On the TV, there are a group of people wearing ridiculous large red and blue scarves, while checking out antiques.
Abel was glued to the screen.
“Hi Mrs. Temple, I hope you are well?” John asked as he stood and walked over to greet Betty.
“I’m super thank you John.” Betty liked John; he was respectful and knew how to look after Abel. John would stay with them both all day, trailing along behind like the tail of a comet, but he never spoke until spoken to, he simply faded into the background until needed.
Abel’s last care worker used to fuss and jump around like he was on a pogo stick. All it accomplished was to upset Abel and distract from their time together.
“Hi Abel, I see you have your bucket,” Betty said.
Abel’s head slowly turned from the huge Christmas tree, and his eyes refocused on his grandmother. Without a word he stood, lumbered over and embraced her in a gentle hug that made Betty almost vanish behind his thick arms.
“That’s enough of that you great lummox,” Betty said, rubbing his arm gently as he pulled away.
Abel stood back and lifted his small plastic bucket that had a faded image of dancing crabs around it. Inside was a small plastic spade that looked like a spoon in his large hands.
“Ready for the beach?” Betty asked.
Abel’s smile almost split his face in two. He handed her the picture he had painted the day before.
Mrs. Doubtfire was stood to one side chatting with John, while checking him out. She always hung around, trying to catch his attention when he arrived with Abel.
“Once you prize Jezebel off, we will be outside,” Betty said to John as she walked by holding Abel’s hand. She passed the rolled-up painting to the wide-eyed carer.
“And make sure that is left in my quarters.”
Around the corner, in the hallway, it sounded like Mrs. Moreau had been waiting to ambush Mrs. Ederstark.
As the carers ran past to break up the second fight of the day, Betty shouted back into the room as she was walking out, “Don’t wait up, we might hit a few clubs after!”
6
Betty stood on an expanse of concrete that dropped down into the ocean below via a collection of steps. There she stood, bag in one hand, umbrella in the other, just gazing out upon the water.
They always came to Torquay, and she could’ve met them down here, since Abel lived just up the road, but he liked the train trip, and going to pick his grandma up was the highlight of his week.
Abel was off to the right, down a small incline. There he would stay until either Betty or John told him it was time to move on. Regardless of the weather Abel would sit on the sand making a long row of sandcastles. Luckily, the sand was dry. It was cold, and if Abel dug down too far it started to get wet, but if wasn’t too uncomfy for him.
John sat on a step twenty feet behind him, allowing him space to enjoy himself without feeling he was being shadowed.
All along Torquay seafront was a collection of towering steps that dropped down from a concrete walkway that ran the length of the long seashore. The steps led to a sandy beach. Depending on the time of day, and month, the water might be right over the beach and halfway up the steps. Today there was a vast stretch of dark sand with strips of green seaweed, which had been washed ashore. There was a splattering of people, some walking their dogs, others strolling along with their children. There were even two old ladies out in the frigid water, swimming back and forth while keeping close to the shoreline.
John sat reading a book on his kindle HD. Every now and then he would look up to check on Abel.
Abel was now wandering the waterfront, looking for shells and pebbles to decorate his castles with. He noticed one of the old ladies bobbing up and down with a bright yellow swimming cap on. He watched her doing breaststroke for a few minutes before losing interest.
Betty stood looking out over the water. In the distance a large cargo ship was surrounded by smaller vessels. It looked so strange – so much metal floating out on the water, like a vast metallic island. There was a slight mist between the ship and the water, which made it seem like it was floating just above the waves, like a giant alien mother ship had come down and settled.
She liked to just stand and watch the large cargo ships pass. Her late husband, Abel senior, was a captain for a Singapore shipping company. Almost thirty years ago he went missing while captaining a large vessel categorized as a Handymax – a ship that could carry up to fifty thousand tonnes deadweight.
He, along with all the crew, vanished while transporting dry goods through the Malacca Straits, a narrow channel between Indonesia and Singapore, which was well known for its pirate activity.
It still felt unreal to hear he may have been killed by pirates. The image it invoked was an old-fashioned wooden ship with large billowing sails full of swashbuckling men with beards in tights and shiny cutlasses. The reality was dangerous, lawless men in speedboats hefting AK47s and rocket launchers.
The vast vessel was found drifting forty-eight nautical miles off course. No one was onboard, just lots of blood and gore and spent bullet casings. Around the ship there were smears, to indicate where the bodies had been tossed over to feed the sharks.
Betty liked to think Abel senior, (Abel junior was named after his grandfather) somehow escaped and was living on a deserted island somewhere surround by scantly clad young ladies who ministered to his every whim.
There was a grave, with a beautiful headstone for him, but it felt empty and wrong when she went to visit it once a year to tidy the grave and put fresh flowers down. She felt closer to him here, with the large vessels off in the distance. Here she could feel his spirit on the salty sea breeze.
She thought about all the lost years they could have had together. How his disappearance tipped the balance for their daughter Sophie, and how she ran away, leaving Abel Jr with his grandmother. That was only a year after her father went missing, and she hadn’t seen her daughter since. So she had two losses to contend with while trying to raise a child with learning disabilities.
Luckily, she received a pension from the shipping company. It was tight juggling everything, but Abel never went without.
Betty prized her eyes away from the long shadow on the distant horizon and looked down at her grandson.
Abel was knelt in front of a scattering of sandcastles, while delicately pushing shells into the sides with his plate sized hands, then draping seaweed around them, as if making green moats.
I am blessed to have such a gentle grandson, who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
She felt sad that she could no longer live with him. She was deemed too old and incapable of looking after someone with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities – as they labeled it. They came up with new categories each year. In a few years, he would be labeled as having something different, or worse.
“Poppycock, you interfering bastards!” she had shouted when they arrived to cart Abel away.
A woman in an ill-fitting dress suit announced he needed to be somewhere where they could give him the level of support that he needed to maintain a quality of life for someone with his needs. She remembered thinking the woman didn’t have children of her own. All her so-called knowledge came from books, not experience.
So they took him away from the only relative he had and stuck him in a large, impersonal care home, surrounded by strangers that simply looked at him as part of their job.
Imbeciles all of them! Bloody paper pushing idiots who tallied up numbers and percentages. Putting people in different columns and then writing them off.
Betty flicked a glance back out to the cargo ship, saying a quiet good-bye to her husband for another week. She then slowly walked down the steps to stand next to John.
John looked up from his tablet.
“He’s building Windsor castle by the looks of it,” John stated, while sliding his kindle into his leather satchel.
“Coffee?” Betty asked.
“Please.”
Within minutes she was back with two coffees and a coke for Abel. When she walked out to hand it to him, he mumbled thanks, then took the opened can, gulped it down in one swig and handed it back, before returning to his sandy domain.
It was close to 1 PM.
After half an hour of watching Abel they told him it was time to grab something to eat, and the three of them headed down the seafront to their favorite fish and chip shop.
“Hi Abe,” Lucy, the young waitress said. The skinny, pretty blonde girl looked about eighteen, and she had been serving them every Saturday for almost two years. She stood next to their table that was nestled up to the window looking out over the beach, ready to take their order.
Abel blushed and lowered his head. He fiddled with Bob the Builder who sat on the table, leaning against the tomato sauce bottle.
“Same as always?” she asked, directing the question in Betty and John’s direction. They were both sat opposite Abel, due to Abel taking up one whole side to the table.
“Please midear,” Betty answered.
When the food arrived, Lucy told Abel that she made the cook put more chips on his plate and the biggest battered sausage they had. She said this every week, and every week the big man gave her a million-watt smile in return. Lucy even cut up his sausage for him.
After lunch they walked along the shoreline up to the train station.
Abel hugged his grandmother good-bye.
Betty climbed aboard the train heading back to Newton Abbot, leaving the other two to walk back to the care home.
Betty waved out of the window as John led Abel to the side of the platform.
Bless him, she thought. If only we lived together. I guess that will never happen now.
She was too old and, according to others that apparently knew better, too fragile to look after her own grandson.
We will be back together soon; she mused as the train started to pull away from the station, while Abel stood waving both arms like a windmill.
She couldn’t explain it, but she just knew that soon they would be taking care of each other.
Bah, I’m a daft old bugger if I think anyone’s gonna let us live together again.
She wiped a tear away as Abel disappeared from view.
7
Betty didn’t go straight home. She walked up a steep hill to Courtenay Road. The view from the top was spectacular. Then again, that was why she picked the bungalow to be their home.
Abel senior was away a lot with work, sailing the high seas, and she would spend months at a time alone with their daughter Sophie.
She looked down on the property from the road. She could see the roof and garden, but most of the bungalow was hidden by tall trees and overhanging bushes.
She remembers long afternoons during the summer sat on the porch enjoying the view, while little Sophie played with her toys on the grass.
From the front of the bungalow, a person could look right across Newton Abbot and the village of Kingsteignton. They could also see part of Bovey Tracy in the distance, and Bishopsteignton and some of Teignmouth. Dartmoor stood high and beautiful to one side, with Hay-Tor rock jutting up like a sentinel looking down across the deep, long valley.
In the distance, the River Teign snaked around a hill, heading off toward the ocean.
The sound of the traffic on the motorway in the distance, and tens of thousands of people living their lives floated up as a wash of white noise.
Betty settled down on a bench, placing her bag and umbrella down next to her.
She liked to sit and take in the view every now and then. It was hectic at the nursing home, and sometimes she just needed a few more hours away from the noise, the smells, and the hustle and bustle of all the people squeezed into one building.
Dark heavy clouds were piling in, filling the valley. The wind picked up a little, tossing her hair to one side.
It was 2:32 PM, and the sky was starting to darken already. Within an hour or so it would be almost pitch black. It got dark early this time of the year.
Betty removed another cereal bar from her handbag and sat sucking on it.
Two pigeons, from a nearby tree, glided down and started circling the bench while bobbing heads at each other.
The song, Walk Like an Egyptian ran through Betty’s head. She tossed some crumbs onto the ground.
She could have done with a cigarette right about now. She hadn’t smoked since she became pregnant with Sophie, but even decades later the want was still there, when the mind wandered and the solitude dragged up old memories and cravings.
Betty routed around in her bag. Right at the bottom was a packet of Players Navy Cut Medium Cigarettes. It was the last packet she ever received, decades ago. She had smoked half the packet until a trip to the doctor announced she was pregnant. After that, her husband stopped bringing them home. At the time he was in the navy.
The cigarettes had long disintegrated to dust, but if she held the faded packet up to her nose, she could still smell the musty rank of them.
She wasn’t sure why she had carried the packet with her for over fifty years, but for some reason it brought her comfort. And that feeling of comfort helped her over the last week, especially after the bad news she had received from the doctors.
8
Betty arrived back just after 4 PM. It was like the middle of the night outside, and Mrs. Fredrick muttered something about how she was going to get mugged one of these days while walking around by herself in the dark, as she ambled past.
Mrs. Fredrick, the manageress, was a smallish woman in her late fifties. She was almost as round as she was tall, and had a beehive haircut straight out of the fifties, and wore bright dresses of eye watering, psychedelic colours with huge circular earrings that a buggieregard could perch on, and glasses that took up most of her flushed face.
Mrs. Fredrick wandered off to shout at one of the carers that was two minutes late returning from their break.
The main lounge was almost full.
The lights from the huge Christmas tree were so bright; it was as if a helicopter’s search light was being shone into the room.
Some residents were watching the TV, zoned out, hardly blinking at whatever was on. A few were asleep, bent over awkwardly, looking uncomfortable. A couple of others were at tables near the back of the room, playing chess or draughts or some other board game. Three were sat at a couple of tables pushed together, where they were completing a huge thousand piece jigsaw of a group of dogs dressed up as people playing a game of cards.
Three carers were stood by the entrance to the lounge watching the TV.
The news was on, and the reporter was rambling on about some kind of outbreak in Madagascar. So far two airports were closed off, one in Madagascar and one in South Africa, where nine loggers, who carried the virus, had been airlifted to.
Bah, Betty thought, there’s always some major catastrophe happening somewhere in the world. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. That’s the problem with the news today, there were so many networks fighting to grab the latest breaking news, that they would jump on absolutely anything.
She couldn’t see how nine sick people on the other side of the world warranted coverage on British TV.
It must be a slow news day, she thought as she climbed the stairs to her room.
Someone had thought it was a good idea to wrap tinsel around all the bedroom door handles. Betty pulled hers off and dropped it onto a tall table that rested against the hallway wall, which was already bursting with baubles, wilting branches, and plastic snowmen.
Her curtains were already pulled, and her bed turned down. There was absolutely no concept of privacy whatsoever. Sometimes she woke in the morning and the door to her room was wide open, giving anyone walking past the chance to stare in. A carer had obviously checked in during the night, to see if she had croaked it, and had wandered off, leaving the door ajar.
It was like being a teenager again, and adults couldn’t trust you being in a sealed room, in case you got up to some kind of mischief.
And all the carers wondered why she was so grumpy towards them.
Betty shut the door and hung her coat over the hook on the back. She kicked off her shoes and slid her feet into her slippers.
She didn’t have a television in her room. She didn’t want to get into the habit of just turning a television on and watching whatever was available.
She pulled Of Mice and Men from her bag and settled down for a few hours reading until it was time to go down for the evening meal.
Because they had a large cooked breakfast, and those that stayed in, which was almost everyone, had sandwiches for lunch, supper was a bowl of vegetable soup and freshly baked chunky bread, followed by cheese and crackers.
Most of the residents plodded off to the lounge for some Saturday night TV. They all settled into their seat, getting comfy, ready for X-Factor.
Betty took Of Mice and Men and went and sat in the large conservatory. It was warm and cozy, and she had it all to herself, due to it not having a TV anywhere in sight. Also, because of the plastic frame, and there being nowhere to push a pin into, it was relatively free of decorations.
Unlike some of the other classic books she had tried to work her way through; she was really enjoying John Steinbeck’s masterpiece. One character really hit a cord – Lennie, the large slow witted man. She could just imagine Abel in his place.
Half an hour later a carer strode in. The dour woman was wearing a Father Christmas hat.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she announced.
“Why, am I the woman of your dreams?”
She ignored the comment and handed Betty a small plastic medicine cup, which had two large pills in it, and a plastic cup of tepid water.
“This is your new medicine the doctor prescribed.”
“Great,” Betty said while taking the cup and looking inside. “Just what I need, more pills.”
The Sixth Extinction & The First Three Weeks & The Squads First Three Weeks Omnibus [Books 1-10] Page 37
