‘If you get any more points on your licence, you’ll be off the road,’ Ginger told him severely. ‘I’ll be there in another fifteen. Find somewhere to stop for coffee and directions, and I’ll meet you there then.’
A retiredSunday Newsguy who now lived in Wexford had told them the rumour that Callie Reynolds and her daughter were back living in Ballyglen, but another far bigger financial crisis had knocked the Reynolds affair off the general news radar, so nobody had bothered with it. However, word had it that Jason Reynolds’ girlfriend’s mother was dying and he might come back if she did.
‘A cop contact told us that,’ the news editor told an increasingly edgy Ginger that morning. ‘If you do your magic, we could be in before anyone else. Bet the wife will want to kill him.’
‘Thought she knew nothing about it all, has no money?’ said Ginger.
‘Exactly. The story “woman he fooled and left” makes for lots of newspaper sales.’
The thought of writing that story made Ginger sick.
In the coffee shop, Johnny had already asked for directions to the nursing home. Ballyglen was a close-knit town, the Wexford ex-reporter said. ‘She and Reynolds both came from a tough area. If they’re on her side, you won’t find out anything in there. Try the nursing home.’
Ginger hated this. It was not the sort of thing she’d signed up to do. She’d followed the case, sure, but her sympathies had been with Mrs Reynolds and the poor kid. And now she had to go and try to extract Callie Reynolds’ pain from her like a dentist removing a tooth.
Sam
‘Music,’ Dr Arnold, the director of the nursing home, had told Sam when she first arrived, ‘is often one of the last links to our world that people with dementia have. See how everyone’s eyes light up when they hear music? Or even if their eyes don’t light up, they automatically move, remembering. The mind is the last great undiscovered field, but we are beginning to learn a little more about it. But here at Leap of Faith charity, we are not keen on researching our patients, we want to make them happy.’
Sam had been touring the nursing home for over two hours and it was thrilling, glorious, to see how people with dementia could be taken care of and stimulated.
‘We can do both,’ said Sam, writing in her notebook: ‘make them happy and do a little research, that’s part of what Kindness wants to do. Our aim is to help organisations like yourself and help to fund research into areas of dementia that may not have been covered before. If only we could get some researchers in here to investigate what sort of music works best, just to give people peace and happiness.’
Dr Arnold, an older man who walked with a stick, looked thoughtful.
‘I don’t see what harm it would do,’ he said, ‘but the researchers have to be mindful about the people we work with. They are the most important people in this place.’
Sam smiled at him. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ she said, ‘because of that ethos.’
‘Walk around, make yourself at home,’ said Dr Arnold, ‘I’ll have one of the team come out later to show you around the whole facility. I’m afraid I’ve a meeting right now. Your boss is pretty persuasive though.’
‘He is,’ agreed Sam, thinking of how long it had taken her to persuade him to change the charity’s name to Kindness instead of the beautiful Irish name that nobody outside Ireland could pronounce.
As she walked around the nursing home, she became aware of a sense of lightness and happiness that she hadn’t felt in any of the other care homes she’d been in. The music was a huge part of it.
Each place in the home had speakers and music played from them. Upstairs, there was classical in one room and gentle Big Band stuff from the forties and fifties in a sitting room.
The ward for the people with the most serious level of dementia was locked.
‘People move from upstairs to down here eventually,’ said the director of nursing, letting her in. ‘That said, we do our best to make this a very special place.’
Wards and rooms surrounded a large airy room that led into a beautifully maintained garden. There were flowers on the windowsills, Glenn Miller was playing in the background, and feet were tapping.
A very slim blonde woman was gently feeding the tiny, frail little old lady who was seated on a chair covered with a beautiful piece of sheepskin to protect her delicate bones. There was something vaguely familiar about the woman carer, although Sam couldn’t quite say what it was. Yet there was just something ... the woman was tall, older than Sam for sure, and had blonde hair tied back in a very severe ponytail. She was murmuring gently to the little old lady as she fed her.
‘Come on, Mildred. Just a tiny little bit more and we can stop. You’ve got to keep your strength up. How are you going to go dancing with Stanley later this afternoon if you haven’t had any lunch at all?’
Again, Sam marvelled at the gentleness of the carers who worked with these people. It wasn’t always easy, she knew. She watched the woman for a little while, watched Mildred holding her tiny little head up to be fed, like a little beautiful bird.
When lunch was over, the woman very gently cleaned Mildred’s tiny face with a soft cloth and then laid a gentle hand on her cheek.
‘Now, my darling,’ she said, ‘you’re beautiful again. You’re always beautiful, but even more so. Shall we get your lipstick and your powder?’
Mildred nodded, the first sign Sam had seen that she understood anything.
‘I’ll be back in a tickety-boo,’ said the woman, smiling.
As she walked towards the corridor, Sam noticed that the woman had a word for everyone, a smile, a touch on a shoulder, a gentle, ‘How are we doing today?’ One of the nurses whirled past and Sam interrupted her.
