Chapter 38: Unto the Next Generation

Tamara

2097

Not all the residents of the Elysian Nursing Home where Tamara worked were over eighty years old. Some were rather younger. In fact, some were barely seventy. It hardly seemed much of a reward for decades of scrimping and saving for retirement to have to live in a single room in a nursing home before you had much opportunity to enjoy your twilight years as a retired citizen. Iris was one such woman. It hadn't been very many months after she'd celebrated her seventieth birthday and therefore at last eligible to collect a pension that she was brought down by a stroke that brought her previously active life to a sudden abrupt end.

Still, there were worse places to spend your last few years than the Elysian Nursing Home located in the decaying seaside resort of Morecambe. There would even have been a view of the beach across the scrubland that had once been a Golf Club if it wasn't for the high wall that served to protect the town from the encroaching sea.

It was a long way from Surrey, but that suited Tamara. There was little likelihood of her meeting any of the clients she'd got to know from when she worked for Empire Cleaning Services and there was no one who'd need to know she was Jewish. It was dreadful for Tamara to admit that she preferred to hide her Israeli heritage of which she had once been so proud. She never imagined that she'd one day attempt to hide both her cultural identity and her most recent employment. But there were people for whom the fact that she was an Israeli citizen and had worked as a prostitute made her precisely the Jezebel that many now believed all Jewish women to be. This was ridiculous, of course, because before the Arab-Israeli Nuclear War no Israeli citizen ever needed to debase herself in that way.

Although Iris had suffered a stroke that left her physically debilitated, her mind remained lively. She was blind in one eye and could no longer walk or even use her right hand, but she was as coherent as she'd ever been. She had few living relatives or friends. Most of her friends weren't able to visit her because they lived in far-away cities such as Manchester, Preston and even London. Her most frequent visitor was her daughter, Tracey, and that wasn't very often. Sometimes she arrived with her nine year old daughter, Odile, but most often with one or another of a succession of profoundly bored men.

"I don't know why my daughter ever bothers," said Iris. "I moved up here just a year ago when I retired and although we'd never been close she'd followed me and moved into my house. Did you see the last man she was with? What a dumbo!"

"Your granddaughter seems very sweet," said Tamara loyally.

"All nine year old girls look sweet. I don't know how long that's likely to last with a mother like Tracey. She was trouble when she was young and she's trouble now. Did you know we literally have no idea who Odile's father is?"

"No, I didn't."

"You'd have thought that one name might have stuck in Tracey's mind as to who the father might be," said Iris. "She can't have had intimate relations with that many men, could she? But no, she couldn't remember the names of the men she'd slept with in the critical month at all. She did say that if her child was black or brown, that would make it easier to work out. It's not as if my daughter was a prostitute. That's one thing she's never resorted to, despite the lack of decent jobs these days. She just does it for fun. You could say she just gives it away."

"That's one way of putting it," said Tamara with a polite laugh.

Iris wasn't to know that her jocular remark had touched a tender spot. Tamara hadn't had sex with a man even once ever since she'd stopped working for Empire Cleaning Services. Sex quite simply no longer appealed to her. The last time she'd had an enjoyable sexual relationship was when she worked at the Reigate Refugee Centre and that was with a man who was neither a Muslim nor a Jew, but a non-religious Nigerian. Tamara no longer associated sex with pleasure. Sometimes it was the memory of physical abuse that troubled her, but bizarrely she was most often reminded of it on those occasions when the nursing care for which she was now employed most resembled her former sexual ministration.

The men who most often had business with Empire Cleaning Services thought they knew exactly what they wanted. And generally that was to have a pretty woman arrive at their house who would let him fuck her and at the very least treat the customer to a blow job. What they often received instead after they'd ejaculated too soon or hadn't achieved an erection or were consumed by guilt from the shame of resorting to pay for sex was more of a counselling or even nursing service. And now when Tamara cared for a male patient, especially those with urinary problems, she was directly benefiting from her previous on-the-job training.

Tamara shared a dormitory about a kilometre away from the Elysian Nursing Home with other nurses and care assistants. They all worked in care homes owned by Twilight Care (a St. John-Easton company) that were scattered about Morecambe, Lancaster and surrounding villages. A dormitory didn't afford much privacy, but it did provide the opportunity, if Tamara felt like it, to strike up a romantic relationship with one of the many male nurses and care assistants that also shared the dormitory. Although Tamara had to admit that many were rather nice looking, she wasn't sure she could be bothered to hunt for a quiet secluded spot in Morecambe where they could make love.

None of the other care assistants admitted to being asylum seekers or refugees, although Tamara suspected that many of them were. She took advantage of the fact that most English people couldn't tell a Jew apart from an Arab or indeed from almost any other nationality or race. She didn't announce that she was an Israeli citizen and as long as no one asked there was no reason to do so. What good would it do her except salve what little pride she had left to declare that she was one of the estimated hundred thousand or so Jews who'd settled in a country where they were only begrudgingly welcome? Although the care assistants were ethnically diverse, when they spoke it was obvious from the dialect that many of them had been born in England. Tamara's own spoken English was rather more precise and well enunciated than the others, but no one challenged her that the Republic of England might not be the land of her birth. Maybe they thought she was just very well educated.