Looking for Mrs Dextrose (38 page)

Dad shook his head.

Peel sensed blood. “Ever climbed the Herringbone Glacier and made love to a lady at the top?”

“As if he has!” mocked Hoath.

“I bloody have!” said Peel.

“I was going to say…” I began, but they talked over me.

“We, however – that is, Mr Reculver, Mr Chislet and I – have climbed the Herringbone. Indeed, we have been all over Antarctica.” Hoath paused for effect. “And we
never saw you there.”

“No doubt I was there at a different time!” snapped Peel.

“Why, when were you there?” demanded Hoath.

“You first.”

“No, you!”

Reculver clicked his fingers to gain my attention. “They always have this row,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling.

Peel heard him. “Reculver think he’s above the debates,” he said to me. “But he’s not. He and I once argued for three days over who was first to ascend the
Matterhorn on one leg.”

“Hopping, really,” Reculver explained.

“Yes, who first had hopped up the Matterhorn,” said Peel.

I couldn’t help asking, “
What’s the point of that?
”

It sounded as though everyone in the room had drawn a breath. “‘What’s the point of that?’ Mr Chislet?” Hoath said to Chislet, who was yet to speak.

“What a curious question, Mr Hoath,” Reculver agreed.

“The boy’s green,” said Peel, for once on their side.

I noticed that Dad remained silent. I had never seen him so overwhelmed.

“Yes, what’s the point?” I reiterated.

Peel guffawed falsely. “You clearly know nothing of exploration, young man. Exploration is all about firsts. He who is second makes not a footnote in the history books. Tell me, who was
the second man on the moon?”

“Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin,” I replied, having boyishly devoured the Apollo missions.

“Ah,” went Peel. “Bad example. Alright, who was the second man to travel around England with a turbot?”

That one got me. “I’ve no idea,” I said.

“Precisely my point,” he said. “I, on the other hand, was the first.”

“Really?” I went, knowing it would wind him up.

“He makes them up!” scoffed Hoath.

Peel ignored him. “The boy’s an ignoramus!” he spluttered, and began ranting, counting off the exploits on his fingers: “I was the first to slide on a tea tray down Nanga
Parbat; the first to circumnavigate Grantham on a spacehopper; the first to survive being forcibly defenestrated from an ice breaker in Antarctica; the first…”

As he rambled on, Reculver addressed me once again. “You know, we call her
Nurse Death
.”

“Yes, I thought that might be the case.”

“Oh,” he said, and looked downcast. “That’s a shame. That was one of mine.”

“
WHAT IS THIS NOISE?
” Nurse D’eath was standing in the doorway that led to the residents’ bedrooms, surveying the scene, simmering.

Everyone fell silent. Kenneth John Peel tottered back to his chair in the corner.

“
Visiting time is over, the younger Mr Dextrose,
” she announced pointedly. “
And you… heathens will go to bed early. With no supper.
”

I shook Dad’s hand formally for some reason.

“I’ll be back,” I told him.

I had arranged with Robin Botham to take the room above the Dog & Duck. It was mutually beneficial and I had never believed in ghosts: as far as I was concerned, Mrs
Dextrose would not be coming back, not in any shape or form. It was time to move on.

When I arrived back there, I was shocked to discover that the lodgings had been cleared out. The bookshelves and wardrobe were empty, the sewing machine gone, the pictures and postcards, too.
The walls were bare. The beds had been stripped down to their linen and the top of the dressing table cleared. I checked the drawers, knowing that I would find nothing.

Dad’s wishes, no doubt, though the sparseness, the sudden removal of all that personality, made me feel very alone. There had always been someone around, barring loo breaks, during my
recent travels – whether I had desired the company or not. Now it was just me.

I would have to make the place my own, I decided, and made a mental note to find some sea-faring scenes for the walls.

The next day I visited Dad again, worried for his sanity in that gothic asylum. As it turned out, he seemed fine. Chipper, even. He’d just had his lunch –
“Minking pasty and minking chips” – and that morning had attended his first therapy session with Nurse D’eath, which he said had helped him release some of the tension
accumulated over the previous weeks.

The old boys then argued over which of them had undertaken the most death-defying adventure; Dad felt settled enough to join in occasionally and, to my mind, won with his tale of shark-baiting
with a gangrenous big toe off the Lesser Barrier Reef. Not that I’d ever heard the story before, which made me doubt its veracity.

Hoath then tipped Wilmington-Hovis out of his meerschaum bath-chair and everyone laughed – bar Chislet, who seemed to exist in a trance. (An odd cove, I wondered what on earth use he had
been to Reculver and Hoath on their expeditions.)

It was all rather jovial, until the nurse appeared and demanded to know who was responsible for depositing Wilmington-Hovis onto the floor. The mood in the room changed, as if blanketed in
frost. Nerves tautened. When no one owned up, Nurse D’eath advanced upon Hoath and he cowered in his armchair, holding up his forearms before his face.

I left soon afterwards.

Back home I began writing up my own travels, longhand in a notebook – following in Harrison Dextrose’s literary footsteps for a change. The process went so well
that I decided to invest in a typewriter – which felt more romantic than a word processor, better suited to the spirit of my words – and headed out shopping. I found one eventually, an
old Remington, the size and weight of a small pig, in a charity shop.

Afterwards, the noise of seagulls squawking lured me to the seafront: a shingle beach, stretching out either way as far as the eye could see, dotted with hardy folk dressed up against a
meaningful wind, staring at the breakers. One fool was out swimming, their white bathing cap being eyed by a floating tern.

I also saw the pier for the first time in more than a quarter of a century. The design of it rang no bells, not even a tiny tinkle, perhaps because it was so bare and uncommercial; no candy
floss nor amusements. It was, however, very, very long: an awful lot of planking raised a few metres above the sea surface, with a construction much like a bus shelter at the very end. A sign
beside it on the beach read:

No doubt Kenneth John Peel’s pier had beaten them to it.

I took a walk along it, to pass some time and to plan the coming weeks. It would be propitious, I decided, to settle down for a while after my recent travails. Take it easy. That would also keep
me close to my father, who needed me. Although I could afford to live off my inheritance for a good while to come, I planned to ask for part-time bar-work in the Dog & Duck, which should help
endear me to the locals. (And hopefully find a girlfriend.)

As I sat sheltering on the end of the pier, all alone and transfixed by the motion of the waves, a familiar sound drifted to my ears across the white horses.

‘Ting-ting!’ it went. ‘Ting-ting!’

In the coming weeks I developed a routine, visiting Dad on Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays, writing up my travels during my spare time, and working in the pub on Friday and
Saturday nights. The locals gradually took me into their confidence with tittle-tattle, and I began to feel at home in Dritt.

Most rewarding, I found, was getting to know the old gimmers in the Series of Gentlemen Home for Retired Explorers. What had initially looked like the near-death branch of one of John and
Yoko’s bed-ins, became more intriguing as my visits wore on.

Mr Reculver had the best sense of humour and was the most self-aware. He, Hoath and Chislet had teamed up back in the day when a tweed sock was deemed the Acme of snow-wear technology, and had
specialised in exploring the unknown nooks and crannies of the frozen Poles. Until one year their publisher bought them tickets to Benidorm as a treat, and they never looked back.

“Pilsbury, never explore Antarctica,” Reculver warned me. “It is perishing down there and penguins smell worse than you think.”

I assured him that I wouldn’t.

Hoath was rather the wind-up merchant, and the most boyish of the residents (which must be taken in context). He’d be the first to jump on one of Kenneth John Peel’s outrageous
exaggerations and, though it made me feel awkward, was the ringleader of the regular bullying of Mr Wilmington-Hovis.

Poor Mr W-H. He didn’t really say much – though still considerably more than Mr Chislet – and seemed to foster a persistent sense of injustice, trapped in his meerschaum
bath-chair, scowling at the walls. Rarely would he join in with the arguments over who had been the first/bravest/sexiest, and when he did so he was too easily shouted down.

Hoath told me that Wilmington-Hovis had until recently been visited by a grandson and three great-grandchildren, until one afternoon the youngest had asked when he was planning to die, because
Daddy was bored of waiting for Great-Granddad’s money. I noticed when that story finished that no one laughed.

Peel was the only resident I ever saw with a visitor: a painted blonde woman in heels and fur, in her late-sixties, whom he claimed was his wife. Except I overheard them arguing about her
‘fee’ and he palmed her some notes, looking considerably put out. I supposed he was so used to being surrounded by the half-deaf and two-thirds-blind that he’d let his guard slip
in my company. He really was a rubbish liar, which is perhaps why I couldn’t help liking him. (His history was also very poor, so he’d claim to have explored alongside the likes of
Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan and assorted Vikings.)

The others, I gathered, had over the years been abandoned by former loved ones. In contrast to their readiness to elaborate upon expeditions and erstwhile derring-do, it was nigh on impossible
to get them to open up about their private lives and how they had ended up in the home. Decrepit as they were – even Dad began to look more frail in my eyes, as if guilty by association
– the testosterone lingered, and they were gentlemen of a certain era who avoided discussing the touchy-feely.

This much, however, was obvious: no matter what air of independence they might like to project, and in the face of the constant bickering and one-upmanship, they relied upon one another for
companionship and support. They were a gang.

I thought that out loud once, which somehow ended up with me composing a rap for them. It went like this:

There was a middle eight:

I couldn’t finish it so we dumped it.

It was shit but it made them happy. We were going to perform it
a capella
(Peel having offered the services of his human beat-box, which we politely turned down), but none of them could
remember past the first line, and then Nurse D’eath burst in from her office, demanding to know what was so funny.

Wilmington-Hovis gave her some cheek – well, he said, “Nothing, Nurse D’eath” – and she slapped him hard across the face then wheeled him off to his room.

She was a bastard, there’s no easier way of putting it, more cruel dominatrix than carer. She’d been merely snide with them during my early visits, but as she grew
used to me, and the fact that I was as scared of her as the residents were, she grew bolder, nastier and more physical.

Once, she put a stale éclair on Mr Chislet’s armchair and when he sat down told him he’d defecated himself, then stoked up the others’ derision. He looked genuinely
upset – as did she when I picked it up and ate it. That turned the tables. I saw her mists descend, but she knew I could escape at three o’clock. Sadly, that was as daring as I got.

I said nothing when she ‘accidentally’ kicked Mr Peel’s walking stick out from under him, after he’d regaled her with his tale of ascending Saltoro Kangri by emu;
likewise, when she pretended to get her daily horoscope mixed up with her medical notes, and told Mr Reculver he had cancer. For a man with four toes touching the bucket, it could have been the
coup de grâce
. Fear then resignation overtook his demeanour, and he glanced at me, a piteous glance. When Nurse D’eath admitted her mistake in a music-hall voice, slapping her
corpulent thigh, I thought he might go for her. But it would have taken him too long.

The dreadful woman was always talking down to them, treating them like children. They were better than that, deserved much more. I genuinely looked forward to my visits, despite the depressing
nature of the place. It felt like I’d gained a bunch of eccentric granddads.

Nurse D’eath never picked on Dad while I was there. He’d been a different person since joining the Series of Gentlemen: his manner was subdued, he seemed almost pensive. I put it
down to his being the relative ‘new boy’ – the others treated him as such, being sticklers for hierarchy – and assumed that he would in time rediscover his usual bombastic
self.

On Sunday, some six weeks after Dad had joined the home, I felt comfortable enough with them to bring up their cowardliness in the face of the Nurse D’eath.
Wilmington-Hovis was snoozing at the time and Dad was watching telly in the corner, but Chislet’s eyes slid left to glare at me, Reculver nodded ruefully and Peel pretended he hadn’t
heard (perhaps he hadn’t).