Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Brook Row ·
Night Calls From the Brook Row Care Home
A night care assistant at the Brook Row care home takes a call on the staff line at three each morning from a resident who has been dead for a month, and every time she asks the resident which room they are in, the reply is a number on the second floor that has no bed.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: Denise Atwood, night care assistant
I have worked nights at Brook Row care home for nine years, and in that time I have heard most things that can happen on a ward. Residents wandering in their nightgowns, wanting to go home to a house that has been sold. A man who swore he could smell the sea from the third floor. Confused old ladies who think I am their daughter, and who want to tell me about the baby they lost in 1952. I know how to sit with them. I know how to make a cup of tea and let them talk until they fall asleep.
The phone calls started in February.
The staff line is a grey plastic handset on the desk at the end of the corridor, wired to the switchboard in the office, and it rings only when someone in the building wants a member of staff. At about three in the morning, when the lights are dimmed and the residents are settled, it would ring, a single short burst. I would pick it up and say the name of the home, the way the training says to. And a voice would say, very quietly, *Hello, love, it's Mrs. Shaw. Could you come and sit with me?*
Mrs. Shaw had died in the January. A stroke, in her sleep, in room 14. I had been the one to find her in the morning, cold and peaceful, with her hands folded on the blanket and her reading glasses still on the bedside table. I had cried in the staff room afterwards.
I asked the caller which room she was in. She said room 14. I said that room was empty. She said no, she was there, and she could see the window, and the lamp was on, and would I come and sit with her because she did not like the dark.
I went up to the second floor and checked room 14. It was empty. The bed had been stripped and made up with a clean white cover, the way we leave them after a death, and the lamp on the bedside table was off. There was no one there. But when I stood in the doorway, the phone on the wall of the corridor began to ring, the old analogue one that we only use in emergencies, and I heard the voice coming through the receiver, very clear, from inside the room. *There you are. Shut the door, love. There's a draught.*
I went back to the desk. I did not sleep for the rest of the shift.
It went on for weeks. Mrs. Shaw. Then Mr. Penhale, who had died in the summer and had not been on the ward since the spring. Then a young man who had never been a resident, who said he was a visitor and had been left on the second floor by mistake. Every call came at three. Every caller asked for a room on the second floor. And whenever I went up to check, the room was empty, freshly made, the lamp off, and the phone in the corridor rang as I stood in the doorway, and somebody on the line asked me to come in and stay a while.
I told the manager, who listened very kindly and said I had been working too hard. She asked whether I had been eating properly. Then she asked me, quite carefully, whether I had ever noticed that the number of residents on the second floor had gone up since the autumn, though the number of beds had stayed the same.
I had not. But I counted them that night, while I did my rounds. There were twenty-two names on the sheet for the second floor. There were twenty-two residents in their beds. And when I counted again, going slowly down the corridor with my torch, there were twenty-three.
I do not answer the calls now. I let the phone ring until it stops. But at three every morning I hear it start, and sometimes I hear, behind the sound of the ringing, a soft voice from the second floor, patient and pleasant, calling my name as if I were a resident who had wandered off and needed to be brought back to bed.