I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left. One night I laid my teething baby on his chest — and his fingers moved. Then he whispered: don’t tell anyone I’m awake.
The man everybody in that house was waiting to bury moved one hand and closed his fingers round the blanket over my son.
I stood there and was completely certain I had imagined it.
I had been walking Theodric round the staff side of Harrowfold for three hours. He is nine months old, he was teething, he had a temperature, and there was no settling him.
I carried him. I sang. I fed him. He kept going.
So I took him into Rendel Ashgrove’s room, because it was the only room on that floor nobody would come into at two in the morning.
The doctors had said days.
He is forty-six. He built the whole of it out of haulage, and he had been in that bed since the ninth of September, unable to speak or move.
His nephew had been discussing the funeral in the voice other people use for booking a table.
I do live-in care because I need the wage and because no other job lets me keep my son with me.
That night I sat down in the chair next to him to rest my arms.
Theodric was still crying. And without really thinking about it I laid him on that man’s chest for a few seconds.
And the baby went to sleep.
And then Rendel’s fingers moved — slowly, about two inches, until they were touching the blanket.
I said: “Mr Ashgrove?”
His eyelids went. One eye came open slightly.
He was conscious. Completely conscious.
I spent the rest of that night working out how to talk to him.
One blink is yes. Two is no. Looking at the door means somebody is coming.
“Can you hear everything they say in this room?”
One blink.
And something went through me that I have not been able to describe since and have stopped trying to.
By about one o’clock the next day he could move his lips a little. I put my ear by his mouth.
He said: “Christo isn’t waiting for my money. He’s speeding it up.”
And then we heard footsteps.
Christo came in without knocking. Grey suit, a watch worth more than my car, annoyed before he had looked at anybody.
“How’s our patient?”
“No change.”
He did not look at his uncle once.
“Good. Doctor’s here at four.”
And then, on his way out: “And one more thing, Calla. If that child cries all night again, you and he can find somewhere else to stay.”
“It won’t happen again.”
At four the doctor came with a leather case. There were about twenty people in that house by then — family, two agency staff, somebody from the office — and several of them were in the hallway.
And when I stood between the bed and the door and asked what was in the syringe, he put his hand on my wrist and said it loud enough for all of them:
***Step away from the bed. You are staff.***
Nobody moved. Somebody put a cup down on a side table.
He did not let go. He leaned in and said:
***Step away. Well?***
Ten minutes later Rendel’s breathing changed, and his fingers stopped answering me.
And that doctor said, very calmly: “He’s fading. Five days. Maybe six.”
What was in the syringe.
Midazolam.
I know because I did the only useful thing I have ever done in my life, which was to go back into that room at half seven that evening, take the sharps tray out of the bin bag the agency girl had tied up, and photograph the empty ampoule on the windowsill with the date on my phone.
Two of them. Ten milligrams each.
Nobody was killing Rendel Ashgrove. I want that said clearly, because for about four days I thought they were, and I nearly did the wrong thing with it.
They were sedating him.
Why.
Because of a hearing on the eighth of December.
Christo applied to the court in the October to be appointed to manage his uncle’s property and affairs. That is a thing you can do when somebody cannot make decisions, and the court will not simply take your word for it: it orders an assessment.
An independent assessor was coming to Harrowfold on the second of December to decide whether Rendel Ashgrove had capacity.
And the law on that is not about whether a man can speak or sign. It is about whether he can understand, retain, weigh up — and communicate by any means.
Any means includes blinking.
A man who can blink once for yes is a man with capacity, and a man with capacity cannot have his company, his accounts and his house handed to his nephew by a judge.
So for five weeks before that assessment, somebody made sure that when anybody looked at Rendel Ashgrove, he was not there.
Not enough to kill him. Enough to make him a vegetable on the day somebody came to check.
The four days in between, which are the ones I would not do again.
From the twenty-fifth to the twenty-ninth of November I did two things at once, and I was not good at either of them.
I did my job. Positioning every two hours, mouth care, the chart, the feed, the pad, the turning. You do not stop doing that because something extraordinary is happening; a man gets a pressure sore in about six hours and his skin does not care what else is going on in the house.
And in between, I learned to read a face that had almost nothing left to say anything with.
He got about eleven words out on the Wednesday and none at all on the Thursday, because of the four o’clock, and I spent the whole of Thursday not knowing whether he was asleep, sedated or gone.
That is the bit nobody puts in. Twenty-two hours of a man I had been talking to not answering me, and no way of finding out which of those three it was, and a nephew downstairs on the phone to a florist.
I did the night of the twenty-seventh on about ninety minutes’ sleep with a baby who was still teething.
At four in the morning I took a photograph of a page of somebody else’s handwriting from the October, sitting on the floor of that room with my back against the radiator, and then I fed my son, and then I turned a man at five.
Bettina.
And this is where it stopped being my word against a man in a grey suit.
I was not the first.
There is a daily notes folder in that room, as there is in every room like that, and it goes back to the discharge home on the twenty-ninth of September.
There is a carer called Bettina Horák who was on nights at Harrowfold for eight days in the October.
On the third of October, at 04:20, she wrote four lines in that folder.
***Pt appeared to track me across the room. Asked him to blink twice if he could hear, he did it twice. Repeated at 04:40, same. Will inform agency and family in am.***
She was dismissed on the sixth of October. The agency was told she had been found asleep on shift.
That page is still in the folder. That is the thing I cannot get over.
Christo Ashgrove is thirty-one and he is not stupid, and he removed a woman and he did not remove a page, because it did not occur to him that anybody would read four lines of a nursing record from October.
I read it on the twenty-seventh of November, at about three in the morning, because I had started going through that folder page by page looking for the drug chart.
What I actually did.
Not what people hope.
I did not confront anybody and I did not call the police, and I have had to explain that to about eleven people since.
On the twenty-sixth of November, at half seven at night, I photographed the ampoules.
On the twenty-seventh I photographed every page of that folder, all seventy-one of them, in the dark, with my phone on the lowest brightness, while my son slept in a travel cot about four feet away.
On the twenty-eighth I rang the switchboard at St Nectan’s and asked for the secretary of the consultant whose name was on the discharge summary — a woman called Dr Ifeoma Said, who had not seen Rendel Ashgrove since the twenty-ninth of September and had not been told he was being privately sedated by anybody.
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