by Ruth Dugdall
It was intricate work. Precision was important. I didn’t want to make a mess. It would be hard to explain.
I lifted the knife, pointing the sharp blade towards him. I touched the steel to his penis, now only half erect, and slid the blade under, to the soft testis where I pressed. The tip of the blade described a throbbing vein in his scrotum.
He took a sharp breath.
Thirty-two
I removed the blade from Smith’s scrotum and slid it under the lip of the nail polish pot, loosening the dried rim, waiting for the release of red. Once loose I twisted the top off, revealing scarlet nail polish. Then, with the brush, I tested the red polish, painting a shiny drop on my fingernail. I went to where Smith was enjoying a peaceful daze, his bound body moving only slightly as he breathed, touched his flesh with my hand and stroked his body with the brush. I finger-painted shapes on his arms, his stomach, a moon and sun. I opened a second pot and painted the shapes I imagined on the cannibals as they danced under the lunar light, sated with human flesh. I paid special attention to his penis, drawing sun-like rays across his testicles.
“Do you remember,” I whispered, “the story you told me of the tribe in Papua New Guinea? This is our funeral rite, our Kuru.”
When my artwork was complete I adored the surrendered Jesus, marked with ancient ritual in red like blood. I knelt at his feet like Mary at the foot of the cross and worshiped him. By the time the nail polish was dry the sun was up. I untied Smith, as one would unswaddle a baby. I helped him into the house, and to the bedroom. He’d had only four drops of the drug but was disorientated, heavy. I laid him on the bed. Some still-wet nail polish made a bright smear on the white sheets, but I didn’t mind. The test had been a success.
An hour later I was seated on a wooden high-backed chair next to the bed, perched like a schoolgirl in a lesson, watching him. The colour had gone from his face, leaving white flesh taut over bones, shiny on his chin and cheeks. One arm was collapsed across the bed, the other close to his chest where he rested a sports-bottle of water. His head, propped by two pillows, was partly covered by a wet flannel, like a red flag across his brow. His eyes were closed.
Unbidden, the image returned. The memory I wanted to live in: I saw Mummy’s pale body, her cooling hand on her gentle stomach, the curling cheese sandwich on the plate. I remembered the softness of my lilac cardigan, how I placed it so carefully on her shoulder. I remembered kissing her, my head on her chest, my lips on her nipple like I was just a baby, and then her cold cheek. Smith’s drugged body released the memory of my mother. Two became one. I finally had that love, I was once again with Mummy and she was mine, just as she had been when I held her for those final hours. The outside world was forgotten, and her body was still warm. She didn’t belong to Mr Wilding then, or to the drugs. She belonged to me. I had that love again, thanks to Smith.
He was beautiful, like a marble figure in a crypt, the red marks telling stories, the smell of the polish taking me back. Like art, no longer flesh.
“I feel so tired,” he said, lifting his fingers slightly, dropping them to illustrate his lack of energy. He had no will to do anything but sleep. The drug had worked beautifully. My heart danced like a circus horse, knowing that we had created a perfect moment, a tableaux of love. Like all tableaux, all images, it had been beautiful to the eye. I worried about his scattered clothes, the jaunty angle of the chair. I itched to dust and polish, but forced myself to sit. I didn’t want to waste the moment, only to think afterwards that I squandered precious minutes because of my concern to set the scene. I didn’t want to miss the point.
“It’s like being drunk,” he slurred, “the room is spinning.” The window was open, and outside I heard a car passing, a woman calling to a child to mind the road. In my heart I held on to the feeling that Mummy was with me. I held on to love. “Tell me your real name,” he said, suddenly.
My racing heart lurched, missed a beat at the unexpected demand. “But we agreed. No details.” All the weekends that he had visited me I was careful to grab the post from the mat before he saw any envelope; I was meticulous in obliterating any signs of my name from my home.
“Please. I want to know.” He was weary, his voice quiet and slow.
“You do know. It’s Robin.”
“I don’t want to die without knowing your real name.”
How could I refuse? I would have done anything for him, anything at all, after what he had given me. “It’s Alice.”
“Alice,” he repeated, “in Wonderland,” and then he laughed, a straining wheeze that sounded painful and dissolved into a string of coughs, as he expelled the excessive air from his lungs.
“Can you help me to the toilet?”
I supported him as we slowly shuffled down the hall to the bathroom, his hands on my shoulders, and then helped lower him onto the toilet. Sick and pale, his naked body disgusted me. I thought of an old man at the nursing home where I worked as a teenager, who would sit on the edge of his bed every morning, saggy testicles hanging low as he ate his cereal. The degradation of age. Smith, even in his prime, had been brought to this same state by the imminence of death. It wasn’t the epic demise of a hero, he was no Hector, and this wasn’t the scene I wanted in my mind, especially as he opened his bowels with me still in the room. I made a hasty retreat, but he called me back, “Fetch a bucket! I’m going to be sick.”
I held the bucket under his head and, mercifully, he wasn’t sick, but the smell of faeces made me gag. I prayed he didn’t ask me to wipe him. I thought of Keats nursing his brother Tom, and steeled myself. I mustn’t be squeamish. I must remember the greater good we are achieving, and stop being pathetic about trivial details.
Once Smith was back in bed I felt easier. He closed his eyes and quietened, which was a relief. It was minutes, only minutes, before I realised that his breathing was shallow. I placed my head on his chest and listened for his heart. It was faint and slow. My own heart stepped up, over-compensating, and I shook his shoulders.
“Smith?” Oh God, I had given him too much. “Smith!” I slapped him, hard, around the face. His eyelids opened slightly and I saw the whites of his eyes, his head rolled away from me. I shook him violently, calling and shouting, knowing that it wasn’t right, not the way we planned it. He couldn’t die yet – June 16th was the agreed date.
He gasped, he gagged, and spewed his last meal all over my lap. “Alice?” he whimpered, an animal in pain.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that… I thought you’d gone.” I sounded furious, surprising myself.
“What if I change my mind?” He struggled to speak, and the sentence took an age to form. A tear slid down his cheek. “I don’t think I can do it. I don’t want to die.”
Thirty-three
It still surprises me how I panicked when I thought Smith had overdosed. I’ve always been calm in the face of death. Both times I had witnessed it. Death didn’t scare me. My fear was growing old.
After Mummy died my second meeting with Death came when I was sixteen. I took my final GCSE exam on the last Friday in June, and walked out of the school gates knowing I’d never return to that school, not even for my exam results, which they would post on to me. In September I would start my A levels at the local sixth form college, but before then nine weeks stretched ahead of me, a blank sheet. I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Time is only a luxury for a minority, those with funds and activities to keep themselves amused. I had neither and I was quickly despondent and agitated. I hung around the house mainly reading in my bedroom but occasionally disturbing Dad’s peace by demanding to watch the TV, or traipsing through Mum’s kitchen and raiding the cupboards, spilling fruit juice on the floor so she had to use even more bleach and kitchen scrub to keep the place immaculate. Although they wouldn’t ever say it, I was under their feet, disturbing the tentative balance of the house.
School holidays meant my father was also at home. The downside of him being a teacher was all that extra t
ime for family life. All those weeks to kill. Eventually, annoyed by having to watch the Open University programmes I liked when speedway was on the other side, Dad asked, “Why don’t you get yourself a job?”
I looked at him, mouth agape. I didn’t think of myself as a worker. But Dad persisted, “It’ll do you good. When I was your age I was working a full day as a carpenter’s apprentice and then biking to technical college every evening to study. It wasn’t handed to me on a plate, y’know, my education. I had to work hard to get where I am.” He said it defiantly, knowing that his status as a woodwork teacher impressed no-one. “It’s about time you started earning your own money.”
This dig was a reference to my recent insistence that the pocket money they gave me each week was in no way enough. Just one lipstick and it was gone, no change for anything else. And what about going out?
Lee had left school for good, and was working as a lifeguard at the local swimming pools. It wasn’t well paid but considering she only had two GCSEs to her name (design & technology and physical education, both grade C) it would have to do. Anyway she loved the water, and when she swam she was no longer awkward or odd. No-one taunted her when she was at the pool, the kids stopped running when she blew her whistle and the mums were grateful for her presence. She liked to feel useful. She never admitted it but I knew she dreamed of saving somebody from drowning. Maybe it came from being the only girl in a large family of boys, that urge to protect, I don’t know. Lee was happy and didn’t mind smelling of chlorine or that her hair went frizzy from the humidity. She’d just cut it all off and it suited her. At the weekends she wanted to go to the cinema and Pizza Hut, but I couldn’t keep letting her foot my bill. Or rather, I could, but really I shouldn’t. She made me feel beholden to her as it was, with those puppyish glances and that pained expression. It was like having a lovesick boyfriend who didn’t get that he’d been dumped but who proved useful when you were at a loose end. Dad was right, I should get a job.
Working in a shop didn’t appeal to me. I just couldn’t bear to put on a phoney smile and sell to people I didn’t like, things they didn’t need. So I took a job in a nursing home for old people.
The nursing home was close, just a ten-minute walk away, and I got the night shift which suited me just fine. It was better pay and meant less work, as the old biddies were tucked up in bed, or should have been, although one woman, Beattie, who had dementia, often disturbed me, asking when it was time for the wedding. She was all beady eyes and saggy skin, and in her white nightdress she looked like a ghost, legs like sticks. She really got on my nerves but as long as I made sure she took her pills she slept heavily enough.
Beattie hadn’t been pestering me that night and I was glad. The home was silent and I laid out the trays for the morning’s breakfast, following the instructions on the printed sheet taped to the kitchen cupboard door. Most of the residents shared rooms so the trays were a squeeze, what with prunes, cornflakes, juice and toast. I arranged the bread, brown or white or both, on the plate, all set for toasting. I put dry cereal in the bowls, ready for the milk. It was how I was told to do it, though now I think about it, it was unhygienic leaving the food out all night. By seven the next morning the cornflakes can’t have been very crunchy, but maybe that was a good thing considering most of the residents wore dentures.
After setting out the breakfasts, I doled out the medication which was labelled with the names of the recipients. I had to open each bottle or jar and put a plastic cup on each tray, also with the names on the side. Most residents had a shot of Gaviscon, and there were red or pink or white tablets for everyone. No-one was left out. I was sixteen and didn’t know what any of the pills were for. I was in a position of trust which I was too young to shoulder. I hope things are different now; no teenager should be able to dish out drugs like I did.
It was about half ten by the time I’d finished setting up the trays and that was my duties done. All I had to do then was be there, which was why the job was such a cushy number for me. I settled in the square hold of an armchair and pulled The Bell Jar from my rucksack. Eventually I dropped off. Technically it was a waking duty but I always managed to fall asleep, curled like a cat between wings of yellow Draylon. By my side was a travel clock, with the alarm set for a quarter to seven, and I normally slept through until then so I put the clock in my pocket. It was only tiny and I wanted it close enough to wake me.
I was disturbed very soon by shuffling feet on the corridor carpet. Sleep in conditions like that is never very deep, and I quickly realised that the looming figure was Beattie, no doubt about to pester me about some imaginary wedding she thought she was going to. I thought I’d give her another pill, but then I saw that she was holding something and whatever was in her hand was dropping to the floor. I got up, and walked towards her, but she seemed surprised to see me and her hand went flat on the wall.
I saw then what it was.
I smelt it.
I didn’t want to touch her, but I couldn’t let her daub shit on the walls, so I pushed her back, man-handling her towards her bedroom. I was disgusted, and wanted her out of my sight. In her bedroom the curtains were still drawn with the lights off and I kept them that way, not wishing to see the excreta. The smell assaulted my nostrils. If I saw it I would feel obliged to do something about it but if I waited until morning it would be someone else’s job. So, taking Beattie under her arms I hoisted her into bed and told her, firmly, to stay there. I shook her and she jerked back, damn her, starting to get up again and what with the smell and the fatigue and her fighting me I lost my temper. I hit her around the head. Not hard, just to make her sit back on the bed. How was I to know her head would be so wobbly on her neck that the blow would sound like an axe felling wood? Her head hit the pillow hard, her eyes tight shut, and I thought it was a good sign. I wouldn’t need to medicate her after all.
I hurried to the kitchen, washed my hands until they were red and wondered how successfully I could ignore the mess in the hall and lounge. I decided it was best if I remained in the kitchen which thankfully had one low chair. With my coat folded like a pillow I managed to get comfortable enough to doze, and I didn’t leave the kitchen all night.
The alarm woke me and I tried not to think about the dried faeces on the wall. I poured milk and toasted bread, carefully scraping margarine and marmalade until all the breakfast trays were ready. I began my deliveries, bypassing the hall, deciding to leave Beattie until last.
The men tended to be up, sitting on their beds or on chairs. The women usually waited for their trays in bed, enjoying this parody of hotel living. The ones who had more money, and therefore their own rooms, took the trays as if this being waited on was their due, eyeing the plastic medicine cups with restrained glee.
Finally, there was just Beattie’s tray left, with cornflakes, one slice of white with marge and three prunes (it always amused me that the number was stipulated. What would happen if I put an extra one in the bowl? In Beattie’s case, maybe I should put one less). But as it turned out, it didn’t matter.
She’d been dead for some time and rigor mortis had set in. We were supposed to do regular checks through the night though no-one said how often and I can’t have been the only one who didn’t bother.
She was on her side, in the same position I’d left her, curled like a baby. I put the tray on the bedside cabinet and sat in the space within the curve, looking at her. My feelings from the night before washed away, and I was only concerned with her face. The knotted tension, the folds of skin, the beady eyes, were all gone and she looked about twenty years younger. In fact, seeing her that way, I knew what she had looked like as a child. I was calm when I touched her. The cold skin yielded to my fingers despite the firmness underneath. Her cheek was smooth. I kissed her. I don’t know why, it just felt right. I touched her face, her cheek, and closed my eyes to think of the other time, when the woman had been the most loved, when the body I curled against had been Mummy’s.
That was my seco
nd encounter with death and it hadn’t been horrible. It had been fine. I knew death was something I could be happy with. For me it held no fear, only beauty. The promise of something better, removed from the slow wasting of daily life.
Maybe it started then, at sixteen, my desire to assist the dying. Maybe younger when I was just four, when I clung to Mummy in those precious minutes before the world intruded. But I didn’t invent Death’s beauty. This new-found philosophy was reflected back again and again in poems and novels. The final moments of life can be lovely. If you’re young or in love they can be perfect. Romeo and Juliet may be a tragedy, but it’s also a love story. Who wouldn’t choose the path of immortality over infirmity and dementia?
Mummy is always young and always beautiful. She is with me. Always.
Thirty-four
I’ll be sentenced in just three days. I dread it and long for it at the same time. I want it to be over. My days are a blank page and Lee is happy to fill them. I don’t ask her when she’s returning to Germany and she doesn’t ask me about my plans. Together we drift.