Free Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam Page B

tomorrow.’
    â€˜Why bother,’ shrugged the Monster. ‘She’ll be dead by then.’

Chapter Six
    â€˜Here we are then,’ said Colin. ‘Safe and sound.’
    Lorna felt neither as she peered through the ambulance window. Oakfield House seemed singularly ill-named, with no sign of a field or an oak (or indeed of any tree): just an austere expanse of tarmacked drive darkened by the rain, and a grim grey-stone façade that reminded her unsettlingly of boarding-school.
    â€˜No, don’t move, Mrs Pearson. We’ll help you out.’
    Colin set up the wheelchair while Jack got down from the driver’s seat and opened the doors at the back of the ambulance. She found it acutely embarrassing to arrive with a uniformed escort: Colin holding her case and crutches, Jack wheeling her down the ramp and up to the front door. Not that there was anyone to notice. The entrance hall was empty, the reception desk unmanned.
    â€˜Are they expecting you?’ Jack asked.
    â€˜Mm.’ She was eight again, blinking back the tears as the hated school engulfed her. Big girls didn’t cry.
    â€˜I’ll give a shout.’
    Jack’s ‘Hello there!’ was answered by a long, low, desolate wail. Had they come to the wrong place – a torture chamber rather than a nursing-home?
    â€˜Ah, here’s someone,’ Colin said, as a scraggy woman in a badly ironed blue uniform walked into the hall. ‘Can you help us?’ he asked. ‘We’ve brought Mrs Pearson from the Princess Royal. She’s staying here over Christmas.’
    â€˜I don’t know nothing about it.’
    â€˜Well, can you find someone who does?’
    Another unearthly howl echoed from the floor above. Lorna fought an overwhelming urge to seize her case and bolt. Even now she hadn’t quite accepted the fact that she was a prisoner of her chair. If she wanted to go anywhere beyond a scant fifty yards, someone had to wheel her.
    Nervously she glanced around the hall. The grey lino and beige walls did nothing to raise her spirits. The only splash of colour was the Christmas decorations: paper-chains in red and green, and a lopsided Scots pine planted in a red plastic bucket and hung with garish baubles. The Princess Royal seemed a palace in comparison. However, despite the aftermath of her infection, she had been summarily discharged from there. Over Christmas and New Year they kept only emergency cases, being reduced to a skeleton staff. She pictured gaping skulls leering as they brought patients’ medication, jangling bones lurching along the corridor.
    â€˜I see you’re admiring our Christmas tree.’
    Lorna turned to see another blue-uniformed woman – a definite improvement on the first: not only neatly dressed but actually smiling. And pretty, too, with short, dark, curly hair and grey-green eyes.
    â€˜Hello. I’m Sister Kathy. Mrs Pearson, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Yes, that’s right.’
    â€˜Welcome to Oakfield House. I’ll take you to your room.’
    Lorna felt strangely bereft as she said goodbye to Jack and Colin. They had become friends in a friendless world, Jack chatting to her all the way from London and even confiding that he, too, was dreading Christmas. She pressed a £10 note into his hands – an over-generous tip, maybe, but as well as thanks it represented a plea for them not to abandon her in this ghastly place but take her back with them to normality.
    Alas, it was not to be. Sister Kathy picked up her case and wheeled her down a corridor that smelt depressingly of urine. Through open doors Lorna caught glimpses of white hair, white faces, white cardigans, dead eyes. As they paused a moment outside the lounge, she gazed in at a circle of chairs, each occupied by an inert ancient female. The only sign of animation was a bouncy girl on television prattling away to the impervious stares of her audience.
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