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Copyright © 1998 Miriam Robertson.
All rights reserved and reproduction without written permission expressly prohibited.
Road Kill
I'm a care worker in one of the nursing homes round here. In case you don't
know
the area, we're within commuting distance of London, but it's real countryside,
an ANOB: Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, renowned for its extensive
woodlands. Except for Sundays, you don't get many people in the woods and then
it's only families walking on the edges or going to the Viewpoint.
Alder Vale is a wealthy area and that's why there are lots of private residential
nursing homes here. It used to be a haunt of famous writers like George Eliot,
Bernard Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson - you know, "Ring out wild bells to the wild
sky." When the weather gets bad round here that poem could have been written
about this valley. Probably it was. And Arthur Conan Doyle lived at the top of
the ridge, near Satan's Cauldron. I wonder what he, or rather Sherlock Holmes,
would make of the tale that one of our residents told me.
I'm Anton, by the
way, and the resident was Mrs Marley. She'd had a stroke a few weeks
previously, but she was recovering well. Mrs Marley didn't like being at The
Rusholme Nursing Home. She didn't say much at first, but the stroke hadn't
affected her speech or memory. Her left arm was useless, but the physio gave her
exercises. Mrs Marley wasn't keen on doing the exercises, so I was detailed to
go along and make sure she clenched her fist fifty times and all that.
Mrs Marley was only booked in for a couple of weeks until her daughter (who was
footing the bill) came over from New York. She told me all this while she was
doing her physiotherapy, and I told her about how I used to be a lifeguard at
the swimming pool, but they'd closed it to build a supermarket. She got annoyed
about that because she said the people of Alder Vale had raised the cash for
the swimming pool and it was built on a site that had been left to the
villagers for recreational purposes "in perpetuity". I was worried about her
getting annoyed - after all she was recovering from a stroke. I didn't want her
to have another, especially while she was in my care.
[End of this extract. The full story was published in Gravity's Angels]
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