Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

‘How long would you say it will be?’

  ‘Depends on how good we get at cell-repair. It’s coming along in leaps and bounds. Reckon in thirty, fifty or at the most, say, a hundred and fifty years we should be able to fix most things. Or clone a whole new you from a single cell. So if we can’t fix what’s left behind, we’ll take a little bit and make us a replica. This is a promise in our policy: Eternity Inc. won’t unfreeze you until we’re good and ready to fix you. So, what’s to lose? It’s a better bet than prayer. And, hell, for immortality, it’s cheap at the price.’

  ‘What is Lady Divina having done?’

  ‘Just her head, ol’ buddy. Neurosuspension. We do what we call a capitation job. There’s a good deal to be said for it. You still get all the grey matter. All the essence of the person. If you take a mechanist or behaviourist position, then everything there is is in the head. Right? If you see what I mean. And the price comes down. Around thirty-five thousand dollars per neurosuspension against one hundred grand for a full body job.’

  Mr Fox wondered if she’d told them about her Alzheimer’s? On the other hand – would they care? If they had a century or two to play with, and nothing really to interfere with the storage process. Except for, say, nuclear war. So she would wait, hoping for a cure for her Alzheimer’s, or a new body by cloning. But, above all, she would wait out the threat to which she had given most vocal expression, stored away down there in the giant Thermos flask in the vaults of Eternity Inc., in Cola, South California, solid in her envelope of liquid nitrogen. No matter what happened to the ozone layer, Lady Divina would be safer than most on the globe from sunstroke, from the overheating earth, like a blue egg, frying.

  Mr Fox waved Mr Middler’s white collection vehicle out of sight. on his speedy way to Gatwick Airport, rooflights revolving, klaxon going. He walked into Serenity House, now quieter than it had been for many a good year. He sat down at his desk and thought. ‘Hell! That was a good couple of weeks of work.’ He was about to ring for a list of recent departures when St Margaret Drive was suddenly crowded with more revolving lights and sirens. For a moment he thought that Mr Middler had come back. Perhaps he had forgotten something.

  But these were blue lights. And men in blue. And Chief Superintendent Slack banging on the front door of Serenity House and demanding entry.

  And that was when the roof fell in on Cledwyn Fox.

  Superintendent Slack had a warrant for the arrest of Max Montfalcon. Reports from Poland were deeply unsatisfactory but Slack was not to be held back by the dithering of incompetent subordinates. He was taking Max Montfalcon in for questioning.

  Superintendent Slack, in pursuit of guilty men, came down on Serenity House like a wolf on the fold. That his fugitives were doddering, deaf, senile, toothless, incontinent and forgetful, that they were liable to take leave of this world without permission, was a fact that had haunted Slack. Once the War Crimes Bill passed into law, he had pledged to press and country that he, Trevor Slack, would ‘hit the ground running’.

  As supersonic speeds are measured in Mach units, so Trevor Slack had, once upon a time, in a jerky way, when he’d thought of movements measured at the speed of light, considered a new scale of such celerity. Star travel would be measured in ‘Steins’: Einstein, Zweistein, Dreistein – each Stein being the equivalent of ten light years.

  Alas, the brain rots. Though Trevor Slack had never been known to exceed the alcohol quota – twenty-one units weekly – allowed for the best preservation of mental health, though he had never in his life inhaled tobacco smoke, or indeed any other noxious drug, though he ran a mile each morning and exercised each evening, yet, do what you will, the brain rots. Cells falter, fail and float away much as the skin flakes and drifts. It is a progressive, incurable human condition. He might have thought of this now, as he hit the ground running and moved up to the speed of light. He might have remembered the old man’s unaccountable amusement at their last meeting. He might have been a tiny bit prepared for what he found – or what he did not find in Serenity House. He might have – but the death of the brain intervened. Alas and alack, he had forgotten about the death of the brain.

  And so when Cledwyn Fox reported absolutely no sign of Max Montfalcon, he simply refused to believe him. ‘There are recent cases, in France,’ said Superintendent Slack, ‘of clergy hiding war criminals. I hope you’re not doing the same. I have a search warrant, I’ll turn this place upside down.’

  And he went at it with a will. That old and rather fragile Victorian house felt the force of Slack and trembled. Roof tiles fell to earth. Bits of plaster showered the Superintendent and his team as they moved from room to room.

  The residents of Serenity House, whom he had been counting on to help him track down Max Montfalcon, proved a considerable hindrance. Most of them were dead. Worse still, his investigation into the strange disappearance of his quarry turned up alarming evidence that the departed elders had not died naturally.

  The staff, the survivors of this carnage, were confused. They made instant reference to someone called Jack. Such charges! Drowning patients in the bath. Injecting them with tranquillisers in massive doses. Among the most grisly executions (for that is what the newspapers were soon to be calling them) was the alleged method of disposal whereby poor Reverend Alistair’s tongue was depressed with a tongue depresser and water forced down his throat. The Reverend Alistair, Snoring Sandra and Margaret had all perished in this fashion. Yet, most remarkably, these weak, semi-conscious patients had actually fought their attackers, as evidenced by skin beneath their finger-nails

  Night Matron accused him of having administered fatal injections of insulin and Valium to elderly patients or having conspired with others to do so. The Superintendent asked why she or her staff had not attempted to stop him? She refuted the imputation with vigour. ‘All I ever did was to bring relief where there was suffering. Joy where there was discord. And she quoted the latest American statistics to show that anticancer treatments in the very old seldom do anything to prolong life. A waste of time. ‘My conscience is clean. God is my judge.’

  The little nurse-aide, Imelda, confessed to having seen this Jack taking several patients for what she called ‘the swimming cure’. In the swimming cure, water was forced into the lungs while someone held the tongue and nose of the patient. All cases of the cure had proved fatal.

  Certain surviving elders also made reference to a member of staff named ‘Jack’. But records at Serenity House showed no trace of this person.

  Some elders, it is true, were more positive in recalling a boy with one green eye and one blue, and yellow hair. Major Bobbno, for example, swore that ‘this fellow Jack combined the cunning of a Pathan with the hygienic habits of an African warthog. We used to see him around the camp in the mornings, banging on his mess tin with a spoon. A superior gait he had. Stiff. Polish, I suspect!’ And here Major Bobbno paused to demonstrate, throwing out his legs and tucking his hand-reacher under his arm. ‘He was particularly vicious’, Major Bobbno added, ‘with the Russian prisoners. Poor swine!’

  Other members of staff disagreed in their evidence. Day Matron, for example, dismissed the very idea of Jack’s existence. ‘Hysteria!’ she snorted. ‘It’s not uncommon in institutions of this sort. It happens in much the same way that women kept confined will begin to menstruate at the same time. You also get spreading hysteria in small communities operating under strain. As far as I am concerned, there never was a boy. He did not have green eyes or blue eyes or red eyes. Or a black moustache. He didn’t ride a broomstick.’

  Superintendent Slack’s chill realisation came at last to be unanswerable. Max Montfalcon had done a runner.

  In the days that followed Dr Tonks was to announce that he was ‘stunned’ in one of the tabloids. In another he was ‘shocked’. In a third – ‘unrepentant’. While not condoning any alleged mistreatment of aged patients, he asked: ‘Do you think I want to live on in that fashion, my bowels leaking, my head dead, my family anguished? Hell, no!’
At least he did not rave like the others did about the mysterious Jack. When Slack asked about the boy, Dr Tonks replied: ‘I do not believe in Jack. I am a scientist.’

  *

  Lizzie Turberville was found stripped down to her black lace French knickers, hanging from the branch of an apple tree in the garden of her house in Highgate. When she was found, she looked, thought Sergeant Fyffe – one of Superintendent Slack’s team of officers, thirty-five he was, blond and something of a connoisseur – to be something out of a surrealistic painting by Dali. Or was it Max Ernst he was thinking of? Or Magritte? It was the black bag over her head that so disturbed him as she swung silently on the creaking apple bough. It was a touch, that black bag, both menacing and seductive.

  In fact the bag was also cosmetic. For the face of Lizzie Turberville had been hit so many times with a blunt instrument, probably a hammer, that it was perfectly unrecognisable. The sheer ferocity of the attack suggested that the killer had had some further psychological problem with his victim. Lizzie Turberville had died from a double knife-thrust to the heart. The attack on her head had come later. Had been gratuitous. It was an assault as ugly and as senseless as any Sergeant Fyffe had seen in his career. It was as if the first blow, which probably broke her nose and cheekbone and lifted an eye from its socket, had merely enraged the killer. Driven demented perhaps by the terrible look of asymmetry it gave to that once calm and smooth face, he had rained blow after blow until nothing was left that remotely resembled human features.

  The bag, of black velvet, German manufacture, some time in the early forties most probably, and possibly meant to contain jewels, had been dropped over her battered skull and the draw strings closed and then fashioned into a neat bow which she wore on her neck like a pathetically formal bow-tie. It was the bow-tie that had made young Sergeant Fyffe hesitate between the artists Magritte and Dali and, finally, come down on the side of Dali. It was the playfulness of that tiny chilling detail of the bag that decided him. And, then, to be sure, there was the fact that the pubic hair of the victim had been skilfully shaved. Not all of it, but exactly half of it, the right-hand half of it.

  All in all it looked like a pretty exotic murder committed by someone with very serious sexual hang-ups. ‘A pervy bloke,’ was the way Sergeant Fyffe put it, though not in his report. Had he known something about the way things are in America, Sergeant Fyffe and his superiors, who puzzled over ‘The Body With The Bow-Tie’ as the papers called it, would have recognised it as a carbon copy of one of a series of murders carried out in the video Girl Crazy, which had its origins in a wildly popular rap song by a group called Make Mine the Widow which contained in it the lines: ‘Gonna slice that thatch/Right off your snatch.’

  And if, in the unlikely event, the young and artistic Sergeant Fyffe had been familiar with any of this, he would have suspected the killer to be carrying, somewhere about his person, the shaven pubic hair of his victim. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find Jack wearing a small brown leather pouch under his shirt. For Make Mine the Widow punched into the stinging rhythms of their song, the refrain, ‘And gonna wear your dreck/Right around my neck’, but none of this was ever likely to see the light of the English day. No one in the police team hunting down the killer of ‘The Body With The Bow-Tie’ knew the first thing about American culture.

  Carpet bag on his lap, Max sat in the back of Mr Middler’s speeding ambulance beside the recumbent body of Lady Divina, still wearing her pink plastic shower cap.

  He reflected with a certain wry amusement on Lady Divina’s head, resuscitated, opening its eyes and lips upon a brave new world and another century, another millennium, and finding it still wanting. Hotter than ever. The Great Lakes of Canada dropping and still dropping. Tropical cyclones hitting every other week the vanished Maldives, now sunk like Atlantis; malaria in Dorset, ringworm and river blindness in darkest Wales.

  Max chuckled in the darkness. ‘Won’t they be sorry they woke her up!’

  ‘May I see your tickets, please, sir – madam?’

  A tall old man with thick grey hair that took on, in certain lights, a faint blue tinge. He was dressed in what looked like an ancient green overcoat which revealed a glimpse of white and pasty calves ending in short white socks and ancient leather slippers. He also wore a long, lolling, yellow pointed woollen cap and a red tie, the knot huge beneath his Adam’s apple. He carried an old-fashioned carpet bag. Next to him sat a girl. Great silver circles around her eyes, a chalk-white face, hair no longer red, but black. For yes, it was Innocenta. And, here was an interesting thing, though lustrously thick, raven black, the hair also sometimes took on a hint of blue.

  I cannot seem to go back to the place I came from, Max reasoned, because I can’t remember where I came from, but I can, at least, go back to the place he came from. And so they found themselves standing among hundreds of Orlando-bound passengers in one of the lengthy queues snaking back from the check-in desks where, in the dim distance, the girls of Northwest Airlines sat smiling. Security guards moved along the lines checking passports.

  ‘American airlines are terrified someone will get in with a gun. Or a bomb,’ said Innocenta.

  ‘If they carry Americans in number, I suppose they have to be,’ her grandfather retorted.

  Dark, deliberate, diligent, the security man scrutinised their passports.

  ‘Do you have any other form of identification?’

  Innocenta gave him her driving licence. Max handed over a seamed and threadbare card, made from grey paper. It was covered in a spidery purple script in a language the young man did not understand.

  ‘What is this, please?’

  Max stood up very tall and smiled his dreamy smile. ‘What does it look like? That is a fine example of the card carried by German students who belong to one of the fencing fraternities. The student corps. What you have there is an identification document of a corpsier. That is to say a young man given over to self-observation, self-answerability and self-control. A young man who undoubtedly knew the taste of cold steel, who had fought in real combat, known as the Mensur. A young man who probably learnt to fight with honour and dignity using a rapier with a guard shaped in the form of a bell. They called it the Glockenschläger, glocken meaning bell. Although the Mensur was forbidden under the Weimar Republic, students still engaged in it. In the same way as they kept on drinking. And running after women. That’s the way the world over.’

  ‘That’s interesting, sir,’ said the young security man, ‘but it won’t do as a form of identification. Even if you could prove that you were the young man who signed this card and fought duels with the Glockenschläger.’

  ‘I think I made a mistake,’ said Max. ‘Between the young man who signed this card and believed in the honour of his fraternity and his country and the elderly man who stands before you now there is no connection in the world.’

  ‘Then why did you give me the card, sir?’

  ‘I really don’t remember.’ Again Max smiled his rather vacant smile. ‘Here, take my pension book instead.’

  Three times Max failed to pass through the metal detector. He tossed his pen into the receiving dish beside the electronic archway. He put in it his silver lighter, his coins, his watch and his two gold rings, but still the machine shrilled its protest whenever he stepped through its regarding eye.

  ‘Do you happen to wear metal arch supports?’ the attendant asked in desperation.

  Max shook his head but took off his shoes. He walked through the arch in socks. ‘Hallelujah!’ the officer said. ‘You’re clean, mate.’

  Innocenta bought him a pair of white tennis shoes. Except tennis shoes, as he remembered them, did not have gold and purple arrows on them. Nor orange laces, which Innocenta advised him to leave untied. ‘They’re made to be left undone, Grandpa. I’m sure that’s better for your feet.’ She showed him how to inflate them. ‘Press here. It’s a built-in pump. You can put as much air as you like into the shoe. They take on the shape of your foot.
Good! Now you’re walking on air.’

  Max followed her to the plane. He was indeed walking on air. His new shoes were very comfortable. Running shoes, Innocenta said they were. Their huge blue tongues flapped when he walked, like the tongues of thirsty puppies.

  Cledwyn Fox’s attempt to ingratiate himself with the police by revealing the existence of an electronic tracking device in the heel of Max Montfalcon’s right slipper (I’ve fitted all my wanderers with them’) did, at first, cause not a little joy. For in no time at all the transmitter had been located and had established Max’s presence very precisely. Superintendent Slack made the drive to Gatwick in just an hour and a quarter which, allowing for London traffic, was not bad.

  Max’s badly trodden slippers were still lying beside the metal detector bleeping pathetically like a lost child. But the owner of the slippers was eighteen hours gone, and at that moment, for the first time in his life, about to step into a Jacuzzi in the Days Inn Motel just off the Bee Line Expressway, twenty minutes from Orlando airport, Florida.

  And the moon shone down on Serenity House, dark, locked, seemingly deserted. Gleamed down upon St Margaret Drive and the cul-de-sac of Lord John Road. It filtered through the windows and painted the wheelchairs lined up neatly in the hall. It fell lightly on two discarded papier mâché heads, of the Duck and the Mouse, which had rolled like abandoned footballs beneath a forest of Zimmer frames, the moonlight like a ghostly fire in the cold fireplace of the downstairs parlour. The house seemed to creak and mutter. Somewhere behind the skirting boards mice scurried. The survivors had been found temporary accommodation in the Church Hall, while investigations continued. Somewhere in the very bowels of the house, two dogs began to howl, as if they could see the moon, which assuredly they could not. Forty-eight hours’ incarceration in the luggage depository had had an inevitable result. The animals had begun to eat the suitcases piled on the great luggage mountain, the hill of leather bones. Their toothmarks showed in the old hide as they bit and gnawed at Max Montfalcon and Maudie Geratie and Lady Divina. Petal and Denis, forgotten since Pat Dog Day, raised their voices and howled to be taken home.