Adam Biles - Feeding Time

D ropping the key through the letterbox, just as the boy from the estate agents had instructed her, Dot (ne Dorothy, aka Dotty to some, most of them dead) wondered, for a moment, if anyone had ever drawn a line under life in quite such a dont-mind-me manner as this.

Well take care of the rest, Mum, the boy-agent had assured her, shifting about beneath his suit, his back broad enough to support just one of the jackets shoulder pads at a time. Leave the worrying to us.

That Dot couldnt do. She forced a smile.

The storm had started during the night and hadnt let up. The rain whipped earthwards from the charcoal heavens, churning in the potholes of the driveway and coursing along the gutters of Trapp Street in miniature white-water drifts.

No chance, it seemed, that the driver would brave the storm to help Dot with her cases. Since the battered Cortina had rolled to a stop outside the bungalow and the man behind the wheel had honked three hopeful pips to begin and then, a minute later, a single insistent blat the only movement from the car had been the determined flapping of the wipers.

When, trout-wet, Dot opened the door, tumbled her cases, her handbag and then herself onto the back seat, the drivers greeting caught her off guard:

You filthy motherfucker!

She wasnt shocked. The utter incongruity of the outburst forbade that. She simply felt as if shed been goosed, emotionally.

I

The driver turned, his shirt covered with sweat; the material creased like a walruss paunch. He gestured with his index finger, killing two birds by using it first to suggest she pause, and then to indicate the black plastic tongue curling from his ear, the tip of which was pulsing with a pin-prick blue light.

Uh huh No, no. Go on.

Dot waited as the driver continued his call, for the most part a symphony of grunts, snorts and harrumphs dropped to reassure his interlocutor that he was still listening. After a couple of minutes he paused. In the rear-view mirror Dot saw a flare of panic in his eyes:

The Aristocrats? Ha! Wait What? Another pause. No, no. I get it Its just What? He flicked the ignition and the car choked to life. Then, with a lurch of acceleration they were away, out of Trapp Street and onto the main road, refusing the slow and poetic farewell between herself and the receding bungalow that shed played out so many times in her mind since deciding to sell it.

No, no, Mike. That was a good one, the driver said. Whove I got up next? Jenks? The old cun His eyes collided with Dots in the mirror. The old guy with the colostomy bag? Jesus, Mike! Last time I drove him he leaked all over the seat. Took me a fortnight to Whats that? Bin liners? Well I could, Mike, but Im not sure Ill be able to convince him to climb into one!

His meaty hands crashed onto the dashboard as he wheezed his satisfaction with the joke. The driver was a big man. Not fat exactly, but solid an ancient standing stone spirited to life. He dragged his sleeve across his nose. Dot ached to intervene, to reach forward and clip the rogue behind the ear. Theyre never too old to fear the sting. But she couldnt. What had happened to her? Had forty-five years of classroom hardening drained away overnight?

Dot thought of the formidable specimen she had become by the time shed retired at the age of seventy: a smoky, combative old dame, with a line in dry wit that was two parts Wilde, three parts London Gin. Shed been the kind of teacher only appreciated several years down the line, when a safe distance had been achieved and maintained. Her pupils might remember how she would shy her Collected Shakespeare across the room, clocking the crown of a classroom gossiper, but they would also jolly well remember every word of Macbeths dagger soliloquy until their dying days. Unless of course

No. The woman Dot had been when she retired would never have put up with such insolence from a taxi driver. But a lot can happen in four years. Shed been dry most of that time, and had even given up the smokes.

Yeah, the driver said. Shouldnt be too long now, anyway. Take it easy, Mike.

Then, spying his chance to join the beetling rows of cars, he flung the Cortina into the outside lane.

After about a quarter of an hour, the traffic slowed, then stopped. The driver started beating a dislocated drum solo on the steering wheel and sighed, the air whistling through his dry lips to the accompaniment of the thumping wipers.

Dot pulled the brochure from her handbag and flipped through it. It had the same vaguely chemical odour as the expensive fashion magazines in her doctors waiting room, the same way of flopping open in the hands, the same luxurious heft. She traced the gold-embossed logo on the cover: the silhouette of an acorn that seemed, perversely, to be smirking. There wasnt much text, just the name of the place Green Oaks in a childish font and below, in squint-or-youll-miss-it grey, the words A West Church Holding.

Behind the acorn was a photo of an old manor Tudor? Georgian? Leonard would have known roosting atop a verdant hillock, flanked by two wizened oak trees, their foliage a tapestry of the ochres and rust reds of clichs autumn. The cloudless sky shone with the gilded blue of late afternoon, although the sun and its long contemplative shadows were absent, lending the scene an uncanny lack of depth.

Dot got the message. Even the most addled of her pupils could have. It was hardly subtle: You may have reached the autumn of your life, the twilightof your years, it crooned, in that flashy, mercantile tone everything seemed to have these days but you neednt be afraid. Because look, not only is this the natural way of all things, of the day, of the seasons, it is also, in some way, quite beautiful, something to be cherished.

Codswallop! Bilge, bosh, bunk and blarney! No, anyone who had reached the age of admittance to a place like this and could still be manipulated so easily was a dupe who had learnt almost nothing from life.

Inside were more sugar-blasted photos of the grounds, along with floating testimonials from several residents. What a handsome bunch of eeries! There was an extra-terrestrial glassiness to their eyes, as if they had been imported from the propaganda of some futuristic dystopia, or an advert for some Japanese video game for retraining flaccid, geriatric brains. A world from which dirt and other imperfections had been meticulously, but brutally, erased. A TV world, in which even the uglies were beautiful.

They were all smiling, of course. Not at the camera, but at something just beyond it. And they could smile, looking like that! Whereas Dot had rotted and shrivelled over the years, an old plum with her own patina of bluish mould, these models had been matured in oak caskets. Whereas her skin was desert-cracked, theirs had softened and creased like fine Italian shoe-leather. Whereas her hair had thinned out into a substanceless scaffold of a do, theirs was as vigorous and bushy as squirrel tails.

Strangest, though, was not what their faces showed, but what they didnt. Where was the sadness, where the pain of loss that she saw etched into her own face? Where the resignation? Where the runnels carved by the unquenchable tears shed over the For Sale stakes planted in the gardens of their bungalows?

A question nipped at her mind. That voice again: Why do you think any of these fine specimens of humanity so much finer than you, by the way, so spared, coddled and closeted by life would have chosen to enter the purgatorial world of residential care?