I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left
I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left. One night I laid my teething baby on his chest — and his fingers moved. Then he whispered: don't tell anyone I'm awake.
The man everybody in that house was waiting to bury moved one hand and closed his fingers round the blanket over my son.
I stood there and was completely certain I had imagined it.
I had been walking Theodric round the staff side of Harrowfold for three hours. He is nine months old, he was teething, he had a temperature, and there was no settling him.
I carried him. I sang. I fed him. He kept going.
So I took him into Rendel Ashgrove's room, because it was the only room on that floor nobody would come into at two in the morning.
The doctors had said days.
He is forty-six. He built the whole of it out of haulage, and he had been in that bed since the ninth of September, unable to speak or move.
His nephew had been discussing the funeral in the voice other people use for booking a table.
I do live-in care because I need the wage and because no other job lets me keep my son with me.
That night I sat down in the chair next to him to rest my arms.
Theodric was still crying. And without really thinking about it I laid him on that man's chest for a few seconds.
And the baby went to sleep.
And then Rendel's fingers moved — slowly, about two inches, until they were touching the blanket.
I said: "Mr Ashgrove?"
His eyelids went. One eye came open slightly.
He was conscious. Completely conscious.
I spent the rest of that night working out how to talk to him.
One blink is yes. Two is no. Looking at the door means somebody is coming.
"Can you hear everything they say in this room?"
One blink.
And something went through me that I have not been able to describe since and have stopped trying to.
By about one o'clock the next day he could move his lips a little. I put my ear by his mouth.
He said: "Christo isn't waiting for my money. He's speeding it up."
And then we heard footsteps.
Christo came in without knocking. Grey suit, a watch worth more than my car, annoyed before he had looked at anybody.
"How's our patient?"
"No change."
He did not look at his uncle once.
"Good. Doctor's here at four."
And then, on his way out: "And one more thing, Calla. If that child cries all night again, you and he can find somewhere else to stay."
"It won't happen again."
At four the doctor came with a leather case. There were about twenty people in that house by then — family, two agency staff, somebody from the office — and several of them were in the hallway.
And when I stood between the bed and the door and asked what was in the syringe, he put his hand on my wrist and said it loud enough for all of them:
***Step away from the bed. You are staff.***
Nobody moved. Somebody put a cup down on a side table.
He did not let go. He leaned in and said:
***Step away. Well?***
Ten minutes later Rendel's breathing changed, and his fingers stopped answering me.
And that doctor said, very calmly: "He's fading. Five days. Maybe six."
What was in the syringe.
Midazolam.
I know because I did the only useful thing I have ever done in my life, which was to go back into that room at half seven that evening, take the sharps tray out of the bin bag the agency girl had tied up, and photograph the empty ampoule on the windowsill with the date on my phone.
Two of them. Ten milligrams each.
Nobody was killing Rendel Ashgrove. I want that said clearly, because for about four days I thought they were, and I nearly did the wrong thing with it.
They were sedating him.
Why.
Because of a hearing on the eighth of December.
Christo applied to the court in the October to be appointed to manage his uncle's property and affairs. That is a thing you can do when somebody cannot make decisions, and the court will not simply take your word for it: it orders an assessment.
An independent assessor was coming to Harrowfold on the second of December to decide whether Rendel Ashgrove had capacity.
And the law on that is not about whether a man can speak or sign. It is about whether he can understand, retain, weigh up — and communicate by any means.
Any means includes blinking.
A man who can blink once for yes is a man with capacity, and a man with capacity cannot have his company, his accounts and his house handed to his nephew by a judge.
So for five weeks before that assessment, somebody made sure that when anybody looked at Rendel Ashgrove, he was not there.
Not enough to kill him. Enough to make him a vegetable on the day somebody came to check.
The four days in between, which are the ones I would not do again.
From the twenty-fifth to the twenty-ninth of November I did two things at once, and I was not good at either of them.
I did my job. Positioning every two hours, mouth care, the chart, the feed, the pad, the turning. You do not stop doing that because something extraordinary is happening; a man gets a pressure sore in about six hours and his skin does not care what else is going on in the house.
And in between, I learned to read a face that had almost nothing left to say anything with.
He got about eleven words out on the Wednesday and none at all on the Thursday, because of the four o'clock, and I spent the whole of Thursday not knowing whether he was asleep, sedated or gone.
That is the bit nobody puts in. Twenty-two hours of a man I had been talking to not answering me, and no way of finding out which of those three it was, and a nephew downstairs on the phone to a florist.
I did the night of the twenty-seventh on about ninety minutes' sleep with a baby who was still teething.
At four in the morning I took a photograph of a page of somebody else's handwriting from the October, sitting on the floor of that room with my back against the radiator, and then I fed my son, and then I turned a man at five.
Bettina.
And this is where it stopped being my word against a man in a grey suit.
I was not the first.
There is a daily notes folder in that room, as there is in every room like that, and it goes back to the discharge home on the twenty-ninth of September.
There is a carer called Bettina Horák who was on nights at Harrowfold for eight days in the October.
On the third of October, at 04:20, she wrote four lines in that folder.
***Pt appeared to track me across the room. Asked him to blink twice if he could hear, he did it twice. Repeated at 04:40, same. Will inform agency and family in am.***
She was dismissed on the sixth of October. The agency was told she had been found asleep on shift.
That page is still in the folder. That is the thing I cannot get over.
Christo Ashgrove is thirty-one and he is not stupid, and he removed a woman and he did not remove a page, because it did not occur to him that anybody would read four lines of a nursing record from October.
I read it on the twenty-seventh of November, at about three in the morning, because I had started going through that folder page by page looking for the drug chart.
What I actually did.
Not what people hope.
I did not confront anybody and I did not call the police, and I have had to explain that to about eleven people since.
On the twenty-sixth of November, at half seven at night, I photographed the ampoules.
On the twenty-seventh I photographed every page of that folder, all seventy-one of them, in the dark, with my phone on the lowest brightness, while my son slept in a travel cot about four feet away.
On the twenty-eighth I rang the switchboard at St Nectan's and asked for the secretary of the consultant whose name was on the discharge summary — a woman called Dr Ifeoma Said, who had not seen Rendel Ashgrove since the twenty-ninth of September and had not been told he was being privately sedated by anybody.
I was on hold for nineteen minutes. I had Theodric on my hip the whole time.
And on the twenty-ninth I rang the court office, and a woman explained to me what an application looks like and gave me the number for the office that supervises them, and I rang that too and talked to a man called Nnamdi for about half an hour in a car park.
The assessment that was supposed to happen on the second of December happened on the thirtieth of November, at four hours' notice, by an assessor who had been told what to look for.
Rendel Ashgrove blinked once for yes seventeen times in that room.
What Rendel told me first.
Before any of that. On the second night, when he had his lips back.
He said: "Don't tell anyone I'm awake."
And then, when I asked him why — because my first instinct was to go downstairs and shout it — he said one word and had to rest, and then said two more.
"More. They'll give. More."
He had worked it out already. He had worked it out from inside that bed, on his own, over about three weeks, from the fact that every time he got close to moving something, somebody came in and put something in his line.
A man lay in a dark room for seven weeks doing the arithmetic, and he was right.
And the second thing he asked me for was not the police.
It was a solicitor. He blinked out a name over about forty minutes: D-E-L-P-H-I-N-E. Delphine Rask. She had done his wills since 2011 and her number was in a drawer in his study, which is where he sent me on the third night, blink by blink, down a corridor past four closed doors with a baby in a sling.
Why he was so easy to take.
And here is the thing that turned it from a story about a wicked nephew into something sadder.
In the March of 2019, Rendel Ashgrove signed a power of attorney naming Christo.
Nobody tricked him into it. He was forty, he was healthy, he had a solicitor, and he did it on a Tuesday afternoon because he had seen what happened to a friend's family and he did not want to be a burden on anybody.
And he chose Christo because Christo is his sister's son, and his sister died in 2005, and Rendel raised that boy from the age of eleven.
School fees, driving lessons, the first flat, the job at Ashgrove Haulage, the second job when the first one did not take. Twenty years.
The man who put a sedative order in place for an assessment is the boy whose homework Rendel Ashgrove used to sit and do with him at a kitchen table in 2006.
And the document that made all of it possible was signed by Rendel himself, in good health, out of a wish not to be a nuisance.
What happened after the thirtieth of November.
It moved extremely fast and almost none of it was dramatic.
The court application was withdrawn on the ninth of December after the assessor's report went in. The attorney appointment was suspended and then revoked in the February on Rendel's own instructions, which he gave in a room with Delphine Rask, an independent witness and a speech and language therapist, over about four hours, because he was still doing it one letter at a time.
Dr Pelham Vass — the man with the leather case — was referred to his regulator in the January. That has not concluded. He has not treated anybody privately since the March.
Christo was arrested in the February. The charge is ill-treatment or wilful neglect of a person lacking capacity, which is a real offence and which I had never heard of in my life.
He has pleaded not guilty. His case is that he acted on medical advice throughout and that his uncle was agitated and distressed and needed sedation.
It is listed for the spring. I am a witness. I am told I will be in that box for most of a day, and that the folder and the photographs will be exhibits one to four, and that Bettina Horák is giving evidence before me.
I have met her twice. She is fifty-three and Slovak and she has been a carer for nineteen years, and when I told her that her four lines from the third of October were in a court file, she sat down.
She said she had rung the agency on the sixth and been told she was being removed for sleeping on shift, and that she had cried in a car and then taken another job on the Monday, because that is what you do when you are an agency carer with a mortgage.
She said: "I thought nobody will believe me. I am the night girl."
And the assessment itself, on the thirtieth of November, which took two hours and eleven minutes and which I was not in the room for.
I want to be accurate about that, because people assume I stood there holding his hand.
I was asked to leave. Correctly. The whole point of an independent assessment is that nobody who has a view is in the room.
So I sat on the stairs on the first-floor landing with my son asleep in the sling, four feet from a door, for two hours and eleven minutes.
At one point Christo came up and stood at the end of that landing and looked at me for about thirty seconds without saying anything at all, and then went back down.
That is the only moment in this entire business when I was frightened of him, and he did not say one word.
And when the door opened, the assessor — a woman of about sixty called Phyllida, who had driven ninety minutes at four hours' notice on a Sunday — came out and did not tell me anything, because she is not allowed to.
She said: "Are you the carer who rang the office?"
And I said yes.
And she said: "Right." And then: "Is that your little boy?"
And then she went downstairs and asked Christo Ashgrove for the drug chart, in the hall, in front of four people.
What I have had to take.
Everybody wants me to be the person who worked it out.
I did not work anything out. A teething baby would not stop crying and I took him into the one room where nobody would complain, and I put him down on a man's chest because my arms hurt.
That is the whole of my cleverness.
And here is mine, which I have had to say out loud to a woman called Halla on Thursdays since the March.
On the twenty-sixth of November — the day of the syringe — Christo Ashgrove stood in that doorway and told me that if my son cried again, the two of us could find somewhere else to stay.
And I said: "It won't happen again."
And then I spent four hours that afternoon, with a conscious man eleven feet away, seriously considering saying nothing to anybody.
I am twenty-seven. I had three hundred and eleven pounds and a nine-month-old and a room in that house, and no family in this country who could take us, and I had already been in two places that year where we could not stay.
So I sat on a bed in the staff corridor and did the sums, which took about four hours, and the sums were: if I say something and they throw us out tonight, where do we go.
I did not find an answer to that. I want to be clear about that, because the version of this where I am brave is not true. I never did solve it.
What happened is that at about eight o'clock I went in to do his position change, and he was there — properly there, the sedation had come off a bit — and he blinked at me once, before I had asked anything, just to tell me he was still in there.
And I thought: he has been doing that at people for seven weeks.
And I went and got my phone and photographed the sharps tray.
Not because I was brave. Because I could not go back to walking a baby up and down a corridor past a door with a man awake behind it.
The other thing.
And there is one more, which is smaller and which I like less.
That folder had been on the shelf in that room since the first of November.
I started on the first of November. I read the drug chart and the turning chart and the fluid chart, every shift, like you do.
I did not read the daily notes from before I started. Not once in twenty-five days. Nobody does — you read the current page.
Bettina Horák's four lines were eleven feet from my chair for three and a half weeks.
If I had gone backwards through that folder on my first night, that man would have had twenty-five days of his life back, and the eighth of December hearing would have been dealt with in the November, and it would have had nothing at all to do with my son.
Rendel.
He is fifty, in the sense that he will be in the June.
He can speak. It is slow and it is effortful and he gets about eleven words a minute on a good day, and he says "very good day" and "bad day" and we have stopped pretending there is a scale.
He has his right hand. The left is not coming back and he has stopped asking.
He lives at Harrowfold with a care team of four, which he directs himself, personally, with a great deal of opinion.
The company is run by a board and a managing director called Devorah Sim, which was his own decision in the March, and he has told me that handing it over was easier than the first week of physiotherapy.
And he will not have the word Christo said in that room. He has never once asked me what the nephew said while he was lying there, and I know what was said, because I was standing next to the bed for some of it, and he has made it clear he does not want it.
He said: "I heard it. I don't need it twice."
And Dilys, the housekeeper, who has been at Harrowfold since 2004 and who I have had to think about more than I have thought about Christo.
She knew something.
Not the sedation and not the hearing — I believe that, and so does everybody who has looked at it, and she was never interviewed under caution.
What she knew was that a night carer had been dismissed in the October for sleeping on shift, and that the woman had stood in her kitchen for twenty minutes before her taxi came, saying she had not been asleep and that the man upstairs was awake.
Dilys Crane heard that, in her own kitchen, on the sixth of October.
And she said — to me, in the February, with both hands round a mug — "I thought she was overtired, love. They do say things when they're on nights."
She is sixty-four. She has worked in that house for twenty-one years, through two of Rendel's relationships and his sister's death and the boy growing up.
And a woman stood in front of her and told her the truth and she filed it as somebody being overtired, because the alternative was going upstairs past Christo Ashgrove and asking a question.
She has not forgiven herself, and I have not been able to tell her it was nothing, because it was not nothing. It was eight weeks.
Where things are.
I am not his carer. I left in the March.
That was mine and I had to fight him about it for a month, because he wanted to put me on a contract at a wage that was not a wage for the job, and I said no, and he sulked about it for eleven days.
I do a childcare course on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I work at a nursery in Ellersley four days a week, and Theodric comes with me, and we have a flat.
He paid the deposit on it. I let him do that one and we have not discussed it since.
And on Sundays we go up to Harrowfold, and my son — who is two, and enormous, and who has been going into that room since he was nine months old — climbs onto that man's chest and lies there for about four minutes, which is the limit of both of them.
And Theodric, who is the only one of us who did not do anything difficult and who did the whole of it.
He was nine months old and teething and he had been crying for three hours, and he has no idea.
He will be told. Rendel has already started, in the way you do with a two-year-old, which is a sentence at a time with no shape to it: you went to sleep on me and I woke up. Theodric thinks this is a game about sleeping and asks for it.
At about sixteen he will get the rest of it, and I have thought about how that conversation goes more than is sensible.
Because there is a version where he grows up being told he saved a man's life at nine months old, and I am not having that. It is not good for a person and it is not even true.
He did not save anybody. He cried, and he was heavy, and he was warm, and he fell asleep on a chest that had not had anything on it for two months.
What I want him to have instead is the actual shape of it, which is this: a man had been trying to be noticed for seven weeks, and a woman had walked past that door for twenty-five days, and a page of handwriting had been sitting on a shelf since October.
All of it was already there. Every single piece.
And a baby who wanted his gums rubbed at two in the morning happened to be the thing that put one adult in a chair next to another adult for long enough to look at him properly.
And the last thing.
I asked him about it in the August, in the garden, when he had got to the point of being able to do a conversation.
I asked him why his fingers moved that night, and not any of the nights before.
Because he had been trying. Seven weeks of trying, and Bettina on the third of October, and nothing after that.
And he thought about it for a long time — he thinks for a long time now, which is either the injury or simply what he is like when he cannot interrupt — and then he said it in about four goes, with a gap in the middle where he had to stop.
He said: "Everything in that room. For two months. Was about me."
"The machines. The visits. The arrangements."
"And then. A baby cried on my chest. At two in the morning."
May you like
And then he had to rest, and he came back about a minute later with the end of it.
"First thing in that house. In two months. That wanted something. And didn't want it. From me."
