Looking for Mrs Dextrose

by Nick Griffiths

  Then I prised it open quickly, fingers fumbling. It was him: a tiny head-shot crudely cut from a larger photograph, black-and-white, taken at a time when his hair was still in check. He was smiling. It was such a relief, I nearly cried out loud with happiness.

  I could never have defended his dereliction of her – the tawdry bits of which I was aware – but I had to know that she still cared, despite him. Because I was certain, however much he huffed and bluffed, that she meant plenty to him.

  Contented on that front, one gaping hole in our family saga remained, which I had tiptoed and pussyfooted around – buried, frankly – and which I could not let lie any longer. So when Dad returned to our room clutching shopping I blurted it out. “Dad. Why was I adopted?”

  He dropped the bag and stiffened. A melon rolled out across the floorboards, its ridges playing out an uneven beat.

  Seconds passed.

  “Sit yerself down,” he said.

  “Us had no money,” he began. “Simple as that, son. Had no roof over us heads. Had no food for us mouths.”

  “Why not?”

  Sitting opposite me on the edge of his bed, he looked down at his feet. “That’d be the rub,” he said.

  “Well?” I wasn’t going to let him squirm his way out of it this time.

  “If yer must know, I’d bought Dextrose I, just a week ’fore yer mother tells us, ‘I’s preggers’. Were bad timing.”

  Dextrose was his yacht. He’d used it on several of his expeditions. “You mean you’d spent all your money on a yacht?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “So you were broke when I came along?”

  “Mm.” He had the grace to look uncomfortable.

  I just didn’t get it. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why buy a yacht when you obviously couldn’t afford it?”

  His face flushed a little. “Harrison Dextrose is an explorer, son – that’s what he does. I were going to make us money. I had plans for that boat.”

  “Which were?”

  “Single-handed around the world. That’s what I were going to do! Make history, coin in the cash!”

  I trawled my trivia knowledge. “Didn’t Francis Chichester make history by sailing single-handed around the world?”

  “Hmm,” he went. “Can’t say I’d heard of the minker, till someone mentioned his name.”

  “Alright. You said you had plans for the boat – what else?”

  “Remember, Pilsbury, this were the mid-Sixties – men was heading into space. It were a time of great exploration. No barriers, no boundaries.”

  “So what else?”

  “Find the North West Passage sea route?”

  “Wasn’t that discovered in the 1900s?”

  He smiled weakly and nodded. “Someone else pointed that out, just ’fore us set off. Lucky they did! Minking cold up there!”

  I didn’t laugh. “What a mess.”

  “Sorry, son.”

  “Couldn’t you have just sold the boat?”

  He looked at me, incredulous. “I told yer: I’s an explorer! That’s us job! Without me boat I were grounded.”

  “Couldn’t Mrs Dextrose have got a job?”

  “No missus of mine is going out to work! I has some principles, yer know.”

  “And because of your principles, you abandoned me.”

  He said nothing, but stared at me, hands clenched together between his legs, hunch-backed. He looked like a little boy.

  “Who were those people who adopted me?”

  “Ah, see! The missus’s sister knew this couple, Humphrey and Mildred, and she wanted a baby but couldn’t. Respectable folk. Folk with money. We knew they’d bring you up right…”

  That was it. “I was fucking miserable, Dad!” I shouted. Then more quietly. “I was fucking miserable.” A tear escaped my lower eyelid. I felt its progress down my cheek and tasted its saline sadness as it trickled between my lips.

  The mattress beside me sank down considerably, then an arm curled around my shoulders.

  “Come on, son,” he soothed. “Come on.” Whiskers tickled my face.

  His voice was higher-pitched than normal. “We met them a couple of times, when you was a bit older. Down here in Dritt. Yer probably wouldn’t remember it. We was trying to get you back, but they was having none of it. Said it weren’t fair on you, that you’d settled there and wouldn’t know who we was. In the end we all agreed: they was right. But it broke yer mother’s heart.”

  I was sobbing uncontrollably, shaking, taking juddering breaths.

  “Broke mine too, truth be told. We was fools, son. I were a fool.” His voice brightened a little. “Yer know, one time I decided to kidnap yer back! Drove round to their house and staked the place out. Two days I were there, sitting in that car, stinking to high heaven, waiting for the chance to snatch yer back.”

  “So?” I managed to blurt out between heaves.

  “Wrong house. I’d got the digits wrong way round. What was yer? 27? And I’d sat outside 72. Or were it the other way round?”

  I just started laughing. There was snot running into my mouth, slimy and gross and I couldn’t help myself. The laughter turned into hysteria.

  The man was a fucking liability. I simply couldn’t believe how useless a human being he was. I could have hated him – should have hated him – but it wouldn’t happen. What would have been the point? His ineptitude was all part of his not inconsiderable charm. No more backward steps. There had been too many of those in my life already. Far too many.

  Dad did not join in the hysteria, perhaps he didn’t see the joke; he just held me as I let it all out.

  When I had finally calmed down, he said, “I’d understand if yer couldn’t forgive us.”

  I studied him through sore, bleary eyes, that man with his blackheads and his scars, his brow furrowed, his expression all nerves.

  “Water under the bridge,” I said.

  “Really?”

  Snorting up enough phlegm to fill an eggcup, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and smiled. “Course.”

  He smiled back. “I love yer, son.”

  “I love you too, Dad.”

  The morning after the funeral, he shook me awake.

  “I can’t live here no more,” he said.

  He sat on his bed holding in his hands a small tin box, black-painted and dented. He unlocked it, extracted a leaflet and handed it to me.

  It was headed:

  THE SERIES OF GENTLEMEN

  HOME FOR RETIRED EXPLORERS

  Its cover depicted a gothic building in grounds with tall trees with, inset, a small photograph of an old chap in a wheelchair attempting to raise a smile.

  “That’s where I’m going,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’s a charity. It won’t cost yer a penny.”

  “It’s not about the money, you old goat,” I chided him.

  “It is to me,” he said. “Anyhow, it’s what I want. Me travelling days is over.”

  *****

  The door was large and heavy, with wrought iron fixings and a gargoyle for a knocker. I pulled on the gargoyle’s tongue and let it fall back. ‘Donk.’

  It didn’t sound terribly loud so I repeated the action. ‘Donk.’

  Dad, who was wearing his funeral suit and had once again attempted to slick down his hair, though unruly tresses had sprung back up, looked nervous. I heard him suck his teeth. Rather him than me, I thought.

  “You’re sure this is what you want?” I asked.

  Before he could reply, the door creaked open.

  A fearsome looking woman in a starched white nurse’s uniform stood before us, glaring. Her coal-black hair was arranged into a beehive and a funny little folded hat sat on top of that. It would have been comical, had I not been so perturbed.

  “You only needed to knock once!” she bellowed, at a volume more suited to addressing people 50 yards behind us. “You will wake the residents!”

  It was 2.33pm.

  �
�Hmm,” she went, still sounding like a foghorn.

  I hoped that introductions might break the ice. “I’m Pilsbury Dext…”

  “I know who you are!” she thundered. “And that is your wanton father. I’ve heard all about him. We shall have none of his funny business here… well, come in! Don’t just stand there, like lepers at the gates of Heaven!”

  Only once we stepped over the threshold did I realise how short she was. She barely came up to my chest and was built like a barrel. It was her face that did it: square and mean. Her tight lips curved downwards and her flabby cheeks followed them, her expression set at permanent displeasure. She had the beginnings of a beard: thick, wiry black hairs, poking sporadically from around her mouth.

  “I am Nurse D’eath,” she said, quieting down at last, and eagle-eyeing my reaction.

  I didn’t dare move a facial muscle.

  “Welcome to the Series of Gentlemen Home for Retired Explorers,” she added.

  Her manner put me so on edge. I don’t know why, perhaps I was trying to endear myself to her, but I put a hand on her shoulder. A gesture of affection? I guess it was meant to say: ‘Please like me, I mean no harm’.

  “That,” Nurse D’eath bellowed, “is the last time you will ever touch me.”

  “Thank mink for that,” I heard Dad mutter.

  She glared at him. “What. Did. You. Say?”

  “Nothing,” he mumbled, the schoolboy.

  “WHAT ?”

  “Nothing.” Louder.

  “Nothing, Nurse D’eath!”

  “Nothing, Nurse D’eath.”

  “Good. Now come and meet the residents.”

  Nurse D’eath led us down a gloomy, high-ceilinged, wood-panelled hallway lit by candles set into alcoves, like something out of Scooby-Doo. I expected a ghostly hand to emerge from a false panel at any second, to swipe at my departing back. To our right was a large hatch and behind that an old bloke wearing a white coat, seated at a desk, holding a broom in one hand. His face was ghostly pale and thin; bruised bags seeped from beneath his eyes in ripples. He was slumped and looked decidedly bored, but straightened upright on seeing Nurse D’eath.

  “Afternoon, Nurse D’eath,” he called out.

  “You said that not one minute ago, as I was answering the door, Cedric. Do not repeat yourself,” she boomed. “This is our new guest, Mr Harrison Dextrose. With him is his son, Pilsbury. You will remember their faces. That is Cedric. He is our security guard and janitor.” Her voice cannoned down the corridor and bounced around in a series of diminishing echoes. It sounded like a haunting.

  Through the door at the end of the hallway, we entered a vast communal lounge, painted white top to bottom. There was no natural light; a large, dusty chandelier from another time and place hung from the ceiling, only half of its bulbs working; there was a door in each of the three walls. The room contained six armchairs, five of which were occupied, each by an old gentleman. They were all asleep, one in front of a television.

  The nurse clapped her hands, instantly jolting them from their slumber.

  “Our newest recruit to the Series of Gentlemen!” she announced, then motioned towards the empty chair. “Mr Dextrose, please take your place.”

  He looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “You sure this is what you want?” I hissed.

  “We will not have dissention here!” shouted Nurse D’eath.

  Dad nodded to me and did as he was told.

  I had never taken him for a masochist. It puzzled me.

  “Here,” Nurse D’eath pointed to three men whose chairs were arranged next to each other, like seats on a plane, “are Mr Reculver, Mr Hoath and Mr Chislet.”

  Reculver waved, Hoath smiled, Chislet did not react.

  Each in his early-eighties, I guessed, they wore matching outfits: tweed jacket and plus-fours, long green socks and shiny brown-leather shoes, with matching tweed caps. Each had a tartan blanket draped over their lap.

  Reculver was an imposing sort of fellow with fingers the length of prize runner beans. He was so pale he was almost translucent. His flesh clung to his bones and he had a collection of interesting growths on his enormous ears.

  Hoath had a bulbous, deep-red nose, on which was balanced a pair of black-rimmed spectacles, and wisps of ginger hair hung down from the back of his cap. He regarded me with a tangible sneer.

  And Chislet… I wondered whether he might be paralysed. A short, fat, white-bearded, bald-pated fellow wearing half-moon glasses, he never moved, though you’d begin to notice his eyes follow you around the room, as if he were a portrait in a haunted house.

  “That,” the nurse pointed at a chap facing the door in the far wall, “is Mr Wilmington-Hovis… Mr Wilmington-Hovis! Stop staring at the bathroom!”

  Very slowly, with a shaking hand, Mr Wilmington-Hovis reached down, gripped what I realised was a wheel and swivelled himself around. It was not an armchair at all, but an old-fashioned meerschaum bath-chair.

  His ancient head was resting on his chest, as if he did not have the strength, or the inclination, to lift it. He wore a white vest and pale blue pyjama bottoms. His muscles had wasted away, his arms were covered in liver spots, his eyes were hollows and his chest sunken. So old and wizened was Mr Wilmington-Hovis, he looked like the sort of thing an Egyptologist might discover beneath bandages.

  Nurse D’eath snapped, “Mr Wilmington-Hovis, sulking does not become you! Any more of that and you will go to your room!”

  His hand twitched but he said nothing.

  “Mr Peel! Mr Peel!” the nurse called out to the old man in the corner watching television, though it appeared he had fallen asleep again. “MR PEEL!”

  Mr Peel jumped as if he had sat on the live rail and landed back in his chair clutching his chest.

  “Mr Peel, come and greet our guests.”

  He grabbed a walking stick and tottered towards us methodically, stooping and smiling. I decided that I might like him the most.

  When he eventually reached me, he bowed. “Kenneth John Peel,” he said. “They wrote a song about me.”

  His voice was very soft and his handshake surprisingly firm for a dodderer, though he did have more meat on him than the rest of the bunch. He was wearing a tight red tracksuit better suited to someone a quarter of his age. I’m afraid I couldn’t help but notice the banana-style outline of his aged penis.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “Which song?”

  He tutted jokily. “You know!” And he began to sing, pausing in the wrong places: “Do you, ken John Peel, at the break of day? Do you, ken John Peel, with his coat so gay? Do you, ken John Peel, when I’m far, far away… Got it now?”

  I did. (And I knew that ‘ken’ meant ‘know’ in the Scottish dialect, rather than ‘Kenneth’.)

  “Yes. Yes I do,” I replied, not wishing to hurt his feelings. “By the way, that’s my father, Mr Harrison Dextrose.”

  Kenneth John Peel spoke. “Harrison Dextrose, eh? I’ve read your book,” he said. “Didn’t believe a word of it.”

  Nurse D’eath clapped once again. “Good! Now everyone knows everyone else! Mr Dextrose, I shall now tell you the Rules. Commit them to memory.”

  Good luck with that, I thought.

  She recited: “1. No drinking.” – He didn’t even blink – “2. No smoking. 3. No shouting. 4. No swearing. 5. No comfortable bedding of any description to be brought in. That one is particularly for you to remember, the younger Mr Dextrose,” she added, wagging a finger. “6. No talking after lights out. 7. No using the toilet after lights out – a bucket is provided in your room. 8. No females other than blood relatives or spouses. 9. Visitors only between the hours of two and three. And lastly, number 10. No leaving the home without permission. Are we…”

  Mr Wilmington-Hovis piped up unexpectedly, “We’re explorers – and we aren’t allowed out!” His voice was weak and hollow-sounding, as if it were its own echo.

  “Right, that’s it!” barked the nurse. “Off to your ro
om!”

  She grabbed the back of the meerschaum bath-chair as he tried feebly to kick her, and began wheeling him off towards the door to my right.

  “I forgot to mention, Mr Dextrose,” she called back. “This door leads to the bedrooms. I shall show you yours later. As you should be aware, the far door leads to the bathroom. Use it wisely. The other door leads to my office and quarters. You must never – ever – use that door.”

  I stood shell-shocked.

  “One last thing, Mr Harrison Dextrose. You were very lucky to acquire this place at the Series of Gentlemen. Your application arrived on the day we had a death.”

  When the door shut behind her, I said urgently in a lowered voice, “Dad, we’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “No, son. This’ll do us fine. Don’t you…”

  Kenneth John Peel cut in: “What have you been up to, Dextrose? Eh? Ever killed a grizzly with your bare hands and washed down its still-beating heart with a rough tequila?”

  Dad shook his head.

  Peel sensed blood. “Ever climbed the Herringbone Glacier and made love to a lady at the top?”

  “As if he has!” mocked Hoath.

  “I bloody have!” said Peel.

  “I was going to say…” I began, but they talked over me.

  “We, however – that is, Mr Reculver, Mr Chislet and I – have climbed the Herringbone. Indeed, we have been all over Antarctica.” Hoath paused for effect. “And we never saw you there.”

  “No doubt I was there at a different time!” snapped Peel.

  “Why, when were you there?” demanded Hoath.

  “You first.”

  “No, you!”

  Reculver clicked his fingers to gain my attention. “They always have this row,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling.

  Peel heard him. “Reculver think he’s above the debates,” he said to me. “But he’s not. He and I once argued for three days over who was first to ascend the Matterhorn on one leg.”

  “Hopping, really,” Reculver explained.

  “Yes, who first had hopped up the Matterhorn,” said Peel.