Exit

by Belinda Bauer

  EXIT

  Also by Belinda Bauer

  Blacklands

  Darkside

  Finders Keepers

  Rubbernecker

  The Facts of Life and Death

  The Shut Eye

  The Beautiful Dead

  Snap

  EXIT

  BELINDA BAUER

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2020 by Belinda Bauer

  Jacket photographs: Man © iStock; Exit sign © iStock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishing

  Typeset in 11.75/15pt Minion by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: February 2021

  ISBN 978-0-8021-5788-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-5790-4

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  To Sarah Adams – my kind, clever, patient, one-in-a-million editor.

  Part One

  The Job

  The key was under the mat.

  As usual.

  Felix Pink found the predictability comforting – even if the predictable outcome was death.

  ‘Here we go then,’ said Chris, putting the key in the lock.

  Chris talked too much but Felix never said anything about it. He imagined it was nerves. He himself had stopped being nervous a long time ago. Now he cleared his throat and adjusted his cuffs, and followed his accomplice inside.

  The house smelled of the dust that coated the inside of pill bottles. They often did.

  They stood in the hallway and Chris called, ‘Hello?’

  There was no sound apart from a clock ticking somewhere. Not a real clock, Felix could tell, but some battery thing that ticked a small, fake tick to make people think they were getting olde worlde value for money.

  He noticed a piece of paper on the third stair, folded into a little tent, like a place card at a wedding.

  UPSTAIRS

  He picked it up and showed it to Chris, who started up the stairs. Felix took a moment to fold the paper several times and put it in his briefcase, then he gripped the banister. He was naturally cautious but, when there was a job to be done, it became a conscious effort.

  Chris was waiting for him on the landing.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello.’ The answer was small and weak.

  In the big front bedroom there was a man in bed. He was propped upright by pillows and facing the bay window, which revealed a view of a similar window across the road.

  ‘Rufus Collins?’ said Felix.

  The man in the bed nodded weakly.

  ‘I’m John and this is Chris.’

  Mr Collins nodded again, as if he knew why they were there – and then closed his eyes.

  Felix had chosen the name John because he thought it sounded competent. Margaret had had a doctor called John Tolworth who had seemed competent for quite a long time. It wasn’t his fault that he’d been beaten by death.

  In the end, it beat them all.

  He didn’t know Chris’s real name. It was for the best.

  There was a chair beside the bed and Felix sat in it and put his briefcase on the floor beside him. There was no room on the nightstand, what with all the pills and tissues.

  The cylinder was already there. Dull grey metal, like a little aqualung, attached by a length of clear tubing to a plastic face mask that lay under the man’s chin. A tired-looking piece of elastic looped from the mask around the back of his neck and over his ears, making them fold down a little. One bony hand covered the mask protectively, as if someone might steal it.

  ‘I’ll get another chair,’ said Chris and left the room.

  Felix looked down at Mr Collins. He was old, but probably no older than he was, which was seventy-five. But this man was sick, and that made all the difference, and he looked a hundred. His yellowy skin so stretched across his cheeks and brow that it looked ready to split. His breath rattled in his throat as if he needed to cough but just didn’t have the strength.

  Chris puffed in with a small wooden armchair and put it down at the other side of the bed with a loud clump.

  Mr Collins’s eyes opened and his hand clutched at the mask.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Chris.

  The sick man closed his eyes again.

  And then they waited.

  The house was so quiet that Felix could hear the clock fake-ticking downstairs. Now and then cars shushed by outside, and Mr Collins breathed. Every breath was different from the one before, as if he was discovering breathing each time anew and trying to work out which way was best. Some breaths were short and gaspy, some long and wheezy. The little rattle was the only constant.

  Felix folded his hands in his lap like a priest, and waited.

  ‘How long have we got?’ said Chris, and looked at the door.

  Felix had a watch but he didn’t look at it. ‘There’s no rush,’ he said.

  It was true. It was often like this. It rarely happened fast. Occasionally it didn’t happen at all . . .

  It would or it wouldn’t.

  They could or they couldn’t.

  The ultimate outcome was, of course, inevitable, but in the short term an Exiteer had to learn to be patient.

  Felix had always been a patient man. He had actually toyed with calling himself Job instead of John, but Job would have invited interest in a way that John never did. And interest was to be avoided at all costs.

  But, like Job, he waited. They both waited.

  An hour.

  Two.

  Felix had to guard against sleep. He found it hard to sleep at night but often dropped off during the day. But never on the job. He studied the bookshelf and recalled the plots of those books he had read. Dickens. Tolkien. He remembered his wedding and tried to recall every guest. Chris did a Sudoku, with a pair of bifocals gripping the tip of his nose for dear life. Felix had never got on with bifocals. The optician, Mrs . . . Something, had told him his eyesight was good for his age, which was some comfort. He’d lost a button on his cuff. Annoying. But he always kept spare buttons, so probably had one that would suit . . .

  He swallowed a yawn out of deference to the sick man, but missed the feeling of his respiratory system being flushed out. He’d read that when the iron lung was first introduced, patients would die even though they were breathing, because no allowance had been made for the occasional sigh. Just breathing was not enough. He hoped it was a true fact. You had to be so careful nowadays.

  Children passed outside. Home
time. Strangely Felix recalled it better now than he’d ever done. The long trudge. The heavy bag. The mock fights that sometimes turned to real ones. Looking down at his scuffed shoes and scabbed knees, with his belly gurg­ling for tea . . .

  Quietly, Felix put his briefcase on his knees.

  Mr Collins opened his eyes and looked at him.

  ‘Do you mind if I eat?’ Felix asked him politely.

  Mr Collins looked vaguely amused. ‘You go on,’ he whispered.

  ‘Can I get you anything to eat or drink?’

  Mr Collins shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  Felix took out a red tartan thermos flask and tinfoil block which, when unwrapped, revealed his sandwich. It was strawberry jam on white bread – a childish preference he’d never managed to shake off, despite his age and gravitas.

  He’d lived through rationing.

  The man in the bed watched him eat his sandwich and sip his tea.

  The children faded to silence.

  The clock pretended to tick.

  Chris’s chin drooped on to his chest and his mouth fell open.

  Felix finished his sandwich and his tea, then shook a clean tissue from his pocket, wiped the little cup dry and screwed it back on to the top of the thermos. He folded the tinfoil into a neat square for future use. He put both back into the briefcase with the soiled tissue, and quietly closed the lid.

  Before he could click it shut, Mr Collins lifted the mask to his face.

  ‘Thank you,’ he murmured, and died.

  They held the debrief at a nearby café.

  There wasn’t much to talk about, but Chris ordered a ham and cheese toastie, a slab of coffee cake and a large cappuccino.

  Felix had already eaten, of course, but ordered tea to keep him company.

  As they waited for the food to arrive, Chris said, ‘I’m not doing this any more.’

  He looked as if he expected a fight, but when none was forthcoming he went on, ‘It’s all got too much for me. All this death.’

  Felix stirred the teabag in the pot. ‘Well,’ he said, as if about to pass comment, but then he didn’t. Just left Well hanging there between them.

  The truth was, he didn’t blame Chris. Of course, he was disappointed that he was leaving, because it meant he’d have to get used to somebody new. He also felt Chris was giving up on important work. There weren’t enough of them as it was. Geoffrey was always saying so in the rambling, late-night phone calls he sometimes made to Felix’s home.

  We need more like us, Geoffrey often said. Good men prepared to step up to the crease. Because if we don’t do it, who will? Tell me that, Rob. If not us, who?

  Geoffrey often called him Rob. Felix often thought Geoffrey might be drunk, but he didn’t blame him if he was. Geoffrey had Parkinson’s and had to use sticks and sometimes a wheelchair, so Felix felt he probably had the right to be drunk whenever he could hold a glass to his lips without spillage.

  He’d never met the man, of course. Didn’t even know where he lived. The Exiteers were very careful about anonymity. Geoffrey encouraged the use of pseudonyms, and was always telling Felix never to speak to anyone on the phone claiming to represent the Exiteers.

  Protects us all, Rob, he’d slurred. A secret shared is a secret halved.

  It was Geoffrey who’d named them the Exiteers.

  Like Musketeers, you see? he’d told Felix on more than one occasion. All for one and one for all. After all, not everybody can afford to go to Switzerland. And Felix had wondered if that meant that Geoffrey couldn’t afford to go to Switzerland.

  A bustling pepperpot of a woman with her hair in a golden bun put their food on the table, and Felix blinked out of his own thoughts and back to the café.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Chris, as if he wanted to be talked out of it, but Felix refrained from trying. Exiteering was all about rights, and that meant Chris had the right to leave the group, just as their clients had the right to leave life – without judgement or question, or attempts at persuasion to the opposite view.

  Also, if Chris wanted to give up, then Felix felt he was possibly no longer the right person to be an Exiteer.

  Was not steadfast.

  Being steadfast was no longer fashionable but it was a quality Felix had always admired. He liked to think he’d been a steadfast husband to Margaret. Even after she had left him alone with their memories.

  Even after that.

  Steadfast.

  ‘John?’

  ‘Yes?’ Felix was blank for a second, then remembered that Chris had asked him what he thought about him leaving the Exiteers.

  So he cleared his throat and said, ‘I understand completely,’ and Chris nodded gratefully, as if Felix had actively supported his de­cision. Chris took a huge bite of his toastie, and a long string of melted cheese looped from his lower lip and draped itself down his navy tie.

  Felix twitched but managed to stop himself from wiping it away. Chris was not his son.

  Chris finished his sandwich without further cheese incident, and then ate his cake and drank his cappuccino.

  They were encouraged to take public transport to jobs to avoid their cars being captured on CCTV, so they walked to Bristol Temple Meads station together and Chris shook his hand and said Good luck, John, and Felix said something similar back, and then Chris walked off to get his train home. Felix thought he lived somewhere near Winchester, but wasn’t sure.

  He walked the two miles to the bus station and got the coach back to North Devon.

  Mabel was waiting in the hallway to glare at him, and there was a puddle by the back door.

  Served him right, he supposed. He looked at the clock. He’d been gone for nine hours. Next time he’d ask Miss Knott next door to have her. Miss Knott was always interrupting their walks to engage him about Mabel, as if she were a Crufts winner and not a scrubbing-brush mutt with breath that could strip paint.

  He opened the door to the garden and Mabel gave him a withering look that said it was too late now, before stalking slowly outside.

  He cleaned up the widdle using yesterday’s Telegraph sports section and a bottle of bleach. After washing his hands, he put his briefcase on the kitchen table and removed the thermos, then washed it out and turned it and its accompanying plastic cup upside down on the rack to dry. He unfolded the foil that had wrapped his sandwich, shook the crumbs from it and wiped off a spot of jam with the J-cloth. Then he folded it back into its square and smoothed it into the second drawer down, along with more of its kind and a collection of paper and plastic bags, elastic bands and string.

  Finally he took out the silver cylinder of nitrous oxide and the clear plastic mask, and wiped them clean of . . .

  anything

  . . . and put them in two separate shopping bags. Tomorrow he would take the cylinder with him and drop it in a bin near the library, where he needed to renew a book about the migratory routes of seabirds. The day after that he would put the mask and tubing into somebody else’s recycling bin.

  Felix always disliked getting rid of the evidence. It all felt rather grubby. What the Exiteers were doing was not illegal, of course, he had made very sure of that. So long as they didn’t actively help the clients. Didn’t encourage them. Didn’t supply the cylinder of nitrous oxide – or what Geoffrey called ‘the instrument of death’. So long as they just sat there and witnessed the end of life, then everything was fine. The client died quickly and without pain, and the family could be assured that their loved one had not died alone, without themselves being implicated in their death. Everybody got what they wanted. Sometimes insurance companies were cheated of a few premiums, but as unnecessary lingering and suffering were prerequisites of their contractual fulfilment, Felix’s conscience was crystal clear. Even so, it would have been foolish to leave anything lying around that might prompt a suspicious mind to ask awkward
questions about what had at first appeared to be the wholly expected death of a terminally ill patient. And Felix Pink had never been a foolish man.

  He opened the corner cupboard. His own nitrous oxide cylinders were behind the dog food. He had secured them from the same tame dental surgeon that Geoffrey had recommended, after the third or fourth Exit he’d attended. Mrs Casper – a sweet-seeming woman with motor neurone disease. By then Felix had seen enough to know how easy, how kind an end it brought to life. He bought a fresh cylinder every so often, just to be sure it was all in working order. One day he’d need it, and it would be there. Sooner rather than later, he hoped. Although not before Mabel, of course, because in these days of Bichipoos and Poodledoodles, nobody wanted to adopt a scruffy old mongrel – especially a scruffy old mongrel who enjoyed sliding her face through fox poo.

  But when Mabel was gone, then his time would come . . .

  Mabel had had Lamb and Vegetables last night, so he thought she should probably steer clear of red meat tonight. Tuna Surprise, perhaps, or Chicken Terrine. He held the can at arm’s length so he could read the ingredients on the Chicken Terrine and was disappointed to find that it contained only seven per cent meat products. Meat products. That left the door open for some of those seven per cent not even being chicken. Felix speculated as to what meat could be so much less than chicken that the makers would just call it ‘meat’ rather than tell it like it was and trumpet it on the label.

  Mabel nudged his calf with her nose.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said. He tipped the Tuna Surprise into her bowl and put it on the little plastic mat that saved the floor from spills.

  By the time he’d straightened up with due deference to his hip and had glanced down again, Mabel had eaten the Tuna Surprise and was looking up at him expectantly. He ignored her and went slowly up to their bedroom to put away his navy mac. It would be the last time he wore it this year, unless there was a sudden cold snap.

  He stood for a while with the doors open, surveying his wardrobe with a pragmatic eye.