A home at shady pines

The old folks take a horrible revenge -This was for a short story competition - the subject was "Union or unity" (WTF?) which I put in green down the side as a starting point.

A Home at Shady Pines

Under the watchful eye of the mighty pinaceae trees, Shady Pines stands atop a gentle hill, gazing down to the sunny meadows of Hamptonshire and beyond them, the ocean. The high quality of senior persons care at Shady Pines is matched by the beauty of its surroundings and the individual care and attention given to each resident. When you decide to house your elderly loved ones with us, you can be sure that their dignity and independence will be preserved with 24 hour care by specially trained staff. Shady Pines is run as a family business by the Wragg family so our residents feel as loved and cherished as they would at home. To find out more about Shady Pines please give us a call on 0102 448 8787

No-one was told that Elsie had died. The residents simply saw her body being removed by the undertakers on Tuesday morning while they were having their tea. The tea was lukewarm, weak, and the tea bags had been re-used several times. The milk was on the turn so they drank it black.

“Reminds me of the war, this tea.” Said Olga to Alice, who muttered something like “Bloody awful bloody tea” through her false teeth, and slurped the dreadful beverage in reply.

It was a week since Elsie had been taken to the basement. The basement was where the residents were taken when they were about to die. Elsie had had a fall from her wheelchair, just a small bump the doctor said, but she had then picked up an infection in her injured leg and she had deteriorated rapidly from there. In theory, the basement was for those residents in need of “special care”, but no-one had ever come up from there. Olga had seen her friend fall, and pressed the emergency button that linked the resident’s accommodation to the Wragg family’s apartment at the top of the house. The Wragg family were not quick to respond. The only phone in the building was up in the Wragg’s apartment behind a locked door.

Olga had been good friends with Elsie, or as good friends as anyone was in the home. The system at Shady Pines did not encourage friendship. If a resident made a mess, spilled their tea, soiled their clothes, vomited or needed an extra bath, the other residents were punished to discourage them from “wasting The Family’s time” in such a manner. Punishments included cancelled meals, turning off the heating or electricity, or a beating. The residents blamed each other although the punishments were handed out indiscriminately. Residents were discouraged from keeping personal possessions at the home and valuables had a way of going missing; so the senior persons living there did not own much. Elsie, however, had kept a bundle of letters from her husband, she kept them tucked in a pocket while she was awake and put them under her pillow while she slept. Olga had called her a sentimental old fool for doing so but Elsie said that the letters were all she had left of her marriage and she needed to feel they were close by her. Elsie asked Olga to make sure that her letters were buried with her if she should die first.

Now it was Tuesday afternoon and the residents were confined to their bedrooms for a nap while The Family had lunch. The residents called the Wraggs “The Family” and were in fear of them. The resident’s lunch had been tough beef in a watery gravy, most of the residents had been unable to chew the gristly meat so had just eaten the tepid vegetables on the side. Up in their apartment on the top floor of the building, the family ate tender sirloin and hot chips. Mr Wragg’s face gleamed red while he devoured his meat, his elbows at right angles to his body and his head stretched down towards his plate as his steak knife tore into the steaming flesh. His wife sat bolt upright, eating with small vicious bites, cleaning her plate with her fork as though she could not bear for a single drop of the meaty gravy to be wasted. Their 30 year old daughter Maryska and her lumpen husband Ray had given up on cutlery entirely and were shoving fistfuls of chips smeared with ketchup into their faces.

Olga slowly lifted herself out of her bed using the metal bars at the sides for support. She didn’t know what the punishment would be if she was caught out of her room during rest hour but she was determined to keep her promise to her dead friend.  Shuffle-bump, shuffle-bump, Olga wielded her walking frame down the linoleum covered stairs that lead to the basement. She would have risked using the lift in the centre of the building but she was afraid that the noise would alert The Family and they would come down from their apartment and find her out of her room. Her legs trembling with effort, Olga lowered herself down the final few steps of the bottom flight of stairs and paused in the tiny hallway at the bottom to catch her breath. She was aware of a fetid smell in the hallway and she gagged as she struggled to breathe normally. Olga turned left to the only door and pushed it open. What she saw and smelt in that room shocked her to the core.

Ronald Robertson had been an army engineer in his youth. Now he was frail and wasted, a shell of a man, and his small reserves of energy were usually spent completing old crossword puzzles in the out-of-date magazines in the resident’s sitting room. When Olga told him, weeping, what she had seen in the basement, he felt a stirring of anger deep within him. Why should this happen to us? He asked himself. We fought in the war, we worked hard all our lives, we tried and strived to make the world a better place, and now we are abused and forgotten by a generation who had everything handed to them on a plate. Do we really deserve to end our lives like this? That god dam family have got us so intimidated that even those of us with someone to complain to daren’t say anything. We have to do something before we all die suffering in that evil place under the house.

 “Union, or Unity, 5 across, 7 letters, any ideas?” Said Ronald to Olga, Alice, Albert and Dot, who were huddled in the icy sitting room later that afternoon.

“WHAT DID HE SAY?” shouted Alice, whose hearing aid battery had run down 3 weeks ago and had never been replaced. “Got any letters?” asked Dot, who sat so close to the electric heater (one bar on) that she was in danger in of becoming 6 down “combustion”. “Second letter is an A” replied Ron.

“Harmony” suggested Dot, which fit, and gave Ron the first letter “M” for 4 down “kill”, in 6 letters. “Murder” Ronald wrote carefully in ragged capitals, his handwriting shaky from his freezing fingers.  At this point Ronald became thoroughly stuck again, and he stared at the blank white squares in the puzzle with increasing irritation. “Murder”, he read again and again, “Harmony”. His thoughts strayed back to what Olga had told him, and how Elsie must have died, unclothed, tied fast to that iron frame, lying on a filthy mattress, surrounded by buckets of her own excreta. “We don’t deserve this.” He thought again; “We have allowed The Family to make us entirely dependent. We squabble like children, but before we came here each one of us were capable of doing at least some things for ourselves. Why not an old people’s home where we all look after each other?” Ron looked at Olga, sitting hunched over in a hard chair, grief and shock still written all over her face. “Murder” he read again. “Harmony”.

 

“Never killed a man before, and I’m not about to start now”, stated Albert when Ronald spoke to him of the plan. “Gawd knows I’ve wished The Family dead often enough, but they will not die by my hand”.

“Please, Bert, give it some thought.” murmured Ron desperately. “You won’t have to do anything. I’m just asking you to keep quiet, and help us afterwards. Do you want them to put you down there next?”

“Well, if everyone else has agreed I suppose I’ll have to” muttered Albert “I am not one to say that two wrongs make a right, but the bible tells us an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and to my mind that applies here. None of us deserves to die like Elsie.

“I’m nervous” said Olga to Ronald. “What if something goes wrong?”

“There’s nothing to go wrong” Ronald reassured her, “The mechanics of the lift are quite simple, and they all have to come down if you press the emergency bell six times. I can disconnect the emergency phone in the lift from outside the building. I’ll stop the lift on the third floor by Alice’s room, she can’t hear anything without her hearing aid. It’s perfect”

“But how long will we have to leave it, and how will we make do without them?” quavered Olga “I’m scared”.

“I think at least two weeks to be on the safe side”, said Ron. “And we’re perfectly capable of looking after each other if we put our minds to it.” The food is delivered every second Tuesday, so if we do it Tuesday evening, it’ll be a fortnight before anyone shows up, and we can’t reach the telephone or walk to get help. As I said, it’s perfect”

“Well, Tuesday evening then.” Said Olga.

The winter sun streamed through the large windows into the warm residents’ sitting room. The electric heater blasted away, while the residents sat around and drank strong hot tea with lots of milk. It was hard, managing without the lift, but the more mobile residents helped the others with the daily tasks of washing themselves, going to the toilet, taking medications and moving around. In the early days if you strained your hearing you could just about hear faint thumps and cries coming from the lift shaft, but these were not loud and they faded and stopped altogether after four days. Food was cooked, everyone went to bed when they pleased, and the residents stayed warm and dry and clean. Ron and Olga spent most of their time together, and asked themselves; was it worth getting married at their age? The two weeks weren’t easy, and not everyone got along all the time, but they worked together and they managed.

Yesterday police were called to Shady Pines Old Person’s home in Hamptonshire to investigate the deaths of the family who managed the site. Police found the bodies of the four members of staff who ran the facility trapped in a faulty lift. It is likely the family died of dehydration. Police were alerted by a Budget Foods delivery man who attended the site for a routine delivery on Tuesday morning, he was met by distressed residents who said that the Family had disappeared about two weeks ago and left them to fend for themselves. As well as investigating the deaths of the family, police are looking into allegations of abuse within the home based on what a police spokesman called “A chamber of horrors” found in the basement of the building. Police praised the courage of the elderly residents who had taken remarkable care of themselves in these difficult circumstances. The residents have been moved to nearby Sunnyside retirement home until permanent places can be found for them.