Sin City by Wendy Perriam Page A

if she’s parcelled me away, wiped me off like a grease-mark on a table.
    I watch her snip a stalk, ram it into chicken wire. She’s brought a few flowers home, snooty hothouse things, purplish-pink, with sort of pouting lips. Are they really only homework, or something to impress her guy, her new Mr Right who’ll soon move in with her? There won’t be room for three.
    She repositions a flower head, moves back to admire it. “Does Norah want to go?”
    I shrug. “Not really. I don’t think she wants anything. When you’ve been in a place like that for years and years, you don’t have any wants left. On the other hand, she’s scared about the move. It’s definite now. Everyone’s discussing it. Patients like her who aren’t batty or half-crippled or over eighty have to go into lodgings and she hates the very thought.”
    â€œBut how can a holiday change that? She’ll still have to move, won’t she, after the ten days?”
    â€œWell, I suppose she thinks it’s …” I swallow a last noodle, push my mug away. “Longer.”
    â€œCarole, you didn’t let her think that, did you?”
    â€œNo, I bloody didn’t. I can’t help it, can I, if she refuses to read the bumph? She’s had three letters now and hasn’t glanced at one of them. She assumes all sorts of things without me saying anything – not just about Las Vegas, but …”
    â€œLook, Carole, she’s obviously confused. There’s just no point in going with her. She’ll be a total drag. Or maybe worse. Supposing she goes funny, or has a fit or something? It’s quite a responsibility, you realise, travelling all that way with a loony in your charge.”
    â€œShe’s not a loony. I wish you wouldn’t use that word.” I touch the squashy package in my pocket – a piece of mushroom flan wrapped in pale pink Kleenex, the pastry damp and blackened from the mushrooms. Norah saved it from her dinner, a treasure which had somehow missed the mincer, hoarded it for me. “We do have loonies, sure, quite a choice selection. In fact, it could have been far worse. Imagine ten days in Las Vegas with Flora Thompson who’s got only half a face and less than half her brain cells, or Meg O’Riley who thinks she’s still in Ireland.”
    Jan grimaces. I suppose she loathes the hospital because her life is prettying things. Exotic scented flowers to follow bloody tearing births or smelly sordid illnesses, or to patch up deadly quarrels.
    Even death itself strewn with coloured petals. Floral tributes, they call the wreaths in Mayfair.
    My mother sent a wreath from both of us, a ghastly thing with silver lurex ribbons dangling from self-important lilies; wrote “To Father” on it. He wasn’t her father, only mine, and anyway I never called him that. I stole out later with a pair of kitchen scissors and snipped my name neatly off the card (which was vile itself – a white and silver cross with a disembodied hand held up in blessing.) I scoured every money-box and hiding-place I’d ever used since I was a kid, tipped the pile of coins into a plastic bag (they were too heavy for a purse), blew the lot on cheerful non-snob flowers – marigolds and cornflowers, sweet williams, scented stocks; spent all day clinging on to them. They were awkward to carry and the damp stems made my skirt wet, but I couldn’t bear to leave them in that sapless crematorium, or slighted by my Mother’s fancy wreath. By evening, they were drooping. One marigold was just a stalk. I must have knocked its head off and not noticed. In the end, I left them on a bench, one Dad often sat on in the park, happy doing nothing – whittling sticks or patting dogs or exchanging words with strangers who walked by. (My mother never spoke to anyone unless she had a formal signed certificate – in triplicate – that they were