Robbie's Wife (21 page)

The room was cold and the steam radiator under the window was just warm to the touch. But there were several rough wool blankets and I wrapped myself in one, plugged in my laptop, packed my clothes in the armoire, and settled in. “Tomorrow,” I said out loud, “I will go to the Precious Care Home, get a job, and I will find Maggie. That’s a promise, Jack Stone.”

I slept fitfully. Perhaps it was the cold clamminess of the room. I had a dream that elephants on stumpy legs were being herded through the hallway of Precious Care, with Jack, the sheep dog, nipping at their heels and Robbie in a wheelchair, his body vibrating, shouting instructions at Jack. I found myself trapped in the common room with the elephants running at me, the floor vibrating and somewhere the voice of Alfie Precious shouting, “Have at him, Barlow! He’s a fraud!”

I spent the next morning in the room, sorting out my finances — I was running low on money, and had enough for another month at most. I tried to work on the script but nothing would come and I rehearsed what I would tell Alfie Precious. My story about business on the continent wouldn’t wash if I asked for a job at what couldn’t be more than minimum wage in a run-down home for cast-off old folks and cripples. I would have to pretend to make a clean breast of it, tell Alfie that I was down on my luck, needed to make enough money for passage home, and hope that he was cheap enough to hire someone who obviously didn’t have the legal standing to work in England. I would work Maggie and Robbie into the story, tell him that I had spent time at Sheepheaven Farm, had worked for Robbie and had come back in hopes of finding more work.

Finally I left the room, wandered along the promenade for a while and then made my way to the Precious Care Home. It was early afternoon and Alfie was in his office.

“Mr. Stone,” he said. “You’ve come back to us.”

“Yes, I said I’d leave off my address.” I held out the piece of paper with the address of the hotel.

Alfie looked at it, then at me. “Will you be staying there long?” he asked.

“I don’t know. That depends on you.”

He watched me carefully, not saying anything. I was struck by the ferret-like quality of his face, and I half expected his nose to twitch, whiskers to sprout from beside his thin lips.

“When I came in here yesterday, I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely honest with you.”

Alfie continued to look at me, his eyes unblinking. Alfie, you’d make a good poker player, I thought. You know when to keep your mouth shut.

“I’m afraid that I’m a bit down on my luck.”

“What, exactly, does that mean, Mr. Stone?”

“It means that I’m running short of funds, need a job in order to get back to the States and I suspect the British government would frown on my working for wages, since I’m not here to take a job.”

“How do you know the Barlows?”

“I worked for Robbie at Sheepheaven Farm for a short time. I came back down to the village to see if he would take me on again. And I thought if I could find his wife, maybe she’d lend me a bit.”

Alfie smiled. “You was thinking maybe she got some insurance money from her husband’s accident, was you?”

“No, nothing like that. I just thought maybe she’d lend me enough to get a ticket back home.”

“And you expect me to believe all this, Mr. Stone?”

“You can believe what you like, Mr. Precious. The sign on your front door says you need a worker. I’m willing to work. My guess is that you won’t mind if I’m not legal. My guess is that you’ll pay me less than you would a regular worker and you probably won’t have to pay taxes to the government or health insurance, the kind of things that employers in America have to do as well.”

“So, Mr. Stone, you be guessing that I’m willing to take a short cut around the law to save a few quid, do you? Wouldn’t there be penalties for employers in your country if they did the same?”

“Only if the worker is found out.”

“You’re no boy down on his luck, Mr. Stone. You’re a well-dressed man, same age as me, I’m guessing. Why do I think your story don’t ring true?”

“Let’s say I’ve made a few mistakes, Mr. Precious.”

“We’ve all made mistakes Mr. Stone.”

“Please call me Jack.”

“Well, Mr. Jack Stone, suppose I was to give you a job? And suppose you was to make enough to get yourself a ticket to America. In a few weeks you go skiving on me and who knows what you’d nick on the way out?”

I was struck by the fact that he called me Jack Stone, the same way Maggie had used both of my names, and at that point I wanted to say to him, you little rat-faced prick, all I want is Maggie’s address and it’s just possible that I’d nick your fucking head on the way out, toss it over the promenade into the fucking sea, but I said, “There’s that chance, Mr. Precious. But there’s also the chance that I’ll stay on several months since my guess is that you won’t be paying me enough to save up for a trans-Atlantic ticket in a few weeks and from what I’ve seen, there isn’t much worth nicking, as you put it. We both stand to gain on this. I get a paycheck, you get a cheap worker, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

I took out my passport and laid it on the desk. He thumbed through it.

“So, you came here near three months ago? And it says here you’re a writer. What does that mean?”

“It means that I used to make my living writing movie scripts, but I haven’t sold one in years and that’s why I’m down to my last few dollars.”

“Dollars won’t do you much good here, Jack. Pounds sterling it is, got the Queen on it. Used to be, when I was a lad, everything American was gold, but not no more, Jack. We does all right on our own.”

“So, is there a job for me?”

Alfie closed my passport and handed it back. “You don’t have much tick or you wouldn’t be staying where you are, that’s for sure. Three pound an hour, five days a week, twenty-four pound a day, less a pound a day for your tea, you eats the same as the folk what lives here, it ain’t much, but it’s filling, so that’s one hundred fifteen pound a week, paid in cash on Friday.” He chuckled. “My old man, he worked for the Duke of Carlisle, farm laborer he was. He used to get up on Friday and stretch out his arms toward the manor house and say, ‘It’s Friday! Today’s the day the Duke shits!’ You be here tomorrow, eight o’clock, Jack. I’ll try you for a week. We’ll see how you turn out.”

“What kind of work will it be?”

“They shits in their sheets, they needs to be fed, they need a kind voice, somebody to wash them and mop the floor and make sure they don’t fall out of their zimmer frames. Whatever it takes, Jack.”

The following morning I came to work at Precious Care Home. Agnes Precious gave me a green smock to wear and I spent the morning mopping floors, washing out bedpans, and collecting soiled linen to take to the washing machine in the basement. There I met Ali, a slightly-built Pakistani whose voice rose and fell in a lilting sing-song and who, when he found out how much I was being paid, said I was being cheated.

“He’s a mean bastard, that Alfie Precious.”

I protested that he didn’t seem mean, just cheap, and Ali said, “No, that’s what I meant, he’s mean,” and he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and said, “If you were to drop a single pence coin on the carpet he would hear it and pick it up when your back was turned!”

Ali, too, was being paid under the table and so was Joshua, a beautiful West Indian boy with smooth ebony skin who turned everything into song, making up rhymes as he piled dirty sheets in the machine.

“Dis bunch of linen, it be soiled,
de water swirls and takes away
all de things that sticks to it.
How come this mon make a living washing out shit?”

The work quickly fell into a routine and by the end of the week Agnes had me feeding patients and wheeling some of them out onto a little terrace for what she called “their morning airing.” Agnes took a liking to me, said I was good with the oldies, and she told me repeatedly that I shouldn’t be down on my luck, Mr. Precious had told her all about me, there was no reason a man as easy as I was shouldn’t be a success in life, sometimes she couldn’t understand how things worked out but weren’t we lucky not to be like them, meaning the patients who sat comatose in their wheelchairs or shuffled around in walkers. Some of them sat for hours on the edge of their beds, staring at the doorway as if expecting a relative to show up any minute.

One old man buttonholed me every morning as soon as I came into the common room.

“You!” He pointed a finger at me as if he were accusing me of stealing something. “Call my solicitor. I’m being kept here against my will.” Each time, when I demurred, he’d wheel back a few feet, shouting, “It’s not that you can’t. You fucking won’t. You’re part of the conspiracy, you are. I hope you end up in a place like this, you scurvy bastard!”

But the next time I’d see him, he’d be sweetness and light, want to play drafts or have me wheel him out onto the terrace. A pretty mum in her thirties came periodically to visit him with his two grandchildren and they hung back while she tended to Dad and he alternately cried that he wanted to come home where he’s loved and called her a slut, “nasty little scrubber, fuck everything in the village with trousers on, you would,” and the next moment “How are the roses? Will I be going home with you today, my love?”

And there was Robbie. At first I tried to stay away from him but Agnes had me feeding them, helping some of them to get dressed, and it wasn’t long before my routine in the mornings meant that I spent most of my time with what Agnes called her “chickens.”

“Time to feed the chickens, loves,” she’d announce and Joshua and I brought up stacks of trays from the kitchen in the basement, arranging wheelchairs along the common room table. It was impossible for me not to spend time with Robbie. Joshua literally danced along the lineup, singing songs he made up to match the meal’s menu.

“Peanut butter, good for you,
stick your teefs in like glue.
Eat your tuck, you’ll not go wrong,
Missus Agnes make it strong.
She make de soup from heads of fish,
dis haddock he make quite a dish.”

And with a flourish he would place a thick plastic bowl of watery soup in front of an old dear, sashaying back to take another bowl from the cart and invent a new stanza. Sometimes there was a smattering of applause, dry hands slapping gently, usually when Joshua’s song pilloried either Agnes or Alfie.

Robbie had to be hand fed and it was a struggle since anything more than liquid by straw had to be put in his mouth with a soup spoon, one hand holding his head steady, the other trying to get the food past the vibrating lips and jaw. Most of it went down onto the child’s plastic bib that was tied around his neck. I learned how to hold his chattering mouth, pressing my fingers and thumbs on his jaw so that it remained open long enough to get custard down him, or meat ground into a soft pâté, and Robbie no longer had to periodically be connected to tubes in order to get enough nourishment to maintain his steadily wasting body.

The second week I was there I broached the subject of contacting Maggie again with Alfie but he cut me short.

“Like I told you, Jack, I don’t have no address except for her bank and that’s something that’s none of your business. Maybe she’ll be coming down to see him come Christmas. There’s some what comes for a visit on special days. But I wouldn’t hold much hope for Robbie Barlow. I’ve seen his like before. They waste away, don’t last a year, no matter what we does. Everything inside shuts down. You mark my word, that lad isn’t long for us and if you was to ask me, I’d say it’ll be a blessing when he goes.”

I asked Joshua and Ali if they had ever seen Maggie. Both said no.

“Sometimes he gets a postcard from a lad named Terry,” Joshua said. “I see two, maybe three of them.” Joshua had the job of distributing mail and he often read the card or letter out loud to patients whose sight was failing or whose hands shook too much to hold the page. He embellished the messages with rhymes, repeating lines in his lilting Jamaican rhythm. I told him to let me know the next time Robbie got a card.

I slipped into a routine at Precious Little. That’s what Joshua and Ali and the others called it. Maxine, the day nurse who tended to the medical side of the patients, arranging medications and checking blood pressures, became a daily source of gossip and cheer. She was a large woman who came into Precious Little at mid-morning in her hospital whites with a little white hat perched on her straw-colored hair like a Sir Francis Drake galleon under full sail.

I met the night people. There was a janitor named George who was obsequious, called me Mr. Stone Sir as if it were all one name. George rode an old fat-tired bicycle with a tiny gas engine bolted to the frame so that he could both pedal and motor along the flat stretches with the engine rattling loudly. He claimed it was his grandfather’s and “granfer rode it in the Blitz, he was a messenger, rode it right through them buzz bombs and all.” There was a practical nurse named Georgette who had the night duty. A non-descript girl in her thirties who arrived at the end of the day, she silently removed her coat, silently made tea, and for a while I thought perhaps she was mute but Maxine said, “No, she keeps to herself and perhaps she’s got good reason to do so, never mind that she’s no chatterbox, she keeps watch all night and tends to those what need her and she’s ever alert, she is, and that’s what she’s paid for and Alfie and Agnes ought to treat her better or they’ll lose her and they won’t find another one like her, that’s for sure.”

During the day there were Shirley and Wilma, two girls still in their teens who were, according to Maxine, school-leavers who ought not to be allowed to breed but “they will,” she said, “they will and if they was dogs or cats they’d be fixed only they certainly aren’t because they’re in heat all the time, leave a trail of poor boys barking up their skirts, there ought to be one of those government warning stickers on them.” Joshua called them “dey Surely Will Sisters.” They were never more than a few steps from each other and lived in fear of Maxine whose sharp “You lot! Get that bed made proper! Look alert or out you go!” rang out and poor Shirley and Wilma looked around but Maxine wasn’t in the same room with them, she was out in the corridor. But Maxine knew they’d done a sloppy job even if she couldn’t see them and dey Surely Will Sisters thought she could see through walls.