A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  “Maybe you do need to see that therapist,” Frank told him with a laugh.

  It wasn’t intended to hurt. Joel was certain of that. Neither the de Selby mask nor the real Adams would deliberately hurt him, or anyone really, but it stung all the same. He hadn’t made a friend in a long time, and he didn’t want the one he had to start thinking he was crazy just because he wanted to kill himself so badly he could almost taste it.

  Worse again were the consequences of being sent to the therapist. He might end up confronting his own hopelessness, his own utter unhappiness with the world around him and end up being moved away from the first friend he’d made since Lucey had left him behind.

  Maybe they’d even put him into the psychiatric ward and drug him heavily, and as far as Joel was concerned, that was a fate worse than death. To have even less freedom than the meagre amount he still held to. The fear of it was a palpable sensation that quickened his breathing and choked him all at once. He tried to cover as he sat on his bed, tried to mask the breathing and whiteness of his face that he knew must be there; he had felt himself blanch. Suddenly Frank was by his side, helping him into the bed.

  “It’s okay,” he said soothingly. “It’s okay.”

  Joel nodded his thanks at him, but didn’t trust himself to talk.

  Frank shoved a piece of chocolate into Joel’s mouth.

  “There you go now, old boy, that’ll help. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.”

  Joel slowly composed himself, mortified that the mere mention of a therapist was enough to set him off.

  “I can’t,” he finally mumbled at Frank. “I can’t go to that therapist.”

  “Okay, okay. No therapist.”

  “Promise me,” he insisted. It was irrational, he knew that. Frank could promise no such thing; he just wanted to hear someone say it.

  “I promise, I promise,” Frank told him.

  “We can hold them off until my birthday, can’t we?”

  “We can,” Frank said reassuringly.

  “It’s just a month. We can hold them off for a month.”

  Frank Adams opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. He closed it again.

  Neither of them spoke as Joel sat upright in his bed, Frank attending nearby, hovering worriedly. Joel took deep breaths. No one had ever explained to him whether or not a panic attack might result in a stroke, but he had been having one the day the TIA struck him. He didn’t want another one.

  Frank sat into the seat by Joel’s bed as Joel steadied himself. He flipped through the channels on the television. There was a comfort in the familiarity of sitting alongside one another and watching TV. It soothed Joel, he was surprised to find.

  At one point Nurse Karl came in, a well-built chap with a jocular manner, short cut blond hair and an occasionally straggly blond beard. He covered Liam’s days off, and shifts for the other nurses here and there. Joel liked him, but as he came down from the sudden and overwhelming panic attack, he couldn’t bring himself to face the young man, and so he ignored his greeting save for a slight nod. Joel worried it would make things worse. He worried that Karl would report back that he had failed to engage, that he had seemed withdrawn. The sliver of hope was that Nurse Karl was temporary; perhaps he wasn’t in on the betrayal.

  When he eventually felt well enough to talk again, it was a simple enough two words across the room.

  “Thank you,” he said to Frank.

  “Not at all,” de Selby replied munificently.

  He recalled with a jolt his nightmare from the night before. The sense of doom, the sense of being chased, the skeletons of Mr. Miller following him, and worst of all the low, oppressive, terrifying clouds. He thought he had been safe in his sleep, but apparently not. If that cloud could follow him into his dreams, there was nowhere safe. He was sure that had contributed to the panic attack.

  He needed a suicide. He needed a good suicide and soon.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You think it should be funny, don’t you?” he asked Frank.

  “What?”

  “My death.”

  “Depends on whether we’re laughing with you or at you. My preference, well known, is to laugh at you, but in this case maybe that’s not what we’re aiming for.”

  “Have you ever answered a question like a normal human?”

  “Normal humans are frighteningly dull, old boy. I prefer to avoid connection to them.”

  “Jesus—” Joel almost groaned at the pomposity “—funny or not funny?”

  “Funny is good.”

  “Maybe I should kill myself in a clown suit?” Joel mused.

  Frank treated him to a long, drawn-out stare. It was flat with its lack of enthusiasm.

  “I don’t mean like that would be it, just maybe I should be in costume when I do it.”

  Frank shook his head disappointedly.

  “Well, if you’d tell me what to do, we could avoid all this,” Joel complained as he tried to imagine himself dressed as a clown, detonating an explosive in a tiny car. He smiled in spite of himself.

  “Do you know what ‘pithy’ means?” Frank asked.

  “No.”

  “Pity,” Frank replied and then chuckled at his own cleverness.

  Joel let him have his moment.

  “I probably won’t kill myself in a clown costume,” Joel told him eventually.

  “Good to know,” Frank said, returning to his book.

  Joel watched his friend out of the corner of his eye. There was a depth to Frank that he had underestimated, a soul in him that Joel found himself almost envious of. He couldn’t remember at what point he had given up his soul or, at the very least, surrendered it to the idea of his death, but it was gone now, and in its place just this need to be done. This need to cast off. Frank simply sat, in his scarf reading his book. For all his depth and worldliness, he seemed unperturbed by the terrible finality of life.

  “Now what shall we do today, old boy?” his friend eventually asked. “What adventures shall we have?”

  Joel glanced around at the walls, and half-longingly out the window.

  “Watch TV more?” he suggested.

  “We’ll call that a maybe. Any visitors coming today?”

  “No. Eva visits on Sundays with one of the kids. That’s it. How about you? Any visitors?”

  “No,” Frank replied with a rueful smile. “I’ll get no visitors.”

  Joel wanted to kick himself for his own selfishness. In all the time since Frank had moved in, and it had never occurred to ask him about his family. Once the gay thing had been mentioned, Joel had let Frank keep his personal business to himself; he had asked for nothing and nothing had been volunteered. Joel knew, beyond doubt, that Frank would never volunteer personal information. He would preen and talk and impress everyone with his de Selby mask, but he wore it strictly for the purposes of keeping people out. It seemed wrong to Joel, that they should be on such uneven ground, as if Frank’s confession to him had come full circle. Now he was the one left out.

  “No one?” Joel asked, feigning casualness.

  “Ha!” Frank laughed. “Don’t try to pull that one on me. I invented that one.”

  “What one?” Joel asked indignantly. Frank had seen through him immediately. He was too sharp for his own good.

  “The offhand inquiry one. I invented it. I’ve been doing it to you all week.”

  “No idea what you’re talking about,” Joel shot back.

  “Sure you do. You’re no slouch either, but you do have a tell. Sticking out your jaw like that when you’re embarrassed is one of them.”

  “I do not,” Joel said, trying to tuck his jaw back in without appearing to try.

  Frank just laughed at him. It was a good-natured laugh, not the loud booming de Selby laugh, but a low chuckle. It was warm. After a moment the laughter stopped, and Frank just stared straight ahead, apparently looking right through the television. Joel changed tack; he didn’t probe, he just turned to his friend, his lonely,
vulnerable friend and waited. Frank continued to look through the television; Joel continued to wait.

  “You know,” said Frank, finally acknowledging him, “for a vicious old bastard you’ve a remarkably compassionate streak. Though it might just be nosiness.”

  That was the second last time that Frank ever called Joel vicious.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want,” Joel told him grumpily. “I just don’t want you thinking you can’t, you know.”

  “Merciful Jesus,” Frank muttered, “we’ve changed places.”

  Joel tried to think of something philosophical and witty to say. He came up blank.

  Suddenly Frank was talking and Joel didn’t have to think of anything.

  “When I was eighteen I kissed a boy for the first time, and someone who saw us told a man who knew a man, and that man told another man who knew a different man and that different man knew my father. When he found out he beat me quite badly.” Frank was wearing his de Selby mask and only a slight twist to his lips could have given away how much he was hurting as he spoke.

  Joel didn’t know how to respond. He knew himself that he lacked the tact and subtlety to say the right thing. He sat in his bed, like a fool, while Frank emptied his soul into the space between them.

  “I think my brothers beat up the misfortunate boy I kissed. Didn’t know him. I was drunk and we’d just finished doing a show. A play. Terrible that I can’t remember the boy but I can remember the show. Romeo and Juliet.”

  He let out a short, angry laugh as he recalled.

  “I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up. Not until I found the theatre. See, I always found myself attracted to boys, and I was terribly afraid they’d find out. I was safer with girls, but the more time I spent with them the more people wondered about why I was in their company but didn’t have a girlfriend. A stupid time to grow up, when we were kids. I mean, I’m sure it’s not easy nowadays either, but imagine being that afraid, all the time. I was terrified my father would know, and so I just pretended I didn’t like boys. I pretended that I liked girls and I avoided everyone. For fear of my father.”

  Joel recalled his own father, the rough discipline of the man, the vicious streak in him, the barely contained fury when Joel failed to live up to expectations. He recalled his own private delight when he had outgrown the man and watched him wither under his old age. He understood, and his heart broke for Frank.

  “When we moved into town and out of the countryside, I joined the drama society. New life, new opportunities. No more sitting around on my own. I was determined,” Frank continued, a wistful note entering his voice. “And things were different. I fell in love, instantly. I performed, I sang. I don’t have a terrible voice, let me tell you, and I was good. Everyone knew it. Suddenly I had friends and people were telling me I was special. When we performed Romeo and Juliet with another school, I met a boy, and when the show was finished we all drank stolen booze in the dressing rooms and then down little laneways in town, trying to sneak into bars. I kissed him then. Can hardly remember it, though. My first kiss.”

  The last words were bitter, and the de Selby mask slipped off, showing Frank Adams, angry, hurt and somehow still confused by the events all the years later.

  “My father beat the shit out of me. My mother sobbed the whole way through it. I remember begging her to intervene and she standing there watching. Turns out she wasn’t sobbing because he was beating me, she was sobbing because she didn’t want a gay son. She watched the beating happen because she honestly thought it was for my own good. The saddest part of all, my dear,” he told Joel as he tried to slip back into the de Selby mask, tried and failed, “the saddest part was that I started to think it was for my own good, too. I went to college. I got a room in a house and studied something or other. I didn’t really pay attention. I joined the drama society.

  “They came to visit,” he continued, his voice becoming cold, distant, his eyes hardening. Joel almost held his breath, his heart breaking further with each word.

  “They came unexpectedly. They didn’t catch me in the act or anything, but they knew. Me standing in underwear looking shocked and frightened. They knew. I tried to fight back that time. Can you imagine it? Me? He beat me to a pulp. She didn’t cry that time. She just watched. He made shit of me, Joel. He smashed my face, broke several ribs, shattered an arm. For my own good. All of this for my own good.”

  Joel felt his fury join with Frank’s. He had been on the receiving end of beatings from his father growing up. Beatings handed out for his own good. It was the way of parenting at the time. Spare the rod, spoil the child and all that. He resented his father for it, maybe even hated him a little, and feared how much of that man made up who he had become. But he had never had the very makeup of who he was be the focus of a rage so profound that his own father would try to beat it out of him. He had been a vicious bastard, but not that vicious. A lump formed in his throat, and he felt the stirrings of tears.

  “She came to see me in the hospital too, but I’ll tell you this, and I’ll swear it to anyone who listens. Nothing gives you confidence like performing on stage. Nothing will help you to slay your fears quite like performing for an audience. It wasn’t like the first time he hurt me. I was angry now, and confident and fed up. And then there was this tall nurse, with these lovely blue eyes…” He trailed off for just a moment.

  A tall blue-eyed nurse. A description of the man who cared for them five days a week. The pieces clicked into place.

  “My mother came to tell me that if I promised not to be gay anymore that I could come home, but that father dearest was still very upset. She wanted to know if I felt bad about making daddy feel upset? Can you imagine? I was full of my anger, and I was in love with a nurse and I hated them, and I think, I hated myself a little too. Don’t ask me to explain that to you. I’ve had the best part of sixty years with that one, and I still have no idea.

  “I told her to go fuck herself. I looked her dead in the eye, just like I had when I was begging her to stop my father from beating me up, and I told her to fuck off. She slapped me in the face, and I slapped her right back. I still remember the look she gave me.

  “That was the last time I spoke to any members of my family. I assume that I was the great shame of my family. I assume they went back to their parochial little lives and their bigotry and just pretended I wasn’t their son. I changed my name to de Selby and pretended they didn’t exist. Every now and then I get a twinge, and I wonder what it would be like to have a family, but then I remember his big fat fists smashing my face, and I move on.”

  “You never heard from them again?” Joel asked, almost breathless. Frank de Selby’s life was a tragedy.

  “Never,” Frank told him.

  “What about the nurse?”

  “We lived together for a while,” Frank told him, sniffing as if he could hide the profound pain he was feeling in a performance of indifference. “He was a beautiful person, inside and out. We broke up eventually. I don’t want to be one of those people who blames his father for absolutely everything that ever happened, but I wonder about it. I was afraid to hold his hand, you see. Afraid to kiss him in public. Afraid of showing off too much of myself. Isn’t that silly? Me? Afraid of showing off?”

  There was a slight catch in his voice. A threat of tears. His face slipped between Adams and de Selby. Showing one, then the other.

  “I’m sorry, Frank,” Joel told him earnestly.

  He understood the reaction out on the bench when they had first spoken. It had taken a lot to bare his soul that day. He had made no peace with who he was. What he needed was instant support; what he got was instant outrage. Joel kicked himself internally again for his insensitivity.

  “Hardly your fault, old boy,” Frank replied, trying to force his de Selby mask to stay on. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take a nap.”

  Joel wanted to tell him not to. He wanted to tell him that between the two of them, they could talk t
heir way through it all. That together they could find a way through Joel’s own hopelessness and isolation, through Frank’s loneliness and self-loathing. He didn’t say it, though, because he knew it wasn’t true. A conversation might help them both, but it would fix nothing, practically speaking. He sat, powerless to come to his friend’s aid, feeling every bit the useless old man when suddenly an idea came to him, a light bulb moment that would equally fix nothing, but would help, at least soothe the hurt.

  He waited until he knew that Frank was asleep, and reached into the nearby chest to retrieve his contact book. Carefully, he stole from the bedroom in his slippers and dressing gown to make his way to reception.

  Nurse Angelica sat there with her beautiful skin and fleshy hands. She smiled nervously at him. So she knew as well then. Knew he was sick. They were all in on it. That probably included Karl. He made his best smile to comfort her and asked if he might make a phone call. Eva had given him a mobile phone for his birthday the year before, top of the range by all accounts, but it lay in its box, in a deep recess of the cubby in his nightstand. He preferred the landline at reception, an old Bakelite with its spinning dial. There was something about the feel of a landline, the weight of it, the realness. The fact that it still worked, still existed was tantamount to the sense of permanence it had. Not like the mobile phones, transitory things, gone and replaced by something better as soon as you had it in your hand.

  He thumbed through the old Moleskine book until he found Lily’s phone number and dialed it, pulling at the old dial and listening to the satisfying click click click as the dial rolled back. She answered promptly, the number for Hilltop being saved into her phone.

  “Grandad?” she asked quizzically.

  She sounded sleepy. He remembered Eva’s propensity for sleeping late and bit back the admonishment.

  “I need a favour, Lily, my dear,” he told her confidentially.

  *

  When he was finished on the phone with Lily, he turned to Angelica. She was clearly still uncomfortable with him. He decided he could use it to his advantage.

  “I’d like to have a movie night,” he told her.