The Exit (5 page)

I smiled all the way home in the taxi, imagining a life dancing on a beach in Costa Rica rather than Ibiza, a life which could start tomorrow night. I’d wear nothing but a bikini all day. And tiny wee dresses at night. My skin would be brown. My legs SO toned from the dancing.

Mum was weird the next morning. She did her usual part for breakfast – making poached eggs and toast – but didn’t pick me up on it when I arrived late to make the coffee and squeeze the orange juice.

‘You look tired, Mum.’

‘I was tired when I went to Paris, remember? I could hardly eat my ticket on.’

I laughed. ‘What are you talking about?’

She laughed too. ‘I really don’t know.’

Natalie Holland had been making bruschetta for lunch, and offered me some when we got to her kitchen. She was around my mother’s age. By now I realised that was not old. She was teeny tiny, about five foot two, and slim, with shiny black shortish hair that was wavy, but with a very short fringe. She wore a tight black wraparound dress that forced you to check out her toned figure and perfect small boobs (wow) and she had nude wedges on that forced you to check out her legs (wow). Or maybe I’m just a perv. Whatever, this woman was cute and should be checked out and congratulated for it. She’d totally get it. Her house, a pebble-dashed semi-bungalow that I’d have labelled as depressing from the outside, was quite the opposite inside. It was messy in an organised, arty way, books and newspapers and magazines everywhere. Signs of hobbies littered the living room, kitchen, and garden. I noted seven – piano, karate, dress-making, drawing, football, Xbox, baking, guitar. This woman and her children – boys, by the looks – were into everything. They knew how to be happy. No wonder Rose liked her. She was still holding the plastic folder I’d given her at the door.

‘So, Catherine, have you been working there long?’

‘Just started.’

She placed Rose’s folder on table beside the teapot, handed me a piece of tomato-topped ciabatta, poured me some tea.

‘She said to say the truth is in her drawings.’

A sad sigh. ‘Yeah.’

‘What do you do, Natalie?’

‘Now? I feed and ferry my boys. I was Rose’s social worker.’

‘Are you going to look at the drawing?’

Natalie didn’t seem to want to, but did eventually. Her eyes seemed to well and for a moment I thought she might have understood something, that there was a message of some sort on the page. Natalie put it down on the table and sighed again. ‘It’s the same as usual.’

‘She’s sent you drawings before?’

‘She started drawing this exact one about six months ago. At first, I wanted to understand it, to believe she had something to say. I thought maybe something bad was going on in there. When she moved in I visited a few times a week, but six months ago she started getting really distressed so I visited every day. I complained when her phone was taken away. They’d started treating her like a prisoner. I took her to the police station once when she begged me to – course, by the time we arrived she’d forgotten why she’d wanted to go. That was four months ago. The day after we went to the police, my boss hauled me in.’

‘Why?’

‘Ach, it’s complicated. Someone complained. I wasn’t behaving like a professional, apparently. I was upsetting her, making things worse.’

‘So they sacked you?’

‘No, I left. Might do some agency work, not sure. I thought after that I could visit Rose as a friend, but they banned me. I haven’t seen her for four months. Now she only has Chris, her grandson. Her daughters don’t even bother with her. Is she okay?’

I’d only known Rose for twenty-four hours, but I could already detect what year she was living in by the look on her face. She was purposeful but not frantic: eighty-two. She looked up from her desk, where she’d been drawing again: ‘Did you get the page to Natalie?’

‘She said to give you a hug.’ I moved towards her, arms wide, not wanting to deliver said hug at all, but feeling it would be deceitful not to. Rose ended the awkwardness for me.

‘A hug? Oh for fuck’s sake.’

My arms slunk back torso-side. Phew.

Rose handed me the second envelope full of cash. ‘Thanks for trying, Catherine.’

‘I shouldn’t really take your money. She didn’t understand your drawing.’ But my hand was already extending itself.

‘Ach, surely you know by now I’m rich as a bastard. Take it. And if you’re interested, I’d like you to try again. I’m not giving up.’

In my head, I was already buying a connecting flight from Costa Rica to Tahiti. ‘I’m interested.’

‘I’ll finish a new drawing today.’

In two days, I’d have earned £1,500. I was beginning to love this job. I agreed to take the page as soon as my shift was over and felt clever and elated. There was something special about me. I’d walked into the shiteiest job in the universe; the one no fucker wanted to do; the one that required no skills, experience, qualifications, drive or vision, and yet . . . This was so postable, and Rose wouldn’t object, wouldn’t even understand. I changed the camera view so it was on me, pointed at my jubilant, wealthy, clever face, and began working on the caption in my head:

I am happy and rich and clever.

I just earned £1,500! Suck it peeps
!

See me. See all you arses who thought I’d amount to nothing . . .

My posting was interrupted by Rose’s voice: ‘That’s Emma.’ She was looking out into the hall. Two men were carrying a stretcher with a sheet-covered body towards the front door. Rose’s eyes followed the body, and she spoke to it: ‘I’m so sorry, Emma. I tried.’ Once it was out of sight, she wiped her tears with a tissue.

It seemed insensitive to wheel them out so publicly. ‘Couldn’t they take them out the back door?’

‘It’s too narrow,’ Rose said. ‘I like to wave them off. Will you come with me?’

We were now standing on the ramp at the front door. The trolley was already beside the ambulance. An elderly man and two middle-aged women sobbed as Emma was lifted and rolled into the back. Rose was still crying. ‘Poor things. They missed it by hours.’

‘Does it matter?’ I wasn’t meaning to sound cold-hearted, but it seemed odd for relatives to worry so much about being there the moment it happens. It’s not like the person knows most of the time. People shouldn’t feel guilty about it.

My comment angered Rose, who chastised me the way my mother sometimes did. ‘It matters.’

I found myself responding with a snide: ‘Why?’

Rose sighed. ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘How do you want to die?’

‘I don’t.’

‘You still think you won’t, eh?’

‘No.’ But she was right. I wasn’t even going to get old, let alone die.

‘When the times comes, it’ll matter to you where you are, who you’re with. You’ll have a last wish, and it should be granted.’

‘What’s yours, then?’

‘My wish?’

‘Yeah, what’s your death wish, Rose?’

A dead arm fell out the side of the trolley and it made one of the grievers howl.

‘I don’t want to die in Room 7.’

Rose probably didn’t have a good singing voice when she was young. Add old age to it and you had the thin wavering whimper that came out now: ‘You take the high road and I’ll take the low road.’ I didn’t want to join in, and wasn’t the type to feel forced into rituals, but I was glad that I did, because the sound was less feeble with my voice in the mix. Behind us, a male voice joined ours. Marcus. And before we knew it, the husband and the middle-aged women in the drive were singing ‘The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’ too, singing all the way through to the end of the song, by which time Emma and her dead arm were long gone.

When Rose was safely back in her room finishing off her picture, Marcus suggested this might be a good time for my first supervision session. I followed him round the back of the building and upstairs into his apartment, which took up the entire first floor of the mansion. There were hints of what the place would once have been – original oak flooring, huge central hall with open doors leading to several enormous rooms, narrow stairs going up to a probably creepy and definitely turreted attic, and a drawing room twice the size of most houses. But Marcus had stripped all he could of its old-world beauty, transforming his living quarters into a minimalist gadget-ridden bachelor pad. The wooden flooring, he’d painted white. He’d taken down picture rails, which had no doubt held portraits of generations of Bairds, and placed iPod docks and speakers on a wall in every room. In the drawing room, he’d bolted a television the size of a cinema screen where a fireplace should be. One work of exceptionally ugly art graced each room, two of which involved naked flesh and bulging eyes. The old library was now a box of handle-less black gloss kitchen units which opened with ‘barely a whiff of your pinky’. All the appliances were hidden behind these shiny walls: the ice maker, the wine cooler, and the Italian espresso machine, which he was using now.

‘Sugar?’ Marcus sat at the polished concrete dining table and stirred sugar into our tiny cups of black coffee. ‘What are you reading at the moment?’

‘I’m not much of a reader.’ The only books I’d managed to sit still long enough to finish were the ones on the school curriculum. I hoped he didn’t want to talk books. I’d have nothing to say.

‘Have you read
The Catcher in the Rye
?’

I couldn’t believe it. I had, for school. It had bored me shitless. All that bollocksy male angst. If you’re all so fucking alienated, then lock yourselves in your rooms and keep your thoughts to yourselves. ‘I didn’t like it much.’

He ran across the hall to his office, came back, book in hand. ‘Perhaps you were too young. It changed my life. The way it deals with the complex issues of identity, belonging, connection and alienation: genius! I insist you read it again.’

I wouldn’t read it again but I’d check Wikipedia for some dodgy but impressive facts so I could pretend I had.

‘Have you seen a dead body before?’

I hadn’t, I told him. I was five when Grandad died, and in Lanzarote when Nanna went.

He asked me how I felt about Emma as he washed our now empty coffee cups and magicked a door open that turned out to be the dishwasher.

Emma’s arm had fallen from under the sheet when they lifted the trolley into the ambulance, a lump of flesh, disconnected, but that’s all I’d seen of her. I told him I felt fine about it. I’d only seen her arm, after all, and while it was greyer than any other arm I’d ever seen, it hadn’t scared me because I didn’t know Emma and she was old and sick, so it wasn’t a surprise, was it?

‘It’s five o’clock. Mind if I have a Prosecco?’ He poured me a glass without asking if I wanted one. I put up my hand up as a No. ‘I’m still on shift.’

‘I’d like you take the rest off after what just happened. It’s important to debrief. It can get to you.’

He had earrings, Marcus. I hadn’t noticed that before. Tiny silver hoops.

‘I remember my first time.’ He was pouring us both another. He took a sip, waiting for me ask him to go on, which I didn’t do. ‘I was fifteen. Her name was Nadine. She had this amazing thick red hair. Wavy, not curly. Her skin was translucent. Y’know, the Irish type.’

He flared his nostrils a little. When un-flared, they were long thin slits, his nostrils. The flaring turned them into long fat ones that returned to their usual position very gradually. He had no nose hairs that I could see, probably shaved them with one of those special trimmers, which probably meant he shaved down there too.

‘I spent my childhood in this place. Mum and Dad made me read stories to patients for pocket money on weekends and I hated it. Even ran away a few times. I found it scary – old people, dying. Then Nadine came. She was only nineteen – oh that hair! My first serious crush. She’d never said a word to me though her illness, but I believed I was in love. You know how it is. Anyway, Mum thought it’d be good for me to be there when Nadine died, a kind of immunisation, to normalise it, so I wouldn’t be scared any more. I was sitting by her bed when it happened. I remember the noise she made, the change in the colour of her skin, the transformation of her mouth and eyes from alive to not. I remember I could see the shape of her nipples through her nightie.’

I took another sip of my Prosecco: ‘That’s some weird shit, Marcus.’

He laughed and held his glass to mine. ‘Hey, I was fifteen!’

Marcus’s chinos were burnt orange. I noticed he had very round knees. I think there’s something seriously icky about round knees, especially on a man. Earrings, fat knees, creepy stories: the points against him were stacking up. I decided to leave.

‘If you really don’t need me to stay on, I have something I need to do.’

Rose had finished her drawing by the time I arrived back in her room. She handed the envelope to me with shaky hands. ‘Say the same thing. The truth is here.’

‘What truth, Rose?’

‘This is a terrible place. Bea and Emma died! Quick, take it.’

‘Where? To Natalie? I’m not sure she’ll understand this one either.’

Confusion descended on Rose’s face as if it had suddenly gone out of focus. She repeated my words. ‘I’m not sure she’ll understand this one either.’

‘Did you want me to take it to your grandson?’

‘Chris, he’s a good boy.’

‘Are you sure?’

She lay on the bed – ‘Of course I’m sure’ – and closed her eyes.

I found Chris’s address in Rose’s file in the office and phoned for a taxi to Gartmore.

It cost forty pounds to get to Chris’s house, a whitewashed cottage in the one-street town. I was feeling embarrassed before he answered the door, knowing this mission was a pointless one, but he put me at ease as soon as I introduced myself. ‘Ah, you’re the new girl!’

Chris looked like the gay best friend I’d always wanted, but had never been cool enough to nab. My friend Rebecca managed to get a gay best friend when she was sixteen. Rebecca was horizontal-relaxed. Nothing fazed her. Nothing seemed to interest her. She only ever talked to me – in a slow, flat monotone – about other people’s clothing at parties and clothing she had worn to parties and clothing she was planning to wear to parties. But she had something that made out-and-proud Frankie comfortable and they huddled together for years, talking (surely) about things other than clothing and parties. God, even Mum had a gay best friend. Why not me?