Feeding time, p.36
Feeding Time, page 36
Dot looked across at the others. Were they seeing this too? She couldn’t tell, although their eyes were trained on Smithy with an attention that suggested this rift in time was an exquisite torture devised for her alone. How many repetitions would she be forced to watch?
Jeepers! The Carpet!
A slither of a second before Frankie was due to slip her toe under the rug, however, something happened. Dot wouldn’t have been able to explain it if asked, but for an instant she felt a strain in the room around her, a tension, a concentrated energy, primed for release like the string of an archer’s bow. The whole room, the whole house, perhaps the whole world trembled. The walls around her seemed to flex. It was so intense, she feared she would pass out…
Then came the release. Frankie’s feet slapped together and lifted, both of them, from the floor as she pivoted about the axis of her pelvis, spinning ninety degrees. She yelped – ‘Ah! Agh!’ – and slapped to the floor like a decked fish.
And nobody noticed! They were all too transfixed by Smithy’s advance – now gloriously uninterrupted. A few feet from his target, he dipped his shoulder and, with the grace of a rugby forward, rammed into Tristan’s gut, scooping the CareFriend up onto his shoulder before the two of them dropped, hard and heavily, onto the stairs.
Pat dodged the impact and wasted no time setting off across the hallway. With barely a backwards glance at his fallen colleague he took hold of Frankie, dazed from her own inexplicable tumble, pulled her to her feet in one fluid motion, and the two of them were out of the door and halfway down the driveway before anyone had the chance to stop them.
Smithy hoisted Tristan – writhing, though with little real fight – back onto his shoulder, strode across the hall, flung open the rubber room door and hurled the bewildered youth inside, before closing it and bolting it shut.
Then he turned to the others. He looked as surprised as they did. Dazed, as all revolutionaries look at the moment of victory – unable to believe what has happened. In barely five minutes everything had been overturned, and none of them quite knew how. No matter, that was for the historians to argue over. Or not. Green Oaks, suddenly, was theirs now…
Without a word, Smithy walked towards them. As he reached the edge of the rug, his toe caught on it. He looked down and smoothed away the kink with his foot. With an expression on his face Dot found utterly inscrutable, Smithy took Betty in his arms and rested his old, heavy head on her shoulder.
On the floor above, the closet door opened. For a few seconds a high-pitched sound, almost a shriek, could be heard, the sound of air rushing into a vacuum. Entropy at work. Then, a lanky pyjama-wearing old man was ejected – spat! – through the door and onto the landing. A dead heap of bones.
Dead?
No, not quite. Watch:
Limbs distended, a mouth gasped.
Fall in chaps.
One two three… ah!… four!
Book Six
Gripping the Zimmer’s bars tightly, Dot shifted her weight onto her left foot and then, tentatively, tipped over onto her right. The ankle twinged, stabbed… but held! After so much time under plaster her right leg had taken on an existence quite removed from the rest of her body. It was mannishly furry and pale and, while all of her muscles had withered, her right calf had atrophied to such an extent that if someone had told her Doctor Frankenstein had passed in the night and replaced her lower leg with a goat’s, she would have accepted this explanation without too much protest. Wasted though it was, it was recovering.
Ward B was empty this morning. She remembered, vaguely, hearing the others awake, exchange a few jokes, a few barbs, and then, alone or in pairs, leave the room. Now that all the doors were left unlocked – all but one, anyway – it was difficult to keep them in one place, except when they were sleeping. Set free, they had explored Green Oaks, discovered rooms, upstairs and down, that had previously existed for them only as closed or locked doors. The morning after the CareFriends had been chased from Green Oaks, Olive had once again shaken Dot awake.
‘Oh, Dotty, you have to see it. It’s wonderful!’
‘Hmm… Olive? What time is…? What are you…?’
‘The toilet, Dotty. In the staffroom. The seat. It’s made of wood.’
Or it was the stash of food in the kitchen, or Cornish’s library, of books and music, or the carpet and faux-coal fireplace in Ward A. Everything seemed wondrous, everything new. The Hadean wasteland had transformed, overnight, into Aladdin’s cave. Lanyard, after a few hours of tinkering, had fixed the chairlift, and they had queued like impatient children at a fairground to try it out. Now, barely ten minutes passed without the new calm, drained of its eeriness, being broken by that dilapidated whirr, carrying one of them up or down the stairs.
For Dot, however, it was the phone in Cornish’s office that had been the greatest boon of their newfound freedom. As soon as the Captain and Smithy had shifted the bloated corpse of the unfortunate director, she’d nestled into the office chair, picked up the receiver, and let her fingers trace that familiar old dance across the keypad.
‘Knot!’ The imperiousness with which the small boy answered the phone had always made her smile.
‘Kristoph?’
‘Ja?’
‘It’s Granny. Is your daddy home?’
Thomas must have been standing beside his son because his voice rang out immediately.
‘Mum?’ Then, whispering. ‘What the bloody hell? We’ve been trying to call you for months. Does nobody ever answer the phone in that place? I almost contacted the police. You’ve no idea how…’ At which he had broken down in great, heaving sobs.
Dot had apologised, explained, her voice acting as an emollient to her son’s distress. She had wept too. The tears had been rolling before the call connected, but now they were charging down her cheeks in happy torrents. It was so unlike Thomas to cry and, after a while, he had gathered himself.
‘How’s Dad?’ he asked. Dot had thought back to earlier that evening when Leonard, mud-caked and ecstatic had barrelled into the ward.
‘He’s fine,’ she’d said. ‘Well, as fine as can be expected.’
The weight back on her left foot now, she shuffled the Zimmer forward a good six inches and repeated the process, her arms trembling with the strain. A part of her was surprised she was even walking again, that a body as old as hers could be both disintegrating and, simultaneously, executing a dogged recovery. The body couldn’t hold back the tide forever, of course, but something in her admired it for trying now. Admired the delusion and the fight. More fool her for ever thinking that she could choose to draw the line.
Her thoughts turned abruptly to Leonard and the Captain.
Where were they this morning?
‘The trick,’ Captain Ruggles said as he bound the two oak twigs together, ‘is to twist the grass before knotting it. That increases the strength enormously.’
Lance Corporal Knot was lying on the grass, watching the only cloud in the clear blue sky slowly unpick itself to nothing. A long blade of grass was arcing from between his lips.
‘Twist the grass,’ he echoed, vacantly, ‘before knotting it.’
‘Exactly!’ Ruggles said, hopping to his feet. He leaned over the long mound of earth and thrust his makeshift cross, complete now, into one end. Then he pulled it out again, walked the length of the mound, and thrust it into the other end, before pulling it out again.
‘I suppose it’s no use asking you which end was his head and which his feet?’ he said, turning to the Lance Corporal. No answer. The Captain shrugged and plunged it into the middle of the mound. ‘He’s lucky to get a cross at all, if you ask me. A lot of more deserving men have received a lot shoddier treatment during this god-awful war.’ His gaze lifted to the first floor of the guard house. ‘Much, much more deserving.’
The cross was somewhat lopsided and the Captain reached down to straighten it. It was presumptuous of him, he knew, to assume the Kommandant would want his grave marked with a cross. Perhaps he wasn’t a Christian at all. He certainly hadn’t acted like one. Then again, the mind could be remarkably plastic. It could, like a French waiter, balance all kinds of apparently contradictory beliefs on its tray, without ever toppling over.
Perhaps, though, he’d still have preferred a swastika. Well, tough luck! There was no way Ruggles would sully his hands by making one, or this newly liberated earth by laying one upon it.
Lance Corporal Knot hoisted himself into a sitting position.
‘The war?’ he asked, as if angling for a memory that was refusing to bite. ‘Is it won now, then? Is it over? Is it tea time? I didn’t hear mother calling…’
‘Impossible to say, old boy,’ Ruggles answered, straightening up. He brushed himself down and looked out over the war-ravaged desert. ‘Communications are down at the moment, so I have no way of contacting headquarters. Whether it’s over or not, though, and whether we win or lose in the end, what we did here will go down in history. Dirk Shavings will be proud of us when he hears about this, you mark my words. Really! Whoever heard of prisoners taking over the camp? The insane taking over the asylum, that’s a worn out old trope… But this? And to think, all that time I was planning an escape…’
In the hallway, Dot saw Lanyard, on his knees in front of the grandfather clock. The door was open and an array of components, including the long, delicate pendulum, had been laid meticulously on the carpet.
‘Dot, dear!’ Lanyard said, turning and wiping his greasy hands on his trousers. ‘How’s the Zimmer working out for you? Did we get the height right? I can easily shave off a few more centimetres if need be.’
Dot shunted forward a few inches.
‘No, no, Lanyard. It’s just perfect like this.’
Lanyard almost looked disappointed.
‘Well, that or anything else, just ask,’ he said.
‘You look like you’ve got your hands full already,’ Dot said, nodding at the clock.
‘Oh this? No, no. I should have this done by noon. The caretaker actually kept a fine toolbox.’ The tools were lying beside the clock parts, arranged with surgical precision.
‘I can see that.’
‘I think I found what the problem was,’ he said. ‘Should have it working tickety-boo in no time. It so frustrates me when things don’t work as they should.’
Of all of them, it was Lanyard who had undergone the most dramatic transformation. Dot sensed a lingering shame about how he had acted before, and an effort to make amends. That couldn’t be the only explanation, though. The change was simply too great.
‘Where are you off to, anyway?’ A shifty look fleeted across Lanyard’s face. Dot tried to disguise her own shiftiness when she replied:
‘Oh, I’m just taking a little stroll. You know how it is.’
‘Maybe you should pop your head around the door of C, check everything’s alright in there.’
Ward C. Just across the hall. Where it always must have been, Dot was forced to admit. And yet… Why had it proven so difficult for her to locate? Where had she thought that door led? Had she even noticed that door at all? Even though only a couple of days had passed since her reunion with Leonard, Dot found it hard, almost impossible, to think herself back into her mind as it was before. That was the problem when things got turned on their heads: all reference points were lost.
Still, there Ward C was, and Lanyard mentioning it had made Dot suspicious.
‘Why? Is nobody keeping an eye?’
‘Betty, I think,’ Lanyard said, turning back to his work. ‘But you know how it gets in there. It’s always nice to have company.’
Okay – she thought, glaring at Lanyard as he hunched back over his work – I’ll go to Ward C, but only because my original destination can wait. She smiled. It can wait and wait and wait…
She arced off course and, a couple of minutes later, made it into Ward C. The first thing she noticed was that Leonard wasn’t home.
‘Don’t worry!’ Betty said, intuiting from her chair beside the door. ‘He’s with the Captain. Important mission, apparently.’
‘Betty! What have you got on?’
‘A nurse’s cap. I found them in the stores,’ Betty said, shifting the origami hat so that it perched squarely on top of her head. ‘When I do something, I like to do it properly. And I’d thank you for at least making some effort to hide your amusement.’
‘You look splendid, Bet,’ Dot said. ‘Everyone looks splendid.’
It was true. Dot had insisted that Ward C be their priority and now, a few days later, the place was unrecognisable from how they had first found it. Betty had recruited the Captain, Olive and Smithy – the most able-bodied of the lot – to clean and disinfect the room, to strip and change the sheets, to open the windows, to bathe the poor sods as much as they were able. She couldn’t tell if it made much difference to the residents themselves, but she hoped it did. Either way, at least they all looked like real people again.
‘Snap!’ An old, olive-skinned man slammed a card down on the half-eaten Monopoly board, sending a shower of plastic counters to the floor. The small woman sitting across the table from him applauded.
It had been Betty’s idea, just yesterday, to give them the games, and they had taken to them with real enthusiasm. The fact that they were incomplete, unplayable, didn’t seem to matter. The haphazardness of the games seemed to gel perfectly with the haphazardness of their minds. The Jack of Hearts overtook Colonel Mustard to pass Go and collect several jigsaw pieces for his trouble. Why, in the end, shouldn’t that make sense? Stranger things had been known to.
There would be darker days ahead, of course. When someone fell ill, or when the food or drugs ran low, and Dot wasn’t sure yet how they would handle things. But she was trying not to worry too much about that for now.
‘I’ll relieve you after lunch, Bet,’ she said, clomping Windsor’s old Zimmer around a full hundred-and-eighty. Betty batted the air.
‘Whenever you’re ready, my darling.’
Just as she was about to leave the ward, Betty took hold of Dot’s wrist and looked sternly at her.
‘I need you to do me a favour, Dot.’
‘What’s that?’ The grip tightened.
‘Help me keep an eye on Alain.’
‘An eye on Smithy? Is he alright?’
‘Oh he’s fine. But I’m worried he’s getting just a little too big for his boots.’
Dot had noticed a certain cockiness to Smithy since that night, but had been more than willing to forgive him it.
‘And I do wish he wasn’t acting so proud about his newly loosened bowels.’
Dot smiled.
‘We do have him to thank, though. Without him, none of this…’
‘Come on, Dot,’ Betty interrupted. ‘You must be able to see that Alain’s actions were the symptom of something, not the cause. I’d been trying to get him to do something for ages. Who’d have thought it would be an act of rudeness, of social indiscretion that would finally make him crack?’
Well, not Dot for one. Then again…
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Betty went on. ‘I’m glad he’s proud of himself. God knows it’s been a long time coming, but…’ she paused, as if afraid of betraying a confidence. ‘The way he sighed and rolled his eyes when I mentioned Ward C earlier. Just keep an eye on him, will you? We don’t want history repeating itself here.’
‘Of course, Bet. Don’t worry too much, eh?’
Out of the ward, Dot reset her course for her original destination. The rubber room window was dark. She ignored Lanyard this time as she crossed the hallway, attentive for any movement, any flicker of light. To offset the slowness of her progress, she thought back to what she had seen yesterday, the first time she had paid that room a visit.
To begin with he had looked so small, so helpless, balled up in the far corner. How the mighty fall, she had thought, watching the boy sleep. The menace he had once embodied for her had leaked out of him, pooled on the floor like a rancid puddle of piss. It was as if he had been a man possessed, and the events of the previous night, when Smithy had hoisted him on his shoulder, strode to the rubber room, tumbled him in and bolted the door, had acted as some kind of exorcism. He was an empty vessel, a wreck of his former self.
They couldn’t keep him forever, of course. She knew that. But deciding what to do with him, when to release him, that would be difficult. It was De Tocqueville, she thought she remembered, who had said that in a revolution, just as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent was the end. Luckily this was not really one and certainly not the other. The end would most likely just invent itself.
She’d knocked on the window, knocked until he stirred. Then, as he ungummed his eyes, she’d pressed her face up against the pane of glass so he could see exactly who was watching him, exactly how the tables had been turned. At first he’d looked confused, then desperate, begging her with outstretched hands to set him free. Perhaps he had her down as one of the least wronged. Perhaps she was. She’d smiled – a vicious sneer, one she hadn’t known she was capable of – and slowly shook her head. At that he had grown enraged and hurled the pewter bowl against the door. Dot had only smiled more broadly, maybe she had even laughed… It felt good to be cruel. The pretence to goodness, to sanity, took its toll after a while. She had been engrossed by the boy’s predicament, revelling in it, so much so that she hadn’t noticed someone approaching her from behind, laying his bony hand on her shoulder.
‘Private?’ the Captain had said, softly. With the presence of another her pleasure had evaporated. It was replaced with a savage shame and she’d blushed. She didn’t know why. Wasn’t Ruggles the one most sinned against by this brute? Shouldn’t he be enjoying it as much as she was?
‘Dinner’s ready,’ he said, pulling her gently away from the door.
Despite yesterday’s embarrassment, though, Dot couldn’t stop herself from visiting Tristan again. It reassured her to know that the source of so much of their discomfort and humiliation was locked away like that. She could allow herself a little peek…
