A slice of early morning sunlight fell across the bed, intruding into Alice’s dreams. Turning over under the warmth of the duvet and pulling it tighter around her was useless, as the tinny clatter of the cleaning trolley nudged her reluctantly into wakefulness. Suddenly Mavis was shaking her shoulder and the reality dawned on Alice that she was still an unwilling resident of The Elms – a nursing home – a place where people went to await death.
‘Come on, wakey wakey, Alice, time to get up now.’ The woman sounded like a relic from a bygone holiday camp. Alice didn’t want to ‘wakey, wakey’. She didn’t want this obnoxious woman as her ‘carer’. Mavis so obviously didn’t care – and she most certainly didn’t want to be in this awful place, a hybrid of a prison camp and a mental hospital.
As Alice’s feet touched the cold wooden floor, Mavis reached for the buttons on her nightdress.
‘I can manage!’ Alice snapped, shrugging her off, sick of being treated like a child.
‘Suit yourself.’ Mavis smirked and straightened the bed while Alice hurried into the small shower room, her only place of escape, even though the door didn’t have a lock.
As hot water cascaded over her body, so did the all-too-regular hot tears and familiar despondency which marked this confusing period in her life. She hardly noticed Mavis enter the room and did not attempt to cover her nakedness. Her dignity had been the first thing to go, or was it her sanity?
Alice had always assumed that dementia – or madness – or whatever affliction this was, would overtake her, unawares, that should such awful misfortune strike, there would be no knowledge of losing her mind and therefore no pain or regret at the loss. But this was a living nightmare. She was deemed no longer safe to live independently or make her own decisions, but it was such a struggle to accept this new reality and Alice hardly recognised the woman she’d become.
A cocktail of drugs was served to Alice with each meal and monitored by a carer to ensure she took them. Unfortunately, taking the medication appeared to have no benefit and served only to elicit feelings of constant woolly headedness, confusion and exhaustion.
‘Clean clothes,’ Mavis shouted above the noise of the running water, placing a small pile on the toilet seat, ‘and breakfast’s here.’
After drying herself off, Alice struggled into the shapeless clothes she didn’t recognise. She’d given up trying to tell them that they weren’t her clothes as everyone insisted they were.
The breakfast tray held one banana, one slice of toast and a dish of yoghurt, the same fare every morning and apparently her choice.
Mavis hovered in the room, a spy for her jailers, but precisely who those jailers were, was still unclear to Alice. Deliberately taking her time, she sensed the other woman’s growing annoyance, but as this was one of the few things over which she was still in control, Alice was determined to exercise it.
Alice still couldn’t recall exactly how long she’d been in The Elms. The first few days had passed in a haze of sleep, only waking for meals and visits from staff, and Alice struggled to differentiate between being awake and dreaming. During those days, as she was helped to her feet, dizziness washed over her and her eyes struggled to focus. She ascribed these feelings to the side effects of the drugs they continued to give her — and Alice loathed taking medication of any description. The idea of all those chemicals swimming around in her bloodstream was abhorrent to her.
As the days dragged by, Alice’s memories tormented her. Vague recollections robbed her of peace, or could they be dreams? At times it seemed that she was back in the hospital, the distinctive clinical smells in her nostrils – and there was a CT scan. They said she needed a brain scan. Alice remembered being pushed on a trolley towards a vast doughnut-shaped machine flanked by two smiling nurses. The machine moved towards her enveloping her head. Her heart pounded and it became an effort to breathe. She wanted to get out of the monstrous contraption.
Grinding noises filled her ears and she strained to hear the nurse’s voice in the distance, attempting to reassure her, urging her to remain still. And there were the blood samples; they seemed to take so much blood that Alice wondered if she would become anaemic. Her fear was almost tangible, yet still, Alice couldn’t speak up for herself, it was like being trapped in a bad dream, one of those awful experiences when your legs feel like lead and you can’t run away, when someone is chasing you — and that someone seemed to resemble Rachel. Tom drifted in and out of her mind too. Could he be dead, as her daughter insisted? Surely not, please God no!
By the third or fourth day at The Elms, Alice’s awareness of her surroundings increased, her brain cleared enough to assess the situation and know exactly where she was. But with clarity came despair and an unsettling degree of anger at being at the mercy of others. A constant smell of incontinence and disinfectant vied for dominance in the atmosphere, making her feel quite nauseous. While meals were cooked, other odours invaded her space and she longed for her own home. Televisions blared from the day room or other residents’ bedrooms, the inevitable backdrop to latter years.
Alice always hated visiting nursing homes, the whiff of despair, the residents wandering aimlessly up and down corridors with no goal to their lives, no hope of a better future, merely waiting to die. But here she was, in just such a place, where she most certainly didn’t belong. It was for old people, and Alice was only fifty-five. Surely that was still middle-aged?
It was all Rachel’s doing, her fault that she was here. It was her daughter who’d insisted on calling a doctor in the first place — and who’d told her the vicious lie that Tom was dead.
As Alice’s awareness increased, she was determined to leave The Elms as soon as possible. Needing answers and not knowing how long it would be until they allowed her to go home, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
Alice required a distraction to facilitate her escape; the opportunity for such was everywhere, and after breakfast would be the ideal time. The staff were busiest then – the dining room needed clearing, the medication trolley organised, and notes made. The carers made never-ending notes; it seemed that each resident’s every move was to be recorded, for whose benefit Alice had yet to decide.
Alice’s room was on the first floor, with the staircase only a few doors down and the day room opposite. She’d been taken downstairs on a couple of occasions and watched the carer tap numbers into the keypad, which opened the door. It was the gateway to freedom, so Alice held the numbers in her mind, knowing that this was the only exit; the lift required a key.
After breakfast, most residents were ushered into the day room where the television played continuously and yet more weak, milky, lukewarm tea served. Alice had noticed one particular lady who was prone to frenetic outbursts, the slightest incident prompting loud wails and hysteria. She felt sorry for the poor woman, who appeared to have lost all sense of reality, but she was the ideal target.
Reluctantly, despite her empathy, Alice approached the woman who sat at the far end of the day room, well away from the door. Then, using her own body to shield her target from view, Alice took the biscuit which the woman was holding, leaned in close enough for only her to hear, and in a loud whisper said, ‘No more of these for you, ever!’ It was totally against her character to do something so cruel to a poor soul who couldn’t understand, but it resulted in the desired effect.
The woman shrieked as if physically assaulted, then began hyperventilating, throwing her body backwards and forwards in the seat, a frantic noisy rocking. Alice didn’t stay to see what happened next and as every available staff member rushed into the day room to see what the commotion was about, she quickly walked, unobserved, towards the stairs.
With her heart pounding, she grabbed the handle, confident she could be down to ground level and out of the building before being spotted. Pulling with all her might on the heavy door, Alice gasped in frustration as it refused to open. Confusion washed over her until she remembered the keypad. Yes, she needed to tap in the numbers, and quickly before anyone came. Her fingers hovered over the buttons: she pressed three, five, seven, nine, but nothing happened. The door remained locked.
Certain that this was the right combination of numbers, she tried again. Still, the door remained locked. Alice tried a different combination, with tears of frustration beginning to dampen her cheeks. Perhaps she’d remembered wrongly and it should be even numbers? Two, four, six, eight, still nothing moved.
‘Alice?’ A voice made her jump. ‘What are you doing?’ The carer was at her shoulder, moving her away from the door and steering her towards her room. ‘Did Olive’s outburst scare you? Don’t worry, she’s fine. I’ll take you back to your room, shall I?’
The woman was kind, and Alice could do nothing other than allow the carer to return her to her room as if she were a piece of lost property. It seemed that they hadn’t connected Olive’s outburst to her escape attempt, which proved to be nothing more than pathetic.
‘Can I get you anything?’ The carer asked as they arrived at the room.
‘Yes, I’d like to see a policeman.’ Alice looked hopefully into the woman’s eyes.
‘Why would you need to see a policeman?’
‘To ask them to find Tom.’ Tears streamed unchecked down Alice’s face.
The woman smiled. ‘I’ll fetch you a nice cup of tea.’
Alice closed her eyes, her brow furrowed – so much for her escape, her grand gesture – and so much for finding Tom, her real goal. In her heart, she knew he wouldn’t have left her. Their marriage was strong. They’d been together for so many years, there must be a good reason preventing him from coming for her. She feared that something might have happened to him, and Rachel, for some reason, was telling everyone that he was dead. Behind Alice’s closed eyes, Tom’s face was clear in her mind, as if she’d been with him only yesterday. If Rachel was telling the truth, how was it that Alice could see her husband so distinctly in her mind’s eye?
