A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  Inside the bar, sconces illuminated the beige wallpaper, old but clean, and reflected from the highly polished dark wood bar top. A small handful of patrons sat here and there at the collection of low tables with their accompanying soft-topped chairs, an eclectic mix of social classes and styles of dress and states of inebriation. Behind the counter the barman flicked through his form guide while the low drone of the horse-racing commentator intruded on the room from the television.

  Joel and Frank had taken their places at the end of the bar, staring up the length of the place, their pints of stout resting on the now damp beer mats. “My Tools, My Rules” resting nicely alongside them. Joel liked the vibe of the bar, the sort of everybody welcome atmosphere that saw suited elderly gentlemen sit with down-and-out-looking middle-aged men with a handful of young kids, not even twenty, dressed like idiots, drinking ironically.

  “What’s so wrong with that idea?” he asked Frank indignantly.

  “It’s ill-conceived.”

  “Is it possible for you to say anything without overcomplicating it?”

  “It’s a stupid plan.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s ill-conceived.”

  “God dammit, Frank.”

  “All right, all right, here it is.” Frank took a breath. “If you’re arbitrarily picking landmarks to hang yourself from, then you clearly don’t understand the point of making a statement. If you had told me that the clock represents the inexorability of aging or death, or the false sense of progress achieved by the passing of an hour, then I’d have told you it was fine…”

  “Okay then, that’s what I meant,” Joel interjected.

  “No, you didn’t, you fraud!”

  “Maybe I just don’t express myself as well as you, but that’s one hundred percent what I meant.”

  “Liar. You can lie all you like, Monroe, but you’re not fooling me, and you’re certainly not fooling yourself.”

  Joel opened his mouth to retort, but the popinjay was right. Worse than being right, he wasn’t even being smug about it, just quiet and tolerant. Joel took a swig from his pint and sighed morosely.

  “I’m running out of time, Frank. I really am. That’s not a joke about the clock.”

  Frank barked a short laugh.

  “Of course it’s not. You’re not clever enough to have come up with that.”

  Joel shot his friend a most unfriendly look.

  “A bloody psychological examination. They’ll send me away, or worse, lock me up.”

  “You’re doing a fine job of hiding it so far,” Frank assured him.

  “Not really,” Joel replied, thinking of all the recent run-ins with the staff, and the presence of The Rhino in his bedroom. “It has to be done before they get their chance with me.”

  “Maybe you’ll get away with it, you know. I don’t want to see you rush this.”

  As he spoke Frank scribbled notes into his journal of ideas, his thin wrinkly hands a blur as he scratched out his thoughts. Joel envied his mind, his creativity.

  “Ach,” he said, “you just want me to stay alive so that you can get more of that play done.”

  “No. Not even close, but I’ll tell you this for absolute certain. When the right idea comes, when it really hits you, you’ll know all about it. When you finally get it, you’ll really get it.”

  Joel let that thought marinate as he called for two more pints. He thought about Frank and his creativity and his plays and his acting, and wondered for himself, what that life might have meant for him. He could have worn some scarves and spent his days with theatre folk drinking in the afternoons. He might have had friends then, more than just his wife, though she had certainly been friend enough for long enough.

  “Good health,” Frank said, proposing his toast.

  “Or not?” Joel replied, lifting his glass.

  “Excuse me, gents?” a low voice piped up from behind them.

  Turning on their stools, Joel and Frank found themselves looking down at two elderly men, one in his Sunday best, the other, rougher around the edges, and both well into their seventies.

  “Help you?” Joel asked.

  The man with the wrinkled and spotted shirt lifted a deck of cards.

  “More fun with four?” he said.

  Frank was moving before Joel, sliding out of his stool and positioning himself at the lower table; his face was already breaking into the wide grin of the de Selby mask, preparing for a show. Joel smiled at his friend, ever ready to meet new people, ever ready to engage, always on stage. Joel still ached a little from the act of lowering Frank down on to the coal bunker. He had realised some years before that aches and pains were generalised now, a sort of all-body aching. He was slower than Frank to climb down from the stool.

  “Name’s Roberts,” the dapper one said, extending his soft, wrinkled hand. “Leonard Roberts.”

  “Joel Monroe,” Joel replied with a brief handshake.

  “This is Darcy. Mick Darcy. Most people call him D.”

  Joel shook the other man’s hand, a harder, tougher hand. It was like shaking his own hand.

  “De Selby is my name,” Frank told them.

  “Adams is his name,” Joel corrected.

  “Frank de Selby,” Frank continued, unperturbed.

  Roberts and Darcy watched him press his hand to his chest in introduction with amused glances.

  “You get used to him,” Joel told them.

  They smiled even wider.

  Joel felt the afternoon slip by him in a pleasant reverie. They drank pints together, all four of them, and Darcy became D, and Roberts became Leonard, and by the time they had reached pint number five, the barman was bringing their round without being prompted. Joel felt like he was the lord of the manor. The other customers came and went, but for four or so hours the four men played five-card stud and gambled for pennies. Joel covered Frank for the gambling, and was surprised, though perhaps he shouldn’t have been, to watch his friend scoop hand after hand.

  It was the casual way he played, still regaling the table around him with the made-up antics of his youth, full of bullshit stories about the women he’d chased. In his stories he was the hero, and his lack of anything approaching modesty should have been off-putting but wasn’t. Joel knew them for the lies they were, but he wasn’t about to interrupt, and despite knowing them for false, he found himself caught up as Frank recalled a time when he had his face slapped by three women at a dance, only for all three of them to wind up arguing over him by the end of the night. Mick and Leonard lost their money in good grace, caught up in The de Selby Show. Joel just enjoyed the moment.

  Around the end of pint five, the moment had passed. There was no incident, just a simple, unspoken acknowledgement that their time together had come to an end. Leonard and D slipped on their jackets, and with hearty handshakes and warm smiles, they bade farewell, with an invitation to do it all again next week.

  Joel and Frank sat back to finish their pints.

  “You think we’re in trouble when we get back?” Joel asked eventually.

  “Almost certainly, but what exactly are they going to do? Ground us?”

  “When do you think might be a good time to go home?”

  “Whenever we want. We’re masters of our own destinies. Captains of our own souls.”

  “So no rush, then?” Joel asked.

  He had felt his trepidation and worry almost leak out of him as the day wore on, the fear of being caught dwindled as Hilltop had vanished from sight behind them on the bus. In its place was the certainty that they’d be facing a verbal firing squad when they got back to the home. Typically this was the kind of thing that Joel Monroe worried about. His love of obeying the rules and being honest gave him a distinct anxiety about transgressions, but since he was planning on killing himself anyway, he found it harder to muster up the worry that he’d usually have for such incidents.

  “Perhaps a pint somewhere else?” Frank suggested.

  “You don’t l
ike here anymore?”

  “Variety is the spice of life.”

  “Even I’ve heard that one before,” Joel told him.

  “I’m sinking down to your level,” Frank replied loftily as he swung his scarf over his shoulders and marched out the door.

  Outside, the afternoon sunshine stabbed at them, and the fresh air threatened to make a fool of them both after five pints each. The street bustled with people in the afternoon going to and fro, shopping, meeting friends, running errands. Joel found himself smiling at the bustle of it all, the energy around him; he enjoyed the feeling of being a little drunk among a crowd, the sense of being part of a vibrant city. Most of all he was enjoying the sense of not being cooped up, of not looking at life from the outside, hidden away at the top of a hill with nowhere to go and nothing to do with his day.

  He was enjoying it right up until he heard a voice call out.

  “Dad? Is that you?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Be cool,” Frank told him under his breath and smiled welcomingly at Joel’s daughter.

  She was walking down the street toward them with Lily, both burdened with shopping bags. She looked well, Joel idly thought, with her blond hair hanging loose, in smart clothes with two lovely little earrings. She also looked angry.

  “What are you doing here, Dad?”

  “We’re just out for a…” Frank started.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Adams. Dad, what are you doing here?”

  Joel cursed his inattention. The pleasing familiarity of the street had tricked him. It was the street where Eva’s workplace was located; her office must have been no more than a hundred yards away. He had been enjoying his stroll so much he had completely forgotten, and his sense of comfort had come not from his fresh sense of perspective on the world, but from the fact that he had walked this street often enough in the years before.

  He could have kicked himself.

  “Having a pint,” Joel told her coolly to cover his disappointment. He checked his words after he said them for any sign of slurring. She didn’t need to know how many they’d had.

  “Did the nursing home let you out for the day, Grandad?” Lily asked, a small smile playing about her lips. She wasn’t angry; she was impressed. Joel got a lift from it. At the very least his granddaughter didn’t think he was some kind of imbecile.

  “Yes, they did, my dear,” he told her warmly.

  “Time off for good behaviour,” Frank added.

  “Did Nurse Ryan tell you that you could leave, Dad?” Eva asked, clearly angry.

  “Not in so many words,” Joel hedged.

  “Did she or did she not?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether she did or not,” Joel replied, feeling his temper beginning to fray.

  “I think it does,” Eva replied.

  “Well, it doesn’t. I don’t need to be told by her, or by anyone else when and where I can go.”

  “Dad, this is ridiculous, what if something was to happen to you?”

  “Like what?” he replied hotly. “Like I enjoy myself for an afternoon? Heaven forbid.”

  “Do you not remember what happened last time?”

  Joel recalled the TIA. He had been dizzy. He tried to recall if he had eaten anything that morning but couldn’t. Something very temporarily restricted the blood flow in his brain. Deprived of oxygen for just a few moments, brain cells began to die. Joel lost his balance and went down. The next he remembered was a crowd around him, a man’s mouth all over him and another man hurriedly phoning an ambulance.

  They told him the next one might kill him. Two years later and he was still painfully alive.

  “Well, you once threw up in a shoe shop and you’re still allowed out shopping,” he bit back, as if these two things were comparable.

  “I was eight, Dad.”

  “So what? Things happen. Doesn’t mean I have to be a prisoner all my days.”

  “Not this again. You’re not a prisoner Dad. The home is a nice place, with nice people, not a prison.”

  “They could be the loveliest prison guards in the world, but if I’m not allowed to leave and they lock me into a room at night, it’s still a prison.”

  His temper was really boiling now. A perfect little afternoon ruined by a chance encounter. He would have had to face the music anyhow, but now he’d be shuttled home immediately. It wasn’t fair.

  “Don’t be so bloody dramatic,” Eva snapped at him.

  “Don’t you take that tone with me, young lady.”

  “Okay, easy now, Joel,” Frank said, trying to calm him.

  His smile had slipped into an uneasy grimace. Lily’s, too. They were both hugely uncomfortable with the showdown unfolding in front of them.

  “I’m not a child, Dad!” she snapped back.

  “Oh, would you look at that. An adult who resents being treated like a child. What a surprise.”

  “If you didn’t act like one, you wouldn’t be treated like one.”

  “Well, if you didn’t act like such a bitch, I wouldn’t treat you like one either.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them.

  It was a nasty, low, rotten thing to say. A verbal slap. The kind of one that he hated. The words had stung her, too. His little Eva. His daughter. She looked furious and hurt and startled all at once. He thought about apologising. Thought about it and then discarded it. He wouldn’t bend now. She’d backed him into a corner.

  She stared at him for a long minute, holding his gaze. He stared right back. Lily and Frank shuffled awkwardly on the spot.

  “Lily,” Eva eventually said, in a low furious voice, “wait here with your grandfather. I’m going to get the car so I can take him back to the nursing home.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Joel replied.

  “Yes, you most certainly are.”

  Her will was iron. He could see it in her. She had always been a stubborn child. He remembered her refusing to leave his workshop when she was ten. She couldn’t be told what to do, or where to go, by anyone. Lucey had despaired. When Eva had become a young woman she was uncontrollable. A rebellious, stroppy child. Joel had watched Lucey tearing her hair out in frustration, yet he had done nothing. That, he thought to himself, might very well have been the beginning of the gap that grew between them. He let his wife try to tame their errant child, and he worked. That was his contribution. Work. Nothing more.

  Now he had no work and his willful stubborn child was determined to lock him up.

  “Perhaps we ought to head back, pal,” Frank offered uneasily.

  Joel wanted to bark back. He wanted to say no, to take off and head for a new pub, to enjoy being part of a society again, and not separated from it by virtue of his age, but he recognised the pointlessness of it. He also knew that whatever trouble they were in would only be compounded by standing his ground now. And trouble might mean the psychologist. He just needed to hang in there for another few weeks.

  “Go get your bloody car, then,” he told his daughter. She nodded, in satisfaction, and turned smartly in the direction of the car park.

  The drive back to Hilltop was conducted in silence, with Joel and Frank sitting in the back and Lily and Eva up front. Frank tried to add some levity once or twice as he climbed into the car but quickly gave up, dropping the de Selby mask and sitting in the uncomfortable silence.

  Joel’s furious sense of injustice was tempered somewhat by his granddaughter. He could see her face in the wing mirror next to the passenger seat as his hands played with the sign he’d lifted from someone else’s garage. The tilt of her head and the sparkle in her eye suggested something to him. Amusement, certainly, she found the whole thing quite hilarious, but wouldn’t risk her mother’s ire by laughing; but there was something more. It was a feeling more than anything else, a sense of something that had been lacking. He thought it might be respect. He hoped it was. If he had still been a praying man at that time of his life, he would have prayed for it.

  Unli
ke her mother, Joel thought, she may not see the cranky old man who won’t simply do as he’s told. She could see something else. Something she liked. Something she might even admire. He clung to that feeling to keep the humiliation of being escorted back to his prison from eating him up.

  He glanced sideways at Frank and found him clenching his jaw in a bid to keep from smiling. Frank too felt the wrath of Eva was not something he should draw upon himself, and so he stifled his amusement, but it was plain to see. Between Lily in the front seat and Frank in the back, Joel found himself almost caught up in the humour, and like several hours before, suddenly discovered that there was a laugh bubbling up from his stomach. He looked in the rearview, catching the reflections of his daughter’s eyes, still hard and furious, and found that equally funny. The laugh bubbled up to the surface, and he coughed to cover it. It didn’t work. Some of it found its way out.

  Frank, who had been working hard to keep the smile from his face, was caught unaware and he snorted a laugh, which he tried to cover by fetching a handkerchief from his inside pocket. Lily was entirely unprepared for Frank’s snort, and her shoulders now twitched as she tried to keep the laugh in.

  She turned her head entirely to one side, so that her mother wouldn’t see the smile that she could no longer stop, and her shoulders began to gently rock as she laughed a silent laugh. Joel watched Eva’s head turn incredulously to her laughing daughter. The outrage Joel saw there caused him to guffaw out loud, which caused Frank to crease over, his loud booming delight filling up the whole car. Eva opened her mouth to admonish them, but suddenly Lily erupted, no longer able to contain herself.

  The three of them sat in the car in hopeless gales of laughter as Joel’s daughter waited impatiently, furiously for them to quiet down. She was determined to have her say on the matter.