Authors: Russell Hill
I found the address of the Precious Care Home in the telephone directory in a petrol station just off the roundabout entering the city and after consulting the map and making several wrong turns I discovered that it was only a few blocks from the quay. It, too, was a brick Victorian building, two stories, separated from the other buildings on the block by a narrow alley filled with overflowing rubbish bins. I parked and stepped out into the cold wind that swept up from the sea.
I expected it to be warm inside the building but it was cold and clammy in the little lobby. There was a sliding window in one wall with a shelf in front, apparently where visitors checked in, but there seemed to be no one in the cubicle behind. I looked for a bell or a buzzer, but there seemed to be no way to summon anyone.
Then a door opened and a large woman in a flowered dress came out.
“How may I help you?” she asked.
“I’m hoping to see a patient,”
“You have someone staying with us?”
“He’s a friend. A mister Robbie Barlow? Is he here?”
“Oh, how nice,” she cooed. “A visitor for Robbie. You’ll have to sign in. A formality, you know, authorities want to know everything about everything these days.” She slid the little window open, reached in and took out a small register. There was a ballpoint pen attached to it with a string and I wrote my name.
“And your address?” she said, looking over my shoulder.
“I’m just traveling through. I may spend the night here in Bournemouth.”
“Well, that’s all right,” she said. “I judge from your accent that you’re not English. American? Canadian?”
“American.”
“Then just write America. I’m Agnes Precious. My husband and I are the proprietors. That’s why it’s named the Precious Care Home,” she bubbled cheerfully. “Although we like to call ourselves the caretakers.” She looked again at the register, then at me. “This way, Mr. Stone” and she stepped back through the door, holding it open for me. We were in a long corridor with a high ceiling, dark wainscoting and a worn wooden floor. It had the look of an old hotel with transom windows above each door. It smelled of urine and disinfectant and stale laundry. At the end of the corridor we came into a wide room filled with old people in wheelchairs. Potted plants were along the wall where a bay of windows looked out at the building opposite. There was a table in the center of the room with half-finished puzzles covering it and a television set flickered on a shelf in one corner. Most of the chairs faced the TV, but others were haphazardly scattered with slumped occupants who seemed asleep. I noticed that all of them had cloth cummerbunds that held them in their chairs.
“Robbie!” the woman called out to a chair near the window. “You have a visitor!”
I wasn’t prepared for it. The man in the chair was emaciated, hollow-eyed and he shook. He vibrated, as if he were sitting on some continuous electrical connection, his hands in his lap loosely shuddering, his head bobbing, shoulders, arms, the constant shaking of someone who has been put in a refrigerator or is lost in a blizzard.
“You have a visitor,” she shouted again. I wondered if he were hard of hearing or if she shouted simply because she needed to get through the chattering framework. “It’s a Mister Stone.”
Robbie suddenly began to grunt and then a torrent of guttural shouts bubbled from his lips, spittle flying, and it seemed as if he were trying to talk or focus his wildly flying eyes.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Sometimes he gets this way with someone new. We think it’s his way of recognizing them. The doctors say he’s still got a good brain, although how they know that is beyond me. Have you got a good brain, Robbie?” she asked. “Can you recognize your friend here?”
Robbie continued to blurt noise, and the spittle turned yellow, as if phlegm were coming out as well.
“Never mind,” she said. “He’ll settle down in a minute or two. I’ll leave you two to chat.”
I stood there in front of the wheelchair and I could swear that he was trying to lunge at me, and there was something fierce about his eyes that told me he knew who I was and he remembered the night in the shed.
“Can you hear me, Robbie?” I asked.
He continued to shout. No one else in the room paid any attention. At least I thought they were shouts. Obscenities, angry accusations.
“I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough, but I’m truly sorry.” His chin was wet with slobber and it flew in all directions as his head vibrated and I wanted to wipe it off for him and I wanted desperately to leave. Mary had been right when she said it wasn’t a pretty sight. But Mary hadn’t clubbed him into this and I was sure that the intensity of his shouts was recognition of who I was and what I had done. One thing was certain, Robbie Barlow wasn’t going to be able to tell anyone that I had tried to kill him.
“I’ll come back, Robbie,” I said. I needed to escape and I looked for Mrs. Precious but she was nowhere to be seen. I looked down the corridor but there seemed to be no one there and then, through an open door, I saw an orderly pulling stained sheets off a bed.
“Can you tell me where I’ll find Mrs. Precious?” I asked.
He threw the sheets into a cardboard box on the floor.
“Down the hallway, first door on the left, mate.”
Mrs. Precious was at a small desk, a cup of tea at hand, sorting through some papers. “A problem, Mr. Stone?”
“No, I’m leaving for a bit, but I’ll probably stop in again.”
“That was quick,” she said, arching her eyebrows.
“I was wondering,” I said. “His wife? Mrs. Barlow? I think her name is Maggie. Does she come to see him often?”
“No, we haven’t seen her in some time. She sends his keep by mail regular, she does.”
“And would you have an address for her?”
“That would be Mr. Precious’ bailiwick, Mr. Stone. He keeps the books. You’d have to speak to him.”
“Is he here?”
“No, he don’t come in until afternoons. I do the mornings. And why would you be wanting Mrs. Barlow’s address, if I may ask?”
“I just thought I’d like to drop her a note, tell her how sorry I am about Robbie’s accident.”
“Well, that’s nice of you, Mr. Stone. You come back this afternoon and Alfie, that’s my husband, you talk to him.”
On the way out of the building I saw the placard taped to the glass next to the door.
HELP WANTED APPLY WITHIN
NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
I drove back to the quay and found a pub facing the sea. It was dark inside, clammy, and the bartender pulled a beer for me, commented on the weather and left me to contemplate my options. I would go back to the Precious Care Home and find Alfie Precious. If he kept the books as his wife said, he would have Maggie’s address. I could track her down, make some excuse for seeing her, but I thought of Robbie’s shuddering body and I wasn’t sure I could face Maggie, knowing what I had done. Perhaps, with time, it would go away. If I waited long enough, Robbie would die and he would be no more than a photograph in a scrapbook, but again the image of his emaciated body vibrating in the wheelchair came back to me and I felt sick.
I finished the beer, went outside and walked along the promenade, the sharp wind cutting at my face, the sea flat with a white chop that looked sinister. A huge ferry backed out of a slip in the harbor and wheeled slowly before heading out toward France. I could go to France, I thought. I could also go back home to Los Angeles. Or, I could go back to Precious Care and find Alfie Precious and get Maggie’s address. I knew I would try to find Maggie. She was a magnet and I was nothing more than iron filings on a sheet of paper, and if the magnet touched the paper, the filings darted toward it, unable to do anything else. I would carry the knowledge of what I had done to Robbie, and to Maggie and Terry as well, with me and I would find her and somehow it would sort itself out.
I went back to Precious Care and found Alfie Precious in the same office where I had last seen his wife. I told him I was a friend of the Barlows, had been in that morning to see Robbie. Wasn’t it a tragedy, I said.
“He’s alive,” Alfie said, “and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. But they don’t give him much chance of living very long, no matter how we feeds him. So we takes care of him and it’s nice that you come to pay him a visit. Some of our folks don’t see anybody they know. We’re all they got.”
“I was wondering if you have an address for his wife?”
“You said you was a friend of theirs?”
“Yes, but I haven’t seen either of them since before the accident. I thought if you had her address I could send her a note. Express my sympathies.”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Stone, that’s not possible. You say you’re a friend, but you have no idea what kinds of scamps come in here. Bill collectors, insurance folks, even them what sells coffins and funerals. No, I don’t have an address for Mrs. Barlow for you.” He turned toward his desk, as if he were dismissing me.
“I can understand that, Mr. Precious. Perhaps if I gave you a note, you could send it along to her, let her know I was here?”
“No, I wouldn’t be able to do that either. Matter of fact, she don’t have an address. I get the payment each week from a bank, comes regular as clockwork, so unless she lives in the bank, I don’t have any idea where she is. And if you’re such a good friend, I’d say you ought to be knowing where she lives. Wouldn’t that make sense, Mr. Stone?”
“It would. But I knew them when they lived at Sheepheaven Farm in Mappowder, and I’ve been on the continent on business. Her friends in Mappowder said she was at her brother’s house in Yorkshire, but I’m afraid I must have that address wrong, since the note I sent to her last week came back to me.”
“And where be you staying, Mr. Stone?”
“Here in Bournemouth. At least for a few days.”
“If you give me your address and I hear from Mrs. Barlow, perhaps I’ll call you.”
“That’s kind of you, Mr. Precious. I’m afraid I don’t know the street address, but I can bring it by first thing in the morning. Would that be all right?”
“You can leave it with the wife.” He began to rearrange papers on his desk and I knew I was being dismissed.
“I’ll go out and see Mr. Barlow, if it’s all right.”
“Oh, quite all right. They’re always grateful for a visitor. We don’t stand on ceremony here, Mr. Stone. You know the way?”
I went back down the long hall into the common room and found Robbie in the same spot he had been in that morning. Somehow I felt compelled to see him, talk to him, assuage my guilt, I suppose. In any case, when he saw me he broke into the same guttural shouts, slobbering and vibrating and I waited opposite in a plastic chair for a break in his outburst.
I sat there, enduring Robbie’s abuse, for I was sure that’s what it was, for a long time. Finally I spoke to him.
“I asked about Maggie, Robbie. They tell me she sends a check every week, but they don’t know where she is. What am I to do?”
He shouted again, this time a quick yell, and I thought to myself, he’s just told me to fuck off. It was as if I could understand the code in which he was speaking, and I could take the transposed sounds and reassemble them and I could make sense of the slobbering noise that came from his shuddering body. Of course, that was nonsense, although I paid closer attention to the next utterances, hoping that somehow they would become clear. But Robbie began to drift off, exhausted by his performance, and eventually he slipped into silence, his head slumped forward, straining at the cloth bandage that tied it to the back of the wheelchair. Even though he seemed to have drifted off into sleep, he vibrated, quick random movements that seemed as if they were brought on by someone poking him with an electric prod.
I watched him for a while longer. I had told Alfie Precious that I would bring my address the next day. And if there were any chance of my finding Maggie, it would be here at the Precious Care Home. Alfie’s claim that he had no way to get in touch with Maggie was a lie. He had to have some way to contact her. So I needed to find a place to stay in Bournemouth. More importantly, I had to get rid of the car, an expense that was draining my dwindling bank account. And I would have to find something cheap to stay in. Then it dawned on me that I could take a job with Alfie. The placard in the door advertised work. No experience necessary, it said. He probably needed orderlies or clean-up people, and there was no reason I couldn’t work for him and be near Robbie, which meant that if Maggie came to see him, as eventually she must, I would be at hand. I could ingratiate myself with Alfie and Agnes, and I would pry out of them the name of Maggie’s bank. I would somehow find out where she was, and I would see her again.
I left Precious Care, and hunted for a cheap hotel in Bournemouth. I found one in the back of the town, a brick building that had seen better days, with a sign in the front door that said “rooms to let.” It had the same look as the hallway at Precious Care, and the elderly man who showed me the room looked as if he had been a part of the building for years. It was a room not unlike my cheap room in London, a bed, chair, small dressing table, an old armoire on one wall and a bathroom down the hall.
“We lets the rooms by the week, sir,” he said as we went back to the front hallway where there was a pay phone and several umbrellas in what looked like a waste-basket until I realized, with a start, that it was a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. I paid him for the week, took my things from the car, and looked for the car hire agency in the phone book that hung from a chain next to the telephone. The nearest office was in Salisbury and when I telephoned them they said yes, I could drop the car off there, it would mean an extra charge of thirty pounds, but that was cheaper than driving it back to London and taking a train down to the coast, so I drove the hour to Salisbury, left the car, and took a bus from Salisbury to Bournemouth. For some reason the image of the empty elephant’s foot filled with umbrellas kept popping up, and I could see natives gathered around the dead elephant, sawing off the feet, balancing them on their heads and following some Victorian white hunter back to camp.
The trip took several hours, the coach stopping periodically to pick up or let off passengers, and it was nearly ten o’clock when I got back to Bournemouth and walked the empty streets back to my hotel. The elephant foot was there by the phone when I let myself in.