At four o'clock on my first morning, Frank Ashdown put his crossword down on the blanket, folded his reading glasses, tucked them in his pyjama pocket like he was getting ready for a photograph, and told me he'd paid somebody to kill me.
He said it nicely, the way you'd tell a stranger their label was sticking up. And I laughed. Ask anyone. Ask my mother.
He didn't laugh. He waited for me to finish, like you'd wait out somebody else's sneeze.
But I should start with the lane, because I want you to know I was already having a terrible night before anybody tried to have me murdered.
The lane up to High Royd is a mile long, one car wide, and made of the kind of mud that has opinions. My car is a Nissan Micra from two thousand and nine, the colour of a digestive biscuit, so she's called the Biscuit, and at the bottom of that lane, in the rain, in the dark, she sat down. Not broke down. Sat down, like an old dog that has decided this is where it lives now. I revved, and she sank, and I said some things to her I'm not proud of, and then I got out into mud up to the ankle and walked the last mile with my torch in my teeth, because I needed both hands for my bag and for not falling over.
Sheep watched me the whole way. Their eyes go green in torchlight and they don't blink, and there's dozens of them. Then the house came out of the dark at me, black stone and one lit window, with a barn hunched off to the side and the wind coming down off the moor behind it with its sleeves rolled up.
I needed this job. I was two months behind on my rent, even with a lodger, and the agency had said that if this one went well there'd be regular nights, and regular nights meant I could stop hiding from my landlord behind the cereal in the Co-op. So I came up out of the dark at ten to eight, soaked to the shins, torch dribbling, and the farmhouse door opened before I'd got my hand up to knock.
"You must be Kit. Oh my God, look at you, did you swim?" said a girl of about nineteen in a garden-centre fleece, with her car keys already in her hand. She pulled me into the hall and talked at me while I got my boots off. "I'm Rosie, he's my grandad. Right. DNR's on the fridge under the Whitby magnet. Power goes if a crow sits on the line. Signal's only at the attic skylight, the ladder's in the back-bedroom cupboard, you stick your head out like a meerkat. Okay? Okay. You're going to love him. Everybody loves him."
"What do I do if the power goes?" I said.
"Wait," said Rosie. "It comes back. Mostly."
In the kitchen there was a nurse from the hospice with her coat already on, and a big man in a quilted gilet standing by the Aga like he was being charged for it by the minute. He had a crease ironed down the front of his jeans. I have never trusted a man who irons his jeans. He's got a plan for every day of the week and none of them have got you in.
"Another one," he said. Not to me. To the nurse.
"That's my dad," Rosie said. "He's lovely really."
He looked at my socks.
The nurse was kind and fast and wanted her tea. Eleven days, the doctor had said, maybe fewer, and she said it like a bus timetable. We counted his morphine together, little glass ampoules in a locked box, and she told me what they always tell you, that the night nurse counts it in and out and Bev does the big count every other Monday, and I said who's Bev, and she said, "Me, love."
Then the man in the jeans said, "He's all yours," and everybody went, and it was me and Frank and the rain.
The parlour was warm and too bright, with his hospital bed where a settee should be and the oxygen machine humming in the corner, the one that makes oxygen out of ordinary air and sounds like a fridge with something on its mind. He was sitting up against four pillows in navy pyjamas with piping on, a proper old gentleman, all cheekbones and big hands, and he looked at me over the top of his oxygen tubing like I was a delivery he'd been expecting and was ready to send back.
"You'll be Kit," he said. "I asked for you."
"Did you?" I said, in a voice like a kettle.
Nobody asks for me. People get me. I stood there dripping on his rug, and I could have cried, and instead I put my hand in my coat pocket and found a fig roll, a bit furred with pocket, that had been rolling round the car since the summer, and I gave it to him.
He looked at it. He looked at me.
"Fig rolls," Frank said. "We'll get on."
And we did. That's the stupid thing. We got on like a house on fire. I checked his syringe driver, the little pump that feeds him morphine under the skin, slowly, all night, through a fine line taped on his chest, and he watched my hands do it and said, "You're quicker than the last one." I did his pillows, and I hummed Dolly Parton while I did them, because I always sing to them, it's how I know I'm working.
"Don't sing," said Frank. "I'm dying, not deaf."
He did the cryptic crossword with a fountain pen. I am not a crossword person. I'm a word search person, and even then I only find the rude ones. He read me clues anyway, in a voice like a newsreader, and I answered every single one with total confidence and I was wrong every single time, and by midnight he was asking me on purpose.
"Seven letters," he said. "Lazy fellow, upset, takes a seat."
"Lasagne," I said.
"That's not even a fellow."
"It's seven letters, though, Frank. Count it."
He counted it. It was. He breathed out through his nose at me, which I decided was a laugh, and I ate a fig roll out of his tin, because he'd said help yourself, and some people say that and don't mean it, but I always assume they do.
At one his breathing got tight at the top, so I gave him a breakthrough dose, the extra for when the pump isn't keeping up. I punched the four numbers into the box, snapped the neck off an ampoule inside a bit of gauze so I wouldn't lose a fingertip, drew it up, gave it, and wrote it on the sheet with the time and my name. When I turned round he was watching me over the top of the crossword like he'd paid for a good seat. Ten minutes later his shoulders came down from round his ears.
"That's the stuff," said Frank, like a man in a pub.
He kept looking at me. Not in a pervy way. I know pervy. More like I'd been on the telly once, in the background of something, and he was trying to think what. He wouldn't look away when I caught him, he'd just carry on, pleasantly, like I was a view.
"Have I got something on me?" I said.
"Mud," said Frank. "Mostly."
At three I got up out of the chair and did the rest of the night standing, like I always do.
"Sit down, Nurse," he said. "You're like a heron."
"I'm fine," I said.
And at four o'clock he put the crossword down.
"Kit," he said. "I've paid a man to kill you. When my heart stops, he kills you. That's the arrangement."
So I laughed, and he waited, and when I'd run out of laughing he was still waiting. The oxygen machine hummed. Out in the yard the wind got under something on the barn and banged it, and banged it again.
"Right," I said. "Okay. Is this the morphine? Because it does that. I had a lady in Todmorden who was convinced I was Princess Anne. She had me open a leisure centre."
"I'm entirely myself," said Frank.
I got my pen torch out and did his pupils anyway. He let me. He held still for it like a man humouring a child with a pretend thermometer. His pupils were fine. His breathing was fine, or as fine as it ever was. He was the most sensible thing in the room, and the room had me in it.
"Who?" I said.
"He's closer than you'd like."
"That's not a name, Frank. That's a horoscope."
"It's what you're getting."
"Is it your son?" I said. "Because he irons his jeans."
Frank considered this. "He does, doesn't he."
"I'll ring the police."
"Tell whoever you like, love," he said. "I would."
"I'll go right now. I'll walk out of that door and down that lane and leave you here on your own with nobody to do your pillows."
He looked at the window. The rain. The mile of mud and sheep. My boots steaming by the radiator.
"Off you go, then," said Frank.
"Or I could just put this pillow over your face," I said, "and save everybody the bother."
I'd got hold of one, too. I don't know when. It was in my two hands, plumped, and I'd plumped it myself not an hour before.
"You could," said Frank. "And then my heart would stop."
I stood there holding the pillow and working it through, which took longer than I'd like.
"So I've got to keep you alive," I said.
"That's rather the job, isn't it, Nurse?"
I put the pillow back behind him. I even did the corners.
I didn't go. Of course I didn't go. He was on a pump and eleven days and I was his nurse. So I tried bargaining instead, because I've been bargaining with men since I was six and my dad had my pocket money off me for a scratch card.
"Give me a name," I said, "and I'll do your feet. I do lovely feet. People cry."
"No, thank you."
"I'll bring you fig rolls from the market. The good ones, from the man with the van, not those dusty ones from the garage."
"I've plenty of fig rolls."
"Why?" I said, and that one came out of me smaller than I meant. "What have I done to you? I've known you eight hours. I've been nice to you. I've been really nice to you."
He didn't answer that. He just looked at me, very kindly.
"Then why are you telling me?" I said.
"I'd like the company."
Then the lights went out.
Rosie's crow, landing on Rosie's line. The oxygen machine wound down on a long falling note, and the parlour went black, blacker than the lane, because in the lane there'd been sheep, and I stood in the dark next to a man who'd hired somebody to kill me, and nothing made a sound except his breathing and mine.
"Still there, Nurse?" said Frank, out of the dark.
"Where would I go?" I said. "You've got the only fig rolls."
The lights came back. The machine coughed and started humming again. He hadn't moved. He had his hands folded on the blanket and he was watching me.
"You're a very poor judge of character, love," said Frank. "I'd heard that about you."
I didn't have a joke for that one. So I got the little pink sponges on sticks out of my bag, and the water, and I did his mouth. Round the gums, round the inside of the cheeks, the roof, the tongue, gently, as if it were a baby's ear, and I put the lip balm on after with my little finger. He opened when I asked and closed when I asked. His eyes stayed on me the whole time.
Then I went into the kitchen and stood at the fridge.
It was there, like Rosie said, under a magnet with a lighthouse on it. The do-not-resuscitate form, signed by his doctor and by him, in that fountain pen, in a big pleased hand. Nobody restarts his heart. I've pinned up a hundred of them.
I read it three times, in case it said something different if I caught it off guard.
It didn't.
At six I washed him, because that's when you wash them, so they're decent before the day lot arrive with their clipboards. Warm water in the bowl, the flannel, and his own soap from the dish by the sink, a yellow bar that smelled like a barber's shop in nineteen seventy-five. I did his arms one at a time, then his back, and talked about the weather the whole while, because you give them something dull to listen to while your hands get on with it, even when the man under the flannel is the one you're frightened of.
He watched me. Every flannel.
"You've good hands," said Frank.
"You've got lovely veins," I said, "for a man who's having me killed."
The corner of his mouth went. I'd made him laugh. I hated how pleased I was.
Rosie came back at eight, pink from the cold, smelling of the car heater, with a coffee for me she'd bought on the way, which nobody had done for me ever, in any job. She went straight in to him.
"Was he good? He was good, wasn't he? He's always good."
I started to say it.
"She was marvellous," said Frank, from his pillows. "She'll do nicely."
And Rosie turned round and hugged me, hard, coffee and all, and said into my hair, "Oh my God, thank you. The last one cried."
So I didn't say it. I stood in the hall with Rosie's arms round me and her grandad smiling at us both through the parlour door, and I said, "He's a smashing patient," and I went and put my boots on.
In daylight the lane was just a lane. The sheep were just sheep. The car was where I'd left her, sitting in her mud at the bottom, and when I got in and turned the key she started first time, which she has never done, not once, in four years, and I sat there with the engine running and my hands on the wheel and couldn't make them do anything.
It's eighteen minutes from High Royd to my house in Albion Street. I don't remember any of them.
Owen, my lodger, was in the kitchen in his socks, odd ones, a big toe coming through the red. He'd got the butter out at eight so it would be soft for me, and the grill was on, and the whole house smelled of it. He took two slices out, buttered them thick, cut them into triangles like you would for somebody small, and came over with the plate and stood close, because my kitchen's tiny and everybody stands close in it.
"There she is," he said. "How was your night?"
I opened my mouth to tell him, and he put a triangle of toast in it.