Feeding time, p.34
Feeding Time, page 34
Without a word Dot leaned forward in the wheelchair’s sling and flicked the catch that secured the leg rest. Then, gripping her leg beneath the knee, she lifted the plaster boot and lowered it to the floor. Moving her hands to the armrests, she started rocking herself forward in the sling, until half of each buttock was hanging over the void. Her whole body was trembling now. At the effort already expended, and in anticipation of the effort to come. Straining at the armrests, and favouring her good leg, Dot lifted herself from the wheelchair. It must have only lasted seconds, but to Dot it felt like minutes, hours, lifetimes passed as she forced herself vertical. Whole civilisations might have been founded, bloomed, turned and fallen in the time it took her to stand. Her muscles were shrieking pain – how easy it would have been to drop back into the leather seat, to give in, to surrender to entropy. But if she did, she knew that would be her last act of agency, her signature at the bottom of life’s contract. And although she had come to Green Oaks to reach that very state, to sign off, to wind down, at that moment it felt impossible for her to accept. There was just so much unfinished business…
Upright, she shifted some of her weight onto the plaster boot. Something inside it cracked loudly and the off-white surface fissured like baked earth. She lifted her head slowly until their eyes locked.
‘I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond… Lat kutte hem of,’ she said.
Tristan laughed, a small interrogatory gurgle – ‘Huh?’ – and took a step forward. He was breathing heavily through his nose, a flake of dried snot in his right nostril quivering like bunting in the summer breeze. She could have bitten his lips off right then, their faces were so close.
‘I wish I had your balls in my hand… I’d cut them off,’ she translated.
For a second Dot thought she had rattled him. The way his eyes opened wide and his head was cocked suggested, at the very least, that he was surprised. It didn’t last long.
‘If you think this is bad,’ he whispered with faux-casualness, as if discretely making her privy to confidential information. ‘You should see what I’ve got in mind for Ward C later.’
Dot froze. The confirmation of that elusive ward’s existence grounded her with a thump. So she hadn’t been mad all this time – at least not completely – and it wasn’t a mere euphemism, as Betty seemed to believe. Ward C existed. Ward C was real. Which meant… Which meant… She blinked hard, several times. The implications were almost too much for her to process. Did that mean the Captain wasn’t dead? Had she lifted that pillow from Leonard’s face before it was too late?
She could sense the fight oozing from her and fatigue oozing back in, her paper-thin skin was too fragile a membrane to prevent the transfer. She should say something. Before it was too late.
‘What…’ she said a rogue quiver tugging at her voice. ‘What have you got in mind?’
Tristan reached forward and laid a hand on her shoulder. His grip was firm, like a Cockateel’s.
‘For your two beaus, you mean?’ he said, smacking his lips. ‘Perhaps nothing. If you cooperate.’
He was only applying the lightest pressure, but Dot could already feel her knees giving way. Of course she would cooperate. What else could she do? The risks of resisting were just too great. Her mind’s needle had jammed on Olive’s words from several months earlier: You know what they say, Dot? The house always wins…
Beneath Tristan’s hand she slumped to the floor.
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5
Tristan watched as Pat’s furry belly waxed and waned. After a minute or so his left leg began twitching and Tristan worried he was about to awaken. But he didn’t. The leg just twitched itself out and Pat rolled onto his side, his dumb, unconscious puss squashed into the fart-filled cleft of the old cushions.
It’s for his own good.
On several occasions, before the Kalki delirium had knocked him off the rails, Tristan had wondered if he would ever need to use what he had come to know as the ‘nuclear option’ – revealing to Mister Cornish what had really become of the old Indian. He had assumed its utility would be to transform collective responsibility into something more… individual. Shifting the blame, after a blind and ailing Grey was discovered locked in the upstairs closet, onto Pat or Frankie. Or Agnes. Onto anybody but him.
He had called it the ‘nuclear option’, because he was sure it would be the moment everything exploded. He would never have guessed he would be using it to keep the team together…
One day he’ll thank me.
There was no way any of them could leave once Kalki’s disappearance was revealed to the world. Not Pat, not Frankie, not Cornish. Not Tristan either. They were all implicated in one way or another. Guilty only by association or incompetence, perhaps, but guilty all the same. They would be bound together, in a strange little four-way matrimony. For better or worse.
Perhaps, for want of other options, he and Frankie would end up fucking after all.
He opened the door as quietly as he could, left the staffroom and closed it again behind him.
He wasn’t quite sure what he would say when Cornish asked – as he surely would – about what had become of Kalki’s body, but the uncertainties this introduced would only heighten the sense of risk and the obligation for all of them to hold their tongues.
In sickness and in health…
He heard raised voices coming from Ward B. Recriminations probably, for the punishment he and Frankie had inflicted on them earlier. They would normally have been locked in for the night by now, but with the Captain out of the picture, Tristan had become a little lax. He’d see to them after he’d seen to Cornish.
After climbing the first few stairs, he froze…
There was nothing familiar at first about the mud-encrusted ground-hog bowling towards him at an impressive gravity-aided clip. It was an extraordinary, harrowing sight, slowed down enough by the panic-centre in his brain so that he could watch it in excruciating detail. With two canes held aloft in one hand, the apparition was windmilling an open pot of honey with the other. Impossible to tell if he was in control or not, if each forward footfall, each rotation of the honey pot, was part of an elaborately choreographed attack-charge or, instead, a simple and desperate attempt to remain vertical.
Before Tristan could duck, the plastic tub connected, square with his jaw, and as consciousness left him, he felt his knees give way and his body crumple to the stairs.
From this day forward…
He must have only been out cold for a few seconds, because the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the old man finishing his descent, skidding into the hallway and promptly falling onto his arse.
Forget-me-Not. Tristan recognised him now. Impressive dementia. A terrifying black hole of a brain, that was slowly drawing in and crushing memories – new and old – out of existence. What the hell was he doing out?
His mouth overflowed with blood and he gagged. He coughed red onto the carpet. Moments later a tooth slumped onto his tongue. His head spun with the pain. Not again.
Forget-me-Not lifted himself to his knees then, rattlingly, to his feet… He looked about the hallway, from one door to another, to another. There were five for him to choose from, which looked like four too many. Frustrated he leaned back against the wall, propped his canes beside him and massaged his fleshy forehead with his free hand.
‘It couldn’t hurt,’ he said, eyeing the honey pot. ‘It could help. With the… the… the’ – and plunging three fingers into the viscid goo he lifted a clod of it and trailed it into his mouth. He closed his eyes and worked his tongue over his lips. He was meticulous, working the crevices until the honey’s vague gilding had been replaced by the clear shimmer of his spittle.
‘Silk, silk, silk, silk, silk… And what do cows drink?’ The effort of his reflections had carved deep crevasses in his forehead. ‘Money… Money… Money… Money… Money. And what do bees eat?’
His eyes sprang open.
‘Bee!’ he cried. He closed the honey pot and started stropping his hand on his cardigan. Incanting ‘Bee, bee, bee, bee…’ his eye finally snagged on the large black letter painted on the door.
‘Carwious an… an… and Tai Tschi…’ he cried, wobbling into Ward B.
Things were falling apart, Tristan could see that now. Doors were unlocked, Feebies were on the loose, Pat was leaving… The tooth was still in his mouth. He spat it onto the palm of his hand where it lay in a puddle of saliva and blood. A fucking incisor. Typical.
He had to press the button. Now.
He was on the landing in three strides. At Cornish’s door in another two. He stopped, took several deep breaths, and wiped his bloody lips with his sleeve.
‘Mister Cornish,’ he said, knocking. When no reply came, he knocked a second time, harder.
The door creaked open.
‘Mister Cornish?’ he said again, spreading the fingers of his left hand and easing the door open further with the tips. It squealed, as was only proper.
A sharp intake of breath. A flurry of blinks.
Then he stopped breathing. Stopped blinking.
He walked slowly towards the purple-faced effigy, cable-tied to the office chair.
‘Mister Cornish…’ he tried.
Inches away, he stared. Cornish stared back at him. Tristan looked away, looked down… At the body. It was horrible. Long gone to seed. The skin below the neck was the towel-grey of old underwear, and its layer of fuzz looked more like some extraterrestrial mould than anything human in origin.
Tristan swallowed hard and looked back up at the face. It was Cornish, there was no doubt. But transformed, swollen, the bulging eyes bloodshot, the fat tongue, an even deeper indigo than the rest of the face, lolling between his lips like a lazy hard-on.
Tristan reached out a pair of fingers to feel for a pulse. He hesitated before making contact, drew his fingers back, then steeled himself and touched him beneath the jaw. Only for the briefest moment, though… the sensation, the unearthly sponginess perhaps, reminded him of something and he drew his fingers back in shock. The moment contact ceased, Cornish’s cadaver unleashed a long, loud fart.
Til death us do part…
Shit!
‘Pat!’ Tristan cried, staggering backwards. ‘Pat!’ he shrieked again from the landing, before suddenly falling silent. Hortense was staring at him, impassively, from Ward A. She tilted her head a few degrees, inviting an explanation.
‘Dead!’ Tristan shrieked. ‘Dead! Murdered! Cornish!’
Without taking her eyes off him, and with an odd little smile, Hortense reached for the red emergency cord hanging beside her chaise-longue and gave it the heartiest tug her withered arm could manage.
‘What the fuck’s got into you?’
Tristan spun around. Pat was standing at the top of the stairs.
‘Murder!’ Tristan quivered again.
‘Your mouth’s gushing blood like a fucking hydrant.’
‘R… r… rape!’ A darkness settled onto Pat’s face.
‘Hortense?’ he asked. Then: ‘Tristan what the fuck have you done?’
‘Ha!’ Tristan choked, showering Pat with blood. ‘Not me, dumb-dumb. And not Hortense,’ he said, pointing off to the side. ‘Cornish!’
Pat’s gaze followed the invisible dotted line emanating from Tristan’s index finger.
‘Holy living…’
‘Conspiracy!’ Tristan interrupted.
‘Wh… what?’
‘The Captain! It must be. Forget-me-Not couldn’t do this alone.’
‘Tristan, no!’
Yes, he thought. Yes, yes and yes!
‘Of course it’s him. Who else could it be? This is my chance to…’
‘No,’ Pat shouted. ‘This is your chance to nothing! A man’s dead.’
‘A man’s always dead,’ Tristan said. ‘A man’s always fucking dead, but an opportunity has to be taken when it comes.’
Tristan felt Pat’s hands on his shoulders. Their faces were almost touching now.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen to me, alright? The first thing we do is go downstairs and call someone. The police, I guess. Or an ambulance. I don’t know. And they take it from there, OK?’
Pat put his arm over Tristan’s shoulder and began leading him towards the stairwell.
‘I mean… He’s really gone and done it now.’
‘Tristan?’ Pat said. ‘Come on. Please.’
Pat looked exhausted suddenly. Pale and drawn. Like a marathon runner who had abandoned the race at the twenty-five mile marker.
Halfway down the stairs, they stopped.
