Oh, My Darling

by Shaena Lambert

  He stood outside the Ogilvie Care Home for Seniors, a concrete building of pallid mauve, like cold skin. The glass doors slid open as a nurse wheeled a man into the sunlight. The man clutched a cane, the end propped on the chair’s footrest. He wore leather slippers like Kenneth’s slippers at home. The doors closed, muffled by a thousand brushes hidden in the door sockets. From down by the seawall a child’s voice rose: I want a bagel, I want a bagel, I want a bagel! A seaplane scudded across the bay. Kenneth stepped on the automatic-door rug, and the doors hissed open, withdrawing into their hairy keeps.

  The lobby tiles had been buffed to a mirrorlike brilliance, reflecting the penumbra of Kenneth’s white hair. By the window a cleaning woman patiently ministered to a collection of tropical plants, caressing a dampened paper towel over each broad leaf. Solitary figures in wheelchairs had been set out here and there, deployed, Kenneth thought, like chess pieces. He shivered as he made his way to the check-in desk. The nurse looked up, visible pores on her nose. A crucifix dangled between her large breasts. Lebanese, she might be, or Spanish.

  “Is there a Priscilla King here?”

  “Who’s visiting?”

  “A friend.”

  The nurse glanced at his hat, now in his hand, and at his jacket and tie, then typed on a keypad and checked the computer screen. “She’s had a fall. She’s upstairs now. Room 319. Come.” A single word, as though to a child.

  Kenneth followed her buttocks down the corridor to the elevator. They went up to the third floor, which had walls the colour of a pool, long-legged insects reflected in wobbly patterns through glass. He heard the sigh of recirculating air.

  The nurse paused before a door, knocked on it briskly and then pushed it open.

  “Prissy, you’ve got a friend to see you.”

  She held the door. Kenneth entered.

  Two women were parked in parallel beds. The woman in the far bed had frizzy hair around her ears, but the top of her head was bald like one of the Three Stooges. Moe? Curly? Kenneth had never known which stooge was which.

  The woman in the second, closer, bed was Priscilla.

  She shifted her head with a single heavy motion and fixed Kenneth with her gaze. She was over eighty—her hair had turned white, her face had weathered, lines deepening, cheeks sinking, sultry lips cracking—but she was still Priscilla, and he felt an urge to say, You haven’t changed, because she hadn’t, not really. The years on Frank’s boat had merely crystallized her, like a piece of candied ginger.

  Kenneth advanced to the bedside. “Hello, Priscilla,” he said softly. “I’m Kenneth Farraday.”

  “Who?” She squinted at him.

  “It’s me. Kenneth. You wrote me a letter.”

  She took out her hearing aid, gave him a complicit smile, flicked the plastic sound piece and then replaced it in her ear. “I dropped the damned thing in the maple syrup this morning,” she said. “Now, come again: Who did you say you were? Because I want you to know one thing, I pay my taxes.” She turned to her companion in the next bed to share this piece of drollery, but the other woman had fallen asleep. Priscilla went through the elaborate head motion again, and fixed her gaze on Kenneth. She had caught hold of the edge of the bedsheet.

  “You wrote to me,” he said.

  “Now why would I do that?”

  He found himself blushing. “I knew you a long time ago. I’m Kenneth, Priscilla.”

  A pause. A beat. He watched the message pass in through the syrup-covered hearing aid, along the crotchety synapses, and into the pupils of Priscilla’s eyes.

  In the lobby a woman in a wheelchair raised a clawed hand to waylay him in his passage across the sea of tiles, but Kenneth kept moving, through the sliding doors, past the hideous fuchsia hanging in their baskets, along the seawall. Two Native women lay on the grass eating fried chicken from a paper bucket. Let them. What did he care?

  He found a bench, sat and looked at his watch. The back of his hand was drained of colour. He had two hours until his ferry left the harbour. If he went now, he could wash his hands in the bathroom of the Empress hotel, then eat curry at the Bengal Lounge, before driving back to the ferry. But he stayed where he was.

  After Kenneth had said his name, Priscilla had searched his face, just as though she were digging in the sand, scrabbling with her fingers, clawing to see one vestige, one aspect of the Kenneth she had known, before settling again on his pupils.

  “You see. It’s me.”

  She made a sound like youch, or ouch. “You can’t be.”

  He answered before he could help himself. “Why can’t I be?”

  “You’re nothing like him.”

  “I’m older. We’re older.”

  She looked from his face to his hands, then shook her head angrily. “You remind me of an egg.” Oh, the look on her face as she said those words, a kind of practical malevolence, as though she knew exactly what she was doing.

  At that moment the nurse bustled in to give Priscilla a pill. She told Kenneth he could sit, and he sat. When the nurse was gone, he spoke again.

  “I got your letter. I thought I’d pay you a visit.”

  “You did, did you?”

  “You invited me.”

  “I gave the letter to the nurse. I didn’t think she had mailed it.”

  “Well, she did.”

  Sunshine attached itself to the slats of the blinds, lighting each edge to brilliance. When he glanced back, Priscilla was looking at him with fascinated disgust. And why? What warranted this reaction? He smelled of aftershave, no doubt, and he was elderly (though not as old as she was). He had on a finely cut jacket, and a scarf, and carried a hat with a small feather in the ribbon.

  She said, “Do you miss him?”

  “Who?”

  “Kenneth.”

  Now he was angry.

  She said, “I miss him.”

  “Who do you miss, Priscilla?”

  She paused, and then gave him a crafty smirk. “Frank,” she said.

  He sat for another minute, and then he told her he must go. As he opened the door, he heard her say to the woman in the next bed, “That’s a real cock-of-the-block. A puffed-up bird, that one.”

  Now Kenneth looked out at the bay. Buildings rippled and broke in the water.

  How long before Priscilla forgot that he had visited—before the boy, Kenneth, returned to her? The reader of poetry. The leaper of gorse bushes. A sleep, a wakening, and then he’d be back. In fact, Kenneth-the-boy might have slipped from the room a second before Kenneth arrived, and danced back in the side door a second after the old cock-of-the-block took his hat and departed. Fury prickled Kenneth’s back. The old bird. The old, dried-up bird with her brittle bones, hoary toes, cracked skin. Why should she have such access to his boyhood self when Kenneth himself had nothing?

  He got up and walked to the parking lot. No curry this time. He would drive to the ferry, and he would never cross the Strait again. Priscilla had had her revenge. The great karmic wheel of time (something Deirdre believed in) had spun round and now she, Priscilla, had finished on top. One part of her mind was addled, there was no question of that, but another part, using senility as a cover, had slithered across the floor, crafty as a snake, and lashed out.

  Do you miss him?

  His car went over the ramp with a thump, into the belly of the boat. Squeezing out through his door, he found himself face to face with a teenage boy holding a dog on a leash. “Get that thing away from me,” Kenneth said.

  Upstairs he found a seat by the window. Children on the deck were playing at being blown back, coats like sails. Behind him a Punjabi family ate spiced rice and fried meat from plastic containers. Bracelets jingled as the mother took out food.

  One of the children outside had a red coat, the same shade as the towel that Priscilla used to set on the porch railing, a rock weighing
it down. Priscilla who now lay in bed like a dried-up bird. He pictured red pubic hair beneath the hospital gown, a softened belly, bones so frail you could break them just by lying on top of her. And the look on her face—the spite and satisfaction as she had insulted him. He stood and walked down the aisle, past the ferry takeout restaurant. Something was moving in him. Something old. Something strange.

  From what I’ve tasted of desire

  I hold with those who favor fire.

  Oh, Prissy, he almost moaned. You got me good. You got me by the short and curlies this time. But here he stopped short, making a woman behind him spill her coffee. She scowled as she passed him, but he shook his head, because it had come to him. The solution, that was all. The very solution to his problem.

  He would return. Lying to Deirdre, lying and sneaking, driving to the ferry, crossing the Holy Sea on his mission. And such a mission it would be. And who could say, who could slice it fine enough to say if it would be a mission of contrition or revenge?

  “It’s me,” he will say, standing by the bed, once every month, like clockwork.

  Hat. Overcoat. Gloves. Cravat. Umbrella.

  “It’s me,” he will positively purr.

  She will turn her head with that rolling gesture. “Who?” Mouth puckered in fear.

  “Kenneth.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  Priscilla will edge back, grasping the blanket, buzzing, if strength allows, for the nurse. (“Isn’t it sweet,” the nurse will say, “how he visits so regularly?”) Then he will meet Priscilla’s eyes, forcing her to see him, prying open her mind to expose those last spots that hold the other Kenneth, sucking them out like buttery clam meat.

  The Coffin Story

  Pa aged. It seemed only yesterday that he had been a despot, striking Jackie across the palms with the wooden ruler he kept on a nail by the kitchen door. He never used the metal ruler—he was firm but fair, Mums always said, though to Jackie, at seven, Pa was a whirlwind of fury, a sensation of sickness at the pit of his stomach. But Pa aged. He altered. So that to Jackie, heading now into his own middle years, Pa seemed to have stepped right out of his skin, transforming in a single, shimmering second from a monster of punishment to a bewildered gentleman in sheepskin slippers and a tartan robe.

  They lived in the Town of Ardrossan on the Firth of Clyde. For fifty-six years Pa had dispensed four-inch nails and six-inch nails, sheet metal and plungers from behind the marble counter of Hobbes’ Ironmongery. But eventually Pa retired, and Mums died, and Jackie, urged on by his wife, Karen, changed the name of the shop to Hobbes’ Do-It-Yourself. Together they brought in fluorescent light bulbs and toaster ovens and hand-held blenders.

  Pa lived above the shop, and on days when things were quiet, Jackie could hear his father walking around upstairs, making the beams creak. Though he was a spare man, he had a heavy way of walking. Jackie could tell when Pa was making tea, when he was frying his lunch, and when he had settled in the leather chair by the window to read his newspaper.

  Pa made two trips outside each day: to the newsagent in the morning, to collect his paper, and to the pier in the afternoon. He could tell what each ship’s freight was by the height of its hull, and knew at a glance whether it was built on the Clyde. The rest of the time Pa sat in his chair by the window, where he had an excellent view of people beneath. He knew who had entered the chemist’s, and when the delivery girl would bike up the hill, and that Jackie’s neighbours, the ones with the new car, had picked up a large package from the butcher’s.

  At six Jackie let down the blinds of his shop. The bell tinkled as he flipped the sign to “Closed,” then he crossed quickly to the pub down the street, the Hole in the Wa’. He downed a pint and then headed back across the road. He knew Pa was watching him. The top of Jackie’s bald head glowed, he knew, and the tips of his ears turned red, so strange and fierce did it feel to have his father looking down at him, though it happened every night.

  Jackie unlocked the door on the street and climbed the stairs. They were extremely narrow and at least a hundred years old. Ten or twelve steps up, they turned abruptly at a narrow landing. The walls smelled of ancient, salty limestone.

  Jackie let himself in through the kitchen, with its felted pattern of black peonies. Pa sat by the window in the front room.

  “Stepped across to the pub,” Jackie said.

  “I saw.”

  Jackie settled in the chair opposite. It had a view of the gasworks and the foundry. Between them a slash of blue, which was the Firth of Clyde.

  “But tell me, Pa, what happened here today?”

  Beneath his wild, unruly eyebrows, Pa squinted with malice. “That Sinnett boy, I caught him trying to pry the lock from Mary Clough’s bicycle. He didn’t know I could see him, tinkering like a thief. I threw a book at him, clear across the road.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Just about beaned him. ‘I’ll report you,’ I told him—but I wanted you to come sooner. The book sat there all day.”

  “Is it still out there?” The delivery bike stood where it always did, chained to the pole. “I can’t see it, Pa.”

  “It fell behind that car.”

  “That one there?” Jackie pointed to a Mini a full ten feet from the bicycle.

  Pa reached for his tobacco and began to stuff his pipe.

  “What book was it, Pa?”

  “One of your mother’s.”

  But all of the books had been Jackie’s mother’s. It was an easy sort of answer, and made Jackie think his father might have made the story up, just to have something to tell.

  The setting sun spread a pink flush across the whitewashed walls of the chemist’s shop.

  “I’ve got a problem for you,” Pa said now, by way of changing the subject. “A conundrum.” He lit a match and sucked on his pipe.

  Jackie looked up warily. When Jackie was younger, Pa had often scoffed at his slowness in handling tools. He remembered his father’s legs sticking out from beneath the sink, voice muffled: Not the monkey wrench, you dolt—the number two clamp. In such situations, Mums intervened, a flutter of white cloth, the smell of Jergens, puffy feet padding across the linoleum.

  The sun lowered another eighth of an inch. The room was cooler.

  “Go on,” Jackie said.

  “You won’t be able to solve it.”

  “Give me a try.” He lit a cigarette.

  “Better pour us a drink.”

  Jackie got the bottle from the cupboard, poured out two glasses and set them on the round table between the two chairs. “Now go on. A conundrum, you said.”

  “A veritable conundrum.”

  Pa took a sip, gasping appreciation for the burning in his throat, and then set the glass down. “I went out walking today,” he said. “Decided to visit Princes Street. Monroe and Sons.”

  Jackie felt his stomach tense.

  “Funeral home. In my day they were called undertakers, but that’s all changed. It’s a fancy establishment now, coffins laid out like sports cars. The younger Monroe boy was there. He owns the place with his brother. Helpful fellow.”

  “I’m glad, Pa.”

  “I must have spent an hour with him. His name’s Nick. His brother’s Bob.

  “That’s right—I went to school with them.”

  “I decided to get a simple vessel. ‘Universal,’ it’s called. White ash, brushed-iron hinges, lined in satin. Coffin shaped. Not one of those caskets.”

  Jackie sighed. Even when Pa was a much younger man, in his forties, he would talk like this, waxing lugubrious about getting old, as though he were the only person who would ever experience the pattern of aging. I’m old, he would groan at the supper table, so old, Margy. To which Mums would say, Nonsense, George, you’re not so old. Jackie, sitting between them, staring at the oilcloth, longed to meet his father’s eyes: You
’re ancient, he wanted to spit, but he kept his head down and ate his peas.

  “That’s good to be prepared. Though, it could be years yet.”

  “But here’s my dilemma. Nick Monroe says to me, ‘Where do you want to be laid out?’ He says I can be laid out in ‘the home’—that’s the room they have at the funeral place. But I won’t have it.”

  “Perhaps the sitting room at our house. Karen—”

  “I told him I’ll be laid out here. Right here in this room. He and Bob Monroe will bring the coffin up and set it out. I suppose they’ll need a table of some sort. I’ll be laid out with all the rigmarole for three days, and there’ll be a crying and a wringing of hands, and a general mourning will run up and down the land. The bells will ring and the women will wail.”

  “Pa!”

  “Then they’ll carry my coffin in state down the Princes Street to the Barony Church, and then on to the cemetery, digging a hole beside Mums. But now—and here’s my conundrum.” He set down his pipe and rubbed his palms together. “You’ve seen the stairs.”

  “What stairs?”

  “The ones you use every day, man. For God’s sake, don’t be a dolt. Well, here’s the thing—the coffin will never fit around that narrow bend at the landing. It’s too tight a spot.” With an air of triumph he sat back, looking at Jackie from beneath his white eyebrows.

  “Pa,” said Jackie gently. “You may need to get a slimmer casket.”

  “That’s their thinnest model.”

  “Should I telephone the Monroes?”

  “Don’t you think of it.”

  “They’re professionals, Pa. They’ll figure it out.”

  “They go by the book. I’ve got the dimensions right here.” He took a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket. On it he had pencilled measurements of coffin, door with frame, door without frame, hallway and landing. “I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon,” Pa said. “And I can’t find a solution, except perhaps to set up a pulley system from the window, lower the coffin in a canvas sling. It won’t be easy. And it would cost.”