I couldn’t help asking, “What’s the point of that?”
It sounded as though everyone in the room had drawn a breath. “‘What’s the point of that?’ Mr Chislet?” Hoath said to Chislet, who was yet to speak.
“What a curious question, Mr Hoath,” Reculver agreed.
“The boy’s green,” said Peel, for once on their side.
I noticed that Dad remained silent. I had never seen him so overwhelmed.
“Yes, what’s the point?” I reiterated.
Peel guffawed falsely. “You clearly know nothing of exploration, young man. Exploration is all about firsts. He who is second makes not a footnote in the history books. Tell me, who was the second man on the moon?”
“Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin,” I replied, having boyishly devoured the Apollo missions.
“Ah,” went Peel. “Bad example. Alright, who was the second man to travel around England with a turbot?”
That one got me. “I’ve no idea,” I said.
“Precisely my point,” he said. “I, on the other hand, was the first.”
“Really?” I went, knowing it would wind him up.
“He makes them up!” scoffed Hoath.
Peel ignored him. “The boy’s an ignoramus!” he spluttered, and began ranting, counting off the exploits on his fingers: “I was the first to slide on a tea tray down Nanga Parbat; the first to circumnavigate Grantham on a spacehopper; the first to survive being forcibly defenestrated from an ice breaker in Antarctica; the first…”
As he rambled on, Reculver addressed me once again. “You know, we call her Nurse Death.”
“Yes, I thought that might be the case.”
“Oh,” he said, and looked downcast. “That’s a shame. That was one of mine.”
“WHAT IS THIS NOISE?” Nurse D’eath was standing in the doorway that led to the residents’ bedrooms, surveying the scene, simmering.
Everyone fell silent. Kenneth John Peel tottered back to his chair in the corner.
“Visiting time is over, the younger Mr Dextrose,” she announced pointedly. “And you… heathens will go to bed early. With no supper.”
I shook Dad’s hand formally for some reason.
“I’ll be back,” I told him.
I had arranged with Robin Botham to take the room above the Dog & Duck. It was mutually beneficial and I had never believed in ghosts: as far as I was concerned, Mrs Dextrose would not be coming back, not in any shape or form. It was time to move on.
When I arrived back there, I was shocked to discover that the lodgings had been cleared out. The bookshelves and wardrobe were empty, the sewing machine gone, the pictures and postcards, too. The walls were bare. The beds had been stripped down to their linen and the top of the dressing table cleared. I checked the drawers, knowing that I would find nothing.
Dad’s wishes, no doubt, though the sparseness, the sudden removal of all that personality, made me feel very alone. There had always been someone around, barring loo breaks, during my recent travels – whether I had desired the company or not. Now it was just me.
I would have to make the place my own, I decided, and made a mental note to find some sea-faring scenes for the walls.
The next day I visited Dad again, worried for his sanity in that gothic asylum. As it turned out, he seemed fine. Chipper, even. He’d just had his lunch – “Minking pasty and minking chips” – and that morning had attended his first therapy session with Nurse D’eath, which he said had helped him release some of the tension accumulated over the previous weeks.
The old boys then argued over which of them had undertaken the most death-defying adventure; Dad felt settled enough to join in occasionally and, to my mind, won with his tale of shark-baiting with a gangrenous big toe off the Lesser Barrier Reef. Not that I’d ever heard the story before, which made me doubt its veracity.
Hoath then tipped Wilmington-Hovis out of his meerschaum bath-chair and everyone laughed – bar Chislet, who seemed to exist in a trance. (An odd cove, I wondered what on earth use he had been to Reculver and Hoath on their expeditions.)
It was all rather jovial, until the nurse appeared and demanded to know who was responsible for depositing Wilmington-Hovis onto the floor. The mood in the room changed, as if blanketed in frost. Nerves tautened. When no one owned up, Nurse D’eath advanced upon Hoath and he cowered in his armchair, holding up his forearms before his face.
I left soon afterwards.
Back home I began writing up my own travels, longhand in a notebook – following in Harrison Dextrose’s literary footsteps for a change. The process went so well that I decided to invest in a typewriter – which felt more romantic than a word processor, better suited to the spirit of my words – and headed out shopping. I found one eventually, an old Remington, the size and weight of a small pig, in a charity shop.
Afterwards, the noise of seagulls squawking lured me to the seafront: a shingle beach, stretching out either way as far as the eye could see, dotted with hardy folk dressed up against a meaningful wind, staring at the breakers. One fool was out swimming, their white bathing cap being eyed by a floating tern.
I also saw the pier for the first time in more than a quarter of a century. The design of it rang no bells, not even a tiny tinkle, perhaps because it was so bare and uncommercial; no candy floss nor amusements. It was, however, very, very long: an awful lot of planking raised a few metres above the sea surface, with a construction much like a bus shelter at the very end. A sign beside it on the beach read:
England ’s Second-Longest Pier
No doubt Kenneth John Peel’s pier had beaten them to it.
I took a walk along it, to pass some time and to plan the coming weeks. It would be propitious, I decided, to settle down for a while after my recent travails. Take it easy. That would also keep me close to my father, who needed me. Although I could afford to live off my inheritance for a good while to come, I planned to ask for part-time bar-work in the Dog & Duck, which should help endear me to the locals. (And hopefully find a girlfriend.)
As I sat sheltering on the end of the pier, all alone and transfixed by the motion of the waves, a familiar sound drifted to my ears across the white horses.
‘Ting-ting!’ it went. ‘Ting-ting!’
In the coming weeks I developed a routine, visiting Dad on Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays, writing up my travels during my spare time, and working in the pub on Friday and Saturday nights. The locals gradually took me into their confidence with tittle-tattle, and I began to feel at home in Dritt.
Most rewarding, I found, was getting to know the old gimmers in the Series of Gentlemen Home for Retired Explorers. What had initially looked like the near-death branch of one of John and Yoko’s bed-ins, became more intriguing as my visits wore on.
Mr Reculver had the best sense of humour and was the most self-aware. He, Hoath and Chislet had teamed up back in the day when a tweed sock was deemed the Acme of snow-wear technology, and had specialised in exploring the unknown nooks and crannies of the frozen Poles. Until one year their publisher bought them tickets to Benidorm as a treat, and they never looked back.
“Pilsbury, never explore Antarctica,” Reculver warned me. “It is perishing down there and penguins smell worse than you think.”
I assured him that I wouldn’t.
Hoath was rather the wind-up merchant, and the most boyish of the residents (which must be taken in context). He’d be the first to jump on one of Kenneth John Peel’s outrageous exaggerations and, though it made me feel awkward, was the ringleader of the regular bullying of Mr Wilmington-Hovis.
Poor Mr W-H. He didn’t really say much – though still considerably more than Mr Chislet – and seemed to foster a persistent sense of injustice, trapped in his meerschaum bath-chair, scowling at the walls. Rarely would he join in with the arguments over who had been the first/bravest/sexiest, and when he did so he was too easily shouted down.
Hoath told me that Wilmington-Hovis had until recently been visited by a gra
ndson and three great-grandchildren, until one afternoon the youngest had asked when he was planning to die, because Daddy was bored of waiting for Great-Granddad’s money. I noticed when that story finished that no one laughed.
Peel was the only resident I ever saw with a visitor: a painted blonde woman in heels and fur, in her late-sixties, whom he claimed was his wife. Except I overheard them arguing about her ‘fee’ and he palmed her some notes, looking considerably put out. I supposed he was so used to being surrounded by the half-deaf and two-thirds-blind that he’d let his guard slip in my company. He really was a rubbish liar, which is perhaps why I couldn’t help liking him. (His history was also very poor, so he’d claim to have explored alongside the likes of Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan and assorted Vikings.)
The others, I gathered, had over the years been abandoned by former loved ones. In contrast to their readiness to elaborate upon expeditions and erstwhile derring-do, it was nigh on impossible to get them to open up about their private lives and how they had ended up in the home. Decrepit as they were – even Dad began to look more frail in my eyes, as if guilty by association – the testosterone lingered, and they were gentlemen of a certain era who avoided discussing the touchy-feely.
This much, however, was obvious: no matter what air of independence they might like to project, and in the face of the constant bickering and one-upmanship, they relied upon one another for companionship and support. They were a gang.
I thought that out loud once, which somehow ended up with me composing a rap for them. It went like this:
Don’t got knives.
Or wives.
We barely got our lives.
We’re old.
Got no gold.
With the heating on we’re cold.
We’ve explored.
Now we’re bored.
But don’t take us yet, oh Lord.
There was a middle eight:
Reculver, Hoath and Chislet
Wilmington-Hovis, he’s the business
Don’t fuck with Ken John Peel
Or broken you will feel
Harry Dextrose
He’s the…
I couldn’t finish it so we dumped it.
It was shit but it made them happy. We were going to perform it a capella (Peel having offered the services of his human beat-box, which we politely turned down), but none of them could remember past the first line, and then Nurse D’eath burst in from her office, demanding to know what was so funny.
Wilmington-Hovis gave her some cheek – well, he said, “Nothing, Nurse D’eath” – and she slapped him hard across the face then wheeled him off to his room.
She was a bastard, there’s no easier way of putting it, more cruel dominatrix than carer. She’d been merely snide with them during my early visits, but as she grew used to me, and the fact that I was as scared of her as the residents were, she grew bolder, nastier and more physical.
Once, she put a stale éclair on Mr Chislet’s armchair and when he sat down told him he’d defecated himself, then stoked up the others’ derision. He looked genuinely upset – as did she when I picked it up and ate it. That turned the tables. I saw her mists descend, but she knew I could escape at three o’clock. Sadly, that was as daring as I got.
I said nothing when she ‘accidentally’ kicked Mr Peel’s walking stick out from under him, after he’d regaled her with his tale of ascending Saltoro Kangri by emu; likewise, when she pretended to get her daily horoscope mixed up with her medical notes, and told Mr Reculver he had cancer. For a man with four toes touching the bucket, it could have been the coup de grâce. Fear then resignation overtook his demeanour, and he glanced at me, a piteous glance. When Nurse D’eath admitted her mistake in a music-hall voice, slapping her corpulent thigh, I thought he might go for her. But it would have taken him too long.
The dreadful woman was always talking down to them, treating them like children. They were better than that, deserved much more. I genuinely looked forward to my visits, despite the depressing nature of the place. It felt like I’d gained a bunch of eccentric granddads.
Nurse D’eath never picked on Dad while I was there. He’d been a different person since joining the Series of Gentlemen: his manner was subdued, he seemed almost pensive. I put it down to his being the relative ‘new boy’ – the others treated him as such, being sticklers for hierarchy – and assumed that he would in time rediscover his usual bombastic self.
On Sunday, some six weeks after Dad had joined the home, I felt comfortable enough with them to bring up their cowardliness in the face of the Nurse D’eath. Wilmington-Hovis was snoozing at the time and Dad was watching telly in the corner, but Chislet’s eyes slid left to glare at me, Reculver nodded ruefully and Peel pretended he hadn’t heard (perhaps he hadn’t).
Hoath exploded. “How dare you! How dare you! You’re not too old to put over my knee!”
“He is, you know,” said Reculver, adding: “How old are you, Pilsbury?”
“I’m 33,” I told him (for the umpteenth time).
“What a nice age,” he said.
Then Peel chipped in with some garbage about being best man at Chris Bonnington’s wedding. That was the trouble with trying to start a serious conversation in the Series of Gentlemen Home for Retired Explorers: one couldn’t.
I tried again, having first apologised to Mr Hoath, who had begun to sulk. “I just don’t get it,” I said. “There’s one of her and six of you, yet you never even talk back to her. She treats you like shit and I hate seeing it. Why don’t you react? When are you going to stand up for yourselves?”
It was a reasonable speech, I thought, though I did check over my shoulder halfway through to see that Nurse D’eath hadn’t entered the room.
Wilmington-Hovis woke up and mumbled, “I’m hungry.”
“You’ve only just had lunch, you old fool!” snapped Hoath.
Peel tried again with his Chris Bonnington tale.
Then Wilmington-Hovis added: “I hope it’s not broccoli.”
As I sighed, Reculver piped up. “You know, Pilsbury, your visits make me sad,” he said.
I regarded him quizzically.
He went on: “Not because I don’t like you – we don’t like you – because we do. It’s just that you make me feel so bloody old.” He laughed to himself and wiped his nose with a finger. “You know, you remind me of me. I imagine it’s hard for you to look at an old fool like me, in this silly, rotten shell, and picture me as a young man. You must think my stories as ridiculous and unlikely as Peel’s…”
Peel opened his mouth, ready to splurge indignation, but Reculver continued: “I was your age once, you know. Many years ago! And in many ways I still am that age, sad as that may be. Only the fight has gone, Pilsbury. Only the fight has gone.
“Old age suffers us so many indignities. I’m 87. You wonder how something can creep up on you over a period of 87 years. You think you’d notice it. But you don’t. One day I was seven, and now I am not. And here we are. I have my friends with me, and we get by, on fading memories and stewed tea. Nothing Nurse D’eath can do can either improve that, or make it heavier to bear. We are what we are. It is what it is.”
Everyone was rapt by his little speech, bar Dad who was still wrapped up in Neighbours. I wanted to hug him.
“But I won’t lie to you Pilsbury,” concluded Mr Reculver. “There are times when you walk out of that door that I envy you.”
That night, something woke me. I had no idea what and, when I checked the illuminated display of my Timeco Z112.2 XG, it read 03.58. The room was in near-darkness and there was no sound, no seagull pattering along the roof, a noise that had woken me on more than one occasion. Yet I had a sense of being watched.
Fear gripped me and I lay stock still, listening. So heightened did my hearing become that after a while I was convinced I could hear the ticking of the clock in the town hall tower, way up the road. Still nothing stirred in the room.
After a while, when my te
rror had subsided and I was certain enough that I was alone, I dared to reach across and switch on my bedside light on the dresser.
I screamed.
Sitting on the end of my bed was the Shaman’s dummy, staring at me with its beady eyes. Its nose was broken off, its dinner jacket was ripped and dusty, and its monocle glass was missing though the frame remained.
There came a banging on my door. I pulled the covers over me, fearing for my safety as well as my sanity. My hands were shaking.
“Pilsbury!” Robin Botham’s voice. Dear old Robin Botham! “You alright in there?” he called thought the door. “I thought I heard a lady scream?”
“Robin, please, come in,” I called back weakly.
How desperately I needed company.
“Christ, what’s that ugly thing?” he said, spotting the wooden boy.
“You don’t know how it got here?” I asked. “No one’s been up here? No strangers?”
He thought for a bit. “None that I can think of. You alright?”
No. “Yes, sure. I’ll be fine, thanks.”
After he left I kept the light on, waiting for the dummy to make its move. Eventually convinced that it was inanimate, I lunged at it, wrenched open the window and flung it out into the night. I heard its wooden head land – ‘ctnth’ – on tarmac.
Then I sat there, sheets pulled up to my chin, bolt upright, terrified, wondering how the fuck that abomination had got there, when I had left it discarded at the side of the Nameless Highway weeks ago.
Words rang in my ears. These words: “You know I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth, don’t you?”
It couldn’t be her. Just couldn’t be.
Could it?
The following morning I didn’t leave my room until gone ten, when the sun was fully up and the light through the window allowed me some comfort. I dressed quickly and crept out of the pub, peering around corners before entering corridors and inspecting the bar for signs of life. But the Dog & Duck was closed and the chairs and stools were unoccupied. Dust floated around the room, sparkling in the winter sunlight.
Looking for Mrs Dextrose Page 26
