Disorientated, he struggled to climb back into the present. Nothing in the room made sense, and it seemed smaller, as if the walls had shrunk overnight, closing in on him, entombing him in a living coffin. Then reality broke through the walls and crashed upon him. He didn’t want to think about the kids he’d put in coffins, their names forever carved on his every waking moment. The sooner he was in a coffin, the better.
He was suffocating in his room; he needed to walk, to purge the demons from his mind. Reaching his door, he twisted the handle which didn’t budge, locked from the outside. He hammered against the door before the arthritis made it known he wasn’t to try that again. He kicked the door and the flimsy hollow door shuddered in its frame but didn’t open.
Elijah cried out, for what, he couldn’t say. One final kick and he slumped against the door, his age forgotten. He was a child lost in a grown up world with no one to help him. Memories crowded in on him like the fans and his colleagues and the players all had. They’d put him on a pedestal. If only they knew how far it was to fall from that lofty perch.
At the sound of a key turning in the lock, and the door opened onto Elijah, flinging him to the ground. Light fell into the room illuminating Elijah cowering on the floor and the angry orderly at the door.
“What the hell is going on? You trying to wake up the rest of the residents? Calm the fuck down or I’ll give to something to make you sleep. Tracey don’t put up with this shit.”
“I wanted a drink. Why was I locked in?”
“We always lock you in, can’t have a hundred old farts roaming the corridors, you’d all end up in the wrong rooms. Health and safety man, look don’t make my job any harder. You get back into bed, there’s water in the bathroom, you can help yourself. You’ve been here long enough to know the rules. No one gets out of bed at midnight unless you’re dying, and even then Tracey’d prefer you died quietly in the night and we dealt with the mess in the morning. Saves a ton of money that way.”
“I needed a coffee. You’ve got coffee, hell I’m paying for coffee and I want my coffee.” Elijah’s voice rose. He realised he was being belligerent but night after night of interrupted sleep and living a never-ending nightmare forced him out of accepting the status quo. He was past the point of no return.
“You fuckwit, there’s no coffee for residents. There’s no getting out of bed at night, and there’s no fucking making my job harder than it is. Get the fuck into bed, old man.”
Elijah stood his ground. “I want a coffee. I’m not a prisoner, I am a paying guest. And if you think I need to discuss this with the manager, you go wake her.”
“Lay back down old man, you’re nobody here. You’re not a big shot coach any more. Get that, you’re a nobody. No one cares if you want a coffee, no blonde cheerleader will deliver you a latte with a happy ending afterwards. Get into bed. Or I’ll put you there myself, old man.”
Elijah almost responded but the futility of the situation swamped him and like the old man he’d become, he slumped on the covers, hanging his head in defeat.
“That’s better, old man. No more noise from you tonight or I won’t be as polite next time,” said the orderly before slamming Elijah’s door and locking it behind him, the fall of the hammer absurdly loud in the night.
The orderly was correct, he was a nobody. He’d been a somebody once, but that all changed on a road next to a tree after a game. A game they’d won. That was the last thing he’d win. It wasn’t a surprise he couldn’t even persuade the staff to let him have a coffee. A nobody, nothing.
His thirst deserted him and a great lethargy overtook him. Elijah folded himself into his blanket and waited for sleep to come, a sleep without pictures or memory, but like the coffee, that too was unobtainable.
30
“You having trouble sleeping, Elijah?” Sulia asked over breakfast.
Elijah paused, a slice of toast halfway to his mouth.
“I can give you something to help with the dreams. What I got will make those dreams disappear just like your arthritis pain.”
“I’m fine.” Elijah carried on eating his toast with margarine. The budget honey barely making it any more edible than cardboard. Breakfast was toast or a thin porridge resembling the detritus at the bottom of a stadium urinal on a Friday night.
“Suit yourself, but I’ll be here when you want to come calling.” Sulia tucked into both the toast and porridge, and great slurping noises dominated the table. “Damn this needs sugar,” she announced, after emptying her bowl.
Dread settled over Elijah as Sulia’s gargantuan arm beckoned the closest orderly. Not the same one who’d come to Elijah’s room, but he knew from experience that this one was trouble, and he didn’t look pleased.
“Have you got any sugar, dear?” Sulia asked, her voice itself dripping with honey.
The rest of the room sensed the conflict and the hubbub of conversation petered out, the residents lowering their spoons and mugs and toast. Like an Oliver Twist parody, everyone knew not to ask for more; everyone except Sulia.
“What?” the orderly asked, his grasp of the finer points of the English language lost between his mother’s womb and his last day at high school.
“Sugar, for the porridge. There’s none on the table, and a woman can’t have porridge without a ton of brown sugar and fresh cream. I sure don’t need the cream, look at me, but I need the sugar. Helps keep my energies up.”
Watching Sulia, Elijah thought he saw a flash of something there. As if she knew she was playing with fire but wanted to test it.
“You think you’re in Trump Tower? The only cream you’ll be getting is cream of sweet corn soup for dinner. If you’ve finished breakfast, get back to the lounge so we can clean up after you.”
“Oh I haven’t finished, I’m having more porridge.”
“No you aren’t, you will take your fat arse back to the lounge and play kiddy games with the nurse and try to remember your own name if you can. That’s a good game to play. Think you’re above the rules, you fat—”
At that, Elijah stood up. An unplanned, impulsive move. He’d been thinking about Sulia’s sugar, which made him to think about sugar in his tea, which lead to imagine sugar in his coffee, in the coffee he wasn’t allowed. Stale coffee tainted the breath of the orderly, and one thing lead to another and he confronted the other man.
“Apologise. Apologise to Sulia for your rude comments and we won’t make a complaint about your behaviour,” Elijah said, not as the introverted old man he’d become, but like someone used to being understood and obeyed without argument.
Elijah stared into the man’s bloodshot eyes. Eyes surrounded by an infinite number of blackheads, with a day’s worth of stubble and wheat-coloured hair plastered back with a chemical smelling gel. So entranced with the sudden euphoria of standing up for Sulia, Elijah never anticipated the orderly’s next move.
Oomph
The orderly threw a hefty punch into Elijah’s stomach with the power of a well fed younger man and Elijah folded, the shock and the pain taking him to the ground. The room erupted. Crying women and decrepit old men pushed back their chairs ready to enter the fray.
Nursing staff and uniformed orderlies appeared from nowhere as if they’d squeezed through the cracks of the sewers the residents suspected they came from.
On the ground, his breath knocked out of him, Elijah had no idea of the surrounding commotion, and he couldn’t have said who tipped their bowl of porridge over the head of the pugilist but the orderly reacted by firing a boot into Elijah’s side, cracking a rib. Toast and mugs flew and cutlery clattered to the ground. Octogenarians tussled with men a quarter their age whilst others cheered them on from the sidelines.
The dining room was a complete disaster. Broken crockery, brought for its indestructibility, lay shattered on the lino floor. Congealing porridge dripped from the wall and coated the residents and the staff. One benefit of the fracas was the disappearance of sachets of honey from the tables, sachets secreted in
to voluminous pockets and bags of innocent knitting, to eating at leisure in the safety of their bedrooms with crackers. Sulia herself had collected a handful of honey pouches, and a knife and a side plate. She didn’t expect the staff to bother with a stock take when they cleaned up, but then again she wasn’t yet aware of how the Rose Haven operated — any loss or destruction of Resort property was deducted from wages and Tracey was nothing but vigilant when an opportunity arose to save money, money which disappeared into her pocket.
An eery quiet descended as the residents slinked away in pairs and alone. No one wanted to be there when Tracey arrived, and she would… she could sense trouble.
It didn’t take Tracey long to appear in the doorway, her high heels tapping on the linoleum as she approached. Tracey had watched the fight unfold on her surveillance system, on the cameras she loved. She’d have more if it was legal — in the bedrooms and bathrooms, the kitchen and staffroom. She hadn’t seen the orderly’s punch, but she’d seen Elijah stand and then an image on another screen distracted her - the image showing another orderly ducking into one resident’s room - an orderly who shouldn’t have been in that corridor then. What was he doing? By the time she’d looked back to the dining room camera, Elijah Cone was on the ground, the giant Indian woman next to him, and the roomful of pensioners were on their bunion-clad feet protesting. She’d stayed in her office until the staff had it under control; she was wearing a new suit and the last thing she wanted was slop thrown over it.
With her hands on her hips in the doorway, Tracey looked the part of a successful lawyer or accountant, but up close she looked more like Miss Hannigan from Annie.
“Preston, over here,” she called to the orderly at the centre of the maelstrom.
Slinking over to Tracey, Preston Sergeant hung his head.
“What happened?”
“He threatened me,” Preston mumbled.
“Threatened you? We can’t have that behaviour now can we?” Tracey replied. “Was he posing a risk to the other residents?” The clipboard under Tracey’s arm complimented her officious tone and with manicured hands she marched a pen across the paper on the board, her chicken script impossible to decipher. She didn’t wait for Preston to answer. “And when you realised he was a threat, you did what you had to do? To protect the other residents?” Tracey said, revelling in placing the right words into Preston’s mouth, dictating the tone of the exchange. Power had been denied to her when she was young so now she coveted it, brandishing it like a weapon. The power warmed her and filled the void inside her heart.
Preston jumped on her words. “I subdued him because of the threat to the other residents from his behaviour. Their safety was my only thought.”
Tracey smiled, showing a set of surgically whitened teeth. “I’d have expected nothing less from you, Preston.”
“He caused a ruckus last night too. Pedro told me at changeover. I expect it’s in the notes. Pedro said he wanted coffee in the middle of the night and damn near broke his door trying to get out.”
Tracey’s pen wavered above the page. She read the handover reports which hadn’t mentioned a disturbance in the night. Preston had just blackened the name of Levi, the night orderly. Tracey surrounded herself with those less competent than herself, they were easier to manage, and to fire, but she needed them to abide by the rules. One rule was that any instance of the residents straying outside the accepted behaviour parameters had to be in the handover reports, which she used to flush out difficult residents, identifying who to move on. Churn was good for business… her main business, and the profitable sideline she had going with Doctor Perry. The rules were there for a reason.
“Help the others clean up and I’ll handle Cone,” she said to Preston, dismissing him. Pedro she’d deal with later.
Tracey picked her way through the mess towards Elijah, who was still on the ground, leaning against a chair. Her high heel slipped on a smear of porridge on the polished lino, and cursing under her breath, she made a mental note to ask Pauline to cost out a new breakfast menu which excluded porridge. Not serving it would reduce their electricity usage as a start. A smile played across Tracey’s painted lips.
“Mister Cone, let’s get you up off the floor.” Tracey offered her hands to the man on the floor, well aware of his crippling arthritis. That at least was in the handover reports.
Elijah ignored her and Tracey spread her smile wider, twisting her face into a death grimace. “Mister Cone, we need to get you up so the orderlies can clean up the mess. It pains me to see one of our residents on the floor. Come, let me help you.”
Still the man ignored her and Tracey watched as Elijah rolled to his knees with glacial speed and stood on his own. Oh how far the mighty had fallen. When he’d first moved in, she’d watched old YouTube footage of him on the sidelines, hollering at his players and being interviewed on tv. And now he floundered on the floor at her feet.
Tracey’s eyes widened as she watched Elijah lean on the substantial arm offered by the sari-clad Indian woman beside him. As far as she knew, Elijah had shown no interest in connecting with anyone at the Rose Haven Retirement Resort, other than Johnny Paulson, but he wasn’t an issue any more. So what was this? A friendship? Whatever it was, it could be problematic.
“That orderly punched him, its assault. You should call the police, not send him to clean up the mess he caused,” Sulia’s voice rose with every word.
“I don’t know what happened, other than a group of senior citizens started a food fight. A food fight in a home for retirees. Can you imagine the police response? We’d be a laughingstock. No, I suspect Mister Cone here slipped over in the fight, which will be an expensive exercise to clean up and to replace the broken crockery. I’ll watch the security tapes because someone started this and they will be billed for the mess. Was that person you Mister Cone?” Tracey was on home territory with money. Billing the residents for replacement crockery was a genius decision and smug conceit wormed its way onto Tracey’s face.
“Elijah was standing up for me. He did nothing wrong. It was the orderly,” Sulia insisted.
“Leave it, Sulia,” Elijah wheezed.
He wouldn’t look Tracey in the eye which she found satisfying. He looked guilty which made it an easier decision to add the cost of the replacement crockery to his weekly account. If he was going to be trouble, she’d consider handing him over to Doctor Perry, but only after he’d paid his bill. She couldn’t abide outstanding accounts. She couldn’t hand him over to Perry until after she’d bled him dry. Given his former high profile career, it was a sure bet he had cash salted away for a rainy day. Hiding it from the families of the kids he’d killed. He’d have to pay her though, they always did. She laughed.
At the doorway, Sulia and Elijah looked back at the sound of Tracey laughing amid smashed bowls and abandoned slices of toast. Both felt an icy finger of premonition up their spines. Sulia tugged gently on Elijah’s arm, pulling him away from the dining room and the painted woman’s piercing eyes.
31
Sarah Miller coughed discreetly into a tissue at the counter but to the rest of the waiting room the cough sounded more like a colony of seals clamouring for attention. She was sick; she knew she was sick, and to her utter annoyance she had to see a doctor or she’d end up on a hospital respirator, that was how sick she felt.
It had been at least twelve years since Sarah had last stepped foot in a doctor’s surgery. She preferred holistic, and her regime of daily vitamin C tablets and a clean vegan lifestyle, combined with a spoonful of honey, cured any ills. But her cough had worsened, and she didn’t want to die alone at home for want of antibiotics. She’d fought the idea for a week but she knew she was running out of time.
The receptionist handed her an enrolment form for new patients. Hopefully she wouldn’t need to see the doctor again, which she explained to the girl, but the receptionist was insistent she complete it. With an impatient sigh which turned into a hacking cough which threatened to send her lung
s up through her throat and out onto the floor, Sarah retreated to one of the plush armchairs and filled in the form. The waiting patients shrank away from her, their own woes not as bad as Sarah’s cough.
She got as far as the next of kin question before her heart twisted with a pain worse than the coughing. A pain deeper than anything she’d experienced. Even death wasn’t as bad as the heartache overwhelming her as she considered what to write. The emptiness of the line was empty as her life and her heart. The utter rejection she’d received over the phone still as crushing as at it had been. How long ago was it now? She knew within the fraction of a second how long ago it had been - four weeks, five days and seven hours ago. Her life shattered with one phone call, breaking her heart with no possibility of ever picking up the pieces. There was no one to add for next of kin. She had no one, so left it blank.
The receptionist took her form whilst chatting on the phone about her weekend plans. It would be nice to have weekend plans, or any plans at all. Sarah was an artist and worked at home, at one with her oils and watercolours. Her brushes and liniments were her true friends. Most of her old friendships had fallen by the wayside when she’d immersed herself in her relationship. They’d given up on her after she brushed them off one too many times so it was only karma she had no one to make plans with, to dream about the future with, to grow old with. Her debilitating cough took over again and the waiting patients flinched away from her.
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