Miss Phyllis wants to go down to the piano bar. I don’t blame her. It’s lovely weather this morning, but it’s been raining all week and the decking is damp. We absolutely cannot let her out today. It takes nothing for them to get sick and it isn’t worth it. She will forget she’s even been and anyway, she’ll want to go again tomorrow. It’s nearly spring now and spring does strange things to Miss Phyllis. The bluebird in her heart just wants to get out. Something must have happened to her in spring. It makes her think of her only true love, the police constable who broke her heart. We don’t talk about that, though sometimes, on a bright day, I have caught her muttering sweet things into the air, as if in conversation with someone. All afternoon she sits in the old armchair next to the bay window, looking out and refusing to move. We let her be for as long as we can but after an hour we need to move her. The chair isn’t regulation, just decorative, and sitting in it for too long will hurt her back. Alanna kneels next to her to coax her into getting up. It doesn’t work. Miss Phyllis refuses to move. She has fastened her fingers around the wooden knobs of the armrests and her veins bulge blue and painful.

‘We have to try Mona,’ Alanna whispers.

We call Mona on the interphone and when she comes she is holding the paper cup with Miss Phyllis’s medication.

‘Doesn’t she take these a little later usually?’ I ask.

‘It’s not like she knows what time it is.’

Miss Phyllis swallows the pills automatically. Most of them acquire it as a reflex: it’s like feeding birds. When her head starts to lull to the side, Alanna and I pry her hands from the chair and escort her back to her room, holding her by an elbow each, like a lady to the dances. As we prepare her for sleep, quietly, she begins. I recognize the melody, she has sung this song before. It’s a love song, and it was her pièce de résistance. All the soldiers loved it, on both sides. She always sang it last. But the words are not like I remember them; the lyrics are somewhat different, out of order, like a warped record playing.

⋆

All night Miss Phyllis is singing quietly in her room. She doesn’t bother anyone but if you put your ear to the door you can hear it. Sometimes she pauses to take a sip from the mug on her night table. We think she will stop when the drugs wear off, but in fact she becomes a little louder, clearly enunciating,

Will you accept

This token of good faith

I’m falling for you

My Lili Marlene

DATES

Four Months Earlier

cumulonimbus

Sent: 22/11/2015 – 03:02

Lili,