Death of a She Devil

by Fay Weldon

  It was not Valerie, it was Dr Simmins, who wanted a word; she had been up, she said, since six o’clock. She had come up from the village early to do fasting blood tests for six residents who needed them. A pity, she said, that the canteen closed for breakfast at nine-fifteen sharp, Ms Bradshap thinking it was no hardship for anyone, no matter how old and feeble, diabetic or otherwise, to go without breakfast occasionally. But that could wait, Dr Simmins was in a hurry and had to get back for her morning surgery. But she had looked in on Bobbo and the She Devil should be aware that the old man did not have long to go. His pulse was fluttery; his breathing was Cheyne-Stokes; he was picking at the bed clothes.

  ‘He’s acting,’ said the She Devil, flatly. ‘For the last ten years the old bugger has been pretending to die, but he never does. He’s strong as a horse.’

  ‘Um,’ said Dr Simmins, ‘even horses die,’ and asked if the She Devil was legally married to Bobbo.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the She Devil, affronted. ‘Of course I am.’

  Dr Simmins said it was a matter of the legality of the DNR notice should anyone ask questions.

  ‘DNR?’ asked the She Devil. All this, and before her coffee. ‘And why should anyone ask questions?’

  ‘Do Not Resuscitate,’ said Dr Simmins, grimly. ‘These are issued in consultation with family, which does not include exes, and I am checking that I can refer to you as Mr Patchett’s wife.’

  ‘I have no recollection of going through divorce proceedings,’ said the She Devil, haughtily, ‘so you can refer away. Do you have any idea exactly – when? It is rather an awkward time for everyone, with all these guests arriving for Valerie Valeria’s Widdershins Walk shenanigans.’

  ‘I am well aware of that,’ said Dr Simmins, crossly. ‘But dying is not an exact science.’

  ‘If we had to cancel the whole hoo-ha, I would not be too unhappy. I must say I rather dread the occasion. The cold and the wet!’

  ‘I see,’ said Dr Simmins. ‘Well, your husband, as you will have noticed, does not give up easily. And that idiot of a nurse doesn’t help. She is very nubile and has no principles. If he deigned to actually swallow his sleeping pills things might go quicker. They are quite strong. But I have my ethical position to consider.’

  The She Devil said she appreciated that, and Dr Simmins was conscientiousness itself, getting up early so her patients wouldn’t even miss their breakfast and the weekly visits to Mr Patchett and so on, and perhaps Dr Simmins would care to borrow the Iron Maiden Mercedes for her rounds? The She Devil hardly ever used it herself.

  Dr Simmins said grudgingly that it might come in useful, but was it diesel or petrol? The She Devil said it was petrol, wasn’t it? which seemed to be the right answer, because Dr Simmins said in that case she would take up the offer, but perhaps Lady Patchett would care to make a visit to the sick bed quite soon, if only for appearances’ sake.

  ‘Of course,’ said the She Devil, pathetically. ‘But it’s so distressing. He doesn’t even recognise me.’

  ‘Um,’ said Dr Simmins. ‘For someone with advanced dementia your husband, as you’ve said, is a very good actor.’ And she went away, duty done. But not before asking for the car keys, which the She Devil told her to pick up from Security.

  Ruth found herself weeping, she was not sure why. Bobbo? Actually dying? Ceasing to be? She had spent so much of her life hating him, she thought; it was his existence that sustained her. Hating Bobbo, she could hate all men. He had become the prism through which she looked at the world. How would she occupy herself in this new strange leftover life? As herself at the age of twenty-two, before she met him, in an eighty-five-year-old body? Without Bobbo, She Devilry would melt away. Without hate to sustain her, hate to energise her, to give her reason for living, she was all too likely to wither away. And how would the generations that followed after her manage if she collapsed now?

  When Valerie finally arrived the She Devil was red-eyed but composed, any necessary grieving for Bobbo done and dusted and before the event. It had not even happened yet. She must concentrate on the future. Dr Simmins would no doubt use her ethical discretion. And with any luck the good weather might keep up.

  Such a lovely morning! Valerie said she was sorry to be so late with the coffee. Femina Electrical had reported that a mouse had got into the wiring for the platform lights and they needed to know what her views were on humane killing.

  ‘What are your views?’ asked the She Devil.

  ‘Australian,’ replied Valerie. ‘Just get rid of it,’ and they both laughed.

  63

  Nurse Samantha Gets In Touch With Tyler

  She needs company.

  At around eleven the next morning Tyler was sitting down to breakfast with his new family. His mother and Matilda were to get married; the banns had been called the previous Sunday. It was to be a church wedding in Brighton. Matilda was buzzing around cooking eggs and tomatoes; Jane and Jilly were making toast. Cutlery had been unpacked, and the table laid with matching knives and forks. The salt was in a cellar, not in a carton, the butter was in a dish, not its wrapper. There was even a butter knife. It was unprecedented. Things were looking up.

  ‘Don’t just sit there, Cyclops, and expect to be waited upon,’ said Nicci.

  ‘Oh don’t go on at him, Nicci,’ said Matilda. ‘Give the boy a break. His name is Tyler.’

  ‘But I was told I’d have a Tayla,’ said Nicci, ‘I still can’t get used to it. I’d have aborted him if only I’d known.’

  ‘Do try not to be such a bitch, Nicci,’ said Matilda. ‘Tyler deserves better.’

  Tyler wished he’d had Matilda for a mother. His phone rang: the Mission: Impossible theme. He didn’t recognise the number.

  ‘That’s right, boy,’ said his mother. ‘Disturb the peace. Face nothing. Avoid the chores. That’s my Cyclops.’ Why would anyone want to marry his mother of their own free will, Tyler wondered? Have her in their bed on a permanent basis? Was an empty bed such a terrible option? Women were a mystery to him, but it was his fate to live amongst them. He took the phone outside to answer it.

  It was an old school friend, Samantha Travers, out of the blue. Did he remember her? They’d exchanged rude selfies and had their phones taken away? Yes. He remembered very well. She’d been trying to contact him again for ages but failed. Did he never look at his Facebook? Tyler said since he had nothing good to report he seldom did. She said she was sorry about that but thought he ought to know that his grandfather was dying up in the High Tower and if he didn’t come soon it would be too late.

  Tyler said he knew he had a grandmother but he didn’t know about a grandfather. Samantha said yes he had one, but only just. Security might not let him in since they were very fussy about men in the High Tower, but if he dressed up she’d smuggle him in and risk it. She had a black wig he could wear. It had belonged to Samantha’s mother when she was having radiation treatment. Tyler’s grandfather was difficult but at a time of letting go he needed loved ones around. There had to be reconciliation and peace. A well-managed passing away could and should be a blessed time. Old Mr Patchett was already seeing people who weren’t there. And there was a daughter, wasn’t there? Perhaps his daughter could come with Tyler.

  ‘You mean my mother?’ asked Tyler, and said he didn’t think so, she wasn’t the kind to do deathbeds. But he said he’d come up with Samantha next morning.

  Tyler went back to his breakfast eggs, satisfied. His mother’s ire was focussed on her mother, not on her father who had hardly ever got a mention. She could not stop him going, and it was time he took back some of the moral high ground. He rather fancied the image of a black wig. He could surely dress up as a girl without feeling his sexuality was threatened? He was so obviously and securely a man, it didn’t matter what he wore. And once in the High Tower he might catch a glimpse of Valerie.

  64

  Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting-A-Ling-Ling?

  Tyler and his grandfather find each other at last.
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  Tyler followed Samantha into the Lantern Room.

  ‘It’s your grandson, Mr Patchett. Nicci’s boy Tyler come to visit you.’

  ‘What is this, you stupid cunt, a deathbed scene? You want me dead?’

  ‘Take no notice of the language, Tyler. It’s a slippage in his brain, not the real him. It happens in old people sometimes. A subset of Tourette’s. It’s all in my Grade 3 notes.’

  ‘I believe you, thousands wouldn’t,’ said Tyler. He was accustomed to bad language but from the young, not the old. He found it quite shocking. But then the whole scene was not at all as he had expected. The vast shadowy room, the great windows, the small high bed in the corner, a withered old man upon it like some garden gnome; not the source of dignity and wisdom he had supposed.

  ‘He’s so much livelier this morning,’ said Samantha. ‘I hope I haven’t brought you out all this way for nothing.’

  ‘God you’re a stupid cunt sometimes,’ said Bobbo.

  ‘You see,’ said Samantha, ‘I don’t care what they say. It isn’t dementia. Bobbo has all his wits about him!’

  Dressing up as a woman had been the easy part, a pleasant night or two in Mason’s nightie had acclimatised Tyler to the idea. The wig had made him look too like his sisters so he had rejected that and was wearing a spare white, crisp uniform of Samantha’s. He’d belted it tightly – he liked the sense of containment, of being unusually compressed in some parts, and unusually freer in others. He’d combed back his golden hair and run his fingers through it, so instead of curling round his ears it stood up like shafts of young wheat. He couldn’t manage Samantha’s heels so was wearing some nice shoes of his own instead. He’d put on her blue cloak to disguise his flat figure and they’d passed through Security easily enough; they’d chosen a time when most of the team were at breakfast. It was fun, he thought, being a girl, and could be perfectly well endured in a good cause. It was sort of like being reborn, starting afresh. If Samantha could deal with this disagreeable old man, he decided, so could he.

  ‘Come nearer, dear boy, if that’s what you really are. A genuine Patchett whelp, a Tyler out of Nicci out of Ruth, I’m told. Dreadful bloody names.’ Tyler had to bend down to hear the old man. His breath didn’t smell good, but it wasn’t intolerable.

  ‘Nicci is my mother, yes.’

  ‘And who else are you out of, might one ask? Or does the birth certificate just read father: sperm bank?’

  ‘My father’s name is Gabriel Finch,’ said Tyler, haughtily. ‘You might have heard of him. He’s a Bronze God.’

  ‘What’s that? Something like a brass monkey? Nothing surprises me.’

  ‘A kind of social entertainer,’ said Tyler, patiently. The old man could hardly be expected to keep up with the times.

  Bobbo had featured very little in his mother’s liturgy of family woes other than as a weak old jailbird of low intelligence. But the last hardly seemed to be the case. His mother was evidently an unreliable narrator. And if so about a grandfather, perhaps about a grandmother too?

  ‘But my father doesn’t count. He walked out on my mother as soon as I was born.’

  ‘Good man! Must’ve decided he was well out of it.’

  ‘Oh no. I was born with an unsightly vision impairment and he wasn’t man enough to face it – according to my mother, that is.’

  ‘Nicci? She always was a spiteful little thing, forever trying to break me and Mary up. Not that it was that difficult. Nicci’s your mother... Once a cunt always a cunt. You poor lad, if lad you are.’

  ‘My mother is a good woman and has done everything for me,’ said Tyler, automatically springing to her defence.

  But even as he spoke Tyler began to feel sorry for himself. ‘Poor lad’ just rang so true. How had he ended up a graduate and unemployed, still living at home, here, dressed as a woman, if it had not been for a mother who’d insulted him, undermined him, every step of his life? Perhaps she’d been bent on destroying him from the beginning? Thwarted in doing so while he was in the womb, she had done what she could during his young life to achieve the same result. Poor him.

  ‘You’re sure you’re a boy, not a girl?’

  ‘Yes, I am, sir.’

  ‘My eyesight isn’t as good as it was. I’m ninety-four, you know.’

  ‘You are doing very well for your age,’ said Tyler, politely. There are certain circumstances in which lies are excusable, even necessary. At least his mother had taught him manners.

  ‘So help a poor old man, prove it. Show it to me,’ said Mr Patchett. His voice was becoming hoarse and ragged.

  Tyler looked bewildered.

  ‘Do it,’ said Samantha. ‘Show it to him. It’s simpler in the end. Otherwise he’ll get upset, poor old thing.’

  Tyler hitched up his skirt, pulled down his knickers, thought how simpler this was than taking off belts and undoing buttons, and showed his private parts. From this angle they seemed purposeful enough.

  ‘Yes, you’re a man,’ said the old man. ‘Not bad at all. Much as I was in my day.’

  Tyler, accustomed to his mother’s and sisters’ derision, felt relieved and hid his parts again. He marvelled that it was so simply done.

  ‘Fucking cunts of mothers are the source of all evil,’ croaked the old man. ‘It was because of my mother that I married your grandmother.’

  ‘Don’t take too much notice of him, Tyler,’ said Nurse Samantha. She had brought Tyler here and wanted the reunion to be a pleasurable experience for everyone. ‘He talks nonsense most of the time. He’s on his way out but no one comes and visits him if they can help it.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Tyler. ‘I’m surprised you put up with it.’

  ‘A job’s a job,’ said Samantha. It was a litany in these parts, Tyler had heard it often enough. On the coast, out of season. A job’s a job.

  ‘Idle lying bitch of a woman, your great-grandmother. I was ill, low with hepatitis. She said one wife was much like another. I believed her.’ Bobbo was wheezing badly. He could hear it himself. So the old Labrador of his childhood days had wheezed when it was dying. The very fleas were fleeing from his skin. Brenda his mother had stood over the poor old fellow with the Hoover to catch them as they fled. Perhaps old Dr Lezzer was right and he was indeed dying?

  ‘I can hardly be held responsible for my great-grandmother’s sins,’ said Tyler, piously.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said the old man, and began to cough and splutter. He’d held the last of the doctor’s pills (to hurry him on, he was sure) tucked between tongue and tooth. In trying to make sure they were still there he had swallowed them by mistake. Bobbo hawked and hawked but they were gone. Well, that was that. Dr Simmins had the last word. Outside the wind got up. If he were dead he wouldn’t have to listen to the howling any more. God, women were awful. He fell asleep.

  65

  The She Devil Calls A Meeting

  When in doubt, discuss.

  The She Devil had called a Board meeting, to discuss-last minute preparations for the Widdershins Walk. Only two days to go.

  There were eight members present; four had opted out, for reasons of health, boredom or general weariness. Dr Simmins had been asked to attend. It was quite a formal affair, beginning with a call to order and an official adjournment. The She Devil was Chair, Ms Bradshap Executive Officer, Ms Sidcup was Treasurer, these days using Valerie as her right-hand woman. The agenda covered Health and Safety, a field mouse infestation, changes in Security, canteen catering, general policy changes, accommodation, and at the last moment Ms Bradshap had added an extra item: the election of Ms Valeria as one of the trustees. The She Devil was in no position to object: someone would have to replace Ms Laura when she retired, which thankfully would not be too long in the future, and Valerie apparently had the necessary skills, having qualifications in financial administration. Or so she said. The She Devil had thought about asking Human Resources to check, but decided it wiser not to. Better have Valerie in the tent pissing out, t
han Ms Laura outside the tent pissing in.

  The meeting was held in the penthouse of the Castle Complex, 3CC/1. Its large triangular window looked out to sea, and it was at its best on a day like this when the wind was quiet and the waves benign. Santa Barbara Ltd, architects and Feng Shui specialists, had decided to model the whole complex on the basis of the millennial trend for supermarket design: ‘when bicycle shed meets consumer palace, low culture and high culture meet’ was the mantra of the Santa Barbaras, and why they’d got the job. The new building had its advantages and disadvantages. At least, being steel, glass and concrete, dry rot was not a hazard – as it was the other side of the walkway to the High Tower – though many came to understand why coastal cottages had small windows and thick walls: it’s the weather, stupid! Central heating roared and knocked throughout the winter and hummed and hissed all summer. Coffee was served, rather against Ms Bradshap’s wishes – caffeine ingestion blurred cognitive capacity in elders – but also her favoured green tea.

  The mouse infestation was declared over, thanks to a new eco-friendly poison for the traps. The extra expense of real cream instead of synthetic cream, vegetable fat and intense sweeteners for the meringues was approved. Lighting for the new walkways had been put in. Valerie was able to explain, quite poetically and to the satisfaction of most of the Board, why it was appropriate to invite men to a celebration of forty years’ pursuit of gender parity. The She Devil and Ellen the photographer abstained from voting on this, the She Devil still muttering that it was the thin end of the wedge... parity was initially about pay: no one had anticipated such a change in gender attitudes that men would demand parity with women. But again the effort of arguing defeated her. She was tired.

  The sky had darkened again. Someone turned on the lights, though it was midday. The matter of the Lantern Room came up again; to dedicate such a large and valuable space in the High Tower itself to a single invalid was hardly reasonable. Ruby Simmins said she thought the problem would soon enough resolve itself. Valerie said she’d had an idea. The Lantern Room could eventually be used as a feminist library, a safe place open to the public, and its original purpose as a lighthouse – to shine a helpful light into the hearts and minds of all genders everywhere, shining out over sea and land. Valerie was inspiring, heart-lifting, a palpable role model for women everywhere.