A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  “So what shall we do now?” Frank asked.

  “We plan my suicide,” Joel replied determinedly. “We just do it quieter and quicker than we had before.”

  “You are, without a doubt, the most pigheaded, most stone-stubborn creature I’ve ever met. And I’m glad I know you,” Frank told him lightly.

  He hugged Joel without warning. And Joel hugged him back.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Joel Monroe, as previously stated, was a man of tremendous energy and vitality, when he had a purpose. His purpose now, under the threat of removal or evaluation, was death. As Thursday ticked on by he read, he even pawed through the snooty, pretentious crap that Frank read, looking for inspiration. He had convinced himself that everyone in theatre killed themselves, all the time, and that the inspiration for his final liberation would come from a theatre play. He read Shakespeare, and something called a Sophocles, and leafed through thick hardback tomes whose names he didn’t even bother to learn. He read in the morning and through the afternoon. He read with his lunch in the common room and with tea out in the garden. Once or twice his eyes absently strayed down the hill to their rock, and he found himself thinking of outside again, and wistfully, he’d remember just how much he had been enjoying himself, before they were arrested as it were, by his daughter.

  He also tried to ignore the questioning looks he was getting from the others around. Mighty Jim looked positively perplexed by the arrival of literature into Joel’s life. Nurse Liam dropped in and out of the room in the early evening about five times more than was necessary just to check if Joel was still reading. Pleasingly, Una Clarke was looking at him askance, too. Having been in her room some days beforehand, and seen all of the various books she was reading, he thought she might appreciate seeing a more scholarly side to him, and he tried not to smile as she swept into their room in the early evening, ostensibly to have a chat.

  “What on earth has gotten into him?” she asked Frank, as Joel, aghast, read The Lonesome West.

  Frank, for his part, had spent the day with his notebook, scribbling, whipping through pages, glancing occasionally at Joel, as if to measure him for dialogue or action. He put down the book to address Una, with a warm smile.

  “Took me a mere couple of weeks to train the man. I’m pleased to say.”

  “You did a fine job. Really, though, what’s wrong with him?”

  Joel tried not to hear them. Everyone was acting as if something was terribly wrong with him. He tried not to let the irritation show. Though a grain of worry popped in that so much reading would only reinforce the opinion that he was going insane.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” Frank replied with a laugh. “Well, nothing more than usual like.”

  “You’d tell me if there was, wouldn’t you? I promised his wife I’d look after him.”

  Her words made Joel sit up straight. It had never occurred to him that his wife might have been planning his life without her. She had slipped away so suddenly that it seemed like she couldn’t have. That was why Una was always so nice to him. That was why she looked after him, and took an interest in him. He had been downright rude to her at times, he knew that, and regretted it doubly now. He felt an extra twinge as he realised that perhaps that was the limit of her interest in him.

  Probably for the best, he thought, since the finish line loomed so close now. He did think it might be nice to go out with a kiss, though. Something romantic, something warm. It had been too long since he’d shared that kind of moment with anyone. He had thought that maybe Una might… but now it seemed it was something else.

  How lucky he had been, though, to have had a wife so concerned, so loving, so giving. It made his heart swell again with pride for her, and break a little more for her absence.

  “She was a great woman,” he said, without looking up from his book; he didn’t need them to see the tears forming in his eyes. He suspected Frank knew anyway.

  “I should like to have known her.”

  “You’d have loved her,” Una told him without taking her eyes off Joel. “A warm woman. Kind to a fault. Welcoming all the time.”

  “I got lucky,” Joel said, in the understatement of his life.

  “You did,” Frank told him, and in his voice a trace of wistfulness. A hint of something missed.

  “She was terrific,” Liam said, as he came through the door. He had heard it all.

  “Pills?” he asked.

  There was a tone in the question, one that had been missing lately, one that Joel appreciated. It wasn’t a demand, it was a request, and kindly offered.

  “Please,” Joel said, laying the book down.

  Nurse Liam placed a glass by the bedside and dropped the pills next to his lucky penny and his My Tools, My Rules sign. A show of trust. He wasn’t going to stand there and babysit. Joel nearly smiled. Nearly.

  “And for you, kind sir,” he said to Frank, laying the pills out.

  “Thank you,” Frank said, his eyes dropping, as they did in Liam’s presence.

  “No,” Liam said kindly, lingering by the bed for just a moment. “Thank you.”

  Joel was watching the interplay between the two when he caught Una’s reaction, a quiet, satisfied nod. An indication that she saw something she needed to see. Joel didn’t have the depth of understanding for people that Frank did, but he caught the significance in her look all the same. She knew. He had underestimated her again. Did she know Frank was gay? She surely knew that Liam was. She had been here long enough, and as Joel had eventually learned, she was too sharp to miss that. She saw something pass between them. Joel checked to see what it was. Frank hadn’t looked up, his de Selby mask was still on, but there seemed to be something of Adams showing in the small, almost frightened smile on his face. Joel couldn’t have recognised what had passed between them, but if it was making Frank happy, he was in favour of it.

  Joel smiled at his friend across the room.

  “Think I’ll turn in now,” he announced to them. “While the going is good.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I have to tell you, Joel, we’re really happy with you these last couple of days. And Nurse Ryan seems to have come around, too,” Nurse Liam told him on Saturday morning.

  He had come in as Joel sat with his book on his lap, his eyes vacantly staring down the long drive to and across the gardens to where the rock was. He was thinking about it.

  Joel had spent all day Friday reading again, turning pages of Frank’s collection looking for inspirational suicides. He had been quiet as a mouse. The absurdity of being praised for quietly looking up ways to make a statement by killing yourself wasn’t lost on him, and Joel chuckled at Liam as he offered him breakfast.

  He was thoroughly uninterested in knowing that his docility had earned him a gold star from the jailers and the respect of the warden. He wanted to spit out his pills just to spite them all, but more and more he thought he saw someone on his side in Nurse Liam. A man who wanted Joel to be happy, to have what he wanted out of his remaining years, but was caught between his duty to his job and his desire to see his residents thrive.

  “I’m glad,” Joel told him, as if it mattered to him in the slightest.

  Liam patted him encouragingly on the leg as he prepared to withdraw. He couldn’t know that Joel deeply and bitterly resented the patronising pat on the leg. A pet for a good doggie. He stomached it, because that’s what he said he would do.

  “It was a nice thing you did the other day,” Joel told Liam as he turned to leave.

  The nurse glanced at Frank’s empty bed; the raconteur had left to have breakfast in the common room with Una.

  “What’s that now?” he asked, feigning ignorance.

  “What you did for Frank.”

  “I didn’t do anything really.”

  “I don’t fully understand it, but I think it was a nice thing. It lifted him.”

  “You’re a pretty surprising guy, Joel. Sometimes I think you live in a little world of your ow
n, but you don’t miss much, do you?”

  “I miss too much, to be honest, but not that one.”

  “It’s pretty amazing seeing you two together. How close you are already. You really love him, don’t you?”

  Joel was hugely uncomfortable with the word love. Especially where it related to a gay man he shared a room with. Liam saw it, and laughed.

  “But then you’re also you, aren’t you?” he said.

  There was a trace of bitterness in the question. A hint that for all his own comfort in his own skin, Liam had encountered a thousand Joels, a thousand times. Each Joel bringing his own level of discomfort or distaste into Liam’s world, hurting it with chip after tiny chip into the man’s personal defenses.

  “Only thing I’ve ever been,” Joel told him. He tried to sound contrite, sorry for the way the world was, but it came out sounding privileged, authoritative.

  Liam nodded at him with a wry smile.

  “You’re all right, Mr. Monroe.”

  “Am I?” he asked, trying not to let his anger show. Another compliment on his good behaviour, on what an excellent house pet he was now that he was casually accepting his place.

  “I know it’s hard for you, Joel. I know that,” Liam told him. “We’re not trying to make it hard for you. The exact opposite. And I’ll do everything I can to make you as comfortable as you can be.”

  While you wait for me to die, Joel thought to himself. But he stayed quiet and forced a smile.

  Joel plunged back into his suicide research, reaching for something that would inspire him, that would show him a way to do something profound so that those left behind would pause, and wonder if maybe there was a better way to care for the other residents, that there was a better life to be offered to them. A lesson in his passing that would stand the test of time that he himself could not. All the while the threat of the psychiatrist loomed behind him. It was his greatest fear, that he’d be found out, that someone else would delve inside him and find within him the lethargy, the fury, the hopelessness and the thin, occasionally wavering wedge of desire to end it all. And that when they found it, they’d lock him up for real. No rock at the end of the hill, no Frank, no Una. It terrified him to his core.

  *

  In the early afternoon, sometime around three o’clock, Joel sat in the common room, fighting to another stalemate with Mighty Jim.

  “He goes back down to the plain,” Jim told him earnestly as they drew to the game’s inevitable conclusion.

  Joel sighed heavily as he placed another knight. He could already see it. Four moves, maybe five. His only hope now was a calamity from his opponent. A calamity he knew was never coming.

  “He can wholly understand why he is being sent to jail,” Jim told him with a cunning smile.

  It was clear and sharp. Lacking the vacancy around the eyes that typically marked Jim Lincoln.

  “Are you in there, Jim? Is there something on the surface there? Something I could maybe talk to?”

  “The workman of today works every day in his life,” Jim told him, the cunning smile gone, the vacant, empty eyes returning with a heaviness that almost hurt Joel to look at. A moment of lucidity perhaps? Or perhaps a nothing.

  Frank sauntered into the room, still in his pajamas, with his dressing gown on and his scarf, this one mostly white with a thin pattern of brown waves running through it. As the old man took his place, Nurse Liam arrived, his coat on, ready to finish his shift.

  “Half day today?” Joel asked, still playing the good dog.

  “Back in tonight for the night shift,” Liam told him.

  “No rest for the wicked and all that,” Frank said conversationally.

  His body language had changed toward Liam. Something about it spoke of an ease and a comfort, but Joel recognised the de Selby mask even if his friend was wearing it a little looser. Whatever had passed between them had been lovely, warm, but not enough to erase decades of defenses.

  “This is for you, from the staff,” Liam told him, presenting him with a neatly wrapped box.

  “What’s this now?” Frank asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Just a little birthday gift. Enjoy yourselves.”

  Joel kicked himself as the nurse made his way out the door. It was Frank’s birthday. He didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, but there it was. His friend’s birthday and he hadn’t even mentioned it. Perhaps birthdays were nothing to Frank. Years without a family to celebrate them, without a wife or a husband or anyone to bring him cards or make him dinner or throw him a party. Perhaps birthdays were just another reminder that he lived an isolated life. It was an awful thought to consider, and Joel hated it. He wanted to make it better. Show the man that he had someone who cared now.

  Almost wistfully Frank unwrapped the present and removed it from the small box. Joel knew what it was long before the lid came off. Some presents are just too perfect for some people.

  Delicately Frank lifted the silk scarf from the box, smooth silver material with roses in white and maroon woven finely into it.

  “I’m sorry, Frank, I didn’t know,” Joel told him.

  “Not to worry, old boy,” Frank assured him, still admiring the scarf. He handled it carefully, almost reverentially.

  “What age are you?”

  “Seventy-nine.”

  Joel tried not to let his shock show. Frank was older than him. Something about his debonair attitude, his casual nature had made Joel think he was a younger man. A much younger man. That he had three years on Joel had never occurred to him.

  “Now I feel bad. I got you nothing.”

  “I didn’t want a fuss made. If I wanted a fuss made, I’d have been banging on about it. You know me.”

  The opportunity was there to perform, to play the victim, to turn in another trademark de Selby performance and condemn Joel for his thoughtlessness in a tirade of cutting, hilarious remarks. Frank ignored the opportunity, and let him off the hook. Joel couldn’t decide if the decision was out of deference to Joel’s fear of impending examination, or his determination to see himself out the door of life, or because the de Selby mask was off and in its place stood a lonely, isolated Frank Adams, opening a birthday present for the first time in a long time.

  Either thought was repugnant to Joel. He didn’t want to be deferred to, or wrapped in cotton wool by the man who had become his best friend; nor did he wish to see that man lonely, neglected.

  Joel glanced about the room. All he could see was neglect. Old furniture still useful but in bad need of repair or restoration. An old television set, donated so long ago that Joel was certain its like couldn’t be found in any shop. He knew that was in his head. He knew some people were happy at Hilltop and the rot and ruin that marked the place for him was a symptom of his own impulse to suicide, but that didn’t change his opinion of the place a jot.

  The neglect that he saw was so much more than the building or the furniture; it was the people. The nurses didn’t neglect them. Society did. It was as depressing as it was infuriating. He looked at the wistful, happy smile on Frank’s face. It seemed all at once so pathetic. This gift, this sop from the staff who were complicit in hiding them away from the world. He felt his anger and his frustration as an energy inside himself, a galvanizing, cavalier force that ignored his fears, that ignored his trepidation.

  And all at once Joel had an idea. A dangerous idea, but a fun one.

  “Why don’t you and I go to town and have a pint to celebrate?” he asked.

  Frank’s face lit up a little, but he quickly extinguished his excitement.

  “Probably not a good idea. We’ve been doing well. Keeping a low profile. It’s been a lovely quiet little world for the last two days, why rock the boat?”

  “Don’t be daft. It’s your birthday. We should be celebrating.”

  “Joel, I don’t mean to question your already feeble grip on sanity, but don’t you think that’s a little nuts?”

  There he was, Joel thought, there was Frank. Sharp. Witt
y. Jovial.

  If Joel got his way they’d never get to spend Frank’s eightieth with each other. He’d be done. Moved on. His mortal coil shuffled off. This would be his last chance to spend a birthday with the best friend he had newly acquired.

  “No, as a matter of fact I don’t,” Joel told him. “My tools, my rules.”

  “You’re about one more outburst from a psychiatric evaluation that might see you locked into a mental institution for good, and you want to go poking at the bear?”

  “I don’t want to poke any bear. I want to have a pint for your birthday.”

  “Joel, dear boy,” Frank started, lowering his voice to conspiratorial levels, “all things considered, and taking certain future plans into account, don’t you think this will just be bringing unnecessary attention down on you?”

  As he mentioned future plans he drew a rather exaggerated thumb across his throat. Joel smiled at it. There was a point to what Frank was saying, no doubt, but all Joel could think about were the faces, the look of pure disappointment on Lily’s face, the casual discomfort on Chris’s, the withering condemnation from both his daughter and The Rhino. He loathed the faces, he loathed the power they held over him. He had agreed to be the good dog, to lie down and do what he was told, and he’d taken the pats on the head for his good behaviour, though uncomfortably, as if somehow he owed to these people a performance of good behaviour, as if he should simply accept the control over his life and learn to stomach it. He felt an almost animal growl begin deep in his belly.

  “I will not have my life dictated to me by anyone. Not on my friend’s birthday.”

  Frank looked at him, really studied him for a moment, and his face broke into a large and mischievous grin.

  “You should never underestimate the sheer pigheadedness of some people,” Frank told him, adjusting his scarf. “How do we do it?”

  Joel felt the excitement in him begin to bubble. He would earn back the smiles and the flicker of respect he’d seen from his granddaughter. He would do what he wanted, what he chose to do. He would act on his own agency and not the patronising, relentless monotony of life on Hilltop.