A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  He pinched the nose and tried again, forcing his life force into the corpse’s lungs. He pushed on the chest and begged it to breathe some more.

  Eventually, after an eternity, or ten seconds, or somewhere in between those two, Joel Monroe stopped. He could feel the little body, already seeming so frail where it had once been full of energy, wilting under the pressure of his hands. He hated that feeling. He hated the feeling that somehow he might be hurting Frank. Though he certainly was not.

  He had been lying on his side, dozing lightly, facing out the window when he heard Lucey whisper for a cup of tea. He had never heard her voice again. Never knew that sound again.

  Now he looked down at the still form of Frank de Selby, once known as Frank Adams, and he bawled his grief and sorrow at it. Some part of his brain desperately searched for the last words Frank had said.

  “You’re a perfectly good man,” Frank had said.

  Joel would never hear the voice again. It would be lost to him. A remembered thing, no longer real. No longer present.

  He bawled again then, in a sort of animal grief he couldn’t control. The voices he’d never hear again. The voices that had left him behind, alone, again.

  It wasn’t until a passing couple on their way home from a night out heard the sounds of sobbing and moaning that anyone called the police.

  Joel barely saw them. He cried and desperately fought to remember the sound of Frank’s voice.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Joel lay on his side, facing out the window of Hilltop, wrapped in a blanket of grief and shock, staring at the spot where he knew the rock was. Behind him the shot glass sat among his little collection, his gift from Frank. Lying on his bed, in between the rock and the shot glass, Joel stared down the yard at the former. He had no idea why he was staring. The rock’s magical grip on him was gone. He had no more interest in it now than he had in the whispered conversations of the staff and residents of Hilltop going on behind his back. Behind his back, where the bed was. The bed that had been Lucey’s and then Mr. Miller’s and then Frank De Selby’s. There was nowhere to put Frank’s personal affects. No one would be coming for them. There wasn’t even a number to reach them, nor any way of knowing where they were, if they cared. Even if Joel had the energy or the wherewithal to reach them, he wouldn’t have. They didn’t deserve Frank’s possessions, meagre as they were. They didn’t deserve all those books and those scarves and whatever other memorabilia Frank had accumulated.

  Joel had known Frank a mere five weeks. But in that time he had really come to know the man. They had shared with one another. Loved one another. Joel felt he had more right to be allowed to look at Frank’s possessions than any of his friend’s lousy, rotten family.

  When the police had arrived at the scene the night before, they had considered arresting Joel. They didn’t say as much, but dimly, somewhere on the edges of his consciousness, he was aware of them. They thought Joel had killed his friend. The only witnesses were a couple of drunk twenty-somethings who had stumbled on to the scene when it was already too late. The police had argued quietly about whether or not there had been a murder. Joel could tell them nothing. What on earth would be the point?

  The ambulance had arrived next and the paramedics knew shock when they saw it. They wrapped him in a blanket and spoke to him in loud and slow sentences. He remembered the shapes their faces made when they were saying the words, but had no idea what they had been telling him. He thought one of them looked a little like Chris. He focused on that. He looked at the Chris Paramedic until the man looked back at him. When their eyes met, the paramedic had offered him a look of such pity that Joel began to cry all over again. The lady paramedic who didn’t look like anyone Joel knew wrapped her arms around him. It was a warm and caring gesture. He sobbed into her shoulder until she carefully passed him on to someone else.

  Even in his grief he recognised the smell. He didn’t have to see her; he felt his daughter wrap her arms around him and he sobbed again.

  He wanted to ride in the ambulance that was bringing Frank to the morgue, but the paramedics told him he couldn’t, and his daughter urged him away with gentle hushing noises until he was in her car. When the gates of Hilltop opened before him, he stopped sobbing. He didn’t know why he had chosen that moment to stop, nor why he should suddenly no longer feel the need to express his grief; he just didn’t. So he climbed out of the car and shuffled to the main building. Shuffled. Like a broken old man, shoulders down, head down, feet dragging the whole way in. He had never in his life felt so old.

  Inside his bedroom he had curled up on his bed, with his back to Frank’s bed and to the shot glass and stared out the window. He woke, some hours later, in the same position. Curled up, eyes forward, the bed behind him, and at the end of the garden, down the winding driveway and behind the stand of trees that marked the boundary of Hilltop Nursing Home, was the rock.

  He had curled up in the bed and wished he was dead. All over again.

  “Joel,” a voice whispered. A soft voice. Kind. Caring. Liam’s voice. “Can I bring you some breakfast?”

  “No,” he heard a voice croak back, and he supposed it was his own.

  “I’m so sorry,” Liam told him. There was a catch in his voice when he said it. A hint of a sob suppressed.

  Joel wanted to roll over and face the man. He wanted to tell Liam that Frank had loved him. Or at very least fancied him. And, Joel reckoned, envied the man, too. Saw in him the life that he was not allowed to have. Joel wanted to do it, but instead he just lay there.

  Eva came back that morning, too. She hugged his bony old body, still curled up on the bed, and whispered soothing things to him. He tried to smile at her to say thanks, but his face wasn’t his own. It didn’t do what he wanted it to. It did whatever it wanted to. And it didn’t want to smile at her.

  That was the morning after Frank Adams, mostly known as Frank de Selby, had died. For a whole day Joel lay on his side, and he thought about Mr. Miller, and he thought about Lucey and he thought about his friend. And he wanted to die.

  He went to sleep that night, after everyone had come and gone with their kind words and their condolences and hoped, as he closed his eyes, hoped desperately that he wouldn’t wake up.

  The following morning was a bitter disappointment to him.

  Not only was he still alive but he had to use the bathroom. Which meant he had to get off the bed, and that meant he would have to acknowledge the empty bed behind him. He struggled to sit up on the edge of the bed. He still had his back to the bed behind him. He sat there for a moment, trying to build the will to move. He found that he was in something of a race. Building the will to move versus the building urge to urinate. Eventually biology beat him, and he stood to his feet.

  It was just a bed. He was disappointed for the second time in the space of mere minutes. The bed looked ordinary. Frank’s things were still there, for which he was grateful, but the all-terrifying bed that he had been so reluctant to look at was still just a bed. He had wanted it to be something more. Something profoundly ugly, or profoundly beautiful. Something significant. He blamed the bed. It had taken people from him. It haunted his life. Silly that something that haunted his life should look so ordinary. It deserved spikes, or chains or barbs or something.

  He walked passed it in disgust. Bed didn’t even have the good grace to look impressive.

  He found the same was true of his reflection, when he cast his eye on it after he had relieved himself. It was a very unimpressive face. He tried to remember the last time he had looked at it and been proud of what he saw there. He had always thought that he looked older than he felt; now he felt as old as he looked. Ancient. And a little bit broken.

  “Monroe,” he addressed the reflection, “why aren’t you dead yet?”

  He waited to see if the stroke would finally get him. He almost prayed for it.

  “No, Mr. Monroe, not yet please,” Angelica said to him quietly.

  Her voice was almos
t a shock to him.

  She had obviously walked in to check on him while he had been doing the necessary. He washed his hands quietly and waited for her to leave. He felt embarrassed in her company, and uncomfortable. Her meaty hands still scared him a little. The memory of her body compressing Mr. Miller mixed with his memory of trying to push the life back into Frank and made him well up. He brushed the tears away with an angry hand. Crying like a child again. He wouldn’t do it. Not here.

  He took his time drying his hands and listened for the sound of her exit. It never came. He wanted to wait in the bathroom, but that simply wouldn’t do. There was a line even Joel Monroe couldn’t cross, and hiding in bathrooms was apparently it.

  She was standing there when he emerged. She looked frightened of him. Still. Even after everything else that happened she still looked like he frightened her.

  “Not yet, Mr. Monroe, please,” she said again in her soft accent.

  “Why not?” he asked her, hearing the bitterness in his voice.

  “We don’t want you to,” she told him. It was a kind thing to say.

  He smiled a weak little smile at her. His face was almost his to control again.

  “I’m tired, Angelica. I’m very, very tired.”

  “I know. Sometimes I am, too. Sometimes I’m exhausted. I’ve been working here for eighteen years. Did you know that, Mr. Monroe?”

  He didn’t. In his selfishness he had never bothered to find out. He bet that Frank had known that. Una certainly did. She was here nearly four times longer than he had been.

  “I didn’t know that, Nurse Angelica. I’m sorry, I didn’t take the time before.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Monroe. I understand.”

  The look she gave him was filled with understanding. He was surprised by it, and yet it made sense. In a way that he had never considered before, it made perfect sense. She had been here for eighteen years; the corridors here were packed with the ghosts of people she had cared for, people she had known, some well, some others not so well. She understood because she was tired of it, too. She looked different to him all of a sudden.

  “How do you do it all the time?” he asked.

  “You just do,” she told him. “Or else what are you going to do?”

  “What if I can’t?” he asked her.

  “Mr. Monroe, if anyone else asked that I would have to think about my answer, but I never met someone before like you. I think that if you want to do anything you can do it. You’ve broken out of here three times…”

  “Four,” he absently corrected her.

  “Four,” she said, smiling. “You just have to want to keep going. Please Mr. Monroe, you just keep going for me, okay?”

  He smiled at her again, at little more warmly this time, but still a wan little thing.

  “I think I’d like to go back to sleep,” he told her, as he walked passed the very ordinary bed.

  *

  He dreamt again that afternoon, as he dozed. Another barren, hilly landscape populated by skeletons of Mr. Miller and Mr. Adams. He was looking through the crowds of bones trying to find de Selby before it was too late. In the distance Lucey and Una pursued him, calling for him; he dodged about the skeletons evading them, he was staying in front of them, even beginning to put some distance between them and him when a low rumbling sound filled his ears. He looked all about him and realised the rock from the end of the garden was rolling down every one of the hills, rolling toward him, getting bigger as they rolled, smashing Mr. Miller and Mr. Adams skeletons as they inexorably closed in on him. He spun on the spot, looking for an avenue of escape, but the rocks were all around him until all he could do was put his hands up in the air and wait…

  He was shaken awake by the gnarled hands of Mighty Jim. The ancient old man was staring straight at him, dead in the eye, his face only inches from Joel’s.

  “Boundless grief is too heavy to bear,” he told Joel. He looked serious. Certain. His eyes were clear and bright and not clouded over as they so often seemed to be.

  “I was having a nightmare,” Joel told him, trying to shake off the feeling of impending doom.

  Mighty Jim looked at him expectantly. Joel noticed the boxed chessboard in the man’s hands. A lovely gesture, if the man was mentally capable of such. Joel thought that he might be. He had no interest in playing regardless. So he just shook his head.

  He didn’t eat that day either. Nurse Liam looked at him with concern as he came to collect his dinner that evening. The plate had gone untouched.

  Lily and Chris came to see him. They brought chocolates and flowers. Lily forced a jovial demeanour as if by pottering around the room with force and vigour she might infect her grandfather with the same. It didn’t work. Chris tried to talk to him. It was banal stuff. A question about car engines that he had prepared at home in the hope that the old days might knock some life into the old man. It didn’t work either.

  Before he went to sleep that night Una came to see him.

  “I can’t bear to see you like this,” she told him.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her, and he meant it.

  “We’re all heartbroken, Joel. All of us. Did you know he had breakfast with me every morning? While you slept in, he and I had breakfast. He was my friend, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joel told her, and the urge to cry began to creep up on him.

  Of course Frank went for breakfast with her every morning. It was a typically classy gesture from the man. Taking his neighbour out to breakfast every morning, even if taking her out meant walking to the common room. He had wondered what the old rogue was up to with his early mornings.

  “We need you now, Joel,” she told him earnestly. “This is how communities work. We share in life and we share in grief.”

  He nodded his agreement at her. She was right. He lay down and curled up and faced out the window so she wouldn’t see him crying.

  He slept all night that night, a deep and dreamless sleep, and woke exhausted and weak. His head was swimming in itself, and he could barely pull himself up in the bed.

  Nurse Liam was there again. Another shift. Another day. Joel wished that he could be stronger for the man. For all of them. They weren’t nearly the terrible gang he had made them out to be.

  All of them were gold.

  He wished he had it in him to tell them that. He wished that when he was really alive, for those brief, beautiful weeks when he felt like somebody again, when he walked taller and laughed loud and shared dinner with his friend that he had told them all that he was very fond of them.

  He wished he hadn’t been such a selfish bastard for so long. Such a vicious bastard. Maybe they’d remember the good times when he was gone. He hoped so.

  “Joel,” Liam’s voice came to him from a tremendous distance away, like the voices that haunted him and chased him in his nightmares. Floating through the ether. “Have some breakfast, please.”

  There was a note in the voice, a note of command and authority. The voice he’d normally use when he was calling Joel “Mr. Monroe”. He expected the voice to cut through the malaise, to reach the part of Joel that sometimes reluctantly did what he was told. The voice did not. He offered a look to Nurse Liam. He hoped the look said how sorry he was, and how much he appreciated what the young man was doing for him, and had been doing for him for a long time.

  “Joel, if you don’t eat we’re going to have to get a court order and make you eat, or a drip or something. Please, Joel, don’t make us do that. No one wants that.”

  The boy arrived again. The therapist. With his shirtsleeves rolled up. He was a flimsy little thing really, insubstantial. He wasn’t smiling patiently now, he wasn’t practicing his nonthreatening look; he was solemn.

  “Mr. Monroe, I thought you might like to talk today.”

  “You thought wrong,” Joel croaked at him, his throat cracked and dry.

  The boy poked at him a little with his questions. Joel sat in the bed and stared through him. Now he didn’t care if th
e boy knew that he wanted to kill himself. He became more insubstantial by the minute, like his form was coming apart, a ghost of a thing. Had Joel really been frightened of this inconsequential creature once?

  When he left, Joel tried to go back to sleep. Tried and failed.

  Joel wondered if this was how he would die. Not some elaborate suicide catapulted out of a castle or the angry-man suicides of a man possessed with vigour, energy and more fury than he knew what to do with, but a simple wasting away, too tired and fed up to do anything, too lonely and sad and afraid of his death to do anything to stop it coming to take him away.

  Nurse Liam looked like he might be on the point of tears as he took away the tray of untouched breakfast. Joel slept again.

  Then Eva was there. Sitting by his bedside. The Rhino was there, too. She was in her uniform, but only half the way and her face was painted with a sad concern. She looked too human. Too sad to be herself.

  “Dad,” Eva said softly to him as he woke from his daze.

  He looked at her and tried to smile. She looked so solid. So real. He had always known she would grow up to be a force to be reckoned with. A tough woman. Soft in her own way, but so very capable. He was at least proud of that.

  “Dad, look, I didn’t want to tell you this…” she hesitated. Her hands were restlessly playing with a little book.

  Joel looked at the little book. It was Frank’s. He recognised it.

  “Dad, I know how sad you are. I know this is devastating, but please…” She hesitated again. She looked so earnest. So worried.

  “I know I’m tough to deal with sometimes,” she told him. “I know I could have made this easier for you. I didn’t and I’m so sorry about that. I got so caught up in myself.”

  She was saying the words to him that he desperately wanted to say to her before he went.

  “But I thought we had a chance to make it right,” she continued. “I was so glad when you came to me the other day. If you didn’t…”

  She didn’t finish. The implications were pronounced enough for both of them. He might have died before they ever fixed themselves.