From the first day he arrived at the Tranquil Moments Nursing Home, Mr Jeremy Petricevic was nothing but trouble.
Into the bleached air and palliative hush of the hallway, he had burst like a jetboat, trailing sound and fuss. His wheelchair was constantly veering into the pale-pink walls with a soft thunk. He winked proficiently at the receptionist, and spoke to her in an angular foreign language; but when addressed, he stared immovably at his interlocutor with an ill-concealed sneer.
Initially, it was assumed these infractions were nothing more sinister than the symptoms of advanced decline. Then they had located the contraband. Nested in his cherry-red suitcase like a glowing, translucent golden egg: a bottle of whisky, reclining on a bed of cigarettes.
The manager, Wayne, narrowed his eyes in alarm. The staff stood around uncomfortably, staring at their sensible shoes as the silence rose like a tide. Mr Petricevic watched with disinterest, humming a dark minor air, as his sins were extracted, dangled, itemised. At length, he emitted a long, querulous fart.
Wayne, who had a nose for insurrection, saw at once that this diminutive, veiny specimen represented a threat.
“He’s trouble,” he summarised, resting one of the confiscated cigarettes on his gently sloping belly. He watched the youths playing basketball in the barren carpark, the high brick fence beyond. “You’re gonna have to keep him in shape, Lynn. Think you’re up to it?”
Lynn smiled stiffly and ground her cigarette carefully into the asphalt with the white toe of her sneaker. “He’s 70,” she pointed out curtly. “And terminally ill. It’s not really a fair fight.”
Nevertheless, she was on guard. She smacked the folded bedsheets firmly with one pudgy hand, to chase out any lingering dust; she pulled a loose lock of hair sternly behind her ear. In the thirty years that Lynn had worked at the Home, none of her slight, papery clients had so much as dented her record of immaculate discipline. It was a matter of pride.
At home things were different. Poor Samuel knew the rules, but was incapable of respecting them; his clutter grew haplessly, like a persistent moss. Tabitha, at 14, was worse; recently, when angered, she had started leaving dirty saucepans in Lynn’s bed, knowing this was the most upsetting and confusing invasion imaginable. Friends remarked on the bright cleanliness of her home, her meticulously scrubbed floor. But this was usually due to a kind of reverse hurricane: damp towels, piled circulars, bent garden forks, mud-hemmed shoes rose from their places, whirled down the hall, slumped in a panicked pile in the cupboard under the stairs.
So the Home was Lynn’s haven. Its neat drawers opened to reveal not chaos, but yet more order: labelled things, piled and folded into squares. The only sound was the rustle of starched sheets, and an underlay of laboured nasal breathing; the waking sleep of the old and ill.
As she reached Room 6, she paused and frowned in alarm. Something was amiss. She cocked her head, incredulous: was she imagining it?
No – there was music coming from his room: soft, classical, wandering naively into the hallway like a child blithely unaware of transgression.
She strode in and saw Mr Petricevic sitting quietly on his bed, alert. His eyes were a piercing blue. They nestled under his prominent brows like two cagey shellfish, shielded by twin tufts of lichen.
She scanned the room and immediately located the culprit: a small red portable tape deck, sitting on the bedside table. She stalked over and snapped it off. The flute ceased to soar; only the hum of the radiator remained. His eyes remained brightly on hers. He cocked his head slightly to one side, as if listening hopefully.
“Mr Petricevic. That’s far too loud,” she hissed. She gestured exaggeratedly in the direction of the walls: “No noise after seven. That’s the rules. People need to sleep.”
He nodded docilely. The soft feathery hair on his head was entirely white, light as dandelion spores. His stare was beginning to unnerve her.
She fidgeted with her watch-strap behind her back. “Well, now another of the rules,” she said, firmly, “is that every day you have your bath. Usually in the morning. But the times will vary” – she drew this word out, for some reason – “due to changes in my schedule.” She pointed at it, pinned to the bare wall: a pale blue grid of days.
He glanced at it in silence. She bustled the wheelchair in from the hallway, pushing it before her like a battering ram, then threw a yellow towelling robe beside him on the bed and began undressing him in a practised, summary fashion.
Mr Petricevic cleared his throat delicately, a small dry sound. “Lynn.”
She looked up with a start, alarmed.
“You are wearing a name badge, on your left breast pocket,” he explained.
“Oh I see,” she said, inanely, glancing at the badge as if to confirm it was indeed there, and because this made her feel stupid, she was driven to remove his shoes particularly aggressively.
“In the ordinary course of things, I am sure you would have introduced yourself to me,” Mr Petricevic assured her, as she began to unbutton his shirt. His voice was low and mellifluous, an improbable sound from such a thin and wizened vessel. “But for my indiscretion involving Mr Mahler. In any case, Lynn, although I am both old and dying, I am in at least some respects physically capable. So unless you are particularly enjoying derobing me in this way – and I pass no judgment if that is indeed the case – I am very happy to do so myself.”
She was unable to prevent her lower lip from falling slightly open.
“I see in your face no pleasure whatsoever,” he went on, enjoying himself, “and so I will assume I may remove my own trousers.” His mauve, pinched fingertips began fumbling with his buttons. She watched, arms folded, face thunderous: Trouble,she thought grimly.
After a moment he paused in his efforts. “Lynn,” he said affably, “would you mind terribly stepping out into the hallway?” He wriggled out of his trousers. “I wouldn’t dare turn the music back on – I simply want some privacy.”
She shook her head No.
“It seems I have been declared some kind of moderate security threat,” Mr Petricevic mused, catching a toe in one hem, extracting it by dint of several frenetic, avian kicks. “That is somewhat entertaining, since you are about to put me in a wheelchair.”
He put a thumb in the powder-blue waistband of his boxers. A taut moment passed. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to at least turn your back?” His gaze was chilly.
She huffed, turned around. “I don’t know who this Mr Mahler is, but there had better not be any funny business on my shift,” she said crossly. She felt flustered. Sometimes Tabitha came home drunk, past curfew, blithely unfazed by Lynn’s rage; this was the same terror, the same sudden impotence.
Mr Petricevic, yellow-robed, whistled softly as she wheeled him down the hall. His crabbed finger tapped a driving, relentless rhythm on the armrest.
She settled him in the bath, stepped back. “I suppose you would also like to bathe yourself, Mr Petricevic?” she said sarcastically.
His eyes glinted wickedly. “I have never refused a sponge bath, Lynn, and I do not intend to begin now.”
She shrugged carelessly, only slightly betrayed by a light flush to her cheeks. For a moment she looked younger than her 45 years. An irresistible thought struck her: in his prime, Mr Petricevic must have been a handsome man.
Garrulous as he had been, he chose to stay silent. He observed her through the steam as she scrubbed his feet, freckled with age and doubly creased from the bathwater.
At last, when she rolled him to his room, he spoke again.
“Lynn?”
She turned. In the half-dark, small ribs of streetlight lacing his prone form, his bright eyes were fastened on her. One hand was playing arpeggios on the soft felty ridges of the bedspread.
“Shall we listen to some music next bathtime?”
Waspishly: “I told you, Mr Petricevic, people need their sleep.”
They both contemplated, for a moment, the absurdity of what she had just said.
“You don’t think your patients might enjoy it?” he asked, timidly. Anxiety welled in her throat, bringing no glib answer with it.
“Goodnight, Mr Petricevic,” she muttered, and gently closed the door.
“Are you trying to slough off my wrinkles, my dear?” Mr Petricevic complained, as they began another bath together. “I assure you, they go all the way to my core. Like a thumbprint. I am old and tired to the bone.”
The faint strains of Brahms were rising along with the steam. The tape deck had been secreted in Mr Petricevic’s bathrobe, and installed (surprisingly deftly) while she turned away to locate the soap. At Lynn’s glare he had explained, in a high and oddly desperate tone, that he had conducted a careful investigation into the architectural layout of this wing, and had ascertained that the bathroom shared no walls – “not one, Lynn” – with other patients’ rooms. She had given way almost immediately to his implacable logic, finding herself strangely reluctant to unplug its cheery red form.
“You don’t seem particularly tired to me,” she said ironically. The hot water was staining her hands an affronted pink.
He smiled sadly. “It is all relative, isn’t it? I was quite energetic in my finer days. Before I met my wife.”
Lynn snorted disapprovingly, attacked the space between his toes.
“I miss that feeling,” he declared. “Don’t you?”
“What feeling?”
“The feeling of being young. The unshakable belief that one had nine lives to spare. That one could get away with anything: that every lapse in judgment would pass downstream and be gone, instead of eddying continually about causing trouble.”
“Perhaps you should have been a poet,” Lynn said crossly, pausing to wipe the suds from her sleeve.
He eyed her balefully. “Perhaps I was.”
She wanted to ask, but didn’t. Instead she began on his wiry legs.
She was unaccustomed to bathing a coherent adult. Most of her charges had regressed to the point that they took infantile pleasure in their own nudity: sloshing happily in the milky water, smiling at the sight of their breasts or testicles bobbing like sad, deflated buoys. But Mr Petricevic was clearly not beyond some sense of dignity, and this made the task of supervising his bath at once painfully awkward and strangely intimate.
Eventually he leaned in, said in a confidential tone: “I was in the air force. I flew all over the world. Cairo, Saigon, Buenos Aires – I loved it. Ah, the women – the friends I made, the mischief we had.” Lynn stiffened with disapproval.
“I crashed my plane in the desert. Like a sort of Croatian Petit Prince.” His French accent was impeccable. He shook his head ruefully, reclined again. “After my accident I had to retrain as an engineer. Horribly boring, by comparison. I never wrote poetry,” he concluded thoughtfully.
She thought, angrily: Errors and their consequences, huh? You men think a bloody plane crash qualifies? She was being too fierce on his bony chest, its skeletal hollows and ridges evoking the death he was trudging towards.
He smiled sadly. “Do you know why I am here, Lynn?”
She frowned. “Cancer,” she said uncomfortably, as if by mentioning its name she was taking its side.
“I am here,” he said firmly, “because of a perceived wrong.”
“Meaning?”
He paused. “I had a private nurse at home, at first. Nessie,” he smiled. “We got along very well.” He cleared his throat. “Indeed, we began to get along rather better than my wife would like.”
Lynn gaped at him, incredulous.
“She thought she saw the recurring symptoms of an old habit,” he explained, delicately. “So she has moved me in here.”
She shook her head grimly, scrubbing again: You are all the same.
“I have loved many women,” he conceded, slightly defensively, “but only ever one at a time.”
“I’m not your priest,” she snapped. “I’m just giving you a bath.” She ground the sponge into his underarm hair, making it stand upright in soapy fright. A cold inexplicable rage was uncoiling in her viscera.
“Oh come now Lynn, you appear to be human. Did disobedience never tempt you? It should have. It feels naughty and wonderful.” He grinned.
“I didn’t much like the consequences,” she retorted, sharply and too loud.
His eyes met hers, curious, and she knew she had snapped on his lure, like a too-eager trout. Her heart drummed angrily. “None of your beeswax, Mr Petricevic.”
After a moment he reclined his head, closed his eyes. “You are quite right, Lynn. I am prying. Our relationship is a professional one. I should enquire only after your family and health and inanities like that. It is just that I am dying, and I like to talk. From our short acquaintance I have gleaned that you are anxious that rules be obeyed. I was simply trying to determine the genesis of that particular trait, that’s all.”
She lifted him unceremoniously from the bath, wrapped him in a towel, rolled him to his room in silence. She felt exposed, unsettled: as though the floorboards of the Home had begun imperceptibly to tilt.
She watched stony-faced as he struggled into his bed, eventually gaining the thin mattress with a rheumatic wheeze. Eventually, she thought, one cold, steely October day, new buds would shiver on the oak outside, and his bedsheets would be crisp and empty. She saw her stocky form reflected in the window, and thought: You horrible woman.
“Lynn?”
She flicked out the light and walked stiffly out the door, towing the wheelchair behind her.
Their last bath passed almost entirely without conversation. They listened to Janacek (Lynn having carefully failed to notice the pregnant profile of Mr Petricevic’s lap, on arrival) and she sponged in silence.
Finally, as she was preparing to drain the water, he leant forward. “Lynn.”
“Yes?”
He glistened contritely. “I’m sorry for what I said last time.”
She nodded, and avoided his gaze. He was treading carefully, painstakingly.
“Lynn – I’m sorry if I touched a nerve.”
They looked at each other in the meek winter light: one taut as a bow drawn back, the other soft and ambiguous as a mushroom.
Then, for a reason that she could never later identify, she said just this:
“When I was 16.”
A small leaked trickle of truth. She stared at her knuckles, knotted with wear. He furrowed his brow and waited. The violins swelled, filled the arid air with promise.
Suddenly, inexplicably, it welled up in staccato bursts: her darkest mistake, its long eddies, buried even from Samuel and Tabitha. A schoolgirl crush, a hasty tryst; her naïve joy at being touched, found beautiful. His wife. The inexorable expansion of Lynn’s young, fertile belly. Her parents’ disloyal rage; her tiny daughter’s impossibly soft hair. Banishment, bloodied hospital sheets, and papers to sign.
At the end she sat slumped, devoided. Somehow, without moving his thin lips or his pale, finely-veined cheeks, he conveyed the barest hint of a smile. “There is nothing wrong with pleasure, Lynn,” he said softly. “Somewhat contrary to the prevailing view.”
The grief in her throat did not permit speech. Her sight shimmered with hot, unprofessional tears.
“Do you know where she is?”
“Yes.” Her cheeks were flooding: self-control in rags around her feet.
“How old is she?”
“36.”
“Have you met her?”
She gulped. “No.”
He cleared his throat, delicately. “Has she tried?”
“No.”
Gently – “Are you disappointed about that?” A pause; his blue eyes were shimmering. “Or relieved?”
Lynn capitulated, started to cry. “Both,” she sobbed, brokenly. Salty rivulets converged at her chin, dripped into the greying bathwater.
“She’s just got married,” she added, as an afterthought, staring at her thick ankles, the ruins of her young body.
Tentatively, he placed a damp hand on her shoulder. She did not move. The soapy water soaked into her mint-coloured smock. She bowed her head, slowly, until their foreheads just touched.
They sat together in silence until the tape wound to a close. For a moment neither moved; the red stereo hunched mute beside them. She touched its cold plastic edges, as if brushing off dust. Then she yielded, gently: turned the tape, pressed Play.