Good Eggs

by Rebecca Hardiman

  “I’d like to book a taxi, for three a.m. But can the fella meet me round the corner from here? He’s not to ring the bell. Under any circumstances.”

  “Is this a prank?”

  “No, this is not a prank. I’ve got fifty euro.”

  “Have you now? Well, where is it you need to go?”

  “Home, but I don’t want the man ringing the doorbell, it’ll wake everyone up.”

  “So I gathered. What address are you to be collected at?”

  “Rossdale Home. It’s in—”

  “I know the place. And where would you be going to?”

  “I’ll let the driver know.”

  “I’m supposed to mark it down, for the order.”

  “I’ll tell him when he gets here.”

  The man sighs. “Right then, what’s the name?”

  “No name.”

  “I see. So it’s no name going nowhere at three?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Am I to assume there’s no number to go along with that?”

  “And no coming to the door, please, don’t forget to tell him.”

  “Is this per chance Mrs. Gogarty? Of Dún Laoghaire?”

  Millie blanches. “Who’s this?”

  “I thought I recognized the voice, Mrs. Gogarty, howya? It’s John here, in Quick Taxis.”

  “John?”

  And then she knows him: John’s the pudgy chap with the black beard who lives on JJ’s road and never brings in his wheelie bins. “John, hello.”

  “Sounds like you’re planning a top secret mission there, Mrs. Gogarty.”

  “Not at’all,” she says casually.

  “Discretion all the way.”

  “How’s my friend Jessica?”

  “She’s grand, far as I know. Going over to her niece in Brooklyn next month I believe.”

  “Is she?” says Millie, thinking, Good on ya. She misses JJ—they’d have loads to gab about—yet she can’t bring herself to phone. “That’s grand.”

  “So I guess we’ll see you soon.”

  * * *

  Night shifts pare down from a handful to one nurse per floor, and tonight it’s Agata, a pleasant Polish immigrant with half a shaved head and a single silver stud winking, beacon-like, from the tip of a strong nose that is currently hidden behind Nasz Glos, a paper she shares with the morning nurse from Warsaw.

  “Still awake?” Agata says.

  “I’m feeling a terrible chill tonight, Agata. Would you ever fix up a hot water bottle for me?”

  “You have blanket?”

  “I do, but I think I’m coming down with some awful something.”

  “So sad news yesterday yes? You are sad?”

  “Determined.”

  “Ah. OK.” Agata reluctantly folds her motherland news. “I bring to you.”

  “Lovely girl,” says Millie. “Thank you.”

  She refrains from kicking up her heels. A distracted Agata allows Millie to practically saunter down the third-floor hall, though Aideen’s rucksack, with its odd assortment, is heavy upon the small of her back. With ease, Millie makes it to the stairwell—two flights down and bob’s your uncle. She descends the top floor, ninja-like, stopping every third stair or so to pause and stand flat against the wall, ears keenly alert, like some TV cop hunting down her perp. When she reaches the ground floor, she gathers up her courage to poke her head out around the final corner whereupon she spies a hairy bloke manning the central station, a sausagey bulk of a guy she’s never seen before. Millie’s noticed, on other occasions, a guard posted here, so she isn’t surprised. What does surprise her is the high-tech security keypad embedded in the wall beside the door, red light blipping. How had she, a woman who might self-describe as fairly observant, never taken in this blasted contraption? With a need to reassess, she slips into the first bedroom she comes upon.

  She finds herself in a dark, single room, smaller than hers but otherwise laid out in the same institutional blueprint. In one corner, a soundless TV glows, throwing off snatches of light onto its occupant, a snoring blob beneath blankets. Millie stands near the door breathing. Is this ludicrous and futile? She must think. The security code would be posted or printed somewhere at the front desk, she supposes, in a drawer or, more likely, taped up next to the computer monitor. Agata’s errand won’t take much longer, though Millie’s pleased she thought to switch on her loo light and close the door, in case the nurse is overly persistent. Chances are, the girl will probably just leave the bottle on her bed and get back to her reading.

  Millie steps farther into the room, closer to the lump, and gapes when she recognizes her old nemesis, Officer Elizabeth Colding, who in slumber looks gentle and sweet even as she lets loose the oblivious snores of a lifelong drunk. One of the woman’s feet extends from the bed like a preemie swathed in covers from which peep two grotesque, gangrenous toes. Above her, ringing the wrought iron bed (brought in from home, the surest indicator of Elizabeth Colding’s dubious status as a lifer), dozens of stained-glass ornaments dangle—in the shapes of puppies, stars, unicorns, hearts—the kind of yokes you might find in a craft shop and bake in your oven, if you were the type of granny who did such things.

  Ah, look at her.

  Millie, moved despite her daunting task, steps toward the old lush, inadvertently causing a pair of glass angels to tremble against each other. A yellow kitten clanks against a gingerbread house, which taps, domino style, every other ornament down the line. Millie cries out, tries to still them with her hands. Elizabeth Colding stirs, but not enough to cause concern. Millie waits for a long moment until the room becomes still again.

  She hears the yelp just as she’s cleared the room, hand on the door. Millie spins around to see Officer Colding sitting up in bed like a mad Victorian ghost: face drained of color, hair a chaotic clump of pipe cleaners, mouth a gaping O. There’s something in her wide-eyed zombie gaze that gives Millie gooseflesh, confusion and terror combined, a flash of things to come: reduced to a single room, alone and forgotten in a hospital bed, muttering gibberish and written off long ago by every human being who’s not paid to tend to her.

  “Nurse!” Colding croaks.

  “Sssh,” Millie hisses. “You’ll wake up the—”

  “Nurse!”

  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “NURSE!”

  “OK, yes, I took your book, I confess. But just as a loan. I had every intention of returning it. In fact, it’s in my room and you can go up—”

  “NURSE!”

  Millie’s out the door and back in the hall. She searches for someplace, anywhere, to hide. To the right is all corridor and doors; to the left, the front desk where she already hears the guard’s creaking chair, en route directly toward her to investigate the mad Jane Eyre wailing. Millie might as well be stripped down to her skivvies, so exposed is she, no physical barrier between herself and himself, no cover to take. He will pounce, send her straight back upstairs where she will continue to do little but wait until she goes the way of Elizabeth Colding or, worse, Emma Jameson.

  The only object that could possibly obstruct her is a giant, dying fern sent, no doubt, by a relative in a faraway land to assuage guilt, and at some point stashed in a corner by a harried aide. There is nothing else around, and though her navy jacket is decidedly not green, she hopes it might help camouflage her.

  From her hiding spot, Millie listens as the man moves one, two, three laboring steps in her direction, and through the stiffened branches, she sees he’s got one ear cocked. The two of them, a foot apart at the most, share a long silence. Then, as these things happen, and reaffirming one of her long-held convictions (that one really has so little control over anything), an untimely, irredeemable and not demure bout of gas escapes her cursed body. Before she can so much as excuse herself, the man is upon her, registering with amazement what he clearly perceives to be a mental patient farting in a potted plant.

  “Well now,” he says.

  Millie freezes.


  He peers closer and says, “Are you in need of… of… the ladies’?”

  Part of her desperately wants to disabuse him of the mortifying assumption he must have made, that she’s soiled herself, but the smarter part, the one appointed with the task of survival at all costs, knows she mustn’t make a codswallop of this. She’s come this far (well, two staircases and two corridors, but, symbolically, an odyssey). Nothing short of force can compel her back to Room 302.

  Millie releases her held breath, folds her hands together prayer-like, and in as helpless a falsetto as she can summon, says, “Papa?”

  With kind eyes buried deep into late middle age, the guard says, “What’s that, love?”

  Millie tries to shrink in upon herself so as to appear tiny and frightened. In what she later thinks of as her pièce de résistance, she lifts her face toward him to strike a coy, girlish pose and says, “Have you come about the ponies?”

  “The…?”

  “In the stable?”

  “Sorry?”

  She flashes her battiest smile.

  “Let’s come out of there, bring you back to your room. Oh, you’ve got your coat on, have you?”

  “NURSE!” comes screeching from Elizabeth’s room. Millie should have smothered the old bag while she’d had the chance. Now she hears a flurry of commotion—maybe it’s Agata on the third floor—a door shutting, footsteps sounding from above.

  “Come on out from there and I’ll get the nurse, help you back to your room.”

  He reaches to assist her and Millie, with bold verve deep-dives into the drama of her role, bristles and shakes his hand off her, as if her arm were on fire (at least that she can draw from real-life experience), with a pained squeal. The man steps back, mutters what sounds like “Agata,” and turns toward his desk, where he will have the nurse down here in under ten seconds.

  Millie begins to cough modestly but, when he seems to ignore this and continues toward the intercom, she builds it all up to an almighty smoker’s hack, as if her very guts will discharge themselves and land splattered on the floor between them.

  “Water.” She points toward her throat. “I just need a glass of water.”

  He seems to weigh her request. If the timing were better, Millie would certainly not object to a lovely little palaver with this kindhearted and not unattractive gentleman. But eyes on the prize, Amelia, as her Peter might have said.

  “No problem.” He nods his head. “Not a bother in the world. We’ll get ya sorted with a glass of water, doesn’t that sound grand?” Carefully, in an exaggerated show of civility, he extends, again, a gallant arm, which, since she’s already chewing up the scenery, she accepts like a lady, as if he’ll be escorting her to the grand ballroom for the next waltz.

  He brings the intermittently coughing Millie Gogarty over to the lounge where, weeks ago, she and Kevin had waited for Mrs. Slattery.

  “I’ll be right back. You sit tight.”

  Millie grins at him like a half-wit and listens as he shuffles down to the kitchen. Then she dashes to the front desk, which is a mess of papers and file folders, a steaming mug of coffee, a telephone, tiny television, computer. Yellow Post-its are stuck like incongruent tiles across surfaces, but none seems to bear a series of numbers resembling any sort of code. She reefs open drawers, cabinets; she even climbs under the desk thinking someone might’ve taped up security codes beneath it, but no.

  Now Millie hears movement from the kitchen. The man’ll be back any moment. When her eyes fall a second time onto his coffee, she’s struck by an idea—wicked and insane—or brilliant? She digs into Aideen’s bag until she locates the pilfered pills. Removing the bottle of Ambien, Millie drops one pill in and watches it sizzle on the muddy surface. Footsteps approach. She adds two more and stirs the tiny dissolving burnt orange magic beans with a Biro.

  * * *

  Millie wonders, idly, whether she’ll ever have use for her newfound knowledge: that three Ambiens reduce one sausage to a drooling heap in approximately twelve minutes. Behind the lounge door, she had listened as he returned to his desk, no doubt wondering where the madwoman had got to, and then eventually resettled into his chair. It was an excruciating limbo, but finally the guard drained the dregs of his laced coffee.

  Now Millie must hurry. She beelines to the front door, sweeping by the guard whose broad salad plate of a forehead drifts languidly toward his shoulder. Might as well have ten jars in him, she thinks. She begins inputting any obvious combination of figures she can drum up: “1234,” “1111,” “007.” But the idiot flashing light continues to taunt her.

  She races down the corridor as fast as her old lady legs will take her, toward the back door, which leads to the garden, or the “grounds.” She hasn’t run in ages. Her lungs catch fire instantly, but she’s curiously light of body. She’s like a girl again, chasing down the soggy strand, hurling wet, reeking globs of rubbery seaweed at her brother, the two in fierce battle as always. But Millie skids to a halt at the back door where a second, hideous light blinks mockingly at her.

  To make matters worse, now comes the sound of knocking on the front door. The taxi. Hadn’t she told your one not to knock? Readers on, she inspects the keypad. A second knock sounds. He’ll wake the guard, or will he? From the desk, a phone begins bleating. Just as Millie’s ready to give up and yank the bloody door open, come what may, she sees, at the bottom of the device, a microscopic red button marked “disable.”

  Millie presses this and the light instantly ceases to flash. She reaches for the door, turns the handle, and it gives easily, freezing night air rushing at her as if she’s slammed into a wall of ice. Millie makes her way slowly through the garden, stepping round shrubs though she inadvertently nails a flower bed. She keeps close to the building, away from the drive, and hovers at the corner of the house, scared to step away from it where she can be seen.

  But she’s managed to get herself out of the building, and this thought propels her forward, into the front garden just in time to see her taxi reverse into the road. She lifts her arms high into the air and waves, but it quickly recedes.

  Now it’s very cold and very quiet. Millie doesn’t know her next move, but she knows to move. She heads left through the garden of the neighboring house and then the next one. It isn’t until she reaches the corner of the road—four houses down—that the adrenaline begins to abate.

  She has a painful stitch in her side, the rucksack already feels ten stone, her lift is gone, but never mind: the fact is, she’s out.

  * * *

  Millie’s plan, such as it is, begins to form when she comes upon the same home, 49 Glen Ground, for the third time, distinguishable from the other semidetached houses along the road only by the fact that one of its occupants has left a red bike helmet out to ruin in the garden. She is officially going round in circles, lost in a disorienting suburban maze of beige, pebble-faced housing, cul-de-sacs that present themselves without warning and nondescript stone walls barricading strangers like her. Not a single car has passed Millie since her escape; nor is a light blazing in any window; all curtains and blinds appear drawn. They are in; Millie’s out. And the truth is, she’s winded, the stitch is worsening, and she can feel her slimy sock rubbing painfully against the left bony bit of her foot (to say nothing of her bunion), which means a blister is sprouting, which in turn means walking will not be a realistic option for much longer.

  She has so little idea where she is; she needs to get off the streets and home. What, Millie wonders, if she were to knock on this door with the helmet and play the role of a harmless, lost lady in need of assistance? She could tell the kindly mum or dad within, who’ll be sleepy yet open to civility and compassion, that she was returning home from the country—Kildare, say, sounds rather posh—visiting her brother who runs a B&B—no, better make it a sister, she never got on with her brother and that hostility might bleed into her performance. She must’ve driven over a nail in the road because she’s got a flat tire. The car, she’ll g
o on, is just down the road (yet too far to see from here) and could she possibly borrow their telephone for a taxi? At which point, the father, whom she now envisions as more likely to answer the door in the dead of night, who’ll have patchy, disarming facial hair and a soft jowly face and a midlife paunch, will offer to drive her home to Dún Laoghaire. Along the way, he might ask where her own car is but she’ll convince him not to worry, that she’ll call a repair truck to tow it in the morning.

  Millie peers more closely at the brass knocker, which is an Anna Livia replica, with that famously sorrowful face. The door itself is still decorated with faux Christmas garland, which, it being mid-March, indicates to Millie a certain auspicious lapse in rules.

  On the one hand, she knows this plan is vague, dangerous, ill-conceived, harebrained, cockeyed, and likely doomed. On the other, what the feck else can she do? The guard at Rossdale may have woken up with the banging; Agata might have copped on to her absence. Perhaps the police have been called. With a certain swell of pride, she imagines the pandemonium. But this scenario, if it is, indeed, playing out, is problematic: they will ring up Kevin and go immediately to Margate, beating her to the punch, and then force her back once more.

  Millie reaches for the knocker and hears the muffled and distant but unmistakable sound of a car. The police? She instinctively ducks behind a hedge. How many bleedin’ bushes is she to find herself in tonight? The car sounds about a road off and Millie wonders whether she ought to reveal herself and get a lift, or would she have a better shot at this house? As she weighs these options, she spies, among the rough roots, a torn, aging chocolate bar wrapper and then, stuck in the branches, a lone infant moccasin dangling from a ribbon. The slipper is lined with fraying beige fur and it’s so tiny, it can’t have fit any infant for long—a handful of weeks at most. She lets herself conjure up her long-ago baby. Maureen, in swaddling most of her few short months, never had need of slippers—or, for that matter, eyeglasses or tweezers or a sieve or a driving license or a husband. And to think of all the shoes she herself has owned! Millie’s throat tightens; a sharp pressure bears down on her chest. She has spent so many years stuffing such thoughts out and away, yet here they are, freshly devastating, as raw as something just slain, bloody and throbbing still.