by Paul Meloy
“Djase,” Griff said. His tongue did all the work, belling in his palate, because his lips wouldn’t go together. “Sowwy, mwate. Don’ urt mwe.”
“Jase!”
It was the boy. Mr Chard swallowed a mouthful of ale and leaned an elbow against the bar. This was interesting.
The boy walked across the room and stood between Griff and his attacker. He held his hands up, open, palms towards the bigger man.
“What you doing, Jase?” the boy asked.
The man pointed a trembling finger at Griff, who was sitting propped against the bar as if thrown down there like an old coat. Griff tried to use a hand to close his mouth but his jaw moved with a horrible unfastened sagginess and he let go with a dismayed choke.
“What about him?” the boy asked. “What’s he done?”
The big man said, “He tried to fuck my wife.”
Griff was shaking his head. He tried to shake just the top of it. He groaned. “I nwever.”
Now Mr Chard recognised the man. He was one of the Mauritian nurses the hospital had recently shipped over to make up the staffing levels. They came over every year in planefulls, recruited by the managers because they were cheap and worked like dogs. They were also, unfortunately, as honest as the day was long.
The boy was guiding the man away, talking softly to him. He opened the door and walked the man out, patting him the shoulder. Mr Chard heard the boy say, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” This confirmed what Mr Chard had surmised, that they were working on the same ward. Maybe the Mauritian was the boy’s mentor, or at least responsible for acting like one, which explained the boy’s confidence in deference to him and the man’s reaction. Shame. Mr Chard had fancied watching the boy get smacked.
The boy closed the door against the bitter evening and came back over to where the girl was standing. She had put her coat on and was holding out the boy’s jacket. She had a look in her eye, noticed Mr Chard. He finished his ale, watching them over the rim of the tankard.
The boy slipped on his jacket and drained his pint, then brought their glasses over to the bar and put them down in front of Malcolm.
“You might want to get him to a hospital,” the boy said.
Malcolm shrugged and took the glasses. The boy turned and looked at Thick Steve, who had shuffled away from the action and was standing at the corner of the bar eating peanuts. The boy raised his eyebrows.
“Oh for fuck sake,” Steve muttered, “I’ll take him. In a minute.”
“Good for you,” the boy said.
The girl had come over and her body language was all, let’s get out of here. Mr Chard put his tankard in the right-hand pocket of his white coat.
The boy smiled and took her arm and they walked towards the door. She snuggled in to the boy’s side and he put an arm around her slender waist.
They walked out. Mr Chard stood up, stepped over Griff, and followed them.
Steve watched him go, chewing a cud of peanuts. “Nuvver one, Malcolm,” he said, holding out his glass.
KEEPING THE COUPLE in sight, Mr Chard trailed them across the football field. The moon was covered now with dark winter cloud. Missed me, thought Mr Chard, pulling the collar of his coat tight against the back of his neck just in case it re-emerged and made a last attempt to snag him with its ascending barb and carry him off. He imagined himself the grotesque monster in a childrens’ fairy tale, the shoemender on the moon’s hook, maybe. Something sent out to dangle over the houses of slothful boys and girls, undead in airless space, arms and legs stiff as a scarecrow, tatty white coat rattling and full of awful tools, to nail heavy iron boots to their sleeping feet with rusty tacks. Mr Chard grinned a fierce, chipped grin. Not tonight, you slit, he thought, and watched as the young couple made their way up the steps into the nurse’s accommodation block.
He hurried to the entrance and slipped inside. This nursing block was little more than a corridor providing access to eight single rooms, four on each side, with a small kitchen at the end and a communal bathroom facing the kitchen. Mr Chard ducked his head and peered through the glass set in the door leading off the entrance hall. His breathing was coming fast, and he felt the loathsome pinch in his right lung. He concentrated on slowing his respiration and watched the couple stop outside the room third on the right. They were kissing. Not just a peck goodnight, this. Their mouths were pressed against each other and his hands were in her hair. She broke the kiss and turned to put her key in the door. The boy was stroking the back of her neck. The door opened and they fell inside, laughing. The door shut, and Mr Chard crept down the corridor and stood outside the room. He looked at his watch. It was half past six in the evening. A strange time for nurses. He calculated that the law of averages dictated that at least half the occupants of the rooms were on late shifts, which finished around nine, and that the remaining few would be either asleep or getting ready to go out later. The girl and boy were occupied, so he just hoped no one fancied a snack and made a trip to the kitchen. In his experience, student nurses rarely cooked and almost never had customary meal times, so he reckoned the odds were working in his favour since it was regular teatime for most folks.
Over the past years, Mr Chard had been along this corridor many times. The doors were thin and damaged by decades of careless use. Their paint was chipped and faded and some of the panels were split or loose. Into each door, three feet above ground level, Mr Chard had bored small holes with a bradawl.
He waited for the timer to switch off the two fluorescent lights in the ceiling along the corridor, and in darkness, teeth wet with saliva, Mr Chard knelt and peered into the girl’s room. He had used the master key on his key ring to have a look in all the rooms and knew where the beds were, which was the prime factor in the location of his peepholes. This girl had her bed up against the right hand wall, headboard beneath the window, which was good of her; perfect for all positions. The peephole was only about five millimetres in diameter—the widest he dared risk—but as he put his eye to the opening he was afforded a decent perspective, enough to get the details.
She was lying on her back on the bed and the boy was sitting sidesaddle, facing her, his backside resting against her hip, feet on the floor. The bedside lamp was on and backlit them perfectly. The boy lowered his head and kissed her. She shifted against him and her legs swayed opened with an instinctual languor. Her short skirt rode up a little revealing the taut gusset of her black winter tights. The boy ran a hand across her belly and gently squeezed her thigh. Her legs moved with that slow distraction while he stroked higher. They broke their kiss and she sat up and dragged her tights down her legs, flicking them from her toes with a giggle.
Mr Chard closed his eyes for a second and put his forehead against the wood. He breathed deeply and recommenced his witness.
The boy had taken off his shirt. Still sitting on the side of the bed, he caressed her thighs. The girl lifted her bum and he pushed her skirt up, bunching it around her waist. He pressed his palm against the fabric of her panties, sliding his fingers so that the tips rubbed and stroked the goblet of shadow that lay between the tendon at the top of her thigh and the soft flesh beneath it. She moaned and pushed him away.
Shit, thought Mr Chard.
The boy stood up. The girl reached out and undid his jeans and they fell to the floor. He kicked them off as she was pulling at his pants, getting them halfway down his thighs, and she lay back against her pillows, gazing with uncontained anticipation at what she had revealed. Without taking her eyes off his craning cock, she pulled off her knickers, affording Mr Chard the briefest of glimpses of what pouted there, gleaming and rosy between her scissoring legs, and then she swivelled her hips and sat on the side of the bed. The boy stood there, mesmerised, and reached out both hands to cup her pretty upturned face. She tilted her chin and looked up at him and undid the buttons of her blouse. It slid from her shoulders and Mr Chard could see her little tits, pushed up in a lacy black bra.
The girl smiled and Mr Chard could see the boy
go tense. The cheeks of his buttocks hardened and the fingers that held the girl’s face tightened their grip. They dug into her hair as she opened her mouth and Mr Chard could see her tongue gleam in the lamplight as it moistened her bottom lip.
She put her hands on the backs of the boy’s thighs just beneath the curve of his bottom, pulled him gently towards her face and put her mouth…
The door at the end of the corridor opened.
Mr Chard threw himself sideways, away from the peephole and sprawled across the linoleum floor. He rolled and came up in one move and was already walking towards the exit, hands in his coat pockets, head down and gaze averted before anyone had stepped into the corridor and turned on the lights. He maintained a reasonable walking pace, aware that someone had now come through the door and was treading slowly towards him. Whoever it was smelled like he had trodden in something. With both feet. Mr Chard wrinkled his nose. Why hadn’t they put the lights on? Well, all the better for him if they didn’t.
He was furious. He felt as if he had just been woken from the best dream of his life, at the precise moment of penetration, frustrated as usual by his own repressed subconscious. Why was it always like this?
Despite his intention to remain inconspicuous, he looked up, raging inside, to see who had entered the corridor. To see who had brought that stink in with him and ruined his night. He wanted to remember this person. There was self-preservation in it, too. He might have to make excuses if he was recognised.
And then the lights did come on as a large fist smacked against the timer button. He blinked as the fluorescents flickered and burst into life with a low hum.
The presence was large, seeming to push the shitty smell ahead of it, and as Mr Chard looked up, he saw why.
It wasn’t a person at all.
PHIL THOUGHT HE heard a stifled scream from the corridor. It was probably someone’s television on too loud in one of the other rooms. The walls were like loo paper. His ears were buzzing a bit, too, from the increase in his heart rate. Anyway, what was he going to do about it right now?
“Did you hear that, Carol?”
Carol shook her head.
“Um-um.”
Phil’s knees buckled slightly. Wow.
THE NEXT MORNING Phil dressed and let himself out of Carol’s room without waking her. She was on a late shift and after last night he wished he were too. His eyes felt grainy with exhaustion. Everything below his belly felt hollow, including his legs. He grinned. This morning’s shift was going to be a long one.
He shrugged on his jacket as he walked down the corridor and as he was peering down to fasten the zip he noticed fresh scuffmarks on the pale blue linoleum floor. They were shaped like black chevrons and went all the way down the corridor to the door at the end, alternating left and right like footprints. To Phil it looked like someone had been dragged kicking the entire length of the corridor, the scuffs rubber from lashing heels.
He noticed something else. It was lying against the skirting board beneath a Perspex covered sign screwed to the wall advising What To Do In The Event Of A Fire. Someone had written on the Perspex in red felt-tip: MELT
Phil bent down and retrieved the item. It looked like a screwdriver but it had a sharp point. The handle was wood and the ferrule was rusty. Phil pursed his lips and stood, putting the bradawl in his jacket pocket.
If someone had been in a fight or dragged from the place, surely there would have been more noise. Phil continued walking up the corridor considering other scenarios. Maybe they weren’t boot prints. Maybe someone had walked a piece of furniture out of their room leaving leg or castor marks on the lino. Why would they do that in the middle of the night? Because they were student nurses. The strangest, most non-conformist lot on the planet. He had come home to his own digs one night after a party to find two of his cohort attempting to coax one of the horses from the meadow at the back of the cricket field along the corridor. One of them was riding on its back; the other was shuffling backwards holding out a fistful of Murray Mints. Phil had watched for a moment and then stepped over a fresh pile of manure to let himself into his room. He had passed out fully clothed on his bed and never did find out what had happened to that horse.
He stepped outside. It was bitter cold, still dark, and misty. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and headed off across the hospital grounds towards the wards. As he reached the drive that led from the hospital gates up to the main building he stopped, squinting through the mist, and stared at what had come silently in the night and set itself up on the green.
The drive encircled the green, looping in front of the old Victorian building, and was bordered on both sides with dense and untended juniper bushes. The frosted globe lamp was lit above the arched entrance to the hospital, giving the mist an eerie, diffuse radiance, and Phil could see the coloured lights on the Christmas tree in the lobby twinkling through the long window beside the porch. Phil walked slowly up the drive, all thoughts of the mystery of the scuffmarks fading from his head as he took in what had pitched up in front of the hospital.
It looked like the dirtiest, most disreputable fair ever to be convened. Shabby stalls overhung with tatty awnings dotted the churned earth. Fresh, glistening ruts criss-crossed what was left of the grass where caravans and trailers had been driven and hauled up off the drive. In the centre of the green was a circus tent made from a nasty-looking glossy material that made Phil think of human skin. There were black and grey pennants draped around its conical roof, their points dripping moisture. At the far side of the green, covered in an oily tarpaulin stood a cage on the back of a trailer.
As he circled the green he glanced at a trio of old caravans wedged together between a couple of hastily erected stalls. They were in darkness with frayed curtains pulled across their small, grimy windows. Next to these was what he first took to be a pile of rusty machine parts but on closer inspection proved to be some kind of mangled bicycle. It must be part of some ride, he thought, because it appeared to have wooden frames like wing-struts folded into its side which were covered with ragged fabric and it had a small engine beneath the saddle that looked powerful enough to run a petrol mower. It was tilted to the side and its front wheel was buried in a deep ruck of mud. It looked like it had flown in and executed a rough landing.
Phil continued around the path until he reached the cage on the trailer. He stood with his back to the hospital and approached the cage. He could smell festering straw and something higher, more acidic. Thatches of straw stuck out between the bars beneath the tarp, dripping condensation.
He stopped, his fingers an inch from the bottom of the tarpaulin, and pulled his hand back.
Something had moved inside the cage, something heavy enough to rock the trailer on its axles. It grunted, a single, deep, phlegm-filled snort, and the tarpaulin rippled where Phil had been about to put his hand.
Phil backed away from the cage. Who in their right mind had organised for this lot to come here? He thought back to the summer, and to the previous Christmas when he was only three months into his training, and the previous Fun Days the staff had put on for the patients. They had been nothing like this. No invited performers, just knackered old stalls and a bit of Now That’s What I Call Music played on a record player connected to tinny speakers. They’d come piling out of the wards, lurching and stumbling to get their groove on to Walking On Sunshine, and the hideous irony of it all was heart-rending. This was a terrible place, and its days were numbered, and all Phil had to do was go through another year and a half to qualify and he could get a job in the community in preparation for the influx of work that would come when the old asylums were shut down.
Perhaps some charity had donated this? Who knew what went on behind the scenes? The management was old school, as institutionalised as the patients. Their decisions were often arbitrary and counter-productive, or self-serving and brutal. Phil was young and modern enough in his outlook to be staggered that this hospital still used a Punishment Ward, a flagg
ing, cruel and inhuman extension from the first half of the century, where patients that didn’t toe the line were sent for months of reprimand and reconditioning.
He was about to go inside when he noticed something lying in the mud at the edge of the green. A piece of paper had been pressed into a rut by the wheels of one of the trailers. It looked like a chip wrapper but when he bent to retrieve it, flicking wet grass and mud from it, Phil could see that it was a fly-poster. He shook it out and read:
RAINSCISSOR AND MORGODER
PRESENT
A CONGRESS OF SPECTACULAR
ENTERTAINMENT AND A COLOSSAL
COMBINATION OF ALL THAT IS
BREATH TAKING AND IMPLAUSIBLE
Beneath this was a drawing of a glum little clown holding a hoop, and within the circle of the hoop was the outline of a dark and savage-looking beast. Phil pursed his lips. It looked a bit like a bear. He tilted his head, and it looked more like a wolf. It had a slovenly ursine slouch to its shoulders but the snout was long and narrow. Phil didn’t like the look of it, whatever it was, and dropped the flyer back into the mud. He took another look at the cage with the tarp over it.
Nothing could persuade him to lift the tarp again, not after hearing that nasal rattle, and he was starting to feel exposed out there in the glazed, damp pre-dawn darkness. Phil shuddered, pushing away any further curiosity, and walked off towards the entrance to the hospital.
He went through the door into the foyer. It was deserted; nobody manned reception anymore. Layoffs in preparation for closure were evident everywhere. An entire ward had been demolished recently, consigned to history in a single afternoon. The workmen, facemasked against asbestos, had left nothing but a remnant of claw-footed baths, miles of lead plumbing and cast iron Victorian column radiators. It had looked like a vandalised reclamation yard, tossed into a pile and left to tarnish, rust and rot, its traces of atrocity, madness and affliction ghosting off it like fumes.