opened her eyes. It was an effort, as was almost everything nowadays. She wondered where she was. Then wondered why she had wondered. She was in the same place she always was when she woke up, her bed. Her eyes struggled and strained to adjust to the bright light slicing through the crack in the curtain. The house was silent. Pain had been to visit in the night and woken her early. She felt him all over her like an unwanted lover but he mostly settled for holding her hands in his. She looked down at them, two tight angry fists, slowly opening flowers of crooked bony fingers, white knuckle thorns and paper-like petals of skin over blue vein stems. She reached for her glasses on the bedside table and slipped them up onto the end of her nose. Her head felt too heavy as she tried to sit up, as though it might just roll off her neck and down onto the floor. Her fingertips found the reading lamp which shed some light on the matter.

Her pupils adjusted themselves to wakefulness and light, allowing her eyes to find the face of her husband, or at least a photo of his face on the dresser. He looked happy and brimming with youth. She remembered taking the photo as though it was yesterday, but of course it was a long time ago now, back when it was just the two of them, when they were happy. She glanced over her shoulder at the right hand side of the bed. The sheet was smooth and flat and neatly tucked in place. She missed him. Still, there was no point moping about the place. She knew it wouldn't be long before they could spend some time together. Life went on, at least for some at Godalming Lodge, and this building and its elderly inhabitants were her life. Until she could find a full time replacement manager to run the place she was stuck here day and often night, trying to do all of the things that needed to be done. She heard the things the staff said about her when they thought she couldn't hear. They all thought she was too old for the job, mainly because she was. She missed her own bed, her own family, and her own life, but as she kept reminding herself and her husband, this was only temporary. He thought she was mad, working so hard at her age, but he understood her reasons. In so many ways, her work gave her a reason to live.

Mrs Brown sat up. It felt like a major achievement. With effort she swung her legs around to the side of the bed and eased her feet into her fur-lined slippers. The cold mornings and Mrs Brown's arthritis did not get along. Sitting up had been relatively easy, now came the tricky part. She gently started the rocking motion, slowly at first, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards on the edge of the bed, gaining momentum until, with the help of her clawed hands she launched herself into an upright standing position. She waited the few seconds required to determine whether the launch had been successful. She didn't fall back down onto the bed and smiled to herself at getting up on the first attempt on such a cold Monday morning. Or was it Tuesday? Her memory sometimes played tricks on her, but she liked to think she still had a full set of marbles. Running a residential care home for the elderly certainly required them all.

Now that Mrs Brown was officially up, she could get on with her day. Like most days, today was bound to be busy, her time was no longer her own. Until a new manager could be found, it had become easier to live on site with the residents from time to time rather than commute backwards and forwards every day. There were never enough staff and this way she was always close by if there was a problem. She surveyed her surroundings. She hated this room. It was like a floral-covered prison cell. Though she was free to come and go as she pleased, she felt trapped in here, suffocated. How many people had died in this room, in this bed? She shuffled towards the oversized bay window on painful toes and drew back the curtains, permitting the bright sunshine to render her briefly blind. Her tired eyes blinked revealing snapshots of a cloudless blue sky, the outside world looked entirely agreeable. With tremendous effort she opened the window and the sound of birds' chatter broke the still silence. The floor above creaked, joining in the chorus with an out of tune melody, momentarily snatching her attention from the glorious outdoors. Nobody was walking overhead, the house was simply stretching and yawning away the night that had been and gone. Ancient floorboards, groaning like old bones, bored and bending with the prospect of another day much like the last. Mrs Brown willed the window to open further and greedily gulped the cool air that surged into the room. The house had a certain staleness to it. It was more than a smell, it was an aftertaste of talcum powder, piss and a lonely despair that no potpourri could disguise. Even when she left the house she could still smell it on her clothes and in her hair. They were all just waiting for the end together, some knew it was coming, nobody knew when.

The garden was looking quite splendid, protectively encircling the proud old building. The grounds of the lodge were as impressive as the house itself. Unlike the crumbling bricks and bodies within, it didn't show its age. These walls had stood on this hill overlooking the town below for over a century. These rooms had held and warmed a wealthy family of shipping merchants and their decedents before the property was emptied and sold. The impressive country estate had itself retired to a quieter, simpler existence and was reborn into a place where people came to die. The walls were solid and trustworthy and had seen a great many things. They protected those inside from all of the elements, including reality. The walls kept the residents’ darkest secrets, heard their final thoughts and prayers and hid the tears shed for hopes and dreams never realised.   

Mrs Brown shuffled her way past the unmade bed towards the en-suite. She pulled the cord to illuminate the small bathroom, there was no window. The extractor fan hummed and whirred into action. She found the sound comforting. It reminded her of home and was part of a daily routine which held her together. She gripped the sink to steady herself. The reflection of an elderly woman stared back at her from the mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet. They gazed quietly at one another, sussing each other out. Mrs Brown never failed to be shocked by the sight of the old lady in her bathroom each and every morning. She looked as tired as she felt. Time had carved deep lines into her once youthful face and her thinning grey hair was in a delicate, wispy plait that fell over her shoulder. She squinted through her thick spectacles to get a better look at the woman she knew to be herself but failed to recognise. It was the eyes that gave her away. Somewhere behind them she could just make out a shadow of the girl she had been, the woman she grew into. The pale skin around her eyes was translucent and timeworn. She did not like what she saw, so opened the bathroom cabinet, banishing the elderly stranger and revealing a small pharmacy of pills. She didn't take any, she couldn't remember what they were for. She made sure the little bottles of tablets were in a straight row, arranged according to height. It was something she did every morning and something which Rosie the nurse called OCD. Mrs Brown didn't know what OCD meant. She called it neat and tidy. She washed her face and popped in her teeth.

Mrs Brown shuffled back into the bedroom, pulled open the dresser drawer and examined the neat rows of socks and knickers. She wondered how many other people had stored their underwear in these drawers and thought better of thinking about it. They sometimes did her laundry for her when she stayed, which was kind. She made sure her clothes were washed separately from the residents' belongings. She didn't want her nice things to be washed in with theirs, floating around with their vomit stains, dribble, piss and shit. She found a vest and a healthy portion of guilt in the bottom drawer; it wasn't their fault they were so disgusting, they hadn't always been. She was grateful for the nurses who worked so hard to deal with the messier side of old age. She mainly had to deal with all the staffing issues, paperwork and visitors, so had more than enough of her own shit to deal with.

She closed all the drawers, determined to seal her guilt back inside for the day. She had selected a pair of lilac cotton knickers, amused and ashamed by their tent-like size, she pulled them on, one leg slowly after the other. In the wardrobe she found a nice summery cotton dress to match the optimistic weather outside. Everything she now owned was washable at forty degrees; there was no time anymore for fancy frills or fuss. Pulling the dress on was an effort. Pain rose up with the hot air through the floorboards and stabbed at her body. She fought with the dress to pull it up and over her head, her fingers shaking disobediently like frightened little twigs as she struggled with the buttons. She wrapped her trusty cream cardigan around her shoulders and was ready for what the day had to offer. She closed the window and picked up the pile of paperwork that she had meant to finish the night before from the desk. She would take it to the conservatory, it was lighter in there and she could keep a closer eye on everyone.

Mrs Brown stepped out of the laughable sanctuary of her room and peered down the barren hallway. The stale air of the corridor flooded her lungs. There was nothing she could do to stop herself from breathing it, from breathing them. Like smoke from a bonfire, the stench of decay clung to her and followed her around from dawn until dusk. A constant reminder for all who entered Godalming Lodge, they weren't so very different from the residents who lived within. A warning to all that their time would one day come and was inevitably closer than they might think. Life wasn't too short, it was too fast. If you didn't keep up, you would get left behind, and spend your life alone looking back over your shoulder at all that could have been. Mrs Brown carefully and cautiously put one foot in front of the other towards the new day, looking forward, not back, for fear of what she might see.