The King of Spain

by Robert Ford

  Sam stumbled back a couple of paces down the cloister. Hal’s face was energised, open and inviting - he seemed to be enjoying the role of antagonizer, indeed was made for it. A minute passed, longer perhaps. More than anything Sam wanted to confront this wretched little man, but he could not, was incapable of it. Never had he been so appalled by his own lack of fight and with every passing second he wished it wasn’t so.

  ‘Come on then, Dickie. Spit it out.’

  ‘My name’s not Dickie,’ Sam said, his voice flat, with only a hint of the anger that was its foundation.

  ‘Like I care,’ Hal spat back at him.

  Sam tried to gather himself; within the context of a life, the incidents of that day had been minor and yet for some reason this was different. Sam had not come all this way to be taken advantage of, to be pushed around. Inside his mind small pockets of rage exploded, individual insurgencies that piled one on top of the other, graduating, bending Sam away from his most trusted escape route, the path of least resistance.

  ‘You could have helped me today,’ said Sam, trying to keep his temper in check.

  ‘You didn’t need me. You didn’t need help.’

  ‘But that poor man. He was dying and you did nothing.’

  ‘Dying? Ha! That’s a good one. Fellow must have had a reaction... But we’re all about the greater good here. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘What? A reaction to what?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Dickie.’

  Sam thought for a moment, trying to catch up to him. ‘You drugged them.’

  ‘Administered peace, my son. They’re already ‘drugged’ - I just peppered the dosage a little to ease us all through the morning. So where’s the harm in that? You’re just pissed off because you think you did all the work today.’

  ‘You could have killed someone! Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Hate to break it to you, chief, but these people are virtually indestructible. Their bodies are, anyway. Wish that I could have taken a few of ‘em out. For their sakes.’

  In certain respects Hal was repellent, but at the same time, he seemed so full of ragged energy that it was hard not to like him. What galled Sam the most was that he was beginning to see the logic in Hal’s argument; the morning shift had been special and the residents seemed happy. Perhaps the man that had choked wasn’t in danger, not really. Whichever way, Sam had had enough. ‘Piss off.’

  Sam shouldered past, making his way along the cloister. And then moments later he heard from behind the soft pad of Hal’s lolloping trot, followed by a small hand that came snaking over his shoulder.

  Hal looked across at him as he drew level, smiling now.

  ‘Not bad, not bad. Sorry to badger. To be so crude. But one can’t be too careful around here. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Ah. Well. You will. Come on, it’s Friday night. Buy you a drink?’ Hal tightened his grip, a squeeze that read as an apology, a challenge, a declaration of friendship perhaps.

  For a moment Sam hesitated, torn between extreme dislike and a certain levity, gladdened that he had withstood such trauma as Hal could create. ‘Guess I could have one?’

  ‘Yes!’ cried Hal, his voice echoing along the cloister. ‘We have a winner!’

  THE REC

  The ‘Rec’ was a large, rectangular space within the staff areas of the house that had been requisitioned to form something of a social room, a place for the handlers to relax out of hours - a bar, a sanctuary, above all a place removed from the stiff realities of working life at Edge Hill.

  The room itself was arranged around a ‘lost and found’ aesthetic, a scattergun approach to interior design that consisted of mismatched tables and chairs arranged with no particular regard for style or function. At the far end of the room was a small bar rendered from chipwood and bamboo screens, the South Pacific meets Dagenham. Next to this was an antique record player that the staff kept constantly employed with a broad selection of scratched vinyl, while from the high splodged ceiling hung a tired-looking glitter ball, stuttering about its axis.

  It was ten o’clock and the Rec was busy, packed tight with handlers celebrating the traditional end to the working week; not that weekends really existed in their shift-dictated, residential world, but the ritual served almost as a marker, a handle on the passing of time.

  Sam, Hal and Dr Fell attended the bar; after two hours of committed drinking both Sam and Hal were looking the worse for wear, all slurred speech and stained white uniformed tops. Dr Fell, however, seemed unaffected as he slowly, professionally, embarked upon another enormous binge.

  ‘You see there really is no one worth talking to in this god-forsaken place, Dickie, remember that. No one. Impossible. Really.’ Hal straightened up from a slouch at the bar.

  ‘Thanks,’ said the doctor without conviction.

  ‘Exactly. Even the good doctor here is not much when it comes to company, to informed opinion or debate.’ Hal leaned across to Sam. ‘He is, if the truth be known, something of a fiend.’

  Hal bent back away, righting himself so that he might gulp at his drink. Sam meanwhile peeked past the end of the bar to where the doctor sat fingering through a palm full of loose change.

  ‘Rum. I think it would be better all round if we had rum now,’ Dr Fell said, almost to himself .

  ‘Well, that’s not much of an endorsement,’ said Sam, turning back to Hal.

  ‘Endorsement? What’s to endorse?’

  ‘This place. These people, I guess?’

  Hal looked about the room, peered as if through a thick haze.

  ‘What? These people I would not endorse. Not even under duress, if you could imagine such a thing.’

  ‘But it must be OK? I mean, how long have you been here?’

  ‘Longer than I care to remember.’

  ‘So you like it here. You stayed, at least?’

  Hal took a moment, considering his response. ‘Edge Hill is something of a mire. And you’ll do well to not get stuck in the mud. What you have to remember is that this is a place founded on necessity. That this facility, this institution, can only be seen in context. That it is, in fact, simply better here than the next best place, which is terrible, which is a life in the city, a life of unemployment and poverty. So do I like it here... I like that I am not elsewhere. For an elsewhere I do not have, nor would I want to consider...’ said Hal, making just about enough drunken sense to pass these sentiments off as profundity.

  ‘Yes, very good. Carry on,’ said the doctor. Engaged solely with his own imagination now, he stroked the bar, as if petting a small horse or dog.

  ‘Quite, doctor. Well said,’ Hal called over. ‘We must carry on. We must endure. And by that I mean we must have something rather more exotic to drink. Ale is not, after all, cosmopolitan. As are we.’

  ‘Kir Royale,’ Sam whipped the back of his hand across his mouth, feeling the effects.

  ‘Yes,’ came Hal’s enthusiastic response. He lurched round so that he faced the bar.

  ‘Alan. Kir. Royale. Alan!’

  Alan was the beleaguered bar manager at Edge Hill. As the former landlord at the local inn, he had been forced to find work at the facility when his pub shut through lack of business. Bipolar and with a tendency to stockpile antique weaponry, he had a thick neck and sharp features that gave him the air of a large preening bird, half man, half kestrel.

  ‘I’m serving, Hal. Serving.’ Alan harboured the look of a man who had seen this all before and was in no mood for such capering.

  Hal squinted along the bar to where two young male handlers stood waiting for their drinks.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Hal ventured, standing straight up, shoulders back, chin thrust out. ‘Would you mind?’

  The two handlers looked at each other, then at Hal.

  ‘‘Scuse me?’

  ‘Would you mind terribly?’ Hal drawled.

  The larger, more simian, handler slapped his friend on the chest, laughing in high staccat
o bursts. ‘Mind terribly, what?’

  Hal turned away from the two men. The end of the bar nearest him was reserved for glass collecting, and at this point in the evening was rather full. Leaning over, he surveyed the haul, nodding, a sign of appreciation. Then, taking an empty pint glass, he decanted various slops in order to create a heady mixture of booze that was dark brown in colour and smelled vaguely of disinfectant. Sam watched in awe as Hal held the pint aloft, assessing its form.

  ‘An excellent year...’ he said to himself. And then without further ado he eased back his head and devoured the pint in one.

  Behind the bar, Alan sensed trouble and stepped back into the shadows, snacking nervously on a half-empty packet of pork scratchings. Dr Fell, meanwhile, climbed down from his stool with the minimum of fuss and strolled off towards the exit, happy enough, mumbling.

  Hal set the glass down and turned back to face the handlers. They were big men both, looking down on him with skewed, aggressive features as if observing a foreign species for the first time.

  ‘Would you mind terribly...’ repeated Hal.

  ‘Yeah?’ came the larger handler.

  Hal stepped back a pace, reeling, the liquid he had just consumed taking a little time to settle in his already bewildered stomach.

  ‘Would you mind terribly...’ Hal’s eyes widened as he managed to recover himself a little. ‘Would you mind terribly getting the fuck out of my bar, you enormous, staring imbecile?’

  ‘You what!’ The man came forward a couple of steps towards Hal, his friend holding him back a touch with a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Steady, J, steady!’

  Half turning, Hal raised an arm and pointed at Sam. ‘My friend says that you sniff the residents’ undergarments. He says he caught you. Several times. Sniffing. Knickers.’

  ‘What!’ The larger handler was straining at the leash, his anger now deviated towards Sam, who, for his part, had moved back and around the corner of the bar, hiding behind the wooden pillar that marked its edge.

  ‘No. No, I didn’t. Really.’

  ‘Knicker sniffer! Knicker sniffer! Knicker sniffer!’ Hal began to chant, delighted, skipping circles around the two large men.

  ‘Knicker sniffer... da da da... Knicker sniffer.’

  The two handlers fixed Sam, full of menace.

  ‘Hal?’ Sam croaked, a flurry of rapid blinks.

  ‘Knickerrr snifferrr!’

  ‘Hal?’

  It was the larger man who snapped first. He stormed past Hal, shoving him with huge strength on the way, a push that sent him into something of a spin, ricocheting around the bar as he lurched from lap to table to chair to, finally, floor, collapsing full length in a heap, moaning.

  All eyes were on Sam and Hal and the handlers, the assembled staff members cheering on the brawl about to happen, while behind the bar Alan rattled a Civil War era pike, shouting sporadically, ‘OUT! OUT! OUT! OUT! OUT!’ - although a good deal of these squawked objections were mitigated by the Rec’s antiquated sound system, now squeezing forth the melodic strains of I Only Have Eyes For You by the Flamingoes.

  The two handlers scrambled across the room, snarling and shoving, groping with thick hands as they swung at Sam who, despite both the quantity of booze he had consumed, and the ungainly, angular poke of his long limbs, proved to be something of an acrobat. Via a fortuitous network of human shields he ducked and weaved before bounding across several tables towards the exit. Glass broke, furniture splintered, voices were raised as events began to verge on the riotous.

  Hal picked himself up and dusted down his tunic, which was now a grey brown across the front. Peering through the carnage, he realised, with much delight that the cavalry had at last arrived in the not inconsiderable form of Morris, who stood by the door reasoning with the two handlers, while behind his huge back Sam cowered just out of range of their furious gesticulations. Recognising an opportunity to take their leave, Hal sprang into action. Bounding across the Rec with a surprising turn of speed, he grabbed Sam by the arm and fairly bundled him towards the exit. The two handlers were up in arms, shouting and kicking in their general direction, but such was the massive presence of Morris that they were unable to give chase, instead having to watch Sam and Hal scamper out through the exit, away into the slim staff corridors outside.

  ‘Knicker sniffer!’ screamed Hal as they ran off along the passageway. ‘Knicker sniffer...’

  For a time they wandered through the dark deserted cloisters of the main house while behind them drifted the doctor. They had found him slumped beneath a coat stand, a bottle of lime-coloured pills grasped between thumb and fingers of his right hand.

  ‘The better part of valour is discretion.’ Hal spread his arms out wide, addressing the darkness that engulfed the far end of the cloister. ‘In which better part I have saved my life.’ He shouted theatrically before collapsing to the floor in fits of laughter.

  Sam shook his head. ‘That was completely unnecessary,’

  ‘Come on, Dickie. You loved it. Loved it. Look, let me make it up to you. I’ll show you the dorms. You need to see them sleep.’

  Together the three of them laboured up the spiralled stone steps, an ataxic climb that led them into the upper cloisters; these were in fact mirror images of the passageways below, lined on this level to the left with rooms, ten or eleven of them in total occurring at regular intervals, while from the right the additional elevation allowed lilac streaks of moonlight to spill through the small, stone-lined windows.

  Leaving the doctor to his own devices, flopped upon the floor near the steps, Sam followed Hal over to the first white plastic door.

  ‘Shhh.’ Hal cautioned as he held out an arm, inviting Sam to take a closer look through the large round window cut into the door at eye level.

  Sam moved over and peered inside, cupping his hands so that he could better see though the glass. The room was large and square and minimal in its conception. From the ceiling hung several orb-like bulbs which soaked the room in a peaceful lavender light, a pulsing ambience that lent the room a subaquatic calm. The floor was given over to ten or so hexagonal chambers; made of a white plastic composite with a dark brown padded inlay, they were sealed on top with retractable perspex domes, through which Sam could see the pale, laminate faces of the sleeping residents.

  The chamber settings could be altered with the use of a control module that was built in to the side of the base. This panel not only controlled the temperature, but also regulated the residents’ sleep as well as the release of the various chemicals that were an essential part of their daily corporal rejuvenation, their epidermal upkeep. Indeed, such were the strictures of the programmes that ran these chambers, that an extraordinary effect was produced: the residents all breathed in sync, in and out, in and out, over and over again, the uniformity of breath eliciting a sound something like a slow purr, a soft communal gasp that was just audible to Sam through the glass of the door.

  It was a strange and sombre sight, unsettling, though not without a beauty of its own. Gradually, as the minutes wore on, Sam’s mind began to flirt with the approximation between the sleeping residents and the lot of his mother, alone in the house, in her own, cheap situation. And all of a sudden Sam felt very sad, very alone and, above all else, very drunk.

  Spinning away from the door to the other side of the cloister, Sam bent down so that he could place his arms on the bottom frame of the window in front of him.

  Hal was by this point sitting on the floor with Dr Fell, smoking a cigarette with great relish.

  ‘Alright there, Dickie?’ said Hal, sending two distinct plumes of smoke coiling from his nostrils.

  Sam did not reply. His head dropped between his outstretched arms and he spat upon the floor, an attempt to cleanse his mouth of the strange metallic taste that had developed.

  ‘Oi!’ called Hal. ‘You wretch.’

  Sam felt very strange indeed; his vision had clouded, an alarming tinnitus taking hold of his ears.

&
nbsp; ‘Don’t feel so good,’ he managed to utter under his breath.

  ‘If you can’t handle your drink...’

  Hal was mid-sentence when Sam vomited copious amounts of viscous fluid all over the floor, over his trousers and his shoes.

  ‘What the -’ Hal scrambled to his feet, smiling. He had broken the new boy.

  Sam clung to the window frame for all he was worth.

  ‘This is a disgrace, Dickie. I will of course have to report you to the appropriate authorities.’ Hal began to pace up and down, arms behind his back.

  ‘This kind of behaviour will not be tolerated at Edge Hill retirement...’

  It was as if Hal had been struck a terrible blow by an invisible hand. He collapsed to the floor clutching his abdomen, writhing until he, too, was violently ill. Indeed such was the ferocity of his regurgitations that they almost shook Dr Fell out of his opiate-fuelled reverie.

  Almost, but not quite.

  After several minutes the doctor, sensing that something was amiss, clambered unsteadily to his feet and tramped away along the moonlit corridor, his diminutive frame receding until at last he disappeared into the darkness at the far end, leaving Sam and Hal alone. Groaning. Ill.

  THE KING OF SPAIN

  The area within the infirmary reserved for the staff was a small annexe, a scruffy section where the paint peeled, damp penetrated the walls unchecked, and the ragged linoleum floors clumped and bulged. Despite this, the ward itself was a pleasant enough space, with large bright windows and creaking, metallic hospital beds, an area that seemed to retain something of its previous incarnations - a store room, a stable, a chapel, a morgue.

  Sam and Hal faced each other from either side of the room, propped up in bed with huge banks of white pillow. The medical staff had diagnosed a double case of Ape Flu - a variation on the classic virus that presented with symptoms that included vomiting, temperature, fatigue, rapid but temporary hair growth from the nose and ear, and an angry, reddening inflammation of the buttocks. The viral hair growth had been most pronounced, both men now made to look a little like rag dolls whose lining had diminished to the extent that their stuffing had started to protrude. To add insult to injury, they had both been dressed in the long white infirmary night shirts, a design plucked from the pages of A Christmas Carol, it would seem.