What Goes Around
By
C.G. Durrant
Copyright ? 2016 Colin Durrant
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved
Published by Colin Durrant
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locals is entirely coincidental.
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Author's note
This story contains scenes of violence, profanity and licentiousness. The content is in no way intended to offend but is in keeping with the genre of the story and its nature and reflects the mentality and proclivities of the characters therein.
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CHAPTER ONE
Malachi stood in his usual spot at the entrance to the nursing home dragging on his cigarette, trying to prevent that here-we-go-again feeling from turning in to that time-to-get-the-hell-out-of-here thought. He exhaled, the day's winter breeze whipping billowing smoke from his lips before it had chance to plunge his features into obscurity. He dropped the butt, crushing it, heal to toe. He flung open the door and entered the reception. The smell of old-age struck him. He guessed it was a mixture of pungent incontinence mingled with the faint scent of perfume and cheap air fresheners. He glanced at the tall cactus to the right of the front desk and thought that there could not have been another plant in the world that was as unwelcoming as this. It was perfect.
He walked up to the dragon lady with the blouse buttoned to her neck. "Hi. I'm here to see my mother."
"And she is?" She made small, circular motions with a pen as though summoning the answer from the middle of the desk.
He hated the bitch already and somewhere in him he wondered if she'd make a good addition to his barn. "I hope," he jested, "that she's somewhere in there, unless you've let her of the leash and allowed her to wander...again." He pointed beyond a set of glass-panelled doors.
"I'm not smiling."
He huffed. He wasn't surprised. Her mouth was like the slit of a letter box in a wooden door, incapable of stretching even to the accomplishment of a smirk. "Two weeks ago, she was in the dining room wearing nothing but her Birthday suit. I love the old girl to bits but you know what kind of damage a guy could suffer when faced with the sight of his mother's nipples hardening in the breeze of this piss-poor excuse of this air conditioning of yours?"
Wide-eyed and still, she said nothing. After a moment she found her voice. "Sir, I find you quite rude."
Malachi, leaned in to the desk, whispering. "And there I was hoping we could go for dinner sometime."
The woman shook her head as a younger lady moved in behind her. "Certainly not."
"Then I guess blow job's out of the question then?" He didn't smile or even grin and it was the sternness of his expression that kept the woman in check. He had learnt that you could get away with saying almost anything you wanted if you said it with a very particular expression.
The woman behind the first stepped in. "I'll handle this."
The dragon lady grabbed an aerosol can and sprayed above Malachi's head before pulling away.
He waved his hands like a demented controller bringing a plane to the ground of an equally insane world. "What the hell's with the spray?"
The woman smiled, grabbing the register. "She's a non smoker. She can smell it a mile off."
"One of those huh? Thought she looked a little too healthy."
"Been a few weeks. Good to see you haven't lost that charm of yours."
"I aim to please." He grabbed the pen on the counter and scribbled his name in the register.
The woman grinned. "I've heard that from you before." She leaned forward. "I'm curious as to what form your aim would take."
"I bet you are." Malachi wondered if any part of her, even the darkest foulest part of her that spawned her taboos of which only a fraction had probably ever seen the light of day, could understand let alone share in his definition of pleasure. Over the last three years, he had watched her change and grow as the mother he came to see changed and withered by almost equal measure, as though the youth of this receptionist was perpetuated by his mother's contrasting ageing. She had evolved from a taciturn adolescent who would barley look at him when speaking to a confident young lady who welcomed his innuendos.
She led him down a corridor, telling him that the doctor had done his rounds and that despite his mother's Alzheimer's - and in his head he heard rotting brain - the woman was in a fair condition. He thought that was a little like a mechanic declaring that a car was in good condition despite the blown pistons and the big end having dropped out of the bloody engine. He had seen the doctor weeks ago, working the rec-room with his stethoscope. Some of the old codgers were lively and made a point of letting others know with phrases as there's life in the old ticker yet; others were statuesque and their pulses just faint rumblings beneath haggard skin, prompting the white-coats to periodically verify life...or sometimes death.
His mother was standing in the middle of the room as if waiting for him, or that's what he would have liked to believe. In truth, he knew that her condition meant she could have been standing in the middle of the room just for the sake of doing so. He turned and closed the door. The receptionist left, quietly sneaking off as though a noisy departure would jar the old lady's thoughts from remembrance.
"Flowers, for me?" His mother dashed forward with more energy than her frail frame suggested possible. She snatched the bouquet like an over-excited child snatching a present from its father's hands. "Chrysanthemums: my absolute favourite."
He smiled. Two weeks ago he had brought her roses. They too had been her absolute favourite. As she moved the coned packaging, he tried to ignore how slim she had become. She wore a heavy dress with long sleeves and he knew that she had attempted to hide her frame and by doing so had acknowledged her own decline. Another two weeks, then another - how many could pass before she became so thin that she would simply slip from existence.
She turned, holding her hands out to the room. "This will do, won't it?"
Malachi nodded. "Very tidy. And you," he indicated her dress, "look beautiful." He wondered who had dressed her, who had applied her makeup.
"I like to look my best for when my son visits. You should see him - a handsome lad." Two minutes. He estimated he had been in the room for no more than two minutes before her memory of him nose-dived. It was a record - and not one to be celebrated but lamented. "Malachi," he said. "It's me...your son." Recognition was fleeting but the pretence of it continued.
"Just teasing silly." She slapped his knee playfully. "I know why I'm here...Malachi, but there are some things a mother doesn't forget. Some things a mother never forgets." She walked to him, gripping his face. "I don't blame you. You know that don't you?" She nodded. "I'm here because of me. I'm sorry if I said anything ..."
"You didn't." He lied. He gripped her hand. He wanted to comfort her. He squeezed a little harder, a part of him wanting to inflict a physical pain to equal her mental anguish, to hurt her as she had hurt him. Over the months she had blamed him for his father's death and in the same breath had pitied him for
his loss. She had screamed at him for the loss of his brother but then had blamed herself and then God and then a nonexistent Marxist faction who had taken little Jacob from his cot while he slept. He relaxed his grip. "It's going to be all right."
She backed off and amid a confused glare slapped his face. "How dare you. To take advantage of a woman old enough to be..." she paused, struggling with ambivalence, with fact and delusion. "You want a fondle do you?" She cupped her breasts pushing them forward. "Do yooooou?"
"Fuck this shit." He lunged forward, gripping his mother's neck, shoving her against the wall. "Why do you do this?" For a second he didn't see her face but the faces of the many others who had been subjected to his anger: a leggy brunette who realised too late that she was with the wrong guy; a chubby blond whose misplaced affection for him stunned her into silence while he did what he needed to do; a chiselled thirty-something guy who discovered that he really was not as tough as he believed himself to be. They were all there in that second and his mother saw it.
"Go on," she chided, "it's what you do so well."
He released her. His only consolation was the knowledge that in a few minutes she would not recall the assault. "I'm sorry. Forgive me...okay...forgive me."
The woman stepped forward. "God knows I've tried."
She seemed to tower over him, her frailty momentarily failing to find her for it was no longer suited to this moment because she was no longer here. "All the things you've done." She wagged her finger at him. "All those naughty little things." She was thirteen years or so younger, and that delusion had the power to drag him back with her. He was in his early teens again, yelling sorry for being expelled from another school for fighting, sorry for stealing, for vandalising, for being a disrespectful little shit to the law of the land and that of his mother. He cut off his trip down memory lane, sensing the guilt's desperation to find a more serious crime that would give it the power to destroy him according to the dictates of appropriateness. He was tall again, taller than his mother who had already forgotten the outburst and the assault and was now arranging the fresh flowers in its glass vase.
"Your father," her tone was low, regretful, "never buys me flowers. He doesn't love me anymore."
"He would if he could."
"Not since Jake."
"Ancient history." But he supposed for her it wasn't, not for a woman whose mind was shot to shit and whose present was screwed and whose only recourse was the past. She slipped in and out of it as her lucidity and dementia allowed in an effort to relive the good times but always managed to trudge up tragedy. He knew why; guilt and pain carved itself into the memory and somehow seemed harder to forget. He had been only five when his father copped it in a car crash. A disaster preceded by another in which little Jacob had burned to death in the house fire. He glimpsed details here and there in his dreams and those details often felt more imagined than recalled - scenes of horror shaped according to his mother's narrative. He had been too young to remember the facts. His mother knew that and tried to make him remember before she lost the ability to recall them herself. It would be up to him to keep them alive in his heart and mind.
She sat on the bed and seemed to zone out as she often did. He talked to her, about the weather, about his job, not sure how much of what he was saying sunk in. His boss had him on the early run to Nottingham for the next two weeks. He supposed it wasn't all bad. He had managed to land himself the Citroen van, probably the best of the three fleet of vehicles on offer. It held more room in the back than the others and could deliver supplies to several pharmacies one a single run. His mother nodded every so often, like an uninterested student who sensed rather than saw the stare of her lecturer. He beguiled her with stories of medical wonders that would someday save her, that could one day reach back into time to save everyone she had ever lost. He could have told her that he had climbed the fucking rainbow to the land of Oz and she would have nodded. After a time, he stopped talking and just sat with her, holding her hand, saddened by the sense of role reversal. Twenty or so minutes later, he heard a trolley rattling around the halls outside and knew that pill-popping time was imminent. He kissed her on the cheek, stood, then walked to the door.
"Bring them next time. They would love to see me."
He turned to his mother's faint voice. "Bring who?"
"Your dad of course. Little Jake too. It seems forever since I've seen them."
"Sure mum." He opened the door and entered the hall, already gaining the sense of easing himself back into rationalness. He was right about the trolley. He nodded to the nurse as he passed. His mother was at her lowest ebb immediately before her meds. He had learnt that the best time to visit was before they were administered. As far as he could tell her window of lucidity that opened served only to remind her of what she had lost. That gift of clarity was its own curse, forcing her to acknowledge its fleetingness. It was not so much a reprieve as it was a taunt. It had been during those times of quasi-coherence that she had been most suspicious of him, quizzing him about things she had heard and read: murders, dead bodies, punctured eyes and scissors. He preferred her when she was confused, when those real horrors belonging to the real world became the imagined horrors of a warped mind.
CHAPTER TWO