“Sofa or spaceship Mary?” asked Barbara as she buttered her toast and reached for the jar of marmalade. “It’s sticky again. The jar is sticky.”
Barbara waved her arms frantically as if she were drowning at the breakfast table. Faith huffed over.
“And what is wrong today, Barbara?”
“The marmalade jar is sticky. Again.”
“I’ll let trip advisor know shall I,” said Faith taking the jar from Barbara’s hand and swapping it with the one on the table next door.
“A little civility wouldn’t go amiss. So, sofa or spaceship Mary. If a flying saucer landed in the garden right now. Would you get on it?” said Barbara as soon as Faith was out of earshot.
“I wouldn’t say no to a look around one.”
“But would you leave Earth and go with them?”
“No. I don’t think they have tea bags in outer space. Even if they did, not with my hip.”
“I want to try drugs Mary.”
“For your waterworks?”
“No, LSD. I’d like to experience the psychedelic colours. I completely missed out on the sixties. I was trapped behind net curtains. A brutal marriage saw to that. The closest I got to the sixties was the kaleidoscope of shifting bruises on my skin, purple, green, yellow. He was a doctor. No one would have believed me. Everyone thought he was wonderful. Have you ever tried drugs?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“Not really. A cup of tea and a Rich Tea does me.”
“I’ve already decided Mary. Today we are going to find a drug dealer.”
“If you’re heading to the park ladies, please can you take Elsie with you. She’s getting restless. And I’m two staff down again today,” said Faith as Mary and Barbara waited for her to unlock the door to let them out. “She’s all ready to go. Do that little favour for me and I’ll make cookies especially for you. Just don’t lose her.”
“Chocolate chip?” asks Mary.
“Done. I’ll just go and find her.”
“You do know they’re just out of a packet don’t you Mary,” said Barbara as Faith rushed off.
Elsie is a restless soul. If she wasn’t so solid you could easily think she was the care home ghost. She appeared and disappeared all day, looking for things that couldn’t be found, like cows.
Barbara nervously fists her hand so she could feel the hundred pounds on her palm, that she had slipped into her glove. Faith eventually returns with Elsie whom she’d mummified in a long red scarf so only her eyes were visible.
“She looks like a letter box,” says Barbara.
Faith scowls at Barbara as she lets the three of them out of Redbricks Aged Care Facility.
“Just as far as the park. I don’t have time to come looking for you,” says Faith as she locks the door behind them.
It isn’t far to the park. Just five minutes. But of course the park isn’t their destination. Barbara waits till they are out of sight and rings for a taxi.
The taxi soon arrives. Barbara smiles, she thinks the driver looks promising. He has an earring.
“We wish to purchase drugs. Specifically, LSD. Can you take us to a drug dealer please.”
The taxi driver looks at the three octogenarians on the back seat.
“You being serious pet?”
“Scientists think LSD can mitigate the effects of Alzheimers because it can enhance neural plasticity.”
“I get it. People take cannabis for pain. Yous just want to see if you can find your marbles. I might know someone.”
The taxi driver takes them to a house on an estate and asks them to wait in the car. They all watch as he runs off down the side of a house.
“I thought we’d have been blindfolded by now. He appears to have driven us straight to the drug dealers house,” says Barbara sounding concerned for the first time.
“Do you think it’s safe? On the news someone was murdered yesterday just going to the shops. Perhaps we should blindfold ourselves. Elsie’s scarf is long enough.”
“It is rather cosmopolitan. For once Mary I think you have made a very sensible suggestion. Unravel Elsie’s scarf!”
The taxi driver comes rushing back to find his three passengers tied together; a red scarf looped around their eyes.
“He doesn’t have LSD. He said do you want to like try something else. I explained about the Alzheimers. Or he can make a few phone calls and get you some. It’s not really on trend he said. How much you need?”
“A hundred pounds worth, less what we owe you of course.”
“Hang on.”
The taxi driver disappears again and reappears five minutes later.
“He’s given me an address where we can get some. Shall we ladies?”
This time they were driven to a buckled old caravan tucked behind a house with half a roof. All guarded by an old leather pouffe of a dog that twisted on a heavy chain and had the bark of a smoker. A long-haired man with shelves big enough to display figurines on under his eyes fell out of the caravan with a vile of clear liquid and instructions to just put a tiny bit on your tongue.
Barbara, Mary and maybe Elsie watched through the holes in the scarf.
“Where to now ladies?”
“Hilltop farm please,” said Elsie. Mary started to say something but Barbara cut in and said “Hilltop farm.”
They were dropped in a farmyard. As the taxi disappeared only the mooing of cows broke the silence.
Barbara pulled everyone into a large barn. “I’m going to try some, who’s in?” asks Barbara.
“I’m not sure,” said Mary.
“Suit yourself. Elsie open your mouth.”
“Barbara you can’t give it to Elsie. I don’t understand why you need to take these drugs; they could be dangerous. They came from a caravan. I’ve never had a decent cup of tea from a caravan.”
“I married the doctor because mother said if I didn’t she’d never speak to me again. I wanted to be an air hostess but mother said it was unbecoming. I kept a good home, although never quite good enough, until the day he died. I was the good daughter, then for thirty-eight years I had to act out the part of the good wife. And after he died, I still had to keep up the pretence. Open the village fete and judge Victoria sandwich sponges and potato men, all in his name.”
“Sometimes Barbara you make no sense at all. I didn’t understand what you said in the taxi about plastic and Alzheimers. Is this drug supposed to stop dementia?”
“Scientists really are looking into how helpful LSD can be. It opens up certain types of neural pathways which could counteract Alzheimers.”
“Alright in the name of science I’ll give it a go.”
A field of sunflowers spiraled around and around. Chickens pecked at the ground that seethed with spiders trying to unknot their knitted legs. On top of the chicken’ heads, a chorus line dressed in red danced the can-can whilst trying not to fall. The miniature chorus girls kept slipping off as the chickens pecked. They’d slowly sink through the spiders, screaming as they went. Then a multicoloured dinosaur trampled everything. Gaping jaws and huge teeth swaying back and forth trying to grab at people knelt in prayer.
Barbara wakes up completely naked, sandwiched between two bales of hay. She is covered in chicken dropping tattoos. She stares at a tattoo of Micheal Hestletine on her thigh whilst her mind tries to catch up with the hows and whys. Worryingly there is no sign of Mary or Elsie. She hurriedly looks for her clothes. Most of them seemed to be ten foot in the air hanging from the jagged bucket of a tractor. She can’t quite reach them. The solution is both obvious and not obvious to her. She needs to lower the bucket. It doesn’t occur to her to ask herself where the tractor had come from.
Barbara pokes her head out of the barn. There still didn’t seem to be anyone around. She hauls herself up into the tractor and onto the bouncing seat. She reasons one of the levers must operate the bucket. She eeny-meeny-miny-moes it. Presses start and pulls. The bucket lowers to the floor and out spills Mary. Barbara jiggers up and down on the tractor seat trying to work out if Mary is dead or not. Her boobs flap up and down like the laboured beats of a swans wings trying to get airborne. All just as a policeman walks into the barn. There are some things you just can’t explain not even to yourself. She did think about saying she is Miss October in the naked farmers calendar, but a lack of a photographer made that unlikely.
“Did you get fairies and lights?” asks Mary rubbing her hair which is now held aloft by a scaffold of straw. Barbara catches a glimpse of her own hair in the tractor mirror, now a winter rose bush mulched in muck and straw.
They are all returned to the Aged Care Facility in a police car. Elsie too: she’d been found singing in the cowshed.
“Do you think we’ll still get the biscuits Barbara?”
“Probably not. All things considered I think that was one of the best days of my life.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t do what was expected of me. It was very liberating.”
The next morning Mary found a note pushed under her door.
Dearest Mary
I have decided to get on that spaceship. I’m not going to be the dutiful mother as well and quietly fade away in here. When I die, I want to be played by Jack Nicholson not Felicity Kendal. Thank you for being a true friend.
Barbara. (Ps I need a head start. Don’t tell Faith.)
Friends of Bylines Network
There has never been a greater need for grassroots journalism that investigates the stories that really matter, holds power to account and champions the voices of everyday citizens. We are proudly powered by volunteers but what we do isn’t free.
STAND WITH US for independent, citizen-led journalism that makes democracy stronger, and you will even get some exclusive benefits.
