The Posting

The agency warned me Aldgrove was a hard placement, but they say that about every place that pays this well. Hard, in agency language, usually means understaffed and far from a bus route. It almost never means what it meant here. I drove out on a Tuesday in October, the kind of grey afternoon that never quite commits to rain. Aldgrove Convalescent Home sat at the end of a private lane, three storeys of soot-darkened brick behind a lawn that someone mowed but no longer cared about. Half the windows on the upper floor were boarded from the inside. I remember thinking that was a waste, all that glass, and then I remember not thinking about it again for several days, which is its own kind of strange. The day matron met me at the door. Her name was Sandra Plume, and she had the brisk, scrubbed manner of a woman who had run wards for forty years and intended to run this one until it closed under her. She walked me through the ground floor at a pace that did not invite questions. Dining room. Linen store. The medication room with its double lock. Eleven patients, she said, all of them on the first floor now, all of them stable, most of them asleep by nine. "You'll do nights on your own," she said. "It's quiet. That's the whole job. You do rounds at ten, twelve, two, and four. You write everything in the book even if nothing happens. Especially if nothing happens." I asked why especially. She looked at me for a moment longer than the question deserved. "Because an empty page tells the next nurse you weren't paying attention," she said. "And I want my nights paid attention to." We went up one flight. The first-floor corridor was warm and ordinary, carpeted in a hospital blue that had been chosen to hide stains. Doors stood ajar. I heard a television murmuring, a kettle, the small domestic sounds of people being kept comfortable at the end of things. It smelled of antiseptic and overcooked vegetables. It smelled, honestly, like every place I had ever worked. At the end of the corridor the stairs continued up, and across the bottom of that second flight someone had fixed a length of webbing strap, the sort you'd see at an airport, clipped between two screw eyes in the wall. A laminated sign hung from it. NO ACCESS. STAFF QUERIES TO MATRON. "Third floor," Sandra said, before I could ask. "Closed. Has been for years. Storage, mostly, and the structure isn't sound up there. You've no reason to go up and every reason not to." "Is it included in rounds?" "It is not." She said it flatly, and started back down, and that was meant to be the end of it. I am a thorough person. It is the only thing I have ever been praised for and the only thing I have ever been criticised for, and it has never once occurred to me to change. So I want to be honest about the fact that I noticed three things on that first walk-through, and I noticed them the way you notice a stone in your shoe — not alarming, just present, just waiting. The first was that the NO ACCESS strap was not dusty. Everything else on that staircase wore a soft grey fur of neglect. The strap and its two screw eyes were clean, the laminate unscuffed. Someone had put it up recently, or someone touched it often. The second was that the boarded windows I'd seen from the lawn were boarded from inside. You board a window from inside to keep something from getting out the same as to keep weather from getting in. I knew that. I just didn't let myself finish the thought. The third thing I noticed was at the nurses' station, where Sandra showed me the call-bell panel. It was an old system, a grid of little numbered lights, one for each room, that lit and chimed when a patient pressed their bedside button. The first-floor rooms were numbered 1 through 14. But the panel had more lights than that. Three rows of them, climbing up into the thirties, each with its neat engraved number, each dark. "Those are the upper rooms," Sandra said, following my eyes. "Disconnected. Don't mind them." I didn't mind them. I started my shift at eight, and the home settled into its evening, and by ten the corridor was dark and the patients were sleeping and I sat at the station with the logbook open and the kettle ticking as it cooled. At 10:51, by the clock on the wall, one of the lights in the top row lit up. Room 31. A small amber bead of light, steady, and under it a chime so soft and so brief I might have dreamed it, except that I had been awake, and thorough, and paying attention, exactly as I had been asked.