A little something to go on with...

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

I haven't posted for a while - but then who has?


It all started with the hairbrush. I might be 92 but I remember things perfectly well. It wasn’t long after I came to this frightful place. It’s the woman who owns this place, she’s where the problem lies, Marion. She looks nice enough, oh yes, but I learnt long ago about her type. All marshmallow sweetness on the outside, with her soft skinned plumpness and her blond hair (from a bottle I might add, that colour’s never natural) and her gold bracelet and matching crucifix and her wedding ring and her sugar sweet niceness; but on the inside it’s a different story. She plays up like she thinks we’re all these dear sweet old biddies. Well, the others may be prepared to play that game, but I won’t. I’ve travelled I have, I was in a fist-fight in Cairo I was and I’ve sailed a fishing boat in the fjords of Norway. I’ve survived two World Wars, rationing and the Blitz. I’ve traded on the Stock Exchange, had three husbands, buried two of ‘em and raised five kids (only two of ‘em was mine too), I’ve written a book and been a punk gang mascot and met Paul McCartney. What do you make of that then eh? Bet you’d never have thought it looking at me.

Anyway, the hairbrush, I had bust my wrist trying to open the window – stiff it was, and I was pushing it, and the knife I’d nicked from the dining room and wedged in the join gave and I slipped and bust my arm, stupid really. Just a hairline fracture according to the quack (who called me “love” and had bad dandruff), but it hurt like billy-oh. Anyhow, I got trouble for trying to open the window on my own instead of calling for help. And I couldn’t do so much for myself, so she had to come and brush my hair.

We’d already had a few bust-ups. I was in trouble for trying to organise a trip out to watch a musical (“The residents don’t like too much excitement, dear”), and for ordering a pizza delivery (“The food here is carefully selected to cater for your needs, pizza is not good for the digestion of the elderly, dear”) and for a couple of other things. She’d already taken away my kettle from my room (“If you want a drink call the staff, dear, that’s what they’re here for. We don’t want you scalding yourself now do we?”).

So she was pulling away at my hair and talking about the first of the regular visits of the padre since I moved in. “I don’t want to see him.” says I. She goes on about my impending death for a while and don’t I want to be assured of salvation in the hereafter – or some similar claptrap. “I may look old,” says I, “but I was born in 1911, not the middle ages, I don’t believe any of that superstitious jiggerypokery.”

Well, I can tell she don’t like that, cos she’s pulling harder and harder on my hair. So I tells her to stop it, else I won’t have any hair left. I tells her I would rather look like a birds-nest than be bald. But she won’t stop, she just goes on tugging harder and harder, telling me that she’s not having any resident in her home looking like no-one takes care of them, no matter how ungrateful they are. That’s when it started out going seriously downhill.

So the next time my Linda came to visit with Leon (her youngest, 15 now) to see how I am after the accident I tries to tell her that I don’t like it here, but Marion’s in the room and she starts telling Linda how difficult it is for women of my age to adjust and takes her to one side and starts whispering to her about my memory and the way I sees things and mostly telling her I’m going barmy without actually using the word. Well, I won’t have that, so I start making a fuss, calling her all the names. Linda just glazes over. I see her. She’s always been a bit of a milksop. She never stood up for herself when she was a kid, she was always the one got bullied. And well, she knows I never wanted to come here. I wanted to stay put. I didn’t want to come here at all and I was right, I’d have been better off at home.

Marion ushers her out of the room, saying that she’ll leave me to calm down. Now, they’ve both forgotten about Leon who’s sat quiet in the corner. I notice that he’s got a new haircut a bit like them skin heads used to have. Except it’s a newer style, he’s got some patterns cut into it. His dad (Linda’s ex-husband) was a black man so he’s half and half. Coffee and Cream I calls him. So he’s got this lovely curly hair, I’ve always liked Leon. I always get told off by Linda for spoiling him.

So I calls him over to where I’m sat. He’s a good lad is Leon, and he promises to come back with the razor (clippers he calls it) and do my head for me in return for a tenner and my not telling a soul who did it. He thinks this is the funniest gag ever and calls me a bad-ass – which he says is a good thing. I arrange for him to come back the next day when the food is being delivered for the kitchens, the doors get left open then and the staff are all busy with the lunch so he can sneak into my room no problem.

So Linda comes back to get him and Marion’s just standing in the doorway behind her and I can see her narrowing those wide baby-blues at me. So I give her my nicest smile and I ask Linda when she’s coming back, tell her I want to go out somewhere, maybe go to see the gee-gees or have a nice picnic like in the old days (below the belt that was – she once told me her favourite memories of being a kid was the picnics on the Downs). I’m almost begging my own daughter to take me out. That’s what it’s come to. Well, it’s not like any of the others come. Now my Andy, he’d have gone mad to see me in here, but then I never see any of the rest of ‘em, Linda’s the only one who makes the effort. She looks sad for a second, then doubtful and I see her look over to Marion, who’s shaking her head gently.

“Now Mrs Worth, you know you haven’t got the stamina for trips out anymore. You mustn’t go exciting yourself, dear. You should see her Mrs Johnson, she’ll be good for nothing for days after, and at her age being tired is dangerous, it’ll lower her resistance to bugs and germs.”

I feel like screaming. But I don’t I just thinks on tomorrow and the boy. As they leave I tip him the wink and he winks straight back. He’s got my blood in him alright. You have to take things one day at a time in this place I tell you. So I don’t dwell on Linda. It keeps getting back into my mind, but I don’t let it stop there long.

So the next day Leon slips in sweet as pie while I am in the lunch room and hides in my wardrobe. I cause a little fuss at lunch with the salt just so as they won’t suspect. Then I shuffle back off to my room grumbling. Nobody notices, they all think I’m upset about Annie, Mrs Holloway. She died the night before, in her sleep. Died of boredom if you ask me. I’ll tell you more about that later.

Anyhow, I put the telly on loud and Leon and me push the bureau across the door. Then he plugs in the clippers and I puts a ripped up bag around my neck. And he starts shaving me. It feels funny. I used to have such pretty hair, long and thick and chestnut coloured. I start thinking back over all the styles I’ve had over the years, the waves and the beehives and the crops and the curls and colours I’ve had it. I’ve never had a “number four all over” before.

Sooner than I know it and he’s finished, only one little nick and that aint even bleeding. Good lad. Takes after his father in that. So I give him twenty for doing a good job and a kiss on the cheek. He gives me a big hug. He helps me push the bureau back and I put my head round the door to give him the all clear, and he slips out again. I listen for a while to make sure he gets out okay, it’s lucky my room is so near the back door. And he’s as smart as a button.

The next day when Marion finds out, there’s merry hell to pay. She looks like she’s going to strangle me at one point, I tell her to go ahead, she backs off. I tell her that I did it so as she wouldn’t have to have the bother of brushing my hair. I rather like it I says, something a bit modern. She looked like she was going to have a blue fit, but in the end she just says “Fine”, all ominous like, and walks out of the room. That was the first time I really realised that she was out to get me.

She likes it quiet you see, she gives all the inmates little pills to take, she says they’re vitamins but I think they’re sleeping tablets or something, keeping us calm, subdued. There’s been three people die, since I got here. Mrs Holloway who I said earlier she was the first. Then there was Arthur in the next door room to me, Mr Frederick – supposedly a heart attack – from what? That’s what I want to know, nothing ever happens here, it’s enough to drive you mad. Then a bit later there was Bennie, oh, no, that wasn’t his real name, Bernard Morris. See, I might be 93 but I’ve still got all my marbles, I can still remember people’s names.

Anyhow, I’m getting ahead of myself. Where was I? Oh yes. so after my new hairdo, she starts with this little war of nerves with me. She won’t even speak directly to me anymore, she tells one of the other staff to tell me something, real loud, in front of me, like I was deaf. So I carry on with my usual tricks, but I start to get bored again after a while. I need something to occupy my mind you see. It’s all Richard and Judy and black and white films and jigsaws in here. It’s like hell and I aint dead yet.

So I starts planning an escape. So I decide what I need is to get a little bit of money together. So I ring Leon. I manage to persuade him to get me my bank cards off Linda and get me some cash out. Then I tell him to go to an old friend of mine who runs a stockbrokers, and he says, you don’t have to do that anymore Gran, you can just do it on the internet. Well, I didn’t know what he was talking about. So I got him to explain. It’s a good thing Linda gave me that portable phone when she thought it was getting too fragile for me to live on my own. I never mentioned it when I moved in here, and I keep it hidden in a shoebox for emergencies.

Leon explained to me about these computers. So I get him to read some of the FT indexes out to me down the telephone and register me up on one of these computers. I tells him what to buy and when to sell it. Marion knows I’m up to something by now. I can tell cos she keeps looking at me with her eyes all narrow and squinty (sometimes I tell her that’ll give her wrinkles, not that it’d make much difference with her complexion). And she’s clocked me looking at the financial pages on Ceefax when all the others have gone to sleep. And I think she’s guessed that I don’t take the pills she gives us all, but she aint worked out how I does it yet.

So me and Leon are doing great, we’ve made almost £7500, and then Linda gets the phone bill. I forgot that the portable was still registered to my house and so all the post gets sent on to her. So she comes in to talk about it, and doesn’t bring Leon she doesn’t know what he’s up to yet. She’s sat in the visitors lounge and Marion is just hovering about behind, eavesdropping as usual. So Marion catches what Linda is saying about the phone and comes bustling over.

“Oh, Mrs Johnson, I do apologise for interrupting, but are you talking about a mobile phone?” Linda nods. “Well, I’m very sorry, it should have been made clear when Mrs Worth moved in, we can’t allow them in here you know, they interfere with the medical equipment. I must ask that you take it away. There’s a phone in the TV Lounge that Mrs Worth can use whenever she likes. The bill just gets added to your account.” And she gives me this triumphant look cos she knows she’s just put paid to something, even if she’s got no idea of what I am up to. I knew she was lying because I always plugs it in where the telly usually goes, so I can’t have unplugged any medical equipment. So Linda confiscated my portable, and that was the end of that.

I wanted to make a little more money before I leave, so I stay quiet for a bit, thinking. Then one day I am watching this old war film on the telly, and there’s this spy using a code because the telephone was bugged. And that gives me what I need. I think up a code for the shares thing and send it off to Leon in a birthday card (not that it was his birthday for another five months, but she wasn’t to know that), and then I ring him on the phone where Marion can watch me like a hawk. I talks away all innocent about what’s happening to the characters in Eastenders and he can read down my list and know what to do with the shares. From what he tells me I reckon things are going quite well. We have a couple of losses on Breweries, always used to be a safe bet when I was younger, but we gets up to just over £12000 – I haven’t lost my touch, and these computers are great because you can set a reserve price you know. I’ll tell you all about it if you want to come back and visit once all this palaver is over.

The next stage of the great escape plan was harder though, I had to work out a way to get out. I have to admit I was a bit stuck with that for a while. And that was when Bennie died. And I figured I’d be next. It might sound far-fetched, but I knew how much she hated me, and if three people had died in the time I’d been there, and only one in the whole two years before that (I know, I checked) then I thought she might be working her way round to me. I mean Arthur was in the room next to me, Annie used to always talk to me at elevenses and while she was knitting, and Bennie would sometimes play me at Chess, and always escorted me to dinner. They were the three people closest to me.

So I wanted to hurry it on a bit, but it sounds like I might not have to after all? I mean, if she gets caught now, someone else will be in charge won’t they, and then I won’t be left to get bored anymore? And Leon can have the money I raised up to escape and it’ll all be alright? I can show you where she keeps the pills, you can check them nowadays can’t you? I’ve seen it on the telly. I watch a lot of crime shows when everyone else is asleep. I like the Crime Scene one best, the yank one. You must understand officer, it’s so dull here, it’s enough to drive me mad. This is the best chat I’ve had in ages.

Comments

[wulfboy.livejournal.com]

I was left wondering at the end exactly who was poisoning who, was that intentional?

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

Ambiguity completely intentional - I was wondering whether it was too subtle though.

[wulfboy.livejournal.com]

I could imagine the woman as Jessica Fletcher, deftly relying on her little old lady routine to set up another patsy for the electric chair as she fights the tide of old age by murdering young people.

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

Who's Jessica Fletcher?

[wulfboy.livejournal.com]

"Murder she Wrote" woman, played by Angela Lansbury. A modern Miss MArple in her earlier series. Commonly the butt of jokes about her secret homocidal tendencies in a (usually) low-grade "murder of the week" format. The theory is that she murders people, and then creates utterly plausible cases against innocent men and women who take the fall for her. Makes watching the program much more fun if you do it with this in mind.