When I eventually stop flexing, I gently nudge the tray holding Harry’s bowl of shredded wheat a little bit closer to him in the hope that he might take the hint. He doesn’t. Instead he shakes his head again, meaning all my buffoonery was for nothing.
‘Aaaadoooowaaaaannnnnn!’
‘But you have to.’
‘Aaaadoooowaaaaannnnnn!’
‘Go on, just a spoonful for me.’
‘Aaaadoooowaaaaannnnnn!’
‘Please, mate.’
Reluctantly he reaches for his spoon and I allow myself to breathe a sigh of relief, but then he lets out one almighty, ‘Aaaadoooowaaaaannnnnn!’ and flings out his arms sending the bowl and its contents flying into the air, showering everything within a three-metre radius – the walls, his chair, a framed photo of his wife, and of course me, in a combination of semi-skimmed milk and mashed-up shredded wheat.
Despite this being only my third week in the job this incident is far from the worst thing to have happened to me. Here at Four Oaks food throwing is such a daily occurrence that along with the screaming, biting, punching, kicking and vomiting, it’s barely worth commenting on. Cleaning up after leaking adult nappies, wiping up the contents of bedpans that have been deliberately tipped over by angry residents, and mopping copious amounts of blood from the floor following DIY removals of intravenous drips are all part of a day’s work. And the worst thing to have happened to me since I started? That’s easy. Last week a woman in D9 was prescribed some new diabetes medication that made her doubly incontinent and in the middle of cleaning her up, I ripped a hole in my glove. Colleen, my co-worker, had to yell into my ear for me to get a grip before I finally managed to tear my eyes away from the substance covering my index finger. For days afterwards I treated the offending digit as if it were no longer part of me, and it was over a week before I’d even let it come close to anything that I might eat.
It takes me a good half an hour to clean Harry, his room and myself, which means that I end up being behind on my duties for the morning. Strictly speaking, by ten o’clock I’m supposed to have all the residents under my care dressed and fed (either in their room or in the main dining hall), but it’s more like eleven thirty by the time I’ve managed to locate the only shirt that Tom in 7B will wear, helped Margaret in 11A order a present for her grandson’s sixth birthday, found where the new tubes of ointment for Veena in 17C’s bed sores are kept, and given Iwan in 15D a shave in preparation for his daughter’s visit.
As Iwan’s daughter arrives, I leave the room and find myself wondering whether I’ve got the strength to make it to the end of the day. My shift started at six this morning and doesn’t officially end until three o’clock this afternoon and even though it’s only mid-morning, I feel dead on my feet and I know the day is only going to get worse. That’s the thing about this place. There’s always someone somewhere who needs cleaning, wiping, comforting, feeding or medicating. Always. I suppose if they could have done these things for themselves, then their families wouldn’t have brought them here. That’s the factor that links them together, the one detail they have in common despite the differences in age, race, gender and medical condition: they all need help. Some of their needs are obvious, like Vince in 22C, who shakes like a washing machine on maximum spin because of his Parkinson’s. Others like Anjali in 3C are more subtle, she can laugh and joke with the best of them and will regale you with so many tales of life back in Mumbai that you wonder why she’s here, and it’s only when you ask her what year it is and she tells you it’s 1964 that you realise something is up. Some of the residents, like Donna in 2D who suffers from spina bifida and whose mum is recovering from a hysterectomy operation, are only here for a matter of days while others, like Craig in 19B who, following a motorcycle accident two years ago, can’t even feed himself, are here for the long haul.
If I were a nicer person, the stories of the residents here at Four Oaks would’ve moved me to tears. Honestly, some of their histories are downright heartbreaking. Couples looking forward to growing old together ripped apart by the most tragic of accidents; parents with young children turned into drooling wrecks, all because of heart-rending dumb luck; young people with their whole lives ahead of them struck down by a one-in-a-million disease in their prime. As it is, however, I’m still far too self-involved to give any of the residents more than a second thought. Though I see their pain and can even empathise with their troubles, no matter how sad the story, in the end nothing sticks. It’s as though I’m Teflon coated. I suppose it makes sense to be like this when I know I’m not going to be here for long. Sooner or later I’ll be sacked, of this I have no doubt, so at the end of the day there’s really no point in me getting emotionally involved with any of these people. The fact of the matter is, I’m simply passing through.
As I check in with Margaret in 11A to see if she’s changed her mind about going to the TV room, my phone buzzes with a text. Technically we’re not meant to have our phones on when we’re on duty but everyone – and I do mean everyone – ignores the rule, even though you’d think we’d know better after what we spend all our working days touching. But this is the world we live in: a world where we’d all sooner risk dysentery than be isolated from our Candy Crush scores for more than five minutes.
The text is from Maya. She’s going out straight after work with friends and won’t be back home until late. She signs off her message with three kisses, which is precisely three hundred per cent more than we’ve shared in real life since I started at Four Oaks. Far from saving us, I think my getting a job has made things worse. I think she feels like it’s too little too late and every day that passes she drifts further away from me, and all I can do is stand by and watch.
Somehow despite an altercation between two residents, and a toilet blockage that I’m tasked to deal with along with all my other duties, I make it through to the end of my shift, catch the bus back into Coventry and not long after, I’m walking through town to catch the bus that will take me home to Coundon. As I zigzag my way through the crowds of shoppers, I begin to notice the shops they are emerging from, shops that I never venture into because I’m always broke. I watch a woman loaded down with multiple bags from Primark and then later see two men come out of Currys, sharing the load of a brand new computer. Normally I never notice this kind of thing, but I can only suppose that now that I’m just a week away from my first payday in three years, consumerism is getting the better of me.
I dip into a clothes shop but exit almost straight away because everything’s way too expensive for my liking. More out of nostalgia than anything, I pop into HMV but as I walk around the racks of CDs and DVDs it feels as if I’m in a museum dedicated to preserving the recent past, rather than a shop selling things people in the twenty-first century might actually want to buy. As I leave the store, however, I glance at the window of a nearby jeweller’s and a diamond necklace in the window catches my eye. On a whim I go in and find myself asking the young store assistant behind the counter if I can take a closer look at it.
‘It really is a lovely piece,’ she says, having retrieved the necklace from the window so that I can examine it. ‘Is it for your partner?’