England, January 2022

John

At least the place doesn’t smell of piss. I’d expected it to. Instead it smells like the inside of an airing cupboard full of old blankets. The air feels denser than outside, but it must be my imagination. I don’t think that’s possible.

It’s hot. Like the reptile house at the zoo. Probably for the same reason. Old people need a lot of heat to get them moving. Then they move a leg forward, and stretch a tortoise neck out, look around, blink, then think better of it. Why bother? Stay put in the chair. Whatever they want will arrive eventually.

We sit in a silent and empty dining room, and I spoon food into my mother’s mouth. It’s mush, and if there was more gravy she could suck it through a straw. Baby food. She used to feed me like this once.

The walls are the beige of old people’s clothes. Covered with pictures everywhere – scenes of rural England, as it was in the imagined golden age. Fields without barbed wire or any rusting agricultural machinery in the corners. Happy rustic characters with rosy cheeks leading the good life. These pictures look like they came on a long roll, and were cut off to fit the space available.

And then there are abstract paintings, with big blocks of colour or paint scrubbed on hard with a manic brush. By local artists, I see, and donated to the home.

There are framed photo-montages, too, showing events from the younger days of the residents. Newspaper cuttings of children waiting to be evacuated, Chamberlain waving his piece of paper, RAF pilots sitting in the sunshine in armchairs, black airplanes arrowing though grey skies, crowds on seaside piers and promenades. The old queen, at various ages. All intended to keep memory alive, I suppose. Though you’d have to be, what – getting on for 100, to have any chance of remembering all that. But it’s our national memory, isn’t it? Not anyone’s in particular.

What about the mannequins lurking in odd corners, dressed in mismatched outfits assembled from clothes of different eras? They look like someone’s idea of the guests at a bohemian nightclub. One’s wearing nothing but a sporran over his absent genitals. What memories these are supposed to rekindle is anybody’s guess. More likely to inspire nightmares in the unmoored minds of the demented.

When my mother seems to have had enough, I sit back. She stays bent over, but after a while she twists her head and looks at me. Sort of. I have no idea what she can see. Her eyes packed up years ago. She has peripheral vision, that’s all.