The Lonely Fajita

‘Did you think I was going to let someone shag me so I can pay the rent?’ Maggie’s expression smooths and she stifles a little sob.

‘No. No … that’s not what I thought at all.’

‘You did!’ I jump up. Maggie shrieks and I jab her ribs with my knuckles, laughing at how ticklish she still is. ‘I’m bloody well not becoming a sex worker!’

‘In my defence, you were in a very … distressed state last night!’ she says, between gasps. I stand up and shake the mass of curls out of my face. There’s no time to style it. A topknot and a comb-through will have to do. I pick up my knickers and ping them towards her. She screams and pulls the cover up as a shield.

‘I’m having a shower.’

‘Hang on, what are you actually doing this afternoon?!’ Maggie shouts at me down the corridor.

‘I’ll fill you in over porridge and coffee!’

***

I tell Maggie about ElderCare and the plan to go to Snatch that evening, but Suki has already messaged her (somehow) so she’s coming along. A tiny part of me hoped that Suki had forgotten, or had double-booked herself, but she’d sent me a clip this morning: her head on a pillow with another girl’s hand lazily draped across her collarbone. In it, she whispered, ‘Snatch night, Snatch night, Snatch night’ over and over again into the microphone, so I guess it’s still going ahead.

Maggie has gone off to meet her boyfriend Martin, whom she met last July on a charity gig overseas. From what I gather, it’s a scheme for overachieving teachers who don’t feel exhausted enough by the end of the year, so spend their summer holidays training educators in India. I’ve met Martin once but haven’t really formed an opinion of him yet. He laughs at Maggie’s jokes and doesn’t mock her for being perpetually upbeat, which is more than I can say for her previous boyfriend.

I’m due to meet Annie in a place called Evergreen Village at 3 p.m., which is around twelve minutes from Hampstead station and on the same tube line as me. Questions are swirling around my head about Annie and how this ElderCare thing might work, if I have to go through with it. I click through the website, which has the same garish branding as the flyer, and look at images of happy companions doing implausible activities: decorating a cake that I’m 99 per cent sure has been shop-bought for the picture; completing a puzzle and laughing as if it’s the most fun thing in the world; and walking down a garden to point at a slightly dog-eared rose.

I smile at this last one. When I’d go back to Hereford between terms at university, my nanny would always say, ‘Come and take a turn around the estate,’ which was entirely ironic because she had a tiny back-to-back garden. She’d point out all the flowers that had bloomed since my last visit, or tut in frustration at the molehills that had appeared overnight. Her little two-up-two-down terraced house had once housed seven children and she barely spent a day alone, right up until she went into hospital for the last time. Loneliness hadn’t been an issue for her. She’d had the same neighbours for decades and they swapped gossip over the garden fence about the new postman or ‘her who’s moved into Reggie’s old place’.

A single bed and handrails in the bath, though? I mean, it’s hardly the young professional life I’d imagined when I moved to London and got a job that didn’t exist when I was at school. But it can’t be worse than washing Yaz’s pubes down the plughole before taking a shower. I wonder if old people are more gross to live with than guys in their twenties who ingest all their protein in liquid form?

I think of Annie and wonder at the kind of old person she might be. Uppity and posh? Making the kinds of jokes you have to apologise for afterwards?

I wonder if last resorts really are last resorts if you’ve said that about every living situation open to you? I click through to a rental website and move the sliders down to the cheapest bracket possible, a perpetually depressing experience. The map of London, initially obscured by little purple flags indicating available property, reveals itself at such speed it’s like watching the opening titles for EastEnders. If I have to find a place by myself (and somehow manage to get upgraded from ‘expenses only’ to minimum wage) there are three. Three rooms that I could afford in Europe’s biggest capital city. I skim-read the entries and am left feeling a bit sick and slightly creeped out. Of the options available, one was masquerading as London, but was really in Southend-on-Sea with a two-hour commute; one wasn’t a spare room, rather a space in a ‘platonic double bed’; and the last was a shed. A shed. It was described as ‘spacious for a single tenant, with privacy shield’, but in reality it was a fucking shed shoved into a living room with a sofa propped up against it.

Chapter 8

I get off the tube at Hampstead and follow the map on my phone down a street with rows of tall Victorian red-brick houses dotted with sash windows and dainty shop fronts. I weave between demure middle-aged women who march along the pavement with arms looped through boutique bags. Others walk and sip coffee, pausing occasionally to look in the window of an estate agent, all whilst a well-behaved dog sits elegantly at their side. The bakery near my flat in Stockwell, which struggles to charge more than 50p for a croissant, would look entirely out of place here. Instead, pastries glazed with crackled syrup and delicate pastel macarons line patisserie windows. As I head up the hill, the shops make way for houses pushed back behind iron railings and heavily pruned box hedges. I veer left where the road splits into a single lane that tucks between holly bushes and a patchwork brick wall that ripples with ivy. We’re not in Stockwell any more.

On a final cobbled lane, blossom drifts against heritage-green garage doors and Victorian lampposts flank the entrance to austere-looking townhouses. This can’t be right, surely? Where’s the Sixties prefab with pebbledash walls and mossy rooftiles? The net curtains? The geraniums? This turreted stone gatehouse must be a portal to some sort of elfin village; it surely isn’t a home for the elderly. The entrance, a pointed archway, is framed with a Latin motif that sits below two Grecian statues; one holds a scroll and the other a set of scales.

Partially hidden behind the waxy leaves of a budding rhododendron, a carved wooden sign states ‘Evergreen Village’. I’d once flicked through a book called Secrets of the Capital and managed to skim-read a chapter on ‘London’s Villages’ before the sales assistant sarcastically asked me whether I was going to buy it. I was pretty convinced that places like this had been swallowed up by modern developments, or were empty through foreign investment, but here, barely five miles out of London, was a Dickensian remnant of the past. And it was glorious.

I check the email Alina has sent me. Along with the postcode, she’s written an instruction. ‘Tell the porter at the gate you’re there to see Annie and he’ll walk you round to her cottage.’ Tell the porter? I would if I knew what a ‘porter’ was …

I push on the iron gate and it swings open with well-oiled ease. ‘Um, hello?’ I say, stepping quietly under the archway. My footsteps echo down the length of sand-coloured stone. I pass beyond the threshold and hear a frantic scuffle, quickly followed by the appearance of a uniformed man who pops up behind a half-open stable door, his arms by his sides.

‘Welcome to Evergreen Village. You are Elissa, yes? Mrs De Loutherberg expected you five minutes ago. I’ll walk you over. Come this way, please.’ He unlatches the stable door, nods his cap as he walks briskly past me, and marches around the perimeter of an oval-shaped green that has been given a horticultural crew-cut, with ruler-straight lawn lines and metal edging. The man stops at an entrance between two hawthorn bushes and motions ahead with an upturned hand.

‘Please, this way,’ he says, before turning towards the gatehouse, leaving me alone in front of a lacquered front door. Annie. You can’t be horrible and be called Annie, right? De Loutherberg, though. No one at my semi-rural comprehensive school in Hereford would have got away with a name like that without getting thumped in the arm. I’m imagining Dame Maggie Smith, an uppity dowager, all wide eyes and quivering jowls.

I look around for a non-existent doorbell and as I duck down to see if it’s hidden between the vines of a creeping wisteria, a dangling rope knocks against the back of my head. I pull it hard and the shrill sound of a bell peals from a tiny tower above the porch. I jump back and look as it violently swings back and forth, then glance over my shoulder. An elderly man stares at me with his hedge trimmers poised over a juniper bush. In the cottage next to him a curtain twitches and a chunky woman steps quickly behind it, nearly out of sight but for a protruding stomach.

‘Hello, Elissa. How are you?’ A moon-faced man answers the door and stands with his hands on his knees, like I’m a new puppy he’s taken a liking to.

‘Fine, thanks. Sorry about the bell,’ I stammer, but he ignores it and beckons me inside onto a woven grass mat.

‘Shoes off!’ He points to each of my feet, like I didn’t realise I had two of them, and stands next to me with his hands clasped behind his back in the manner of a slightly creepy priest.

‘I’m Craig. Alina must have told you about me on the phone?’

‘Yep, she did. You work for ElderCare too?’

‘I do indeed!’ Craig replies, rocking on the balls of his feet. I’m aware of his body in proximity to mine and subconsciously lean away from him. ‘Twelve years as a warden for our ladies and gents in Hampstead. I also cover Kentish Town and round by Camden. Some would say that’s a big area to look after, but I’m sure our residents are lucky to have me!’ He spits out a laugh. Poor sods. ‘I visit them once a fortnight, or more if they haven’t got an ElderCare companion, which is what we’re hoping you’ll become.’ He smiles at me without showing his teeth and juts his chin forward. ‘This is a quick visit really – completely standard procedure – to make sure you two click and the like.’

‘Yeah, of course. I mean, I could be an axe murderer or some sort of scam artist trying to steal the weekly pension!’ I laugh and pull at the ends of my scarf. Craig doesn’t seem to get the joke. ‘I’m not, obviously. I’d be a terrible axe murderer. I’m quite clumsy with sharp objects.’ Stop talking about axes, you total moron!

‘Right you are. Shall we go and meet Annie now?’ Craig smooths his oily fringe over his forehead and I’m quite frankly insulted that he’s the one who looks more uncomfortable.

Craig leads me through an archway into a light, airy living room that opens into a small kitchen at the back of the house. A pair of French doors are pulled wide open and the tinkling of a wind chime drifts in from outside. Sitting in a wooden chair, her legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, is Annie.

‘Ladies! Annie, Eloise—’

‘Um, it’s Elissa?’

‘Right. There! Now we’re all introduced!’ Craig claps his hands in front of him and his blue polo-shirt rides up a couple of inches to rest on his hairy belly. I catch myself staring, so smile and turn to face Annie instead, but she’s looking out of the window bobbing her velvet moccasins up and down. Oh no. I’ve been lumped with a senile. I do not have the benevolence for this.

‘I’ll let you ladies chat whilst I do the rounds. I’ll be fifteen minutes or so, all right? Don’t be naughty!’ He speaks with palpable sarcasm, not that Annie has noticed. She’s quietly humming to herself. I hear Craig close the front door. The noise of Annie’s carriage clock thrums loudly from the living room and the sound of secateurs cuts the silence into awkward chunks of time.

Annie turns to me after a minute and lets out a sharp laugh. ‘Thank Christ. I thought he’d never leave.’