Fiction

Hideaway

Mathew Friday

‘Come on, dear,’ Gloria pleaded weakly, her voice like milky tea. ‘Leave the shed for now. You’ll catch a cold and you know what that means.’ So does she and she also knows he won’t listen to her.

It is raining and her husband, Ian, was getting wet—not wise for a sixty-sixty year old man, let alone one in remission from Leukaemia. Drops of water dribbled down his bald head, pooling in the deep pits under his eyes. The clouds were getting darker.

‘No!’ Ian said driving his spade into the hard clay. ‘I’m going to bloody well do this if it kills me.’

The words ricocheted off the wet garden walls and hit Gloria. She felt nauseas and took a step back to steady herself.

‘You’ll see,’ Ian insisted, dumping a pathetically small clump of earth into his wheelbarrow: a child’s effort. ‘It won’t defeat me.’

‘Let me help,’ said Gloria, six years older than her husband but in much better physical condition: a professional dancer and dance tutor all her life and blessed with a menopause that only took light nibbles at her bones.

‘No!’ growled Ian, turning quickly and raising his spade like a sword. ‘I don’t need any help.’ His thin arm began to shake. He lowered it and returned to the digging. Gloria retreated indoors. She decided not to go and see Swan Lake at the Fairfield Halls after all. She couldn’t leave Ian. Something might happen to him.

She was right. It happened at the end of the week, when Ian had constructed the shed, laid out the veranda, extended the gas pipe, dug out a new pond with a running water feature, surrounded the shed with new shrubs and trees, put up the shelves and books, moved in the cabinets with the model trains, lain a carpet and connected up the television, DVD player, stereo and kettle. The last piece was the armchair. Ian got it stuck in the doorway, struggled for a bit, and then collapsed.

Gloria, who had been helping, panicked, thinking she had lost him.

‘Not now. Let him have his shed, please god.’

She called the ambulance but by the time it arrived, Ian had recovered enough to stagger indoors and to bed. The doctor came and said that he had overworked himself.

‘Can it come back? The cancer?’

‘Not this way,’ said the doctor. ‘But Ian is not a young man. There are many other illnesses in life. Keep him warm. Call me if there’s no improvement by Monday.’

When the doctor had gone, Gloria went into the kitchen and cried. She knew how important the shed was to Ian, but she could not stand the irony of it killing him before it was built.

Ian had planned the shed since his retirement, three years ago. It was his gift to himself after forty three years managing customer complaints on the South London train network, once a single company, and then divided like a multiplying cell, well beyond Ian’s patience. The shed was not some overblown extension of a hobby or an office; this was somewhere to be retired, to rest and think, to hide away from complaints, the public, trains, and yes, Gloria.

Gloria was not offended by this. She had kissed him goodbye every morning for over thirty years and even when he was in hospital, she came home alone. She was delighted he was in remission and could start a normal retirement, but this had given them a false sense of normality. Now they were just an ordinary ageing married couple suddenly spending all their time together. The shed was a great compromise.

Also, it would add value to the property. Ian had read about people moving out of the inner city and into the suburbs, such as Carshalton Beeches. People came looking for the trees, detached houses with gardens, clean roads, the pretence of something rural with the convenience of still being in the city.

Gloria went back to check on her husband. She held her hand to his mouth and felt his breath. She couldn’t trust his bony, shallow chest to move through his blanket. She sat down beside him and thought back to when he was in hospital, when she sat by him every day for months, watching him loose weight, seeing him sink into himself, into the bed; making light of the fact his thick hair fell out in shocking clumps, helping him wash and dress, reminding him to take his antiseptic mouthwash.

Gloria liked to think that without her encouragement, Ian wouldn’t cope. Ian said this was true, but he also admitted that the thought of his shed helped wile away the long, gnawing hours, the endless dripping chemotherapy bags, the shame of being attended to by nurses young enough to be his grand child.

‘It’s all I think about when you’re not here,’ Ian had said, his voice rasping through the raw mouth. ‘I plan it all in my head. I know exactly what it’s going to look like, where everything will go.’

Where will you go, Gloria had thought. And when? Not in this hospital bed, please. Let it be his shed.

‘I hope it won’t be an anti-climax,’ Ian had said. ‘You know when you long for something and plan it, when it actually happens, it’s a bit of a let down.’

‘I’m sure it won’t be,’ said Gloria, always being cheerful. No one knew how hard it was to be cheerful all the time.

‘It’s not my tomb, you know?’

‘I never thought it was,’ said Gloria, surprised by Ian’s sudden seriousness.

‘I’m going to live in it, not...’ he hesitated. He could not bring himself to say it. He was still fighting.

‘I know,’ said Gloria patting his bony hand. ‘It will be lovely.’

Ian slept for twenty hours and then awoke Monday morning, confused.

‘I dreamt I built a shed but the wind blew it down. Is it Monday? I had better get ready for work.’

‘You’ve retired dear. You don’t have to go anywhere.’

‘What about hospital?’

‘Not for the time being, God willing.’

‘What about the shed?’

Gloria took Ian to his shed. It is a nice, bright day. The sort of day for making plans, thinking ahead, dreaming. Pity it was a Monday and most people pouring into the roads and trains of South London were feeling that weekly grey gloom of going back to work.

‘You got the chair in,’ said Ian.

‘I got Sandra’s boy, Robbie, to give me a hand. He was back from university to visit his mum. Very tall, he is. Like you. Let’s get you settled.’

Gloria sat Ian down in the armchair and tucked a blanket around him. She made two cups of tea.

‘It’s just how I imagined it,’ said Ian warmly. ‘I’ll be very happy here.’

Gloria swallowed back sadness. She couldn’t help remembering what the doctor told them both: Ian’s disease may one day come snaking back through the long grass of his life. The bite would be worse.

‘Yes, dear, you will.’

She handed her husband a cup of tea. She forced herself to look at him, to compare what she has with what she could have lost. At least he did not look so small and feeble as he did in hospital. Death found him there, but Gloria and the shed had shielded him and kept Death at bay. Death had to rush off—so many other poorly people to visit - but promised to come back one day.

With a bit of luck, Death would find Ian in his hideaway and find him happy. Gloria would make sure of it.