Problems, Problems

Eight little almshouses stood with their backs to the town and their faces to the quay, brick the colour of tea. Albert Quayle, eighty-one, thirty-one years a docker and the last man alive who could name the cranes, answered his door in a flat cap and a cardigan buttoned wrong.

A council form lay on the table by the kettle. COGNITIVE: fluctuating confusion. "That's me," said Albert, following your eyes. "They wrote it in the spring. I told them I was confused about why they'd put it on a form instead of a handrail."

He'd sat on Marian's panel for the old, and she'd come every Thursday with biscuits and an agenda she took less seriously than the biscuits. His window looked straight over the quay. He didn't sleep much.