He nodded. ‘Yes, I accept that, nurse, but surely we . . .’
He’d done it now – banged his snitch against that most sensitive of levers, the one marked ‘status’.
Sister Pulham, as if she’d been hooked into a Force Ten Gale, seemed to inflate at a tremendous rate. ‘Nurse? Did you call me “nurse”? I think we mean SISTER, do we not?’
The Tangerine Man flitted quickly past the office outside of which, at a file-strewn table, a couple of Nightingales were straining to hear what was being so nastily mouthed by their superior. On entering Rhona’s ward I immediately saw that changes had been made since my last visit: Big Agnes Coulter, who’d occupied the bed to Rhona’s right, had gone. Her bed had been stripped to the bolster and her usual pigsty of a locker looked startlingly bare. The bed to Rhona’s left contained a new occupant – a teary-eyed brunette who in her grey/blue bed-jacket looked like a beached whale. Her husband, a flattish-looking guy who wore what looked like industrial glasses, steel-rimmed things which seemed to be acting as a brace for the overhang of his brow, was gripping his spouse’s hand so tightly I got the impression he was terrified that she might suddenly, with rude noises issuing from her backside, go on a wrecking sortie amongst the ceiling decorations. It was too bad that big Agnes was away. Dead cheery she’d been, though her humour had been a bit on the blue side for Rhona’s taste.
The novel in which Rhona was rather pettily pretending to be so absorbed that she hadn’t yet become aware of my presence, was, surprisingly enough, a James Bond one. I’d never known her to read such stuff. Quite shocking really; like going into Granny’s purse and finding a condom. Not even the scraping of the chair legs on the polished parquet tiling diverted her from the improbable doings of Fleming’s cynical robot. I seated myself and slung the laden netbag onto her bed. Eventually – it seemed like minutes, but was probably only ten seconds or so – Rhona, the book still unlowered from her face, asked, ‘Well, gave her a good ticking-off, did we?’ Her voice sounded husk – no, not huskier. Alien? Uh-uh. Hollower, then? Nope. Phoney? Aye, that’s it – phoney. A vocal forgery, somebody else trying to pass counterfeit verbals in Rhona’s name. With no thanks due to either Mr Fleming nor his callous plaything, the novel itself literally provided a dramatic twist by dipping to reveal its reader’s face. A shockwave that would’ve taken the Richter Scale needle clean off the dial hit me. Jeezuz! What’d they done to my Rhona? Her face . . . her features had been put through a blender – every familiar quirk and line had been erased so that nothing recognisable remained, only a pink puddinglike mass, a maxfactored melange upon which wobbled the red O of a mouth. As words began to wriggle from this creepy orifice I was already on my feet and grabbing at the netbag. Patients and visitors alike turned to stare in amazement as I fled the ward.
The pair of nurses were still monitoring the fate of Fedora Fred, their ears trained like radar dishes on the office. By the sound of it, the contest was over – I could picture him lying on the floor with his feet in the air while the Medusa zapped his twitching corpse with a last round of mouth-ammo. As I approached them the nurses eyed me as if I’d no right to be this side of the skirting board. Where, I demanded to know, had they stashed my wife this time? On the roof maybe? In the attic? Was I getting warm? How about the basement . . . Trained to deal with visitors’ sarcasm they didn’t respond for a long time then one of them condescended to consult a register and I was given a ward number, purely as a favour I should understand. From the same charity bag came terse directions: lift; turn left; Mrs Clay’s new ward was to be found at the far end of the corridor.
The lift was in Australia when I pressed its come-hither button. Once those abbos had her fully wound up she rose as gracefully as a cow with a gutful of pig-iron. The gate crashed open, then crashed shut again. There followed a massive shudder throughout its mechanism then it slowly sank back to Australia. I should’ve done some stair-stomping but got mulish. Never give in to gadgets. Once these gizmos get to know you’re a soft touch they’re into their own thing: the tranny, for instance’ll start tuning itself into Jimmy Shand and the cutlery drawer’ll take to pitching steak-knives at you.
I began to massage the bell-stud. A longish time later the lift capitulated and came to me with an ominous crrrrch-crrrrch-crrrrrrching sound, like two major components were intent on erasing each other. The gate staggered open in much the same way as the Planet’s curtain used to before Burnett retired it and left it to rot in the wings. A porter, one of the pair who’d scowled at me in the corridor, was the clanking box’s sole passenger. If anything, he seemed even more scunnered with me than before. Half-man, half-walrus, he looked like an escapee from Doc Moreau’s Island.
‘Whatja keep ringing that bell for?’ he growled. ‘Fuck’n thing dirling in ma ears . . .’
I stepped into the lift and stood alongside him.
The machine, making more bedlam than a fire drill on Noah’s Ark, began to lift off. I decided to ask the walman about the barefooted cadaver; if anybody knew why a male stiff should be getting hurled around a Hatchery during the visiting hour, he seemed the most likely. The business niggled me. There had to be a rational explanation. Such as? Well, supposing this wino – let’s call’m Charlie – had a premonition that he’s ‘on the last go round’ as Woody G. puts it. Charlie, not wanting to peg out, al fresco, on a crummy street bench, creeps into the Maternity and hides himself in the warmth of its boiler-room. In a way he’s returned to the womb, gone back to Mammy. Aye, could’ve been something along these lines. A bit of a longshot, but at least Charlie had acquired some history which, I suppose, is preferable to being laid out on a slab with a John Doe ticket tied to your toe.
The porterish half of the walrus, far from being interested in my questions, seemed more concerned with our ascending machine’s iron grumblings, so much so that he stepped to one side and pressed his ear to the wall and listened intently, as if he was conversant with the language of inanimate complaint. Supposing he should hear some crisis point declaring itself, what’d he do – jump clear? I repeated my question but we’d already arrived at my floor and the gate was well into its stop-go routine before he responded.
‘What corpse?’
I stepped from the lift and turned to face him, ‘The one I saw being wheeled somewhere – the mortuary, I suppose, by one of your muckers. Big fellow, bright red hair, beard . . .’
His cobwebby moustache stirred in the faint breeze of his reply. ‘Naw, nae rid-heided porters work here, mack, especially no deid yins . . .’
With a gasping, squealing sound the gate shunted itself shut then, harnessing all of its antique energies, the lift bore its demi-human skywards.
On entering Rhona’s new ward I was told by a nurse that I’d find her in the Day Room. I went there, Rhona was watching television while she worked her nails over with a slim manicure file. One other couple shared the room with us, a giggly twosome who seemed to be treating the solemn business of approaching parenthood with undue levity: the poor mite in her womb would feel it’d been caught up in a mirthquake. Demonstrating the proper decorum, Rhona, never once raising her voice, even managing to throw in decoy smiles from time to time, gave me a right good sand-bagging, a bawling-out done entirely in whispers. Keeping her head so close to mine that any passerby would’ve thought that we were exchanging endearments, she hissingly informed me that I was the giddy limit. The use of ‘giddy’ was the closest Rhona ever got to swearing, a euphemism which although puerile was at least more honest than her brother’s hrrumphing. With a smile only the possessor of flawless ivories would risk she choppily announced in my left lughole that, no, she didn’t want to hear my excuses since all of my lies were as unimaginative as they were repetitive. She was, she further informed me, sick to the perfect back teeth of my feeble fictions which usually involved old women falling off buses; stuck lifts; a meeting with someone I’d long presumed dead; transport fated to break down the moment I’d purchased my fare ticket. No, please, she didn
’t want to hear a single word concerning my ability to arrive twenty minutes into the visiting period. I suppose it was lucky she’d forestalled me for I’d been about to tell her the unvarnished truth for a change. It hadn’t been a woman who’d been involved in a transport accident this time, in fact, it’d been a tipsy greybeard who, in the whimsical way of the drunk had decided to come down the bus stairs the same way he’d gone up them, namely, headfirst. He’d landed on his beak and – but what’s the use of going on? She didn’t want to know what hazards had attended my journey here. Liars fully deserve the cuts and bruises they get when reality catches up with them. Even if I’d walked in here with an honestly-acquired broken nose she’d soon enough have twisted out of shape my account of how I’d come by it.
Rhona’s attention had now tilted to a higher plane where life could be relied upon to be free of long-haired latecomers, where the tedium of waiting is edited out, and zones of mistrust can be crossed in the winking of a heroic eye. Yes, the wonderful world of ‘Disney Exist’ where dreams really do come true.
Rhona sawed away at her fingernails with such vigour and flashing of the file you would’ve thought it was an attempt at self-erasure. Her eyes remained fixed on the telly-screen. Beneath the imperious mantle of her purple housecoat she was wearing the quaint-looking nightdress I jokingly refer to as her ‘nun’s negligee’. I glanced at her as a commercial for a chocolate bar filled the screen. ‘Bite a Delite Tonite!’ the voice-over ordered, and presumably if we did then everything would turn out rite.
The movie was the usual eye-fodder: the romance between the heroine and the son of an autocratic millionaire was on the verge of exposure. The lovelorn pair sat now in his car which overlooked a small industrial town – every brick’n stick of which belongs to dollar-driven Daddy. The son began now to philosophise which was signalled by the thoughtful way he raised his left eyebrow. ‘Pop’ll just have to shake the notion that the world’s his auction room and the future his by merely raising a finger . . .’ Now steady on, Junior, Pop might’ve bugged your dash. Anyway, what’s this future jazz? Aint no such thing to be found on our half-assed planet. Take that TV set for instance, it makes with a whole batch of buttons that’re wired to nowhere. They await, you see, an advance in electronic know-how that’s not going to be around in the buzz-box’s lifetime. Symbolic buttons, then – good for damn all. A touch of swank, that’s what it amounts to. Most of us front our lives in the same way – twiddle-twiddling, trying to tune in to non-existent signals.
‘How did you manage to smash Mum’s pot plant?’ Rhona asked.
I frowned. ‘On the news was it? “Cops hunt aspidistra-slayer!”’
‘I phoned her before you got here – seeing as I’d plenty of time on my hands.’
Into the Day Room there came a Sikh with his swollen wife. He escorted her to a chair and helped her to lower her baggy body into it. His amber turban and green transport livery gave’m a sort of ‘ready-to-go’ air. He looked a bit cheesed-off, fed-up, scunnered.
‘You tell’m it’s none of his business,’ he said to her. ‘If you don’t tell’m then I bliddy tell’m.’
Rhona put her nail file into its pouch and pressed the stud closed with a faint plocking sound. ‘I hear you took yon old Grandfather clock to mother’s?’
I nodded.
‘Why?’ she asked.
I got a little wiggy. ‘Because.’
‘Call that an answer?’
‘It’ll have to do.’
Rhona sighed. It was becoming a habit this sighing business. We didn’t have visits anymore – we had sigh-ins. She’d forced me to become fluent in Sighamese. So much so that I can intuit meaning from the merest breath of disgruntlement. This latest sigh, for instance, was a carry-over from my refusal on my last visit to agree to attend a simple little service in honour of Dad Carlyle, the second anniversary of whose death would be this coming Sunday. ‘It’s not even a service,’ Rhona had told me. ‘Just a few prayers and some readings from Dad’s favourite passages. Surely that’s not a lot to ask?’
How smugly dismissive of the atheist’s viewpoint some salvationists can be. Because I’d found no evidence to support the notion that our ball of mud and stones has a celestial gaffer looking after it, having found not so much as a divine thumbprint or a button from his cloudy coat, I was judged to be some kind of moronic cyberman whose solenoids were incapable of experiencing that sensitivity which is the hallmark of your true Christian. I’d turned her down flat then and if she asked once more I’d do the same. I had proposed, however, that I’d take young Jason to the Kelvingrove Museum so that Phyllis and Jack Sherman would be able to attend the anniversary of the laid-low locksmith.
Rhona began now to drill me about my financial outgoings. Had I paid this, had I paid that? Well, that’s what Friday nights at the maternity were all about, why they’re called ‘husbands preferably’ visits so that the expectant couples can be alone with their debts and to plan for the wifeless week ahead. My tongue clacked away like a calculator. Yes, I’d contacted the Gas Board about emptying the meter. Yes, I’d made a payment to the Futility Furnishing Company. Soon I hadn’t a debt in the world. Talk about relieved. Phew! as Pansy Potter would say. It was great to feel so unburdened. Free and floating. It was best not to come up too fast or you could get the marital bends, a most painful affliction, I’m told. Its victims literally laugh themselves to death. From hilarity Rhona was in no danger whatsoever. But now as she continued to speak I thought I detected a lighter tone developing in her voice.
‘Tom, can I ask you something?’
‘Fire away.’
‘Would you . . . well, would you be fussy about what it was?’
‘I’d prefer a white yin if you can manage it.’
‘Eh?’
‘You know, un enfant blanc – a white wean.’
She smiled (yeah, read all about it – Rhona smiled!) I’m talking about a job, stupid. Would you be fussy about what it was?’
‘Take a stab at anything, me: brain surgery, chastity belt fitting; helping Kim Novak on with her bra. You name it.’
Again that chronic sigh of hers. ‘Be serious. Just for once, stop acting the goat.’ The smile had fled; in fact she now looked on the verge of tears. More levity juiced my tongue but I stifled it. She was right, it was high time I tossed away my dog-eared script with its quips and repartee for all occasions. Time, too, for me to cut out that harlequin prancing around her emotions, the verbal skipping from one corner of a lie to another, calling her in only to trip her up, confounding with a glee that was almost malicious her grey-eyed appeal for a truce, a pause between puns. Something extremely important was happening to us – we were becoming parents. From now on it was incumbent upon me to come clean, to meet her beyond the rhinestones and the rhetoric.
‘You’d do anything? D’you really mean that?’
A sinister blip had appeared on my internal radar screen. Anxious personnel were crowding around. ‘What the hell’s this, then? Something’s in the air and heading our way, folks!’ From a pocket in her housecoat Rhona fished out an envelope and from this envelope she removed a letter. A gasp filled the control room: ‘My God! – this is for real!’
‘I got a letter from Uncle Billy this morning,’ she told me. ‘You remember him?’
‘Wooden leg; walks with his worries to one side?’
‘Stop acting it. Dad’s brother – lives in Townhead.’ She thrust the letter at me. ‘Here, read it for yourself.’
I conned the pedantic writing which covered two pages: ‘Hope you are well . . . blah, blah, blah . . . I visited your mother the other day’ (I bet you hit six boozers on the trot after that Billy, boy!) ‘She tells me that your Tom’s still not got work. I’m sure this must be a worry to you, especially since you’re hoping for a new house. I was wondering if I could be of some help.’ (All communications lost as Clayville suffered a direct hit!) ‘A vacancy has turned up in our warehouse for a packer. The wages are reasonable and
the work is fairly light. Perhaps you could mention this to Tom and, if he’s agreeable, he could maybe pop in to see me for a chat . . .’
I now demonstrated so much aversion to the letter you would’ve thought its pages were infested with anthrax. ‘Well?’ Rhona’s gaze had all the warmth and compassion of a Nazi Stormtrooper with his Luger pistol jammed up your nostril.
‘Uncle Billy,’ I said manfully, ‘he’s in bananas – right?’
She nodded. ‘Been in the same warehouse for the past ten years.’
‘Well, he should be about ripe by now.’
‘What?’
‘Rhona, I don’t relate to bananas. Can’t stand the frigging things.’
‘Mind your language.’ She indicated the letter. ‘His address’s on the top. Go, see’m.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon; he’s never out.’
‘I’m taking the Cub Pack to Ben Nevis, Saturday . . .’ (Strang’s weird remark about keeping clear of high places returned to me. What’d he been getting at?) Rhona’s brow had darkened again. I nodded. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll go see the man, but I’m not making any promises. Right?’
She nodded. The film resumed. The multibucks boyfriend was now showing his gal from the boondocks some impressive-looking real estate. It was one of those colonnaded mansions which tend to be populated, in the movies, that is, by manic Southern belles; the house and adjoining ranch sat in lush grassland which was only slightly smaller than Texas. ‘Hell, no dear,’ he growled, whacking his riding boot with his stetson, ‘wouldn’t roost chickens in tharrr. Place I kinda had in mind’ll use up two and a half mountains of prime stone . . .’
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 8
