A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  “Excuse me?” she asked slowly. It was dawning on her that she was being played. Joel swallowed. Improvisation was an actor’s talent, and Joel was learning quickly that he was no actor. The only actor in the building was still stuffing his pockets with chocolate.

  “Eh… Here?” he asked stupidly.

  She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “You’ll have to forgive this one,” Frank interjected smoothly, leaning past her and taking Joel by the shoulder. “He’s a resident at the nursing home I live in. Heaven knows how he got out on his own. Sadly he’s not all there in the head.”

  The look he gave her oozed sincerity. She regarded them both suspiciously.

  “I’ll take him home,” Frank stated without missing a beat. If he was even remotely ashamed of the ruse or the pockets bulging with chocolate, he gave no indication. He began guiding Joel toward the door. Imminent safety gave Joel heart, and he leaned back into his role with renewed vigour.

  “I think I once peed up against this door in 1967,” he announced loudly.

  Timing being on their side, the bus rolled down the street and came to a stop at Frank’s beckoning. Joel was ready, after his matinee performance, to wow the bus driver.

  As the bus pulled up to the curb he put on his simpering smile and tried to look vacant. Frank pretended to be his personal minder. Painfully slowly he climbed onboard and looked straight at the driver and to his massive disappointment the man waved them on without even bothering to ask for ID. After his shaky, but ultimately successful raid on the shop, he had been hoping for a chance to impress, and the bus driver, bored of seeing another elderly citizen climb onboard, had robbed him of that. He was beginning to see what Frank enjoyed so much about acting. There was a rush to it. As they trudged down the aisle to find their seats, Joel found himself bubbling over with excitement. His first acting performance at the tender age of seventy-six. He looked at Frank and saw his own excitement reflected there.

  “Over-actor,” his friend told him, as they both began to chuckle.

  Joel’s sense of elation stayed with him as the old city bus trundled out of town and into the suburbs. The small crowd of Sunday travelers thinned out stop by stop, many of them smiling at the two elderly gents who chuckled all the way home, sharing a bar of chocolate between them. Joel nodded at them as they went, feeling how infectious his own smile was.

  Outside a small school that sat at the bottom of the hill, the two men disembarked and made their way to the gates of Hilltop. Joel could no longer tell if his good mood was the lingering effects of his solitary pint, or the excitement of pulling off a heist, but he didn’t care. He pressed the buzzer.

  “Hilltop, can I help you?”

  The voice ran his blood cold. It was The Rhino.

  Joel froze but Frank did not.

  “Frank de Selby and Joel Monroe returning from day-release, Warden,” he told her impishly.

  The gate buzzed open without further ado; her silence at Frank’s humour seemed to transmit itself through the electronics so the gate swung wide in front of them in an almost ominous fashion. Joel’s excitement evaporated as he scanned the long driveway and front car park for a sign of his daughter’s car, or that insufferable partner of hers.

  As he had guessed, his sense of dread was waiting for him inside the swinging gate. Like something in the air around Hilltop that seeped into his bones. He tried to force the smile on to his face as they climbed the small hill, Frank’s easy gait now an irritation. Did nothing flap the man?

  At the top of the hill Nurse Liam was loading something into his own car. He turned to look at both of them as they made their way toward the main door. Joel was trying to gauge if the man looked like he suspected something or not.

  “If you don’t stop looking so damn guilty, they’re going to figure us out,” Frank told him out of the corner of his mouth, still smiling.

  “How do you do that?” Joel asked, trying to replicate it.

  Frank burst out laughing, causing Nurse Liam to stand up straighter and narrow his eyes at them.

  Inside the main door Head Nurse Ryan waited for them, her look cool, composed. A tiny, petite woman in her mid-forties, she carried herself with the authority only years of experience in nursing can give you. Her uniform was immaculate. Joel scanned her face for signs of something, anything that might tell him what was in store. She gave him nothing.

  “How was your dinner?” she asked in a tone loaded with suspicion.

  “Marvelous,” Frank told her with a smile, looking her dead in the eye.

  “Your daughter didn’t drop you home, Joel?” she asked, turning her attention.

  “Tony did,” Joel told her. “I asked him to let us out a little early. For the walk, you see.”

  “I see,” she said, clearly not believing a word.

  She looked from one to the other slowly. Frank stood casually, smiling lightly, his whole demeanour a sort of challenge—“just try to make me take you seriously,” he seemed to say without opening his mouth. Joel on the other hand took everything seriously; his body language said he wasn’t for budging, and you’d need a bulldozer to do it if it took your fancy.

  If anyone was up for these challenges it was The Rhino.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you Mr. Monroe. Privately if you please, Mr. Adams.”

  “No. It’s fine,” Joel told her. “He can stay.” He wouldn’t have liked to admit it, but he needed the backup.

  She said nothing for a moment but looked him up and down coolly. Frank offered her a bland gaze and planted his feet. It amazed Joel how unaffected his friend was by her icy presence.

  “As you will,” she told him after a moment. “Nurse Dwight and your daughter have both spoken to me about your recent behaviour. Your mental well-being has become a matter of concern for the staff.”

  He didn’t like where this was going. Maybe Nurse Liam had heard him talking about his suicide that morning. Maybe he’d told her.

  “And?” he said, trying for Frank’s bland look but feeling like a bug about to be squished underfoot.

  “We’d like you to speak to a counselor or psychologist,” she told him. “Considering your recent loss, we feel it’s prudent.”

  Joel tried not to look horrified. They must know he wanted to kill himself.

  “Do I have a choice?” he asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Monroe, despite your belief to the contrary, this isn’t a prison.”

  “Then I choose not.”

  Her glare got colder, if such a thing was possible. A deep and sustained freeze. She wasn’t used to being defied.

  “Mr. Monroe, this is a retirement home and a nursing home, but we don’t have the facilities or the staff to care for someone whose needs are complex and psychological. We can help you only if you let us, but should you choose not to, then perhaps we’ll have to move you on to somewhere that can cater for you. I strongly recommend that you speak to the counselor. For your own benefit.”

  Her tone was cold, a deep and profound cold, and the threat was barely veiled. Comply or leave.

  “So I don’t have a choice?” he asked her bitterly, thrusting his hands into his pockets.

  “Mr. Monroe, regardless how you may feel personally about the staff here, I can assure you that we all have your best interests at heart. Me included.”

  He found that hard to believe. His best interests, he was sure, didn’t include being treated like some kind of truculent child.

  Inside his pocket his fingers struck his lucky penny, and he felt some of the bitterness drain out of him. She couldn’t take his taste of freedom away from him.

  She took his silence for acquiescence and turned on her heel and marched back down the corridor, her footfalls echoing as she moved.

  Joel watched her leave in mixed resentment and relief. He had time. He hoped he had time. He didn’t need much. Just enough to decide how he wanted to die.

  “Let’s go count the loot,” Frank said eventually, when he was sure they we
re out of earshot.

  The two made their way to their bedroom, with Joel’s mood sombre but lightened by a sense of accomplishment. He rubbed the penny in between his fingers as he walked. They had done it. He had left. Taken control. Disappeared on his own steam and had his own day. He looked at his friend gratefully as Frank unloaded fifteen different types of chocolate bars from his pockets.

  In a spur-of-the-moment decision, without really thinking, Joel dropped his penny on his bedside table, walked across the room and threw one arm over Frank’s shoulders, embracing the smaller man in a sort of awkward side hug. Frank just laughed.

  “What have you got there?” came Una’s voice as she walked into the room.

  Joel remembered that he was grateful to her, too. She clearly knew, before they left, that they were up to something, and just as clearly she had let it go without comment. He realised to his surprise that he was glad to see her.

  “We brought you a gift,” he said, brandishing as many chocolate bars as he could.

  Chapter Ten

  Joel had nightmares that night. It might have been the booze, or maybe the chocolate.

  In them there were skeletons, hundreds of them, and all of them were Mr. Miller. They ambled aimlessly here and there in a hilly, barren wasteland. In the distance Frank pursued him, but his nightmare version of Frank was a therapist who wanted him to sit down and talk. At the foot of the largest hill he found a huge rock that he tried to hide behind, but as soon as he put his back to it, the thing started rolling out of his way. Therapist Frank was gaining on him, and if he could just get the damn boulder to sit still, he knew he’d have somewhere to hide.

  “Joel,” Therapist Frank called out in The Rhino’s voice. “I’d like a word with you please.”

  The cursed boulder kept rolling and rolling, and he kept trying to hide behind it. The skeleton army of Mr. Millers began to converge on his position, and he shooed them away in case they gave away his hiding place. He could hear Therapist Frank getting closer and closer, and he tried to edge around the huge boulder, until he realised he was stuck behind it. If he let it roll back down, it would crush all the bony Mr. Millers. He heard Therapist Frank’s footsteps in the rocky soil and tensed.

  Coming into view, first his feet, then his too-wide pants that didn’t quite fit him, then it suddenly wasn’t him at all, but Lucey, standing in front of him.

  “What on earth are you doing?” she asked curiously.

  “Fuck,” he exclaimed as he started out of sleep.

  “Fuck,” he said again, as he came face-to-face with Mighty Jim, who, for reasons unknown, was nose to nose with Joel and examining him in his sleep.

  “What on earth are you doing?” he asked the older man angrily, brushing him away as he tried to right himself in the bed.

  “I should have put him in his proper place,” Jim muttered, as he shuffled out of reach, looking chastised.

  Not for the first time, Joel wondered just how much of what was going on around him Mighty Jim could really understand.

  “Don’t bark at him, you old crank,” Frank admonished from across the room.

  “He was watching me sleep.”

  “Sure we all do that. Take it in turns, too.”

  Mr. de Selby was awake early it seemed, and Mr. Adams still fully asleep.

  Frank was sitting up in his bed, happily eating one of the leftover chocolate bars that hadn’t been devoured or donated the night before. Wearing a scarf of purple and green and blue.

  “Want some tea?” Frank asked him.

  “Not off that traitor,” Joel replied.

  He had decided some time the night before that both his daughter and Nurse Liam were traitors. Especially Liam. Frank and Una’s point about him just doing his job was well wide of the mark for Joel, and he imagined a conversation between The Rhino and the two traitors where each of them thought up ways to punish him for not doing what he was told all the time. Nurse Liam had been a friend, and it was probably unfair of Joel to assume the worst of the man, but he felt aggrieved. A bloody psychologist just because he wasn’t all sunshine and roses like the great Mr. de Selby? It stuck in his craw, and as was Joel’s wont, he worried at it until it got worse and worse.

  “He’s not a traitor and he’s not working today. It may come as a surprise to you to remember that this is his place of work, he doesn’t live here and he doesn’t spend his time plotting ways to make you even crankier than you already are.”

  “What’s Jim doing here?” Joel grumbled, letting the Traitor Liam moment pass him by.

  “No idea, old boy. He just wandered in here to see you. You okay? You were tossing and turning there for a bit.”

  Joel remembered his nightmare and the Therapist Frank chasing him around a hellish landscape. He looked over at Frank, in his pajamas with his scarf on, dipping Turkish Delight in his tea. He laughed at the absurdity.

  “Something funny?” Frank asked with a raised eyebrow. It added to the comic effect, and Joel laughed even harder.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Jim was smiling again, regarding Joel and Frank pleasantly, patiently.

  “I think he’s looking for a game?” Frank suggested.

  “All right then,” Joel announced hauling himself from his bed.

  As he rolled out, he saw the coin, his lucky penny, sitting next to his photo of Lucey. He smiled at it.

  His bare feet struck the old linoleum floor, as they had done most mornings for the last five years, but for the first time, Joel found an odd satisfaction in the sensation. The cold on his warm feet. He wiggled his toes and wondered what could have made him so chipper. He was not, as Frank had pointed out to him in his first week at Hilltop, a morning person. There really wasn’t much doubt where his positivity had come from, a whole day outside the prison walls, the delicious forbidden pint, the freedom. He remembered the threat of the psychotherapist, but decided that he wasn’t going to be put off by it.

  There were aches, of course. Minor ones, but many of them. It had been a while since he’d walked for as long as he and Frank had the day before, and he hurt. His knees were the worst, but the pain was all over. A reminder that his body had been in slow decline for some time now.

  “Can you wait a minute for me, Jim? I just want to make myself presentable.”

  “You’ll need more than a minute,” Frank de Selby quipped.

  Joel, bare-chested, washed himself quickly in the shared washroom and wet, then combed his hair. He studied the results. Time had been kinder to him than it had to others, but it was hard for him to look into a mirror and not see this aged creature. In his head he hadn’t changed. In his head he was still the man he once was.

  The meagre handful of dark brown hair was more of a mockery of what it had been, and while his shoulders were still broad, they had sloped a little. He had never been a very vain man, but he had known that he cut an impressive figure in his youth. Even past middle age he was still formidable, the kind of man that people called “sir.” Now old, he saw only his gray chest hairs and the sagging of the skin around his jaw and chin. He had aged. He sighed at himself and rebuttoned his pajamas.

  Outside the washroom Mighty Jim waited patiently, his small pleasant smile unwavering.

  “Enjoy your date,” Frank told them as they left.

  “Try not to ruin the sheets in chocolate,” Joel shot back.

  As they made their way slowly through the hallways for the common room, Joel nodded and smiled to the passing staff and residents. They moved at Jim’s pace, which was slow, bordering on a snail’s. Joel’s typical impatience at Mighty Jim’s excruciatingly slow pace was conspicuously absent this morning, and he clasped his hands behind his back as they crept along. Through the corridors they walked, and Joel had to remind himself that Hilltop was a prison and that a prison, comfortable or not, was still a prison, and that being told what to do, when to eat, what to eat, when to sleep and every other minor command they gave was another erosion of the life he had built f
or himself, a life that he had surrendered for reasons he now couldn’t recall.

  He found it odd that he had to remind himself of this. It was usually at the front of his thoughts, but today seemed different, more colourful. Even the bleak nightmare that had dogged his sleep was forgotten in the bright light of day. He checked for the presence of the cloud of suicide and depression that typically shadowed his steps through the hallways of Hilltop but couldn’t find it.

  “Cheek against the stone,” Mighty Jim told him.

  “Certainly,” Joel replied with a tolerant smile.

  For all his happy-go-lucky nature, Mighty Jim certainly knew how to wipe a smile off someone’s face. Over two hours they played to stalemate three times. The third time he thought he saw a window, a tiny moment where he might sneak past Mighty Jim’s mighty defense, only to see the door slam shut on him. He also thought he saw a twinkle in Jim’s eye, a hint that the old man had left that door ajar for him to aim at, only to close it on him for his own amusement. Though Mighty Jim, being fully senile, surely wasn’t capable of such subterfuge.

  His early morning good mood mostly squandered, Joel made his way back to his room to watch television, and kill another few hours. Frank was already present, reading some ancient Greek tragedy, presumably in the hope that someone would notice that he was reading an ancient Greek tragedy.

  “You win?” Frank asked, smiling to himself as he saw Joel’s scowl.

  “No. Only this time I think he was making fun of me.”

  “You think that Mighty Jim, the man who hasn’t spoken a coherent sentence in about a decade, was making fun of you?”

  “Sometimes I think he knows more than he’s letting on.”

  “And the nurse is a traitor?”

  “Yes,” Joel said obstinately, though he could see where Frank was taking this.

  “Have you ever heard of paranoid delusions?” Frank asked, without looking up from his book.

  “Have you ever heard of broken teeth?” Joel threatened back idly.