A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  “We’ll see, Mr. Monroe,” she said ominously, as she withdrew from the room.

  He sat there fuming.

  He turned to get his support from the lump covered in quilts that was Frank Adams. It stirred slightly. A foot protruding out the end of the pile the only evidence that what lurked beneath was human and not monster.

  “Perhaps, old boy,” came Frank’s gravelly voice almost from entirely under his covers, “perhaps you should consider speaking to someone.”

  Joel was stunned.

  “Excuse me?” he asked, infuriated.

  “Look, don’t get all ‘Angry Joel’ and start shouting, but do you not think that maybe…”

  “Maybe what?” Joel snapped.

  “I said don’t get all angry,” Frank replied, sitting up in the bed with a wince. He wore his hangover like a second skin. “Just, wasn’t last night fun? Wasn’t it nice to see your grandkids and all? Maybe someone can help you with all that. Relationship stuff and grief and things?”

  It had been fun. It had been revelatory, and somehow addictive. He wanted more. He did not want it at the expense of his freedom and having played the good dog for long enough; he didn’t want to have to beg for it.

  “Where the fuck is this coming from?” he practically snarled.

  “Pardon your language.”

  “Stop kidding around for once in your life. Where is it coming from? You’re supposed to be on my side. You want me to beg for their permission? What happened to all that stuff about taking control of my life?”

  “I am on your side.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re taking her side. You afraid of her?”

  “God, I’m way too hungover for this,” Frank sighed, passing a hand in front of his face. “I’m not afraid of her, Joel. I just happen to think she might have a point.”

  “You? Of all people, you? The one person I was sure was on my side. What about all that talk about me being the only friend you had left? What about that? With all your big talk about master of my own destiny.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, can you stop making this about people taking sides? I’m just saying that it might help. I’m not condemning you to life in prison.”

  “You promised, Frank. You promised you wouldn’t make me go.”

  “I’m not making you go, you jackass.”

  “Well, you’re practically making me. Thought I had one person in the whole place who wouldn’t turn on me.”

  “Can you stop making this all about yourself for one minute? Your daughter is worried, The Rhino is worried, Nurse Liam is worried, Una is worried, fucking everyone is worried about you, and you’re going to sit there telling me that no one is on your side? Are you completely fucking stupid?”

  “Why don’t you go to the damn psychologist?” Joel asked.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. You’re a gay man who literally can’t say the words ‘I’m gay,’ you changed your name so that the real you would never have to be gay. You’re the one that needs the damn psychiatrist.”

  If Joel’s brain had been working correctly that morning, he might never have said that. He might have held his tongue instead of flaying his best friend with it.

  The words hit Frank hard, right between the eyes. There was no sign of the de Selby mask, just a rock hard and furious Frank Adams.

  “You’re one nasty, vicious bastard when you want to be.”

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

  “But since we’re fighting dirty,” Frank continued, “let’s stop and have a look at what’s really going on here. You’re a coward. You’re afraid of going to the therapist for fear of what that therapist will find inside that head of yours, for fear of what you might find out about yourself. This isn’t about you controlling your own life. This is about you being afraid. And worst of all, you’re a coward because you want to kill yourself rather than face anything.”

  “I’m not a coward,” Joel fumed, his fists bunching.

  “Then why do you want to kill yourself so badly?” Frank snarled.

  The words were timed with the most awful perfection, for at that very minute, Una Clarke walked through the door with a tray of tea and biscuits. She stopped dead, her stunned face blanching as the impact of the words struck her fully.

  Frank’s face blanched, too. He hadn’t intended for anyone to hear. The furious face dropped. Joel tried to think of something to say to cover it, something to make her not know, to take it back. A joke, a comment, anything at all…

  But nothing came, and the look she turned on him was a mix of bitter disappointment, deep and profound sadness and a white-hot anger.

  With some obvious effort, she managed to carry the tray over to Joel’s bedside, and she placed it delicately there, never taking her eyes off him. Desperately his mashed-peas brain struggled for something to say, anything to say that would fix it, that would take that hurt look from her lovely eyes. Still nothing came. She shook her head at him and turned away, making her way out of the room.

  For a long moment neither of them said anything. Joel’s confusion and his disappointment in himself turning back into anger, he stared balefully at Frank across the space in between them.

  “Joel,” Frank almost whispered. “I’m so sorry, I never intend…”

  “Shut up, Frank. Just for once, shut the fuck up.”

  Joel turned in the bed and dragged the covers back up to his neck and tried to go to sleep.

  He could have died that very moment, and he’d have been perfectly happy to do so.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  He dozed in the afternoon and dreamed again. He was trying to find Una, walking across the same barren landscape as before, populated with the skeletons of Mr. Miller. Hills and boulders everywhere and low thick clouds of despair, so close to him that he thought he might just be able to reach out and touch them. The rocks that sprinkled the place were all the same shape as he and Frank’s rock, but they rolled at the gentlest push. In the distance he could see Una and Frank laughing as they sat at the foot of a hill, their backs against a boulder, but as he pushed through the various Mr. Millers, the hill seemed to get farther away. Suddenly he couldn’t see them at all.

  “Where did you go?” he called out.

  “They’re on the other side of the hill,” came Lucey’s voice.

  He turned to speak to her, but it wasn’t her, it was The Rhino, in her casual clothes, smiling at him warmly. She reached out to grab him, and he woke.

  The room was empty. There was no sign of Frank. The tea and the tray of biscuits were still there, cold now and somehow awful-looking. The tea in the large mugs looked like it was made with stagnant water. Joel had always felt that there was something terrible and pathetic looking about a cold cup of tea. He stared through them to look at Frank’s bed. It was made up and neat and tidy and looked too sterile. The halls were quiet too, missing the usual signs of life. He checked the time. Three o’clock. Everyone must have been in the common room.

  The worst of his hangover had apparently passed in his sleep, but traces of it lingered in his stomach. An uneasy feeling that was part the alcohol and part his great and overwhelming remorse. He hauled himself from the bed, feeling no satisfaction from the cold on the soles of his feet, and turned on the television.

  He flipped through the sports channels for an hour or so, trying to find something worth watching, but his brain wouldn’t let him think or feel anything other than sad. The void was back, looming in his head, threatening to suck him in, stretch him out. Make him unreal.

  By evening time, Joel gave up on television and put on his slippers and dressing gown. He walked through Hilltop, passing the residents in a kind of muted resentment. There was Mrs. Klein. She smiled awkwardly at him, a pathetic kind of hello. The word was out about their shenanigans the night before, and most of them would have heard the argument that morning. How much they heard was another matter. Joel tried not to think about it.

  Frank
had snarled the words at him, venomous, nasty, but not loudly. Surely they didn’t carry to the ears of the nurses. Would Una have told anyone? He doubted it. Still, it was a terrifying prospect. As if things weren’t bad enough without people looking at him like he wanted to kill himself. The fact that he did was irrelevant.

  He settled in the common room. Frank sat beside Mrs. Clarke; neither of them were speaking, just sitting there watching soap operas. Joel hated the damn soap operas. He sat at a small table out of the way and set up the chessboard. And waited.

  He cared little how it looked, one broken-down old man sitting at a table, stubbornly not talking to anyone, stubbornly waiting until Mighty Jim ambled in. His eyes lighting up on the board.

  “I obviously believe that he’s an accurate representation of the human race,” Jim told him, taking his seat with a friendly smile.

  “Just play the damn game,” Joel told him, for once not trying to decide if the man was more sane than senile.

  They played to a stalemate in just under half an hour, and Jim began to reset the board. Joel didn’t bother objecting to another game, or even saying anything. He had killed half an hour, so he stood up from the table to leave. Frank turned his head and looked in his direction, and for just a second he looked like he might say something. He didn’t. Una didn’t even turn.

  Joel made his way back to his bedroom with the sense of resentment growing deep in his belly.

  At some point in the evening, Nurse Karl arrived with the pills that were supposed to save him from the stroke that everyone promised was coming. The one everyone feared so much. Joel didn’t object. He took the damn pills without a word, drank the water that came with them and lay down. Nurse Karl’s expression never changed. Impassive. Silent. Joel was grateful for that at least.

  He lay on his side, facing the window, facing away from the bed that had been his wife’s, then Mr. Miller’s and now Frank’s. He didn’t want to look at it. Instead he stared down the long drive and into the corner where the rock was.

  He heard Frank come in some time later. He listened carefully as Frank dressed himself for bed. He didn’t move as the sound of creaking announced that Frank was all the way in the bed, and he barely breathed as Frank clicked the lamp on his nightstand off. He just lay there and didn’t speak.

  When Monday rolled around the following day, as it typically did after a Sunday, Joel found himself back where he had been the night before. Back where he had been the day after Mr. Miller died. Alone, silent, full of bitter resentment and exhausted by it all. The isolation of it was awful. He wondered how he had ever lived like this. In the time before Frank. The time when being in Una Clarke’s company meant feeling guilty. That terrible moment in his life between the passing of his wife and the arrival of his best friend.

  He ate a breakfast in bed, picking at his meal more than enjoying it, and flipped through TV channels. Game shows and documentaries. Nothing of any consequence, but at least it wasn’t a damn soap opera.

  He tried to doze afterwards, to pass some time, but found himself tossing and turning. So he went back to staring out the window, staring down the long drive, wondering if they had discovered his rock. He wondered if Nurse Ryan was working, or was she at home with her child, or maybe even children. He realised he knew nothing about her outside of this place.

  “You’re not helping yourself, you know?” Nurse Liam said.

  “Leave me alone,” Joel told him.

  “Not this time, Joel,” Liam replied.

  He stepped around the bed, quietly on his soft shoes, because this was not the time or the place for loud.

  “Why won’t people let me be?”

  “Because we’re worried about you…”

  “So you keep saying.”

  “…and this self-imposed exile isn’t helping the case against seeing a therapist.”

  “Bloody therapist again,” Joel grumbled.

  “I’ve been worried about you for years.”

  That was surprising.

  “What?” Joel asked him.

  “Years. Una Clarke, too. I think even Mighty Jim Lincoln was worried about you. You’re the only one he wants to play chess against, you know.”

  “Nonsense,” Joel insisted.

  “Not nonsense. You’ve been so low. So quiet all the time. So anxious and unhappy.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Sure you were. Only these last couple of weeks you’ve come out of your shell. I remember when you weren’t like that. When Lucey was here, you were a quiet old gent doting on his wife. With a polite word for everyone. You read and you watched your sports and you were nice. Then years of nothing, only for it to finally pass. It’s been lovely seeing signs of life from you. Seeing you wake up a little. Hearing you laughing when I pass the room in the mornings. Listening to you and Frank mocking each other.”

  “That why you let us go the other evening?” Joel asked, almost tentatively.

  Liam adopted a bland expression and spread his hands as he sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “I didn’t let anyone go anywhere. It would have been a significant breach of my duty of care if I had let the two of you sneak out. If I had seen you, I would have stopped you. But I didn’t see you ducking into the tree line like two World War II vets behind enemy lines.”

  Joel couldn’t stop the small smile from creeping across his face. It was quite an image. Not one he would have picked for himself, but a charming one all the same.

  “If you care so much, how come you keep pushing this therapy thing? How come you’re always on Ryan’s side?”

  “Joel, I mean this in the kindest way possible, but you’re an extraordinary dope sometimes,” Liam told him with a rueful smile.

  “Well, that’s not very nice.”

  “You have to stop thinking this is a fight. You have to stop thinking this is a prison. You have to realise that we’re trying to help.”

  Joel tried to picture it otherwise. He tried not to see bars on the windows. He tried to picture life at Hilltop as something other than an open prison. It was difficult.

  “Look,” Liam continued, “I want you to try to look at this as an opportunity. It’s happening regardless. You will be meeting a counselor. If it has to happen anyway, why not seize the opportunity to share a little? Why not look at this as your chance to get some things out in the open? Please understand that this isn’t being done for no reason. It’s not a punishment. It’s not a penance. It’s only because you’re too pigheaded stubborn to even admit you need the help.”

  “You’re a very insulting boy when you want to be,” Joel told him, trying not to look pouty.

  “And you’re a very infuriating man when you want to be. A good one mostly. But infuriating.”

  He looked like he might say more. Instead he placed a steaming mug next to Joel. “I brought you some tea.”

  He patted Joel consolingly on the arm and stood up. Joel would never have admitted it, but it was nice to talk. He had gotten used to talking again, and the silence had become oppressive.

  Without waiting, Joel sprang from his bed, or at least, hauled himself out of it with considerably more energy than he had previously shown, and picking up his tea, he headed out into the hallway.

  When he reached her door, he tapped on it three times. Three appropriately even taps. She must have known it was him, since Una opened her door stony-faced.

  “Joel,” she said frostily.

  She had never been frosty to him before, and for a flash of a second he missed the days when she was unrelentingly pleasant to him, often uncomfortably so.

  “May I come in?” he asked nervously.

  “You may,” she told him, standing aside to admit him.

  “I’d like to talk,” he told her.

  The words almost stuck in his throat.

  “Very well,” she replied, still icing him with her eyes. “Talk.”

  He sipped his tea to compose himself. Frank would know what to say. Something clever and
disarming. He’d do it with a twinkle in his eye and his de Selby mask on and she’d laugh, and then everything would be smoothed over again.

  “I’m sorry you heard that yesterday,” he began. “It was never my intention that anyone know.”

  “But why, Joel? Why on earth would you think a thing like that? What on earth is so awful about life here that you’d even contemplate doing that to yourself. You have a daughter and two lovely grandkids.”

  “I know, I know,” he told her. “But it doesn’t change anything, really. I’m not happy here. Or at least, I wasn’t happy here.”

  He had wanted it, he was sure of that, but it seemed long ago somehow, when he had truly wanted to die. Now he was unsure. His brain a confused jumble. Two nights ago he could have stepped into the river. Been done with it. At any time he could have fashioned a noose from the cord of his dressing gown and been done with it.

  At any moment he chose, he could have been done with it. So why wasn’t he done?

  “And now you are happy?” she asked, a small hope in her voice.

  He didn’t want to hurt her. For all her anger and her fury at him, she still seemed so delicate, so breakable.

  “I don’t know, Una. I don’t know what I am. I had enough, you know?”

  “No, Joel, I don’t know,” she replied.

  “I had enough of it, you know?” He almost stumbled on the words; they stuck to his tongue just a little as he started, but once they were out, he pressed on.

  “The pointlessness. The utter boredom of it. I used to be useful. I fixed things. I fixed cars. People brought me their broken things and I made them go again. Even after I retired, I fixed things. All around the house. I fixed everything. Do you know, I used to hope that things would break just so I could feel useful? Lucey kept the place. She kept it clean and tidy, and I sat there like a big useless lump, complaining that I was bored instead of helping her. And the garden. We had a beautiful garden. A lovely little thing, she kept it so nice. And I sat inside waiting for something to break just so I could fix it.” It was sticking in his craw again, the words bumbling and clumsy to his ears. He remembered her little garden and her earthy hands and how he could see her through the living room window while he watched the football, toiling happily in the dirt. He’d make her tea and she’d beam at him. He tried to recall when he had changed, when he had become something new, and different. When had he forgotten how to communicate? He struggled to express himself without sounding stupid, and weak, but he was rolling now.