Gorphwysfa #2
We’re interrupted by howling and rattling from the far side of the room.
Silas is thrashing against his chains, chattering in some gibberish language of his own invention, his bed frame creaking as if it might crack into splinters at any moment.
I half expect Armitage to return and calm him, so I clam up, but his fit is left to burn itself out and the screaming eventually simmers down to grunts and whimpers in the darkness.
My neighbor, Eddie, doesn’t speak again.
* * *
Allan concedes the care home isn’t so bad once he’s got used to it.
They kindly sponged out the tea stain from the carpet where he’d knocked his cup over, and they showed him how he could turn the lights on just by clapping.
It feels like such a miracle at first that he sits in the chair clapping his hands over and over, watching the lights flash on and off like a boy with a new toy.
There’s an emergency button, too, if he should need help again.
If it wasn’t for the ever-present smell of bleach, even in his bedroom, he’d almost feel at home.
He finds the cut as he’s performing his ablutions one morning, the air in the bathroom thick with the smell of hairspray and shaving foam.
It’s on the underside of his arm, almost reaching his armpit, a two-inch gash that has bled during the night and soaked through his pajamas.
It’s dry now, a thick, dark crust that sticks the cotton to his skin.
When he peels it away the wound reopens, blood welling like scarlet beads along the incision.
He has no idea when or how he did it. He’s been absent-minded lately, but he’d remember that, surely? It’s almost deep enough to require stitches. He can’t think when his arm might have been close to anything sharp enough to cause a wound like this.
The bleeding is slow to stop, a side-effect of the statins he takes for his blood pressure, so he balls up some toilet paper and holds it under his arm to soak up the flow.
Checking the bed, there’s a palm-sized Rorschach blot where it’s seeped through his pajamas in the night.
He’s embarrassed by the stain, like a teenage girl on the rag, and he bundles the sheet and pajamas into the washing machine with a double dose of powder.
They wash the sheets for the residents once a week.
The last thing he wants is for them to start asking questions.
He’s late heading down to the common room, and they’ve already cleared away the morning tea and biscuits.
Two old men he doesn’t recognize occupy the chairs closest to the TV, their mouths slack as they doze in tandem to the news of a suicide bomber in the Middle East. At the back of the room Phyllis, his neighbor, is doing needlepoint.
Her head bobs up and down as her fingers work, her mouth open in concentration, and a voice in his head says that she looks like she’s performing fellatio.
He flushes with embarrassment, and is about to turn and leave when she calls to him.
“You’re late this morning, Allan. Sleep badly?”
He can’t walk out without seeming rude, so he perches on the edge of the chair opposite.
“I slept okay, but the funniest thing—I found this cut on my arm this morning. No idea how I did it, and the damned thing wouldn’t stop bleeding.”
She stops what she’s doing and stares, as if he’s just shared a story about his bowel movements. He doesn’t know why he told her, it just came out.
“Anyway,” he continues, “it’s fine now. I guess that’s why we’re living here. We’re old, and these things happen.”
Phyllis Brewster stares at him for a moment longer, then shakes her head and returns to her needlepoint.
“It’s probably nothing,” she says, “but you might ask one of the nurses to check it out. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind. Before it becomes anything else.”
He doesn’t know what she means, and he’s embarrassed to ask.
When it’s clear the conversation’s over, he stands and shuffles back to the cocoon of his flat.
Checking in the mirror, the cut has started weeping again, and he has to change his shirt.
He sits topless in his living room, toilet paper balled under his arm, as he sips tea from a china cup.
* * *
Eddie’s cage is at the far end of the room from mine.
I suspect Armitage did that on purpose, to keep our minds on the work.
Back-breaking work it is too, swinging that hammer over and over, the way it jars your elbow when it connects with the rocks head-on.
They’re big, the pile he gave me, some of them the size of my head or larger.
I have to work on them one at a time, cracking them through then taking aim with the hammer at the smaller chunks, over and over.
Swing, crack . Swing, crack .
By lunchtime I’ve managed to get a few of them down to gravel-sized nuggets that I post through the holes in the cage, a tiny pile growing on the other side.
Only when my heap is deemed high enough will Armitage let me out for the day.
By my reckoning it’ll be three days at least before it’s all broken down small enough to fit through.
Eddie’s pile is already a couple of feet high, and he only has a few fist-sized chunks left to work on. He weren’t lying when he said he should be done today. There’s a tiredness to his swings that comes after three days of hard labor, but he’ll be finished before the sun sets.
We speak at lunch, when Armitage lets us out of the cages and hands us each a wedge of bread and a slice of hard cheese. Mine’s dried solid around one edge, so I have to chip away at it with my teeth. It’s almost as much work as the rock-breaking.
Once Armitage has loped off, Eddie lowers his voice. There’s fear in his eyes, for sure.
“Never been to the pesthouse myself,” he says, like our conversation last night never ended, “not been here long enough. But Adam will tell you all sorts of stories. He’s seen it all.”
I’ve seen a few pesthouses in my time, from outside and in.
Nasty places they are, a wormery of contagion and rot.
For many who walk through their doors, they’re the last resting place.
You’re left to cough and sweat and vomit in your own filth, out of sight and out of mind, with only the barest rations to help you cling on to life.
No master wants to waste good food on a walking corpse.
I was sent to one in Bristol with a rattle in my lungs, and I barely walked out of there after two weeks. I still recall the taste of decay.
“They have many folks in there right now?” I ask, around the wad of bread in my mouth. I don’t want to stay in a plague-ridden workhouse a day longer than I have to.
Eddie shakes his head. “Just one. I hear he’s been there longer than anyone knows. Years, maybe. Before even Armitage came here.” Then he stands and brushes the crumbs from his front. “Best get back to it now, if I want to leave today.”
They release Eddie that evening after supper.
The meat soup isn’t all bad—there’s actual meat in it, and no maggots I can see—and he eats with the rest of us, a broad smile on his face.
I’d seen him break the last of his pile, scooping up the gravel with his palms and feeding it through the grid.
He banged the sides of the cage with his mallet then, and let out a whoop like he’d just inherited a fortune.
Armitage comes to get him after the bowls have been cleared, arms swinging at his sides like the man’s made of straw.
Eddie gathers his few belongings into a piece of sacking then ties it off at the top.
The resulting bundle’s smaller than his head.
When he passes my bed he slows up, lets Armitage get a few strides ahead, then rummages in his pocket and hands me something.
It’s hard in my palm and heavy, but I can’t look at it right away, not when Armitage might turn around at any moment.
My hand slides under my pillow, depositing whatever it is for later.
I wait until the door has slammed shut and their footsteps have retreated down the corridor before pulling it out.
It’s one of the stones he’d been breaking—or part of it, anyway.
A thin sliver of flint the size of my palm, triangular and sharpened to a wicked point.
I run my thumb down the edge and it traces a thin red line through the pad.
I don’t know why he has given me this. It is a weapon, that much is clear.
I bury it back beneath my pillow, but where I can reach it, should I need to.
It’s getting dark when Armitage returns. I’m staring at the wall, picking a sinewy strand of meat from between my teeth with my fingernail. It’s not me he’s come for, though. He lopes straight to Silas’s bed, a bunch of keys dangling from his finger.
“Up with you. Time for your wash.”
He strips him there in the room with me and Adam.
No space for privacy in the workhouse, we all know that.
Silas can barely stand unaided, and Armitage has to twist and tug at his shirt to lift it over that great misshapen head of his.
I half expect him to start fighting back, it looks so like the pair of them is wrestling, but the boy is docile and cowed throughout.
I’m guessing he learned the hard way not to fight.