A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  As he said it the nurse glanced in Frank’s direction. A small thing, a flicker of the eye, really. He understood. Somehow he knew what Frank was going through. On some level or other he understood it. Frank assiduously avoided eye contact, though something now hovered in the air between them. Joel thought he might understand it, too. Liam was what Frank had lost, because he had never allowed himself to be what Liam was. Gay and open and unconcerned about what any of these elderly folks thought about it.

  In showing his intuitive understanding, Liam telegraphed to Joel that he’d have the same sympathy when Joel finally executed his plan. Now there were two people at least who would understand why he did it, after he was gone.

  “So me and you will get on better, then?” Joel asked Liam. He loaded the question and hoped Liam understood what he was implying: Will you let me be the grown man that I am?

  “I’m sure that we will,” Liam said gently, and now he was looking at Joel strangely, the way Lily had. Seeing something stir and come alive inside the elderly man where there had once been a shell. How ironic, Joel thought, that they could see the life stirring just on time for him to snuff it out.

  “Live and let die?” Joel asked him with a smile.

  Nurse Liam nodded slowly at them both and walked out.

  Joel stewed in the moment before he finally turned to Frank.

  “What’s the plan for tomorrow? I know you’ve got something up your sleeve,” he said as he looked across the room at his friend, stretched out on his bed.

  Frank smiled a small, secretive smile.

  “The plan for tomorrow is that we’re busting out of here, and we’re going to find a place where we can plan that final farewell of yours. How about that?”

  The old actor leaned as far across the gap between them as he could without falling out of his bed and whispered his idea.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Early the next day Joel and the other prisoners of Hilltop’s Gardening Club made their way out into the cloudy May morning. Frank, extra energetic and enthusiastic, had dressed in his finest, a waistcoat and tweed suit; his long hair, curling naturally at the end, bounced around his scarf. The Gardening Club members looked at him askance as he walked on to the grass in his clean leather shoes. Mrs. Clarke tsked and shook her head, but said nothing.

  That morning at breakfast in the common room, she had smiled knowingly at the two of them from across the room. Joel had offered her a serious nod of his head in return and hoped that she didn’t see the guilty apprehension all over his face. He still couldn’t quite make up his mind about what exactly Una Clarke meant to him, but recently he had found himself happier in her company than he had been for a long time. He wondered if it might be hard to say goodbye to her too, when the time came.

  It was the thought of his impending end that snapped him back into the moment. He had work to do. The plan was not complex, but it required a little timing, and a little luck. If Frank was right, no one would be paying attention to what tools they carried, just two old men out gardening for the day. When the moment was right, they’d need to strike. Since the Gardening Club had twenty members, Frank surmised that the comings and goings of the two of them wouldn’t really be noticed.

  Joel tried to keep the sense of nervous excitement under control as he stood alongside Frank while Una explained all of the various jobs. Frank nodded his way through it, as if he understood everything. Joel could practically feel The Rhino’s eyes on him from somewhere back inside the nursing home. In his imagination she was standing at a window, staring at him. Only at him.

  When the briefing was complete, the gang headed for the storage shed that sat up against the west wall behind the home itself. Inside they picked garden shears and hoes and thick, heavy-duty gloves. Frank looked so ludicrous in his old, shabby finery with the thick gloves and the hoe slung over his shoulder that Joel had to smile at him.

  “And what jobs would you gents like this morning?” Una asked them as the groups began to break away to their tasks.

  “We were thinking,” Frank told her, “that there’s a little patch down by the front gate, just inside it, that could do with some attention.”

  “All the way down at the front gate, eh?” she asked.

  “We’re less likely to be in anyone’s way down there,” Joel put in.

  “Indeed you are,” she replied. She was smiling broadly now.

  “A fine day for it,” Frank told her. “I’ve an itch to be about my work.”

  She looked him up and down patiently and absently fixed his collar.

  “Try not to get into too much trouble,” she told them as she moved away. “And don’t ruin any of my flowers,” she added as an afterthought.

  She might know they were up to something, but she had no plans of stopping them.

  “Let’s move,” Frank told him tersely. He might have done a fine job of appearing casual, but Joel could see signs of the same nervous energy about Frank that he had himself.

  They moved down the driveway, acting nonchalant, and made some show of fussing about the flower bed down there before surreptitiously checking for watchers and dodging into the trees.

  “So what happens when we have it cleared?” Joel asked as he made his way through along the path, littered with its pine needles.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Frank replied, carefully picking his way across the ground so as not to scuff his shoes.

  Joel had, at least, gone for the most serviceable apparel he had. Once upon a time he had owned overalls for working in the garage, and pairs of jeans and sturdy boots. He had retired them when he had retired himself, but still among his clothes were sensible trousers and stout shoes, and a warm wool sweater. He, at the very least, didn’t look ludicrous for a man preparing to be about the garden. As they moved along the wall, passing the back gardens of neighbours’ homes, Joel thought he could feel the rock calling to him. The perfect little ladder, secluded, out of the way, something he missed in all of the walks he had taken, in all the ground he had covered in his years at Hilltop, this little gem lay buried. He figured he owed Frank some thanks for its discovery, but he’d reserve that until he saw how much work the man was willing to put in to accessing it. Joel suspected it might be less than strenuous.

  Then they were upon it. It looked a little slipperier than the day before. He suspected there might be no sunlight in this little corner of the property at all, but it still looked majestic to him. The brambles in front of it looked less so. They were thick, gnarled, their roots deep, but Joel found himself grinning at his friend, and found Frank grinning back as he hung his suit jacket on a branch and loosened his collared shirt. Joel rolled his sleeves up, and they slung their tools into the task. It was, Joel felt almost instantly, lovely to be back at work. To have something to do. A job, a purpose.

  They sheared at the thicker brambles on the outside first, chopping with an energy that Joel thought he had left behind him some years before, and when the worst of them were cut away, they started to hoe at the ground around the base of some of the thick bushes.

  The first phase of the plan was not complex, just shear and hoe a path through the brambles so they could reach the rock. It took them the guts of an hour and a half, but when it was done, when they had shifted enough of the thick undergrowth to be able to make their way through it, Joel found himself as excited as he had been since he moved into Hilltop.

  Without speaking, the two of them pushed their way through the little path they had cut, and with Joel moving first, they both climbed up the small little stairs. His arms were weary from the work, his joints ached. His body was letting him down badly. The spirit was very much willing, but Joel’s advancing years told him he was weak. He ignored the protests and awkwardly, uncomfortably swung himself up on top of the wall and sat himself down. Smaller than he, Frank merely folded his arms on top of the wall and rested his chin on them.

  Beyond the wall was a significant drop. Close to ten feet from th
e ground. High enough, in fact, that he was level with the roof of one of the neighbours’ garages, and close enough that he could have almost reached out and climbed on to it, if he trusted his own body enough. It was perilously high, and Joel reveled in it. He let his feet dangle over the neighbour’s backyard along the side of their garage, and he sat there.

  The neighbour’s yard was clean, well kept. A small conservatory jutted from the back of the house, stuffed with children’s toys and colouring books and crayons. He hoped that none of them decided now was the time for play. He feared they’d be frightened by the elderly men poking their heads into the back garden of their home.

  At the bottom of the wall, flush against it and just a few feet from where Joel was sitting, a wide coal bunker sat. One of those plastic, impermanent things. He measured the height with his eye.

  “It’s too high for us to drop down,” he told Frank.

  “Too high for you to drop down,” Frank corrected him.

  “Oh, you think you can make it, do you?”

  “Well, I’m still spry. You, on the other hand, are secondhand parts.”

  Joel felt like he was secondhand parts, rusty ones that didn’t quite fit together the way they should, but Frank didn’t have to put it so bluntly.

  “I still think it’s too high.”

  “And I think you’re a fraidy-cat, but that’s a problem for down the line. It’s time for phase two.”

  Reluctantly, and slowly because of the pains and cramps he was feeling, Joel swung himself back over the wall and into the grounds of Hilltop once again. For a moment only, he had felt free, but stepping down from their perfect little rock, Joel felt the walls close in around him again.

  “What’s phase two again?” he asked.

  “We hoe the flower patch at the front, then we rejoin the rest. They’ll be waiting for us. We go back up, we eat or have tea, or whatever the others do, and in the afternoon we come back…”

  “Why are we hoeing a flower bed?”

  “Because if someone comes down to check on us, we have to make it look like we were productive, and if we don’t move now, they’ll be down on us like a flash. If you think she’s not watching…”

  He trailed off, the threat more than implied. There could be no doubt who “she” was.

  With every step away from the rock Joel felt a little more trapped, but equally determined. There was no way he could make the drop, but Frank was confident, and if Frank could get down, well, they could figure something out.

  They hoed at the flower patch, weeding it, flipping the soil, rearranged some of the flowers, and were just getting done when Nurse Liam and Una arrived to check on them, and bring them back up to the house for tea. Both men were sweating heavily and showed all the signs of their labours deeper into the tree line, but if Una or Liam suspected anything untoward, they showed no sign of it.

  Joel drank his tea and listened to the idle chitchat about gardening as patiently as he could manage. The rock was still down there, and the wall, and beyond it another taste of freedom. Another chance to escape the drudgery. A chance to feel like a man again, on his own, with himself and his friend for company, deciding things, doing things, being someone, and he had to sit here and listen to their idle banter. It was almost more than he could bear.

  His joints ached, and yet he felt more alive than he had felt in a good many years. The pains in his knees and feet and hands from hoeing the ground were balanced by a sense of vitality and energy that had been obviously absent only weeks before when he looked into a sneeze guard and saw a skeleton’s reflection looking back at him.

  It seemed that in his rush to get dead, he was really living it up.

  “You look agitated, Joel,” Liam told him as he fixed Mrs. Reddan’s IV drip.

  “Just keen to get back to work,” Joel told him, truthfully.

  “Good. That’s great. It’s good to see you with some energy, some enthusiasm.”

  He sounded genuinely pleased. Joel resisted the urge to scoff at him. As if mere bloody gardening could offer him some kind of release from the monotony of Hilltop.

  Frank remained calmer, of course he did; the performer didn’t know what pressure was, always relaxed, always cool, but as the Gardening Club began to gather themselves to return to the tasks at hand, Joel could sense the anticipation off him. He had taken a moment during the tea break to dust himself down and tidy himself up, and looked, once again, completely immaculate, and utterly ridiculous.

  “You ready?” he asked Joel as they stood up from the common room table.

  Joel nodded.

  “Good, start down the hill now, bring the gear with you. Wait for me at the rock. If I’m not there in five minutes, wait longer.”

  Joel had to laugh. In all his nervous excitement, he didn’t think he had it in him to crack jokes, but nothing ever stopped Frank. He made his way down the yard, toting two hoes and two pairs of shears and the heavy-duty gloves as if he was planning an extended excavation of the main gate, but when he was alone at the bottom of the hill, he propped the tools up against a tree and made a deliberately clumsy effort to hide them. Anyone who came upon them would think the two had tried to hide them and then somehow slipped out the front gate in all the commotion.

  He checked around him before he ducked into the tree line. They would eventually twig that the two men were missing, but with luck it would be a while before they noticed it.

  Joel was halfway along the canopied route to the rock in the corner when the commotion started. The fire alarm pealing out in the still, early May afternoon. Joel chuckled to himself. He could practically see Frank standing on his bed, lighting a little slip of paper and wafting it under the detectors. The alarm would start certain protocols into action, and the nurses would be deployed to search rooms and round up the residents. In the hubbub of it all they’d make their escape, and when the dust all settled, the staff would check the emergency exits along the west wall at the back, and not down in their newly discovered southeast corner. Phase Two continued to pierce the air with its shrill but unnecessary warning as Joel leaned on the wall and waited.

  The sound of the alarm was insistent and awful, and Joel felt bad for the unnecessary anxiety they were causing the other residents but they needed the distraction. They needed a way out.

  He waited and waited and began to get nervous when Frank appeared through the trees, picking his way delicately as he went.

  “What kept you?” Joel demanded irritably.

  “Had to go back for the book.”

  “What book?”

  “My notebook. If we’re going to plan your suicide, I’ll need to take notes. The Unfortunate End of Joel Monroe isn’t going to write itself.”

  “So you made me wait while you fetched a damn notebook.”

  “Waiting is good for you, Joel. It builds character. You’re in too much of a rush to get everything done anyway.”

  “Know what else builds character? A rap in the teeth.”

  “Why is it always violence with you?” Frank asked as he brushed by to mount the rock stairs. “All that aggression can’t be good for your chakra.”

  “My what?”

  “Never mind. There’s no point in making fun of you if you don’t understand what I’m saying.”

  Joel winced. Double hit. He was being made fun of, and he didn’t understand it.

  “Two points to you,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “We’re keeping score now? That’s good to know. Here, help me down.”

  The smaller man had, despite his advancing years, managed to shimmy himself up on to the wall, but had to squirm and wriggle as he tried to position himself to be able to drop down on to the coal bunker.

  “What do you want me to do?” Joel asked, puzzled.

  “I want you to sort of…” Frank gestured vaguely. “You know?”

  “No. I don’t. How on earth am I supposed to help you down?”

  “Jesus, Joel, it’s not that hard, you just sort of…
” He squirmed and gestured at the same time.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Fucking hell. Just get over here and grab me and kind of…” He began to gesture again, but there was more squirming this time.

  “I’m going to throw you off the wall if you don’t explain yourself.”

  Behind them the alarm shut itself off. Both men turned to look in the direction of the big house.

  “We better start making a move,” Frank told him seriously, just come over here and grab me.

  Joel climbed the stairs and reached out to his friend. He felt awkward, ungainly. He tried to tell himself that Frank’s sexual orientation had nothing to do with his discomfort, but that would have been a lie. He forgot about Frank’s uncanny ability to see into his mind.

  “Stop feeling me up, you pervert,” Frank told him, “I need you to just…”

  He squirmed and gestured.

  Sighing, Joel finally understood, and with significant reluctance, he sat himself down, so that Frank was positioned in between his legs. He became uncomfortably aware of how intimately close they were as he placed his hands under Frank’s arms and began to slowly lower the smaller man down. For his part, Frank reached out with his short legs and braced them against the side wall of the garage to slow his descent and take some of the weight from Joel.

  Halfway through the operation, Joel found the urge to giggle rising in his throat. He tried to stifle it, but found it bubbling up through him. His arms and chest shook with the need to laugh. If the owners of the house, or any of the kids walked out now, they’d spot two men into their seventies, one halfway down a wall, trying to escape a nursing home with the last echoes of an alarm still hanging in the air.

  “Stop laughing,” Frank gasped, his legs still propping him up against the side wall of the garage. “You’ll drop me.”

  “Can’t,” Joel breathed in between stifled giggles.

  Frank managed to release one leg and probed beneath himself for the top of the coal bunker, his toes grazing it.