A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  “Mr. Monroe,” Liam said, trying to take the firm route. Joel could see the hint of anger beginning to creep into his normally gentle eyes. “This isn’t acceptable behaviour. Now please take your pills and eat your breakfast.”

  Do this. Take this. Eat this. Sleep now. Wake now. Die now. Joel had had enough.

  “I will in my fucking hole,” he barked, surprised by his own use of profanity.

  Una and Liam gasped. Adams laughed his deep, booming belly laugh. And then they stood and sat there locked in a stand-off. It was too late to turn back now. Joel faced them all, refusing to budge. He could beat them by pure determination, by a pure gut refusal to bow to them, and just when he thought they might crack, she walked in.

  The Rhino, bustling as she did in her matronly clothes, immaculately turned out, her hair pulled back into a severe bun.

  “What’s all the commotion in here?” she demanded.

  Liam balked. Whatever personal row he might be having, he knew that no one wanted to be on the end of a blast from Mrs. Ryan, and he didn’t want to leave Joel in it. Joel saw the hesitation and regretted his anger. Liam could have thrown him into the soup, but was now desperately trying to think of a way to keep Joel out of it. He decided to save him the bother.

  “The commotion is,” Joel replied, trying to mollify his tone in her terrifying presence, “that I’m sick to death of being told what to do all the damn time, so I’m not taking any of that medication until I decide I want to.”

  For such a diminutive little woman, her commanding presence was nothing short of incredible. Joel felt the worm of fear creep up in him.

  “Mr. Monroe,” she said, her voice low, calm and threatening. “You will take those pills and you will take them this instant, or shall I call your daughter?”

  Call his daughter. Like he was some kind of errant child.

  “I’ll take them when I want,” he replied, furrowing his brow and bracing himself for the backlash.

  “Look,” Adams interjected again, “I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. Say we just leave the pills here and I’ll make sure he takes them.”

  “Stay out of this, Mr. Adams,” The Rhino snapped. “Mr. Monroe, take those pills this instant or there will be hell to pay for this behaviour.”

  There it was again, the kind of tone used to discipline a child, not a man of seventy-six years. He knew it too well. He had used that tone on Eva when she was supposed to clean her room, or do her homework or go to bed.

  “Fuck off,” he growled at her, shocking himself even as he said it.

  “How dare you…” she began.

  “No,” Adams suddenly barked. “How dare you?”

  The whole room turned to regard the little actor.

  “How dare you talk down to the man like he’s some kind of child?” Adams continued. “How dare you dismiss me as if I’m unworthy of common courtesy? You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  His tone was commanding, a challenge issued in defiant ringing tones, the voice of a performer of calibre. Joel was stunned by it. By his own challenge to her and by Adams’s willingness to get himself involved. Una looked stunned by bloody everything.

  “I can see,” The Rhino announced calmly, “that putting the two of you in the same room may have been a mistake.”

  “Or maybe not,” Adams declared dramatically. “Joel, my old pal, would you be a dear and take those pills for me? I should hate it if you caught ill.”

  Joel turned to his new roommate in admiration. He was offering Joel a way out. He checked the man for signs of condescension; he saw none. Instead he saw the smile playing about the edge of Adams’s lips and recognised the feigned outrage for what it was. He really was a joker.

  “Certainly,” Joel said eventually, as if the rest of the room didn’t exist. “I’d do anything for you, Frank, my old friend.”

  He reached out and popped the pills into his mouth calmly and quietly. Then slowly and deliberately poured some milk into his tea. The Rhino regarded them both coldly, then swept from the room. Liam visibly relaxed, though he shook his head in disappointment at both of them before leaving with a sigh of what Joel assumed was relief.

  He had been saved. Adams had done it, hiding a smile as he did. Joel felt an enormous surge of gratitude for the man, and a warmth for him that he thought he had forgotten somewhere along the road. He smiled broadly in spite of his shock, and the horror of his casual profanity. When he finally trusted himself to look up from his tea, Frank was grinning broadly at Una, who chuckled lightly despite herself.

  “The two of you,” she said to them both. “You’re both just terrible.”

  Chapter Five

  “A bold move from Monroe,” Frank told the room in a loud dramatic whisper, “scratching his nose like that, as if we can’t all tell that he’s secretly trying to pick it.”

  The handful of people sitting about the common room sniggered at Frank’s running commentary. Joel just tried to ignore him. Over the first couple of weeks of Frank’s life at Hilltop, Joel had found himself warming to the retired actor more and more. Ever since the incident with The Rhino, the two had found themselves in each other’s company with increasing frequency.

  Alarmingly for Joel, after what had seemed like an eternity of passing politeness to his fellow inmates and the staff, he found himself beginning to converse. Not the one-sided conversations with Mr. Miller, but really talking. Initially he found it difficult, but within a mere fortnight, Frank Adams had managed to worm his way into Joel’s affection, so that the grim monotony of his existence seemed somehow more bearable. Joel didn’t care to think too deeply about how long it had been, but he suspected that Lucey was the last person with whom he’d had a conversation that lasted longer than five minutes.

  What Joel might have called routines, minimal as they were, were interrupted by Frank’s presence and, with it, his constant energy. He moved a lot; his hands, his head, his shoulders, always moving, as though stuffed with a vigour that he couldn’t contain. Joel found it both amusing and irritating in equal measure. He gesticulated when he spoke, he nodded animatedly during conversation, his shoulders rocked up and down every time he launched into that loud booming laugh of his. This energy somehow acted as a bulwark against Joel’s cloud of despair and his suicidal thoughts. They stalked him still, creeping up on him in moments of quiet, forcing him to pine for the days when he was just plain old miserable instead of miserable with a terrifying desire to kill himself.

  Adams somehow repelled that cloud that followed him, scattering it with a never-ending parade of stupid questions and inane jokes.

  The jokes were another thing. They flowed through Frank as constant as his endless moving. They were usually dry, sardonic jokes, told in low tones as the two of them sat abed at night, watching football or reading, but Frank could tailor them to fit his audience, and so in Una’s company they were much more socially acceptable, with just a hint of sauciness designed to make the prim and proper woman feel edgy. It was telling how quickly he could change shape to fit his crowd. Nurse Angelica hooted with laughter and then snorted every time Frank impersonated the other residents. Every time she snorted, it sent her into fresh gales of laughter, and she wasn’t the only one. Frank’s popularity was such that nurses, cleaning staff, even other patients’ visitors were coming to visit Frank and Joel’s shared bedroom. Joel found the irritation to be small; it was nice to see the spirits raised a little. He still found it hard to look at Nurse Angelica’s hands however; they were still meaty, too meaty for the thin chest of Mr. Miller. He saw them crush that little chest every time she laid a tray down, or checked his pulse, or did anything, really. He tried to put it behind him, but it was catching him unaware from time to time.

  Joel shook his head to clear the thought and then placed his knight carefully.

  “Monroe with a move so stupid that it must be a trap for the wily Mighty Jim to walk into,” Frank told the room.

  “A face that toils so close to stones is alr
eady a stone itself,” Mighty Jim told Joel happily.

  If he had been paying even the blindest bit of notice to Frank’s commentating skills, he showed no sign, but continued to smile and carefully move his pieces from square to square, always obedient of the rules, but without any apparent forethought.

  “The champion taunts his opponent with a piece of wisdom about stones that’s clearly a reference to Mr. Monroe’s testicles,” Frank announced.

  Someone started choking on their tea laughing. Joel tried to wither Frank with a look. His look. A personal trademark of Joel’s, designed to flatten people who irritated him too much, or tried to talk to him when he wanted to be left alone. Because of Joel’s dominating frame and generally cranky manner, most people stepped light around him when he shot them this patented look. Frank did not. He smiled ever broader, glad to be getting under Joel’s skin.

  “Mind your language,” Joel growled at him.

  “Monroe beginning to show signs of cracking under Mighty Jim’s relentless mind games. He’s determined to show the whole world how old and stodgy he is by objecting to the word testicles, as if old Mrs. Klein over there isn’t giddy from hearing the word.”

  Mrs. Klein laughed and Una chuckled guiltily. The women of Hilltop certainly loved Frank. Una was by his side daily, the two of them slipping in and out of the room in the early mornings when Joel was just beginning to wake. She had often visited Joel before, and she continued to check on him, as though attending to a task, but Joel knew it was Frank she was there to see. He wasn’t jealous exactly, or at least, he hoped he wasn’t, but there was something about Una’s relationship with their new resident that made him feel like an outsider, like he was the interloper.

  The most surprising relationship that had failed to improve in the days since Frank had moved in to Hilltop was that of him and Nurse Liam. Frank didn’t crack jokes with him. If there was company present Frank was performing certainly, but when Nurse Liam pottered about the room on his own, or came and went with the tea or the drugs, Frank remained conspicuously silent. He averted his eyes, or returned to his reading, and on more than one occasion he simply pretended to be asleep. It was so unlike him to miss an opportunity to impress someone with his incessant babbling. It stuck with Joel. In that little mystery, Joel thought he could unlock the truth of Frank Adams.

  The joking, the performances, the constant merriment and mocking humour, even the occasional self-deprecating comments all hid something. He wore his masks, and he slipped them on or off depending on where he was and whose company he was in. Joel watched and waited for the hints of the man under the masks, for there were many, and thought he saw the first signs of something else in the distant, almost cold attitude that his flamboyant friend displayed toward Nurse Liam.

  “Ooooooooh,” Frank told the room. “Mighty Jim looking to rub salt in Monroe’s already exceptionally salty wounds with that manoeuvre.”

  Joel snapped out of it again to realise that Jim’s bishop had moved in and effectively boxed his queen. Nowhere to go. It would be stalemate in five or six turns, depending on how Jim played it.

  “Dammit, Jim,” Joel grumbled.

  “The workman of today works every day of his life at the same tasks,” Mighty Jim told him cheerfully.

  “And I think that’s it, ladies and gentlemen and Mr. Robins, of course,” Frank told them. “Monroe looks ready to accept his inevitable and soul-crushing defeat. Withered once again by the most electrifying entertainer to ever grace Hilltop Nursing Home, and still undefeated champion of not losing but not winning either, Mighty Jim Lincoln!”

  He brought his announcement to a rousing crescendo. There were tolerant smiles, and a scattering of slight applause. The effect was ruined somewhat by Mighty Jim’s vacant, slightly confused look as if he had just noticed Frank for the first time.

  “Just walk beside me,” Mighty Jim told him.

  “Absolutely agree, old chap,” Frank replied solemnly.

  Joel had had enough. He’d passed another hour; his time with Jim had served its purpose. Get the day out of the way, so that the evening time could get done quicker, and he could go back to bed, back to sleep.

  His sleep, at least, wasn’t populated by thoughts of killing himself. It remained untouched. That was perhaps the worst part of his sudden shift, the vividness of it all. Ever since he had first visualised it, Joel couldn’t stop imagining it. Down by the river, one step over the edge, pulled away by the current. No more missing Lucey. No more taking his damn pills. No more being treated like a child. In his idle moments his brain found ways to think about how he might kill himself if he ever managed to get out of here.

  “Where are you off to?” Frank asked as Joel turned for the door.

  “Outside I think. Some fresh air.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply. He knew Frank would follow him whether he waited or not. It just seemed to be in him to follow Joel wherever he went.

  He walked toward the yard without any great sense of purpose. He had no pressing need to be there, just a sense that being there would be better than being inside, better than being in the company of Mighty Jim and the other residents, blissfully living out their remaining days in a purposeless haze of nothing. Behind him he could hear Frank following after with tremendous purpose.

  “I’ll come with you,” his new friend told him.

  “Why?” Joel asked. “There’s no audience out here.”

  He said the words without any great malice, but recognised them all the same for what they were. Nasty and hurtful. He’d been a bit of both lately. Side effect of wanting to kill himself, he figured. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out; he was a lonely, isolated, pointless old man who couldn’t stop thinking about how he might just be done with it all. Something, he concluded, had grabbed a hold of him, and he didn’t know how to shake it. Worse again, he didn’t think he cared to. What would be the point?

  “Audience of one was ever enough,” Frank told him pompously as he fell into step beside Joel.

  “Jesus, you never get enough of the performing, do you?” Joel asked him.

  “Life is a cabaret, old chum,” Frank replied airily.

  Outside, the gardens of Hilltop reared up to intimidate. The main building was a large and sprawling thing, built a century or more before his time, and extended here and there over the intervening years. It rested on a small plateau midway up a tall hill, surrounded by gardens that dropped down from the front of the building and climbed up the rest of the hill behind it. A long winding driveway meandered from the home down to the tall iron gates at the foot of the hill. Through those gates was the outside world, but the rest of the property was ringed with massive trees that hid the elderly from society. Here and there little flower beds sat, well maintained by the grounds staff and several of the green-fingered residents of Hilltop’s Gardening Club.

  Joel had no interest in gardening. The small garden he and Lucey had kept had been tended by her careful ministrations and, in a fashion typical of her, was as lovely as it was wild-looking. After long days at the garage they owned, Joel would come home to find Lucey’s hands dirty from soil and torn here and there from the prickling bushes and occasional stubborn weed. He had always thought there was a lovely symmetry to their hands, his stained with oil, hers with earth.

  Their days together had always been full. He had worked and scrimped as a young man to put the money away, and when the time was right he had opened his own garage. She had been a teller at a bank—that was where he had met her for the first time, sitting behind her counter. He had been immediately fascinated by her and had found excuses to visit the bank. He made his deposits twice weekly instead of once, so that he might chance to be at her till again. He hadn’t the charm or the wit to ask her for a date, but she knew regardless, and one day she casually dropped into conversation that she might be attending a dance.

  Joel still remembered the evening of that dance. The scrubbing of his hands to get the grease and dirt off them.
How she had held his scrubbed hands as they danced. He remembered with a grimace how she had stood there while he made a perfect fool of himself trying to summon the courage to ask her for a kiss. She knew what he was working toward but had cheerfully let him blunder his way through it. Joel had simply never been what anyone would have described as smooth.

  After that their days were working and gardening and laughing and raising their daughter, and before he knew it, Joel had grown old with Lucey. They had grown old together. Then she had left him. The thought of it twisted his face bitterly in the weak morning sunshine.

  He walked into the garden and aimlessly took up the small gravel path that ran by the trees at the farthest edge of the garden. Someone inside was watching the two of them, he thought, someone was always watching at Hilltop.

  “Want to talk about it?” Frank asked.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Joel told him. “I just fancied a walk.”

  “Nonsense. You don’t fancy anything.”

  “Something to do, isn’t it?”

  “We could have played chess. That’s something to do and you don’t have to be outside in the cold.”

  Frank adjusted his scarf as he spoke. It was brisk for a day in May, but certainly not brisk enough for a scarf. Not that it mattered to Frank. He often wore a scarf even when in his pajamas and dressing gown. They were a part of his image, his brand.

  “You didn’t have to come,” Joel replied.

  “I thought you might want to talk about it.”

  He was dogged. Joel was obstinate. They walked in silence for a bit, but remaining quiet for any extended amount of time was beyond Frank Adams.

  “I think Una fancies you,” Frank said eventually

  “Shut up, Frank,” Joel told him.

  “No, really. I think she does.”

  “Yeah, well I think she fancies you. It’s not me she’s coming to see in the mornings.”