Darkside

At night there were just three members of staff on duty. That was usually plenty. Mostly the residents slept through, with only occasional calls for help with the commode. They had one sleepwalker at present. Mrs Eaves had scared the shit out of him the first time he’d seen her tottering towards him in her flowing white nightie. Now he quite enjoyed the break in routine that was the silent little dance he occasionally performed with Mrs Eaves on the landing while he tried to head her off at the pass so she wouldn’t dance straight down the wide stairwell with its thick, swirly carpet that hid the stains so well. Mr Cooke had invested in an infrared alarm which fired a clever red beam across Mrs Eaves’s bedroom door and beeped loudly in the staffroom whenever she took to wandering through the home. When it did, one of them would bound upstairs – or squeeze into the lift in the case of Lynne Twitchett – and go and corral her back to bed.

Tonight he was on with Lynne and Jen. He liked Lynne, who was giggly and sweet, but wasn’t so keen on Jen, who smelled of cigarettes and teased him about his girlfriend. Girlfriend, she always said. How’s the girlfriend, Gary? Why don’t you bring your girlfriend to the Christmas do? We’d all love to meet your girlfriend.

Jen could go screw herself. He doubted anyone else ever did.

Right now she was bitching about a woman she’d seen in a pub wearing yellow stilettos. Gary thought yellow stilettos sounded hideous, but he was still on the wearer’s side.

The radio was tuned quietly to Lantern – the local station – which played old chart stuff and made him drum his fingers and think of school discos.

Mrs Eaves’s alarm beeped and Gary picked up his torch. Turning lights on at night could be disastrous. Residents who had only been in bed for an hour would stir like grizzlies coming out of hibernation and start to dress themselves in wobbly anticipation of another day growing older in the garden room. Torches took care of that.

There were fourteen bedrooms on the first floor and Gary knew that Violet Eaves could be in any one of them apart from her own, Gorse. All the rooms had twee names like Gorse and Heather, which were supposed to be Exmoor-centric. Whoever had chosen them had started grandly but must have quickly realized that gorse and heather were the only really recognizable flora the moors had to offer, and had been forced into crap names like Sedge and Blackthorn and – feeblest of all – Moss. Gary reckoned it was Mr Cooke’s wife who’d done it. She was always putting her finger in the Sunset Lodge pie.

The old house was a maze of turns and steps and nooks and ramps. Two rooms here, three there, up two steps, round a corner to three more rooms. The beam of his little torch danced about like a firefly as he trod quietly along the corridors.

No sign of her. Gary stood still on the wide landing. He’d have to check the bedrooms; it would not be the first time Violet had tried to climb in with someone else.

‘Violet!’ he hissed, even though when she sleepwalked she never responded to sound. ‘Pain in the arse!’ he muttered, but he didn’t really mean it. When she was awake, Violet was one of his favourites. Even at the age of ninety-two Violet had a sparkle. She would hold his hand and call him ‘such a good-looking bay’, then wink at him, because she’d been blind since she was seventy-five. It was an old joke but a good one. Then she would touch the rings that were stuck for ever on her gnarled fingers, and count off her husbands.

‘Eddie – never spent a penny on anyone but herself. Charlie – her was a good one, that’s why her died, of course! Only the good die young. Another Eddie, same as the first – never go out with an Eddie, young man, you’ll have nothing but worry and debts! And that one’s Matthew. Mattie, I used to call her, and her used to call me Viola, like in the Shakespeare, see? I was seventy-two when we got married and her was seventy. My toyboy. Always save the best till last, that’s what we used to say to each other. Always save the best till last.’

She’d pat his hand and look into the past, which was somewhere over his left shoulder.

Then she’d cock her head and say, ‘Is that the biscuits?’

Standing here in the dark with his torch making a bright disc on the carpet, Gary smiled. Violet just looked confused if you shouted ‘HELLO!’ straight into her face, but she could hear a biscuit tin opening at a thousand yards.

He heard what sounded like a scrape of furniture and hissed down the corridor: ‘Violet?’ and set off again. He hadn’t gone ten paces when he heard – from the open staffroom door below – the faint beep of Violet’s alarm going off for the second time.

Miracle. She’d found her way home.

He turned back, went down two stairs and turned a corner, then up two more to Gorse.

He’d expected to find Violet standing by her bed, but she’d already got back into it.