by Jan Carson
‘Damn it,’ Roger Heinz would explain when the Board of Directors got wind of Cunningham Holt’s unorthodox funeral arrangements, ‘the old boy’s circling the stratosphere as we speak, and you can’t get no further from a sinking than that.’
The Board of Directors, mortified by certain gargantuan oversights in the supervision of their staff and management, chose to take the matter no further. Trip Blue, semi-permanently incarcerated in the state correctional facility for megalomaniacs and psychopaths, would eventually be replaced by a matronly lady from New Jersey, who specialized in rehabilitating arts and crafts techniques and dance programs for adults with dementia. The following year the Annual Thanksgiving Turkey and Tipples Tea Dance would have its budget increased by five hundred percent, the only prerequisite for this windfall a glowing article in the Willamette Weekly, penned by Nate Grubbs and featuring photos of the happy, healthy and well-treated residents of the Baptist Retirement Village.
Things settled down quickly in the cul-de-sac. Within a week the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs had fallen back into its twice-weekly schedule. Though music was no longer explicitly under threat, the habit of meeting together to sing had become a kind of religion for the residents of the cul-de-sac, and all involved agreed that Cunningham Holt’s memory would be best served by honoring the tradition. In the years to come Martha Orange continued to wipe butts and fix drips at the Center. Ross Orange remained unremarkable in his ability to eat, shit and sleep in dull rotation and Jimmy Orange became a constant absence running through the future days of his once-abandoned family. A postcard arrived annually on the day before Jimmy’s birthday (the only anniversary he had memory enough to recall), signposting his travels across South America, Europe and Australia, coming to a sudden halt in Singapore on the eve of Malcolm’s college graduation. Bound to a man who could not keep still long enough to execute a divorce, Martha Orange never married again. In her fifty-first year, Malcolm moved in with a blunt-haired girl from Tulsa and Ross began an internship with a local graphic design company, and Martha, finally feeling the maternal anchors slip from her ankles, without so much as a second thought indulged the persistent itch in each shoulder blade and booked a one-way ticket to Marrakech.
Malcolm Orange remained a remarkable and much-celebrated young man throughout his youth and early manhood. The events of his eleventh summer would stick with him, forming a bedrock for all future assumptions as impermeable and constant as landfill concrete. All things would go but the very fact that his mother had chosen to remain had bored its way into Malcolm’s skull, muddling with all the lesser truths of the Treatment Room. Later, when the police and the psychiatrists and the ‘helpful’ people from the Board of Directors left the Baptist Retirement Village and everyone returned to their chalets, heart-heavy and elated, Malcolm would wonder why the Treatment had left him only half-healed, still perforated for many weeks to come. His mother, enfolding him in her now functional arms, would cover him with bite-sized, fluttering kisses and say, ‘Don’t worry, Malcolm. I’ll hold you together from now on.’ This, Malcolm Orange concluded, was exactly the kind of extraordinary he’d been hoping for all along.
About the Author
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts development officer based in Belfast. She is the current recipient of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Artists’ Career Enhancement scholarship. Malcolm Orange Disappears is her first novel.
Copyright
First published in 2014 by
Liberties Press
140 Terenure Road North| Terenure | Dublin 6W
www.libertiespress.com | [email protected]
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Copyright © Jan Carson, 2014
The author has asserted her moral rights.
ebook ISBN: 978–1–909718–54–8
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or storage in any information or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher in writing.
The publishers gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
