Looking for Mrs Dextrose

by Nick Griffiths

Then I remembered the sign. “Sorry, I meant gas!”

  “What?”

  “Gas!”

  “What?”

  I could see that Dextrose was about to lamp him.

  “You’ll have to speak up!” he said. “I’m half deaf!”

  Half-deaf? “GAS, PLEASE! FILL HER UP! AND THE CAN! PLEASE!”

  “You don’t have to shout, young man!” He went to unscrew the petrol cap, looked at the pitchfork in his hand, seemed surprised to find it there, and threw it across what passed for a forecourt.

  “Stupid bugger,” he muttered to himself, absent-mindedly.

  An old woman appeared in the office doorway. “Guests, Eustace? You should have told me!”

  Eustace didn’t hear her. I had the impression she was used to this.

  “Not very nice weather, is it, boys?” she called out.

  At first glance I had thought she was sitting in a chair, but quickly realised it was a wheelchair. A motorised one, on four small off-white wheels, controlled with a ball-tipped joystick in her right hand.

  Her hair was white, almost translucent, tied in a bun that sat on top of her head. She wore a lace-trimmed black dress, ankle-length, but which rode up slightly as she was seated, exposing thick brown tights. She wasn’t wearing shoes. Like her partner – husband, I assumed – she too wore little round glasses, perched on the end of her nose.

  “Where phone?” demanded Importos.

  What could I do?

  “Well, young man, we do have a telephone. But it’s not really for the customers.”

  I nearly ran over and hugged her.

  However, she was not finished. “But I tell you what: you come in for some of my tea and cake, when you’ve done with your boys’ things out there, then I’ll let you use it if you’re quick – how does that sound?”

  She turned before any of us could answer, the servo-motors in her wheelchair whirring.

  Importos eyed me and smiled, not in a gentlemanly manner.

  It was the first time I’d been offered tea and cake with my petrol, though I supposed that was what happened when one shopped among the inevitably lonely. Since our packed sandwiches were curling at the edges and water’s thrill dulled quickly, it was an offer that would be hard to refuse. It would also put off the moment when Importos made his calls. Perhaps in that time, I could find and cut the telephone wire? It was an idea worth percolating.

  Dextrose was less enamoured. “Tea and minking cake?” he railed. “Does Harrison Dextrose look like he drinks tea?”

  He didn’t, admittedly, although the bulging waistline did suggest a penchant for cake.

  I tried to reason with him: “But Dad, it’d do us good! Warm us up! And we can get dried off.”

  “You can dry off – and you can mink off while you’re doing it. Harrison Dextrose does not drink tea.” He folded his arms, signalling an end to the matter.

  Still I tried. “What are you going to do, then? You can’t sit out here – it’s miserable.”

  It failed to sink in. “Hey, you!” went Dextrose, tugging Eustace’s sleeve as he concluded filling the tank. “How far from here to Mlwlw?”

  I froze.

  “What?” said Eustace.

  “HOW FAR TO MLWLW?”

  I prayed he wouldn’t know.

  “Mlwlw?” said Eustace, and thought for agonising seconds. “Never heard of it.”

  Yay for old people!

  Then Importos pointed out, “Importos not to trust fat man. He to go wizout.”

  Leave without us? I hadn’t thought of that. Recently contented Dextrose seemed suddenly malleable and trustworthy, but what if he reverted to type? One whiff of booze might be all it took. Indeed, his upbeat mood seemed already to be waning. I had an idea.

  “Look! Over there!” I blurted out, pointing randomly into the rain. “A naked lady!”

  Everyone bar old Eustace followed my finger. With Dextrose’s attention thus diverted, I whipped the key out of the ignition and pocketed it. Sorted.

  However, before I could stop him, he had dismounted the bike and started running – or rather, quick-hobbling – towards the entirely fictitious lovely.

  “No, wait! Dad!”

  He didn’t stop.

  “I might have imagined it!”

  But it was no use – he was not for turning.

  The house was entered via the cashier’s office, which contained a desk and chair, a till with keys on levers, straight out of commercial history, and assorted tools hung from the back wall: pliers, hammers, shears, machete, screwdrivers, hand-drill, the usual, all well-maintained despite their evident age.

  The old lady was waiting for us at the door into the main house. Now I could see her clearly: paper-thin, grey skin with myriad wrinkles, like cats’ whiskers, emanating from the corners of her mouth. A peanut-sized mole nestled on the end of her nose, and proved distracting when talking to her.

  Also noticeable was the odour: a cloying indiscernible whiff, which I decided to take in my stride. In my experience all old people’s houses had a distinctive, unsettling odour.

  Before he fell out with them, Father used to take Mother and I to visit his Aunt Amelia and her husband, Eric, who bred hamsters. There were cages all over the house, and as I sat there in my Sunday best – since we were visiting relatives – all I heard was the drone of adult-talk mingling with the squeaking of hamster wheels rotating. Interestingly, their house smelled not of rodents but of gravy. I never did fathom that out.

  Then there was Mother’s mother, Grandmother, the only (supposed) grandparent of whom I was ever aware. She was a dreadful old witch who was so decrepit that I never saw her move. She just sat in an armchair staring at a clock, wishing out loud that the Lord would take her and put her out of her misery. Her house reeked of mouldy undergarments and I used to have to affect an interest in flowers so that I could escape into the garden.

  I never understood why we had to visit her, since hardly anyone ever spoke. They all just sat around occasionally going, “Hmm” and “So”, or Grandmother wished she was dead.

  I was uncomfortably delighted when her wish finally came true.

  Most embarrassing was realising that our own house had a smell: a not-nice vegetable-y whiff. I’d only notice it when I returned from boarding school at weekends, and very quickly I would become oblivious to it. It was as if Father, Mother, the house and I were melding into one amorphous pong; I wondered at times whether I carried that back to school with me, and whether that might partly explain my wanting popularity.

  Matters came to head when Father one time invited his Headmaster from Glibley Secondary to dinner, planning to woo him with a roast partridge. The head was barely over the threshold when he sniffed the air and said to Father, “Hydrogen sulphide? Been bringing your experiments home with you, Mr Grey?”

  That had been an awkward dinner and Father stopped inviting people round after that.

  At least our new old-lady friend from the gas station was odour-aware, pre-empting any similar social faux pas. “Please excuse the smell,” she said. “I’ve been boiling up some offal for the dog.”

  Mmm.

  We introduced ourselves – her name was Hilda. When I shook her limp, bony hand it felt as if I were cradling a dead bird. She showed us into her dining room, where she had already laid out teacups and a brewing pot on a circular oak table, around which four placemats with plates, knives and forks were set in front of three chairs. Eustace followed us in.

  Rain beat against the window, performing a constant drum roll, and a bare lightbulb suspended from the ceiling cut through the gloom. There were photographs pinned haphazardly around the walls, all of people, I noticed. No scenery. Many of those pictured were different, suggesting a large circle of family and friends keenly missed. However, there was one face that featured regularly on one wall, in various situations and at different ages, from birth to around his mid-twenties.

  “Your son?” I enquired, pointing.

  Instead o
f answering, Hilda eyed up Importos. “My, aren’t you tall!” she exclaimed. “How tall are you?”

  He sneered at her. “How stupid are…”

  I cut over him. “He’s almost eight feet tall! Amazing, isn’t it!”

  Hilda wheeled herself before the chairless table setting, the ‘Vrt-vrrrrrt’ of her motors the only sound, then ushered me to sit opposite and Importos beside her. He sat, comically towering over the table, though I could not find it funny.

  “Eustace! Go fetch the short stool so our friend can sit at the table properly!” Hilda told him, sharply but without shouting.

  Clearly he heard her fine, as he shuffled off dutifully and returned with the item while we waited in painful silence. All the while, Importos did not take his eyes off me.

  Desperate to break the tension, and to divert my thoughts from Importos’ bad friends, I struck up conversation. “So, Hilda,” I said. “How long have you and your husband lived in Lonely Bush?”

  “Well. How old are you, young man?” she replied.

  I told her I was 33.

  “Well we’ve lived here a lot longer than that,” she said.

  I took my first sip of tea, which was so weak I wondered whether it was actually tea-based.

  Hilda turned to Importos. “And how old are you, big fella?”

  He finished his cup. “Where is cake? Importos to phone. Yes?”

  “All in good time,” she said, patting his knee, which was sticking up.

  In my peripheral vision I noticed Eustace, to my right, staring at me, his mouth hanging open.

  Hilda said, “Didn’t your other friend want to come in?”

  I loved that: ‘other friend’. “No, I said. “He didn’t.” I couldn’t think what else to say.

  China clinked on china.

  The atmosphere was making me so nervous I started blurting out polite but inane questions to fill the silences.

  How long had they been married? (Longer than she would care to mention.)

  What was their dog called? (Jeff/Geoff.)

  Where was he? (Outside.)

  What breed was he? (I don’t even like dogs.)

  Had they ever – wait for it – run out of gas themselves? (No.)

  My pièce de resistance, though, was this, to Hilda: “How do you get upstairs?” How very sensitive.

  Fortuitously, she hadn’t seemed offended. “Oh, we live down here,” she replied. “We save upstairs for visitors. And we do get a few come to stay,” she said smiling, motioning towards the photographs on the wall.

  “But we do get lonely,” said Eustace. His cheery opening gambit that teatime.

  I was absolutely desperate to leave, yet equally desperate that the repast never ended. A terrible quandary. A debate began raging in my head: should I stay, put up with the social hideousness, or should I go, and hope that Importos’ bad friends were out?

  During my consideration, Hilda said, “I’ll fetch a fresh pot.”

  “No more tea!” snapped Importos.

  “Actually, I’m still rather thirsty,” I said. “More tea would be lovely, thank you.”

  The tall man glared at me. I smirked back, which would not help my cause. I just couldn’t help it.

  “You asked whether that was my son,” Hilda noted on her return. She unpinned a photograph from the wall and flicked it across the table towards me. “Well yes, it was. What do you think of him?”

  A loaded question, if ever I’d heard one. The picture, in the washed-out, slightly unreal colours of a previous printing technology, was of a young man, in perhaps his late-teens, taken on a beach. He grinned into the camera beneath a clump of blond hair, with a bare torso, red swimming trunks, not a care in the world. In his hand he held an ice-cream cone. His eyes stared straight into mine.

  “He looks very happy,” I said.

  Suddenly I knew exactly what she was going to say next. I could have scribbled it on a piece of card, sealed it in an envelope and had a stranger open and reveal it to an amazed audience.

  “He’s dead,” she said.

  Why had I ever mentioned the boy? My mind was made up. There was no way I was tottering down that conversational path, and balls to Importos and his Mafioso. Just let them try and find me – the explorer!

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, pointedly downing the last dregs of my cup. “And I’m very grateful for your hospitality, but we really must be getting on.”

  “Don’t go!” squawked Hilda, a little too desperately. Then more softly: “Not yet.”

  “We do get lonely,” said Eustace.

  “Yes, we do,” agreed his wife.

  No way. I stood up. “Honestly, I’d stay if I could but…”

  “But you haven’t had your cake yet!” trilled the old woman. “Let me fetch it now. It’s Victoria sponge. Our favourite.”

  She returned, smiling as sweetly as her crinkly face would allow, holding aloft a sponge cake on a silver plate. She wheeled herself back before her place-setting and put down the cake on the table. Picking up a cake knife, she asked, “Right then, who wants some?”

  Importos sighed impatiently. “Oh I then. To give quick.”

  And she stabbed him in the neck.

  She stabbed him so vehemently that the blade went straight through; then she pushed the knife away, opening up his throat. I wished I had been looking anywhere than at his face during those perverted moments, but I hadn’t. I’d been staring right at him.

  I watched as his expression changed from annoyance to disorientation, and realisation to terror. I watched as his green eyes briefly blazed and then the fire extinguished. I watched as the blood sprayed out, covering teacups and cake, and his rattling, gurgling groan, the sound of a drain emptying, filled the room. The rain continued spattering its tribal drumbeat on the window. I couldn’t move.

  Hilda turned to me, still smiling sweetly, blood covering the hand that held the knife. “He won’t be leaving us. Now, what about you?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  Importos dropped sideways, like an oak felled.

  Through my delirium I heard the servo-motors. ‘Dvrrrt-dvrrt…’ Hilda was coming for me.

  No way. No. Fucking. Way.

  I leapt to my feet.

  “Stick him, Eustace! Stick him with your knife!” Hilda shouted.

  Old Eustace, right beside me.

  “What?” he said.

  I took my chance. Pushed his chair over, sending him sprawling in front of his very slowly advancing wife.

  I jumped over him, pulled open the door and ran out of that room, out through the cashier’s office, out into the rain.

  I heard her behind me: “Get out of the way, Eustace. He mustn’t leave!”

  Dextrose, thankfully, had returned to the motorbike and sidecar, hunched over and tinkering, beer bottle in one hand. No, please, I thought. Not the old Dextrose. Not now.

  “DAD!” I screamed, running at him.

  He looked round.

  “START THE BIKE! QUICK!”

  “Eh?”

  I reached him, panting, adrenalin in full flow.

  “She’s killed him. Start the…” Wait! I had the key! But what was he doing? Wires in his hand…

  I looked back towards the house, fumbling through too many safari suit pockets. No sign of the demented couple.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  He looked up at me from his crouching position, that blistered, ravaged face with its thatch, and he looked almost apologetic. “Hot-wire the minker?”

  The bloody fool. One chance: hope he hadn’t damaged anything.

  Felt steel, felt its edges: the key. Got it.

  “Get in the sidecar! NOW!”

  “But me beers,” he said, looking at his opened suitcase on the forecourt, still full of bottles. Seemed he’d only drunk one or two. I might be in luck.

  “GET IN THE SIDECAR!”

  I turned towards the house again and saw Hilda’s head through the window of the cashier’s
office. Not facing us, but bending down beneath the till. What was she up to?

  When I turned back, Dextrose had one leg in the sidecar and, unable to lift the other, was stranded, a victim of his own shocking equilibrium. I moved swiftly around the bike, bundled him in, leapt onto the rider’s seat. Key in ignition. Turn. Nothing.

  Turn again. Nothing.

  And again. Nothing.

  Not a dicky bird.

  Fuck. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

  “Not sure,” he said quietly.

  Frantically, I pulled at the wires behind the ignition. Bare ends. Unconnected.

  BANG! A ripping sound above my head.

  In the doorway of the office, Hilda sat pointing a shotgun towards us; Eustace was standing behind her, a hand on her shoulder. Above us, the corrugated awning was now peppered with holes.

  “Come on, boys, come inside,” she called out.

  “We do get lonely,” said Eustace.

  “We do,” she echoed.

  “Dad, we’ve got to run,” I told Dextrose.

  I had entered a strange state of calm that took me by surprise. The adrenalin still flowed yet the panic had subsided and it felt as though someone else, someone in control, had taken charge of my actions. An out-of-body experience.

  BANG! The shot cut in half one of the struts holding up the awning, which began to tilt precariously as the others felt their age.

  “Shit!” I heard Hilda curse.

  As I helped Dextrose out of the sidecar, I saw she had uncocked the shotgun and was fumbling with two fresh cartridges.

  I took his hand in mine. “Come on, Dad, we’ve got to go.” As we left the shelter of the awning the rain spattered our faces. I noticed some of Importos’ blood, tiny drops on my arm, watched it become diluted and roll off into the sand.

  But Dextrose could not run. He could not even jog. Though I tugged at him, urging him on, it was like dragging a mattress through a hole half its size. “Come on! Please!” I urged.

  Twice he fell over and I had to haul him to his feet, newly drenched and soiled, before we made the tarmac of the Nameless Highway. Behind me, over Dad’s shoulder, I saw Hilda had started towards us, one hand on her steering knob, the other holding the gun; she was straining her head forward, as if that might encourage the wheelchair to go faster. It didn’t.