Izzy places a second photograph in Flo’s hand. A colour picture of the celebration. Outside the loose ring of happy women in the vicarage garden, young Flo sits beside a woman almost as old as she is now. ‘Mother,’ she says.

Jess peers out and through the open patio doors and to the distant grove. ‘This was out there?’

‘What they all doin’?’ Izzy asks.

‘Exalted,’ Flo whispers, her face animated.

The enigmatic remarks are meaningless to Jess. And after a moment of what looks like bewilderment, Flo resumes her self-absorbed gazing at the garden, perhaps trying to recall something or even catch again what she has just recalled before it vanished.

Izzy thumps across the room to the door. ‘Going to the toilet. Back in a minute, Flo!’

Flo lets the pictures drop from her hand to the floor.

Jess instinctively bends to retrieve the fallen photographs.

A flash of movement and Flo swings her whole upper body behind a swiping blow at her carer’s head.

SNAP.

Hyper-alert, Jess catches the old wrist in one hand. Holds it firm in a fisted grip and whispers, ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’

Flo relaxes, smiles at Jess and mutters, ‘Erce. Erce. Erce.’ Then gently rocks back and forth. So old, so frail, so reduced.

Jess keeps hold of her client’s arm. ‘You can play me up all you like. Not her. Never. Or else. I ain’t so far from not givin’ a shit. I know you’re listenin’, yeah?’

At the sound of the toilet flushing upstairs, Jess releases Flo’s thin wrist. ‘She’s all I got. She’s everything to me.’

Izzy bumps down the stairs outside, her excitable voice preceding her entrance. ‘Flo! Flo, guess what!’

22

Face strained and hair mussed, Jess dips her hand inside the murky shade of the last light fitting on the ground floor, inside the porch. She drops the exhausted bulb, its glass a musty brown, into the bag at the foot of the collapsible steps, then slips the new bulb into the socket. She steps down and hits the switch inside the hallway.

More light banishing more shadows. The dirty, messy space of the entire reception and both sides of the threshold blazes with white light. Nothing can hide or trip her up down here again.

As she passes the old mouth of the living room, she peers inside from the doorway and catches sight of Izzy in conference with Flo. Izzy sits before the wheelchair footplates and looks up at Flo as if listening intently, though Flo’s lips do not move. When Izzy resumes drawing on a sketch pad, Jess moves on, wearily shaking her head.

* * *

Proud Nerthus House at dusk.