by Tanvir Bush
Mosh is about to speak into the radio when the door is wrenched wide open. The little bearded man with the twinkling eyes stands blinking up at them.
‘She had a little accident. I was just changing her dress.’ He is perfectly composed, unsurprised by the two men’s wary glaring. ‘She is ready now.’
Andre rolls his eyes at Mosh but says nothing.
‘You aren’t going to cause us any trouble now, are you, Mr Tunny?’ Mosh asks.
‘Oh, very funny!’ The old man chortles, and Mosh relaxes. He is a good old boy. Of course he is. Mosh is too tired for this, that’s all.
‘Let’s do it then,’ says Andre, pushing past the old man.
‘Wait, wait!’ Mr Tunny tries to hold Andre back. ‘You’ll scare her!’
‘No he won’t.’ Mosh’s long arm reaches over the little man and firmly grabs Andre’s lapel. He yanks Andre backwards, growling, ‘Get your arse back here now.’
Choking, Andre staggers back a step. Relieved, the old man nods at Mosh. ‘Best to let me go first. I did give her one of her sedatives but it may not have started working yet.’
Mosh lets the old man lead on into the flat. Andre pauses for a moment, his face twisted with rage. That’s fucking abuse, that is, he thinks. Any other time in his life he would just walk off and fuck the job. But he can’t. Lose this, lose everything. Next step down is the street. He takes a deep breath and steps in after the two men.
The hallway is very dark, and Mosh blinks as his eyes adjust, nostrils flaring from the stronger whiff of urine amplified by artificial apple. It’s not that bad, really, and anyway, one gets used to these things pretty quickly. We all finish up pissing our knickers in the end, thinks Mosh.
‘Aww rank!’ he hears Andre whimper behind him, flapping his hands at his face.
Where did they get this kid? thinks Mosh. He’s a disaster.
The room at the other end of the hallway is full of light. No curtains, of course. Why would there be? Even Mosh has taken the street-facing curtains down in his house. The Believe in Better campaigners patrol between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., and it’s too risky now they have the little one. When Mosh is on nights and needs to sleep during the day, he either uses an eye-mask or, if Jenny needs the bedroom, he heads into the dark of the hall cupboard and sleeps on a pile of cushions.
The Tunnys’ flat is, to Mosh’s surprise, sparsely furnished and very, very tidy. He is also relieved. He has noticed the way Andre looks around the houses of the old folks they are clearing and it makes him uncomfortable. Andre looks as if he is making shopping lists in his head. Again, Mosh wonders about Andre’s previous placement. There has been a recent spate of robberies from some of the very houses they have extracted old folk from.
Mr Tunny leads Mosh through into the bright living room where Mrs Tunny is sitting in her wheelchair at a polished dark-wood table. She is a lot larger than her tiny husband; perhaps twice as wide, although it is hard to see how tall, given she is squeezed into the chair and covered in a large red and green travelling blanket. She is almost totally bald and her face is very round, her cheeks bulge and her chin – her chins – hang softly in layers from her jaw. Her eyes are astoundingly beautiful, wide and long-lashed with barely a crow’s foot. Thin, arched brows add to her ingénue film-star stare. Mosh is captivated.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Tunny.’
She blinks at him with those Bambi eyes. ‘Clayton? That you, honey? Have you finished your homework?’
‘It’s not Clayton, Dorcas,’ says Mr Tunny, gently. ‘Drink your milk.’
Mrs Tunny raises a plastic cup with a straw to her lips and sucks, eyes wide as a child’s looking at the men.
‘Dorrie, these are the men I told you about. They are going to take you for a ride.’
‘Yes, Mrs Tunny. My name’s Mosh. It is a pleasure to be your taxi ride today.’
Mrs Tunny smiles shyly and shakes her head, and a little milk squirts from the side of her mouth. Mr Tunny gently reaches out to wipe her chin with a spotless white hanky. ‘I’m going for a ride with these shitfucks?’ she whispers.
‘Yes, my love. You are going to have a little ride, and I’ll be there when you get to the next place.’
Mrs Tunny’s eyes seem to get wider still. ‘Will there be dancing?’
‘Yes, darling,’ says Mr Tunny, squeezing her hand. ‘I am sure there will be dancing.’
‘I bet you were a great dancer?’ says Mosh as he checks her bag of medication.
Mrs Tunny pulls the straw from her mouth and nods. ‘I love dancing.’ Her expression changes, as if she has been shouted at. ‘No, no! Wait, we need to look after the baby! We can’t go anywhere …’ And then her panic evaporates and she blinks like a doll. ‘Fucking dancing,’ she says dreamily.
Mr Tunny kisses her cheek. ‘No babies here, Dorrie. It’s going to be fun. You’ll see. Now finish up all your milk.’
He turns to Mosh as his wife pops the straw back into her mouth and sucks. ‘She’ll be fine,’ he says, his green eyes still twinkling. ‘Do you need … ?’
‘Ah yes, Mr Tunny, just a few last questions and a signature, and then that is that.’ Mosh reaches for his clipboard again and turns a couple of pages. ‘Most of this you have already been through with your GP, so it’s just … this one. If you could check all the information is correct and you understand the veto on visits during the settling-in period?’
‘Yes, yes,’ says Mr Tunny, but he barely glances at the clipboard. He is more concerned with his wife.
‘All the milk now, Dorcas. That’s it. Now let me take it.’ He slips the empty beaker from her grasp and tucks her into the chair. ‘Make sure you are nice and comfortable under that rug. You must be feeling sleepy already?’
Mrs Tunny yawns widely, showing a delicate pink tongue and haphazard teeth. ‘But dancing?’
‘When you wake up, darling.’
Mrs Tunny’s eyes shut and she begins to breathe deeply.
‘Good one,’ says Andre. ‘Out like a light, these oldies.’
‘Any other relatives we should inform?’ Mosh turns back to Mr Tunny, a little concerned. He feels for some reason that the old guy is a bit too calm, too ‘together’.
‘No, our son, Clayton, died some years ago. It was … is just us.’
‘OK then.’
Mr Tunny signs the papers. Mosh countersigns and hands the clipboard to Andre to witness, and then it is just a case of wheeling the old woman down to the ambulance. Mr Tunny kisses his sleeping wife goodbye and steps back to let Mosh spin the chair in a gentle arc to face the front door.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Tunny. We’ll take good care of her. The nurses at Grassybanks are the best in England. She will be treated like a queen.’
There is a small lip in the front doorway. Mosh tips the wheelchair a little to get the front wheels over and the chair bumps down on the other side but Dorcas sleeps on. Andre strides off without a backward glance and Mosh pushes Dorcas gently along the concrete terrace towards the stone steps, feeling the little dapper man watching him from the doorway. It must be heart-breaking for him, he thinks, praying that Andre will keep his mouth shut. Dorcas is heavy and the descent is going to be a tricky one.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Tunny,’ he calls back over his shoulder as he catches up with Andre at the top of the stairwell. ‘She’ll be perfectly safe with us.’
Mosh can’t see but Mr Tunny’s eyes are no longer twinkling. The green has darkened, all light fled. ‘It is done,’ he says and closes the door.
Both Mosh and Andre are dripping with sweat by the time they get to the ground floor. Mosh has taken the lower end of the chair and therefore most of the weight but Andre still managed to bitch and moan at every step. Finally, they are down and a tepid breeze kisses Mosh’s ears; he pauses, catching his breath before clambering into the front of the ambulance to lower the hydraulic lift. He is so glad that this is going to be the last extraction before the weekend. In a couple of hours he will be holding Serena in his arms,
her small, warm body in the crook of his elbow, her scrunched little face blinking up at him.
Mosh picks his phone out of his pocket to text his wife, and so doesn’t see that Mrs Tunny, in her sleep, has reached out and grabbed at Andre’s jacket as he is trying to load her into the back of the vehicle.
‘Leggo!’ Andre hisses into her face but the woman is deeply asleep and her fist clenches tighter around his collar. A thin stream of milky drool catches the light as it falls from her lips.
‘Get off, you old bag,’ says Andre again and tries to twist her hand but the old woman has a grip of iron. Sneaking a quick look to make sure no one is watching, Andre grabs two of the woman’s fingers and pulls them back and back until he hears them crack and her grip relaxes completely. She twists a little in her chair but does not wake, and Andre bends the fingers back into the right shape and stuffs her entire arm under the travel rug. He feels strange, almost as if he has missed a step, is tripping over, a falling, light-headed feeling. He isn’t sure if it is bad or not. He just hopes no one will notice until the old girl wakes up and then maybe they will think she did it to herself.
Upstairs in his flat Mr Tunny turns the lights off and watches the grey sky darken slowly to blue-black. He has a bottle of Jim Beam rye whiskey, a pipe and the tobacco he had been out buying in front of him. He hasn’t smoked the pipe inside in ten years – not since Dorcas started to get ill. The smoke upset her. Now he can smoke as much as he likes. He can do anything he likes. He could go to the pub. He could play cards with Johnson and Maverick. He could go to the café on Turton Street and listen to some jazz at the Cricketers’ Arms. His pipe lies unlit on the polished wood table next to the bottles of his wife’s Librium. The milk he gave her before she was taken had enough in it to kill an ox. She won’t wake up in Grassybanks, thank God! No one was taking his wife off to that terrible place. He still has enough of the Librium for himself when the time comes. He isn’t sure if the time is now. He sips the whiskey and retreats into his memory, dancing ‘with you, Dorcas, my love, with the most beautiful woman in the whole wide world’.
Blind Woman’s Buff
A gobbet of lemony dawn light hits the far wall and slides slowly down the flock wallpaper. Feeling its buttery glide on her eyelid, Alex has an urge to get up and draw the hotel curtains, but she is still, happily, trapped beneath the Poet.
‘Ah … kochanie … you are so … so … so …’
The Poet’s large head moves up and down above her, blocking out the light momentarily, leaving a trail of garlic-infused morning breath like mist. Alex rocks her hips and bites into his shoulder to stifle a little yawn. It has been a wonderful night, and although Alex is now mostly sober and, after several hours of hectic sex – potentially more cystitis than sensation – she doesn’t want it to stop. The priapic Poet is passionate, imaginative and adept and, more than that, enthralled by the same ecstatic surprise as she at this fortuitous communion.
Their initial shy clumsiness had caused a clunking of foreheads so extreme that the Poet had sprung backwards with concern, still half in his trousers, and fallen off the end of the bed. This had resulted in them both getting delicious hysterical wheezing giggles like wicked children. Although what they did later, Alex’s introduction of the game ‘Blind Women in the Buff’, for instance, and the inventive use of the room service fruit basket, was definitely for adults.
But they are both tiring and only human after all. Wriggling around beneath him, Alex manages to release a leg, snaking it up and across his sweaty back; then hup, she thrusts up, twists and flips him over. Before he can remonstrate, she sits astride him, and leans in to nibble his earlobe.
‘I cannot get enough of you,’ he says. His hands twist in her long, dark hair as she slides down, pausing to suck his nipples and lick the soft, furry skin around his belly button. She moves lower still and, after a long inhaled exclamation in Polish, the Poet explodes sour and salt down her throat, his hips pumping uncontrollably, his face contorted.
And it’s over. The Poet smiles sweetly at her, closes his eyes and almost immediately begins to snore softly. Alex lies for a while, the sweat on her body cooling, thinking she might allow sleep to tug her under too. But Alex has work to get to and, more importantly, she has Chris. She has to get up.
Sighing, she swings her legs off the bed and stretches, plucking a stray pubic hair from her lip. In the corner, Chris, her guide dog, takes his cue, sliding out from his makeshift camp under the desk at the other end of the suite and shaking himself. Alex raises an apologetic hand in his direction and rolls her shoulders. In the gloomy room she is encased in shifting spiderwebs of soft shadow, her damaged retinas objecting to the laws of physics. The room is briefly distorted, squeezed and released as if breathing. Slowly, as her optic nerves grapple with her brain, she is able to make out the glint of empty bottles and glasses littering the table, along with the remains of the room service the Poet had ordered. How delicious that congealed muck had been at midnight. Remembering what they had done with some of that food makes Alex turn pink. She really needs a shower.
The Poet mutters something in his sleep, and Alex kneels up on the bed, carefully so as not to disturb him. Now able to take her time, she scans him from head to foot, something she couldn’t do while he was awake. Although she has a smorgas- bord of retinal malfunctions, she does retain a clearer keyhole of central vision just over her nose. She sweeps the world with this, like now, taking in slivers of the Poet at a time and slotting them together like a jigsaw. In his sleep he looks younger. His shaggy dark brown hair is greying at the temples. Alex leans closer in, peering intently as if he is a sculpture. He is lean and pale, muscles and veins of marble dusted with black body hair. He has a large, slightly beaky nose and thick brows, his mouth is a little wide and now slack, the lips parted over excellent, and unlikely to be original, teeth. There is stubble on his handsome dimpled chin. The Poet is a very good-looking man.
Alex had met the Poet two days before, on that Friday afternoon, squeezed up together on the commuter-crush train from London. The carriage was so full, Chris hadn’t been able to guide Alex to a free seat and, as the train lurched forward from the platform, she had, literally, fallen into the Poet’s lap. He had laughed, called her a ‘little ptaszek’, ‘little bird’, which was kind, she thinks, considering she is more obviously ostrich than greenfinch. She had felt the strength of his arm around her waist, caught the flash of those teeth and fallen deep into the dark blue eyes. Squashed together so tightly that they had almost synchronised heartbeats, she had asked him about the book he was making notes in and discovered he was a poet. In fact, he had just released his sixth volume in Polish and English. By the time the train drew into Cambright station, she had been invited to accompany him to his book signing at Waterford Booksellers. Alex happily tagged along, gulping down the free wine, noticing that he had a lot of attractive female fans. Two of them cried during a poem he had read called ‘Bleeding Jack’, apparently written after his father’s death from cancer. Another woman, long red hair flowing down her back like Millais’s Ophelia, got a little hysterical in the Q and A session after his reading, talking so fast in a mixture of Polish and English that the Poet had held up a hand and said, gently, ‘Uspokój się, calm down.’
Alex had felt a little heady from the poetry herself. It seemed to pluck at her spine. He twined words into sticky ropes that caught her up, held her above the world for a moment. Shit, he is good, she had thought, a little panicked, and wondered what the hell she was doing there. She couldn’t compete. Her hair needed washing, for God’s sake, and she could smell the day’s sweat on her clothes. I must look terrible.
Yet afterwards the Poet sought Alex out, shouldering his way past the redhead and the other lovely ladies to where she was standing by the celebrity cookbooks. He had been euphoric, high on the night. People kept coming over to ask him to sign copies of the book and yet he was oblivious to the fluttering lashes and trembling voices.
‘To
night I want to concentrate on my new friends,’ he had said, one arm about Alex’s shoulders, one hand ruffling Chris’s silky ears … and he had. They had bought a takeaway that first night, decent wine and a bottle of Polish vodka, drifting slowly back to Alex’s flat, talking about literature, about the power of words and the power of silence. Occasionally, as they meandered through the city streets, the Poet would pause, leaning across Alex to discuss these things with Chris, who would wag his pennant of a tail and roll his eyes up in adoration. I do believe you too have been seduced, old buddy, Alex had thought, grinning.
‘The flat …’ Alex never called it ‘her’ flat for some reason. ‘It’s a disgraceful mess and no one in the estate has curtains, of course.’
‘That’s nothing,’ the Poet had replied. ‘I once shared a squat in Łódź with a community of postmodern conceptual artists. Now that was a shithole. Literally. When the toilet backed up and exploded, they filmed it and then projected it onto the walls of the Izrael Poznański Palace.’
At the flat, Alex and the Poet stayed up all night, sitting on the sofa, while Chris, content and full of kibble, dozed in his dog bed. They had talked of childhood, loneliness and adventure and why they were how they were. He was sharp and funny and Alex found herself laughing, out loud, from deep in her belly. She couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. In fact, Alex could not remember a time she had been so open with any man. She almost feared the feeling and when – in the rusty light of dawn – he checked his watch and said he had to get back to his hotel as he was chairing a lecture series at the university that weekend, Alex had felt a wash of relief. He seemed almost unreal, this beautiful, clever man on the sofa. Alex could feel her expertly crafted emotional armour beginning to split open under the pressure of his presence.
‘But you will come to the hotel later?’ He had stood in the doorway, insisting, and when she had hesitated, he had leaned in and kissed her, leaving her with both the liquid heat of lust and a hot prickle of tears.