‘Tell me your size.' And Margaret looked happy, happy as she’d ever seen her. She was sure that the Matron and the other one didn’t treat them well; Vadnie thought they might even be abusive but she never saw anything with her own eyes. Recently though, she had made heavy hints about the authorities, and she had sat at home glued to a documentary about a whistleblower. (She had never heard the term before.) ‘I might blow the whistle,’ Vadnie had thought to herself. ‘Tell me,’ Vadnie said to Margaret quietly, ‘Won’t you tell me if they ever lay a finger on you?’ Maybe one of them overheard; Vadnie didn’t know how it had all started. But at the end of the day that had started strangely, Vadnie found herself dismissed. After twenty years: dismissed. And the thing that distressed her most was that she wouldn’t be able to return with Margaret’s cherry red cardigan. She wouldn’t be able to tell Margaret how Preston was, how Ladyblossom, Grace and Marsha were doing. They might as well all be dead.

On the way home Vadnie felt the breeze on her face and the strange feeling turning into Oliphant Street that violence was in the air. She walked slowly, heavily. She had a tight feeling across her chest. She was sweating. She stopped in the DIY shop and bought a new plug and a new packet of fuses. ‘My husband used to be an electrician,’ she had told the woman, ‘Yet could I get him to fix a plug?’ The woman in the shop laughed. ‘Mine is a carpenter - ditto!’ She paused. ‘You said ‘used to’ the woman said. Vadnie nodded slowly, ‘Yes, he passed away a few weeks ago. He’s buried up the road there in Willesden Cemetery.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ the woman said. Mrs Vadnie Marlene Sevlon dabbed at the sudden tears falling down her face. ‘He was a good man, a terribly good man,’ she said. ‘Oh dear,’ the woman said. ‘You must miss him.’

End

 
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