The Light of Amsterdam by David Park Page B

paperwork.
    So she had stolen a bracelet. Everyone probably knew and thought so by now. Nothing happened in the home big or small that it didn’t course through the communal circuits like electricity and, in a place that consisted mostly of a dull waiting, nothing gave more pleasure than a sudden surge of shocking gossip. She imagined the residents in the day room, where they were now confined for the next hour while their rooms were done, passing the story from mouth to mouth, their grey-haired heads leaning in conspiratorially to each other, liver-spotted hands held flutteringly like fans across their mouths. Like Chinese whispers, who could guess the elaborate embellishments that would be added as flawed hearing and malice warped the words into some new shape? She hated them all a little as the squeak of the wheel beat in time with the pulse of her rising anger.
    When she came she had thought this would be a good place to work, full of kindly old souls who would be grateful for the comfort and service their money had finally brought them. But while it didn’t cater for those with dementia or serious illness and was clearly at the top of the price range and supposedly offering some independence of living, now she thought of it as the home of the bitter, the unhappy and often the deserted. Nothing ever satisfied, nothing ever fully lived up to the expectation they had of what their money entitled them to. So it was as if they were on a cruise ship and some aspect of their accommodation or entertainment schedule had fallen short of what the brochure promised. Individual and collective complaining – there wasn’t a week went by without someone organising a gripe about something – was also their way of asserting their dignity, their self-image of being strong people who couldn’t be put upon. Each and every one of them thought of the staff as working personally for them. And that was to say nothing of the rivalries amongst the women, the constant struggle, in a world where everything was designed to give equal treatment, to hold on to notions of superiority and class. To be better than someone else. To have more money. To be more independent. To be more loved by their relatives.
    Relatives. That was a laugh. Couldn’t get a space in the car park at Christmas, Easter and Mothers’ Day and the rest of the year you could land a plane in it. And the more they didn’t come, the more they compensated by talking about their sons and daughters, their nephews and nieces, their grandchildren who had all just finished university and were doing terribly well. But no one ever asked anything about her or her child who wouldn’t have enough money when they were old to stay for a week in a place like this.
    No one except Mrs Hemmings. She paused at the door of her room. Perhaps they should have asked someone else to clean it and suddenly it seemed like a trap where when she went in there would be a stash of money sitting on the dresser and if she were to touch it the secret camera would capture it all on tape, alarm bells ring and her guilt would be established for all the world to see. But when she entered everything looked as it always did with the shelves slightly buckled by their books and classical CD s; the desk with laptop and papers; the fat, mirrored wardrobe that contained the vast array of clothes, most of which would never be worn again but would never be thrown away or sent to the charity shop the living side of death. And the dresser that kept the jewellery box, the letters, the personal and legal documentation, the photograph albums. On the walls hung the two landscapes and the framed panoramic black and white photograph of staff and pupils standing in tiered rows.
    She knew everything in the room intimately because she was Mrs Hemmings’ most frequent visitor and because there was little that she hadn’t been shown or been given to hold. Mrs Hemmings, a former headmistress of a