The Exit

by Helen FitzGerald

  She’d met Vernon at seventeen, and stopped drawing pictures of Margie with wellie boots in them. Marriage, then motherhood, doused her grief and her guilt, and her father’s last words didn’t seem so important any more. She came to terms with what had happened. She was a good wife, a good mother, a good person and then, after Vernon died, she was a good writer. It was the dementia that brought her father’s words back. He whispered them over and over as she wandered the maze.

  The page in front of her was still empty. How could it be that she couldn’t use this hiccup creatively? She’d always used everything that ever happened to her, no matter how awful. Being an evacuee. Losing a sister. That time the farmer fed them her favourite cow for Sunday dinner, and she knew the beef was Josie, but she was so hungry she ate anyway. She’d used childbirth, widowhood, even the coming out of her gay grandson (this particular plotline was vetoed, not surprisingly). But she couldn’t use this, because she couldn’t feel it.

  Rose had often worried about getting arthritis, like the farmer’s wife, whose hands had set in a gnarled knot. What if that happened to her? What if she couldn’t draw? But arthritis would have been fine. She wouldn’t have been able to draw, but she could have written, used an assistant, like the new girl, or dictated into a tape.

  She looked on the wall for inspiration. There was Janey, her first born. So sullen and shy, like her father. So very serious. A millionaire now. There was Elena, happy with her partner in Canada and their two little girls. Rose would love to get on a plane and visit them again. And Chris, always here for her, bossy boots that he was.

  Rose looked at the calendar on her wall, one of the devices the idiots in here used to keep her oriented. It was Thursday today.

  Thursday morning! Oh, that’s right. Thursday morning. She left the desk and stood at her window, waiting for the inevitable.

  And it was only forty-five minutes before it came. When the trolley passed, the new girl unlocked her room, came in, and took her hand. ‘Let’s go and wave him off, Rose.’

  Rose was beginning to like this girl. Tragedy had pummelled the dullness out of her. Rose took her hand and they watched Jason’s body being rolled towards the ambulance. Just twenty-one. She’d achieved nothing at twenty-one, except killing her sister. She wondered if Jason had achieved anything.

  She turned to Catherine as the ambulance drove off, his parents and his sister in the car behind. ‘I remember now. That’s what I was trying to tell you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Jason would die.’

  ‘Is that why you drew the picture of him in bed?’

  ‘Yes, because he was going to die. I knew it. I was trying to stop it.’

  ‘But we all knew he was going to die, Rose, even he knew. No one could stop it.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I meant at all.’

  ‘What did you mean?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did you mean then?’

  Rose leant in so close that she could feel the girl’s breath on her cheek.

  *

  AGE 10

  ‘Your breathing’s getting worse, Margie.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Two days without steroids and Mum had all but disappeared. She was sitting in her armchair, gazing at the female doctor like a newborn, eyes fixed in confused wonder.

  ‘You must be Catherine.’ No pause for confirmation or small talk before she continued her interrogation. ‘I was just asking your mum if we’ve met before.’

  Mum was supposed to understand this cue. She didn’t.

  ‘Have you met me before, Maureen?’

  ‘Um, maybe we have.’

  ‘And do you know who this is?’

  The two seconds or so that followed seemed like an hour. The idea that my mother would not recognise me was unthinkable. I stopped breathing as she stared at me, her newborn face turning to a worried middle-aged one. She seemed as mortified as I was that she might get the answer wrong.

  Then suddenly: ‘Catherine.’

  I could breathe again. ‘Hey, Mum.’

  ‘Good, that’s good. Any pain in the head?’

  Mum’s hand was on her head now, clawing at her thick brown hair, a sure sign she was in agony.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Out of one to ten, how sore is your head?’

  Mum bit her lip, as if she’d been asked to do an impossible calculus problem on the blackboard in front of the whole class. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Okay, that’s good, Maureen.’ The doctor had a very slick outfit on underneath her coat. Tight skirt, heels. ‘Make sure to say if you’re in pain, won’t you? We can give you something. I’ll be back in a few days to check on you.’

  I followed the doctor to the office and asked the things I should have asked as soon as I found out. Had my mother sought a second opinion? Yes, she’d had three separate consultations after the initial diagnosis.

  ‘And there’s really nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why did she refuse radiotherapy?’

  ‘It was purely palliative. She didn’t think another month was worth it, considering the side effects.’

  ‘She has a symptom time line – is it about right?’

  ‘I don’t know which one, so it’s difficult to say. You’ll know when the time’s coming.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You just will. The staff here will too. There’ll be a sudden downturn. When it’s the brain, anything can happen. One thing at a time, or everything at once. She’ll probably sleep more and more. Sometimes it can be quite gentle, a brain tumour. The blankness can take the fear away. She doesn’t seem upset, which is good – personality changes can be a challenge, but that doesn’t always happen.’

  She gave me her contact details, and I went back in to see Mum. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘I’m tired.’ She yawned. ‘The cars kept me awake all night.’

  ‘What cars?’

  ‘Seemed like dozens of them, in the middle of the night, parking in the car park. Headlights and engines. I need to go to the toilet. Can you help me?’

  The toilet trip didn’t go well. Mum was shuffling with the Zimmer now. One tiny step after another. And she’d started humming when in transit: dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum. It wasn’t a cute hum. A coping mechanism maybe, I don’t know. I hoped the hum was temporary because it made me want to drop to the floor, curl into a ball, and stay there. She wasn’t a whistler, hummer, or even singer. Not that she was dour, just that she had too many other things going on in her head to be consumed by meaningless tunes. She couldn’t haul herself up to stand at the Zimmer afterwards.

  It was 1.45 p.m. I tucked Mum in and went to the office, where I placed an envelope in today’s logbook labelled ‘For Rose’s grandson, Chris.’ Inside was £1,500 – what was left of the money Rose had given me topped up with some of the funds Mum had transferred to my bank account – and a note saying how sorry I was. It wasn’t a hard note to write. I now felt terrible about taking Rose’s money like that.

  I turned the key to Rose’s door. Surely it was wrong, illegal even, to lock her in? She was right, she was a prisoner. After talking to Natalie yesterday, I’d decided to talk to Marcus about the tag and the lock as soon as I got a chance. I tried to open the door, but it was stuck. I pushed harder, but the resistance increased.

  ‘If I’m not allowed out, then no one’s allowed in!’ Rose was pushing from the other direction.

  I stopped pushing. ‘That’s fair enough. It’s Catherine, I won’t come in if you don’t want. I just wondered if you’d like to come for a walk? You fancy some fresh air?’

  *

  I shouldn’t have picked the tree at the river bend as our secret meeting place. It sent Rose back in time. As Natalie and I talked, she raced around gathering twigs.

  Rose placed the three twigs she’d managed to gather in a pile by the tree. ‘Sit down, Margie! I’m going to get more wood.’

  I did as Rose asked, my back
against tree. She didn’t seem to notice that Natalie was there, that she sat down beside me, or that I was telling her about the boy who died last night.

  ‘Was Gabriella on shift?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can you do me a favour?’ I don’t know why Natalie whispered, there was no one around but Rose, and she was in another world, and time. ‘Do you think you can get some time alone in the office?’

  ‘I think I can; it depends how Mum is, mostly.’

  ‘Sure, no worries if it’s not possible, I understand and I hate to ask, with what you’re going through. But if you do get a moment, can you take a photo or scan copies of those weird log entries you found? Here’s my email address and mobile number.’ She gave me her card.

  ‘Okay, that’s going to be nice and warm, Margie. You’re going to be fine here till I get back.’ Rose was pleased with the larger pieces of wood she’d found on the bank.

  ‘And if possible, I’d like to know who has died here over the last six months and when – i.e. date, day, time. That’s when she started doing those drawings.’

  ‘You’re scaring me, Natalie. Do you think I should get Mum out of there? What do you think’s going on?’

  ‘Can I trust you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Brian will lose his job if you tell anyone.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘When Gabriella’s son was ill, they had social work input for a while – home help, occupational therapy, that kind of thing. She wasn’t coping at all. After the Dignitas application was refused, the home help let herself in because she forgot her phone. Anyway, she found Gabriella sitting by her son’s bed. She’d dressed him in his rugby kit, put his favourite music on, cooked his favourite meal, and was about to inject him with insulin.’

  ‘He wasn’t diabetic, was he?’

  She shook her head. ‘She denied it, and they couldn’t prove it. But yeah, Brian and I think she was going to kill him.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Email me the creepy log entries, the details of the deaths over the six months – longer if you can. And one more thing.’

  ‘I’m just going to go to the kitchen and get some matches.’ Rose was ready for the next stage of her trauma. The stealing of the matches.

  ‘Can you get me Gabriella Nelson’s shift pattern for the same period?’

  ‘Holy shit, you think she’s killing people!’

  Rose returned to the present day before Natalie could answer. ‘Natalie?’

  ‘Hi there, Rose. How you doing?’

  ‘You’re not allowed here. You’re a thief! You stole from me.’

  ‘Rose, you know I—’

  ‘I trusted you and you stole from me! Get out of my garden! Get off my land! You stopped visiting me! What sort of friend are you?’ Rose was yelling and screaming so loudly that Nurse Gabriella heard and came running from the house.

  ‘What are you doing here? We have an interdict, you’re not allowed within two hundred yards of this place. Go now or I’ll call the police.’

  I looked at Natalie, who was shaking her head sadly. ‘Is that true? You stole from her? Is that why you left your job?’

  ‘You know how confused she gets, how easy it’d be to manipulate her.’ She sighed. ‘Honestly, though. All right, all right; I should just leave this. She’s so unwell.’ She turned and walked away, leaving me by the tree with Rose and Gabriella.

  *

  For the afternoon activity, they brought in a regular guest, a local author. H. R. Something. Jimmy was the only resident there, tapping, as usual, on his Samsung Galaxy. Nurse Gabriella and Marcus were listening intently as the author read a passage about a man tying a woman in a basement and torturing her. Odd choice! I’d been with Mum for the last hour, so I wasn’t sure if they’d asked Rose if she wanted to go. I tapped on her door, unlocked it. ‘It’s Catherine, can I come in?’

  ‘Sure, sure. Have a seat.’

  ‘Did Natalie steal from you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Outside, you said Natalie stole from you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah, by the tree, just now.’

  ‘I was by the tree?’

  No point badgering her, I thought. ‘I wondered if you wanted to go the activity room? There’s an author here.’

  Her eyes lit up. ‘Oh, who?’

  ‘HR. I can’t recall . . .’

  ‘God, Henrietta Ruth. She’s here all the time. I think she’s milking us for material, frankly. No thanks, but I’d love to read a good book. Do you have a good book?’

  ‘Not here, but I can bring one when I get a chance. For now I’ll print something off for you to read. How does that sound?’

  I nipped into the office, Googled how to pick a lock, printed off the first three articles, and handed them to Rose, who shook her head in confusion, then sat down to read them with the same look of intense concentration my mum always had when reading.

  I closed Rose’s door, but didn’t lock it.

  With everyone busy and elsewhere, I snuck into the office, locked the door, and grabbed the old logbooks with the moment-of-death entries, snapping them on my phone as quickly as I could before replacing them on the shelf. Even if Natalie was a thief, taking advantage of a vulnerable old lady, I needed to know if Gabriella was a murderer or – God – a serial killer.

  I looked through the filing cabinet for the shift rotas that were printed each week, but they weren’t there. I checked Word documents and spreadsheets on the PC, but couldn’t find any file names that sounded right.

  The rotas for the last eight weeks were pinned to the notice board, so I snapped photos of those. I heard a scratching noise. Was someone coming? No, it was Rose fiddling with her lock by the sound.

  I froze for a moment to see if anyone else had heard. But if they had, they were ignoring it.

  I leafed through the logbooks from the last six months, taking photos when a death was recorded.

  Jason died yesterday, Thursday morning, it said.

  Emma died last Wednesday.

  The two before that died on Thursday.

  Beatrice died six months ago, on a Wednesday.

  The one before that, Wednesday.

  In the last eighteen months, from when Carmel Tate died onwards, fifty per cent of the patients who died here, died late on Wednesday night. All the rest died very early Thursday morning.

  I looked at my photos of the earlier logbooks, the ones with those strange entries about the moment of death. The patients who died more than eighteen months ago died randomly. There was no recurring pattern.

  Someone was turning the door handle. I raced over and released the snib.

  ‘Please do not lock this door again, Catherine.’ It was Nurse Gabriella. She seemed terrifying to me now, with her dead son and her fountain pen and her lips so red.

  ‘Okay, sorry.’

  ‘Did you leave Rose’s door unlocked?’

  ‘Why? Did she get out?’

  ‘No. She’s busy reading. Did you forget to lock it, Catherine?’

  ‘I must have. Sorry.’

  She closed the office door and walked towards me, stopping when she was close enough to see my lips tremble. ‘You let Natalie come here. She’s not who you think she is, Catherine. She is not allowed to visit.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. But I think it’s wrong how Rose is treated.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re young and arrogant enough to know everything about right and wrong. What was Natalie wanting?’

  ‘Nothing, a visit, but Rose was confused, time travelling again.’

  ‘Is she still giving her those pictures she draws?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, I think you do.’

  ‘And I think you’re standing too close to me.’ I bumped past her shoulder quite hard as I stormed out of the room.

  *

  Before Mum woke, I emailed Natalie the photos from my phone. She replied immediately.

  ‘
Cheers, Catherine. Could you come to mine tomorrow?’

  ‘If Mum’s okay here, sure, but you have some explaining to do.’

  ‘I know. And I will explain.’

  *

  I kept busy that afternoon, reading articles from the Guardian to Mum that she seemed less interested in than I was, going through the three photo albums she’d left in the house, playing music, taking her to and from the loo, encouraging her to eat, asking if she was sore when she grabbed at her hair. ‘I don’t know,’ she’d say.

  I did a few of the jobs that Nurse Gabriella had identified as mine: scrubbed the kitchen, tidied the office, emptied the bin by the water cooler in the back corridor. I’d done the water cooler bin every working day since last Friday. Usually, there were around ten paper cups in the bin. Today there were twenty-five (I counted them). Someone had been thirsty last night. Maybe Jason’s family, poor things.

  Mum was dozing on and off most of the day. At ten o’clock, she looked settled, so I nipped upstairs. I was nervous Marcus might think we were an item after what happened yesterday evening. While the thought of being anywhere near him creeped me out, I needed to set the record straight.

  *

  As I said earlier, my relationships never lasted more than three months. Perhaps because underneath I already knew who I wanted to fall in love with, I never felt the need to try with anyone else, and I ran from it if I felt it coming. So I had developed many strategies to get rid of boyfriends when they showed signs of growing attachment. Sometimes a digital chucking would suffice – a simple un-friending on Facebook, coupled – if need be – by a blockage on Twitter and the non-answering of texts. If they knew friends of mine and/or where I lived, a contact chucking was required. I’d confront them – always in a public place so they couldn’t get loud or tearful – and say, ‘I just don’t fancy you. I tried. I’m so sorry.’ This worked well because there was nothing they could come back at me with. If I’d said, for example, that I was just coming out of a relationship, or that I was thinking about travelling, or that I had commitment issues, or that it wasn’t them it was me, then there was room for negotiation. They could take it slow, no need to label it, no pressure, just fun (aren’t we having fun?), or they could come travelling with me! My technique worked every time, and was usually true.