“Isn’t Benson the nicest man,” Francis interrupted, quite forgetting her earlier concern.
“No one mentioned Muriel last night. Please excuse me,” Elijah replied. He wanted to hurry past the women but even talking to the women pained his broken ribs.
“Hello, Elijah,” boomed Sulia from the other side of the group.
He hadn’t seen Sulia lurking in the shadows, despite being the largest person there. His heart sank, she’d want to talk with him too. He didn’t have the energy for that and contemplated turning tail and going back to bed, despite knowing an orderly would find him and force him to go to breakfast. He could plead illness and get his breakfast delivered to him in bed. Isn’t that the best part of being old? You got to play invalid and someone came and wiped your backside and held a sippy cup to your lips while you spent the rest of the time watching daytime television and sleeping? Elijah didn’t even want breakfast, he just wanted to die. To be with Natalie.
“Will you walk me to breakfast?” Sulia asked.
It would have taken too much energy to decline, so Elijah nodded at the woman, then laughed at his own foolishness — the stupid woman was blind, she couldn’t even see him nodding. “Sure, I’ll walk you.”
With her hand on his arm, they shuffled away from Muriel’s room and along the corridor, an odd sight — the disgraced football coach, wasting away to a shadow, and a giant Indian woman, her colourful sari at odds with the beigeness of the surroundings, her ankles tinkling as her weight forced her to shuffle alongside Elijah.
“Wait!” Sulia exclaimed. “I need something from my room.”
Elijah protested, but the woman had turned back, a slow laborious wheeling turn which left him following closely behind as she entered her room on the opposite side of the corridor.
Sulia’s room was the mirror image of his own except she had even fewer belongings than he did. And where Elijah had framed photographs of his beloved wife, Sulia had nothing. The only nod to her past was a shoebox sized statue of an elephant. Upon closer inspection Elijah wasn’t sure it was an elephant. It had an elephant-like trunk and ears but sat humanlike, cross legged, its feet beautifully rendered, as were its two pairs of arms with something held in each it its four hands.
“That’s Lord Ganesha,” Sulia replied as if she knew where he was looking. “The Remover of Obstacles,” she laughed. “Close the door please,” Sulia directed, her back to him as she gazed sightlessly out the window.
Elijah closed the door and Sulia reached in behind the curtain, pulling out a stoneware bottle, like an old ginger beer bottle from a century ago. Elijah couldn’t have been more surprised.
“Alcohol?” Elijah asked.
He hadn’t touched a drop since the accident. Not only was that one of his parole conditions but it was also part of his self imposed purgatory. Sulia’s furtiveness meant only one thing and his mouth filled with the memory of bourbon. He wanted nothing more than to feel the heaviness of the alcohol on his tongue as he took that first sip, swirling it around in his mouth until it hit every tastebud… no. Natalie’s beautiful face in the casket materialised like an old Polaroid photo coming into focus.
“I don’t drink any more,” he said, ignoring the saliva in his mouth which betrayed his lie. Elijah wanted a drink, but not now, not in this lifetime.
“It’s not alcohol,” Sulia replied. “Trust me, it will take away that pain, you try it,” and pushed the bottle towards him. “Just a sip, you don’t need more than that. Like how you’d try a hot tabasco sauce for the first time, a tiny sip,” she coached.
Elijah took the bottle. It didn’t smell of alcohol. He took a hesitant sip, his tastebuds protesting at the unknown milky substance coating his tongue instead of the bourbon they’d expected. Coughing, he handed the heavy bottle back to Sulia. The cloying scent of the woman’s perfume mixed with the chalky aftertaste in his mouth didn’t sit well in his stomach. He placed his hands protectively across his ribs as he felt a tickle in his throat, the precursor to a cough, the pain would be severe. But the sensation travelled down his throat and spread out through his chest and teasing its way through his limbs. He loosened his arms and straightened without noticing that the movement caused no pain.
“What is it?” he asked the woman who was staring at him with her cloudy white eyes.
“Magic,” Sulia replied, stoppering the bottle and wedging it back behind the curtain. “We’ll go to breakfast now, you take me before they look for us but we’ll talk more later,” she offered, squeezing past Elijah and shuffling to open the door herself.
Following behind, Elijah almost ran into Sulia as she bent awkwardly to scoop something up from the floor. Before it disappeared into her cardigan pocket Elijah caught sight of a pair of two tiny white balls… two pearls.
Breakfast was a hushed affair; like a gathering of Cold War spies the residents huddled over their porridge and milky tea stifling their conversations every time an orderly came near. The empty chairs telling a curious tale, one which grew with every passing through the room. Elijah and Sulia slipped into their seats and waited for breakfast. Elijah spied the morning chef at the kitchen door, scanning the faces of the residents, as if she too were counting heads and coming up short every time.
Preston slammed plates of porridge onto the table sending small tidal waves of thin milk slopping over the sides of their bowls. He had a filthy smirk on his face, as if he knew a secret they didn’t, one which involved them.
“Are you missing one of your friends today?” he sneered, running a dirty cloth perfunctorily over the spilt milk.
Elijah ducked his head, refusing to make eye contact. He wanted no more trouble. Sulia however danced into the fray, toying with the younger man the way a cat does with a mouse.
“What have you done with them then, you filthy cretin?”
“Oi, you watch who you’re calling a creation. Eat your porridge and be grateful, you old bat.”
“I said cretin, not creation. You need your hearing checked. Where did you learn English, from the back of a cereal packet?”
At that, Preston lost it, slamming his hand on the table, sending another wave of milk across the table and onto Sulia’s voluminous lap.
Sulia leapt up faster than her size allowed and pushed her girth into the smaller man, towering over him. Preston cowered down, the confrontation too much, and weaselling his way from underneath her bulk he stalked off, casting glances behind him as he scurried from the room, leaving the other latecomers waiting in vain for their breakfast.
“It’s best to leave that one alone,” Elijah counselled, spooning another mouthful of porridge into his mouth. His eyes taking in the comings and goings, lingering on the empty seats. He didn’t have any close friendships but a quick tally of the dining room confirmed that the people he was acquainted with were vanishing fast.
“You never said if you’d heard about what happened to Muriel?” Sulia said after sitting down again.
“I don’t even know the woman.”
“You had dinner together the other night. The night of the fight. Still think you should report him.”
“Well I’ve got no idea what happened to her, so I won’t stand around gossiping in corridors. She’s old. Old people die. We all die. She’s lucky she’s gone,” Elijah said. Talking about the other residents was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted to eat his porridge and go back to his room. He had another Agatha Christie novel to read which he’d found in the woefully understocked room the Rose Haven called a library. It was in his room, waiting for him.
“Maybe she’s in her room? We should go check,” Sulia suggested.
Elijah slammed down his spoon. “That’s not my job. They have people to do that. I don’t get involved in other—” He never finished what he was saying, instead, staring instead at his hands and flexing his fingers. All ten digits moved with perfect synchronicity. Painless synchronicity.
“Told you it would work,” Sulia said, smiling into her spoon.
Stubbs went to follow Ricky downstairs, but Tracey came out of her office with the two policemen in tow just as he took a step.
“Shouldn’t you be helping at breakfast?” Tracey asked.
Stubbs muttered an apology and shot off towards the dining room. Shit, now she’d think he was listening at her door, when he’d only thought about listening in. Whatever their conversation was, she never showed the police through to talk to the residents, so he kept his big mouth shut lest she accuse him of spreading gossip.
Breakfast was easier than usual, a quarter of the residents were having a sleep in and never bothered coming. No matter, he’d eat the leftovers, it also meant there was less for him to clean.
Between him and Preston, they’d got the old farts served their porridge and toast in record time. He’d have plenty of time for another cigarette at this rate and put Tricky Ricky out of his mind. He had his suspicions about what the boy was doing down in Doctor Perry’s lab, but that was Ricky’s problem. As long as it didn’t impact on his life, he didn’t care. Ricky could shove all the pills up his nose and he wouldn’t give a rats arse.
Stubbs steered well clear of the big Indian woman who’d come in with the football dude, the one who’d killed his wife and kids in a drunken car crash. She scared the hell out of him, with bells on her ankles and that weirdo statue in her bedroom. He didn’t even want to clean in there. Normally he liked having a good rummage through the resident’s drawers, in case they kept cash hidden away, not that they had anything to spend it on. But he didn’t like being in her room any longer than necessary. And the way she looked at you with her dead eyes, he’d wanted to spear them with a fork the first time she’d turned up at the Rose Haven.
He was on the other side of the room when he saw the creepy Indian biddy stand up and screech at Preston like a fish wife, and would’ve gone over to back him up, but Preston turned tail, the coward, and disappeared out of the room. He wouldn’t have let that old freak get away with it, and Bart couldn’t believe Preston had walked away. Still, he gave her table a wide berth when he left for a smoke. This day was turning out to be one of the hardest he’d worked and it was only the morning.
Stubbs had his packet of Camels in his hand and was in the middle of selecting the perfect smoke as he walked out of the dining room when a hand grabbed him from behind.
“You could have come over to help back there. You too scared to help after your little accident?” Preston sneered.
Bart’s cigarette snapped in half when Preston spun him round, and he stood there stupidly, staring at his ruined cigarette. “You ruined my cigarette!”
“Forget the bloody cigarette, you need to come see what I found, unless you’re too scared?”
The wide eyed excitement on Preston’s face was enough to motivate Bart to follow him, his nicotine cravings stalled by the promise of something scurrilous Preston had discovered. He pulled up outside Sulia’s room though, like a horse refusing a jump.
“That’s the Indian’s room,” he said, hovering on the threshold.
Preston was already in the room, his hand on the curtain. “Come on Stubbs, she’s eating her body weight in porridge, so get your arse in here and look at this.”
Stubbs edged his way into the room, avoiding eye contact with the grotesque elephant statue thing, and Preston pulled the heavy curtain away the edge of the window revealing a bottle hidden in the corner.
“Ooh, what’s she got there? Against the rules isn’t it, having alcohol in your room? Tracey will show her the door for this. Or did you put it there?” Stubbs asked, eyeing up Preston’s reaction.
“It’s amazing what you can find if you search hard enough, although this room is on your cleaning roster, so how do I know that you haven’t hidden it there yourself? Thought I’d ask before we take the evidence to Tracey, you know, cover our own backsides before we get her kicked out on hers.”
“It’s not mine, don’t touch the stuff. Anyway, that bottle looks to be as old as her,” Stubbs replied.
“Come on, let’s take it to Tracey now. You can say you found it when you were cleaning and you asked me for advice,” Preston suggested.
Stubbs laughed, doubting Tracey would believe that. But, it was worth a shot and might just make her forget she’d caught him outside the office.
The men lined up outside Tracey’s office and Preston rapped on the door.
“Now’s not a good time,” came the reply.
Stubbs shrugged, he didn’t give a stuff too much either way, because the nicotine cravings had come back and his mouth was more parched that an old hag’s panties.
Preston knocked again and turned the handle, walking through like he owned the place. Once again, Stubbs was standing alone outside the office, until Preston reached back and yanked him in, slamming the door behind them both.
“You tell her,” Preston said, holding the bottle out like a stick of dynamite.
Stubbs explained, before realising Tracey wasn’t alone in the room, Doctor Perry filled the other chair and he had aged.
“Where did you get that bottle?” Doctor Perry asked.
“I said now wasn’t a good time,” Tracey said on top of Perry.
“It was in that Indian woman’s room,” Preston said, pushing the bottle in Perry’s outstretched hands, stepping back from the doctor who looked ready to lynch him.
“You can’t have found it in her room,” Tracey said. “We search everyone’s belongings when they first arrive, you know the rules. Alcohol is on the prohibited list and we confiscate any we find.”
“Where did you find it?” Doctor Perry asked again, staring at the stoneware bottle in his hands.
“Told you, behind the curtain in Sulia Patel’s room, the one stirring up the trouble,” Stubbs said, his bottom lip sticking out, suddenly afraid of missing out on the praise for a job well done.
“Is Bart telling the truth, Preston?” Tracey asked, her frozen face looked incredulous despite not moving an inch.
Preston nodded, his eyes on the doctor, who’d pulled the stopper free and was sniffing the contents.
“It can’t be,” Doctor Perry muttered to himself before sticking a finger in the bottle and sucking the milky substance from the tip of his index finger. With his eyes closed, he licked his lips, and then his body rippled, as if there were a series of tiny earthquakes happening right underneath him.
“Thank you Bart, Preston, we’ll take it from here,” Tracey said, rushing to her feet and shepherding the men from the room. “I don’t want you talking about what you’ve found, to anyone, understand? Doctor Perry and I will have a word with Miss Patel,” and she closed the door, locking it.
Outside Tracey’s office the men looked at each other. Neither had any words to describe what they’d just seen, but it wasn’t natural.
“I need a cigarette,” Stubbs said.
“I think I’ll join you,” Preston replied.
55
Ricky still had a handful of the big pills left. He’d been saving them to trade later, but now he had to hide from the police down here with no one to play with, and his special pipe was empty, so he might need to use them instead. He scratched at his arms; the bugs were back, and he needed something to kill them with so spent a fruitless ten minutes looking for a fly swat or a knife or a gun, anything to kill the nasty little beasties. They mostly came at night so he didn’t understand why they were being so bothersome now, it was only the morning.
He found a staple remover on the doctor’s desk and sat quietly chasing the bugs up and down both arms with the sharp teeth of the staple remover, oblivious to the pain and blood. Ricky didn’t have as much luck killing the ones on his right arm; he had difficulty using his left arm to chase them; they were so quick, but he killed enough of them so now he could focus on crushing the big pills into powder and give them a snort to see what happened, and he’d be able to give his special pipe a rest.
The Namenda pills he’d swiped from the dru
g cart, the ones to treat Alzheimers, looked like huge flesh coloured candies, with the number ‘5’ on one side, and the initials ‘FL’ on the other. He didn’t know if the ‘FL’ was a good omen or a bad one, but if he said them together — the ‘FL’ and the ‘5’ it sounded like he was saying firefly, which Ricky thought was clever. He’d hidden them inside a fancy silver coffee jug, which he was pretty sure the Black Man would pay him good money for the next time he saw him.
Ricky put the handful of pills into the special crushing bowl and ground away at the pills with the ceramic pestle until the pills became powdery flesh, well it looked to him as if someone’s skin had flaked off. Ricky cackled to himself. There was lots in the bowl and he didn’t want to snort the lot. Damn, damn, damn, he shouldn’t have crushed them all, he should have kept some to trade. What a dumb thing to do. He didn’t even know if the powdery flesh would be any good. If he snorted up someone’s flesh, did that make him a cannibal? He pondered the idea while he searched the doctor’s desk for something to snort the powder. There was nothing glamorous on the desk, not like in the movies, where someone always had a Washington. The best he came up with was a Post-it note, which he folded carefully to make sure the sticky side wasn’t facing inwards. He wasn’t dumb enough to fold it the wrong way.
Sticking the yellow paper up his nostril, Ricky snorted straight out of the bowl, the pink powder firing around the mucus and into the blood vessels in his nose, and straight into his bloodstream, then it skipped past the blood-brain-barrier and into what remained of his brain. And then the bugs came. Ricky sat terrified at the doctor’s desk as he saw hundreds of tiny black beetles, and brown bugs, and red ants, crawl from every corner of the room and scurry towards him, running over each other in their haste to get him. Ricky watched ants being trampled to death by the larger bugs who wanted to get to him first. He couldn’t move, or breathe, and then they almost touched him so he pulled his legs up to his chest so they wouldn’t climb up them. Rocking back and forth, he wanted to close his eyes, but didn’t know if they were jumping bugs and he wanted to see them jump so he couldn’t close his eyes, even to blink. Ricky tried counting them, but every time he counted the big ones, they moved and he had to start again, and it was so hard counting when his eyes were so dry, but he couldn’t blink because the bugs might be waiting for him to blink before they jumped on him, or for him to fall asleep, and then they’d burrow into his skin through the little holes he’d made. Ricky checked his arms, they hadn’t made it there yet, so he was okay.
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