by Iain Broome
‘Gordon Kingdom, please. Gordon Kingdom.’
I stand up, get ready for the sneers. But Mrs Johnson drags Steven back into the waiting room and everyone looks at him instead. She’s got him by the wrists. There’s a bulge around his waistline. It looks like he’s wearing a rubber ring beneath his tiny trousers.
‘Is that thing turned off?’
‘What thing?’
‘The intercom.’
‘Of course it is. Come in, sit down.’
‘Let me get my coat off.’
‘So how are we?’
‘We’re fine.’
‘Good to hear. How can I help? Just the prescription?’
‘No. I’d like everything checked.’
‘Gordon, I checked everything last time. Everything looks fine. I want to know how you’re feeling in general. I want to know how you’re coping. Are you still writing things down?’
‘All that stopped. That’s fine now. I feel fine.’
‘You’re not forgetful?’
‘I make a few notes.’
‘That’s good.’
‘But I’m sure I get headaches.’
‘We’ve been over this before. It’s the stress. It’s inevitable.’
‘I want everything checked.’
‘There’s no point, Gordon. It’s a waste of time. For both of us.’
‘I want everything checked.’
Doctor Morris has a notice board stuck to the wall behind his desk. I stare at it while he pokes and prods me. It’s covered in leaflets and information booklets. A mixture of colours and slogans. Do this. Eat that. Say no. Don’t be caught without one. 0% interest free credit. Buy one, get one free. There are six anti-smoking posters. They make me want a cigarette and I don’t even smoke. They’re for the drivers. The men in lorries, dozers, bowsers and dumpers. The 120s, the D8s and the Triple 7s. This is a town surrounded by coal and men in their machines. Eleven hours a day. Always smoking. One after another. A constant flow of toxins sucked inside. Men barely talking out the sides of their mouths. Men who have no need to talk. Always alone, in a cabin full of smoke and dust.
It was in the paper. One of the lorries, headfirst off the face of the cut. The driver hung over the steering wheel, his lifeless face pressed against the windscreen. The yellow hairs in his moustache, splayed all over. Pictures of a 200 loading shovel picking up the broken lorry, like a metal parent. It was summer. The driver’s bare chest ripped open by the fall. His black lungs coated with earth and glass, layer upon layer of dirt. His grey heart giving up. Submitting. A group of men dragging him from his cab, laying him on the floor, standing over him with their hands on their hips. Their machines still humming where they left them. A mixture of half-grief and silence. From the sides of their mouths.
They’re supposed to read these posters and care.
‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Gordon.’
‘Have you checked?’
‘Yes, I’ve checked. You know I’ve checked. I always check. There’s still nothing wrong with you.’
‘Okay.’
‘Let me sign your prescription.’
‘What about the headaches?’
‘Maybe you should try to get more sleep. Drink plenty of water.’
‘I drink tea. And I’ve started baking.’
‘That’s fine. Drinking tea is fine. Try drinking water as well. You’d be surprised what difference a glass of water can make. What do you bake?’
‘I don’t really drink water.’
‘Well now would be a good time to start.’
‘Sometimes it comes out brown. I bake cakes.’
‘You can always buy water from the supermarket or the shop. They sell it everywhere.’
‘Water?’
‘It’s good for you.’
‘I’m not paying for water.’
‘That’s up to you. Here’s Georgina’s prescription. How is she?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘I should really see her soon. It would be nice to meet her, check her over.’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary.’
‘Well I’m glad she’s doing well, but you should still make her an appointment.’ Doctor Morris hands me the prescription. He stands up, walks to the door and opens it. I should follow him, but something stops me. I stay seated, my back to him, staring at the colours and slogans. ‘Gordon?’ he says, closing the door again. Doctor Morris returns to his desk, stands at my side and puts his hand on my shoulder. I want to put my hand on his, but I don’t. He’s not here for comfort.
‘What if it happens to me?’ I say. He pauses for one, two, three seconds. Then he shakes my shoulder and removes his hand. He walks back to the door and turns the handle.
‘Gordon, you’re absolutely fine. Just get some rest and look after yourself. You know where I am if anything happens.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. I trust your judgement.’
‘No problem. No problem at all.’
‘You did nothing wrong.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That girl.’
‘Right. I know that, Gordon.’
Angelica is still arguing with the receptionist. There’s no sign of Mrs Johnson or her son. I wonder if he’s on his way home or being dragged round shops, his new underpants full to the brim, urine sloshing round the tops of his legs. I stand behind Angelica, hold my breath so she can’t feel it on her neck. That’s how close I am. She has her hair in a ponytail and a spot beneath her hairline. It looks ripe for squeezing. I could squeeze it.
‘Olivia Sergeant, please.’
An elderly woman struggles to stand up. She holds her walking stick at an angle and tries to force herself upright. What little weight she has relies upon that stick. I picture a child running up and kicking it from under her, bored with waiting for her bones to work. I imagine the old woman’s withered frame tumbling to the floor like a vase to concrete. She starts making her way across the room towards the door-to-the-corridor-that-leads-to-the-doctors. Her feet make tiny steps. Her hands shake. No-one goes to help her. No-one says, ‘Would you like a hand?’ or, ‘Let me take your bags for you’. Everyone sits and stares. Just a roomful of eyes.
‘Olivia Sergeant, please. Olivia Sergeant.’
I turn my head and take a deep breath while no-one is watching. I hold it for as long as possible. Angelica smells of perfume and cigarettes. Someone else’s habit in my nostrils. I imagine feeling young again. Then I breathe out. I wonder if she felt it. I wonder if she can smell the breakfast on my breath. I think about sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the toaster to pop. Breakfast with Angelica.
‘When are you going to fix that toaster?’ she says.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the toaster.’
‘It sparks blue when you put the toast in.’
‘You don’t put toast in the toaster. You put bread in the toaster.’
‘Don’t be clever. It needs fixing.’
‘I’ll do it at the weekend.’
She comes and sits on my knee. Her dressing gown presses against my skin. She puts her arm round my neck and her hand through my hair. She spills crumbs down us both, then brushes them off with my tie. We sit at the table. I hold her close. Bounce her up and down like a baby. She laughs, and every time she bounces it jars her belly. So she laughs even harder. We laugh together. Then I kiss her goodbye and leave for work.
‘Keep your fucking prescription,’ she says. ‘And by the way, you’ve got lipstick on your teeth.’
The girl behind reception sits in silence and smiles sweetly as Angelica flicks her ponytail and marches out the door, straight past me. She watches through the window, holds out her arm and raises her middle finger. Then she rubs her teeth with it. I keep watching Angelica as she walks across the car park. She stumbles and bends down to put her shoe back into place. A man walks round the corner. He’s wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Angelica stands up quickly. They stop, exchange glares, say nothing. The man walks away
to wherever he’s going. Angelica stands on the tarmac. White lines all around her. Boxes for cars just waiting for owners, like dogs tied to lampposts.
Disguise
I’m standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom. Georgina is lying on the bed behind me. Her pillows are plumped and her face is pale. She is dead to the world. I’m wearing a balaclava and staring at myself through the tiny holes where my eyes fit. I’m wearing black shoes, black trousers, and a black jumper underneath a black coat. Black fingerless gloves. I look like someone about to reconstruct a burglary for the television, not a man in his fifties. I shake the ends of my fingers and move my neck from side to side. I bend down to stretch my hamstrings. Then I stand again, take up some kind of boxing stance, throw a few jabs. Come on Gordon, I say to myself. Come on old timer, you can do it. Ten minutes and it’ll all be over. No-one will notice. If they do, they’ll probably thank you. You’ll get cards through the letterbox. Nice one Gordon, they’ll say. You did the right thing. I take a deep breath and blink a few times. I walk downstairs, open the front door and step outside.
It’s half past four in the morning. Benny’s light went out two hours ago. There are clouds in the sky, dark grey and navy. They sit like a child sits at the top of the stairs, listening to parents arguing. Aware of everything. I hear a crack, a nothing sound. It’s absolutely nothing. Pull yourself together. Then again, think of the logic. Someone will always notice. No they won’t. There’s no-one around. I walk slowly across the street with my knees bent, as quietly as possible. I hold my arms out to the sides, palms flat for balance. It’s a new walk. If I saw someone doing this, I’d file it under ‘Suspicious behaviour’.
Now I’m in Don Donald’s back garden. I climbed over the fence and landed in his compost heap, which is mostly made up of decaying food. There’s a stray sausage on the lawn. It must have rolled off, or he’s left it there on purpose for the birds. Frost is forming on the grass. It’s beginning to go hard and crunches under my feet as I walk carefully to the shed. I open the door and step inside, closing it behind me.
There’s a window with a crack in it. The moonlight shines through and illuminates the wooden walls. I look around me. I’ve not been in here for years. A dartboard hangs on the back of the door. It has two pictures on it. The queen mother pinned to the double top. And a blonde girl in her twenties. She has sweet blue eyes and a dart through her forehead. There’s a wooden desk under the window. It has nails, screws, nuts, bolts, drill bits and pornography on it. A magazine opened at the centre. Black, finger-shaped grease marks smeared along the edges. There’s a puddle on the floor and a hole in the roof. The wood is rotting and coated with moss. Along the wall is a line of nails. Some have tools hanging from them, others just shapes of tools drawn round with a felt tip pen. There’s a hammer where a spanner should be. Useless nails holding imaginary pliers. In one corner of the shed, there’s a lawn mower. An old petrol mower from the 1970s. It looks like a tank. And in another corner a bucket, full to the brim with scrunched up balls of tissue paper. There’s one on the floor next to my foot. I try to kick it towards the bin but it sticks to the floor. I open drawers. Start looking for my hedge trimmers.
There’s a tree opposite my house, on the other side of the road. It’s the smallest tree on the street. It was planted by a group of children as part of a school project. They came marching down the road, holding hands and pulling faces. The mayor came and posed for pictures. It seems that’s all she ever does. Hangs chains around her neck and grins. Her teeth shining like she’s got a torch in her mouth. They stood in a circle round the tree. The mayor, the children, and a man from the council. He did the planting. I remember his face, all out of shape, trying to smile.
The tree’s now ten feet high with just a handful of branches and even fewer leaves. It looks like a short telegraph pole. When people talk about the trees on Cressington Vale, they always count seven. They forget about the withered post planted by the children to celebrate Diwali. It’s a nuisance. They fractured the pipes when they dug the hole. That’s why the water’s brown. When the tree loses what leaves it has, they land in the drain directly below. They block it so that when it rains, the street floods. Last year, it rained so hard the water ran into gardens and ruined lawns. It has a plaque nailed into its trunk. The Joanne Gaubert memorial tree. No-one knows who she was. She could be anyone. She might not even be dead.
The tree stands outside Angelica’s house.
I can’t see her television.
Note: Phase 1 = find trimmers. Phase 2 = remove branches. Phase 3 = dispose of branches. Phase 4 = remove trunk. Phase 5 = dispose of trunk. Risk factor = 9.5. Note end.
I’m by the tree. My balaclava keeps slipping and it’s making my face hot. I can feel myself sweating. I found the hedge trimmers under a pile of old newspapers. I knew he had them. I was right. Don Donald has become a liar. I give the trimmers a test. A giant pair of scissors. He’s looked after them well. He’s sharpened them and put new handles on. I try a few snips in mid air. They sound good. Efficient. I start on the branches. They come off easily. I do them one at a time and pile them up on the pavement. When I’ve finished, I take them to the skip outside John Bonsall’s house. He’s having a conservatory put in. I saw the van pull up this morning. The skip is barely half full, just soil and stone. And a bicycle wheel. I throw the branches on top and walk back to the tree. A bare trunk. I pull my sleeve up and look at my watch. I’ve been outside an hour. I can hear the hedgerows rustling. Soon the birds will start to twitter. It used to wake me up before I went to work. Before they put the double glazing in.
I open the hedge trimmers as far as they’ll go and hold them where the two blades cross. The metal is freezing. I can feel it through my gloves, the cold working its way through my fingers. I need to be quick before they stiffen up. I twist my shoulders, flex my arms and start hacking at the trunk of the tree. It jars my shoulders and sends a pain up my back and neck. But I keep going, keep gripping the metal and slashing away at the tree. My wrists begin to ache, so I try using the weight from my hips to turn and hack. Turn and hack. It’s working. I’m half an inch in. I stop a second to catch my breath. I look up at the houses. Benny is standing at his bedroom window with the light switched off. I recognise his silhouette. I’ve no idea if he can see me. I stand perfectly still and wait for him to disappear. It takes almost three minutes.
I look at the tiny indent in the side of the tree. The fruits of my labour. The sky is losing darkness. Not much, only ever so slightly, but I know it’s happening. I can make out the colour of things. Reflections in house windows. The yellow skip with patches of rust on it. Parked cars, two lines of deep maroon. Angelica’s big blue door with the peeling paint. Even my clothes are getting lighter. They look less black. I hear a noise in the distance. A whirring sound, like the draught through a gap in a door. Bottles, close enough to shake in the wind, vibrate against each other. I can hear them rattling. Someone whistling. The milkman.
I close the hedge trimmers and hurry towards the house. I arch my back and lift my head. Another new walk. This one to make me look guiltless. But that’s impossible. I’m wearing a balaclava. So I walk quicker, through the gate and into the garden. I jog the last few steps to the door, struggle with the key and barge inside. I climb upstairs to the spare room and watch the milk float trundle along. It crawls past the half-ruined tree and the skip full of branches. I can see the colour in the milkman’s cheeks. They’re red from the cold. His lips pursed with whistling.
I look at Angelica’s window. The curtains drawn. The flowers on the sill.
The branches are gone.
It’s better than nothing.
Escalation
Georgina has had her second stroke in eighteen months. It happened on New Years Day. The day before Angelica moved in and the day before my birthday. Angelica’s birthday. We’d spent the afternoon in the garden with our coats on. She wore the mittens I’d bought her, even put them on herself. It was bitterly cold
, but we didn’t mind. Georgina didn’t mind. Kipling sat on her lap while I planted the Christmas tree. Don Donald came across in his pyjamas. He said he’d run out of pickled onions and would I make him up a new jar. Then Georgina stood up, walked to the wall of the house and around the garden. She used the fence to keep her balance. I almost cried.
Hours later, I found her on the bed, her towel on the floor by the dresser. She’d just had a bath on her own. I’d dried her hair and she’d dried her legs. Then I’d left the room to get her a glass of water so she could take her tablets. It had been a long day. I’d expected her to fall asleep while I was downstairs. I thought I’d have to shake her shoulder to wake her up. But when I got back, she wasn’t asleep. She was still in position, pillows plumped as always. Just how they needed to be. She was awake. Her eyes glazed over, her mouth disfigured. One side lower than it should have been. Perfectly still. Perfectly calm.
I sat with her for a while. Less than a minute. Then I walked back downstairs to the kitchen, opened the cupboard under the sink and took out my manual. There were no tears. No ambulances. No-one saw it happen. She’d been getting better.
*
‘Why don’t you try writing things down, Gordon? It might help you remember.’
‘What am I supposed to write?’
‘Anything and everything. Just jot down what you need to. Get yourself a notebook you can put in your pocket. If there’s something you need to remember, you can write it down. You’ll always have it. Structure, Gordon. You need structure.’
‘Okay. I’ll think about it.’
‘Well make sure you do. Let me write that prescription.’
I went straight to Wilkinson and bought a children’s notebook. It was all they had left. It was pink with a cartoon bumblebee in the top right hand corner. I put my thumb in its face each time I opened the book. The first thing I wrote was a shopping list. I can still remember it. Milk, bread and a tub of wet wipes. Then on the way home, I ran into Mick Batty. I used to work with him. He stopped me and asked me how Georgina was getting on. I said she was doing fine. I told him she was talking properly again and that they thought she’d make a full recovery. He told me nothing had changed in the office. My desk was still empty. I wasn’t worth replacing. He laughed when he said it. And I laughed with him. Then he told me he’d married an ‘Oriental piece from down south’. I asked him what her name was. He said he couldn’t pronounce it, so he usually called her Roy, ‘Because that’s what it sounds like’. When I got home, I opened my notebook and transcribed our conversation. I wrote ‘Roy?’ in the margin. Underlined the question mark.
