Robbie's Wife

by Russell Hill

  “So, you came here near three months ago? And it says here you’re a writer. What does that mean?”

  “It means that I used to make my living writing movie scripts, but I haven’t sold one in years and that’s why I’m down to my last few dollars.”

  “Dollars won’t do you much good here, Jack. Pounds sterling it is, got the Queen on it. Used to be, when I was a lad, everything American was gold, but not no more, Jack. We does all right on our own.”

  “So, is there a job for me?”

  Alfie closed my passport and handed it back. “You don’t have much tick or you wouldn’t be staying where you are, that’s for sure. Three pound an hour, five days a week, twenty-four pound a day, less a pound a day for your tea, you eats the same as the folk what lives here, it ain’t much, but it’s filling, so that’s one hundred fifteen pound a week, paid in cash on Friday.” He chuckled. “My old man, he worked for the Duke of Carlisle, farm laborer he was. He used to get up on Friday and stretch out his arms toward the manor house and say, ‘It’s Friday! Today’s the day the Duke shits!’ You be here tomorrow, eight o’clock, Jack. I’ll try you for a week. We’ll see how you turn out.”

  “What kind of work will it be?”

  “They shits in their sheets, they needs to be fed, they need a kind voice, somebody to wash them and mop the floor and make sure they don’t fall out of their zimmer frames. Whatever it takes, Jack.”

  40.

  The following morning I came to work at Precious Care Home. Agnes Precious gave me a green smock to wear and I spent the morning mopping floors, washing out bedpans, and collecting soiled linen to take to the washing machine in the basement. There I met Ali, a slightly-built Pakistani whose voice rose and fell in a lilting sing-song and who, when he found out how much I was being paid, said I was being cheated.

  “He’s a mean bastard, that Alfie Precious.”

  I protested that he didn’t seem mean, just cheap, and Ali said, “No, that’s what I meant, he’s mean,” and he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and said, “If you were to drop a single pence coin on the carpet he would hear it and pick it up when your back was turned!”

  Ali, too, was being paid under the table and so was Joshua, a beautiful West Indian boy with smooth ebony skin who turned everything into song, making up rhymes as he piled dirty sheets in the machine.

  “Dis bunch of linen, it be soiled,

  de water swirls and takes away

  all de things that sticks to it.

  How come this mon make a living washing out shit?”

  The work quickly fell into a routine and by the end of the week Agnes had me feeding patients and wheeling some of them out onto a little terrace for what she called “their morning airing.” Agnes took a liking to me, said I was good with the oldies, and she told me repeatedly that I shouldn’t be down on my luck, Mr. Precious had told her all about me, there was no reason a man as easy as I was shouldn’t be a success in life, sometimes she couldn’t understand how things worked out but weren’t we lucky not to be like them, meaning the patients who sat comatose in their wheelchairs or shuffled around in walkers. Some of them sat for hours on the edge of their beds, staring at the doorway as if expecting a relative to show up any minute.

  One old man buttonholed me every morning as soon as I came into the common room.

  “You!” He pointed a finger at me as if he were accusing me of stealing something. “Call my solicitor. I’m being kept here against my will.” Each time, when I demurred, he’d wheel back a few feet, shouting, “It’s not that you can’t. You fucking won’t. You’re part of the conspiracy, you are. I hope you end up in a place like this, you scurvy bastard!”

  But the next time I’d see him, he’d be sweetness and light, want to play drafts or have me wheel him out onto the terrace. A pretty mum in her thirties came periodically to visit him with his two grandchildren and they hung back while she tended to Dad and he alternately cried that he wanted to come home where he’s loved and called her a slut, “nasty little scrubber, fuck everything in the village with trousers on, you would,” and the next moment “How are the roses? Will I be going home with you today, my love?”

  And there was Robbie. At first I tried to stay away from him but Agnes had me feeding them, helping some of them to get dressed, and it wasn’t long before my routine in the mornings meant that I spent most of my time with what Agnes called her “chickens.”

  “Time to feed the chickens, loves,” she’d announce and Joshua and I brought up stacks of trays from the kitchen in the basement, arranging wheelchairs along the common room table. It was impossible for me not to spend time with Robbie. Joshua literally danced along the lineup, singing songs he made up to match the meal’s menu.

  “Peanut butter, good for you,

  stick your teefs in like glue.

  Eat your tuck, you’ll not go wrong,

  Missus Agnes make it strong.

  She make de soup from heads of fish,

  dis haddock he make quite a dish.”

  And with a flourish he would place a thick plastic bowl of watery soup in front of an old dear, sashaying back to take another bowl from the cart and invent a new stanza. Sometimes there was a smattering of applause, dry hands slapping gently, usually when Joshua’s song pilloried either Agnes or Alfie.

  Robbie had to be hand fed and it was a struggle since anything more than liquid by straw had to be put in his mouth with a soup spoon, one hand holding his head steady, the other trying to get the food past the vibrating lips and jaw. Most of it went down onto the child’s plastic bib that was tied around his neck. I learned how to hold his chattering mouth, pressing my fingers and thumbs on his jaw so that it remained open long enough to get custard down him, or meat ground into a soft pâté, and Robbie no longer had to periodically be connected to tubes in order to get enough nourishment to maintain his steadily wasting body.

  The second week I was there I broached the subject of contacting Maggie again with Alfie but he cut me short.

  “Like I told you, Jack, I don’t have no address except for her bank and that’s something that’s none of your business. Maybe she’ll be coming down to see him come Christmas. There’s some what comes for a visit on special days. But I wouldn’t hold much hope for Robbie Barlow. I’ve seen his like before. They waste away, don’t last a year, no matter what we does. Everything inside shuts down. You mark my word, that lad isn’t long for us and if you was to ask me, I’d say it’ll be a blessing when he goes.”

  I asked Joshua and Ali if they had ever seen Maggie. Both said no.

  “Sometimes he gets a postcard from a lad named Terry,” Joshua said. “I see two, maybe three of them.” Joshua had the job of distributing mail and he often read the card or letter out loud to patients whose sight was failing or whose hands shook too much to hold the page. He embellished the messages with rhymes, repeating lines in his lilting Jamaican rhythm. I told him to let me know the next time Robbie got a card.

  41.

  I slipped into a routine at Precious Little. That’s what Joshua and Ali and the others called it. Maxine, the day nurse who tended to the medical side of the patients, arranging medications and checking blood pressures, became a daily source of gossip and cheer. She was a large woman who came into Precious Little at mid-morning in her hospital whites with a little white hat perched on her straw-colored hair like a Sir Francis Drake galleon under full sail.

  I met the night people. There was a janitor named George who was obsequious, called me Mr. Stone Sir as if it were all one name. George rode an old fat-tired bicycle with a tiny gas engine bolted to the frame so that he could both pedal and motor along the flat stretches with the engine rattling loudly. He claimed it was his grandfather’s and “granfer rode it in the Blitz, he was a messenger, rode it right through them buzz bombs and all.” There was a practical nurse named Georgette who had the night duty. A non-descript girl in her thirties who arrived at the end of the day, she silently removed her coat, sil
ently made tea, and for a while I thought perhaps she was mute but Maxine said, “No, she keeps to herself and perhaps she’s got good reason to do so, never mind that she’s no chatterbox, she keeps watch all night and tends to those what need her and she’s ever alert, she is, and that’s what she’s paid for and Alfie and Agnes ought to treat her better or they’ll lose her and they won’t find another one like her, that’s for sure.”

  During the day there were Shirley and Wilma, two girls still in their teens who were, according to Maxine, school-leavers who ought not to be allowed to breed but “they will,” she said, “they will and if they was dogs or cats they’d be fixed only they certainly aren’t because they’re in heat all the time, leave a trail of poor boys barking up their skirts, there ought to be one of those government warning stickers on them.” Joshua called them “dey Surely Will Sisters.” They were never more than a few steps from each other and lived in fear of Maxine whose sharp “You lot! Get that bed made proper! Look alert or out you go!” rang out and poor Shirley and Wilma looked around but Maxine wasn’t in the same room with them, she was out in the corridor. But Maxine knew they’d done a sloppy job even if she couldn’t see them and dey Surely Will Sisters thought she could see through walls.

  The rain finally stopped, the weather turned and there were a few warm days. Whenever there was a bit of sun, Bournemouth filled with people bound for the beach and the quay became filled with cars and people and beach chairs blossomed along the wall. A month passed with no postcard for Robbie and now when I fed him he no longer seemed to struggle as much; the strange cursing that I felt at the beginning had diminished.

  Sometimes, when I had finished with the other patients, I’d wheel Robbie out onto the terrace. That’s what Agnes called the little balcony that looked out toward the sea, only you couldn’t see the sea from there, only the backs of the hotels along the quay. But it faced south so the light was stronger and I took a chair and sat in front of Robbie. I held his head with both hands to stop the shaking and looked directly into his eyes. His eyeballs rolled uncontrollably, which was why they couldn’t train him to answer questions the way they did with terminal MLS patients. They trained them to roll their eyes up and down for yes and side to side for no, but Robbie couldn’t control his eyes so there was no way to establish a pattern that would enable him to communicate. It was as if all of his circuits had been scrambled and he waited there behind his rolling eyeballs, thinking complete thoughts, trapped in a body that wouldn’t cooperate. His brain sent signals to his eyes, his mouth, his tongue, his hands, so many commands it was as if he was trying to do eight different things at once, neurons slamming into each other in confusion, a crowded rush hour car on the underground where all of the passengers are trying to get out at the same time, elbowing each other, cursing, and all the while the train ran full speed through the black hole under the streets, the door wide open.

  I took his head in my hands and held it steady and I looked him straight in the face and I talked to him.

  “Maggie was a good fuck, wasn’t she Robbie? The absolute best.”

  He couldn’t answer, so I answered for him.

  “How would you know, Jack Stone?”

  “Because I shagged her, you spastic jellybean. I’ve told you that a thousand times.”

  “You’re lying, you never shagged her, you’re too old. She’d have no interest in an old American prick like you.”

  “That’s what you think. But you didn’t value her enough, Robbie. She was a treasure and you took her for granted.”

  “Fuck you, Jack Stone. I never took her for granted.”

  “I’m sorry. That was unnecessary. I apologize. You never took her for granted. But I’m not sure you knew how much of a treasure you had.”

  His head moved under my fingers, and I swore it was a conscious movement, not just uncontrollable muscles being exercised at random.

  “You see, Robbie,” and I bent so that my face was only inches from his, looked straight into his vibrating eyes, “I never meant to fall in love with her. But she was so graceful and so bright that I never had a chance. I never meant to hurt you. You were in the way. There I was, going full speed down the track toward Maggie and you were in front of me and I couldn’t stop.”

  Robbie gurgled and then shouted, a harsh grunt that broke into babble, like someone speaking in tongues, possessed by God on Saturday night in the Holy Roller Church, and I held his head steady, spittle running down onto my thumbs that held his chin. He would have bitten me if he could.

  “We need to get over this, Robbie. Every time we talk about her, you get emotional. We need to talk rationally about this, because Maggie is what we have in common. Can you see her? Here she comes, down the hall, barefoot, wearing that old blue vest from Marks and Sparks, as if she’s dancing, coming to see us, the two men who love her so much they would do anything at any time, no matter how unspeakable or dangerous, she has only to ask.”

  We talked this way for a while until Robbie fell unconscious. He often did this, his frantic bobbing and weaving and shouting babble dying, slowing, until he sat, almost catatonic, his body vibrating ever so slightly, held to his chair by the wide cummerbund of cloth wrapped around his chest.

  I know, you’re going to say, no, you weren’t talking to Robbie, you were making up all the words, talking to yourself, but I could feel his words in my hands, feel him telling me to fuck off, that I was the cause of all the pain that he felt, but he wasn’t as angry as he was when I first saw him. Sometimes I thought I could hear words in the cascade of sound that rushed from his lips, and I repeated them, asked him, Robbie, did you say you loved Maggie? Is that what you said? Where’s Terry? Where’s Jack the dog? And the sounds came again, like water over stones in a river, and I bent my face, nearly touching his lips, felt the spit on my cheek, and I listened for words of love.

  The terrace was sheltered by a similar terrace above us, the floor where the ones who were dying were kept in hospital beds, surrounded by tubes and catheters and the smell of urine and disinfectant. The joke among the ones who, unlike Robbie, could communicate, was that you went “upstairs” to the next floor, and from there you went “upstairs” in a pine box. Even if it rained, Robbie and I often stayed out on the terrace. The rain seemed to soften him.

  The doctors said that patients like Robbie had a limited life span. They had to supplement his diet since it was hard for him to get much food down and his internal organs were more likely to fail since they weren’t functioning normally. Muscles atrophied and he was more susceptible to infections. It was only a matter of time, they said.

  But everyone was amazed at Robbie. He continued to hang on, seemed to be iron willed, and they said I had made the difference. “If it weren’t for you, Mr. Stone,” Maxine said, “we would have seen the last of Robbie Barlow some time ago.”

  But I didn’t think it was that at all. It was Robbie’s anger that kept him alive. He refused to die to spite me, and he knew I couldn’t leave him alone because I held on to the slim hope that Maggie would show up. I was the symbiotic parasite that lived off the plant and the plant tolerated me because I helped to keep it alive by keeping the other pests at bay. I wasn’t this remarkably selfless person who tended so carefully to Mr. Barlow, the one Maxine pointed to and said, if we only had more like Mr. Stone, the world would be a better place. Maxine couldn’t see the dark of the shed and the rain coming down, as Maggie said, in stair rods, and Robbie’s startled face as Jack swung the piece of timber and the electric flash that filled the air. I went through the motions with the other patients, emptying bedpans, pulling off dirty linen and stuffing it in the bags, spooning jello into Mrs. Churchill’s sagging mouth, easing crazy Simon Salmon into the little shower where I held him against the wall, my hand on his bony chest, aiming the portable shower head at him and he squealed and I told him, “Shut up, Simple Simon, we need to get the fish stink off you.” I finished them all, then turned my attention to Robbie. I bathed him and talked to h
im and sometimes we took long walks on the quay along the beach. Summer finally came in late July and the streets filled, there were children running in and out of the water, the paddleboats dotted the harbor and the hotels and rooms were filled. I pushed his chair all the way to the end, more than a mile, and sometimes if there was a woman sunning herself in a chair on the beach who looked vaguely like Maggie, we stopped and watched her. Robbie was lashed to his chair with a cloth cummerbund and a kerchief around his forehead and I tucked in a blanket, no matter how warm it was. The blanket seemed to contain his vibrations. The English didn’t pay much attention to things like that. Nobody took the least notice of Robbie, shaking in his chair as we went down the promenade. Their beaches weren’t anything like those in Los Angeles. In L.A., anybody who doesn’t have the body of a teenager feels uncomfortable among the tanned and lithe, but on an English beach you saw middle-aged men with their pants legs rolled up, shiny black socks and oxford shoes, and portly women in bathing suits and pasty-faced young men and nobody seemed to care whether or not you looked as if you just stepped out of Vogue. Robbie and I were ignored.

  42.

  Sometimes after Robbie dropped off I sat with him and watched his gently vibrating body and thought about Maggie. How she had cut Robbie out of her life, as if she had lanced a boil or excised some sort of demon. At first I wondered how she could do that. She seemed too good, too much in love with Robbie, but as I cared for him and spooned gruel into him, and held his spouting mouth while he jabbered, spitting obscenities that only I could decipher, I knew that she was still in love with Robbie, but this creature wasn’t Robbie, he was someone or something else.

  I knew couples like that in Los Angeles. When they divorced, each simply dropped the other off the radar, as if the seven or ten years they had spent together and the two children and the house in Brentwood had never existed. They had become other people, so it was easy to do. Robbie was no longer the person she loved. He had become a thing that gibbered and drooled and she wanted to hold onto the shaggy-haired man with the black beard who quoted Shakespeare and made love to her in dangerous places, his lithe body melting into her receptive touch.