Paradise Lodge Read Online Free PDF Page B

and having taken an emery board to a lady’s upper denture, where it was causing an ulcer.
    I ran into Miranda and a couple of her followers in the toilets—applying kohl to their inner eyelids—getting ready for the lunchtime discotheque. Miranda mentioned Paradise Lodge and before I knew it I’d said it was a privilege to be among elderly people and them having a lot to teach young women like us.
    Miranda frowned at me via the mirror (this obviously wasn’t the line she was taking in the group) and was clearly annoyed to hear me talk like that.
    â€˜You’re joking, aren’t you?’ she said.
    She didn’t really like being among elderly people. Seeing them all so sad and old, struggling along, clanking their walking frames, made her want to scream and push them over, she said—not to hurt them, and not that she didn’t like them, just that the feelings they provoked in her were so at odds with the feelings she had about Mike Yu (a company director aged only nineteen) and life in general. The patients were contaminating her mind, she said, and making her hopes and dreams seem pointless.
    â€˜I mean, how fucking depressing at our age, spending all day with people who are just around the corner from death, and you know it and they know it,’ she said, ‘and having to pretend everything’s normal.’
    I reassured Miranda that they didn’t see themselves as around the corner from death. They saw themselves as around the corner from a nice cup of milky coffee and a Lincoln biscuit or a trip to the lavatory. And actually, was that any different from us here now, in these toilets, me having a cigarette and her around the corner from a vending-machine Kit Kat and the lunchtime discotheque?
    Miranda tutted and said she’d never use the vending machine. She then cheered herself up by describing a three-piece trouser suit she was saving up for from Richard Shops—halfway between the boardroom and the bedroom, taupe chalk stripes, halter-neck waistcoat with plunging neckline and trousers you couldn’t wear pants with. It was going to blow Mike Yu’s mind.
    It sounded quite nice, except I wasn’t so keen on chalk stripes and would always want to wear pants.
    â€˜If my mother wasn’t such an old bag,’ said Miranda, ‘and yours wasn’t such a mess, we wouldn’t need this grim fucking job!’
    I don’t think I blamed my mother for my needing the job. I blamed her at school for my truanting but I didn’t want to be the sort of idiot that gives up on their academic career because their parents don’t give them enough attention—I hated kids like that—but I couldn’t deny that my lack of direction coincided with our mother breaking an agreement with our newish stepdad, Mr Holt.
    Mr Holt had been gently training our mother to be careful with money—after years of frivolity (hers)—but in spite of the two of them making a ‘no more babies’ agreement, our mother had deliberately got herself pregnant and had a baby in 1976. She denied she’d done it deliberately and denies it to this day, but of course she had.
    I felt sorry for Mr Holt. He was a clever and intuitive man and had taught himself much about the world. He knew more than most people learn at even the most expensive school just by using his brain and reading. The one thing he’d failed to understand, though, was that our mother was never going to stop wanting to have babies—however many agreements she made. She couldn’t help herself.
    My mother didn’t tell Mr Holt about the pregnancy to begin with and then, just when she thought perhaps the time had come, he accidentally saw her in the nude, sideways on, and he’d said ‘Jesus H. Christ’ under his breath.
    He hadn’t intended to hurt her feelings but he had, and she’d cried in dismay and said what a bad person she was—relying on the fact