The woman from the chemist’s shop jumped when Mrs Bovie spoke. It had taken Willie and Kathleen twenty years to get used to her and the woman from the chemist’s shop had only been in the house a couple of times. Willie had decided she must be from the chemist’s up the road because it was the only place nearby where the girls wore those slidey uniforms like the one she had on. He had no idea how she’d got into his house but he assumed it was on account of her job: apparently you could get prescriptions home-delivered these days if you couldn’t get out much. Inside his head he could hear Kathleen: Aye, and you’re not ever going far again, are you? Anyway the woman seemed very efficient and so far she hadn’t nicked anything that he could see. Not that he’d be able to stop her if she did. He wouldn’t even be able to yell at her, he’d be lucky if it came out as a whimper.
He watched the uniform slide over her backside as she bent for something from her case. He quite enjoyed that aspect of her visits. She must have gone on a training course because she could do everything unsupervised. She gave him tablets, shaved his face, changed his pyjamas and washed his private regions with a sponge. In the old days the girls couldn’t even sell you paracetamol if the pharmacist was out on his dinner.
‘Oh, did I give you a start?’ said Mrs Bovie. She advanced across the room to the window, and pulled back the curtain a little so that the sun shone straight into Willie’s eyes. Willie made his protest noise.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Bovie. ‘He likes to see the sun, don’t you, Mr Masson?’
They had lived next door to each other for decades but she’d always persisted with this Mr and Mrs business. Kathleen had said to her once, ‘Just call me Kathleen,’ but she wouldn’t. They didn’t know her first name but it began with an E and they reckoned it must be so awful that she’d rather keep things formal. Esmerelda, Ermintrude, Euphemia, something like that. They used to stick the possibilities in front of the other names they had for her and then feel ashamed of themselves.
Kathleen, before she’d gone funny, had had such a wicked sense of humour. Not quite cruel, but mischievous certainly. Once – it must have been after a wee Bovie session (that was Willie’s phrase, but he kept it to himself) – they were talking about names, and Willie recalled a family he’d known when he was a boy, they were Congregationalists and had three daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity. ‘Can you imagine the complexes those poor lassies would grow up with?’ he said. ‘I mean, you might as well have driven them straight to the door of the nearest brothel.’
‘Were they triplets?’ Kathleen asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘a year apart, like a row of Russian dolls.’
‘But for heaven’s sake, that was a terrible risk to take,’ Kathleen said. ‘Supposing the third one had been a boy? They’d have looked pretty silly trooping off to church as Faith, Hope and Eric.’
‘Eric,’ said Willie, ‘why Eric?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I just like the sound of it. It takes the wind out of the other two’s sails.’
Mrs Bovie had a key, ever since Kathleen had started to forget things. Willie hadn’t wanted to give it to her, it felt like an admission of guilt, but once he’d come home from the pub and found Kathleen shivering on the stair because she’d locked herself out, and another time Mrs Bovie had had to take her in for the evening until Willie got back. Poor Kathleen. She’d been quite distressed in Mrs Bovie’s front room, she thought she’d been kidnapped. When Willie came for her she’d stared at him accusingly. ‘What are you doing here? That’s not my television. How much money do they want?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said to Mrs Bovie – who was backing away from the smell of drink on him, even though he’d not really had that much – ‘I’ll give you a key and you can let her in if it happens again. She’s all right on her own once she’s home.’ Mrs Bovie nodded, thin-lipped, disappointed, perhaps, that things might not be so dramatic in future.
It made things difficult for Willie, though. He liked his drink but he couldn’t bring it into the house. It was the one thing Kathleen and he differed on, the drink. Her own father had been a heavy drinker, had been violent to her and her mother. She didn’t trust men and alcohol together and you couldn’t blame her. But Willie wasn’t like that, he wouldn’t hurt a flea. He would certainly never lift a hand against Kathleen, whom he loved as much in her seventies as he had when they’d first met fifty years before. So they respected each other’s opinion as far as the drink was concerned. Once or twice in a week Willie’d trauchle down to the pub and play a few games of doms with the boys, drink a few drams. When he came back Kathleen would be in bed, face to the wall, already asleep. He wasn’t to wake her or kiss her goodnight with his whisky breath. Their backs bowed away from each other like a pair of brackets the wrong way round. But in the morning it was fine again, they had breakfast together and shared the papers and read out to each other the mad, stupid, incredible things that were going on in the world that day.
Once Kathleen got wandered, though, he couldn’t get out to the pub so much. He decided he’d buy a half-bottle at a time and stash it away somewhere. She was getting so confused she’d never notice if he had a dram. The trouble was, she was into everything. She kept mislaying her purse, or the book that she carried even though she couldn’t concentrate on it anymore, or her teeth. When she went searching for one of these items, she sometimes came perilously close to unearthing the half-bottle. Willie used to watch her, he used to say, ‘Warm, warm, colder, brrr,’ just to get her away from wherever he’d put it. He felt rotten because sometimes the purse or the book or the teeth would be nearby and she’d head off into the lobby while he put the missing object somewhere really prominent for her to find when she returned. He could have just given the things to her but he didn’t want to take away her independence. Somehow he believed if she kept on finding them herself it meant she might get better. It meant he might still be able to reach her again.
But she didn’t get better. One day there was a crash in the kitchen, the sound of breaking glass. Willie rushed through. Kathleen was backed up against the sink, holding by the neck the jagged remnants of the half-bottle he’d put behind the wastepipe in the cupboard below. Whisky and blood were running together down her arm, and she was crying. When he came through the door she lifted the broken bottle at him as if he had threatened her. ‘Kathleen, Kathleen,’ he said, trying to soothe her, ‘it’s all right.’
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You liar,’ she said. ‘You drunkard, you liar. Get out of this house or I’ll call the police.’
‘Kathleen,’ he said, ‘darling, it’s me.’ But she only stared at him with hatred, and when he moved towards her she made as if to lunge at him with the bottle.
‘Stay away from me, you animal,’ she said. And Willie realised she was speaking to her father again, who had been dead twenty years and whom she hadn’t spoken to for forty.
So they took Kathleen away because they said he couldn’t be expected to cope and they put her to live in a big old house full of fire doors and handrails and a locked front door, a place that was hard for him to get to with the buses not being so frequent. It wasn’t another place that began with an H because Willie wouldn’t have gone near one of those places, he had a mortal fear of them. It was a Home. He used to visit but there were only brief moments when she seemed to recognise him and they were the worst, they made him feel like he had betrayed her. So he visited less and less. Mrs Bovie, he knew, thought he was callous. She’d meet him on the landing with her dripping mop like Britannia on the old pennies and she’d say, ‘I pray for her, I pray for her because no one else will.’ She was washing the stair and had put the mats upright against the wall. The water in her bucket had a scent of fake roses. He nodded and shut the door on her because he was free to do so. He’d never bothered to ask for the key back: he didn’t want to negotiate with her about anything. The key symbolised something that lay between them and what he hoped was that they’d both fo
rget about its existence, it would lie undisturbed in a drawer or wherever she’d put it. He thought gathering dust but he doubted anything was allowed to do that in Mrs Bovie’s house.
Holy Bovie, that was another one. She’d been born again just after the menopause, Kathleen used to say. Willie tried to think of other nicknames for her in her religiously fervent state but he couldn’t, there was no fun in it anymore. And now too there was no one to stop him drinking in the house or going out to the pub if he wanted to, but he didn’t feel like doing either.
He thought about Kathleen up there in that other house that was a Home and wondered what she was thinking. Maybe she was wondering what she was thinking too. Maybe she thought she’d been kidnapped again. Maybe she thought Willie was her father beating up her mother while she was away. Maybe Willie was Willie in her head but not when he came to visit her, and she was having a grand time going on day trips with him in the 1950s. He could feel the sun beating down through the window of the railway carriage as they set off. He could see her skipping along the harbour wall at Aberdour. He couldn’t understand why it all had to go wrong like this.
Then the thing happened. He was lying on the floor with the television on. He didn’t remember getting there. The cord of the carpet made wee inverted carpet marks on his skin but he couldn’t feel it. His arm lay out away from him as if he was stretching for something, but there was nothing there. A terrible silence was in the room and he realised that it wasn’t the television, which he could hear quite clearly, it was his own voice. He was trying to make it heard and nothing was coming out.
He was there a long time. He’d never watched night-time TV before but he saw it all now, the bloody lot, a load of garbage, it made you despair for the folk that watched it regularly. Willie knew he was in trouble. The garbage came out of the set into his front room and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
Later he heard someone banging at the front door and ringing the bell. And later still he heard Kathleen’s key in the lock. She came in and Willie thought it’s good to see you home, darling, give us a hand up, will you? but it was Mrs Bovie, who yelped and went to the phone and then came back and stood beside him saying, ‘I don’t want to touch you, Mr Masson, I don’t want to do any damage.’ After that a lot of other folk arrived and got him off the carpet while Mrs Bovie hovered about telling them all, ‘I knew there was something wrong after I washed the stair and he didn’t put his mat back down. You don’t like to interfere but you have to keep a watch out for your neighbours, don’t you?’
Eventually he was taken away but not to the place where Kathleen was. He was in a bed but you could tell when all the chemists came to look at him that they really didn’t want him in it, you could tell they wanted that bed for somebody else. And Willie only wanted his own bed anyway, his own bed and his own chair in his own house. Somehow the chemists and he managed to straighten it out between them and they brought him back, and sent the woman in the slidey uniform to see him every day.
And Mrs Bovie, who still had the key, popped in and out like a wifie in a weatherhouse. The chemist wifie got a fright from her but you couldn’t stay frightened for long, she was harmless really. She was a good neighbour, he supposed, he felt sorry for her. She talked about Willie to Willie now, whatever came into her head. ‘I pray for him, don’t I, Mr Masson?’ she said. ‘I pray for him because you just think, it could be you, and you should be grateful, shouldn’t we? Isn’t that right, Mr Masson?’
The other woman nodded and said something Willie couldn’t hear. How could he not hear her when he could hear every bloody word the Bovine one uttered? If he had to have a woman in the house and it wasn’t Kathleen he wanted it to be the one from the chemist’s. She was all right. She didn’t stand for any nonsense. God, in the slidey uniform she even looked a bit like Kathleen had in her WRAF uniform. But could she not speak up a bit? Could she not get the Bovie out of the house, so they could be alone together again?
Willie felt the frustration boiling inside the shell of his body. He made skeletal fists inside his hollow hands and thumped the arms of his chair with them. He could see his hands not moving as he did this, they just lay there like fish on a slab. He didn’t know why he thought of that, the cold corpses in the fishmonger’s window, all dead-eyed and flat-faced, but pictures like this kept rushing in front of him, pictures from his childhood, from the war, from his young days with Kathleen. He raged away at himself and the chemist wifie leaned over and wiped the slavers from his mouth. He tried to turn his head but his neck hardly moved and he could feel the dim sensation of her hand moving the towel across his jaw, deep away from him on the outside. It was like a dentist’s injection beginning to wear off and then not wearing off. It was like being at the mercy of your mother’s hanky-tented dabbing finger years after she was dead and buried. Willie hated it. He knew perfectly well she wasn’t from the chemist’s and that the chemists round the other bed he had been in hadn’t been chemists either, he knew fine where he’d been but he was damned if he was going to admit it.
The first day she was in the wifie had said, ‘Oh, there’s been some mistake here, you can’t be left on your own like this, I understood your wife would be able to look after you.’ Mrs Bovie had come in and made her jump that day too and explained that she wasn’t his wife and the woman had said, ‘I see’ in a meaningful tone and Mrs Bovie had gone pink and explained in more detail and the woman had said she would have to get it all sorted out but it might take a couple of days and would Mrs Bovie keep an eye on things till they could get a place for him? Willie had made every protest noise he could think of but they’d just ignored him or simply not heard. And that was how it was going to be from now on, he reckoned, being ignored or not heard, one or the other.
He summoned all his thoughts together and channelled them down his left arm and imagined it getting a jolt of power like the time when he was a boy in the greenhouses where his father worked and he’d touched an old live wire with his fingers wet from the watering can and got flung in among the cucumbers, and suddenly he was amazed to see his hand flip up and catch the wifie a neat wee skelp with the knuckles right on the end of her nose. A gush of blood started from one nostril, and to his delight, before she could step back and stick the towel on her own face, three bright drops fell through the sunlit air and landed in his freshly pyjama’d lap. His left hand lay once again, wooden and innocent, on the chair.
‘You old bugger,’ said the woman. Her voice was muffled through the towel but she was right in front of him, he could hear her no problem at all. ‘How the hell did you manage that? How did you do that?’
Mrs Bovie was jumping elatedly in the background. ‘A miracle, it’s a miracle! O Lord, it’s a miracle!’
It was the best thing in ages. If only Kathleen could have been there to see it. Willie made the noise that was his laugh now. Tears were streaming down his face.
The Rock Cake Incident
Gregor Meiklejohn arrived at the dentist’s in good time. It was his intention to have ten minutes looking at the magazines before his check-up.
‘It’s Mr Cruikshank, isn’t it?’ the receptionist smiled.
‘No, no, Meiklejohn.’ He didn’t recognise her either.
‘Of course, silly of me. It’s just they have a lot of the same letters in them.’
In the waiting room he sat next to the fish tank, trying to work out how true her remark was. It was a while since his last visit – he couldn’t remember exactly when that had been – but there was a comforting familiarity about the surroundings: he remembered being in that very seat. Or had it been the one over by the door? No, it was the one he was in, he was sure, right by the fish tank. The two fish, a big gold one and a wee blue one with feathery gills, came in turn and inspected him, darted off again, then returned to make another check, having forgotten who he was. That was the truth about fish in tanks, they only had a memory span of a few seconds, which was why they never got bored. The fish were there for a
reason: to calm people’s nerves. Like the piles of old magazines – Reader’s Digest, Country Living, Good Housekeeping, The Scots Magazine – their role was to reassure waiting patients that some things never changed, that there was life after dentistry, bliss in ignorance. Something like that. He began to exchange glances with the fish on each of their circuits – if circuit was the right word for their probing, startled tank tours. Hello, little fishies. Do you ever get confused by life? Do you ever forget who you are? Do you ever remember who you are? Life must be one constant round of shocks and surprises for you. Boo! (Although he was alone, he did not say this out loud.) Imagine: a surprise you fall for every time, day in, day out.
He had barely reached for the top copy of Hello! when the receptionist appeared at the door. ‘The dentist will see you now.’
The dentist, a brute of a man, welcomed him in and with a dramatic gesture invited him to stretch out on the reclining chair. Gregor made himself comfortable while the dentist washed his hands and passed aimless comments about the weather. There was a squeaking, snapping noise as he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. When he came over to the chair, Gregor noticed how the gloves pinched the black hairs at his wrists, and that he smelt of perfumed soap. These were features of the dentist he had not noted on his last visit. In fact, he didn’t recognise him at all.
‘Now, what are you here for?’
‘Well, I’ve come to see you, of course. A check-up.’
‘I think not,’ said the dentist, the final ‘t’ making a noise like a dart landing in a bull’s-eye. He consulted his records. ‘Ah, yes, as I thought. They’re all coming out today, aren’t they?’
Republics of the Mind Page 17
