It was a fairly direct route up Princess Parkway towards Manchester and the Infirmary. The dual carriageway was always busy; it was one of the main links to the airport and motorways.
‘That woman,’ I said, ‘the other patient, she seemed to think Lily hadn’t fallen.’
‘Or that she’d been pushed?’ Agnes sighed. ‘It’s one thing after another. First her getting ill, then she’s so bad they send her to Kingsfield, now this…I do hope she’s all right.’
‘She has fallen before,’ I pointed out. ‘She can’t have been that steady on her feet. It could well be just one of those accidents.’
‘I wish there’d been someone…’
I braked sharply to avoid the lorry ahead, whose brake lights were conveniently covered by a lowered tailgate. ‘Sorry, go on.’
‘It would have helped to talk to someone who’d been there
at the time,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get any idea of how serious it
might be.’
‘I don’t think they’d take her in so quickly unless it was urgent. But Mrs Li said they’d do X-rays and scans before they decided if surgery was needed. I suppose they’ll know from those how bad she is. It sounded as if she might be all right without any operation.’
‘Oh, I hope so. You know, if they are doing a scan,’ she said, ‘they should also be able to see whether there are changes in the brain, lesions or plaques they call them. There were pictures in one of those books I read. They show up quite clearly on scans, apparently. It could confirm once and for all whether Lily has got Alzheimer’s.’
‘You’re still not convinced about that?’
‘No. Not until they prove it to me.’
‘But Dr Montgomery, he thinks it’s Alzheimer’s, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes. They all do. Charles said they were intending to book Lily in for a scan eventually to look at the extent of the disease but she’d have to go on the waiting list. It’s an expensive piece of equipment.’
We reached the Moss Side junction and I turned right past the old Harp Lager place and into Moss Lane East.
‘And eighty-five-year-olds aren’t exactly a high priority,’ she added dryly.
Manchester Royal Infirmary, another redbrick Victorian edifice, sits on the fringe of the university sector just up the road from the Rusholme curry shops. Day and night flocks of students can be seen parading to and from lectures and social events. We parked in the car park at the back and made our way to the main corridor. Murals and mosaics relieved the monotony of the long walk to the ward. The wide corridor bustled with a mixture of staff in various uniforms, visitors in everyday clothes and patients in varying degrees of undress – often swathed in cellular blankets.