She thought about Maddie again as Julian came over, rubbed a bit of her hair between two fingers to look at the colour and nodded to himself.
They’d had Ed terribly soon after they were married, and he’d been early. There had been no time for the two of them to build a relationship, Olive thought. Why had they rushed into it?
Maddie had been such a free spirit, such a fun-loving girl – she remembered the wedding and that dreadful dress she wore. But motherhood had changed her. It was as if life had sucked something more out of her, suffocated her under a pile of to-do lists.
Olive felt it was somehow her duty to look over Maddie, what with her having no mother anymore. Olive had seen a very different girl in the beginning, a feisty spirit beneath all the conventions that came with motherhood and ‘fitting in’ in the village, but that seemed to have been eroded away with time. And then she became a dinner lady. Where was the ambition? She was sure Maddie could have done better than that. She’d never tell her that, of course. Of one thing she was certain: Maddie was devoted to Ed.
Although Tim was Olive’s nephew, sometimes that wasn’t enough was it? Tim had been a difficult boy – he’d always been whiny at school, very clingy, and his eczema used to flare up all the time. Emily, Stan’s sister, had indulged him, in Olive’s opinion. But as an only child, she supposed that’s what happened.
‘Here you go.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your iPad.’
‘Don’t be silly, I don’t want that.’ Honestly, what was wrong with people? ‘What about my hair?’
Olive leant back into the sink at the ‘hairdresser’s’ – well, they would call it that, when really, it was just a corner of the upstairs corridor, with a screen around it, a basin and a couple of chairs. Oh yes, they’d stuck up some posters of Sophia Loren and Jane Fonda on the wall, looking all pouty and glamorous. Olive knew there was a dementia section of the care home next door, but she wasn’t in it, was she? No, sir. Her marbles were intact. Bit old, of course. She knew damn well that today was Saturday and that Sophia Loren had never had her backside in this chair, had she?
‘Right, Olive, what are you planning for later on with your hair all done?’ said Julian, wheeling her back to a seat by the mirror. ‘There’s normally a good event on a Wednesday in the residents’ lounge. The Midweek Mystery Quiz – you liked that last time, didn’t you?’
‘How would you know what I liked last week? You’ve only just started here!’
Julian placed his hand on Olive’s arm and she caught a look in the mirror she didn’t much like. Then he busied himself with combing through some thickening conditioner into her thinning grey strands.
Olive stared at Julian in the mirror, watching him carefully comb her lank grey wisps of hair and find the parting that she always had on the left, as things slipped in and out of place in her mind. It was like a train going onto another track. It was all there, she was sure it was. One moment everything was going in the right direction, going to plan, chugging along where she could see, then wham! It all changed. The tracks moved abruptly and her brain couldn’t keep up. She found herself being confronted more and more these days with her mind pulling into an empty siding, instead of running freely along the tracks. Midweek what? Oh, bother that bloody useless brain of hers.
4
Maddie
‘Where’s my life, Carole?’ Maddie laid down the metal serving spoon next to the baking trays in the school dinner hall.
Carole fixed her with her pale blue eyes. ‘Sweetie, your life’s right here. And you’re right here with bloody mash all over yer blouse!’ Carole grinned and wiped a bit of mash from her sleeve with her tea towel. ‘Pass the peas, will you?’
Her shoulders slumped as she remembered her school nickname. Was she still Mediocre Maddie? The mockery of it, the girls jibing at her.
She’d been having the dream more and more lately, ever since she’d been to Exeter and seen Greg again and ever since the doctors had hinted about Olive’s deterioration. In the dream, she ran away; she had been told that she was losing her memory, and photographs had started to fall from her brain – colour photos,