The Exit

by Helen FitzGerald

  ‘Have you read The Catcher in the Rye?’

  I couldn’t believe it. I had, for school. It had bored me shitless. All that bollocksy male angst. If you’re all so fucking alienated, then lock yourselves in your rooms and keep your thoughts to yourselves. ‘I didn’t like it much.’

  He ran across the hall to his office, came back, book in hand. ‘Perhaps you were too young. It changed my life. The way it deals with the complex issues of identity, belonging, connection and alienation: genius! I insist you read it again.’

  I wouldn’t read it again but I’d check Wikipedia for some dodgy but impressive facts so I could pretend I had.

  ‘Have you seen a dead body before?’

  I hadn’t, I told him. I was five when Grandad died, and in Lanzarote when Nanna went.

  He asked me how I felt about Emma as he washed our now empty coffee cups and magicked a door open that turned out to be the dishwasher.

  Emma’s arm had fallen from under the sheet when they lifted the trolley into the ambulance, a lump of flesh, disconnected, but that’s all I’d seen of her. I told him I felt fine about it. I’d only seen her arm, after all, and while it was greyer than any other arm I’d ever seen, it hadn’t scared me because I didn’t know Emma and she was old and sick, so it wasn’t a surprise, was it?

  ‘It’s five o’clock. Mind if I have a Prosecco?’ He poured me a glass without asking if I wanted one. I put up my hand up as a No. ‘I’m still on shift.’

  ‘I’d like you take the rest off after what just happened. It’s important to debrief. It can get to you.’

  He had earrings, Marcus. I hadn’t noticed that before. Tiny silver hoops.

  ‘I remember my first time.’ He was pouring us both another. He took a sip, waiting for me ask him to go on, which I didn’t do. ‘I was fifteen. Her name was Nadine. She had this amazing thick red hair. Wavy, not curly. Her skin was translucent. Y’know, the Irish type.’

  He flared his nostrils a little. When un-flared, they were long thin slits, his nostrils. The flaring turned them into long fat ones that returned to their usual position very gradually. He had no nose hairs that I could see, probably shaved them with one of those special trimmers, which probably meant he shaved down there too.

  ‘I spent my childhood in this place. Mum and Dad made me read stories to patients for pocket money on weekends and I hated it. Even ran away a few times. I found it scary – old people, dying. Then Nadine came. She was only nineteen – oh that hair! My first serious crush. She’d never said a word to me though her illness, but I believed I was in love. You know how it is. Anyway, Mum thought it’d be good for me to be there when Nadine died, a kind of immunisation, to normalise it, so I wouldn’t be scared any more. I was sitting by her bed when it happened. I remember the noise she made, the change in the colour of her skin, the transformation of her mouth and eyes from alive to not. I remember I could see the shape of her nipples through her nightie.’

  I took another sip of my Prosecco: ‘That’s some weird shit, Marcus.’

  He laughed and held his glass to mine. ‘Hey, I was fifteen!’

  Marcus’s chinos were burnt orange. I noticed he had very round knees. I think there’s something seriously icky about round knees, especially on a man. Earrings, fat knees, creepy stories: the points against him were stacking up. I decided to leave.

  ‘If you really don’t need me to stay on, I have something I need to do.’

  *

  Rose had finished her drawing by the time I arrived back in her room. She handed the envelope to me with shaky hands. ‘Say the same thing. The truth is here.’

  ‘What truth, Rose?’

  ‘This is a terrible place. Bea and Emma died! Quick, take it.’

  ‘Where? To Natalie? I’m not sure she’ll understand this one either.’

  Confusion descended on Rose’s face as if it had suddenly gone out of focus. She repeated my words. ‘I’m not sure she’ll understand this one either.’

  ‘Did you want me to take it to your grandson?’

  ‘Chris, he’s a good boy.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She lay on the bed – ‘Of course I’m sure’ – and closed her eyes.

  I found Chris’s address in Rose’s file in the office and phoned for a taxi to Gartmore.

  *

  It cost forty pounds to get to Chris’s house, a whitewashed cottage in the one-street town. I was feeling embarrassed before he answered the door, knowing this mission was a pointless one, but he put me at ease as soon as I introduced myself. ‘Ah, you’re the new girl!’

  Chris looked like the gay best friend I’d always wanted, but had never been cool enough to nab. My friend Rebecca managed to get a gay best friend when she was sixteen. Rebecca was horizontal-relaxed. Nothing fazed her. Nothing seemed to interest her. She only ever talked to me – in a slow, flat monotone – about other people’s clothing at parties and clothing she had worn to parties and clothing she was planning to wear to parties. But she had something that made out-and-proud Frankie comfortable and they huddled together for years, talking (surely) about things other than clothing and parties. God, even Mum had a gay best friend. Why not me?

  As soon as I saw Chris, I decided I’d get it right this time, and tried my best to ooze Rebecca. I relaxed my shoulders and put on the ‘life’s so fucking boring’ face Rebecca always had. ‘Your gran asked me to bring you a drawing.’

  ‘Come away in. I’ve got a brew on.’ Inside was as cute as out. Stuff everywhere, all pretty but nothing that seemed purposeless. An antique bread bin, for example, lid off, seedy German-looking bread inside. He closed the laptop lid on the wooden kitchen bench and poured me some tea. ‘I feel terrible. I usually see her every day but I’ve been in Aberdeen. How is she? Is she all right? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

  ‘No, no, she’s fine. Well, I’ve only known her a couple of days, but I don’t think anything’s changed. She just wanted me to give you this drawing. She said to look at it carefully.’

  He opened the envelope. As before, Tilly was in a bed in Room 7 and the woman with no facial features bar bright red lips was by her bed.

  Chris read the text out loud.

  ‘“I’ve had enough of this game!” said Tilly. “I’m tired of it. I told you, this is not how I want things to go.”’

  ‘“Oh, so full of woe,” said the Queen. “All right, all right, we’ll have an intermission. Let’s get the kettle on.”’

  ‘She seems scared of Room 7, Chris.’

  ‘Room 7 has damp problems. Not fit for the living.’ Chris folded the picture, put it aside, and sipped his tea. ‘After a resident dies, they put the corpse in there till the undertaker arrives.’

  ‘Ah.’ Well that made sense. ‘Your poor gran, everything’s so scary and mixed up. Oh, I promised I’d tell you that the truth is in her drawings.’

  Chris’s expression mirrored Natalie’s after I said the same thing to her. They’d both probably heard it a hundred times before. ‘Have you read the Tilly books?’

  I nodded. The Tilly books were set in 1940. Tilly was ten. Her full name was Mathilda Greenthorn. She was an evacuee from London. She’d been placed in a country house in Staffordshire with some other children. She was always doing things she shouldn’t and getting into trouble. She was always trying to help the other kids. ‘They were my favourite books as a kid.’

  ‘Mine too. It’s so sad what’s happening to her.’ His mobile buzzed. ‘Sorry, better get this. Work.’

  He was talking to a cop or a lawyer, by the sounds. He mentioned a perpetrator and something about an iron key and an unknown male victim and a MAPPA score of ‘very high’. ‘Right, will do.’ He hung up.

  ‘Are you a police officer?’ I had stopped myself using the word cop, and felt proud.

  ‘No, I run my own IT business. The police use me as a consultant on internet cases.’

  ‘Like fraud?’

  ‘I wish. Sexual offenders. Someone’s gotta do it. T
here’s something for everyone online nowadays.’

  Chris had been planning to visit at his usual time, seven, but decided to go immediately. He dropped me at the shops on the way, and I didn’t manage to say a full sentence the entire trip. I know it’s ridiculous, to be so in awe without knowing much about him other than that he was obviously gay. How did I know this? Just trust me. I’m not sure I have a gaydar, but even the gaydarless would know. I was star struck. He had a gorgeous stone cottage with the coolest interior I’d ever seen. His handsomeness was edgy and intriguing, a shaven, happier looking Johnny Depp, with juicy lips that’d be ace to kiss if he was up for kissing girls. He gave off a confident, kind, loveliness vibe. I had a fag crush. And I loved how much he admired his gran, mad old bird that she was.

  *

  I’m not sure I’d admired mine, but I loved her. She was a fifties housewife. She wore tight floral dresses. She ironed underwear, sewed buttons, removed stains, baked cakes, made curtains. I guess it’s no surprise that my mother rebelled against this. Everything her mum had done, she refused to do. Everything her mum hadn’t done, she did with gusto. For example, my mum vetoed bras and skirts, wore jeans and men’s shirts. She marched against Thatcher at medical school, she quit medical school, she lived with a guy who had a tattoo, got a tattoo, lived with a guy who had a drug problem, got a drug problem, studied international relations, got pregnant, married a guy she didn’t love, and kicked him out a year later. She brought me up to be nothing like her mother, because women like her mother were dependent and weak and I would be an independent woman, she’d told me.

  ‘But, Mummy, I’m only five!’

  ‘And you are your own five-year-old,’ she’d said.

  At school that day, I wondered what being my own five-year-old meant. I still wonder.

  *

  Mum was crying in her bed when I got home. I heard the wailing sounds as soon as I opened the door, and resisted the temptation to go straight back out again. ‘Mum, what’s wrong?’

  She rubbed her face against the pillow. ‘Oh, nothing, menopause! Sorry. How was your day?’

  I’d already decided to keep Rose’s money a secret. Mum’d probably tell me to give it back and I couldn’t, having spent two hundred and thirty of it on beach clothes and make-up at Buchanan Galleries on the way home, and the rest of it in my head. ‘Someone died.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mum’s eyes welled up. In twenty-three years I’d never seen her cry (maybe ’cause I was in Tenerife when Gran died, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she hadn’t then either), and all of a sudden she was a crying machine. Funny, menopause was bringing out the woman in her, not the other way round. ‘Who?’

  ‘A woman called Emma. She sang all the time, that Loch Lomond song. She seemed fine yesterday. I saw her arm. It was grey.’

  Mum just could not control her lower lip. I felt like grabbing it and holding on to it for her.

  ‘Was Emma scared?’

  ‘I didn’t see her die. I’m sure she would have been. Who wouldn’t?’

  Mum put her face deep into the duck feather pillow, but not deep enough to muffle the sobs.

  Menopause! I thought, heading to my room, putting earphones in to drown out Mum’s crying, then trying on the first of three bikinis (red polka dot, halter-neck, this one). I’d rather die than be old enough for menopause.

  Chapter Six

  AGE 82

  Chris had come out to her first. He was seventeen, and happy as Larry about it, not tortured at all. Rose had hugged him and said she’d known since he was seven and was glad he was finally able to say it out loud. Only to you, he admitted. It would take him five years and a large bottle of whisky to tell his parents.

  From the moment he was born he was her favourite thing in the world, even more than her own girls, who’d filled her with worry as they squealed their way into adulthood. Unlike them, he’d always been self-contained, hard working and happy. Beautiful boy. Right now, he was dying her hair blackcurrant. ‘But it’s already blackcurrant!’

  ‘Your roots aren’t, Gran.’

  Once the timer went off, Chris rinsed her hair thoroughly, and gave her a shampoo and head massage that made her lose herself, bliss.

  ‘What are the drawings all about? Is there something going on in that noggin of yours?’

  He dried her hair and ‘distressed’ it with Fudge. He helped her into the new koala onesie he’d purchased in town that morning. Ta-da! He turned her towards the mirror. ‘You look fabulous!’

  Rose had to agree. ‘I bloody do, don’t I?’

  ‘Now get into bed and tell me what those drawings are about.’

  She was so comfortable, sleepy. Chris often made her feel calm. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Gran, you told Catherine to show me a drawing. Why? You know you shouldn’t be sending letters and things to people.’

  ‘Catherine?’

  ‘The new girl. You sent her to my house, remember? Blonde hair, pretty.’

  ‘The dull one.’

  ‘Yeah, her.’

  Rose had no interest in her. She wanted to know about Chris’s work. ‘Tell me about one of your cases. What are you working on?’

  ‘It’s confidential.’

  ‘I’ll forget anyway.’

  ‘Okay, I was monitoring this BDSM site: that’s Body Discipline Sado-Masochism, and traced it to this bloke in Aberdeen. You would not believe the stuff that man was making.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No, it’s too gross, honestly. Not the stuff of bedtime stories. Suffice to say his actors didn’t seem too happy. He was producing as well as distributing videos.’

  ‘Actors, producers, directors. You make it sound like Hollywood.’

  ‘Well, it is a business. Folk make money.’

  ‘Actor’s the wrong word, though, no?’

  ‘Words, words . . .’

  ‘How do they make something like that happen?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well when you bought that shirt, for example, you bought it from a shop. The shop owner bought it from the wholesaler who bought it from the boss of the wee boy in China who made it.’

  ‘Works the same.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Aye. It’s like this . . . The actor’s connected to the producer, and the producer connects to the customers, when the customers connects to the internet.’

  ‘BDSM, I must remember that.’ Rose was drifting off.

  ‘No, Gran, you don’t need to remember that.’

  She didn’t know what he was saying. All she knew was that his voice made her smile. She felt him kiss her forehead.

  *

  AGE 10

  She couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep. How could she have done that? Rose jumped out of bed and raced around the house looking for Margie. She wasn’t inside, must be in the sheds. She ran across the wet lawn and there she was, standing at the fence looking towards the river.

  Rose nudged Margie into the water, knowing she’d be too frightened to take the plunge, and waded in after her. If they could get across together, they’d get there in half the time. Holding her little sister’s hand, she pulled and pulled until they were waist-deep.

  ‘Rose, I said stop!’ Margie said.

  There wasn’t time, but she had to take a second to convince her. She had to be responsible, caring. ‘Okay, look at me, Margie, if we don’t keep going you could die. Let me carry you if you can’t walk. Jump up onto my back.’

  ‘Rose, no. Let’s just go back.’

  ‘NO!’ Rose let go of Margie’s hand and pulled at her own mousy brown hair, screaming, ‘Margaret Isabel Price, you must do as I say!’

  Oh dear, the water was getting deeper, now up to Margie’s straining chest. They were only a quarter of the way across, and it was probably quite a lot deeper in the middle. Rose grabbed her sister under the shoulders, hauled her back to the riverbank, and sat her against a tree. She gathered all the twigs and dry scrub she could find, and formed the sticks
in a teepee over the scrub. ‘Wait here, I’m just going to go and get matches. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  Rose raced as fast as she could back to the farmhouse, snuck in the back door, crept along the hall, into the empty kitchen, and searched for a box of matches. Where were they? Not above the stove, or in the utensil drawer, or under the sink. Ah, in the bread bin! When she got back to the tree, Margie’s shivers had graduated to wild shudders. Her lips were turning blue. It took three matches to light the twigs. ‘Stay by the flames. I’ll be back soon. Margie, stop it, don’t say that – “Hold my hand as I die!” What nonsense, you’re not going to die! And that’s because I’m going to fetch the doctor now. So you see I can’t stay here with you. On Dad’s life, I swear you won’t be alone for long. I know, sing “Imagination” twenty times, and you won’t be finished when I get back.’ Rose started the song.

  Once Margie had opened her mouth in an attempt to join in, Rose ran down to the riverbank and walked in, plunged forth when the water reached her thighs and began to swim to the other side.

  *

  AGE 82

  They had a fancy word for what they were doing but in fact it was assault. Rose was tied to the bed. She screamed and attempted to kick, but she couldn’t move beyond the plastic bands across her torso, arms and legs. Dull Girl was standing at the door, wet, and looking terrified, insipid idiot.

  They’d called Chris. He barged past the dull girl and ordered them to untie his grandmother NOW. ‘Get those off! For God’s sake, she’s Rose Price, not some criminal! I’m going to ring the police if you don’t take those off her now!’

  Nurse Gabriella unbuckled the bed restraints and Chris leant down and hugged her. Wee soul, no matter what, he was always there.

  Bitch Nurse left after a few minutes, leaving Chris and the dull blonde one, Catherine, to calm her down by going through photo albums. Strategies, maybe, but they worked, and she welcomed them.