A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  “I don’t want to take from his memory. I know you loved him very much. I know you did. And we didn’t want to tell you this, because we didn’t want to hurt you, but we’re so worried now. We think you should know…”

  She was still playing with the little book. He knew what it was. The Unfortunate End of Joel Monroe.

  “Dad, Frank was a terribly lonely man. We think he was going to kill himself.”

  “What?” Joel asked incredulously.

  He sat up in the bed.

  Their faces registered shock at him speaking, then some spark of hope.

  “We found a little book he was writing. It’s full of ideas for how he might kill himself. He’s filled it up. He was very unwell, Dad. He talked about shooting himself and hanging himself from the clock tower. I know it’s terribly sad that he’s gone, but it was probably for the best that he went this way.”

  They found The Unfortunate End of Joel Monroe, but since Frank had never written the title, or identified the characters in any way, they had assumed it was autobiographical and that Frank wanted to commit suicide.

  They assumed that Frank wanted to kill himself in the stupidest ways imaginable.

  Joel burst out laughing.

  It was a weak laugh, lacking in the vitality he had let slip from his body in the days previous, but it was heartfelt, real, substantial.

  He laughed and laughed until he wheezed, and his eyes watered. For a split second he thought he might choke to death laughing, and wouldn’t that have been just peachy, but he didn’t. Instead he sucked in great big breaths and tried to stifle another laugh. He reached out for a drink of water and found the shot glass. It drew another laugh from him. The guilty little glance about the room before Frank stuffed it into his jacket. A shot glass in lieu of a cookie.

  Eva and The Rhino watched him laughing and coughing in utter bewilderment.

  He gathered himself.

  “Oh no, love,” Joel assured her, trying to sit himself further up in the bed and shaking his head from side to side. “No, no, no.”

  “But,” The Rhino protested lightly, gesturing at the book, “he wrote it all down here.”

  Her voice wasn’t cold. It was warm. Concerned. He imagined she used that voice when she spoke to her children. He found it lovely in a way he never thought he would.

  Joel tried to picture Frank in any of the absurd suicide situations Joel had pitched to him. Frank with the suicide vest on. Frank charging the police. The absurdity brought on a fresh batch of the giggles. They might have thought he was going insane. He reached out to the shot glass and picked it up, rolling it in his hands as he spoke.

  “No, my dear,” he told her, smiling from ear to ear. “Frank de Selby would simply never have killed himself. He enjoyed his life too much. He loved it. Nearly every minute of it.”

  “But why would he write this all down?”

  “It’s a story. A play. A writing exercise. Something he was working on, but not real,” he told her. “Frank had some problems. His family were a pack of bastards, and they scarred him a little bit, but Frank de Selby simply loved his life too much to do that. He loved living. He loved people. He loved facing life head-on. There was nothing he couldn’t overcome.”

  “Dad everyone sometimes…”

  “No, love,” he told her gently but firmly. “Not Frank. I promise you not Frank. You see he has a skill. A great skill. He wasn’t inhuman, or some kind of superman or anything like that. He was just excellent at being Frank.”

  He looked at them to see if they understood. Eva still seemed bewildered, but not The Rhino. The Rhino was looking at him with an expression he had never seen before. There was a sparkle in her eyes.

  “I don’t…” Eva replied, confused.

  “He was as miserable as anyone else, you know? He had the same problems anyone else had, worse than some, but he found a way to live through them somehow. And to love living through them. He watched the soaps and he did all the other stuff everyone else does around here, except he found a way to take tremendous joy out of it. He loved it. All of it…”

  Joel trailed off as it dawned on him.

  Frank did love everything. He approached his days with enthusiasm. Even his lazy days he valued for their laziness. He loved drinking pints in bars as much as he loved having breakfast with Una behind them. He might have even thought of Hilltop as a prison, but instead of raging against it, he just enjoyed being in prison.

  He had sat in the room with Joel every day and listened to Joel complaining about his life, and somehow Frank Adams had found a way to make that enjoyable, too. He saw life differently. He saw everything differently.

  Better still, he had dragged Joel kicking and grumbling and complaining into his way of life. He had done everything he could to delay Joel’s demise as Joel marched, slowly, stupidly, to a better place in his life.

  It was doubly heartbreaking, the realisation that he was gone, but Joel felt something profound and magnificent in his moment of realisation. He felt an enormous sense of gratitude for Frank’s life.

  *

  The day before the funeral Joel sat in the common room at the chessboard with Mighty Jim.

  “I should have put him in his proper face,” Jim told him as he moved his first piece.

  “Clever opening gambit,” Joel told him and placed a piece.

  It wasn’t a considered tactical decision. He just moved the knight into a square.

  Mighty Jim’s eyes narrowed quizzically. He pondered for a moment before moving another piece.

  “Bold move,” Joel told him as he moved another piece. Again he moved the piece before he had time to consider it.

  They played like that, back and forth, but as the game progressed, Jim took longer and longer to decide his moves, and Joel found himself enjoying the game more and more. He moved his queen into a killing position.

  “Absurd…” Jim said, scratching his head in confusion.

  He considered the board for a very long time, so long in fact, that Joel decided to pay attention to it, too. Checkmate in six moves. There was no way out of it. Jim reached for a piece, then stopped. Then another, but stopped again. He withdrew his hand and took a long look at Joel.

  Then he smiled at big broad smile, warm and happy, and simply got up from the table and wandered over to the television.

  “Just like that?” Joel asked him.

  Mighty Jim paid him no notice. The soaps were on.

  *

  On the day of the funeral Joel dressed himself soberly. Una Clarke helped him. She wore a look that was one part relief, one part irritated, like she wanted to scold him but couldn’t. She did take the opportunity to fuss over him a little more than was necessary. He took it in good humour. The least he owed her really.

  At the appointed time, he stood outside on the gravel of the front yard waiting for the car to pull up. There were cars arriving in twos and threes, and the residents of Hilltop were out in their sombre finest. It was a sunny day. The kind of day made for wandering around town in circles until you gave yourself a thirst, and Joel smiled at the memories of it. They hurt him a little, cut at his heart just a tiny bit, but they came with a great surge of affection. He held Una’s hand in his as Lily and Chris pulled up to collect them.

  The grandkids were clearly relieved to see him restored to some kind of health, but the conversation was stilted, forced almost. His decline and the recent tragedy had taken something away from all of them. Joel wasn’t about to let it get away from him. Frank wouldn’t have let it either.

  “You ever meet Gonzo the Bouncer?” Joel asked them from the back of the car.

  “Gonzo? In the club?”

  “Yeah. Big guy. Dopey-looking.”

  They looked at each other in surprised amusement.

  “Yeah, I know him,” Chris replied.

  “Am I wrong or is he constantly a prick?”

  Chris guffawed loudly.

  “Not wrong,” Lily told him. “And a creep, as well. When
did you meet him?”

  “Last Monday,” he told her.

  He regaled them with the story of the nightclub and Slippery Nipples and the Cock Sucking Cowboys, describing Frank’s unexpectedly prudish reaction in detail. They laughed at the story and added their own. Lily passed her phone back to Una to show her the dozens of selfies she had of Frank with all of her friends, up to his neck in drink, dancing on the dance floor of a crowded city centre nightclub at one-thirty in the morning. Una chuckled at them all, particularly one of Frank and Joel together.

  Joel stared at that one for a long time, his eyes brimming slightly.

  *

  At the graveside Joel stood alone. Alone and yet surrounded. Frank Adams, credited for stage and screen as Frank de Selby, had a biological family somewhere. They weren’t at the graveside. Instead there was a different kind of a family. The residents and staff of Hilltop stood side by side with a smattering of theatre folk and the producer of Glory Days as well as half the cast past and present. A throng of people turned out to see of Frank de Selby, and yet when the moment came and the celebrant asked if anyone wanted to speak, no one stirred. Frank hadn’t been lying in the Theatre Royale; his de Selby mask kept most people at a discreet distance. It was just as well for Joel. He didn’t want these people talking about Frank anyway. He knew that it was him, he knew that he was the one who knew Frank best. A paltry five weeks together, and yet this was undeniably true. They nodded encouragingly at Joel in turn as he stood forward to deliver a eulogy of sorts.

  He didn’t say much. He wasn’t sure he had the strength, but what he did say was full of sadness and humour and sincerity and warmth. The crowd that attended warmly applauded, and as they began to lower his friend down, Joel felt himself overcome again. Grief heavy and thick settled on him, but with it love and community and friendship and all the other things that he thought he had left behind him a long time beforehand.

  And one by one they came to him to show him that they cared. The Rhino was there first, hugging him warmly while he softly wept. His grandchildren with tears in their own eyes. The young men shaking his hand gruffly since they thought that’s what they were supposed to do, and the young women with gentle kisses on his cheeks. His daughter, so warm and compassionate, kissed him and told him everything would be okay. The residents, the nurses, old theatre folk shaking his hand and professing their grief while he tried to hold back gentle sobs.

  Finally Nurse Liam and Nurse Angelica. They were both red-eyed from crying, from sharing his grief and their own. A final gift from his old friend, a community that he didn’t know he had. Joel smiled down at his pal even through his tears.

  When it was done the crowd milled about in a hushed, almost reverential silence. No one knew what to do next. It struck Joel that it was a most un-Frank atmosphere. Something he wouldn’t have stood for. He’d have rescued them all from their gloom somehow, with some generous act of humanity. Joel guessed at what it might be.

  “Shall we go for a pint?” Joel asked them.

  Epilogue

  Joel adjusted his scarf for the fiftieth time. He was nervous. He knew that. He was also unused to wearing scarves.

  “Get you anything, Grandad?” Lily asked from the door of the living room.

  “A different therapist?” he asked. “One that doesn’t look like he’s twelve?”

  The boy, Martin, sat across from him, preparing himself for their weekly meeting, smiled wryly. Eva had arranged to have the meetings at her house, since she reckoned it would put Joel at ease. It had been an improvement on Hilltop. He liked it better here, in her house, in her comfortable living room with its comfortable furniture. He found himself becoming more and more at ease talking to Martin as the weeks went on. He even liked him a little. Though with Joel it was sometimes difficult to tell who he liked and who he didn’t like. Easier than it had been, for certain, but still a little difficult.

  Lily laughed as she moved away down the corridor, calling out to the people in the kitchen as she went.

  As Martin sorted his things out and made himself comfortable, Joel strained to hear the conversation happening in the kitchen. It was early evening, there was cooking going on, and that came with its own sounds and smells.

  He could hear Eva talking, her voice soft and commanding all at once. He could hear laughing, too. Lily and Chris. Probably mocking their mother lightly. They enjoyed that. They were sharp. Not as sharp as Frank had been, but not far off either. He was proud of their wit.

  Una’s voice was there, too. Melodious and pleasant. She had come with him for dinner and to hold his hand through the difficult start of his therapy. She had literally held his hand up to the door. He pretended to be annoyed at the fuss she was making, but he hadn’t removed her hand either.

  She knew what Eva didn’t. What the kids didn’t. She knew he had been suicidal.

  Had been.

  He wasn’t anymore. He thought.

  Martin knew too. Joel had told him. The boy had nodded at him sympathetically and then carried on. He didn’t lock Joel up. He didn’t judge. He didn’t do anything except ask more questions. He always started with the same one.

  Joel didn’t mind. The gift that Frank de Selby had given him was a new perspective. He feared a little less now. He was definitely less bored. He had started a chess club.

  The walls of Hilltop had stopped being so terrifying to him. He played games against Mighty Jim. He won now as often as he lost. He joined social media. He didn’t understand it, but he held out hope for himself that he would eventually. Lily and Chris posted his pictures online. Complete strangers in places he didn’t know liked the photos. The world had shrunk itself down for the new generation, and Joel grabbed their coattails determined to ride them for as long as he could.

  Nothing was as terrible as it seemed, and indeed, though Joel was still slow to admit it, things might even have been described as good. Many things were a great deal better than they first appeared.

  “Mr. Monroe,” Martin began. “Do you still want to die?”

  “No, my dear boy,” Joel told him, adjusting his scarf again. “Not just yet.”

  * * * * *

  Acknowledgments

  It took a village to raise this little child of mine. I couldn’t have done it without all the constant support, encouragement, love (occasional criticism), and so many coffees.

  First and foremost; Pete Moles. This story wouldn’t be half of what it is without you. You helped mold Joel and Frank, and I’m tremendously grateful. Ding ding ding.

  Mam, Dad, Ciara, Jean, Paul, Tara, John P, Mike Sr., Ellen, Mikey, Emily, Grace, Joe, Megan, Maeve and Daniel… Wow. That’s a large immediate family. Thanks for always being patient with me. I love you all. For the aunts and the uncles and the cousins and the people who it turns out were never related to me but I always called my uncles, aunts and cousins, thank you for the support.

  My eternal admiration and respect is kept for Alex Dunne who has once again been an inspired editor and Grainne O’Brien who’s just plain better than me. There, I said it.

  Lauren Parsons and Liz Stein and David Forrer and in fact, all the people at both Legend Press and Park Row Books. I loved how much you all cared about this book, and I even more loved when we were finished. Thanks for all the effort and consideration you’ve put into this. I hope it lives up to expectations.

  For the test readers; Eadaoin O’Neill, “Chilli” John Kearney, Maureen Mooney, Jean Mooney, Emma Langford, Kennedy O’Brien and, of course, Christine Burnell. Thanks for the feedback. Mostly lovely, occasionally brutal. Which is how feedback should be, I think.

  To Ross who seems to be a bigger exponent of my work than I am. Your endless belief in me is as impressive as that eye-roll you do when you think I can’t see you.

  Eric Kelleher, my thanks for the website and explaining things so that the idiot could understand them.

  To the WritePace gang in Limerick, all of whom are inspirational as writers, bakers, chefs, sports p
undits and friends, I thank you for your time and your ears. I started this book in your company and finished it there too, so you’re its godparents. Whether you like it or not. Special thanks to Sarah Moore Fitzgerald and Bob Burke who helped Joel and Frank bust out one Saturday morning.

  To all the other gangs and clubs and societies: My work colleagues in the Shannon Control Centre for patience and good will even when I’m boring them to tears. The Torch Players and the College Players who don’t seem to mind if I’m overly dramatic. The Banter Brigade who I hope never change, Young Munsters RFC, Limerick FC, MRSC and more besides.

  Will and John; why haven’t you changed yet?

  To Paul in Copy That, formerly Moviedrome. I’m grateful for the help and the reams of paper and the patience to put up with me.

  Finally for Christine who encourages, supports, pats me on the back, tells me I’m pretty and has been my personal rock for this entire book. I don’t have enough thanks for all you do for me. I love you.

  Writing acknowledgements is harder than writing a book—I’m terrified that I’ve left you out. If I have, I’m sorry and you can demand pints/coffees off me in Charlie Malones. I’ve never really gotten anywhere on my own. It’s always taken your help. Whoever you are.

  Stand Up and Fight.

  Questions for Discussion

  It’s Joel’s improving relationships that ultimately save him. Which relationship is most important in stopping Joel from wanting to commit suicide? That with his daughter, his grandchildren or his new friend?

  Joel takes a number of items “home” to remind him of the world outside: the old garage sign, the lucky penny and the pin to save the Royale. What do you think these represent? Joel and Frank both have their own problems to deal with. Which of them is more affected by their problems, and which of the sets of problems are more challenging?

  Joel believes the world is out to get him. Do you think he’s right, or is his perspective coloured by his suicidal thoughts?