Release . . . Part 01
MGG. A Chapter Novel.
I wrote this twenty five years ago. It’s about a Serial Killing Nursing Home worker, also referred to as An Angel of Death, who has a problem. . . He’s fallen in love with a nurse who prides herself on keeping her residents alive.
Free to read. Enjoy.
Part Two Soon
RELEASE
MGG
With a touch of his fingers, her plastic lamp switched on, and in doing so, betrayed her. Her eyes were already open, but empty. Hilda looked to the light. She did not look up at Owen, even though Owen was cradling her chin and tilting her face towards him. She had a lost and deflated face.
Owen checked the open door; not that he had to. Clara, the RN, in constant defiance against the reality of her situation, always wore hard-soled shoes and so stomped down the corridors. Owen always heard her coming.
In the bed next to Hilda's, Ivy was asleep: the grey ringlets of her perm lay collapsed on her forehead, and curled around her ears. Hilda's hair was the same. Owen took his time. Rolling back Hilda's bedding, he found her legs permanently pulled up as far as her old muscles would allow. There was no meat on her legs, or anywhere for that matter. Her polyester nightgown, with its frill tearing away, failed to hide her bones. Her only plumpness was her continence pad.
Owen was after Hilda's inner ankle; either one. Hilda kept her legs so tightly together it took two people to change her, one to hold open her knees, the other to clean, re-wrap, and then shove the pillow, whose job it was to keep her joints from rubbing, back in. Her pillow had moved up; it always moved up, and free to mate, the bottom of her legs had clamped back together. After she was gone, Owen knew that her legs would be so difficult to part that chances were no one, bar the undertaker, would bother trying.
Holding one foot down, Owen pulled up the other. Hilda groaned. Once her legs were parted, he pulled the pillow down and blocked open her ankles. He knew what he was hunting for because whenever he showered her, he searched for the artery. Tonight it was blue and prominent. Checking the door again, he inserted the needle.
Hilda did not jerk and she did not cry. Seemingly unaffected, she just blinked calmly and kept her eyes on the light. That was it. The glasses case was waiting next to her lamp. Placing the syringe back inside it, Owen closed it up and then slipped it into his trouser pocket. With his shirt out, as he always wore it, the case, visually, no longer existed.
In his twenties, Owen had been handsome, but you couldn't tell any longer, not until he laughed. Now in his early forties, a lack of sun had used cream paint to coat his face, and time was grey flecking what hair he had left. But laughing or just watching, his large eyes, brown as his hair had once been, and his mellow, slightly slow voice, made it difficult for others not to classify, or was it compartmentalize him, as a gentle husband.
"Here?" Owen whispered.
Hilda did not reply.
Owen came back to the picture. It appeared as though Hilda had begun to drown. Clearly, her body had lost the ability to absorb air, but her mouth, regardless, was continuing to try and suck the air down. As Owen watched, every attempt to breathe became more desperate than the last, until finally she looked as if she had sucked in a slice of lemon. To its bitterness, her whole face tensed, remained so, and then... And then she was gone.
With the pain gone, the beauty briefly returned while the moth hadn't moved at all.
Owen had to calm down. Whispering, he told himself to make sure he had the syringe. He did. Next, he picked up the commode and carried it back to the other side of the room. He stopped. He listened. No Clara. Good. Check everything, he whispered. Everything. Back at the bed, he looked underneath it, then scoured the bedspread, before checking the top of the bedside cabinet. It was fine. It was all fine.
Above Hilda's bed, a small pinboard hung. It was mostly empty now, since the majority of its photos had slipped their pins. One of the remaining ones was a black-and-white one of Hilda as a baby. In it, she was on her belly and laughing like a sunflower. Her laugh made Owen smile. He took down this picture, looked at it again, and then held it close to Hilda's cooling face. There were no reference points that he could see between the plump, joy-bursting face and the relaxed, withered shell. Slipping the picture into his breast pocket, he bent down to Hilda and brought the back of his fingers to her cheek. She was already cooling.
"Goodbye, Hilda," he whispered, then kissed her. The moth was still here, with a brush of his hand he sent it away.
Someone was entering the room. Gasping, he swung to the door. At first, he couldn't see who it was because of the main light behind them, but he could see it was a man and that the man was coming this way. Then Hilda's light revealed a printed side faced away from the container. Locker closed, Owen found Jack covered in crumbs.
"How can you eat scones without dentures, Jack?"
Upon hearing his name, Jack grinned. It was a cheeky grin, the kind you'd expect a cocky young man to have in the hours after he'd just got laid.
Outside, flying foxes, their bellies full of fruit, were flying back to the botanical gardens, and a possum, with her baby clutching to her back, was traversing the pagoda on her way to the plums, whose tree grew against the side of the home. Sometimes Owen sat outside and watched the possums as they lived their lives on the concrete tiles of this nursing home's roof. But not tonight.
Getting a drink of water, Owen sat at the table. His hands were trembling. Taking deep breaths to slow his racing heart, he lay his palms flat onto the table and pressed.
Jack left him while he was doing this. Walked around the staff room once, then after dropping what was left of the scone on the floor, he set off to wherever his dementia was leading him.
"Bye, Jack."
By the time the water was finished, Owen's breathing was returning to normal. Rising to the counter, he bypassed the switched-off urn, flicked on the kettle, and from the cupboard above it pulled out two mugs. Checking they hadn't been used, he rinsed them well, regardless, then grabbed the coffee.
In the day room, Clara was asleep in the home's newest fallout chair. Clara had the face of someone who could have been a minor star. It was her prettiness that had managed to score a few ads, and perhaps, the leading roles in all the profit-share plays she'd acted in. That was until, after celebrating the end of a musical version of Ibsen's A Doll's House, she'd got pissed and screwed the director. The condom broke, and believing she'd be fine, she'd risked it. Nine months later, with her mother holding her hand, Clara had introduced Sian to the world. That was four years ago. Falling back to nursing, she'd worked here, at Grandview Gardens, ever since. She did five night shifts a week, and in the two hours between the first and second round, she always fell asleep, then in the hours between the second and third, she worked on her short stories and scripts.
Her current play was about a single mum who writes a play that becomes a movie, for which the lead character receives an Oscar.
Without waking her, Owen sat in front of the wide-screen TV and faced it. He didn't like Clara waking up and finding him looking at her. It made them both uncomfortable.
"Are you kidding?" she groaned. "It can't be that time already."
"I made you a coffee," he said without looking around.
Groaning, she stretched, then squinted at the back of his head and, yawning, said:
"How about I make you a deal? If you do this round on your own, I'll give you a thousand bucks."
"Two thousand," he said.
"You got it," she purred, and rolling on her side, she pulled her legs up and, grimacing, took in all the collapsed wheelchairs, which Owen had already cleaned and lined up.