Rhinoceros 2
Two police officers were sitting uncomfortably by Alan’s hospital bed. There’s a scenario for Saturday night TV, he thought to himself with a wasted smile. He was sat on the edge of the bed, perched on the prim, stiff sheets. The paraphernalia of sickness surrounded him. Pipes and cables suggested emergency procedures to his overactive mind, and there were switches which could be pressed in the final agonies of a rabid spasm. The chairs were washable, the bed able to clank and squeal into various pre- and post-operative postures. In the way of hospitals, multitudes of busy workers in a bewildering variety of uniforms came and went, somehow tinkering with the huge medical machinery of diagnosis and cure. But none of them came to Alan Scope.
“Food’s not improved, then?” said the crumpled, bald officer, indicating the cold macaroni-cheese on a tray. He looked uncomfortable in his laden jacket, like a badly wrapped present. But the policewoman seemed to be in charge. She held the notebook.
“You said ‘stocky’, Mr Scope.” Her pencil was poised in the hope of something less vague than Alan’s pronouncements so far.
“Hmm,” Alan pondered. He had been warned about short term memory loss by a rare, passing consultant – concussion, he explained – but his memories where as sharp as a tuned bell. He could see the whole sequence of events like a rewound movie. The figure emerging from the gloom, his flabby form, the white track suit with its logo designed to lodge in the memory. And the look on the boy’s face – panic mixed with determination.
“Height?” The pencil was less poised this time, more in repose.
“About five-ten.”
“You said before he was a teenager?” The policewoman politely pretended to consult her notes.
“Yes, by his movements, his clothes… I work with teenagers.”
“Rewarding, is it?” asked the crumpled one.
“No.”
The policewoman seemed irritated. “But you didn’t see his face.” It wasn’t a question. The pencil went supine.
Yes I did, he wanted to say, it was that lump of lard Ryon.
“No. It all happened quickly. He was gone, and I blacked out.” A flurry of activity occurred in the background as the man opposite left his bed and made purposefully for the nurse’s station at the end of the ward. One of the nurses called out, “Mr Alport’s loose again,” and he was quickly propelled back to his bed and roughly tucked in by bored hands and stony faces. The bewildered Mr Alport waved a skinny arm with a flap of flesh running down it and croaked, “But my wife is in the taxi now.” One of the nurses muttered, “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” and they smiled to each other as they returned to their station. The policeman said, “I wouldn’t fancy their job,” and Alan pondered on how nurses, more than any other profession, can get away with almost any kind of anti-social behaviour. In contrast to teachers, for example. He wondered what they did behind that counter all day. Space Invaders, probably.
The police officers had quickly grown bored, already thinking of their next task, making about-to-get-up shifts and sighs, imperceptibly, by degrees, elsewhere.
“You will of course let us know if you remember something else. Any small detail could be useful to us. Our number is on this card,” and she handed Alan a little booklet of information showing the reader how friendly and necessary the police are.
“Of course,” Alan replied, this exchange a functional but perfunctory protocol; both parties knew there would be no further details to add.
The crumpled one turned back to Alan after appraising the nurses. “I’d get someone to bring some sandwiches in if I were you.”
Alan twisted his body around and sank into the large, starched pillow. He tried to quantify how much of life is made up of conversations practiced endlessly and spoken without any real meaning.
***
“Robbed, were you?”
Alan opened his eyes. Had he just shut them, or had he been asleep for a while? Christ, he’d have to watch himself. Perhaps he should exercise more. “What?”
“I couldn’t help hearing,” a middle-aged man in neat pyjamas on the next bed said, indicating the corridor – presumably the direction the police officers departed.
“Oh, yes, some kid broke into my flat. Got knocked on the back of my head,” and he gently stroked the pulsating area of violated flesh.
“Probably off his tits on heroin. Nicking stuff to feed his habit, I’ll be bound.” Alan felt he was at risk of entering into one of those conversations consisting largely of clichés. A further example of perfunctory communication, he told himself with a grimace.
After a while, during which the man continued to stare at Alan, he replied, “Well, I don’t think he’d be able to function as a burglar high on heroin.”
“They get used to it. Permanently high. They get it from the government at drug centres.” Alan scanned the man’s bedside table for a copy of The Daily Mail. “Did he have a weapon?”
“Who?”
“The yob.”
“Not that I remember.” Alan weighed up the various ways of shutting up this man. A sharp blow on the back of the head had a resonant effectiveness, according to his recent memory.
“They’re everywhere you look. That’s why I don’t go out any more,” and he raised his eyebrows knowingly at Alan.
“Well, being indoors wasn’t a better option for me.” Alan felt that he was having to work so hard just to remain within the realms of civility.
“Better security’s what you want. Mortise, camera, steel edging. Belt and braces.”
Alan’s internal cliché alert went into red. “I’ll think about it,” he said, and then faked a long yawn.
“Mine’s one of them five part locks where the door handle has to go up before it goes down…” and the man went on about his security arrangements, which did indeed seem to stand for at least two ways of suspending trousers, and Alan stopped listening and watched Mr Alport escape from his bed sheets once again and make for the nurses. As he was vigorously propelled back into the ward Alan closed his eyes once more in the hope of nothingness. But all he could picture was Ryon’s face charging at him like a cornered rhinoceros.
***
The main question was: why? It made difficult shapes in Alan’s head throughout his stay in hospital as he vigorously avoided contact with the man in the next bed. The question stuck there as an accompanying back tone through his eventual dismissal from the aimless care of the NHS, and it remained, loud and angular, as he re-entered the hallway where his senses had been so fired up and sent out of kilter. He could see the smear of russet blood on the wall below the shelf and felt queasy for a few seconds. The gloom of the sitting room through the door ahead presented him with a further problem. But above all else Alan told himself he was a rational man, and he took firm steps forward and flicked on the light. It was all so disappointingly familiar.
But why?
Sitting in his familiar chair in the sitting room of his burgled flat, stirring his coffee round and round, gazing through the doorway down the short hall to the shelf and the wall with the bloodstain and the front door with the hastily added bolt above the broken Yale he asked it again: why? Why protect Ryon?
This is the boy who, every Monday morning, walked into his English class and said, “You’re lessons are shit, I’m not doing nothing.” ‘Not doing ANYTHING,’ Alan wanted to shout back, ‘At least abuse me in correct English.’ Ryon it was who put that dent in the back of his Ford Focus, just because he restrained him when he was beating the crap out of that year 7. Ryon, who’s mum, when he told her that he was excluded for assaulting a teacher shouted, “You’re paid to deal with special needs, so pull your finger out of your fucking arse and do it.” Ryon, with the big, flabby face, like a blown up paper bag, eyes small and dark, like raisins, his big, lolling, rolling gait, taking up the whole corridor so the other boys had to move out of the way, or pretend that they enjoyed being shoulder-barged by him. Does Ryon want to go through a locked door? No problem. Ryon will kick it in. It is a school for boys with Special Needs after all. That’s what they do in a school for boys with Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. BESD. So-called.
Alan’s mind rambled on. The endless abuse he took. The great wall of negativity. The nihilistic burden of carrying on regardless.
But then there was the time he gave Ryon a lift to his youth offending worker, and in the strangely impersonal confines of the car, both facing the front, Ryon told him about his dad. ‘The dickhead,’ he called him, ‘The nonce.’ Ryon was waiting for his dad to get out so he could kill him for what he did to his cousin. And there was something approaching a strain of emotion in Ryon’s voice. Alan didn’t press the advantage home. You learn not to. He let the roar of the traffic fill the silence, and when Ryon got out, for the first time since he’s known him, he said, “Thanks.”
As Alan reminisced, a further question loomed, and Alan started to feel trapped by his own inaction.
What exactly did Ryon manage to take?
***
Alan looked at himself once more through the eyes of others. He was not, by habit, a man of affirmative action. His nature was more reflective, poised between inactivity and comatose. His ex-wife had often remarked on his passive acceptance of life’s problems. In fact it was cited as one of the main reasons for their divorce. This in itself struck Alan as amusing. A couple of generations ago it was only adultery and mental torture, or something like that, which could lead to an irreparable split. But now extreme reasonableness was enough. Though, quite reasonably, Alan thought, it was probably for the best.
But on this evening Alan was gripped by a sense of urgent activity, such as had not overcome him for many years. His flat seemed to have imploded its contents into the small spaces of its interiors.
In the sitting room the drawers to his writing desk were open, drooling their contents onto the floor, and yet still full. Full of what? Detritus, miscellany; a glass heart his ex-wife once bought him, an array of Christmas cards, a broken stapler, a pack of cards without their box, elastic bands, a screwdriver, notes, bulldog clips, an amusing coaster, a dirty spoon, fluff... On the desk a flock of papers and books, doomed to roost for a time beyond reason. Should there have been some money in that saucer? He just could not remember. The place wasn’t even ransacked. If Ryon had taken something it would have to fit in his pockets. How much time did he have? Not enough to open every cupboard, Alan felt. Everything was chaotically similar. How the hell did he come to accumulate so much crap?
Alan collapsed into his armchair. Then a thought shot quickly into his head and jolted him forward in his seat. Was the robbery targeted? Did Ryon know something, was he after something in particular?
Perhaps Ryon didn’t even know it was his flat. Bit of a coincidence, though, Alan mused. Unless he was working his way methodically through the whole of S11. Alan placed his chin in his hands.
Why couldn’t he think straight? Instinctively, he reached for the wound on the back of his head. A small, numb landscape of scabs surrounded by a sea of pain. There must be something missing. Otherwise he wasn’t much of a burglar. Alan felt a sense of dislodged pride. His Ryon a poor burglar? No way; and let’s face it, he didn’t have much else to commend him. His intelligence, perhaps, but he didn’t use it to operate within Alan’s map of reality. His adaptation to his surroundings, maybe. But isn’t that what everyone has to do? Adapt and survive. Could Alan, a product of the same evolutionary processes, adapt to Ryon’s situation just as well as Ryon? Well of course, mused Alan. He would just need a few formative years to have a good run at it. A useless set of parents and an indifferent government would help. Add a little peer pressure, and hey presto. These and other thoughts collected within the fabrics and patterns of Alan’s mutilated flat as he slumped in the middle of it all, a man at sea amongst the remains of a sunken ship.
A few days to recover, the consultant had recommended, without considering Alan’s agitated state of mind. Rest, sleep, read, light walks. And take the pills. He looked around his flat. It could be a pleasant place to live if it was occupied by someone who cared.
