Owen Marshall Selected Stories (24 page)

‘Herbs and spices, sycamores and young people. And bloody work.'

‘I can't see it,' said Mrs Joyce.

‘You've gone daft in there.' Crealy rapped on her head with his knuckles, but she kept peering out into the sunshine through the tunnels of her fingers.

‘Let me join Jesus,' she said. Crealy looked down at her pink scalp beneath the white hair. Because there was no resistance whatsoever that she could make, because she was not even aware of his malice, Crealy couldn't be bothered hurting her.

‘Dozy old tart.'

‘Let me come to thee, sweet Jesus,' said Mrs Joyce. Crealy had a chuckle at that, and at how Mrs Joyce was peering through her hands and the glass, although everything outside was perfectly clear to him.

Matron Frew heard the chuckle from the office, and it reminded her that she wanted words with Crealy. She first of all took Mrs
Joyce's arm in hers and walked with her down to the dayroom. She was back before Crealy could quite disappear from sight down the corridor, however, and she told him, with some bluntness, of the indirect complaints she'd been receiving, particularly from staff who had noticed Crealy pestering Mrs Halliday and Mr Garfield.

‘Mark my words,' said Matron Frew. ‘I will be watching, and also I'm making mention of things in my report to the board this month. You show an unwillingness at times to be a reasonable member of our community.'

As she spoke Crealy hung his head, but not from meekness or contrition. He was counting the number of usable butts in the sandbox by the office door, and when he had done that he imagined himself in the mild, summer night standing over Matron's herb garden, and pissing on the chives, parsley, mint, fennel and thyme. A lifetime in the indifferent, hostile or contemptuous regard of others had rendered Crealy immune to all three. He recognised no value or interest other than his own.

On Wednesday evenings Matron Frew turned off the television in the east wing lounge and organised communal singing. It was not compulsory as such, but absence meant no chocolate biscuits at the supper which followed. As a professionally trained person, Matron knew that a variety of stimulus was important for the elderly.

The committed, the egotistical and the hard of hearing stood close around the piano, the infirm or less enthusiastic were rims at a great distance. Golden oldies they sang, to Matron's accompaniment. ‘The Kerry Pipers', ‘Auld Lang Syne', ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World', ‘On Top of Old Smokey'.

Matron had begun her career as a physiotherapist and it showed in her playing, the keys kneaded like a string of vertebrae, each tune well gone over and the kinks removed. ‘Waltzing Matilda', ‘Home on the Range', ‘The White Cliffs of Dover', ‘Some Enchanted Evening', ‘Polly Wolly Doodle'. Matron Frew allowed her charges to respond
in their own way and order, but she always had Nurse Glenn or Nurse McMillan guide Mr Oliphant to the uncarpeted area by the door, because the pathos of any Irish tune made him incontinent.

A refrain, particularly with high notes, would sometimes trigger Miss Hails' weakness and she would begin the incessant repetition of a word. It happened, sure enough, during ‘Riding Down From Bangor', and for several minutes Miss Hail sang only ‘May'. Crealy was present not just for the chocolate biscuits, but because it gave him perverse satisfaction, after the Matron's rebuke, to exercise intimidation almost under her gaze.

He stood on Mrs Dellow's toe during ‘Annie Laurie', and stared into her face, daring her to respond. Her thin voice assumed even greater vibrato and her eyes misted. Crealy then leant in comradeship over blind Mr Lewin and sprayed saliva into his face as ‘Christopher Robin Went Down With Alice'.

When the chocolate biscuits came at last, Crealy kept himself between them and George Oliphant until they were all gone, then he said, ‘Now isn't that a bugger, George, they seem all gone.'

‘Silver Threads Among the Gold', they sang, and ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot'. ‘Home, home, home, home, home, home,' Miss Hails continued, until Matron Frew told her to suck her thumb until the cycle was broken. ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown' Crealy liked but, because it was his favourite, the others found no pleasure in joining in.

Mortenson enjoyed the association the songs bore, even if not the singing itself. He preferred to be at some remove from the piano and his fellows, for then he could imagine other company and past days. His mouth would twitch and his good hand move to the melodies. ‘Some Enchanted Evening' — he would sing it with Deborah as they drove back from skiing, ready for court work during the week. He hadn't realised then, that all roads led to this. ‘Roo, roo, roo, roo, roo,' began Miss Hails.

Before midnight, aware of an odd, sighing wind around the home, Crealy made a patrol of his domain. Only his harsh breathing and shuffle gave him away. In his own room everything was as it should be — Garfield was weeping, Popanovich sleeping, and Mortenson in his snores fell every few minutes into a choking death rattle which woke him briefly, then he slept and it all began again.

Further down the corridor Mrs Doone was talking to herself as she strung up nonexistent Christmas decorations. Every night was Christmas Eve for Mrs Doone, and the wonder and frisson of it were freshly felt night after night. ‘Compliments of the season, Mr Ah — ah,' she said as Crealy slippered by. Around the corner, Crealy paused outside the room Mrs Oliffe and Miss Hails shared. Miss Hails was doing her thing, of course. For almost an hour she had been repeating the sound tee, while Mrs Oliffe was trying to find nineteen across, which was Breton Gaelic for divine harbinger.

‘Oh, stop going tee, tee, tee, tee,' Mrs Oliffe said, but the simple satisfaction of it set her off also, and she joined in. Outside, Crealy could hear them in unison — tee, tee, tee. He found his own head nodding, and his mouth formed the sound. One night it might spread through all of Totara, and capture them in a transport of repetitious senility.

Crealy put his hand to his face to stop himself. He looked carefully down the corridor. ‘Mad old tarts,' he said. He considered opening their door and frightening them into silence, but the chances of being caught up in their chant and left nodding with them indefinitely was too great. He went on, still with one hand to his face. Tee, tee, tee, tee faded behind him.

Outside the Matron's office were chairs for visitors, and a varnished box with a sandtray in it for smokers among the visitors. Crealy was able to find several butts worth using again, before he noticed Mrs Joyce standing by the main doors once more. ‘Jesus loves me this I know,' she said. She had two overcoats on, and stood with her hand on the catch of the locked door. ‘I'm going home,' she said. ‘I've
been here nearly a fortnight and they're expecting me back now.'

‘You've been here for years,' said Crealy.

‘Oh no, just a fortnight, and I need to be at home for every special occasion. We've always been a very close family, you see.' Crealy went through her double set of pockets as she talked, but all he could find was a small book of stamps. ‘They may well send a car for me,' she said. They both looked through the glass doors for a moment, but there was only empty wind and moonlight: no car was parked on the linen of the drive.

‘You can go home this way,' said Crealy, taking Mrs Joyce by the lapel and leading her towards the kitchens.

‘Has the car come then?' she said, and ‘God will provide, you know. Even Solomon in all his glory.' Crealy led her through the dining room laid for breakfast, and the kitchens, where worn, steel surfaces glinted like new bone. He unbolted the service door and set Mrs Joyce in the gap. ‘There you are, then,' he said. ‘The main drive's just around the corner.'

‘It's a clear path to home, thank Jesus.' The blue second coat would barely fit over the first, and pulled her arms back like the flippers of a penguin. Rather like a penguin she began walking, struck her head on a pruned plum branch, and reeled past the herb garden.

‘What's your name again?' said Crealy, but Mrs Joyce didn't answer and, still unsteady from the blow, made the best pace she could around the side path. She had the scent of freedom; she had a promise of home.

Crealy waited until Mrs Joyce was well gone, and there was no sound of pursuit, or return, then he went out himself and stood in the summer night, sniffing the aromatic air of Matron Frew's herb garden. He hung out his cock, and waited patiently for his prostate to relax its grip so that he could enjoy the physical relief and pleasurable malice of watering the herbs. He had both in good
time, then he stood under the sycamore by the old garages and had one of the visitors' cigarette ends, after nipping off the filter.

The sycamore creaked and murmured in the night breeze that blew out from the land to the sea. Despite the ache in his joints, Crealy enjoyed being by himself there beneath the branches, and the summer sky, for he knew that he had always been unloved. Even though old age at Totara had given him a mirror image power and significance, while always before he had been subjugated, he liked still to be alone, to have no sources of action or response other than himself. So he stood beneath the sycamore, and enjoyed his cigarette ends guardedly, shading the glow with a palm, and looking out to the better lit parts of the grounds. ‘No bastard can see me,' he said. ‘No bastard knows I'm here.'

Even a summer's night grows cold for old bones, and Crealy came in and bolted the door behind him. ‘Had enough?' he had asked the mint and parsley as he went by them. He inspected Mrs Joyce's stamps in the dim light. He wanted to search her room, but had forgotten her name.

Crealy had never been an intellectual, and at eighty-one he found it difficult to move and think at the same time. So he remained stooped in the semi-light between kitchen and dining room, and he tried to remember what he had been going to do before he met Mrs Joyce.

He went into the pantry beyond the stainless steel moonlight of the kitchen, and lifted out a large tin of golden syrup. He took a thick crust from the toast drawer and, with his fingers as a ladle, spread golden syrup on it. The syrup lay dark in the tin, but silver in glints as it twined from his fingers.

Crealy replaced the tin, and stood with the bread and syrup in his clean hand, sucking his other fingers. He looked into the shadowed dining room: the identical tables, evenly spaced, and an oblong of light across them from the corridor. The golden syrup was rich and energy giving. Crealy began to wonder if Mrs Halliday was having
one of her spells in the home. He made such demands on his old mind that his chewing slowly stopped, and his hand no longer held the bread level. He stood in the kitchen doorway as a Neanderthal at the entrance to his cave. The syrup made a silver necklace to the floor. Crealy couldn't remember: couldn't remember at all.

‘Bugger me,' he said at last. He was unable to come up with anything, so he stopped thinking, allowed the motor-sensory centres priority again, and moved into the lino tubes which were the Totara corridors.

At the duty room, Crealy decided to check on Brisson in case he was doing the unexpected thing and actually making a round. There was no key for the duty room door, but when Crealy pushed lightly against it, he found that Brisson had set the end of the sofa hard to it. Then he heard voices. Nurse McMillan talked as she and Brisson made love, but her topic was dissatisfaction with conditions of service, not romance. Lovemaking altered the normal rhythm of her words so that odd, accentuated syllables were driven out of her. ‘
God
we've all thought
of
handing in our resig
nations
,' she said.

‘There's nothing in all the world to match it,' Brisson said.

The palm of one of Crealy's large hands still rested on the door, though he pressed no more. He listened to a tune which mocked him, and his arthritis drove him on, shuffling and disgruntled, missing out as usual. Mrs Doone had finished putting up her Christmas decorations for the night, and the corridor was as bare as when she first began. Even Miss Hails was silent, but as Crealy passed Mr Lewin's room he heard a talking clock. ‘It is twelve o'clock, midnight,' it said. Like a fox at a burrow entrance, Crealy stood before the door, but the clock didn't speak again, and blind Mr Lewin, who must have activated it, made no sound either.

As he neared his own room Crealy could hear Mortenson's stricken breathing, and remembered with sudden vividness a time more than thirty years before, when he had been a cleaner at the Nazareth Hall and Mortenson had been president of a group that
banqueted there. Crealy had looked out from the serving hatch, waiting to begin clearing up, and S. A. Mortenson CBE, barrister, solicitor, notary public, city councillor and party chairman, had been standing at the top table, standing in dinner jacket to give an erudite speech which was buoyed up constantly by delighted applause and laughter from the other tables. The recollection had such strength that Crealy felt again the flat ache of his own inconsequence, but it passed and he was aware of the cream Totara walls again, and the struggle Mortenson had to breathe.

Crealy laid Popanovich's open bottle of lemonade on the bed so that it would wet the sleeping man's feet, and plucked Jenny Pen from Garfield's bed end and held her briefly aloft. ‘Wake up, Judge,' he said, and took Mortenson's nose between Jenny Pen's hands.

Mortenson's good side woke with horror. What time was it? ‘Let's have poetry tonight,' said Crealy. He made himself comfortable on the bed with his room-mate. ‘And I want to see you enjoying it, Judge, getting into the swing of it,' he said.

began Mortenson indistinctly.

Crealy put one of Jenny Pen's fingers into the slack side of Mortenson's mouth and pulled it into the image of a smile. ‘Let's not be half-hearted about this. Try something else,' said Crealy. Mortenson wished to disregard the setting his senses made for him, and the only escape was through the words. He did his best with a bit of ‘The Herne's Egg'.