by Rod Madocks
And we took him out, cooing sleepily, staring up at the gnarled branches of the cherry and at the roof lines of the city.
“Oh darling, thank you for showing me these. What shall we wish upon these stars?” Irina asked, then went on in a rush, seizing my hand, “Oh, I wish that we will be here next year to see them together once more. Oh yes, it shall be so. It will be so.”
We went back to bed as the first birds began to cautiously sound and she whispered to me then, “I feel that I am truly your woman.”
And we lay there holding tightly to each other.
Although these were precious weeks together, I can now see that within them there were signs of the trouble to come. Anton became so familiar with my presence and also his speech was improving so that “...Ack, ...ack” was recognisably becoming “...Ack, ...Jack!” And although sometimes we would make love while he obliviously played with his transformer toys nearby there was a growing mindfulness and consciousness. Once getting out of bed with my hair tousled up, I caught an unexpected image of myself in their bedroom mirror as I thrust my feet into her husband’s large slippers. I am not sure what I saw there: an intruder, a changeling perhaps. Shortly after that, uncharacteristically, Irina said to me, “You come in to me night after night, Jack but I feel I really don’t know you.”
*
Plip plop, the liquid from Max’s drip fell into a glass bottle hanging by a wire on a cage frame over his legs. He moved painfully as I entered his room.
Plip plop, more droplets fell. He gestured towards his swollen calves which emerged from the pyjama legs. His feet were bound up in support socks of a bright primrose yellow colour.
“I’m no better, boss, you see, but I’m still here! They have got a drain on me legs as they’re a bit puffed out like.” He smiled thinly through cracked lips and drew his hands over his bald scalp. His hair sprouted thickly on the sides of his head and I noticed that his nails were also growing with strange vigour.
A plate of jam sandwiches lay on his blankets; one of the sandwiches had a single bite out of them. He motioned to them. “It’s all I can keep down now, boss.”
I looked down at him as he lay there, strapped into pyjamas with Velcro fastenings for the ease of his uncoordinated fingers.
Plip plop. I sat cautiously on the chair by the end of his bed. He raised his head to speak to me then began to wheeze and flounder. He reached for a ventilator mask, fumbled with a nebuliser vial then pressed the assembly to his face. He gestured apology to me, with his face occluded by the mask. A steamy smell of eucalyptus permeated the room. I could see his eyes were closed as he gasped and I looked around his room as he continued to heave inside the mask. I saw the black-painted oxygen cylinder to which he sometimes spoke, thinking that it was a little child or perhaps a woman. There was a collapsed, folding wheel-chair and a cabinet on wheels holding tablet boxes and a plastic container of orange squash. A rounded, wooden crucifix lay on the cabinet looking like a knuckle or a root, worn smooth with sweats of agony, given him by the oncology chaplain. Biros threaded onto strings in some way with distinctive knotted loops were laid out in rows, as were the spare rubber tubes of his nebuliser kit. There was a shelf of video tapes and back copies of TV papers with neat annotations all over them in his spidery writing. He had decorated the walls of his little room with a copy of a red screen print of Che Guevara. There were also photos of his sisters’ children in school uniforms and a few tourist nick-knacks brought back from holidays by his sister while Max was locked up over the years.
Plip Plop. What was that yellowy liquid? I had no idea. He eventually put his mask down and steam emitted from his mouth like smoke. It was an eerie sight. I visualised him in the crematorium with the smoke emitting from his gaping mouth like that. He began to cough then he bent forward and covered his face again with the mask. I shifted my gaze to look out of his ground floor window. Beyond there was an undulating lawn framed by dense shrubbery. Max took his mask away with another jet of steam.
“Still here, boss,” he repeated and my gaze returned to him. He grinned faintly, stirred a little and sat forward to sip a drink from a cup with a spout. His bottle went Plip Plop Plip in a flurry and he grimaced and sighed.
I had spent the spring of that year looking for a place for Max to die as he faded in the hospital. Even Poynton realised there was no point in hanging on to him. He had become a burden with his endless trips to the district hospital which required additional escorts and his sweaty, wakeful nights on the villa and his groaning which disturbed the other patients. I had also begun to plan how to wring the truth out of him before it was too late. It had proved hard to find somewhere for him. Most secure residential homes took one look at his history and rejected the case. But I found a place: thirty miles away, a great square hulk of a place called Haven Court, built of blackened sandstone, set in overgrown park land. The old Georgian house housed eighty dementing elders. The doors and windows were wedged and alarmed up, and the stolid staff marched down the piss-stinking corridors, unfazed by the shrieks of the poor inmates. It lacked the sophisticated containment systems of the hospital, but it was obvious that the weak and sick Max would not even make it down the long, curving drive. Security came and looked it over and gave grudging assent. It was unusual, but everyone gave up on him as he was sinking fast.
The system worked surprisingly swiftly. A tribunal released him, the last papers were signed and the patient transport Merc rolled up through the old gates. The vehicle drummed over the weed-choked cattle grids, while he winced and groaned inside, then out at last onto the rutted drive, his first freedom in fifteen years. The staff unloaded his hospital things, cardboard boxes full of photos, scrap books of newspaper cuttings and his bunches of knotted string. His gentle sister, Theresa, visited bringing luxuries that were not allowed in hospital: lighters, cans of drinks, containers of deodorant and hair gel. He still fussed with his appearance.
My ostensible role was to monitor risk, check on his psychological wellbeing and to advise staff on how to handle him. As a senior member of staff I had no supervisor now, Dr Colt was long gone and no one would question my long absences from the hospital. I first drove up there in late May to make my initial visit to see him. Late lambs were frisking in the fields, swallows ranged through the parkland trees and the sycamore leaves were emerging like red fists. I sat in the car outside the Lodge and savoured the moment, opened my brief case to check on the contents and ran my fingers over the shiny casing of the taser. I called it my taser but it was really a home made stun gun. I had taken it off a psychotic man years before when working in the forensic community team. It had been made by a paranoid man, a skilled engineer, an academic living in a web of conspiracies. It had an anodised body with two sharp prongs projecting out of its snub, shiny body and it was wired up to an industrial capacitor. It could be plugged into the mains and charged up to deliver a massive voltage.
When I had originally taken the stun gun from the patient I had tried it out in my office. I rolled up my sleeve, not really believing that it worked, and then I just touched the prongs to the skin of my forearm. Wham! A terrific pain coursed down my arm and I lost all coordination and fell onto the office floor. I came to with my face pressed to the carpet. There was a smell of dust and a terrible metallic taste in my mouth. I was impressed by its power and I stored it away thinking that it might come in useful one day. I had no detailed plan as to what I would do with Max, although I was thinking that once I had extracted truth out of him, I could slam the prongs in to him. The shock in his weakened state would probably do for him and the prong marks would not be readily detectable with all his other intubations.
I had an addition to my preparations, stored in an inner pocket of my briefcase. It was a glass bottle containing GHB — Gammahydroxybutyrate, as the pharmacists called it. I had bought it for a stack of notes in a trance club in the city. I knew it would be popular in that sort of place because of its use as a date rape drug. It was colourless and odourle
ss and broke down in the body. It was a powerful depressant, rendering those that take it at first garrulous and over-confident and then in higher doses, hapless and semi-conscious. I had armed myself with the stuff thinking that I could slip it to Max to make him talk.
I rang the bell in the doorway to Haven Court. A slattern in a stained nylon shift let me in and bade me sign the visitors’ book with a biro hanging from a piece of grubby string. Person visited? Moribund Maxie. Purpose of Visit? To extract the truth out of him and send him to hell. Well, that was in my mind but I signed the book with ironic courtesy, “Oh you have come to see our Max, yes he’s no problem, not like some of our others,” the assistant chattered to me as she cast an exasperated, look at a bewildered, elderly lady who approached us and quavered, “Have you come to fetch me?” before being firmly ushered away, “How many times ’ave I towd yer Molly, back to yer room.”
We marched along dark corridors. Lights glowed on alarm panels and each set of doors were opened by complex levers, set too high for weak and uncertain arms to reach. I was led into Max’s room.
He was seated next to his bed, cheerfully shredding heaps of tobacco onto his bed cover. He nodded towards his piles of brown flakes, “I like the air to get to it before I use it.”
There was a scuffling sound and a workman emerged from behind a cabinet and yanked at his tool belt, which had pulled down the back of his trousers.
“Look cable … just installed!” said Max grinning and gesturing triumphantly to a large TV screen showing a history channel with black and white pictures of hundreds of soldiers running and falling. The matron of the place entered and plumped down heavily on Max’s bed as he hastily scraped his tobacco heaps into a plastic bag. She asked if he was comfortable and if there was anything that he required. She spoke to Max as if he were a hotel guest. He kept looking across to me with a sly smile.
“Not so bad eh?” he whispered loudly when her attention was distracted by another member of staff. I sat feeling bewildered. I had come to bear down on a dying man yet found myself unsettled by Max’s lively comic presence. I edged my assassin’s case under my chair with my foot. Max continued to chat with the matron as she perched on the inflatable mattress, built to ease bed sores, which gave under her weight and creaked whenever she shifted. A dietician bobbed in and engaged Max on his menu choices for the next day. It was obvious that the staff preferred talking to Max than dealing with the emptied-out minds of the other patients and indeed they brought out a cheery side to his personality. He joked and chaffed with them and whenever there was a lull in the conversation his eyes would be drawn back to the great TV screen which now showed ancient Egyptians in white loin cloths toiling up pyramid blocks, then a mummified foot looking like a twig, and once an image of the Haj swirling like a vast milky way around the black cube of the Kaabah at Mecca.
“I can look at history all day, I can,” he said and ostentatiously sparked up a rolled cig, sucked at it with hollowed cheeks then blowing out a blast with relish. The matron got up and opened the window; the TV engineer completed his wiring, demonstrated the controls for the massive set then departed. Somewhere an alarm sounded and the matron scurried away. Then, there was a pecking and scratching sound at his door which slowly opened and a bewildered, hollow face appeared with a puff ball of hair and a mouth like a soft pit.
“This is my room — why are you here?” The elderly woman announced firmly. “My Ernie is coming to fetch me you know.”
I ushered her out gently as her bunched fingers scrabbled at my arm.
“Them biddies are always coming to my room at night,” said Max, “lost, I expect, poor old souls.”
I thought how strange it was to see how genial and solicitous he had become once removed from the hospital. I was at last left alone with him. He seemed to be watching TV but then turned to me and his dark eyes met mine.
“So, boss, why are you coming to see me here?”
I drew breath, the toe of one shoe resting on my case as he went on, “I thought the hospital couldn’t wait to get rid o’ me, what do you still want from poor Maxie?”
Before I could answer and perhaps misinterpreting my silence as embarrassment he said, “Oh you don’t have to say it, I see boss, you want to talk to me about death and that, see me off alright.” He heaved mirthlessly.
“Yes, death and that,” I echoed.
I drove to see him weekly through spring and into the burgeoning summer. June came and still Max held me off as I came in week by week, dragging my briefcase, trying to close with him yet disarmed by his odd humility and the melting of his spiky persona. Each time that I saw him I felt a relief and reassurance that he was still there, and sometimes I even began to doubt the accuracy of his diagnosis. These were happy days really, in a strange way, waiting on Max to die that summer, only spoiled by the fear that he would slip away, leaving me nothing after all those years, when all connection and purpose had waned and almost dried up. Now Max was waiting for me, my prisoner, and sometimes I could barely wait to see him as summer flared in the city and I drifted through the streets, noticing all those things that were denied to him: the creamy platelets of the elder flowers, their acrid scent mixed with the car exhaust fumes, sunlight gleaming on iridescent puddles, and the sound of sparrows quarrelling furiously in the shrubberies.
Nights were consumed walking the streets, all the time thinking of Max, about how much time he had left. Sometimes I would be panicked by the thought that he would be gone in the night and I would advance my appointment to see him. I would pace the streets during the short summer nights, waiting for the morning appointment. I would pass girls going off into town for the night, as I did once with Louie long ago, scenting their perfume trails as they passed, listening to the clatter of their high heels as they ran for the bus, and thinking of the rattling stertor of Max’s laboured breathing in the night.
I would often be there early the next morning waiting by the gates to Haven Court and looking up the curving drive into the neglected grounds. I would bump over the grids and pass through the screen of contorted old trees to confront the hulk of the place and break cover once more to enter into Max’s world.
He would often greet me cheerily but with a touch of irony.
“You here already boss, is it that time again?”
Often in the early days he did not look too bad. He would always be well-groomed, with neatly pressed pyjamas, sitting up annotating his TV papers or turning the pages of a large scrapbook with the everyday world scrambling on busily around him as if there were no finitude. A radio would be on in the background as well as the TV news; there would be a smell of cooking and of floor polish. Often staff would scurry in to see him, like the dietician, saying “It’s Chicken Maryland for lunch. I can recommend it.”
“OK, duck I’ll look forward to it,” he would often respond, and then wave her out.
We faced each other, time after time, that summer, twice a week, sometimes more often. Frequently in the early days he would be alert, jaunty and scornful as I resolved to get under his skin and leech into his thoughts. My violent thoughts of ramming him with the prongs of the taser diminished. No, he was my prisoner. I had him, though he bobbed and weaved.
“Not today, boss. No talking today,” he would sometimes say, feigning weakness while at other times he would turn and snarl like the old Max.
“What yer after? Can’t I be left in peace? Bastard hospital, can’t leave me can yer?”
At other times he was more self-pitying. I used to think then that the personality disorder that had frozen his relations with others also had a protective function for him in his extremis; it shielded him from his own reality.
Yet, little by little, over the weeks Max came to look forward to seeing me, even to depend upon me, and his eyes would light up as I entered his room. He would ask about the hospital, reminiscing about patients he had known and talking about hospital staff in a fond way as if they were old companions. Once I told him about a staff nurs
e, younger than he, who had suddenly died of a heart attack. Max seemed genuinely shocked and distressed to hear it.
He also began to talk to me and to let out long-withheld things. I burrowed away at him week by week, asking him about how he was feeling, what he was dreaming about, what his fears were.
Max began to tell me a little about his family and his past. Once, replying when I asked him about the tattooed initials “LL” on his arm, “She were an old girlfriend. What a lass! I’ll fetch out a picture for you to see,” and he crouched stiffly to rummage in one of his cardboard boxes, hesitated, scrabbled about a little more, then drew a photograph out of one of his albums and handed it to me.
“Can’t find her picture but who’s this do yer think? That’s me!” he announced with a sly smile.
“When I was sent to a secure unit near Manchester, ’bout ’67, it was taken by my room mate who had a banned Polaroid, probably he had nicked it. I didn’t see my family for a year after I was sent there for thieving and the fires. I were thin as a rail then. I shared a room, we were given barley water as a treat, never could stand the taste of the stuff again.”
That picture of the lonely boy Max, already dreaming of the mayhem to come, seemed a prefiguring of his sick room now. A slim boy then, though the adult grew fat with his misdeeds. There was the same spartan order, a similar clutch of magazines over which he still liked to pore and annotate. Instead of the 1960s Grundig radio in the photo he now had another gadget that his sister had brought in for him and which he enthusiastically showed to me.