Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon
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through to discolour the new. Only after about six layers will the surface begin to bubble and the wall have to be stripped down to its plaster, but that will happen on average only every five years or so. The pink and white was only the second layer since the Golden Bowl had been opened twenty-two years back. The occupant before Dr Rosebloom had been one hundred and two years old, in good health and spirits to the end, and had also died suddenly in the same bed. The mattress had been in good condition and management had not considered it necessary to replace it at the time.
‘Two sudden deaths in the same bed,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘is too much.’ He was a genial and generous man. ‘This time round the mattress at least must be replaced.’
‘You can hardly blame the bed for the deaths,’ said Nurse Dawn, who pretended to be genial and generous but was not. ‘Dr Rosebloom smoked—look at the state of the ceiling: if he’d had more self-control we wouldn’t be having to repaint—I daresay some respiratory trouble or other triggered the infarction.’
‘Ah, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli, affectionately, ‘you would like everyone to live for ever in perfect health, behaving properly.’ ‘So I would,’ she said. ‘Why would God let some of us live longer than others, if he didn’t want us to learn more in the extra time?’ In her book self-improvement must be continuous, and no respite offered even to the elderly.
The Golden Bowl housed some sixty guests, known to themselves and others as Golden Bowlers. All had had to be over seventy-five at the time they joined the community, and still capable of congregate living. If you were, this augured well for your longevity. The weak had been carried off by now; only the vital and strong remained. The average age of death among Golden Bowlers was a ripe ninety-six, thanks to the particular nature and character of the guests as selected by Nurse Dawn. She had no actuarial training: she worked by instinct. One look was enough. This one would last. Welcome. That one wouldn’t. We are so sorry, we have no spaces.
Death was far from an everyday occurrence at the Golden Bowl, albeit one that was inevitable. Guests moved, within the same building complex, from Congregate Living (when you just didn’t want to be alone) to Assisted Living (when you needed help with your stockings) to Continuing Care (when you needed help with your eating) to Nursing Care (when you took to your bed) to, if you were unlucky, Intensive Care (when you wanted to die but they didn’t let you). Families were encouraged to hand over complete responsibility. Over-loving relatives could be more damaging to an old person’s morale, more detrimental to the Longevity Index, than those who were neglectful. One of Dr Grepalli’s most successful lectures was on this particular subject. Just as a teacher tends to dislike parents, and hold them responsible for the plight of the children, so did Dr Grepalli mistrust relatives and their motives. The doctor was a leading light in the field of senior care administration, appeared on TV from time to time, and wrote articles in The Senior Citizen Monthly which would be syndicated worldwide. Golden Bowlers admired him greatly, and were proud of him. Or so Nurse Dawn assured him.
The longest stay of any Golden Bowler had been twenty-two years: the shortest five days, but that latter was a statistical anomaly, and therefore not used in any averaging out. In its twenty-two years of existence only eight patients had ever moved out before, as it were, moving on. The degree of life satisfaction at the Golden Bowl was high, just inevitably short, though a great deal less short than in similar institutions charging similar prices. Not that there were many around like the Golden Bowl, where you could stay in one place through the increasing stages of your decrepitude. It was customary for the elderly to be wrenched out of familiar places and be moved on to more ‘suitable’ establishments, as the degree of their physical or mental incompetence lurched from one stage to the next, and in the move lost friends, and often possessions, as space itself closed in around them. At the Golden Bowl, whatever your condition, you watched the seasons change in familiar trees and skies, and made your peace with your maker in your own time.
Joseph Grepalli and Nurse Dawn shivered a little in the chilly morning air that dispersed the smell of paint, but were satisfied in their souls. Dr Rosebloom had died suddenly in his sleep at the age of ninety-seven, not a centenarian, but every year over ninety-seven helped ease the average up. He had not done badly, even though he smoked.
The mattress and armchair of the deceased—being perfectly clean—were to be taken to be sold at the used furniture depository: it was remarkable, as Joseph Grepalli remarked, how though a bed could escape the personality of the one who slept in it, an armchair seemed to soak up personality and when its user died, became limp and dismal.
‘Such a romantic,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘I do so love that about you, Joseph.’ The armchair looked perfectly good to her: it was in her interests to keep spending to a minimum but Joseph had to be kept happy, strong in the knowledge of his own sensitivity and goodness. New furniture, she agreed, would be bought at a discount store that very day.
The Golden Bowl had at its practised fingertips the art of providing Instant Renewal of mind and artifacts to maximize peace of mind and profits too. To this end policy was that no single room, suite, or full apartment should be allowed to stay empty for longer than three days at most. But no sooner, either: it took three days, and even Nurse Dawn agreed on this point, for the spirit of the departed to stop hanging around, keeping the air shivery, bringing bad judgement and bad luck. The waiting list was long; it might take guests a month or so to wind up their affairs and move in, but they would pay from the moment their accommodation fell available, ready and waiting. That way the aura of death, the sense of absence caused by death, would be less likely to endure. As with psychoanalysis, the fact of payment had a healing, restoring function. It reduced the ineffable to the everyday.
The bathroom cabinets had to be replaced; as well: Joseph had a superstition about mirrors: supposing the new occupant looked in the mirror and saw the former occupant looking out? Mirrors could be like that, maintained Joseph Grepalli. They retained memory; they had their own point of view. Aged faces tended to look alike in the end: one tough grey whisker much like another, but their owners did not necessarily see it like this. Joseph allowed himself to be fanciful: he himself was a Doctor of Literature; his father Dr Homer Grepalli, the noted geriatric physician and psychoanalyst, had bequeathed him the place and he had made himself an expert. Nurse Dawn was qualified in geriatric psychiatry, which was all that the authorities required.
‘We have twenty-five people on the waiting list,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘but none of them truly satisfactory. Drop-down-deaders: overweight or sociopathic: there is a Pulitzer winner, which is always good for business, but she’s a smoker.’
Nurse Dawn slipped between Joseph’s covers of a night: she was a sturdy, strong-jawed woman of forty-two, with a big bosom and a dull-skinned face and small dark bright button eyes. She looked better with clothes off than on. She clip-clopped down the corridors by day on sensible heels, her broad beam closely encased in blue or white linen, exhorting Golden Bowlers to further and deeper self-knowledge.
‘I trust your judgement, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli. For some reason he felt uneasy, as if standing in front of the lobster tank at a fish restaurant, choosing the one to die for his delight.
‘In fact the whole lot of them sound troublesome and unprincipled. Not one’s as easy as they used to be. Even the old have developed an overweening sense of their own importance. They’ve caught it from the young.’ By troublesome she meant picky about their food, or given to criticism of the staff, or arguing about medication, or averse to group therapy, or lacking in get-up-and-go, or worse, having too many relatives who’d died young. All prospective Golden Bowlers had to provide, as well as good credit references and a CV, a family history and personality profile built on a questionnaire devised by Nurse Dawn herself.
Joseph Grepalli was a bearish, amiable, charismatic man, not unlike, as Sophia King was