by Dan Mooney
“Ooooh, very nice,” she replied, in her soft accent. “When would you like to have it?”
“Tonight.”
“Well that’s very short notice, Mr. Monroe. Perhaps next week?”
“Tonight,” he said firmly, and he put on the face.
Angelica swallowed hard. He felt like a schoolyard bully. It surely wasn’t Angelica’s fault, but to Joel’s mind a line had been drawn, and however she felt about it personally, it had become a case of them versus him, and she was firmly in the “them” camp.
“Well…” she said uncomfortably shifting in her chair.
“Well?” he asked, making the face even harder than he had before.
“We’ll see,” she said.
“I have a daughter,” he told her in uncompromising tones. “I know what ‘we’ll see’ means. I also know that it’s what we use as adults to fob off children in the hope that their short attention spans will lead them down another road. Do you think I’m a child, Angelica?” He added a dangerous soft note to the words.
“No, Mr. Monroe, not at all…”
“Because I can behave like a child if you want? Do you want me to throw a temper tantrum and shit my pants?” he asked with a smile.
Her uneasy smile faltered now, and she looked at him as if seeing for the first time what the others had been talking about.
“Shall I throw all my toys out of the pram, Angelica? Do you want to see me screaming and crying, Angelica?”
The smile vanished, replaced by a guarded look that was part nervousness, part surprise.
“A movie night?” she said. “No harm in a movie night.”
Joel dropped his false smile and replaced it with a real one.
“No harm at all,” he assured her. “After dinner, maybe? In the common room?”
She nodded at him, looking relieved that he had gone back to smiling pleasantly. His victory was tainted more than a little by the rising guilt of behaving like a bully.
He thanked her and left, moving on to find his next accomplice, but when he arrived at her door he found himself unsure. His old-fashioned sensibilities kicked in as he tried to summon up the courage to knock at the entrance to Una’s tiny slice of Hilltop. A little voice told him that this was unseemly. Him going into the private room held by Mrs. Clarke, a friend of his deceased wife. It was the memory of poor Frank’s story that pushed him forward. He knocked gently on the door, but then worried that his knock might sound like an elderly person’s knock, so he knocked again but louder this time. The result was a pounding on the door that he had definitely not been going for. Now he felt embarrassed he’d knocked timidly once, and shook the door the second time.
Una arrived at the door looking vexed, until she saw him, and her expression was replaced by one of pleased surprise.
“Joel,” she greeted him. “Come in.”
She stepped back to let Joel in.
The room was decorated precisely the way he expected it would be. Little porcelain and china knickknacks, small framed photos and paintings of various birds, brightly coloured bedsheets, not the standard prison-issue ones, but ones that her family had brought in from the outside. A little bookshelf on the wall was piled high with various books, and more sat on the floor underneath it. He had never realised she was such a voracious reader.
“I need your help,” he told her.
She smiled warmly at him.
“Anything for you,” she told him.
He told her that Frank was feeling down, though he skipped over the why of it all, and that he had a plan. She laughed at him when he rather guiltily told her that he had bullied Angelica. “You’re terrible,” she told him fondly.
Her laugh was a little tinkling thing like a small bell ringing. It was, he had to admit to himself, the first time he had been comfortable in her company since Lucey died. Karl popped his head in at one point to check on her and tried to cover his obvious surprise at Joel’s presence. Joel hoped that it would go some way to mitigating against threatening to shit himself. When he finally left her room, Joel had regained the morning’s good form, but found that Frank remained a little withdrawn. Joel tried for a reassuring pat on the shoulder that made both of them uncomfortable.
Throughout the rest of the day, he tried to contain his excitement. Lily dropped off the package with a smile, heartened, he felt by seeing an energy and enthusiasm to him that was typically lacking. And this of course was the secret to Joel. When he had a purpose, regardless of what it might be, Joel was a ball of energy, a relentless perpetual motion machine, directly, inversely proportional to the energy and enthusiasm he could muster when his days were a long pointless march into night.
“You’re all fired up today,” she told him as she handed him the box.
“I’m a force to be reckoned with,” he replied fondly.
She smiled at him in a way she hadn’t done in as long as he could remember. Like she was seeing him for the very first time. Seeing a person underneath the cranky thing that had replaced the grandfather she had grown up knowing. An adult seeing another adult, seeing the person inside. He hugged her extra hard before she left.
The potential spanner in the works arrived when it was time for dinner.
“I’ll just take it in here with the telly,” Frank told him, putting on his best de Selby fake smile.
“No,” Joel told him, “you won’t.”
“Oh won’t I?” Frank replied irritably.
“Your company is requested,” Joel replied, channeling his inner de Selby.
“I politely decline,” Frank replied firmly.
“I’m not asking,” Joel replied determinedly.
“Neither am I,” Frank shot back.
Then the two of them stared at each other, borderline malevolently, until Frank finally sighed and got up to dress himself, muttering all the while about stupid pigheaded stubbornness.
Dinner couldn’t pass fast enough, and when it was finally done, Karl arrived in to roll down the large projector screen, and dim the lights.
Frank looked all about him in confusion.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
Joel just smiled at him, delighted, for once to have managed to pull off something that even Frank couldn’t see through. It was a good feeling to know that the old actor didn’t have all of the answers all of the time.
As Karl fiddled with the projector and the box of DVDs, Una stood up and tapped the side of her drinking glass to bring the room to a hush. All the residents, some of them in on the ploy and some not, went quiet.
Una took them all in with a sweep of her gaze. Lit softly by the lamps in the room she appeared grand, majestic even, in her hand-me-down clothes and calm, dignified manner. Joel smiled encouragingly at her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Una announced in her most pronounced speaking voice. “Thank you all for coming this evening. Tonight’s entertainment, courtesy of Joel Monroe’s granddaughter Lillian, is a celebration of the work of one of Hilltop’s most talented residents.”
The penny had dropped with Frank, and to Joel’s delight, he could practically see the fog clearing from around his friend as he sat up straighter in his seat and adopted a modest pose.
“His primary works include theatre and film, but most of you will know him from the long-running soap opera, Glory Days. Tonight we will enjoy a viewing of this talented actor in season four of the series, one of his strongest seasons, if I may say, in honor of this wonderful performer. Residents and nurses, I give you Mr. Frank de Selby.”
The room burst into applause, and Frank graciously stood up to accept. He bowed a little, smiled around the room, mouthed the words “thank you” over and over again. He could have been accepting an Oscar or a lifetime achievement award. Joel realised that if he’d seen such a display a week beforehand, it would have instilled in him a deep loathing for this flamboyant character, this gallant creature, but now he just smiled at his friend, and watched him enjoying another moment in the limelight.
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They settled in to watch each episode, and Joel found himself enjoying them, much to his own disgust. He could never tell Frank that, of course. Frank for his part smiled at the television and, sitting between Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Clarke, filled the audience in on little titbits from each episode. What actors were drunk on set, who was having affairs with whom off camera, ad-libbed lines and broken props. He basked in his moment, his cares forgotten for another day. In this moment he was the de Selby he had renamed himself to be, not the Adams that he loathed.
It wasn’t a fix, Joel knew that, nothing could fix Frank now, just as nothing could fix him, but it would help, somewhat, to ease them through another day. He smiled as he sipped his tea, enjoying the happy murmuring about the room, and the air of positivity that had come with it.
How comfortable some prisons can be, he thought to himself as he looked about at the inmates.
Chapter Twelve
They strolled through the grounds of the nursing home, Joel in a sharp tweed suit (which seemed, he felt, to add an air of dignity to him, something of the old formidable man he used to be), and Frank in his pajamas, dressing gown and a silk scarf with tiny golden fringes.
“That was nice of you last night,” Frank told him as they ambled.
Neither of them had spoken much in the early part of the morning. When Joel woke, Frank was already awake, reading his pretentious literature. That’s the word Joel reckoned Frank would use. He wouldn’t say book. He’d say literature.
They had sat in the common room in companionable silence and afterwards, without discussion or planning, had both retired to the garden for a morning stroll. Together they had walked down to the front gate, circled around on the small pathway that led them under the stand of trees that imperiously stood watch all along the borders of the prison home.
“Well…” Joel mumbled, uncomfortable with the compliment.
“Not like you,” Frank said airily.
Joel was grateful for the dig. He was a man unused to, and massively discomfited by, praise. The easy good-natured ribbing between them was much more his pace. It was a language that men of his generation had grown up speaking to one another. A language he’d inherited from his father who displayed his love for his children by patting them on the head from a reasonable distance and saying “well done.” Joel was about thirty when he heard a man say I love you to another man. It had startled him. He wasn’t aware that men were allowed to do that. He tried not to think about the ramifications of that. How that lack of affection, that derogation of language, could have left him here in this isolated place, how such language, such culture, might have made his friend an outsider. He was too old to change his ways now.
“Think I might be in a spot of trouble over it when The Rhino hears about it.”
“Oh?”
“I may have threatened to throw a temper tantrum.”
“I see,” Frank said, the start of a grin appearing on his lips.
“Might have told Angelica that I’d shit myself.”
The peal of laughter that burst from Frank startled several birds from their branches overhead. He watched them take wing as he wiped a small tear from the corner of his eye.
“The poor woman. I think she’s half afraid of you already you know,” he said finally, when he’d composed himself.
“Can’t say this’ll help,” Joel commented.
“What’ll you tell The Rhino?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t plan that far ahead, to be honest.”
“You worried?”
“A little.”
“The psychiatrist thing?”
Joel let the worry wrap itself around him again. The cloud that was never far away, always waiting for his mind to wander back to it, so it could envelope him, coalesce where he was and blur his ability to think straight. Every bit the prison that the walls of Hilltop were. They would send in the psychiatrist. He would know. Joel couldn’t hide it from him like Frank might have. They would know, and then they’d send him to a psychiatric ward to strip away the last of the dignity he held on to.
“They’ll send me away, Frank. They’ll ship me off to some shit hole, pardon my language, and pump me full of drugs and I’ll die there not knowing who I am.”
“Jesus, Joel.” Frank looked at him agog. “And they call me dramatic.”
“Don’t make a joke out of it. It’s not funny,” Joel said, ignoring the de Selby mask and talking straight at Frank Adams.
“All right, all right.”
“What’ll I tell her?”
“You’re sorry, for a start. You are sorry, aren’t you?”
Joel checked internally to see if he was sorry. He found a morsel of regret. Angelica was a nice woman, kind to him in her own way, and sweet with everyone else. She laughed a lot. He found her particular in-your-face brand of religion irritating, but she hardly deserved to be bullied. The tiny morsel of regret was born of the knowledge that if he wasn’t an inmate in Hilltop Prison Nursing Home he would never have behaved in such a way.
“I suppose I am a little.”
“Good place to start. Keep her off your back.”
Joel worried at it as they walked, kicking through the branches and twigs, pine needles and moss that blanketed the pathway under the trees around the end of the garden. This would be less of a problem if he was dead, he realised. He assumed corpses didn’t worry about the pointlessness of their existence, and they were singularly unconcerned if you were offended by them. If he had followed through with the plan when it first occurred to him. If he had swallowed all the pills, or fashioned a noose for himself from the cord of his dressing gown, he wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not he had upset the head nurse. He wouldn’t look at tall trees and think of sentinels guarding against his escape. He’d be free. Free from worry, free from the pointlessness.
He was lost in his thoughts until he kicked the root of a tree and looked up. He had never, he realised, walked this path before, and was surprised to see the wall dip a little, enough for him to see over into the backyards of adjoining houses.
The property that Hilltop occupied was large enough that several houses butted on to it, and in the May sunshine he saw children playing on swing sets and kicking footballs as they romped on little stocky legs under supervision of au pairs or child minders. He smiled as he watched them at play and for a moment forgot about dying, or nurses or guardian trees and just enjoyed the feeling of being a man walking in the woods.
“Over here,” Frank barked at him.
Joel had almost lost his friend in the small tangle of woods that marked the edge of the nursing home. Frank hadn’t wandered off, however, but moved into the corner where the walls marking the east and south of the grounds met. There, shaded from sunlight and damp from it, sat a large rock, propped up against the corner.
It was an opportunistic rock. A rock of convenience. It sat, a little weathered, with a natural groove in it that looked like a little step, the prefect height for either of the two elderly men to climb up and perch on the wall. The wall was built around the thing, as if perhaps, at some point in the history of the old grounds, there had been a point to being able to climb up on the wall and survey the surroundings. Presumably before someone had built a house next to it. The top of a flat garage roof was visible across the top of the wall, with its perfect stair-rock. Its only drawback were the thick brambles that blocked access to it.
From looking at the various gardens they’d passed, Joel knew the drop on the far side would be high. Too high for either of them, but the rock called out to be climbed, and the wall beckoned to be sat upon. There might be a way down the other side if they could get to it.
Joel looked at Frank who was peering skyward, craning his neck this way and that.
“What are you looking for?” Joel asked him.
“I feel like now would be the appropriate time for a ray of sunshine to pop through the branches and illuminate our little ladder over there.”
Joel scowl
ed at him.
“That’s the problem with you, and the sky,” Frank told him. “No sense of romance. Come on, help me clear out these brambles.”
Frank hitched up his dressing gown and started kicking at the brambles, but delicately in his slippers. With his clothes pulled up, his scarf around his neck and his delicate, clumsy attempts to remove the thorny, tangled mass, he looked like something that had escaped from a cartoon, and Joel found himself breaking down in laughter.
Frank regarded him coldly for a moment, a sharp jab waiting just behind his lips to put the laughing Joel in his place, but Joel’s laughter infected him, and a slow smile spread across his face as he looked at his fancy slippers amid the mud and brambles and the smile turned into a laugh, sheepish at first but growing as Joel wheezed through his own mirth. The two of them stood in the little clearing, next to their newly discovered rock, and laughed until neither of them could breathe properly.
Eventually the laughter subsided, and Frank picked his way carefully toward the rock, studying it closely, his smile still stretching across his old lined face. “What are we going to do?” Joel asked Frank in between little aftershocks of laughter.
“Right now? Nothing. We’re going to go back to the room.”
“Later?”
“Later we’re going to do some gardening.”
That answer was enough for Joel to know that Frank was done talking on the subject for the moment. He was planning something. Scheming, as was his way. It wouldn’t do at all for Joel to probe too hard into the inner workings of the little genius. Besides, it would ruin his grand reveal.
And so they wandered back to the nursing home, with thoughts of a stair-rock replacing thoughts of suicide. Joel thought they might look a little preposterous walking together, the tall man in the sharp suit next to the little man in his dressing gown and scarf, but instead of being embarrassed by it, he stood a little taller next to his pal, and smiled in the early morning sunshine.
*
That afternoon the repercussions of the day before came back to haunt Joel. The Rhino stood in front of him, in her immaculate uniform and her stern, unflinching face. Joel met her calm outrage with a brick wall of obstinate, one-word answers. Anything more and he feared he’d betray the fact that he was afraid of her. She might already know, but he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of showing it.