Because I work on that unit. I have access to Junie Vane’s care plan, her medication chart, her family contact notes, her son’s phone number. I sit in her room three times a week doing music with her.
And my mother is in a relationship with her next of kin.
Mel was very good about it and very fast, which told me she had done something like it before. I was moved off Fern Wing within eight days — to Ash Wing, at the other end of the building, which is residential and not specialist.
I lost the unit I had built everything on. I lost eleven residents I knew properly, including a man called Iolo who only speaks in the mornings and who I had got to a point with.
And I lost Junie.
Which I did not expect to feel the way it felt, because at that point I had spent a week thinking of her as an argument.
And Mel Adeyi, who I have not given enough credit to.
I went into that office on the Monday morning with a speech about honesty and transparency and I got about eleven words in before I started crying, which I have not done at work in three years.
She let me finish. Then she asked three questions, in this order.
Is Mrs Vane safe. Have you ever accessed her records for a reason that wasn’t clinical. Does anyone else on the unit know.
No, no, and no.
And then she said: “Right. Then you’ve done nothing wrong and we’re going to move you, and I need you to hear those two things as one sentence, because in about a week you’re going to have decided it’s a punishment.”
She was right. It took four days.
And then she said the other thing, which she did not have to say and which I have written down somewhere.
“Robbie. What that family is doing isn’t a safeguarding matter and it isn’t ours to have an opinion about. If it were, half this building would be in trouble. There’s a man on Ash Wing whose wife hasn’t visited since 2021. Nobody’s moved anybody over that.”
Junie.
She is sixty-one. She was a primary school teacher for twenty-six years. She has a son, Ross, who is thirty-four and lives four hours away and comes twice a year and rings every fortnight and is, as far as I can tell, a perfectly decent man doing what he can.
She does not know Warren. She has not known him since some time in 2023. She sometimes calls him Peter, which was her brother.
She is not sad. That is the thing people cannot take when I say it. She is, most days, quite content. She likes the radio and she likes being outside and she has a cardigan with a mend on the elbow that she will not take off.
And twice a week a man comes in and sits with her for ninety minutes.
He does not do it performatively. He does not tell staff how often he comes. He does her nails, because she liked that, and he reads her the local paper out loud, the whole thing, including the planning notices.
In four years he has never once said to any of us, does she ever ask about me.
I have watched a hundred relatives, and they all ask that eventually. All of them. It is the question.
He never has.
And the eleven days, which my mother told me about in the October, when we were finally talking properly.
She did not spend them thinking about whether it was allowed.
She spent them driving past Larkmead.
Four times, in eleven days. She never went in. She parked on the road opposite, by the bus stop, at about eleven in the morning, and looked at the building.
She said she wanted to know what kind of place it was. Whether it looked like somewhere you’d put somebody to get rid of them.
And on the fourth time she saw a woman come out of the front with a resident in a wheelchair and sit with her by the flowerbed in the sun for about half an hour, doing nothing much.
And she rang him that night and said yes.
She did not know it was me in that tabard. She was too far away and it was 2026 and I had my hair up.
But that is what she based it on. Twenty minutes of watching a stranger sit in the sun with somebody who could not talk to her.
“It looked like a place where people were kind,” she said. “So I thought: alright. He’s not hiding her. He’s not ashamed of her. And if the place is kind, then he’s not doing it to her — he’s doing it with her.”
What I actually think, which took until about November.
I said a lot of things in the first three weeks. I said he was having it both ways. I said he wanted a wife’s memory and a girlfriend’s Saturdays. I said — and this is the one I would take back — that my mother was a convenient warm room for a man who could not face being on his own.
And she took that one standing up in her own kitchen and then said: “Are you finished?”
Here is where I have got to, and I am not asking anybody to agree.
Junie Vane is not being deprived of anything. That sounds cold and it is simply true. There is no version of any of this where her husband staying home alone on a Saturday night gives her one thing she does not already have.
And Warren Vane is fifty-eight and he is looking at another ten or fifteen years of Tuesdays and Fridays, and at the end of it he will be seventy and he will have been alone for a quarter of a century.
And my mother is fifty-three and has been alone for twenty-four years already.
Those two facts sat in my head next to each other for about four months, and eventually they stopped fighting.
The thing I could not forgive was the lie at my table. And the lie at my table was hers.
What I have had to take.
I have had to look at why my mother could not tell me.
Because it is not just Bridie.
I have spent ten years telling that woman to live. Travel. Go out. Be happy, Mum, you deserve it.
And every single time I said it, I meant a version that would be comfortable for me. A nice man from the choir. A widower with a caravan. Somebody tidy.
I never once said: and if it’s complicated, bring it to me anyway.
She has known me for twenty-eight years. She knew exactly which of her happinesses I would clap for and which one I would go quiet about, and she was right, and she made her arrangements accordingly — the same way she has made arrangements around other people her entire life.
She asked a man to say one word at a dinner table because she had already worked out, correctly, what her daughter was like.
That is the bit I have not got over.
And the one conversation I have had with Warren Vane about any of it, which was in the September, in my mother’s drive, and lasted about six minutes.
I had been avoiding him for eleven weeks. He came out to his car and I was sitting in mine and he tapped on the window, which took something.
And I said the thing I had been carrying: that he had a wife, and that my mother was going to end up being the woman people talked about, and that he had the easy half of it.
And he did not argue with one word of that.
He said: “You’re right. Your mum takes all of it and I take none of it. I’ve thought about that every week since April.”
And I said, why don’t you stop then.
And he said: “Because I’ve tried being the man who does it properly. I did it for two years. No pub, no holidays, nothing, just Tuesdays and Fridays and my own kitchen.”
“And in the January of 2024 I sat in that kitchen and worked out that I was hoping, most days, that she’d get an infection.”
He said it looking straight at me in a drive at half past ten at night.
“I wasn’t hoping she’d die because I wanted a life. I was hoping she’d die because I couldn’t see a way for both of us to be alive at the same time.”
“So I stopped doing it properly. And I stopped hoping that. And that is the entire reason I’m standing in this drive, and you can make of it what you like.”
Bridie.
My aunt has not spoken to my mother since the August.
She told two people at the choir. By the September my mother had stopped going, which she will not admit is why.
I went to see Bridie in the October and it did not go well. She said the word sordid and she said what about that poor woman, and I asked her, as flatly as I could manage, when she had last visited that poor woman.
She has never met her. She does not know her name.
And I said: Warren Vane has done four hundred visits. You’ve done a sentence.
I am not proud of the way I said it and I am not sorry I said it.
Ross.
And here is the thing I do not have an answer for, and I have stopped pretending I do.
Junie’s son does not know.
Warren has not told him. He has told me, straight, why: because Ross has a wife and two small children and a mother who does not know him, and Warren has decided that this is the one weight he is not putting on that boy’s back.
I think that is cowardice with very good manners on it.
My mother thinks it is kindness. We have had that argument four times.
And the truth is that if Ross Vane ever asks me a direct question — and he sometimes comes to the office to sign the visitors’ book, and he sometimes says hello to me by name in the corridor — I do not know what I am going to say.
I know what I am supposed to say, which is that it is not my information to give.
I do not know if I would manage it.
And Junie’s cardigan, which I want to put down while I still remember the mend on it.
Grey-green. Wooden buttons. The left elbow has been darned twice, badly, by two different people.
She has worn it every day since she came in. It has been washed, in the night, by staff, about four hundred times, and back on her chair before she wakes, because the one time it went into the main laundry in 2023 she was distressed for a day and a half.
In my second week on that unit, a new agency worker tried to take it off her for a wash at four in the afternoon, and I stopped her, and Junie held on to my sleeve for a minute afterwards.
And I asked Warren about it once, years before any of this, in the day room, while the kettle was going.
And he said: “She bought it in a charity shop in 2009 for one pound fifty and I have been trying to get rid of it for sixteen years.”
And he laughed. And that is the only time in four hundred visits I have heard that man laugh in that building.
I did the mend on the left elbow in the June of 2024. The bad one, on top of somebody else’s bad one.
I did not tell him. He has never mentioned it.
And somewhere in this whole business is the fact that I had been part of the care of that woman for two years before I ever knew she had anything to do with me — and that it did not make me love my mother less, it just made everything have two sides at once, permanently, which I am told is what being an adult is.
Where things are.
My mother and Warren are still together. A year in the March.
He has never stayed at hers on a Monday or a Thursday, which are the nights before his days, and she has never asked him to.
He came to Christmas. It was awkward for about an hour and then it was not, and he washed up, and he and I talked about the football and about absolutely nothing else, which was a mutual decision neither of us discussed.
I am on Ash Wing. I like it. It is not the same.
And I have not been into Fern Wing in nine months, because the moment I did, it would be a decision rather than a shift pattern, and Mel and I both know that.
And the last thing.
In the November I was crossing the car park at about two on a Tuesday, going off shift, and his car came in.
I had not seen him arrive in four years, because when I was on that unit I was always already inside.
He parked. And he did not get out.
He sat there for — I timed it, because I had stopped walking — four and a half minutes, with his hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead at a brick wall.
Then he got out and took his jacket off the back seat and put it on, and got a carrier bag out of the boot with the local paper in it, and looked at himself in the wing mirror and did something with his face.
I know that thing with the face. I do it at 7:58 every morning in the same car park.
And then he walked in to see a woman who has not known who he is since 2023, and he will have been in there ninety minutes, and he will have read her the planning notices.
And I stood by my car and understood that I had spent five months deciding whether that man was allowed to be happy on a Saturday.
Four and a half minutes, in a car park, in the rain, before he could make his face do it.
I did not tell my mother about it for weeks. When I finally did, she said: “I know. He does it at mine as well. In the drive. Before he comes in.”
Before he comes in. To her.
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The same four minutes, in two different car parks, for two different women.
That is the whole of what I know about Warren Vane, and I have decided it is enough.
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