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Extended Work
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| After Life | |
| By russ11 | ||
| 08 April 2007 | ||
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Put this in short stories in error but suggested (thanks Phil) it might be better here. Any suggestions please? Thanks for reading. CHAPTER 1 Nel, Dot, Edna, Peggy, and Edwina were milling around over the carpet. ‘Milling around’ gives entirely the wrong impression, as had the literature for this place. At the outset I’d read it and guessed that was the way it would pan out, – it was how my nasty, suspicious mind worked. But right back then what I wanted was a job, not the truth. And, most ways, it had been a fair trade - a brochure full of lies for a CV full of fiction. Looks like we both got away with it, the place was still in business and I was still working there. I was a carer. That was a job, not an emotional state. So it was for me, and the rest. So it had been for my father. I hadn’t come to work to be like my dad, I handn’t even come to work, rather to hide. I guess if anyone had bothered to check what I did, what I did would have made all that so crystal. Maybe not the ‘hiding’ bit exactly but, for sure, that I didn’t have a clue. All this flittered through my mind and I smiled wryly, or was that ‘glassily’. Four years back as a fresh carer I might have been concerned to do something about the ‘milling around’ but only in case I was observed. Now I knew it was pointless. Firstly, it was random, repetitive, directionless, like they were trapped in the bagatelle corridors of this Home. Watching, waiting, wasting, wilting, wanting back what they’d forgotten or forgetting what they’d wanted. Secondly, there was nothing to do. All that separated yesterday from tomorrow was a day like today padded with the usual organised inactivities. Stop it and it would only start again. It was a refuge from awareness, you couldn’t blame them. I zoned back to the moment stopping to glance at the pine table and a miniature, white china vase of synthetic daisies. There, a plastic place card holder, scratched almost opaque, made itself important. It held a laminated A4 card upright. The pre-printed sorrow began with ‘….born on……., now sadly missed, died on…’. It had been filled in to tell a story. You get the picture, if not the sentiment. The blanks – the ones on the card – said that Herbert Longstaff born on 9th April 1919 had died on 27th January 2007. An erasable black marker pen was what they’d used. Not enough ink so they’d finished off in purple biro. Don’t judge a book by its cover but if the cap fits yada yada. I love clichés, they mean the world to me. And this plastic card said it all. A photo of ol’ Herb sitting in his high backed Chesterfield cage with the permitted quantity of his own furniture in the background, had been stuck in the middle. They hadn’t used enough Evostick, it had flopped, tilting crookedly. The camera had caught him looking straight at the lens, flash-paled to pallor, stock still and unmoving, on the inside too. His knarled knuckles, shiny and white, like enlarged islands in a sea of roast chicken skin, gripped the arm rests, as if defiant. I listened. Nel and Peggy were talkers. The other three had had their speech stroked away sometime before their relatives had given up and had done the deed – ‘it was for her own good…’, ‘she just couldn’t cope on her own..’, ‘..we had to think of her welfare..’, ‘we’re not as young as we used to be’. “Where are you going”, said Peggy trying to direct her question with her eyes to one of the others, eyes flickering, and wearing out to stop on Nel. “I don’t know” said Nel. “Well…”, responded Peggy struggling through memories of old routines, dead habits. “Well… shall we go together” Peggy went on. “That would be nice”, said Nel smiling in no especial way. “What would be nice?”, said Peggy not smiling at all. Some sense of unease overcame Nel and she bought her Zimmer closer to her, keeping on with the little stomping movements, up and down, gentle, as if dowsing the carpet. “What…what you said…what you said would be nice”, said Nel, somewhere between forgetting entirely and remembering clearly. I blinked back in and made my head decide. I spread my arms wide corralling them back to the resident’s lounge where the high backed wooden armed seats covered in easy-to-clean leatherette, lay in wait . Only eight hours to the Fifties Singalong. Age was a killer that never would be imprisoned. So was I, I hoped. I hadn’t set out to kill anyone, like that made a difference. Sometimes I wondered if ‘out of the frying pan into the ashes’ didn’t best describe my live-in existence here. Four years and still on the run, if that wasn’t a contradiction. Of course, I hadn’t meant to. I’d had to, it was a matter of life and death, that’s all. My life for his death. I’d had the motive, the opportunity, and thoroughly no alibi whatsoever. Stay and face the music?... I didn’t think so - life imprisonment without the possibility of parole was a record that would never make my top tunes. I took what I could, his that couldn’t be traced and mine that could be converted to cash and skedaddled looking for somewhere only the sky would be familiar. CHAPTER 2 I’d stopped for directions at the place. The sign said “Peace in your time”. A telephone number and some rubric about trespassers completed the greeting. Hello to you too, Sunset Retirement Home, Oxenbridge, I thought. I didn’t notice the name much. I had wanted the coast but had packed, flung, cascaded, evacuated everything into the car except the A to Fed-up map I needed. So I was lost… I didn’t know where I was, either. “A bit casual, ain’t we”, said a clipboard attached to a blonde looker. Black pencil skirt, white V-necked blouse, permatan, 2 hour hairstyle, long shiny brown legs upankled into black stilettos that came with an altitude problem and a health plan, and that clipboard. She thought she knew something she didn’t…like who and what she thought I was. She made a tongue of the top sheet of her clipboard peeling it back to reveal the second page, her French polished nail skittered down a list of names. “Mr….”, she was musing. She was the sort who liked to be right, rather than to be told. If there wasn’t a name I was fucked but late in the afternoon with the sun stretching its shadows towards night, there couldn’t be many. “There”, I said. I’d always been too talkative under pressure. “There”, I repeated looking over the blond hair fetching up on her shoulder. “Just there”, I gestured, not that I needed to but I wanted to know what I was pointing at. There was one line with a ‘?’ and the letters ‘CV’ by its side. “Mr Jacobson, is it”. I stuck out my hand but before we could trade shakes she fumbled her clippy to the ground. It caught her on the way. She bent down, her skirt riding up where her stockings and my mind were getting started. A flash of something white and lacey slid into eyeline. It didn’t look like anything her mother had given. My eyes lingered stronger that they might and she made like she didn’t notice or care. Wrong on both counts, I hoped. “We don’t seem to have your paperwork, Mr Jacobson?”, she queried. Cue me – lights, camera, imagination. I lied straight out of my mouth whilst our eyes talked a different subject. “Well, it’s most …”, she started as I interrupted. “….but then I’m an irregular sort of guy”. I don’t guess I should be holding my breath for the BAFTAs and Golden Gs with this kind of dialogue but maybe when in Rome so forth, so on. Here in the Sunset Retirement Home, if the name was anything to go by, originality would be something entirely new and unnecessary. Either way you diced it, I’d better be throwing 6s or this was all a dead end. I didn’t like her anymore than I liked the situation but I needed her interested and distracted. Distracted enough not to examine my cock and bullshit story because it was about as watertight as a kitchen colander. Sure, she might willing to believe that my car was stuffed to the gunnels and I was dressed for disorder all because I had had a housefire that morning. Maybe even that my – or to be precise, Mr Jacobson’s - CV had gone astray but soon there would be questions I only had an open mouth for. Then she’d see me through my answers. She tapped her pencil on her clipboard sounding her authority. “Hmm,, well I’m sure in the circumstances the Board will see you especially since the quality…”She stopped but my mind didn’t. CHAPTER 3 She pulled at her skirt for something to do whilst her gaff hung in the air and then threw out some words to follow. And that’s what I did, followed her behind right through two tall doors of wood and power into even more. Must have been a library once, it was shadow deep mahogany that hinted priest holes, class, and a shed load of Mr Sheen. At the business end, near French windows flaking white paint off their square panes is where they were sat. Behind them in the close grounds, a flag pole impaled the ground, its lanyard ropes clanging in the wind and, atop, a sentinel rook beaking this way and that. They’d had a hard day, all of them, two women and a man. Jackets discarded, his tie loosened, sheeny faces, and armpits shadowed by sweat they hoped their anti-perspirant was sorting. Tired, bored, and fed up with the last interview slot no longer vacant but filled by me. There by providence, to chance my arm. Nothing to lose, I was a murderer, a jealous murderer and didn’t care what they thought if it didn’t work out. They looked me up and down, exchanged glances about their status and mine. Maybe it was the way I was dressed, somewhere between Crimewatch reconstruction and Shelter ads. He started in on me with the usual flim flam. Nice journey, find us OK, so sorry to hear about the fire, names, titles, da de da, da de da. Round Two and so on was more and more demanding. Extracting the crapola the next 40 minutes boiled down to this – I lied at full tilt, lying flat out, barefaced whatever that meant. I told ‘em about a raft of qualifications I didn’t have from places I’d never been to all in Europe where they’d find it difficult to check. God bless you, dad, you boring old bastard. He’d talked his day through a thousand times with my teenage sister and I whether we listened or not. You couldn’t blame us, the ups and downs of a care supervisor wasn’t even close to our subject of choice over the tea table. Now I was glad I had, sometimes. Experienced, they queried? Told ‘em about that too, this time in the States and promised to replace the mislaid CV soonest. By the end of it I’d done more flat out lying than Tutankhamen. It seemed no time at all – nothing more than a thousand years – before they guy was talking again. He was a big, bald, grey and fat guy. His arse oozed over, around the edge of the seat he had inflicted himself on. Somewhere behind his pelican throat was an adams apple that must have worked overtime as he shovelled down his daily load. “Well, that seems to have just about covered…” he didn’t finish his cliché as I interrupted. “Do you mind if ask a few………..” “No, no, of course”, he interrupted back. One thing my father had hated – apart from the fact that we never seemed to be listening – was that ‘they never learnt’. The ‘they’ were the people he worked with and supervised and the ‘learnt’ referred to the things the carers always thought they could get away with. Remember at school, that kid you always hated with the latest Tuf shoes and parents who liked ‘ to work in partnership with the school’, the kid that asked the kinda questions he already knew the answers to. You know, ‘ the look at me, how much I’ve learnt ‘ kinda questions. And right then for as long as it took, that was me. Except they were the questions I didn’t really have the answers to. But they did and after an afternoon on ‘receive’ listening to the same ‘ol same ‘ol they didn’t need to be invited twice to show how much they knew. And all I’d done was replay situations my Dad had banged on about. The fact that I knew about these situations meant I must know the answers, didn’t it. All I had to do was nod my head with the odd sage smile and we were all happy slappy families, aint that truth. CHAPTER 4 I left the room, nodding to Lard Laddo and smiling at the other two. Clipboard slinked my way and said some words I didn’t want to catch as the adrenalin dumped out, my blood sugar dropped, and the action aftermath slugged me towards sleep. “…the Board would like you to hang on”, she’d had to say it twice. I could tell. ‘Hang on’, I’d like that as well, like to my liberty, to my sanity, to my composure. All would have been good if it and all weren’t distinctly in the balance. I smiled, inside, and flexed a little one her way. She took her hips back through the wood and power and the smell of her lingered. Buttoned down leather sofas traduced me into their arms and for a few moments my eyes flickered shut, darkness but no rest. In an instant I had ditched 17 hours and I was back at home, my home, not this Home, 17 hours ago before she died and I began to. And the rerun was just the same as every other time I’d rehashed those last moments… “Back early”, I had said,”just forgotten my….”. I stopped. So did my wife. For a woman in her late forties she was pretty unlined, a carbon copy of her auburn haired mother. Slim with the kinda curves – the kind you didn’t ordinarily have after two kids – that got her looks but her green eyes could glister bright and angry, god knows I knew that. Voluptuous was old world but it fitted her bill and feisty was another entry in the lexicon of Alarion. I ‘d never heard a name like it. That day 15 years ago began like any other but ended like no other. We’d never looked back, except to smile. I looked away and then back, she was still stopped and her face was shut. Come to think of it, she’d seemed off beam for a while. Just then I didn’t know why she was going to try to kill me… “…Mr Jacobson,” said the Clipboard and I was back on the sofa, back in the Home, nearly 18 hours on. I hadn’t caught any of it but she was beckoning me back to the library. I got up wanting food, sugar, anything to get down my neck to dispel the exhaustion. I was, apparently, Mr Wonderful. They’d been impressed, not just with how I’d nearly burnt to death that day – though in all reality the only flames I’d been close to so far that day had been the eternal ones of hell – yakety, yak. I had the job and the accommodation that was only usually allocated to senior workers. All I had to do was get ‘my’ CV copied to them before my position was confirmed, finish the probation period, so on, so on. Translation, all I had to do was make up a CV to match the off-the-cuff, off the top of my head s’etc whatever answers, fix up some phoney references, hope the real Mr Jacobson never rang in, wrote or turned up, they never wondered why none of my referees replied and…oh yeah…make out OK doing a job I knew bugger all about outside my dad’s weasley stories. There was something else too… oh right, that was it, not get caught and convicted for a murder I couldn’t avoid. Come to think of it, I don’t really know what I was worrying about. Two hours later I’d has a look see and got all my stuff from the car into my room in the basement of this home from home. How could I describe it, this sanctuary for me, this choiceless respite from life for its inhabitants. Like a Wendy house after a butch-over is how I later heard it described but those were just the words of JackSmack, as I named him. He was Edna’s grandson whose dedication to grandma – and to anyone else who wasn’t careful with their purse – had got him and his habit banned from the place. He’d tried to kick the habit but it was more the other way round. From then on, at the Home and in life, whenever he hit the enter key he was ‘access denied’. Despite all that, it echoed my first impression that August day – whatever else this place was, whatever else it had, it had strength, The small, irregular bricks had a redness that belied their centuries of age. The house had majesty. It exacted examination. Its buttressed façade was pockmarked with mullioned windows. They sat snugly beneath a roof steeply pitched and studded with octagonal chimneys hungering tall for the wind. At each end battlemented towers loomed, as if leaning in to ward the house. Lunging from this imposing front was a castellated portico. It enticed the eye inwards towards the central courtyard, where its stone paved embrace restrained a luscious green of tightly shawn grass. Quaint, different, and interloping into rolling grassed landscapes man-made and real. Chatsworth meets Windsor Castle with more than a dash of Hampton Court thrown in for excessive measure. It was for the mid range 18th Century landed gentry who’d heard that an Englishman’s home should be his castle. For someone who’d made his pile and then gone on to do it again, this time with crenulated edges, rivettes, strength in depth, and a circular surrounding depression that water might have made moat. Nearly 20 hours on now I’d had no sleep and it was telling, telling me it was hopeless, I was going to get caught, I had no chance, you know, that washing machine-head-no relent-cycle of repetitive thoughts, all black, all bad, all..I tried to concentrate on the moment, on what I was doing. I yaled the door to my room from locked and shut to unlocked and open. I tried, as a refuge from my thoughts, to recall the Reception area. I’d lugged my life through it in irregular sized suitcases, black bin liners, haversacks, S’field carrier bags and anything the hell else that could be filled. I just couldn’t remember it…I was in blackout more or less. This time through exhaustion, not drink. Ten years since I’d stopped being a practising alcoholic, I was a recovering alcoholic… a bit like George Bush though I wouldn’t be blowing you, your life, and your family into oblivion anytime soon. That is, if you don’t count my victim and his NOK. I didn’t feel like unpacking. I also felt like a drink but that would have to wait...like about 40 years if I had my way. As for the unpacking, well it was going to be a struggle unless this 8’by10’ was something of a Tardis. I had one MDF white laminate wardrobe, a matching set of draws, a wood framed single bed with integral bedside shelf, a slit window high up but half the size of a car rear window and one of the residents’ high backed chairs which was, like them, happily vacant. Also, unlike them, it did not smell of leaks. A low watt desk lamp leaked light from its place on the draws to the magnolia emulsion wall blotched to no special pattern after years of blue tac attack. The floor was parquet, little wooden blocks scratched and uneven zigzagging hither and thither. It wasn’t much but the door opened when I wanted it to and for the moment it felt safe. Firm “I am” knuckles rapped a jaunty rhythm on the door. It was an upbeat, demanding sound that made me think of Jehovah’s witnesses, pairs of Mormons, or my aged maiden Aunt who made jam, very patriotic remarks, frequent visits to the WI, and had a habit of being persistently cheerful in her Laura Ashley outfits and her practical ‘your feet have to last you a lifetime’ shoes. I felt the fear to the most, that cold cobra uncoiling and shunting down from my head to my belly, pausing only to set my lungs off fast and shallow and my palms leaky. I was tempted to be out. I handled the door wide. It was Clipboard. She had a name and an agenda. Dressed for the gym by her clothes but with freshly groomed hair and a resplash of the scent that stayed, she was loud and clear. “Oh there you are, you were missed”, Ali said as I stood casual and guarded. Her eyes steadied on me. “I like being missed”, I said pausing,”especially on a Saturday night”. She handed it to me like it was what I’d always wanted.
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