The Exit

by Helen FitzGerald

  Marcus shut the laptop to take in my usual spiel. ‘Look, last night was lovely, but I just don’t fancy you.’

  Men usually left in a huff after I said this. But I’d made a mistake. This was not a public place. It was his place. It could get loud, tearful and/or dangerous. Marcus sighed. He was going to get angry. He might ban me from the building. Or trap me here in his office. I checked the door was open and planned my escape.

  ‘Thank God for that!’ He laughed. ‘I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but it just didn’t work at all, did it? You cried the whole time!’

  I faked a laugh. How dare he? My sexual prowess had never been questioned, ever. And especially when he was so grossly revolting!

  ‘You were too gentle for me,’ I held myself back from saying more.

  ‘You were too frantic!’ He flailed his arms. ‘All over the place! Going this way, going that! What is that about, so aggressive? Are you always like that?’

  We laughed together. Mine was even faker now. Okay, so I was peeved, and that made me want to put him in his place.

  ‘You can have a nap on my bed.’ He opened the lid of his laptop. ‘I’m on a roll here!’

  ‘What did Natalie steal from Rose?’

  ‘That woman. Acts like some Mother Theresa, and all the while she’s in it for the dosh. They found original artwork of Rose’s in her house worth over nine thousand pounds. They should’ve locked her away.’

  That’s right, Natalie had some illustrations in her kitchen. She said she used to have originals, but now only had copies. ‘She told me Rose gave them to her.’

  ‘Rose was the one who phoned the police!’

  Wow, so Marcus had good reason to ban Natalie from visiting. Maybe all the restrictions they put on Rose were for her own protection. But Gabriella still worried me. ‘I have a confession. I don’t like Nurse Gabriella. I don’t trust her. When I ask her a question, she never gives me a proper answer, as if she’s keeping something from me.’

  ‘Ach, she’s just unhappy. Poor thing. Her son died.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but do you think she could be crazy; dangerous?’

  ‘I think most people could be. Y’know, Rose isn’t all sweetness and light, either. The bizarre stuff she comes out with, I don’t think it’s all the illness. I think she likes to wind people up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that I wouldn’t take her too seriously, with the stuff she goes on about. She’s very ill, but she was a shit stirrer before, apparently, and very self-centred.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Chris. And he loves her.’

  I didn’t want to bitch about Rose. It seemed wrong, so I changed the subject. ‘Tell me about your novel.’

  ‘I’ll let you read it when I’m finished.’

  ‘Can’t I just read what you’ve done? Maybe it’d help to talk about it.’

  ‘I don’t need to talk about it.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  He started typing, didn’t want to talk. I kept talking.

  ‘What’s the title?’

  ‘Not sure yet.’

  ‘Go on, let me read a bit. Or tell me the synopsis.’

  He exhaled and shut the lid again. ‘It’s hard to describe.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘You can’t really say what it’s about. The character is searching.’ As was Marcus, for words to describe his work of utter crap.

  ‘You said you had to Google weird shit. Is it crime?’

  ‘Oh, well yes and no, hard to categorise, which is totally what I’m aiming for. I don’t think there’s anything quite like it out there. If there was a gun against my head and I had to label it – literary mystery, perhaps? But it’s not about a crime, although there is one, it’s about . . . it’s about the things I feel I must say.’

  I yawned, wishing I did have a gun at his head, and then I spotted a blue felt box on his desk. It was open, and it had a fountain pen in it. This place was fountain pen central! ‘Actually, I don’t need to read it. Doesn’t sound like my kind of thing. I don’t think I’d like it.’

  I popped into his super-kingsize bed with satin sheets and duck-feather duvet, and slept for three hours.

  He was asleep on the leather sofa in the office when I woke. The laptop was still open.

  His book did have a title: The Little Death. A page was enough for me to see that Marcus was about as deep as a blackhead. In fact, it read exactly like the passages the detective fiction author read in group activity the other day. A cop with a past discovering a whole heap of fucked-up dark shit.

  It wasn’t possible to stop there. I checked his Facebook page – 378 friends, most of them his age and into music. Nothing saucy in his messages.

  I couldn’t open his email account, bummer. So I looked through his photos. The ones on Facebook were mostly party shots – groups of well-dressed young things with posh beers in their moisturised hands.

  I don’t know what made me remember the jpeg number I’d seen listed in the logbook, but as soon as I saw that he had hundreds of unnamed pics in ‘My Pictures’ it sprang to mind. 145. I clicked on it.

  Holy shit, the photo was of close up of an elderly woman’s face. What was her name? Bridget or something.

  She died in Room 3, in bed, window closed. She was alone . . . She sat bolt upright and took a last silent breath. She looked excited, as if she could see someone at the end of the bed.

  Her last words: ‘You’re there!’

  At the moment of death, there was small rectangular shape reflected in her left eye (145.jpeg)

  I zoomed in on her left eye. A white light, rectangular. Probably from the strip light above her bed. I closed the photo and all the other tabs I’d opened.

  The A4 notepad on his desk was filled with chapter outlines. His writing was neat, but not in capitals like in the logbook. All in the black ink of his fountain pen. Considering the jpeg I just found, it was probably Marcus – not Gabriella – who wrote those death entries in the logbook. Research for his book, perhaps. God, everyone here was so fucking weird. No wonder, I supposed. Spending days with the dying was already making me exhausted and paranoid.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I had no time to move away from his desk, no time to lie. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t sleep. I started reading your novel and I couldn’t stop. It’s compulsive!’

  Marcus pounced down towards the laptop and grabbed it. ‘First you take money from Rose.’

  ‘Chris told you?’

  ‘Rose told me. Now you snoop through my things. Your behaviour is completely unprofessional.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Marcus. I just needed a distraction. It’s my mum.’ I was faking the tears, and felt guilty about it, but it was the only way out that I could think of. How awful would it be, to be kicked out of this house now, with my mother still aware enough to realise. I sobbed, moved closer to him.

  He put his arms around me, reluctantly. ‘I know.’

  ‘You won’t ban me, will you?’ I paused, sob, sob. ‘You’re such a good writer, Marcus. You’re going to be famous one day.’

  His embrace tightened. ‘You really think so?’

  *

  When I went back downstairs, my mother, Maureen Mann, a director of Oxfam and of me, and maker of lists, and doer of things, was on her stomach on the bedroom floor, clawing at the carpet in an attempt to get to the toilet.

  She stared at me, perplexed. ‘I can’t seem to get up.’

  I thought I’d be able to get her up by myself, like last time in the bathroom, but I ended up stuck underneath her torso, both of us unable to move. I was rough in the process. She’d probably have bruises under her arms tomorrow. I yelled and Nurse Gabriella came immediately, using well-practised techniques to get her to a kneeling position, and then onto the bed.

  So coming off the steroids hadn’t improved her mobility. It would deteriorate regardless.

  That day, the rails went up on her bed, the Zimmer was r
eplaced with a wheelchair, commode and sponges replaced the bathroom, and an emergency alarm she did not seem to understand – and would never use – was placed on a ribbon round her neck. A slow-moving hoist was installed beside the jail-bed to help her sit up to eat. The occupational therapist showed us how it worked. If used properly, Mum would be sitting up, ready to eat, in an agonising fifteen minutes. I watched as she had seizure after seizure, not violent as I would have imagined, just her arms shaking a little beyond a shiver, a scary-blank stare following for minutes afterwards. I was watching my mother be murdered by a serial killer; one the divorced, alcoholic detective would never catch.

  That evening, when she finally slipped into a fretful sleep, kicking legs that refused to move when she was awake, I went into the office, shut the door, and cried. Rose must have heard me from her room next door. She knocked quietly before coming in.

  ‘Rose, how did you get out of your room? Did you learn how to pick the lock?’

  She held up a hairgrip, then put it in her hair. ‘That one, my dear, is a gigantic piss-piece. When I grow up, I’m going to be a cat burglar.’

  ‘You know I didn’t steal from you, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And Natalie, she didn’t steal from you, did she?’ A blankness moved over Rose like a shadow. I wouldn’t get an answer to this question.

  Chapter Fourteen

  AGE 10

  Margie was sobbing, the blossom. Trying to get air for so long had made her upset. She was giving up, Rose knew it. ‘I’ll go for help. Stop the tears, breathe. You stay here.’

  ‘Come back, Rose, come back. It’s me, Catherine.’

  ‘Shhh. I will come back! I’ll be so quick and then we’ll sneak some cake from the pantry!’

  Margie sighed. ‘Look, look at my name tag. See, it says Catherine.’

  ‘Why are you wearing that?’

  ‘You were here a moment ago. I need you. Please.’

  ‘I promise. I swear I’ll be back. Just stay where you are and keep calm, keep breathing. I’m going to get some matches from the farmer’s kitchen.’

  The farmer had a name, but Rose didn’t like to use it. He was a mean man and he didn’t deserve a name. Rose and Margie and the others worked ten hours a day. The meals were tiny and tasteless and cold more often than not. Their beds were lumpy, their room an ice-box. He rarely spoke and he never listened. Once, Rose had gone into the wife’s room to beg for mercy on behalf of all the children. She was tiny, withered, all curled up in her un-lumpy bed. Rose didn’t have the heart to add to her problems. ‘Sorry,’ she said instead. ‘Wrong room.’

  ‘Wait! Let me show you something.’ Margie ran off. If she could do that, maybe she was getting better.

  She was back again, so quick!

  ‘Look at these. You’re an author, aren’t you, Rose? Look at these books. You wrote all these books.’

  Rose studied the girl at the office door, red-eyed, blonde, books in hand. Apricot shirt, name badge, a little girl, but not seven.

  *

  AGE 82

  ‘A first draft always took me three months. That’s quite quick, I believe. People always asked me about discipline. I always said: I have to discipline myself to not write.’

  The girl put her in bed and started reading her a Tilly book, the one about the roast dinner. As always, there were elements of reality in the story. In the real-life version, the farmer had served roast beef and all the trimmings to celebrate the news that his eldest son, missing in action, had been found – injured, but alive. For the first time in months, they had enough to eat. But Rose knew the meat was her favourite Jersey, Josie. Why else had she disappeared from the south field the day before? Rose tried not to eat, and couldn’t stop herself, but cried through the mouthfuls.

  In the Tilly version, Rose’s young heroine knew the farmer’s Sunday-lunch plans, snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, and led Josie four miles to safety, leaving her to live a long, happy life in the pasture of a kind neighbour.

  The girl had finished the story. ‘I like it when you’re eighty-two, Rose.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you’re yourself. Do you know quite often you go back to when you were ten, to when you were trying to save Margie? You run through the same sequence, again and again. Did you know that?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think someone told me that.’

  ‘You run off to the river, run back and steal matches, light a fire. It’s not nice for you, going back to what happened with Margie all the time.’

  The dementia had brought this memory back and blown it up so large that it obliterated all others. ‘I should have stayed with her. I should have stayed and sang her the song while she died. I know that’s what she wanted.’

  ‘What song?’

  ‘“Imagination.” I used to sing it to her every night. She loved it. If only I’d stayed with her.’

  ‘Keep talking. If we talk about it, it might stop it happening.’

  ‘I wonder if they’ve tried that. I don’t know. Can you get that box in the corner?’

  Catherine opened the box file Rose had pointed out. Inside were black-and-white photos of the farm. It was a small ramshackle house, no more than three bedrooms by the looks. One of the photos showed the attic, a bare-looking dormitory with half a dozen scabby mattresses on the floor. Six children stood, gathered at the window with miserable, hungry faces, like something out of Oliver.

  ‘Is that you?’

  Rose was so angry in that shot. She didn’t want the farmer in the children’s room. She didn’t want her picture taken. Her scowling ability was already legendary. ‘Yes. And that’s Margie holding the wee doll . . . oh, Margie. Can you hand me that doll on the shelf?’

  The girl handed her Margie’s doll, a Christmas present from her parents. Rose got one of these dolls too, but she lost it playing fairies at the canal a few blocks from their London home. Margie had never let her doll out of her sight. ‘She wanted to call her Ro-Ro after me, but I told her she was too pretty for that. Her name’s Violet.’

  ‘I bet Margie just fell asleep at the tree. I bet she understood why you left to get the doctor and she fell asleep feeling positive, with hope. You were a good sister. Margie loved you.’

  ‘I suppose she did. She shouldn’t have. She shouldn’t have! She shouldn’t have loved me!’ All of a sudden, Rose felt like smashing things.

  *

  AGE 10

  Oh how she wanted to smash things. And she would! The thing in her hand, she’d smash it against the wall. ‘You’re a selfish girl, Rose Price! You’re a selfish, selfish girl, Rose Price!’

  Someone was yelling at her – was that Margie yelling? ‘Rose, stop it! Rose, don’t, please; Violet, you’ll break her.’

  Someone was grabbing the thing in her hand.

  Someone was sad. ‘Oh no, oh no, Rose, but don’t worry, I’ll fix her. I’ll fix her. That’s it, into bed, close your eyes, everything’s okay, Rose; everything’s just fine, lie down there now, beautiful, unselfish Rose Price.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  The doll wasn’t really broken, as I’d thought. The head had come off, but it had obviously been taken off once before. I knew this because someone had stuck a plaster to the inside of the skull. The plaster was yellow, ancient, and came unstuck easily. Something fell into the body of the doll. I turned Violet upside down and shook. A silver locket on a delicate chain fell out. Inside was a photograph of a very good-looking young couple. The man had such kind eyes, and an infectious, easy smile. I pushed the doll’s head back firmly in place. Violet looked perfect again. Oh, Rose would be so pleased.

  Mum had her eyes closed, and was picking at her clothes as if she were covered in flies. When she opened them, she stared at me for at least a minute before she understood where she was, who I was. ‘Did the tiler come?’

  ‘Yep, it’s all sorted.’

  She sighed, relieved, then resumed picking at her clothes.

 
; Mum had just said something completely lucid and succinct and important (to her). It was completely Mum. ‘Did the tiler come?’ A question, which had an answer, which I was able to give, and it soothed her. A moment later, however, this is what she said: ‘I can’t believe I’m back in this house again. It seems amazing. With all this furniture! Where did all the furniture come from?’

  What did Mum mean about the furniture, I wondered. ‘Have you been in this house before?’

  Mum didn’t answer. She was looking at the bedside table in wonder, touching it, shaking her head. ‘After all this time! It seems incredible!’

  ‘What’s incredible about it?’

  Mum thought hard about my question. ‘I don’t know.’

  To this day, I have no idea where she thought she was – at her parents’ house, maybe? Oh, I’d love to know. Wherever it was, she was happy there. Whatever it was, it was as real to her as the tiler fixing the tile in the bathroom of our house.

  *

  When I unlocked Rose’s door, she was sitting at her desk writing. Phew, eighty-two. ‘You have a good rest?’

  She looked up from the page she was working on. Just words so far, by the looks. No picture. ‘Did I have a rest? I have no idea. I can’t describe this illness, Catherine. I can’t find any way to describe it.’

  ‘Don’t, then.’ I put the doll on top of the page that was frustrating her. ‘I fixed Violet.’

  Rose touched the doll and smiled at it.

  ‘Oh, did you want this to stay inside her still? It’s not too hard to get the head off and on again.’ I handed her the locket.