Free Rocking Horse Road by Carl Nixon Page A

Exhibits
T1–T38 ).
    Mrs Asher only ever agreed to one interview, and
that was only a couple of years ago, when she was
seventy-one. We visited her at Calbourne Courts,
a group of single-bedroom, concrete-block units
arranged in a circle around a lawn, like covered
wagons in an old western waiting to be attacked.
    Even in old age, Mrs Asher still dressed in black.
Possibly some of the clothes were the same ones
she had worn when we were fifteen (Al Penny later
referred to her as 'our own Miss Havisham'). Silver
bracelets still hung on her wrists. But Mrs Asher's
taut good looks were gone, replaced by a ballooning
puffiness that had transformed her face and made her
almost unrecognisable as Lucy's mother. Perhaps the
bloating was a side-effect of her medication. Perhaps
she had just chosen to let herself go after years of
keeping up appearances.
    Even though we were middle-aged men we
felt the same awe in her presence as when we were
fifteen and used to slip into her darkened dairy. We
sat awkwardly in her cramped lounge and ate the soft
Girl Guide biscuits she offered. We tried not to drop
crumbs on the salmon-pink carpet. Mrs Asher sat in
her big chair and spoke in what often seemed to be
non sequiturs. She did not respond directly to any of
the questions we asked her. She would share with us
a story, which would gush from her mouth and then
stop suddenly, as if a tap had been turned off. More
often a rambling recollection was transformed mid-sentence
into another about a completely separate
incident from years before or years later.
    It came as no surprise when Mrs Asher was
officially diagnosed as having Alzheimer's. That was
about eight months after we met with her. Al Penny
visited her in the hospital unit where she is still living.
He told the staff that he was her son. Nobody asked
for ID. Who but a relative would visit a woman like
Mrs Asher? She was someone with neither a past nor
a future.
    Al found her sitting up in bed in the small, sparse
room where she slept, wearing a shiny red house-coat
with padded panels. For the whole visit Mrs Asher
thought that he was her husband, even though by
then Mr Asher had been dead fifteen years. Al tried to
talk to her about Lucy, hoping that some small storm-tossed
detail would be thrown up by her mind. But
his questions only made her agitated. She kept talking
over him, telling him that there was some loose iron
on the roof that flapped in the wind at night and
kept her awake. Her thin voice rose and fell like the
probably imaginary wind that was bothering her. He
would need to get up there and fix it, she said several
times. Al finally promised that he would get on to it
right away. Then she calmed right down and shortly
after that Al made his excuses and left.
    But on the day of our interview at Calbourne
Courts Mrs Asher still had some of her mind left. The
interview was so significant that all of us were there.
Mrs Asher recognised Tug Gardiner straight away and
asked how his father, her old neighbour, was. 'And is
the dairy still there?'
    Tug hesitated, unsure what to say, but in the end,
settled for the truth. 'It closed down about eight or
nine years ago. Too much competition from the
supermarkets, I guess. The new people converted the
shop back into bedrooms.'
    Mrs Asher considered Tug through puffy eyelids. 'I
always hated that shop anyway,' she said. There was a
pause. 'Carrots are very hard to peel,' she added, and
held up her hands to show us her swollen knuckles
and twisted fingers. Whether her hands were proof or
reason for the carrots' stubbornness we were not sure.
We silently nibbled the edges of our soft biscuits while
we thought about that.
    Lucy, she told us a few minutes later, had always
been a wilful child. 'Right from the very beginning
she refused to bottle-feed. She knew exactly what she
wanted and would howl until she got it.'
    'We wish we'd known her better as a girl,' said Pete
Marshall. We all nodded. It was true. Pete had come
straight from work