Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  And Albert said: ‘This was your decision, Max. Remember?’

  ‘That man will never take responsibility. He just drives the trains.’ Max pointed accusingly at Albert.

  And they all stood looking at him helplessly.

  ‘Trains? What trains?’ demanded Albert.

  ‘I’ll change the locks,’ said Max. ‘They probably have keys to fit my cupboard.’ This with a baleful glance at Lizzie.

  ‘Matron will see to it,’ Mr Fox murmured.

  True to his word he got Matron to talk to the locksmith in Highgate Village and Matron asked Jack to take care of it and Jack replied, ‘Yes, ma’am!’ He did not even have to think before answering.

  Elizabeth was soon telling her friends that he had taken to it ‘like a duck to water’. Mind you, it was a little distressing to visit him. Especially as he always insisted that she take him for a walk.

  ‘But it’s cold, Daddy. First put on your coat.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Well, then, I can’t possibly take you out. What do you think Mr Fox would say if I brought you back with pneumonia?’

  ‘Blast Mr Fox,’ said her father.

  Or she would arrive to find him wearing his heavy winter coat of mustard gaberdine. ‘Let’s go, Lizzie. Take me home, please.’ He stood there with a peppermint green scarf wrapped around his throat, climbing over his mouth to rest beneath his nose. ‘I’m wearing my coat – see?’

  It was Cledwyn Fox who came to her rescue. ‘Look now, Mr Montfalcon. It’s very dark to be taking a walk. Look at it out there. Black as a bat’s wing at midnight.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Max in surprise. He walked to the window and tapped it with his finger-nail. ‘So it is. Black as a witch’s tit. Well, perhaps I’ll go tomorrow.’

  And so it was that, always getting ready to leave Serenity House, Max Montfalcon stayed and could be found attending Ballroom Dancing. Or chatting to Edgar the chiropodist about the Euromongering tendencies of the Government.

  It might have continued like this had Albert Turberville not heard something disagreeable in the House of Commons’ Tea Room one day and become obsessed with questions of number, and took to making sudden visits to Serenity House demanding to be told something called ‘the truth’. At first no one else knew the purpose of these visits. Neither Cledwyn Fox, nor Elizabeth and, least of all, Max himself, who simply hadn’t the faintest idea what his son-in-law was going on about. Didn’t know. Couldn’t care. Didn’t remember. Albert’s face turned red and his eyes bulged, and Max decamped for the relative peace and protection of the Stroke Club.

  *

  The lively meetings of the Stroke Club were a daily ritual, a special delight popular with the residents and open to all, whether or not they had suffered a stroke. There were tea parties and animated discussions of who had chosen what option (pain relief and/or mechanical resuscitation?) in filling out the forms for their Living Wills. And there were wonderful theatrical performances from Jack and the little nurse-aide, Imelda, in papier-mâché masks, disguised as two bright and winning mice. ‘Mickey and Minnie Go To Market!’ and the one that always made Major Bobbno weep: ‘Mickey and Minnie Fall In Love’.

  Everyone knew the Imelda behind the mask.

  ‘A little chit of a person,’ according to old Maudie.

  ‘Just here to find a husband,’ said George, the muscular lover of Angie whose children had disowned her when she announced she was a lesbian at the age of seventy-two.

  But what of Jack, behind the other mask? ‘Tell us the story of Jack, Brigadier,’ Major Bobbno would order and Max would settle back and tell the tale of Jack, Florida Jack, the boy from Orlando, who grew up in a trailer park, lived with his poor old mother and one day set off to find fame and fortune in England.

  ‘Read a book once, but it hurt his head!’ said Major Bobbno.

  ‘Lived on Chinese take-aways,’ said Beryl the beard.

  ‘The Angel of Death,’ said Lady Divina.

  Beside Divina sat the two Malherbe brothers, dressed in business suits which had last been fashionable in their native Manchester forty years earlier. It was quite impossible to tell the brothers apart. Extreme age – and both were now in their late eighties – had had the effect of withering them into an even closer identity than they had shared all their lives. And in any event, thought Max, the old begin to look alike. In the eyes of younger people they become some strange, wrinkled race. Old age was a kind of geriatric Asia full of natives all of whom seem to resemble each other. In the case of the Malherbe brothers the only way you could tell them apart was that the brother Joshua always had his fly open. He had his fly open and liked to stick his hand into it in a reflective manner, rather in a way that someone might massage the lobe of an ear or tug abstractedly at a lock of hair.

  ‘Braggart,’ Lady Divina liked to remark when Joshua’s hand disappeared into his trouser front. ‘Live foxes never came out of dead holes.’

  Lady Divina remained resolutely unimpressed. In the days before Alzheimer’s had taken a grip on her mind she would give no quarter. ‘Mr Malherbe, I had bulls with more charm than your fiddling brother.’ And now and then, sometimes, the mists cleared in her head and she began worrying aloud about global warming or cried aloud for her daughter Doris who had deposited her one day at Serenity House some ten years before, in a furtive manner, and then crept away, rather as a frightened young mother might panic and leave her baby on the hospital steps. Lady Divina had been found in the back seat of an Austin Princess parked outside the front door, with a note propped on the dashboard written on rather good, deep green, bond paper which read: ‘I can do no more for Mummy. I have been a carer for fifteen years and I am so tired! Please look after her. Financial arrangements have been made to cover her stay with you. God bless you.’ The note had been signed ‘Doris’.

  Getting old, thought Max, very often meant being dumped. Your relatives drove you out into the countryside and, ignoring the notices which most specifically forbade dumping, they cast you away like an exhausted bedstead or an elderly car seat through which the springs would soon show in rusty ribs and the stuffing would spill out on to the grass and blow away in the wind.

  It became difficult to keep track of the permanent residents since none of these were very permanent, except on paper, that is to say they were all in for the duration. Max took for his fixed and certain points such survivors as the Malherbe brothers in their antique but proper suits with their stiff collars and mustard ties who, when they sat in the television room of an evening, looked like a brace of performance artists, Josh and Ted, with Josh’s hand absently and eternally stirring his unseen member. Patience without result; desire without efficacy; scandal without heat.

  An unexpected series of diversions was provided by the visits of Chief Superintendent Trevor Slack, retired, who interviewed Max on several occasions. Mr Fox observed the visits with a feeling of mild alarm. Night Matron heard of them with distaste. It had been British policemen who had followed British MPs to Rhodesia in the old days, and they had meant trouble. Jack watched the arrival of the pale, polite, passionless policeman with mounting excitement and fear. It firmed up his own suspicions, but he did not want to be beaten to the draw.

  Superintendent Slack asked Max a whole heap of strange questions to which Max was in the habit of replying: ‘Don’t know. Can’t remember. Pardon?’ Until one day Slack asked him about a young man called von F. What had been von F’s feeling when he first set sail from Hamburg to Harwich? To which Max replied, unhesitatingly: ‘Confusion.’

  ‘What made him confused, Mr Montfalcon?’

  ‘He got talking to these English passengers. Seeing he was German, they decided to have a little fun. Teach Freddie Foreigner a thing or two. They gave him some advice. Whenever terminating a conversation and wishing to be polite, end with the words – “Fuck off!” It’s an old English custom, they told young von F.’

  ‘Thought he was a stupid German, did they, sir? But he wasn’t, was
he? Spoke English as well as they did.’

  ‘What confused him was English ignorance about their own history. Von F knew that the British Royal Family was absolutely riddled with foreigners. Germans, most of them. Look at Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert. Before him, King William could only speak German. And today, as the consort of our own dear Queen, we have a Greek prince. And they’re all as British as you or me.’

  ‘And if they could do it, I suppose anyone can,’ said Superintendent Slack with silky, ominous sympathy.

  ‘Do what?’ Max demanded.

  ‘Pass for British.’

  ‘That’s going to be illegal soon,’ said Max with a little angry laugh. ‘Soon we’ll all pass for Europeans and that will be that. Bloody Germans will run everything!’

  ‘Don’t like Germans, do we, sir?’

  ‘They’re all right – in their place. But that place isn’t over here.’

  *

  Why were people always asking him questions? Max Montfalcon lay in bed and tried again to remember how many people he had killed. Or was supposed to have killed.

  And down the corridor Lady Divina lay computing inside her sealed head, the numbers likely to perish when global warming set off climatic changes in the south of England.

  ‘Give me none of your Upper Volta,’ whispered Divina, ‘or your Bangladesh. Think of Brighton.’ Divina had lived once in Brighton. She could remember that.

  Within a few decades south-east England would be too dry for cereal crops. What would they grow there then? Rice? People to whom she said these things imagined the paddy-fields above the sunken city of Brighton. She saw sturdy pink English calves reddening in the sharp sunshine, flat straw hats and aching backs, the slap of the palm on the fat flesh calf as another Anopheles mosquito bit deep into the English bloodstream. In her room, ceaselessly smoothing the roughened corner of her sheet, on which was stamped in purple capitals the letters D.H., Divina cried out in her pain and anguish, seeming to Max, as he began drifting slowly into sleep, to supply an answer to his question.

  ‘Millions!’ Divina cried.

  CHAPTER SIX

  From Tranquillity to Serenity

  Let us tell tall stories about a barely literate young American, a key helper on the night shift at Serenity House, who has worked there ever since Max moved in. The fall of 1990. A couple of days before, to be precise, and Jack was there to greet him. A boy who has so much get up and go he left his underprivileged home in the Tranquil Pines Mobile Home Park on Orange Avenue, Orlando, Florida, USA, and flew to England. There he learnt a new trade and, to the delight of Cledwyn Fox, Night Matron and young Dr Tonks, became a dedicated member of staff in North London’s Premier Eventide Refuge. Isn’t that the American fairytale? Isn’t that success?

  Yes, but Jack who?

  No one could say for sure. Equally, no one believed Mr Fox when he replied, ‘Jack Robinson, of course!’

  ‘Jack in the cellar.’ This from Major Bobbno.

  ‘Jack Frost,’ said old Maudie, and shivered.

  ‘Jack the Ripper,’ Lady Divina asserted.

  As for Jack himself, when he heard about the questions they were asking in Serenity House he laughed his big, broad-toothed laugh, put on his Mouse head, and asked them a riddle: ‘I was a sweeper. Then a sperm. Then I grew a head. Who am I?’

  No one really got close to the answer. It took Max, after some long serious thought, to say: ‘According to one’s researches conducted by letter and telephone over the past year since I was incarcerated, the story of Jack is as follows. Unexpected transformations are the norm in closed, artificial institutions. Prisoners rise to positions of authority. His type is not uncommon in the camps.’

  And then Max would settle back and recount once more, for the members of the Stroke Club, the history of Jack Robinson. Jack from Orlando. Jack the nimble. Jack the quick. Old Maudie would clap her hands and young Agnes would demand: ‘Don’t forget the Miracle of Conception Ride, Mr Montfalcon!’

  Jack had a job, once. He was a sweeper in the Magic Kingdom, wearing black and white fatigues with a little veil hanging over the back of his neck, looking like a retired Foreign Legionnaire. He shuffled about collecting gum wrappers and cigarette butts from the paths and byways between the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House, ninety feet wide, 800,000 plastic leaves and the merry den of the Pirates of the Caribbean, engaged in their work of jolly arson and rapine. Oh yes, there sat that immensely drunk old greybeard with his scarlet breeches riding up to his crotch, drunk as a lord, a bottle in one hand and a squealing piglet in the other. Piglet? Sure. See for yourself, a merry old soul in a three-cornered hat and a piglet under his right arm.

  The thing about the Magic Kingdom, Jack had discovered to his surprise, was that far from being very big (it covered forty-two square miles and welcomed hundreds of millions of visitors), it was actually rather smaller than life. The Crystal Palace was just a dwarfish echo of that lost Victorian marvel. The Tree House was domestic. Even the pirates’ universe of cannon and carousing was cramped. Only the animals walking about had a little height – the mice, ducks, dogs and bears.

  It might have gone on like this for ever.

  ‘If only it had!’ old Maudie would sigh, when Max described Jack’s sole period of legitimate employment. And Major Bobbno would tell her to keep her chin up. This was the Magic Kingdom, where anything was possible.

  Jack the sweeper caught the eye of the camp authorities, Max would relate, and he was sent to ‘Spermatozoa’ for kitting out in a brand-new outfit. The Kingdom rewards faithful employees. Jack was to be given a Ride.

  ‘If only it had!’ old Maudie would sigh again and Josh Malherbe told her to belt up.

  A disabled soft-ware salesman from Tucson, on his first visit, was somehow spirited out of his wheelchair and put on the Miracle of Conception Ride, a simulated journey of the sperm cell into the vagina and up the Fallopian tube for a headlong confrontation with the female ovum, a ride which pregnant women, children and people with heart complaints are strictly enjoined to avoid. How the salesman got past the pushers, the guards whose job it is to police the rides, remains a mystery. But clearly their frequent warnings to ‘Keep your hands, legs and clothing well inside the car at all times’ were not of much use to the helpless salesman.

  The novelty of the Miracle of Conception Ride is that the travellers in the fast-moving roller-coaster cars each feel themselves to represent a single sperm in its race to reach the egg. Alongside them, charging up the dimly lit, scarlet tunnel towards the distant ovum pulsing with the golden glow of a warm and welcoming sun, riding a kind of milky posse, are other hastening sperm, many with human faces and names like Butch and Freddy, and, yes, Jumpin’ Jack! Built of fibreglass and moving at high speeds, looking for all the world like albino comets, the sperm Butch and Freddy smile and wink as they pull ahead of the car in which you’re travelling and then drop back again. The salesman was struck by one or more of these passing sperm, perhaps Alec, who wore a baseball cap with the legend, ‘Here I come’, or Wayne, ‘Small but fast’.

  By which precisely it matters not. The mangled remains of the unfortunate victim lay spread across the blue plastic floor of the car when it arrived at the other end of the journey and entered into the Florida sunlight, where everyone began screaming.

  At this point alarm bells, Max would say, had started ringing all over the Park. And old Maudie always wanted to add, ‘And so they should have!’ But a warning glance from Josh Malherbe silenced her.

  *

  Jack did in fact catch the eye of his CSC (Cleansing Station Controller) and Jack was, as they say in the Kingdom, to be given ‘a head’. And indeed he was. He wore the fat white three-fingered gloves, the black olive nose perched between black oval eyes with their delicate Japanese eyebrows etched on the plastic face, the green bow-tie, the red trousers, white waistcoat and boat-like shoes. And he sweated a lot. For even though they do very careful fittings down in Capitation, those mice heads are hot and hea
vy and it is never easy to breathe through the smile. But as they say, to get ahead in the Kingdom, you need to ‘sport your head’. And so Jack would have gone on quite happily sporting the head, because the heat is just there to be taken and breathing, as they say in the Capitation Unit, is something you do on your own time. And after all, this was the way ahead.

  No, said Max, it could not go on for ever. Behind the Magic Waterfall, in the so-called Curtain of Mist, a young woman from Delaware was accosted. ‘I turned round and there he was. I don’t think he said anything. Not that I can remember, it all happened so fast. I bit one of his ears. But he was stronger than me. I remember he had this kind of, well, cheesy smell. And very hot breath. What could I do? I just lay there looking up at this insane smile!’

  After the event charges were brought. But the cops had a problem because it wasn’t technically rape and, anyway, how do you formulate a charge in which a rodent is supposed to have had sex with a human female? You may invoke the charge of sexual battery which, in the state of Florida, carries the same status as rape. But to make the charge stick when there is an entire school of identical mice running around the Park on any one day is a very difficult thing.

  Jack, the fall-guy. Lost his head, expelled from the Kingdom. Sent home to sit in the trailer in Tranquil Pines, his old, adoptive mother ill and fading fast. Watching a variety of televisual delights from the Aardvark Video Emporium.

  Yes, but Jack who?

  ‘Jack the giant-killer,’ said Max Montfalcon.

  *

  Mr Fox still preferred ‘Jack Robinson’. Mr Fox’s arrangements for paying Jack, cash on the nail, once a week, no questions asked, did not quite accord with the guidelines laid down by the Department of Employment in these matters and the thought of applying for a work-permit for Jack filled him with mixed emotions. Jack seemed a gift from the gods – you did not sully that divine help with paper-work.

  Thus it was – for what were almost religious reasons – that Mr Fox did not like the anti-American note he heard in the stories told about Jack by the elders. Not all Americans were bad, surely? Not all Englishmen were gay. He could vouch for that. Despite what foreigners said and believed. Americans had been responsible for some very important advances in the field of Living Wills. They had passed legislation which required hospitals to have a jolly good natter to newly admitted patients on the ways in which they would like to die. A cup of tea and a chat about death. How did they wish to be treated when in the terminal condition? Death with Dignity. That was the issue, wasn’t it? Medically assisted release. Med-assist, some American hospitals and, more importantly, eventide refuges in the States, were now calling it.