Death to Secrets
By Bryn Sinstead-Reid
Tuesday 6 May 8 am
A wall of quilted dressing gowns greets me outside of my room. Meg, my late in life love, her face crumpled into a mess of tears, pushes her way through to me. The cause of her distress? Lying prone on the floor of her room, with her body at all sorts of odd angles is Eadie, Meg’s best friend of 60 plus years. The room is neat and tidy other than a pink satin pillow that has been carelessly abandoned beside the bed. I shuffle into the room; no-one stops me. A police detective of forty years still holds some standing even here amongst the false teeth and adult diapers. The women outside the room remain quiet as they wait for me to deliver my verdict, even though they are all thinking the same thing. Eadie had obviously taken a fall. A bad one. Despite her harsh tongue and overbearing personality, she was physically frail, with a heart condition. A nasty fall leading to a heart attack would have been enough to kill her. I look at her grey hair, messy around her face, her nightgown twisted around her veiny white legs. She wouldn’t like that. Eadie is unlikely to be missed by anyone much, other than perhaps Meg. Notoriously difficult to get along with, she fought with everyone, the other residents, the staff and even her own son when he made his dutiful visits, although he doesn’t seem particularly pleasant either. I could never understand the spell she seemed to have over Meg, who is so sweet and compliant. I just figured shared history bound them together for some reason; it does that.
One of the nurses, I can never remember who is who and none seemed to stay around too long, ushers the crowd from the door. She whispers something to the manager of the nursing home, a worried looking woman in her late 40s who spends all her time on the phone. What is the nurse saying? Ahh yes, the doctor would be arriving later that morning to sign off on the death and they were still trying to contact Eadie’s son who seemingly isn’t answering his phone.
‘C’mon Ray,’ the uniformed woman gently guides me from the room, “this is not another of your mysteries to solve.” Maybe. They obviously had not noticed the pretty violet bruising on Eadie’s bony old chest or the awkward sagging of my dressing gown pocket from the diary that my hand is tightly holding in my pocket.
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Monday 5 May
Dear Diary,
I am surrounded by people who are lazy and rude, cheats and liars. None of them are as perfect as they seem to think. Yet they get cross with me, think I am harsh, unforgiving. Fine. I have had enough. Enough of the deceit, enough of the lack of respect and gratitude for all that I do and have done for these people.
Firstly my darling son, when you visit this evening I have a surprise for you. No more handouts, no more turning a blind eye to the women, the gambling and the fact that you have run my father's business into the ground. Do you think I don’t see the loathing in your eyes as you are forced to sit and make small talk with your mother? Today it stops. Today I tell you it is time to stand on your own two feet. No more money now or ever. You will no doubt be angry, maybe you’ll raise your fists to me, you have a wicked violent temper just like your father.
Next, Ms Havers. Do you really think that you can run this place as you do? I have more than hinted to you that I know what is going on, given you the chance to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop stealing from us all! I hear you on the phone pleading for loan extensions and see you sneak out to the club down the road coming back stinking of cigarettes and booze. I know this is the reason that our meals have been getting smaller, the meat chewier, the toilet paper scratchy. Whilst having a hold over you did score me preferential treatment for a while, lately you seem to have forgotten who your friends are. No more!
Lastly Meg. We joked about ending up in a nursing home together, and really it has been lovely at times. Until Ray! That pompous ex-cop, what do you see in him? Running around making up little mysteries to solve, no one cares! Until he arrived, life at Elmslea was an extension of our life long friendship. I look after you and you follow me around like a puppy, it is the way it has always been. After all I was the one who got you out of trouble all those years ago, the shame of being an unmarried teenage mum. Who bought the gin? Who sat with you during those awful hours? Who took you into my home when you fell apart years later when the memories of burying that tiny blue body that never got to breathe on this earth became too much? Not Ray, the one that you spend all your time with now. I am all but forgotten. If Ray knew you though, I mean really knew you, would he be so keen? You are my friend Meg so today you must let Ray know who you really are, or I am afraid I will. Then we will see who is your truest friend. ************************************************************************************************
Monday 5 May 8.30 pm
I am sure Eadie is up to something when she calls us to her room, arriving as her son is leaving. His hands are balled into fists. Did I mention, I am an ex detective? I notice these things. I also see the look of pure anger on his face. He turns into the visitors lounge and kicks the vending machine before slumping onto the sofa. He then proceeds to thump at the coffee table in front of him all the while turning to glare at his mother’s room mumbling something about his dad’s money, his money. Ms Havers is watching from her office. Late shift for her, I think.
Eadie is sitting queenlike on her flowery quilt waiting for us.” I think we all need to talk”, she says, “Meg … isn’t that right?” I look at Meg who is as white as a ghost, her hand trembling on mine. She doesn’t look at me or Eadie. “Please not now Eadie it is late. Let's talk tomorrow,” she pleads with Eadie. I have no idea what is going on but Meg is rattled and Eadie desperate to talk.
“Sorry to interrupt!” There is a pause in whatever the hell is going on as Ms Havers waltzes in with a tray of medication. “I need to give Eadie her evening meds and it is important she gets them at the same time each night and is calm when she takes them.” For the second time I wonder why she is here so late. She doesn’t usually deliver medication to the patients; that’s a job for the nurses. Trust Eadie to get the star treatment though. After another stern look from Ms Havers, I turn to leave the room, but not before I witness Ms Havers administering what looks like quite a large quantity of pills to Eadie. Eadie swallows them without question, her eyes fixed on Meg, who is also looking back at Eadie and ... mouthing something?
Whilst the women are distracted, I slip the diary I see sitting on Eadie’s dressing table into my pocket. Something is going on, and I am going to find out what.
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Monday 5 May 10pm
Does Eadie really think I care about Megs’s past? We are all old, we all have a past. No-one else needs to know it, I didn’t need to know and Meg certainly doesn’t need to know that I know. It was this thought that sends me down the hallway for a second time tonight.
There is Eadie sitting on the edge of her bed, waiting for me I am sure. A look of victory on her smug face. ”Meg is not who you think!” she spits at me”. “I don’t care!”, I reply angrily, “and I will never mention it to her, everyone is allowed their secrets.” Eadie laughs at me, ‘I can tell whoever I want!” I just want her to shut up. I pick up a pink satin pillow. My anger is burning red-hot. Horrible woman! I hold the pillow over Eadie’s face but my upper body strength and lack of balance without my frame is not enough to keep her down. She sits up gasping for breath; her night-time medication has left her drowsy and unsteady on her feet, but still she is coming at me. What choice do I have? I hold up my zimmer frame and push with all my might. Eadie clutches her chest then falls, her head hitting the floor with a sickeningly loud thump. Her eyes flutter, and close for the last time.
I have come full circle. Cop becomes killer. But I can live with this; some people are just bad, and get to live too damn long.
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Monday 5 May 10.10 pm
Too restless to sleep and still shaking from my morning encounter with Eadie, I walk down the shadowed hallway to get a snack from the machine in the lounge. As I round the corner I see Ray walking out of Eadie’s room. What was he doing in there? Has Eadie told him?
Eadie looks ridiculous. I am not sure why but I want to laugh. I guess she must have tried to go after him, have the last word, and ... tripped? I move closer to the inelegant heap on the floor. There is a noise, a soft gurgle. I position myself in front of Eadie. Watery blue eyes look up at me. “It was Ray, I told him, he tried to kill me”, Eadie whispers. I hesitate for a moment, sigh, then pick up the pink pillow I bought her as a present last year. I hold it firmly over her barely protesting face. I understand now what Ray was doing. What I am doing, finishing what he started.
Death to secrets.
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Rationale
The social/historical context I’ve chosen for my short story is a nursing home. In historical terms, they are a relatively recent phenomenon arising only after the breakdown of extended family living arrangements in the mid twentieth century. Therefore the story is set in relatively recent times. Because nursing homes are places that house the elderly there is the feeling that nothing really interesting happens in them so when it does it is all the more shocking. This parallels other works in the cosy crime genre such as Agatha Christie’s, ‘Tape Measure Murders’ (Christie, 1941) where there is a sense of danger or scandal when it lies hidden in respectable closed communities. In Christie's case that is an English village whilst in my story it is a nursing home community. This setting relates to the major theme of my short story, which is that there are consequences for your actions and that you can’t escape them, even in a nursing home, even at the end of your life. This runs alongside the theme of relationships/friendships and their secrets, good and bad. A secondary theme in my short story is that what is ‘legal’ and what is ‘right’ can be two different things, a subversive theme for a crime story, in that I am suggesting that society’s so-called ‘crime’ of murder might not be so bad in some situations where the victim was particularly wicked, or cruel.
The sub-genre convention I have chosen for my short story is that of ‘cosy crime’ which has the conventions of being set in small communities or domestic settings, of crimes happening anywhere there are people living in close quarters with one another and crime occuring for reasons which might seem inconsequential to those living outside that setting. They generally feature an amateur sleuth who is often the narrator and who eventually solves the crime. There are a number of suspects, all with plausible motives for committing that crime, some of whom are ‘red herrings’. In my story the red herrings come in the form of the nursing home manager Ms Havers and the son of Eadie, both who have reasons to murder Eadie and are in the right place at the right time. However, I’ve subverted these conventions somewhat in that my ‘amateur sleuth’ who was once a professional detective, has actually participated in committing the crime and is helping to cover it up, and it looks as though the crime will not be solved as those who have committed it will likely get away with it. This is different to most cosy crime fiction which tends to end with the murderer being caught and justice served, although a similar subversion is found in Agatha Christie’s 1926 novel, ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ where the first person narrator is found to be the killer. Moreover, my short story’s unsympathetic portrayal of the victim manipulates the reader into not minding that they’re killed and hoping that her killers will succeed in getting away with it.
Symbols and Motifs can provide extra context and move along the plot in literature. A motif is a recurring idea or image that reinforces the theme of a piece of a story. The pink satin pillow fulfills this role in my story. It first makes an appearance narratively, the morning after the murder. Of course the reader at this point in the story has no idea of what it may portend. It is only later that we find out that the pink satin pillow was a present from Meg and it is this same present that both Meg and Ray use to suffocate Eadie. The pillow can be seen to represent the women’s relationship. It is a gift from Meg who is always pandering to Eadie's needs, looking out for her comfort, yet in the end, after years of a suffocating friendship it is ironic that Eadie herself is suffocated, ultimately by Meg, before Meg ‘carelessly abandons’ the pillow alongside Eadie’s lifeless body, just as she abandons Eadie to be with Ray.
A symbol in literature can be an object, person, situation, event or action that has a deeper meaning in the overall context beyond a surface understanding. The diary is symbolic in this story. A diary is an old fashioned item in the modern world, a keeper of secrets and contains all you need to know about someone and their life. It is therefore symbolic of the power that started with Eadie but becomes Ray’s when he picks up her diary and symbolically has her life in his hands which of course then leads to him having her life literally in his hands.The diary also serves the purpose of a literary device in my story as it allows the reader to hear things from the victim's point of view. The diary’s contents also reveal that most of the characters have something to hide, whether a criminal or moral indiscretion, something that is a staple of the genre (Franks, 2019)
Cosy crime stories may seem like a relic of the early 20th century with it’s largely bloodless crimes and often domestic settings but they are undergoing a major resurgence (Kerridge 2020) as an alternative to the violent and explicit thrillers of recent times. A short story suits this genre because it allows us to inhabit the action of the narrative as if we were a fly on the wall and gives plenty of room to play with established genre conventions.
References
‘Tape Measure Murders’ in Christie, A. (2001). ‘Tape Measure Murders’, in Three blind mice. New York: St. Martin's paperbacks.
Christie, A. (1977). ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,’ in Masterpieces of murder. Garden City, N.Y.: International Collectors Library.
Franks, R. (2019). May I Suggest Murder. Retrieved 1 May 2020, from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00049670.2011.10722585
Kerridge, J. (2020). JK Rowling and the rise of 'cosy' crime. Retrieved 1 May 2020, from https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/416419/JK-Rowling-and-the-rise-of-cosy-crime