Special

C Green Anthony

Description

The story is seen through Annie's eyes and told with her uniquely simple yet profound voice. The novel is light and easy to read, yet explores multiple themes, including changing attitudes to race and disability, and the struggles and moral compromises that those from deprived backgrounds families had and still have to make. The novel is gritty, realistic, hard-hitting, funny and thought provoking without ever being preachy. Specialis based on Anthony's more than twenty years experience of working within the field of Social Care.

Sujets

• Liverpool

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781788030106
• Langue: English

Extrait

Special




Anthony Green
Copyright © 2017 Anthony Green

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781788030106

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Dedication For the many special people I have known
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Epilogue
Prologue
Annie’s legs were in the hallway and her head was in the utility cupboard.
“Annie, Annie!”
The voice belonged to Lena, one of her support workers. Lena was leaning over Annie, shaking her by the shoulders as she lay dying. There was fear in Lena’s eyes and the smell of toothpaste on her breath. Her face was the last face Annie would ever see whilst living. Her breath the last breath she would ever smell. It mattered that it was Lena who was with her when she died. Annie liked Lena.
It was eleven at night, and Annie had got up to get a glass of milk. She wasn’t really supposed to drink milk, on account of her Irritable Bowel Syndrome. But she’d wanted some anyway, and with Lena already in the staff sleep-in bed, who was to know? She’d been suffering pain for a few days, on and off. It was like an indigestion, but worse. The doctor had been to see her that morning. Annie told her she needed to go to the hospital, the Royal. The Royal was her favourite hospital. It had the best food of all the hospitals in Liverpool.
‘Hospital is for sick people, Annie,’ the doctor had said.
The doctor was called Deborah Rogers, but she said Annie could call her Deborah. She was young and pretty and not Annie’s usual doctor. That was Dr Reid, a man, a nice man, a nice Scottish man. Debora was what they called a locum.
‘But I am sick,’ Annie had said.
“No, for REALLY sick people.”
Sometimes Annie used to pretend to be sick when she wasn’t really sick at all. Doctor Rogers knew this from her records. She had these records up on a screen on a small computer balanced on her lap. Annie had built up a big collection of two different sorts of records over the fifty years she’d been alive. The second sort, big vinyl records, had been mostly bought from charity shops, and took up most of the space in her bedroom, some in their sleeves and some not.
Annie didn’t like the impatient way Doctor Rogers was talking to her. Dr Reid had always been patient with Annie. Annie considered hitting Doctor Rogers, but didn’t. She felt too sick, and she’d more or less grown out of hitting people anyway.
A different support worker, Patricia, had been on duty when doctor Rogers had arrived. Sandra was white; Lena was black. Annie was a mix of the two. Sometimes Annie said she preferred black staff. But she didn’t really care either way; she only said she did when she was angry with Sandra or one of her other white support workers, or when her sister Jane told her she needed more black workers. Her sister Jane did prefer Annie to have black staff. She said it was to do with her culture. Jane was a social worker. She often told Annie that she’d become a social worker because of her, because of Annie, because of the way she was.
The pain Annie felt before she fell was like an explosion in her chest. Somehow, she still managed to hold the glass of milk she was carrying upright, even when she was flat on her back. She didn’t spill a single drop when she fell. She could see herself in her mind’s eye, holding up the glass as though it contained the most precious material imaginable.
Lena was with Annie her within a second or two after she fell. She was wearing flowery pyjamas. She took the glass from Annie’s hand and placed it by the side of Annie’s head. Her hand was shaking and she was breathing heavily. Annie was still alive, then. She looked Lena in the eye. Both of the women’s eyes were deep-black. Annie could see herself reflected in Lena’s eyes, but it was like she was only half there, like she was slowly fading away.
Lena started shouting and shaking Annie. Annie wanted to tell her to stop, to tell her that everything was OK, now, but she could no longer speak. Then it happened: there was no more pain, no more fear; no more anything bad. Everything became, as it always should have been, as it always had been without Annie realising it.
Annie discovered that after the slow fade, death happens like a click of the fingers: alive; click; dead. One moment she was in her body, and the next moment she wasn’t.
Looking down from her new and unusual place above her lifeless shell of a body, Annie felt sorry for Lena. Lena had seen death before, in Africa, in Zimbabwe were she used to live. The last person she’d seen dead had been her husband. She missed her husband and she missed Zimbabwe. Annie knew a lot about Lena’s life, though not as much as Lena knew about hers. Support Workers’ get to know a lot about the life of the people they support. It’s the way things are.
Annie thought how fat she looked laying there, her great, flabby stomach hanging out over her XXL elasticised trousers; her great, flabby breasts almost joining up with her belly-fat.
When she’d been alive, she hadn’t really realised she looked like that, though she’d known that when she’d been young she’d been beautiful. Being beautiful is not always a good thing when you’re like Annie.
Lena tried to revive her, using chest compressions and mouth to mouth resuscitation like she’d been trained to do on courses. Because of the mountains of flab she had trouble finding the right place to put her hand so that she could do the chest compressions properly.
After she’d worked on Annie for a minute or two, she went running back into the sleep-in room to phone for an ambulance. She should have done that first, according to her training, but in the fear and excitement of a moment of crisis people often do things in the wrong order.
“No, she’s not conscious,” Lena was saying, down the phone. “No, she’s not responding to my voice; no, I don’t think there is a pulse; no, I don’t think she’s breathing.”
When she got off the phone, Lena went back to giving Annie heart massage and the kiss of life. Annie knew that Lena knew that it was all useless, but she also knew that Lena had to try. It was her job, and she was a caring, Christian person who still hoped that, somehow, a miracle would happen and everything would be alright.
Soon, the ambulance men arrived.
One of them was called Jim and the other was called Steve. They took over the impossible job of trying to bring Annie back to life. They both knew it was hopeless too, but it was their job to try even more than it was Lena’s.
Lena ran down the stairs to bang on the door of one of Lena’s neighbours. This neighbour was called Sue. Annie liked Sue. Sue used to spend time with her without even being paid to do it. Annie sometimes spent hours in Sue’s flat, drinking tea and eating biscuits and moaning about her staff. Apart from Sue, only her family and her boyfriend Gary ever spent time with her without being paid for their time.
The ‘block’, as everyone called the building where Annie’s flat was situated, was the best place she’d lived since she’d lived with her mam as a little girl. She’d lived in a lot of places after leaving Mandelstones, the old institution where she’d’ spent much of the first thirty years of her life. It took a long time to find somewhere like the ‘block’ where people like Sue treated her as though she was a normal human being rather than someone to be pitied or laughed at or ignored.
Sue sat with Lena in the office while the ambulance men did their thing with one of those electric shock machines Annie had seen on Casualty on the tele. Annie could see Lena and Sue and she could see the ambulance men and her own jerking, useless body, even though they were in different rooms. She’d just discovered that you can do that sort of thing when you’re dead.
Lena was crying and Sue was holding her, trying to comfort her. Sue was nearly crying too. Sue was a grandmother in her fifties but had once been beautiful like Annie had once been beautiful. She had photographs of her younger self in her flat. Annie liked looking at those photographs. ‘I could have had my pick of men,’ Sue would say, ‘but I managed to choose the biggest shit possible.’ Sue had been married and divorced and had one son called Sam. Sam was a drug dealer, but he was very nice to Annie.
The ambulance men were still doing their job, but they knew Annie had gone and wasn’t coming back.
Soon Jim, the oldest of the men joined Lena and Sue in the sleep-in room. The two women were sat on the bed, Jim stayed standing.
“I’m sorry….” he began, and then he told them as nicely and as gently as he could, just as he’d been trained to do.
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