The Exit

by Helen FitzGerald

  ‘You’re scared of me. Oh Jesus Christ. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not me you should be scared of. You have to believe me! Are you hearing me?’

  It was hard not to hear her – her whisper was becoming a yell.

  ‘You don’t believe me! I can see it in your eyes, you stupid little girl. Get out of my room!’

  Nurse Gabriella had heard. She raced in, directed Rose to bed, popped a pill in her mouth, and watched until she’d closed her eyes. ‘Stay with her, and don’t let her upset you. She says the strangest things.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And could you do a daily search of the room? She keeps stealing matches from the kitchen, always when she’s travelled back in time. We never catch her, and we have no idea where she stashes them. She’s fast and sneaky as a ten-year-old.’ Having given her orders, the nurse headed for the door.

  ‘But it’s her room.’ I thought I’d said this under my breath.

  Nurse Gabriella walked back towards me and stood quite close. ‘And?’

  ‘And I don’t feel right about it.’

  ‘Oh, in that case, if you don’t feel right about it.’

  We stared each other out. I blinked first.

  ‘Now do as you’re told or go home.’

  After Gabriella shut the door, Rose opened her eyes, looked straight at me, put her bony finger to her lips and said, ‘Shh.’ Then she closed her eyes again.

  Scarier than Freddy Krueger, this woman.

  I shut the door to avoid helping with lunch, and posted a photo of myself on Facebook titled ‘working woman.’ (Pose #1 chin down, fringe over eyes, serious expression, gorgeous obv.) Ten likes in fifteen minutes. Not bad. Craig hadn’t emailed or texted about my un-friending. He would. They always did. And I’d ignore him like all the other desperados.

  The bookshelf in the corner was filled with Tilly books. They were up there with Katie Morag in my childhood. Most families had at least one series. Obviously this old bird couldn’t manage to read more than a kid’s picture book. Mum had bought a box set for my seventh birthday and read one each night in bed. She loved how independent and strong Tilly was (‘How a girl should be! Don’t depend on some idiot to take care of you!’). I flicked through the one that was my favourite (Tilly and the telegram). So sad and uplifting still, this story. The farmer’s two sons were at war. Bridget, one of the girls billeted to the farm, had collected the mail in the village, and it included a dreaded telegram. On the way back to the farm, she got into a mud fight with the annoying neighbour. She returned to the house covered in mud, and with no telegram. Tilly covered up for her, and dug through mud for hours before retrieving it. The farmer’s oldest son was missing in action. As punishment, Tilly had to muck out the sheds, alone, until the war ended. But somehow, she found a way to enjoy it. It was better being in the sheds than in the house, Tilly decided.

  *

  Was I really reading children’s books while a scary old alien lady slept in bed beside me? And when she woke, would she go on about ‘bad things’ again, or worse, need help going to the toilet? No, this was gross and wrong. I decided I’d see this shift out, head to the Queens for a drink, and work out what to tell Mum – something to do with health and safety, no doubt. The place was badly managed and dangerous! Did she want her only child to be seriously injured, maimed for life, emotionally damaged, for £6.19 an hour?

  There were cards on Rose’s wall from people who loved her enough to send cards, but not enough to let her stay in their houses.

  Love you Granny Rosie!

  Hey Mum, Sorry we can’t come and see you, but you do understand it’s for the best? It makes things worse. Gregor’s been spending most weeks in Brussels so I’ve been holding the fort here. Work’s going well, despite the economy. Got a new BMW yesterday – I love love love it! Hope Chris’s looking after you, Janey.

  Dear Granny, I wrote this story! Do you like it?

  Dear Mum, Happy Christmas! Work and kids have been mad busy. Ally and Cat send their love. Big hugs, Elena.

  There were black-and-white photos. A grim-looking groom, hers no doubt; dead now, I supposed. Two small girls in a garden. And there were colour photographs – the next generation, doing the same things as the last: getting married, having kids, smiling. She’d made those lives, yet here she was, alone, reliving a past trauma and imagining a present one.

  If I wound up here, with the same cruel dementia, what trauma would I relive? The time Mum caught me looking at porn? Nah, that was just embarrassing. When Mark cheated on me? No, I’d done it first, and he was a wank. I realised I had no trauma to relive. My dementia, if and when it came, would be a kind bonnie, bonnie banks one. I took another photo of myself. Pose #2: fringe flicked back, lips saying Prune. Gorgeous obv.

  And, at that moment, traumaless.

  Chapter Four

  AGE 82

  The new girl, Catherine, was asleep on the high-tech chair that tilted this way and that. She was very pretty, but uninteresting. Rose studied her. No, there was nothing interesting about this young girl. If she included her in a story, she would be like Betty, thirteen years old, insecure hormones and determined self-love vying for control. Betty never did much in the books, except bug Tilly. She was a prop, static, something for the real characters to bounce off. The new girl sleeping on the chair even had perfect blonde hair like Betty, groomed for hours, no doubt, because her looks were her only asset. Rose had already written Betty. No need to write another, ever. No, this girl would never make the grade as a character interesting enough to be in one of her books. She looked like she’d been nowhere, done nothing. She looked like she had no ambition to go anywhere, or do anything.

  Rose was looking at her latest Tilly drawing when the girl woke, but it wasn’t making any sense. She handed it to the girl. ‘What do you think?’ While the colours were as vibrant as they were in all her books, there was something creepy about this one that bewildered Rose. Tilly was lying in bed in a room just like Rose’s. A woman stood over her, with no facial features except for bright red lips. Four muted figures surrounded the bed, one of them in a chair. The text read:

  Tilly did not like make-up and did not want to play Kings and Queens.

  ‘You’re lucky, you get to be the Princess!’ said the Queen, taking the lid off a fresh stick of lipstick. ‘And a Princess is pretty, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Very pretty.’ The King smiled at his precious girl.

  ‘With beautiful red lips.’ The Prince smiled as the Princess’s lips were being painted. She was also his precious girl.

  ‘But not as red as mine!’ Pleased with the makeover, the Queen twisted the lipstick back into its hidey hole. ‘What a shame you can’t press your lips together; kiss, kiss.’

  ‘I can’t even remember drawing this. Can’t make sense of it! Then, that was often the way with my books. I’d be three-quarters of the way through before I knew where Tilly would wind up.’

  For the first time, an emotion other than boredom dressed the girl’s face. ‘Tilly! Rose Price! You wrote the Tilly books!’

  ‘You read them?’ A fan! How she missed the queues of little girls at her signing table.

  ‘Each and every one. Wow, Rose Price, of course! But this drawing is different, very dark.’ The girl scrutinised the page. ‘You gave Tilly a beauty spot. She doesn’t have one, does she?’

  Rose took the page and studied the picture. ‘No she doesn’t, that’s odd.’

  ‘And doesn’t Tilly always wear the same outfit?’

  The girl was right. Tilly always wore a dark green pinafore, a white blouse, and knee-length socks. And her red hair was always plaited in two. In this drawing she had short hair and wore a white nightgown with the letter B on it.

  The room, just like Rose’s. Beauty spot. Short hair. B.

  Ah, this wasn’t Tilly at all. ‘It’s Beatrice. Bea! She used to be in Room 5.’ Rose examined the rest of the drawing. The door in the picture was ajar and you could see the words: Room 7 on its
frame. ‘I wonder why I have her in Room 7. Strange. I get the feeling it made sense when I drew it. Now, gobbledegook.’

  ‘Bea died?’

  ‘Six months ago. Alzheimer’s like me. She was a dancer! Only seventy-one. So . . .’ Rose took the page back from Catherine and placed it next to the one she was drawing. So far, she’d drawn Room 7 again. She stood. ‘So . . .’ She bent down and put her ear next to Catherine’s mouth.

  *

  AGE 10

  ‘. . . Your breathing’s getting worse, Margie. Keep your head high. Higher than that! In slowly, and don’t forget the out. Out!’

  ‘I can breathe fine,’ Margie said. She didn’t look fine, though. All wrong.

  Rose spotted the farmer outside the room, and whispered. ‘We’ll have to go over to the sheds again now. When he’s not looking, we’ll go to the doctor. Follow me. Come!’

  *

  ‘You’re a selfish girl, Rose Price,’ her father said the day before they waved him off at the station. She hadn’t done her chores (that day she was supposed to sweep the floor and make the beds). She hadn’t comforted her mother, who was to be left alone in London with two small children. He was usually a big old softy with his girls, so it shocked Rose when he said, ‘You’re a selfish girl, Rose Price.’ Her dad had probably spoken to her after this. He might have said he loved her, that he believed she had qualities other than selfishness. He might have kissed her on the cheek, tickled her under the arms, called her precious and sweetheart and light of my life. But if he did, she couldn’t remember.

  ‘You’re a selfish girl, Rose Price.’ The last words she remembered him saying turned out to be the meanest words he ever spoke to her.

  *

  He was a storyteller, Rose’s dad. Each night he had perched himself on the edge of the double mattress she shared with Margie in the kitchen alcove and made up a delightful tale that always had an excellent ending. He was far too talented to work in a factory. Too talented to be sent to war. He taught Rose everything she knew but the most enduring thing he taught her was that she was selfish.

  Margie had nearly died twice before. At three, when the fever hit her harder than the rest of them and settled on her lungs. Her dad fetched the doctor in the middle of the night. Her mum burnt Potter’s Asthma Remedy for hours after. Rose hadn’t helped at all, but Margie made it to her fourth birthday.

  And a year ago. Springtime brought it on. Rose hadn’t done anything to help then, either, but her parents got Margie to the hospital in time, and she made it to her seventh.

  Squeaky breath, Margie called it. ‘My breath’s all squeaky.’ Her face would go grey, she’d sit up straight and stiff, her back like a board, her tiny chest barely registering desperate cat-like inhalations. Last year, the sound was too awful for Rose to bear. She locked herself in the bathroom and drew pretty pictures of people who were not grey and could breathe untroubled.

  Margie was grey now. She struggled to walk to the shed. Sixteen black Jerseys shuffled towards them from the south field. There was defiant Josie, sheepish Wendy, feisty Gee. Where was happy Noreen? Rose held her sister’s hand, pulling her along. ‘We’ll wait till he’s not looking, then run.’

  Josie’s wet-rubber udders were bursting to be emptied. Rose sat at her stool and began relieving her. Lovely Josie, the rebellious one of the bunch, straying from the line on the way to the shed, hurrying back to the field afterwards. Josie flicked her tail, blinding Rose for a moment. Rose rubbed her eye, checked on Margie, gasping for air as she squeezed weakly at Melina’s teats. Where was the farmer? Nowhere to be seen.

  Run!

  *

  AGE 82

  The new girl was holding her arms too tight. Ow!

  ‘Get off the road! Rose! A car!’ The girl pulled Rose by the arms and they fell on the gravel at the side of the road together, the white van that had swerved to the wrong side tooting as it disappeared round the bend.

  The girl was face down in the gravel. Rose had landed on top of her. Dear oh dear, she’d hurt her. She didn’t mean to do that. ‘What’s your name again?’

  The girl sat up, stunned. ‘Catherine.’

  ‘What on earth are we doing here, Catherine?’

  Chapter Five

  My mum gave me my first ‘Sunday List’ when I was five.

  ‘These are the things I’d like you to try and do this week,’ she said, handing it to me. I was starting at Hillhead Primary the following day – teaching me to read and write before I went to school must have been on one of the lists she made for herself.

  1. Make three new friends at school and ask them if they’d like to come over to play some time.

  2. Write a story for me.

  3. Put your dirty clothes in the washing basket in the utility room. (This, Catherine, is something I would like you to do from now on.)

  4. Make your own breakfast – cereal and milk. (This is also something I’d like you to do from now on.)

  5. Do at least three kind things for others.

  I got one of these lists every Sunday till I left school. If I did three of the five things on it, I received a very disappointing reward, like an extra half an hour of television the following Sunday.

  When I got home from my first shift at Dear Green, there was a skip in the front yard, half filled already. I spotted an open box of old computer cables, faded curtains from the dining room, a broken mirror, the cabinet from the bathroom, some childhood toys, and about a dozen black bin bags. Inside the hall were some boxes labelled Oxfam. Mum was sitting at her desk in the study, writing. A list, in all probability.

  I poked my head in. ‘You work from home today?’

  She covered what she was writing with her hand, and slid some envelopes under her elbow.

  ‘Just this headache. How was your job?’

  The boxes and the rubbish and the envelopes were all indicative of Manic Mum. Don’t get me wrong, she was always manic – not in a diagnosable way – but busy, busier than anyone I’ve ever known. She never lay on the sofa. Never read a book unless she felt certain she’d learn something from it. Never watched television, apart from the Channel 4 News while she was cooking. She had mountains of energy and used it all efficiently. For sixty hours a week, she helped run one of the biggest charities in the UK. For forty-two, she slept soundly. For the other sixty-six, she made lists for herself and for me, and ensured that at least three-fifths of the tasks on them were completed satisfactorily. But by the look of things, today she was the kind of Manic Mum that only happened about once a year. She’d slowed a bit for the last two months and I was excited that perhaps middle age was calming her down. Or making her depressed, which was easier to be around than manic. But she didn’t look relaxed or depressed now. She was at her desk, with that look in her eye that said: I’ve done everything I aimed to do today, Catherine, have you?

  I was going to have sell the idea of never going back to Dear Green. ‘I scraped my arm pulling a mad old lady off the road. She ran off so fast, you should have seen her go! It’s not safe for me there. Look.’

  Mum didn’t respond to the bloody scrapes on my arm as I expected. (That’s a shame, but if you start something, you must finish it.) Instead: ‘How ’bout we open some red? Come, tell me about it.’

  This was odd. We didn’t have a ‘glass-of-wine’ kind of relationship. We’d never been drunk together, had a joint together, danced in the kitchen together. I never initiated a cuddle and when a sense of duty compelled her to, it was bony and man-like. She never told me she loved me and I never told her, not because we didn’t, but because our respective roles – she the driven mother, I the rudderless daughter – did not require mush, or chats over a glass of wine.

  She poured mine and sat on the sofa.

  ‘So . . . Dear Green Care Home. I hear it’s a beautiful old building. Tell me about it.’

  I relayed the events of the day, my phone zzzing with texts and Facebook messages that I wanted to read and usually would, but somehow felt I co
uldn’t.

  ‘And it’s clean, and comfortable?’

  I wish I’d lied and told her it was crawling with rats. I nodded.

  ‘The staff – they’re friendly?’

  ‘I s’pose.’

  She took a last sip, sighed, and attempted to stand, her left foot pointing inwards, a dead weight.

  ‘You okay, Mum?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Pins and needles, my foot went to sleep.’

  She kissed my cheek and I blushed, like I did the first time a boy kissed me.

  She settled back into the sofa and fiddled with the sapphire ring on her finger. Gran’s engagement ring, it was. Mum hadn’t taken it off since she died.

  ‘Look, my finger’s too fat for this now.’ She pulled the ring off and smiled at it. ‘Does it fit you?’ She slid it on my reluctant finger as if we’d just said our vows. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the ring was for fuddy duddies. ‘Your gran was a conventional old bag,’ she said, ‘but God I loved her. I always thought she could have done so much more with her life, but she cherished Dad till he died; and us till she did. Now, I don’t think you could hope to achieve more than that in a lifetime.’

  I smiled at the ring just as she had. Actually, it looked beautiful on my finger.

  ‘Cherish it, Cath. And defrost two lasagne, will you?’

  A few days ago, Mum began cooking frantically, packing portions or home-made food into labelled Tupperware containers. The preparation of our weekly menu was always on her Sunday list (a list which always had more than five items, sometimes as many as fifty). But she’d been OCD for a bit, filling our regular freezer, and another that she’d bought and put in the hall cupboard. She had to do extra, she explained, because we were so busy now.

  After planning my night on Facebook (drinks at Studio at eight with pals Gina and Co.), it was time for me to complete a duty from one of my eight-year-old lists.