Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Read online

  Joe’s eyes always slithered away from official visitors in bored disdain. And just before Christmas, the giver of gifts smiled upon him. Joe stared back.

  “None for you, shithead,” said the guard. “You don’t think they’d let an animal like you loose at Christmas, do you?”

  Joe’s fist hit the desk like a jackhammer on bedrock. Get out of here, you asshole! he blazed, and spent Christmas in The Hole.

  “I hate those Steve McQueen movies,” said the bank robber who meditated. “Very irresponsible. They give young kids the idea that bank robbing is glamorous, just a joy-ride. It is not glamorous, it is hard and bitter work. I may have started young, but I can honestly say” – he said it with moral fervour – “that I never once did it for kicks. I only did it for the money.”

  “I have a favour to ask you,” said Jed.

  I had been dreading this, being asked to carry out letters or bring something in. But it wasn’t that. I must have been lucky. They never inflicted that decision on me.

  “It’s about Joe,” he said. “You know how he is. From cold start to karate in one second flat.”

  I had noticed this. You should figure out some intermediate steps for anger, I told him. Try grinding your teeth and clenching your fists first. It bums up some of the energy.

  That was after the episode of his chivalry. One of the drifters – those people not taking the course for credit but assigned to the school wing for some vague reason or other – had interrupted the class with a lewd joke. Joe had smiled softly and beckoned the drifter out of the room. He returned alone a few minutes later.

  “I gave him a little tap on the head,” he told me. “He’ll sleep it off in an hour or so. He shouldn’t have been disrespectful to you.”

  “Joe’s a good man,” said Jed. “But they have it in for him here because he assaulted a cop. I’m telling you this because he’s up for parole again and he has to stay cool. They keep turning him down. He hasn’t even been out on a day pass in five years. I’m just asking you as a special favour to avoid any mention of politics, philosophy, civil rights for queers, that kind of stuff, for a couple of weeks. Don’t stir up his head space, you know? He has to stay cool.”

  I promised. We had a quiet week. No word. No word. Joe skittish as an unbroken colt and still no word from his classification officer. At the end of a week, right in the middle of a discussion of Kafka’s Castle, he suddenly stood up and bellowed. Like a gored bull.

  And then he said in a quite normal voice: “It’s better to blow it and be done with it.”

  He blew it with style and with furious fist in the face of the guard who always said, “Keep your eyes off the lady there, you scum.”

  It must have been satisfying.

  “At least I was in control,” Joe told me after his spell in The Hole. “I didn’t wait sweating and grovelling for them.”

  “Why do you come here, anyway?” my class asked.

  “No choice. We tragic bloody humanists have problems with our esoteric educations, you see. At the moment my skills are about as useful in the job market as fluency in Latin.”

  “You mean you’re just doing it for the money?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, thank God. We were always afraid you had some goddamn humanitarian reason. Those kind of people make us nervous, you know?”

  “Why do you stay?” I asked a guard, one of the few who spoke with the enemy. (Me, that is. And the padres and such.) He had signed up, he said, when they were recruiting for a “better type” with college degree and idealism and compassion. What a laugh. The institution could only operate in black and white, he said. Grey got it from both sides. Get out, he said, while you’re still human. Don’t blame the staff for hating your guts though. You’re a real threat. You get taken hostage, it’s our lives on the line too.

  “But why do you stay?”

  “I stay because ten years in the Penitentiary Service does nothing for a résumé. This isn’t exactly a stepping stone to an executive career. I stay because at least it’s an income.”

  “Why do you do it?” asked another staffer bitterly. “You think you can reform them with culture? Or you just get your kicks out of making it with a hood?”

  “I need the money,” I said. “Can’t get anything else.”

  “Yeah?” he said, more kindly. “It bums me up, those shits getting a college education for free while I bust my guts and risk my life so that maybe my son can have one though his pa never did.”

  “Why do you do it?” asked my chiropractor.

  “I do it so I can pay your bills.”

  “If you quit that job,” he said, kneading the snarled nerves and muscles in my back and neck, “you wouldn’t need me.”

  Ultimately the decision was taken out of my hands. Couldn’t sign in. Emergency Conditions, they said at the desk. No one admitted until further notice.

  “How much further?”

  “Months probably.”

  “What happened?”

  “A stabbing, followed by the usual pandemonium.”

  I read the details in the evening paper. It was Jed, killed by Joe. Nothing but grief, baby.

  About six months later, I met a member of my class, out on parole.

  “Poor dumb Joe,” he said. “He never meant to hurt Jed, of all people. You know how he was. They say he’s been really weird ever since. Of course he was transferred right out to Maximum, but we get news. They say you wouldn’t recognise him. Shuffles around like a sad elephant. Smiles all the time, like old George. You remember old George, the window fixer? They say Joe’s like that. Except for when he gets mad again, of course.”

  “What happened?”

  “Joe got this letter, see, from his old lady. She’s going to have a baby and of course Joe hasn’t been outside for years. (Stupid dumb broad, why does she have to tell him?) Jed is going around telling everyone to give Joe space, give him time, let him be cool. And we’re in the showers, see, and we can actually hear Joe sobbing. At first everyone thinks it’s just the sound of the showers, but it has a different sound and it gets louder. Well everyone is minding his own business, and Joe is facing the wall close up to the shower, and Jed is giving everyone the hard look just in case, but then gradually the showers are turning off and Joe is consequently sounding louder. So I think Jed is planning to turn more showers back on, because he steps across near Joe and Joe just turns and bellows and stabs. Christ it was a mess with the showers and steam and fountains of blood and all.

  “You know,” he said. “The guys would like it if you’d write once in a while. Especially Joe probably. He always liked you, Joe did.”

  I would like to stop feeling guilty about never having written to Joe, or anyone inside. I should never have taken that job. At least, thank God, as Jed sometimes used to remind the class, I was only doing it for the money.

  Moving Out

  The day the sold sticker was pasted over the sign on the Hamiltons’ front lawn, Mrs Phillips realised what good neighbours they had been. The sticker and its iridescently orange four-letter word were askew, slanting downhill (everything would be downhill now, probably), dribbling gluey water across the realty company’s logo. What she was reminded of, suddenly and incongruously, was the sort of unwelcome wet kiss imprecisely smeared across the cheek by senile relatives.

  So it had really happened. What possible reason could the Hamiltons have for moving? Of course she would never ask. For a month the for sale sign had been on the lawn but she had simply discounted its reality. True, on the first day she had stared at it as though it were perhaps a pig with wings which had fluttered down on the lawn, but days had gone by and nothing had happened. She and the Hamiltons had exchanged good mornings as usual while picking up their newspapers from their front porches. No one mentioned the sign. Mrs Phillips had brushed it from her mind as one does the absurdities
of nightmares on waking.

  Sold.

  Now that they were going she felt that she would certainly invite the Hamiltons in for afternoon tea and seed-cake. She had been toying with the idea for a year or so, considering the proprieties, weighing costs and benefits. Such an overture would certainly have been quite inappropriate any earlier than the blizzard of two winters back. After the blizzard new dimensions of neighbourliness had become possible, although one had to be careful never to rush things.

  The blizzard had brought Mr Hamilton to her very door, blinking the crust of icicles from his lashes, struggling through the whiplash of white that funnelled down between their houses, pulling his way through the drifts by means of a rope he had thrown across to her porch. She had heard the thud of the grappling hook and had thought: the tree has gone. But it had been Mr Hamilton.

  Did she need any firewood? Any dried milk? Any flour or yeast? Of course she had a safe supply of all these things. She had lived through her share of bad winters. She did not take chances. But she had been deeply moved by his concern, had invited him in for hot tea before he made the return journey. He had thanked her and declined, heading straight back to Mrs Hamilton who was under ambush from arthritis.

  They had never been inside one another’s houses, though it had come close to that as the blizzard lashed its tail across the tenth day. It had come close to that for all of them, for the Cotters on her north side and for Mrs Watts across the street. It had almost come to pooling firewood and oil and all moving into just one of their houses (whose would they have chosen?). But the police and the army had made the rounds with snowmobiles and emergency supplies before such an alarming experiment had become necessary.

  Afterwards there had been a different feeling among them all, a certain confidence of kinship, not to be abused or taken advantage of, but definitely there. Any time since the blizzard it would probably have been possible to invite the neighbours in if she could have thought of the proper way to go about it. She did not want to be crass and forward and organising in the manner of all these new professional youngsters – doctors and lawyers and college professors – who were filling up the city like so many dandelions taking over a flawless lawn; young people who insisted on referring to the city as “the town”; who flitted off to Toronto and Montreal on weekends like seed puffs to a weed patch; who held incessant dinner parties where one was required to make conversation with people one had no particular desire to meet.

  No. She did not want to impose herself. She had to be careful. She was a newcomer herself. It was scarcely six years since she had bought the house.

  A newcomer and not a newcomer.

  She belonged. She understood what was expected. She had been born in a house just a few blocks away. From her upstairs window she could see the school she had attended. But then she had gone away to the great cities herself, had left for university and marriage and children and her life.

  The children had grown up and set out on their own odysseys.

  Widowhood had fallen greyly across her days like a shade pulled down by someone else’s hand.

  Life is circular, she thought, and decided to return to her roots. She used the insurance money to buy a rambling house in her own part of the city, the old ward of tree-lined streets, of limestone and brick houses, of gables and turrets and gracefully corniced doorways. It was the right sort of city in which to be a widow.

  “Good grief, Mother!” protested her son who was a banker close to the pulses of power. Her quaint ancestral urge irritated him. “What on earth do you want to rattle around in a vast house like that for? The maintenance will bankrupt you. If you must move so inconveniently far away from us, what you need is a condominium on the lake front. Or if you insist on history, one of those little stone cottages on lower Earl Street. That’s much more suitable for a … you know, for someone at your stage of life.”

  But Mrs Phillips wanted graciousness and privacy. She did not want to share her stairwell with other people or to own only one side of a wall. She wanted a garden big enough for lilacs and a crab apple, with a little stone path between rose bushes. She wanted the right sort of living-room for her harpsichord.

  “Well,” her son conceded huffily, “you can always take in student boarders on the top floor, I suppose. Fortunately you’re walking distance from the university, and location is the name of that game, you know.”

  “Oh yes,” she said mildly.

  Her son’s work had much to do with games and gambits. She had always felt that this sort of thing was best left to the men of the family. They invariably worked something out; or rather, perhaps, matters of property and finance invariably worked themselves out. It was really a little vulgar to speak of such details even in the family, though these days, heaven knew, there were people who spoke as casually about money as they did about sex. Mrs Phillips was glad to set a hedge of bridal wreath between herself and such discourse.

  The sold sticker leered at her like a lapse in decorum.

  Perhaps the new neighbours would be a young assistant professor with a wife and small children. The wife would undoubtedly be doing a master’s degree in something or other and would be an aggressive conversationalist and an insistent inviter-in of neighbours. They would be the kind of people who believed in the triumphant public articulation of certain anatomical words. Penis, vagina, penis, vagina, their playful toddlers would chant to approving parental smiles. Mrs Phillips had known the type in the big cities. She had hoped to escape them. She herself failed to see any intrinsic merit in calling a garden tool a spade.

  But it might be much worse than that. The house might become a rabbit warren for students, with a landlord cramming bodies into every loophole in the zoning by-laws.

  Mrs Phillips had to sit down.

  In the past year the houses on either side of Mrs Watts, who lived opposite, had been converted. It was as though a rowdy motor cycle had ripped through the still life of the neighbourhood, spattering it with mud.

  Mrs Phillips’ son said that property conversions in the area were a clear trend. It meant, he said, that his mother would get a good return on the house (“You sly old lady,” he said), but there would be an optimal time to sell before the neighbourhood slid into irreversible decline. It meant, he said, that she should reconsider the condominiums by the lake.

  It meant, Mrs Phillips did not attempt to explain, that homes with history and lineage were being turned into three-storey filing cabinets for young bodies, that spacious rooms were being mutilated with partitions, and high ceilings defiled with fibre- board tiles bulk-ordered from the Sears catalogue.

  It meant that enough was enough.

  “What exactly do you have against the condominiums?” her son had asked.

  “There are no mouldings around the door-frames.”

  “That is a frivolous reason,” her son said, to which she had no answer.

  “If it’s peace and privacy you want, you’ll have less and less of it here,” he pointed out.

  It was true. All summer the weekend tranquillity had been desecrated by student parties, the streets untidy with Frisbees and footballs and young men and women wearing suntans and fragments of clothing.

  Everyone’s front lawn and bushes had suffered. Mrs Watts had done a lot of shouting and waving her cane; Mr and Mrs Cotter had sat in canvas chairs on their front porch, watching and sighing; but Mrs Phillips, who was a little distressed by all that dazzling flesh, had responded by leaving the storm windows on even through the hottest weeks to blunt the noise. She had retreated to her living-room and her harpsichord. Once a football, horribly poised for several seconds, had stared at her through the double glass as though astounded by the tonal arrangements of Telemann. Mrs Phillips had played diligently on through the discordant fracturing of her forsythia.

  The sold sign appeared to her now as a score-board prophesying a siege of football games. She turne
d away from it and went to her writing desk. On her own embossed stationery she penned warmly worded little notes of invitation and delivered them herself to the Hamiltons, who were leaving; to the Cotters on her northern side; and to Mrs Watts who had said often enough that the only way she would leave the house opposite was in a box.

  “We should have done this years ago,” said Ada Watts, easing herself down between her canes. The sofa received her body, following the last few unexpectedly rapid inches of descent, with a soft slurp of surprise. “It takes a crisis. That’s what my Harold used to say.”

  “Your Winston,” corrected Mrs Cotter.

  “My what?” Ada Watts cupped her ear toward the speaker.

  “Your Winston,” Mrs Cotter repeated, cranking her voice up a few notches. “Harold was your brother.”

  “Both of them,” said Ada Watts with dignity. After fifteen years of widowhood, the confusion seemed to her irrelevant. A petty point. The kind Bessie Cotter had never been known to let slip. “Both of them used to say it. My Harold and my Winston. It takes a crisis.”

  “In the midst of life …” said Mr Cotter sombrely.

  There was a silence.

  “Well, of course, people have a right to their privacy” – Ada Watts was looking pointedly at the Hamiltons – “but I always say, if you can’t confide in your friends …” Ada Watts came from a family which had lived in the town for generations; consequently she never needed to bother herself about other people’s rules. She wore tweeds, though the last of her horses had been sold years ago, before Harold or Winston or whoever had died. She hitched one leg up over the other with casual inelegance to expose a large fish-pale bulge of thigh above her garter. Mrs Phillips looked away quickly; Arthur Cotter stared with undisguised interest.

  “I never pry into other folks’ business.” Mrs Watts’ thigh, coming to an arrangement with the sofa, stressed her point.

  “Nobody wants to move, we all know that,” Bessie Cotter offered helpfully.

  The Hamiltons knew they were under siege; that reasons were called for.