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  The door opened and two elderly men came in, one of them supporting himself on a walker, the other using a stick. ‘I think that’s everyone,’ said Mrs Duffy brightly. ‘Perhaps we could make a start.’

  Hewson nodded. ‘I thought I’d say a few words and then answer some questions.’ He looked around the room. ‘Will the press be here? The local paper?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, it’s just us,’ said Mrs Duffy. The door opened and an old man came in with a tray of tea things. ‘Ah, here’s Mr McCall with your refreshments,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you make yourself comfortable while I pour the tea.’ She waved at a winged armchair and Hewson sat down. Tidy sat in another chair, by the windows. ‘How do you take it?’

  ‘Milk.’

  ‘No sugar?’

  ‘I use sweeteners.’

  ‘That’s nice for you. And Mr Tidy?’

  ‘A dash of milk and one sugar.’

  Mrs Duffy poured their tea and handed cups to both men. The rest of the residents sat down and looked expectantly at the MP. Hewson stirred his tea and took a cautious sip. Bad tea was one of the drawbacks of the job, but this cup tasted fine.

  ‘Before you start, do you mind if Mr Cohen records your talk. It’s not often we get a VIP and we’d like a souvenir to remind us of this special day.’ She gestured at a wizened old man with thick-lensed spectacles who was holding up an old-fashioned video camera, the sort that used a small video-cassette. He nodded and smiled showing uneven yellow teeth.

  ‘Of course,’ said Hewson. ‘Just remember to say “Action” when you’re ready.’

  ‘Do you hear that, Nicholas?’ said Mrs Duffy. The man nodded sagely.

  ‘I was joking,’ said Hewson.

  ‘Action!’ said Cohen, and he pointed at Hewson with his free hand.

  Hewson took another sip of his tea, then went into his standard ten minute speech about the debt the country owed to its senior citizens, about how experience came with age, and then switched into a list of all the good things his party were doing to make the country a better place. Hewson had given so many speeches that he could pretty much talk on remote control. He knew when to tell a joke, when to feign sincerity, and when to sound enthusiastic. He knew all about maintaining eye contact and smiling and when to nod and when to frown. Then he asked them if they had any questions and he finished off his tea.

  ‘When are you going to increase our pensions?’ asked a woman sitting at the table. She had an ill-fitting blonde wig that looked as if it might slip off her head at any moment.

  ‘Pensions rise in line with inflation,’ said Hewson. ‘Our Government has done more than anyone to make sure that senior citizens receive enough money.’

  ‘Enough money?’ said a woman in a floral housecoat. She was wearing thick surgical stockings and leopard print slippers. ‘We get nothing. The council take it straight off us to pay for this place. We never get to see the money.’

  A grey-haired man pushed himself up out of his armchair and pointed a gnarled finger at Hewson. His face was so wrinkled he could have been anywhere between seventy and ninety years old, but his eyes flashed fire. ‘You answer me this, Mr Hewson. Why can someone from another country come here and get free health care and a mansion in London and a big screen TV, and then they get to bring their whole family over here? Yet you can’t pay to take care of your country’s old folks. My father died to save this country, Mr Hewson, I’m just glad he didn’t live to see what you’ve done to it.’

  ‘Really, you don’t want to believe everything you read in the Daily Mail,’ said Hewson.

  ‘I read the Guardian,’ said the man, jabbing his finger at Hewson again. ‘But that isn’t the point. The point is that this country now cares more about foreigners than it does about its own people. Do you know how much I have pay to stay here, Mr Hewson?’

  Hewson looked over at his agent. Tidy was sipping his tea and studiously avoiding his gaze. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said.

  ‘Three thousand pounds a month,’ said the man. ‘And when all my savings have gone, they’ll sell my house and take that. I’m being raped, Mr Hewson, raped by your Government and shame on you.’

  ‘Please, Mr Mosby, there’s no need to raise your voice,’ said Mrs Duffy.

  The man muttered an apology and sat down. There was a damp patch in the crotch of his trousers as if he had spilled something there. Or wet himself. Hewson tried not to stare at the wet stain.

  ‘It is something we feel strongly about, as you can see,’ said Mrs Duffy. She picked up a plate of Digestive biscuits and offered it to the MP. He took one and smiled his thanks.

  ‘They took my cats,’ said an old woman who was sitting with knitting needles in her hands and a large ball of wool in her lap.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Hewson, but the woman didn’t look up. He put his biscuit on his saucer and took a sip of his tea.

  ‘The council, they took her cats away,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘You’re not allowed to have pets in here, so they took her cats away.’

  ‘They killed them,’ muttered the woman.

  Mrs Duffy nodded. ‘I know they did, Mrs Pinborough, and shame on them for that.’ She smiled at Hewson. ‘They told her that they had found homes for the cats but they didn’t. They put them to sleep.’ She tilted her head on one side as she continued to smile at the MP. ‘Isn’t that funny?’ she said. ‘A euphemism for euthanasia. That’s almost a pun.’

  Hewson frowned. ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘Have you been to an old folks home before?’ asked a wizened old man with a bent spine. He had to push himself back into his chair to meet Hewson’s gaze. ‘Have you?’

  Hewson shook his head. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘You’d hate it,’ said the man. He was wearing a green cardigan, brown corduroy trousers and tartan carpet slippers.

  ‘It looks perfectly nice,’ said Hewson, looking around and forcing a smile. Actually it was one of the most depressing places he’d ever visited. The carpet was threadbare, the armchairs lined up against the walls were stained and worn and there was a horrible smell in the air, a mixture of sweat, urine and stale cabbage.

  ‘It’s a shithole,’ said the man.

  ‘Mr Wilkins, please,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘There’s no need for language like that.’

  ‘But it is a shithole,’ Mr Wilkins muttered, but he put up a hand by way of apology as Mrs Duffy continued to glare at him.

  ‘It isn’t perfectly nice, though, Mr Hewson,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘It’s actually quite horrible. They keep us two to a room, did you know that? And we have no control over who we share with.’

  ‘The woman in my room is dying,’ said Mrs Pinborough, her eyes fixed on her knitting needles.

  ‘We’re all dying,’ muttered Mr Wilkins. He looked away as Mrs Duffy glared at him.

  ‘Every night, when she sleeps, her breath rattles like it’s going to stop at any moment,’ said Mrs Pinborough.

  ‘Shouldn’t she be in hospital?’ asked Mr Hewson.

  ‘She’s not sick,’ said Mrs Pinborough. ‘She’s dying. And she’s taking her own sweet time doing it.’

  ‘The man in my room snores so much I can’t sleep without earplugs,’ said a stick-than man with swept-back grey hair. His adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he spoke. ‘And he farts. He farts and he snores and I’ve complained but nothing is ever done. It’s like Mrs Duffy says, we’d be better off in prison.’

  Mr Hewson frowned. ‘Prison? What do you mean?’ He looked over at Mrs Duffy. ‘What is he talking about?’

  Mrs Duffy shrugged. ‘It’s true, unfortunately. You treat prisoners better than you treat us senior citizens.’

  ‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say,’ said Hewson.

  Mrs Duffy shook her head. ‘In prison, we’d have single rooms. With a television. And Sky TV.’

  ‘You have Sky TV here, don’t you?’

  ‘Only the basic package. No sport. And just the one set, in the television room. There are always arguments over what we sh
ould watch. And it has to be switched off at 10pm sharp. We’re not allowed to watch it after that. In prison, you can watch TV all night if you want. And you get video games. And books. All free.’

  ‘We can’t use the garden either,’ said another woman. She had a hair net over her wispy grey hair and a surgical collar around her neck. ‘Only on special occasions. Isn’t that right, Mrs Duffy.’

  ‘That’s right, Mrs Carver.’ Mrs Duffy nodded at Hewson. ‘They say they don’t want us bringing in dirt. I tell everyone, if we were in prison at least we’d get outside every day. That’s a human right, fresh air. In prison they have to have exercise, but here..’ She shrugged.

  ‘Tell him about the food, Mrs Duffy,’ said a portly woman sitting by the window. She had thinning hair that had been dyed a pale shade of purple that only emphasized the whiteness of her skull. Her eyes were reddened as if she had been crying as she stared at Hewson she fiddled with a wedding band on a chain around her neck. ‘Tell him how bad the food is.’

  Mrs Duffy nodded. ‘It’s terrible,’ she said to Hewson.

  ‘You wouldn’t feed it to a dog,’ said one woman.

  ‘A dog wouldn’t touch it,’ said a man with a stoop who was holding himself up with an aluminium walker.

  ‘I’m sure the management would listen to your complaints,’ said Hewson.

  ‘They don’t care,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘We’re not people to them. We’re profit centres. They take as much money as they can and they give us the bare minimum.’

  ‘Less than the bare minimum,’ said the man with the walker. He started coughing and his whole body shuddered.

  ‘Mr Waites, please, don’t upset yourself, you know it only makes your asthma worse,’ said Mrs Duffy. One of the ladies standing near to Mr Waites helped him away from the walker and into a high winged armchair that had been covered in plastic.

  ‘Did you know, Mr Hewson, that in prison you get a choice of five meals for your dinner? And there’s always a vegetarian option.’ Mrs Duffy nodded enthusiastically. ‘Always.’

  ‘I’m sure you have vegetarian meals here,’ said Hewson.

  ‘We only get meat every second day,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘If you’re a vegetarian on a meat day, they just scrape it off the plate before they give it to you.’

  ‘It’s not meat,’ said Mr Wilkins. ‘Not real meat. Not steak. Or chops. We get bits of meat in gravy or sauce and it could be anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were feeding us horsemeat.’

  ‘For breakfast we get porridge or cereal and a slice of toast,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘That’s it. No eggs. No bacon. No sausage. Then we get pasta or soup and a sandwich for lunch. And for dinner we get slops.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ said Mr Hewson. He looked over at Tidy but the man was slumped in his chair and staring at the floor. Hewson leaned forward to pick up his cup, hoping that the movement would attract Tidy’s attention, but he continued to stare vacantly at the carpet. Hewson sipped his tea and took a quick look at his wristwatch. He had only been there for fifteen minutes.

  ‘It’s slops, Mr Hewson, there’s no other way to describe it,’ said Mrs Duffy.

  ‘I haven’t had food that needs chewing for more than a year,’ said Mr Wilkins, and most of the other residents nodded in agreement.

  ‘You know what happens when you don’t eat solid food?’ asked Mosby. ‘Your teeth fall out. If you don’t use them, you lose them.’ He tapped his front teeth, ‘I’ve got dentures now but my teeth were fine when I moved in.’

  Hewson put down his cup and looked over at Tidy. Tidy had closed his eyes. Hewson was just about to call over to him, when Mrs Duffy started speaking again.

  ‘Do you see how crazy the world has become, Mr Hewson? Do you? We have to sell our homes to stay here. They take all of our money, everything we earned over our lives. They take it from us and they make us sleep two to a room and they feed us slops. And when we die, they get someone else in to our beds before the sheets are even cold. I want to leave my money to my grandchildren, Mr Hewson. I want to give them a good start in life. But the council won’t let me. They came to see us and gave us a little presentation, with slides and everything. They said that if we gave any money to our children or our grandchildren they would find out and they would take it back. We had to pay for our care, they said. We have to pay for everything. My husband died for this country, Mr Hewson. He was a soldier, he died in the Falklands, back in 1982. I was pregnant with our second child. I brought them up on my own, I did. And then my younger son was killed fighting in Afghanistan. His wife is now struggling to bring up their children. And you won’t let me give my money to my son’s kids. You want to take every penny I have before I die.’

  ‘Mrs Duffy, really, it’s not like that.’

  ‘It’s exactly like that, Mr Hewson. For all of us. All you want to do is take, take, take. You’re bleeding us dry, Mr Hewson, and enough is enough.’

  ‘What about your families?’ asked Hewson. ‘Have you told them about your concerns.’

  ‘Our families have abandoned us,’ said Mrs Carver. ‘Mine have, anyway. My son lives in Australia now with his family. I can’t blame him, not with the way this country has gone.’ She pointed at Hewson and sneered at him contemptuously. ‘And you’re to blame. You and the rest of the bloody politicians. You’ve sold us down the river. We used to be Great Britain and now we’re overrun by foreigners.’

  ‘Careful Mrs Carver, remember your blood pressure,’ said Mrs Duffy.

  ‘I don’t care anymore,’ said Mrs Carver. ‘They hate us now. They want us to die, that’s what they want.’

  ‘Mrs Carver, no one wants that,’ said Hewson.

  ‘Then tell me why you’ve allowed so many foreigners into this country,’ said Mrs Carver. ‘So many that our own young people can’t get jobs. And when you go to hospital you have to sleep in a corridor because so many foreigners are on the wards. That happened to me, Mr Hewson. Last year. And don’t tell me it didn’t.’

  ‘And what about the foreign criminals you say you can’t send home,’ said Mr Cohen, holding the video camera away from his face. ‘We’ve got rapists and murderers who don’t belong here but they claim their Human Rights mean they should stay, And the judges let them. That’s just stupid, Mr Hewson, you know that?’

  ‘We all benefit from the Human Rights legislation,’ said Hewson.

  ‘But do we?’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘What about our human rights, Mr Hewson? What about our right to live out our last days in comfort, with good food, our own room, pleasant surroundings, with people who care about us?’

  Hewson looked around the room and frowned. He still hadn’t seen any members of staff, no one had even popped their head around the door to check if everything was okay.

  ‘No one cares about our rights, Mr Hewson. No one cares about us, full stop. Mrs Carver is right. The world wants us dead. But before we die they want to take everything we have.’ She waved a hand around the room. ‘This is a prison, Mr Hewson. And we’re all serving life sentences. The only way out of here is in a wooden box, and we have to pay for that ourselves. That’s what I’ve explained to everyone here. We’d be better off in prison. Conditions would be better and the state will pay. You know what would be fair, Mr Hewson? What would be fair is if you would put the nation’s old folks in prison and the prisoners in old peoples’ homes. I tell you, if you put prisoners in a place like this, they wouldn’t re-offend, that I can promise you.’

  Hewson looked around the room and was faced with a wall of nodding heads. He looked at his watch, but had trouble focusing on the dial. ‘Anyway, as much as I would love to continue this conversation, we do have another appointment, don’t we Oliver?’

  He looked over at Tidy but the agent was slumped in his chair, his eyes closed and his mouth wide open. Spittle was dribbling down his chin. ‘Oliver?’

  ‘He asleep,’ said Mrs Duffy.

  Hewson tried to get to his feet but his legs had turned to lead. ‘What’s happenin
g?’ he said, but his tongue felt too big for his mouth and the words came out all slurred.

  ‘That’s what is so unfair, don’t you see?’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘Someone commits a crime and they go to prison, the taxpayer pays for everything. They get a room, they get three good meals a day, free healthcare, free dentistry, free education.’

  ‘My teeth hurt and they say I have to pay £200 to see a dentist,’ said a woman in a pale green shawl. She had clearly applied her lipstick with a shaky hand and there were red streaks under her nose.

  Hewson opened his mouth to reply but he couldn’t seem to form the words and all he could manage was a mumble.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Mrs Duffy, nodding. ‘They say that there isn’t an NHS dentist nearby and they charge us £200 just for an examination. Plus we have to use their taxi service. If we were in prison, the dentist would come to us. Same as trying to see a doctor. We can never get a same day appointment, we have to wait until it’s convenient for them. If we ask for a doctor to come to see us, they just laugh. If we were in prison, there’d be a doctor on call.’

  ‘Why isn’t he asleep?’ asked the woman with aching teeth.

  ‘I put more in the other one’s tea, Mrs Bolton,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘I didn’t want him waking up. But I want to explain to Mr Hewson why we are doing what we’re doing. I think we owe him that much.’

  ‘We going to have to do this quickly,’ said Mrs Bolton. ‘We can’t keep them, locked up in the basement forever.’

  ‘They can’t get out,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘And as soon as we’re finished here we’ll let them out and they can call the police.’

  ‘What have you done?’ asked Hewson.

  ‘It’s what we’re going to do, Mr Hewson,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘Don’t you see, it’s obvious what we have to do. We have to go to prison. We’ll be looked after there.’

  ‘A choice of five meals a day,’ said one of the men.

  ‘Sky Sport,’ said Mr Wilkins.

  ‘A doctor on call,’ said a woman in a pink nightdress spotted with food stains.