by Rod Madocks
“Look, digital! They call it the blue bullet MP3, or summat like that. Does other things too, can even record. The things they do now!”
He fell back gasping, and then smiled; he was quite euphoric that day because he had been newly given an oxygen cylinder and kept giving himself a blast from it.
He lay back on his bed; his toes curled up just like the boy Max in the photo.
“I were lovely then and I am lovely now,” he murmured looking again at the photo, then whispering again, “lovely then and lovely now.”
I sat watching him silently in the room. The mattress crackled as he turned to me and said, “That what I’m saying anyway boss. Heh, heh.”
He confided in me bit by bit as summer deepened. It was hard to say what he thought of me, but he was happy for me to stay while he was given a routine examination by the local GP who checked on all the patients there. The doctor had whisked into the room, uttering reassurances and began the ritual of tapping at Max’s bared back while listening through his stethoscope. His eyes met mine over Max’s shoulder and he made a small movement, shaking his head as if to indicate that there was no hope for him, while Max continued to chatter obliviously to him.
As Max deteriorated I was able to get him to speak more freely. Sometimes I would come into his rooms and go straight to turn the sound down on his TV, leaving the images to flicker in the background as he told me about the night’s pain, the aching beast of it, and his nightmares — diamorphine hallucinations.
“Do you know that stuff is the same as heroin? Who’da thought it? Me being let out of clink and given heroin!”
“What do you see when you are on it Max?” I asked.
“Sometimes faces, places, stuff that happened, mixed up like a dream,” he murmured.
“I dreamt the other night or maybe I remembered. I was a kid again in the sunlit kitchen hiding under the kitchen table. Seeing me ma walkin’ abaht making dinner, her white ankles moving and me thinking — that’s me mum. Also, a funny thing, I remembered when I was five or so, coming in to our front room at home her friends were sitting with her, chatting, faggin’ it. I remembered coming up to her and pulling at her blouse, wanting to suckle like as if I were a babby again. And she saying ‘Not now, you’re too old, yer daft thing,’ and them all laughing and screeching. I kept on trying to suckle, ’til she hit me, making my lip bleed then I ran away, wanted to hide, wanted to hurt. I can still hear them all laughing at me.”
Thus I scraped, scratched and ate into him, draining out his reluctant memories and this work made me feel so alive, so happy and condensed in a way that I had not felt since before going up the five steps. I looked forward to seeing him and often would rise at dawn, driving through the city in the light of early morning. I would park up by the iron gates of Haven Court, as the milk lorry came groaning up the road with its load for the souls caught up there, sometimes watching for a while as a mare and foal silently cropped in the waving grasses of a nearby, overgrown orchard.
To see him was a strange joy for we were both clinging to the same life raft. When he was still there after another night I would feel that we both had triumphed and he would greet me, “Bossman’s here!”
He would often offer me refreshments, which I never accepted for we were here to do business, and at other times he would ask solicitously, “You look tired, boss. Hospital giving you too much work?”
I would often set to questioning him as soon as I arrived because I had found that he was most vulnerable in the mornings when he would be shattered by the night and the diamorphine nightmares. I drew him through his childhood, his adolescence and his borstal time. Often, I would start him off then sit back and let him freely associate, waiting for his unconscious to reveal his secrets.
He steadily supplied me snippets of his life and even reflected on his predicaments.
“Don’t know why I am like I am, just born wi’ it I reckon.”
But he was still self-controlled enough to shy away from being too explicit about his offences, the fires, the things he did to girls and if I pressed him he could become taciturn and resentful.
“I’ve nowt for yer today,” he would sometimes say. If I pushed at him about what he had done to hurt the girls he simply bowed his head and gave out racking sighs followed by explosions of coughing.
At other times there was a chilliness about him and sometimes he seemed to be fizzing with a strange energy — and the old, intent, fierce Max would reappear, ignoring me and bending over his heaps of baccy, shredding and shredding at the stuff or making little notes in a jotter, which he hid away when I arrived. Sometimes I found him plaiting string and neatly knotting it into half-hitch ends around the oxygen tubes of his apparatus. Once I asked him what he was doing with his scrapbooks, scissors and gum.
“Oh just stuff I collect,” he replied, sliding his scrap book under his bed.
On days like that his eyes were obsidian chips in his broad grey face. I remember his intense interest when the nation was gripped by the mystery of two little girls going missing that high summer in Suffolk. Where were they? The nation waited in agonised suspense and Max watched keenly on his great big TV screen.
“I can tell yer,” he said to me, “those little ’uns they’ll be long gone now, done in. Hard to manage two of them together.”
He looked interested, even fascinated, by the searches for the girls and he would peer impatiently past me to look at the screen even with the sound turned off. I couldn’t get to him on those days and irritability sealed him off. Once I saw him snarl in fury as his oxygen tubes snagged on his bed frame and he spat out, “Blast yer!” to the care assistant who was rearranging them.
On days like that I sometimes had the scarcely endurable thought that I would fail to get anything from him at all.
Then, after an unbearable wait, the two girls were found dead. A school caretaker was arrested and sent up the five steps to the hospital as the nation’s hate turned on him. Maxie watched it raptly on the screen and then something seemed to give in him, his health took a down turn and his belly began to bulge out, his feet and legs puffed up and oozed fluid. He was started on the nebuliser and received more diamorphine. September arrived and a gale blew up, rattling the hospital roof tiles and the gutters. I drove over to Haven Court from the hospital and found that some of the old beech trees had fallen in the grounds and were already being burned off by the landowners in a backyard auto da fé. This was a special day anyway, but I felt very afraid that Max was going to escape me soon and I resolved to corner him.
It was the fourth of September and he was hurting. I could see the flesh had melted off the upper body and purple patches had spread onto his neck and shoulders.
He belched and grimaced, “Sorry! The medication is hell on the digestion.”
I sat down and moved my briefcase close to the chair. He kept trying to summon the staff on a buzzer but no one appeared.
“Fat lazy things, probably faggin’ it,” he said referring to the care assistants.
“Could yer,” he said holding out his arm for me to assist him. Then he stood leaning heavily on me to pee into a receptacle. While holding his forearm I could feel the bone beneath the skin and tried not to take in the sweet rotten smell of him. He stood for a long time as I pressed closely to him and realised that this was the first time that I had touched him. The teak-brown liquid slowly filled the bottle as we swayed about and then I eased him down to collapse onto his squeaky mattress.
He lay back, his head dark on the pillow, and muttered, “Can’t make sense of it boss. Can’t make sense.”
I moved my chair closer to him as he continued in a low voice, “Bad nights, bad thoughts. Dreams I can’t stand. The TV. Them girls in what’s that place? Soham.” He gestures to his bed where there was a heap of tabloid papers with pieces cut out from the pages.
“The missing girls. They found them. I reckon he did them quick though. Don’t think they knew much abaht it.”
“How do
you know that Max?”
“I should know. God knows. Interested like …. me dad liked little girls more than me though.” He groaned and shifted. I thought he was trying to get comfortable and stood up to help him with his pillows but he gestured me away, leaned over and scrabbled under his bed to fetch out one of his scrapbooks.
“Look boss, I’ll show yer something.”
He opened the stiff, heavy pages as he leaned on the bedclothes and I saw photographs, cuttings from papers and whorls of annotated script going up the margins. I glimpsed some names that I knew: Jeannette Tate, the three girls in the Midlands triangle and Mr Kipper. When I leaned forward to read the annotations more closely he dragged the book away from me.
“That’s enough now,” he said clasping the heavy document to his heaving chest.
“What’s this about Max?”
He reached for a plastic beaker and drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his scrawny throat.
“My sickness boss. The reason I did that poor old taxi bloke to get myself sent away so I couldn’t hurt others.”
“So there were others? Ones we didn’t know about? Stuff you did?”
He nodded and gulped.
“Yeah … Others. There was always others. Can’t bear to think of it now. Things I’ve done. Things we have done. Seems like a stranger did it, not me, those nights when I was young when I felt I had to do stuff. Hard to understand now. A bad dream.”
He lay back gasping. There then came a soft tapping at his window and we both looked up. Staff must have put out a little heap of crumbled biscuit on the window ledge. A wood pigeon was tapping at the crumbs. I turned to see Max with tears running down the lined, grey skin of his cheek.
“I’m scared boss.”
The soft tapping continued as the bird fed. Max went on, “Seems like a dream — the past. Seems like it never really happened.”
“It does matter Max. Real people were hurt.”
He looked at me, blinking weakly. Then I leaned down and opened my briefcase. I reached down and drew out a photo.
“Do you know what today’s date is, Max?” I asked softly.
He was a little puzzled and mildly irritated.
“Nah.”
“It’s the fourth of September. Do you know what you were doing fourteen years ago?”
“What are you on about?” he said, “I can’t be doing wi’ it.”
I held up the photo.
“It’s you, isn’t it Maxie? September ’86. Look at the tattoo there, the rose on your forearm, and the letters above it.”
“Look, boss, no head games now. What is this?” His old anger flickered up then he coughed, wheezed and grimaced.
“There is little time left Max. You have to tell me the truth.”
I pushed the photo towards him.
His eyes grew misty for a moment, and then they blinked clear. He snatched at the picture awkwardly with swollen fingers. Took an intake of breath and glared at me.
“Who is this? You think this is me? You’re nuts!”
His tongue flickered at his lips as I went on, “I’m here to help you to tell the truth about what has happened.”
“That’s bullshit, boss,” he rasped. “why do you want to know about this? No one has ever asked me this before.”
I sat staring at him as, far off, doors thudded high up in the building and a cleaning machine whined somewhere.
Max stared back at me intently then said, “Who are you boss? What do you want from me?”
“I’ll tell you something, Max,” I said, “I have been looking for you for a long time. I know that you are the one. I will help you by letting you tell the truth after all these years and you will help me by telling me what you have done with her. Where she is.”
“Where who is, fer gawd’s sake?”
Max responded with his voice rising to a shriek, then he lapsed into a bout of coughing and lay back on his pillows looking aggrieved and a little fearful.
My chest was pounding as I went on.
“A woman went missing, a young teacher. You were seen there. That is you pictured there at that time. It is now your chance to make it right, help me and help yourself by telling me what happened and what you did with her.”
Max lay very still. There was a pause then he seemed to be shaking and I could see that he was laughing soundlessly, his face wrenched up in an odd grimace.
“Oh ho, ho, that’s rich,” he finally choked out, “Boss, you’re a sly one, coming here all this time, after something that Maxie has. I should report yer.”
He stared at me then rolled away on his bed with a hissing sound from the inflatable mattress. He lay facing the window where the bobbing head of the feeding bird was still visible.
Max made a rasping, rattling noise and I realised that he was crying. He turned back to me and wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“I’m whauling an’ I don’t know why. You are the one who is wanting help from me,” he gave a choking, bubbling laugh. “Ha. Ha. Looking for Maxie to help the doc, who’d ’ave thought it.”
He lay back and gasped. We sat in silence for a while. My hand moved away from my open case and I thought that we had passed the most dangerous moment. The pigeon continued stubbing at the biscuit crumbs on the windowsill outside, its iridescent back rippled gorgeously in the sunlight.
Max suddenly clapped his hands with surprising speed and force and with a shatter of wings the bird had gone.
“So, you have been trying to find this girl all these years? An’ I have been running from my memories. We both live in hell then, eh boss?”
“Yea Maxie, we both do.”
“I want yer to go now, boss. I’m frightened of you. I don’t know who you are. I think now you are too like me with yer secrets.”
At that moment a care assistant, tightly buttoned into her nylon coat, bustled in to the room and started removing an empty oxygen cylinder on a wheeled apparatus. Max croaked out to her, “Come ’ere.”
I tensed to react but he just said, “Dr Keyse has to leave now, see him out Rosie, there’s a duck.”
I stepped out of the building feeling a strange sense of release. I was reluctant to leave the grounds and stood for a while in the empty, shattered Victorian peach house, looking down at the dried-out sandy beds where the plants used to grow and wondering at all the difficult paths that had led me to this place. I was afraid at what Max would do now that I had unmasked myself and I felt regret that our connection would be severed. He had become almost more real to me now than Rachel after all these years.
It was a frightening time after that, as autumn clenched and the young spiders threw out their webs. I did not know what Maxie would do or for how long he would last. Car alarms sounded in the night, shrilling like crickets, and I would start at the occasional thunder of a low jet as it veered off course over the city. The next days passed slowly and it was a relief when it was finally time to see him again the following week.
A young care assistant with face stud and short ginger hair slouched to the front door of Haven Court and said, “Max is not well. He told me he can’t speak to you.”
I brushed past the girl and headed for his room. I knew I could not afford to let him take control of the situation.
I found him huddled under a mesh of tubes. Two nurses were leaning over him, adjusting something, and I could just make out his gleaming scalp and closed eyes. Perhaps he sensed I was there because he stirred and opened his eyes. He turned his face to me without expression and made a gesture. I was not sure if it was a greeting or a dismissal. I stood watching for a while then left.
Thereafter he deteriorated more rapidly and an October phone call to the hospital informed me that he had been transferred to an oncology unit. I called there at dusk the same day.
It was a shock to see him after a gap of ten days. His face was jaundiced, his remaining hair a wiry inferno on the pillow. He lay in a crowded ward, peering up at a TV screen that hung from a bracket high on the
wall. It showed a 24 hour news channel and the images flickered: a bomb in Bali, snipers on the Beltway. He looked terrible. His neck was swollen and twisted over to one side, his eyes seemed opaque. He was all hung about with wires and lines and his sister, Theresa, stepped carefully over them where they hung by his bed as she rose from a chair and came to greet me.
Her usually serene face was shiny as if she had been crying and she said, “He has been speaking about you doctor.”
“What has he been saying?” I asked uneasily.
“He says how much he has liked seeing you these months. How you have helped him.”
I made no reply and she went on, “The doctors have told me that this probably is the end.”
We both looked over to him on his bed and he began to stir then moved his hand and crooked his finger, gesturing to me to come over.
I stood at the end of his bed, looking down at him, and he again motioned for me to come closer. I came forward and leaned my face close to his.
“Good to see yer, boss,” he whispered. “Given up on me had yer?”
“No, Max,” I replied.
He gave a little smile then said, “Listen boss, there’s a joke I want to tell yer … come closer.”
His wrist, with its hospital band recording his name in indelible ink, stirred and his fingers like a yellow, scaly, bird’s foot plucked at my sleeve. His face came closer to me and I caught the sweet, rotten, chemical smell of his breath.
“A joke, Max?”
“Let me tell yer. You’ll like it.” Theresa helped him sit up a little and plumped up his pillows, “Leave us duck for a mo’ would yer,” he said.
“Listen, boss …” I could hear the rasp of his indrawn breath like a file dragging on burred metal. “A man was running away out of the hospital before the operation, jus’ takin’ his kit and leggin’ it. He is stopped by the hospital porter, ‘What’s up mate?’ asked the porter. The escaping man replied, ‘I heard the nurse say “It’s a very simple operation ... don’t worry I’m sure it will all be alright”.’
‘Well what’s so frightening about that?’ said the porter, ‘She were just trying to reassure you.’