Paradise Lodge (12 page)

In spite of having settled into the chaos of Paradise Lodge, the arrival of Sister Saleem came as a relief to me. Things seemed exciting, on the up, and though there were some challenges—such as actually having to do some work and do it properly—I knew it to be necessary, and I'd been through this kind of change before when my stepfather, Mr Holt, had moved in with us and had insisted we clean our shoes and flush the toilet and so forth. And though these things had seemed like a faff at the time, we'd soon got used to them. Sister Saleem was having the same effect and we all knew that patients and staff alike would benefit and that things would be better. Things would be as wonderful as they'd been before the Owner's Wife had left. Maybe even more so.

Phase One began properly the following morning and entailed Sister Saleem sitting in the owner's nook and looking carefully at every single piece of paper in the building. The point being to gain a clear picture of the financial situation.

‘I'm going to pick up the cat by its tail,' she said, meaning she was going to start with the paperwork, but the others didn't all get it and looked around on the floor for a cat.

For three whole days she sat on the owner's office chair reading paperwork in the semi-dark. Sometimes she swivelled right round and yawned out loud. They were authentic yawns, though, not the little fake yawns that Miranda used to do whenever she was showing off or lying. Sister Saleem's yawns were probably a consequence of her having entered a state of shallow breathing—probably out of boredom—and needing to get a blast of oxygen into her lungs. I knew all this from biology lessons and because I'm interested in the truth about yawning.

It was so bright outside that Sister Saleem had to have the blinds down with only slits of light coming through. We took turns taking her drinks of tea and coffee and lime cordial with ice cubes. One time she asked if I'd be so kind as to get her a milk and rum.

‘Not the Bacardi rum,' she specified, ‘use the Myers's from my basket.'

Cigarette smoke hung in the hot air. Paper dust and the smell of ink drifted through the house and reminded me of sitting against a radiator as a child in the Pork Pie Library, reading
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
by Frank Baum, which was marvellous and took me one whole winter and I'd recommend to anyone, whether or not you like the film. Well, especially if you don't like the film.

At teatime on the third day Sister informed us that Mr Merryman's taxi was due. I was instructed to collect his cases and help him make his way to the hall. The car arrived to take him to Newfields. Matron didn't say goodbye.

By the end of day four—or was it day five?—Sister had taken eight Anadins (four doses of two) and three rum and milks and she'd gone into spectacles. And we'd all had a glass of rum and milk—except Miranda, who didn't drink rum or milk (copying Mike Yu).

Sister Saleem had shown her stress via insulting the owner's Rembrandt self-portrait. ‘Why would anyone want that puffed-up idiot hanging there?' she wondered. Eileen came to the rescue and draped it with a souvenir tea towel from a shopping centre in East Kilbride, where Matron had a pal.

Sister Saleem emerged from the nook briefly, from time to time, to telephone her cousin in private from the owner's sitting room. And one time she asked Matron to accompany her back into the nook. As you know, the nook wasn't very private and it was easy to lurk nearby and hear exactly what was being said. And that's what we did.

Sister's concerns about Matron were manifold. Firstly, she'd had numerous complaints—from staff, patients and the general public—about the inappropriately physical nature of Matron's conduct towards some of the male patients.

‘I don't know what you mean,' said Matron. ‘Who, where, when?'

‘Mr Merryman, the Café Rialto in Leicester, where you had a three-course lunch at his expense, and former resident Mr Greenberg, robust cuddling in the car park at the Weetabix factory,' Sister went on, obviously reading from her notes, ‘and Mr Freeman at a Gilbert and Sullivan concert at St James the Greater Church. Shall I go on?'

‘No,' said Matron.

‘I will tell you that I have had to let a patient go,' said Sister, ‘for legal reasons, before his relatives involve their solicitor.' (Miranda mouthed ‘Merryman' to the rest of us.)

Sister moved on. She told Matron she had searched the staff files with a fine-toothed comb and found absolutely no evidence whatsoever of her being qualified in any way whatsoever (she said ‘whatsoever' twice). And, as far as Sister could tell, Matron had been recruited by the Owner's Wife in 1969 as chief bottle-washer. There was a pause then—when Matron might have defended herself—but she stayed quiet, which meant to us that she was guilty as charged. And though we weren't actually that surprised, we looked at each other—at first shocked, and then sad.

Matron was to be relegated to auxiliary—with immediate effect, Sister Saleem told her. Matron's response to that was a placid little, ‘Right you are.'

She was no longer Queen Bee.

Shortly afterwards Matron joined us in the kitchen. She sniffed and, taking her tiny china teacup from its hiding place, helped herself to a measure of Myers's rum, drank it down quickly and said, ‘
C'est la vie
,' in French.

Matron wasn't as devastated as you might think. The only noticeable difference in her demeanour being that she pontificated less. She continued to wear the Matron's dress and belt—and no other outfit. She did drastically and symbolically change her hair colour from obviously dyed black to a more natural (looking) straw colour. She did it herself in the staff bathroom using L'Oréal Preference, which I knew to be a good brand, and went from Gypsy Queen to Doris Speed in a matter of two hours.

One day soon after the relegation, as we were doing the beds in the ladies' ward, I mentioned it. It was an elephant in the room and I hate elephants in rooms.

‘You seem to be getting on
OK
with Sister in spite of—everything,' I said.

‘Yes, well, she has a job to do,' said Matron.

‘And what about you—you know, your plans?' I asked.

‘I'll have to try harder,' said Matron, and that could have meant a number of different things.

I shared the exciting developments with my family. My mother was most annoyed that I couldn't tell her where Sister Saleem was from (geographically). I explained that none of us had liked to ask—as if to ask such a question was rude. That made my mother even more annoyed.

‘It's not rude to
ask
,' yelled my mother, exasperated, ‘it's rude
not
to ask—she's your new work colleague, your boss, not a person in the street.'

My mother's world was part sonnet, part Bob Dylan song and part boarding school dormitory. She thought everyone should share everything. She thought it was
OK
to buy a beggar a sandwich. She thought it was normal to jump into a river with nothing on and to chat to the girl on the checkout about instant mash and having better things to do than peel potatoes. She believed people should celebrate each other's exuberances and joys and stay up till midnight to share their pain. I think it came from being a certain age at a certain time in the 1960s and it feeling so wonderful to shake off the doom and gloom and disregard the rules. And she thought it was going to be like that forever.

Anyway, she considered it right and proper and absolutely imperative to ask a middle-aged black person where they came from—as if it had nothing attached.

I never did ask Sister any questions about her heritage or why she didn't eat certain meats or beetroot. And, apart from a few anxious enquiries from the most neurotic patients, neither did anyone else. No one asked which country she'd grown up in that had given her such a deep, Hitlerish accent and a love of cheese. No one asked about her family, her past or her friends. No one even liked to mention the weather—in case it led on to talk of hot countries. No one had asked if they could help her with the excruciating English on the medical notes she'd had to plough through. It seemed touchy and awkward—as if we were highlighting a defect, like Nurse Hilary's cow-hocks and pitted teeth, or a tragedy, like Sally-Anne's given-away twins.

Strangely, though, we all thought it perfectly acceptable to touch her bouncy hair. She told us it was water-repellent like a duck's feathers. But when we arrived for Gordon and Mindy Banks' charity fund-raising barbecue and dip she was already in the water, clinging to the ornamental bridge, and wearing a swim cap. So we were denied the chance to see it in action.

We thought it fine to look at her face preparations and discuss the pros and cons of differing nostril size. And to ask about the skin on her legs, which was shiny one minute and dusty like scorched earth the next.

All through Phase One, we came to dread Sister Saleem coming out of the owner's nook. Partly we wondered who'd be next for the chop, but also she kept noticing examples of bad practice. For instance, on the way to telephone her cousin in private she walked into a glass door that she hadn't realized was there and bashed her nose. She was furious at the lack of safety manifestations on the glass. She said even a dot of paint would be better than nothing.

Nurse Eileen took it personally and told her that no one had ever walked into the door before and maybe her eyes were unfocused due to being in the nook in the half-dark.

Eileen had taken slightly against Sister Saleem but, to be fair, she didn't try to influence anyone against her. Except to mimic her behind her back.

Sister Saleem had been trained in modern ways and she made changes on the spot, as and when, and she shifted things around in a most disruptive way. For example, she approached Miranda and me one morning in the day room.

‘Why are the residents' chairs arranged thus?' she asked, gesturing at the circle of chairs around the edge of the room. Neither of us knew quite what ‘thus' meant at the time.

Miranda began to babble and talk rubbish but I knew to be direct and honest, and said, ‘What do you mean, “thus”?' and Sister Saleem said, ‘Like this, in a ring around the margin of the room—as if they are the audience of something that is going to happen in the middle of the floor.'

So I said, ‘Because that's how it's always been.' And Sister Saleem's head went to the side while she translated it into Dutch, or whatever language she had in her mind, which gave me a further moment to think about it and quickly add, ‘And the patients like it like this.'

For the next half-hour we rearranged the ring of chairs into little clusters of three or four with coffee tables dotted about, some by the windows and others by the fire and each with its own focus. The patients looked on, puzzled, and Nurse Eileen popped her head in and muttered ‘ridiculous' under her breath. I must admit, the chair clusters looked attractive—like a coffee shop for hippies but with very ugly chairs. I wasn't sure it was right for the patients because it wasn't what they were used to and that was what they preferred. Always.

Nurse Eileen hit out at Sister one day, saying her father was a business manager and he knew never to make any changes in a new situation until week six—or later—by which time he'd have got the confidence of the entire workforce via trust-building chit-chat and cups of good old-fashioned tea. This didn't rattle Sister Saleem, she simply opened her eyes very wide, thanked Eileen for her ideas and said, ‘Ah, if only we had the time for that palaver.'

It was unsettling, Sally-Anne said, meaning the atmosphere between Eileen and Sister. It was like having bickering parents. Miranda agreed, Mr and Mrs Longlady were constantly at each other's throats, apparently, trying to bankrupt each other on the Monopoly board and blaming each other for Melody going into punk after such a promising childhood.

One day, Nurse Eileen had thawed towards Sister Saleem, which was an all-round blessing. Sister Saleem seemed to know it even before Eileen did and gave Eileen a little pat, and somehow the little pat was the final thing that made Eileen like her. It was a curious circular situation. And then Sister Saleem was 100 per cent liked. Even Miranda, who found things to criticize in even the nicest person, liked Sister Saleem a lot—particularly, she said, on account of her arriving like Mary Poppins.

The owner liked her too. Except every now and again you might find him scratching his head and saying, ‘Who is that curly-headed woman in the green trousers?' and Nurse Eileen or Matron would reply, ‘It's Sister Saleem. You recruited her.' And he'd say, ‘Did I? I don't remember—I must have been in my cups.'

Sister Saleem's nursing trousers—the pale jade, drip-dry with patch pockets—had caused consternation from the off. The patients, you'll recall, having been aghast. The staff, on the other hand, had fallen for them when we'd seen her climb a stepladder, on the day she arrived, to unplug a portable telly and hadn't had to worry about anything silly—like showing her pants, or looking like Dick Emery.

Now Nurse Eileen and Sister Saleem had become friends, Eileen asked if she might order herself a pair of sea-green culottes and matching tabard from Alexander's, the workwear specialist, and we all joined in wanting them. Sister said she was sorry but the owner had enough unpaid bills. Then, only a couple of days later, she plonked a batch of the pale jade trouser suits on to the kitchen table.

It turned out that a hospital in Birmingham, where Sister had worked temporarily, had obsoleted them due to changing livery after merging with another hospital under the
BUPA
umbrella and going back to traditional all-white. Eileen was the first to change into the pale jade and looked superb. Actually, Nurse Eileen made the trouser suit look fashionable and attractive—she looked like a fashion plate (Mr Simmons' words).