WHERE DREAMS GO TO DIE

a story about paying the price

by Thomas M Bailey

The building is an old one, perched on the corner of two vaguely forgotten back streets a stone’s throw from where the 96 tram comes to an end.

It’s an unremarkable house, three storeys tall, with a shabby unkempt garden set carelessly out front. One can faintly hear the traffic noise of St Kilda’s main drag just a few blocks away, but nobody pays this formerly grand house any mind.

A footpath leads to the dusty front door set back on a porch that’s slowly being enveloped by an unruly mob of vines and dark purple flowers. The path’s ancient concrete is crumbling in parts and chipped; time has not been kind.

Through the front door is a security desk, at which is seated a rather bored young woman who’s listening to music on an iPod. The hour is late, and most (if not all) of the residents who call the Nightingale Hotel home have long since drifted off into a shallow, fragile, and dreamless sleep.

Two ancient lifts are to the left of the desk; one presses the ‘UP’ button and patiently waits for the doors to open with a tired groan – the noise an abused beast of burden might make when it’s been pushed to its limit.

Once in the car, which smells faintly of stale piss and marijuana, one ascends to the third floor and heads right, past the communal toilets and over the threadbare carpet worn thin from years of neglect. An occasional fluorescent tube loosely set into the ceiling dimly lights the hall. The only sound in the night is the flutter of moths as the stupid creatures bump and flap and brush against the sole source of light in this corridor.

Down at the end of the hallway, there are two apartment doors facing one another – rooms 311 and 312. Between them is a dirty little window framing the fronds of an old palm tree, which is swaying in the sea breeze that blows off the surface of the bay. There is a light inside Room 311 gleaming dully underneath the door. Maybe not everyone in the building is asleep, after all.

Eleanor simply could not sleep. She desperately tried, but the darkness would creep into her bed as she drifted closer to oblivion and … do things to her. It sat on her chest and it filled her mouth and it covered up her face and she couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t move and she couldn’t –

She could not sleep. Wearily, she reached over her little end table and switched on the lamp. It took a little effort, but she sat herself up and sipped from her glass of water. She looked about her, in that tiny claustrophobic room that’s been her sole home for nearly two decades – nearly as long as the rift in her family opened up and her daughter had stopped talking to her, depriving Eleanor from seeing her remaining beautiful grandchildren. Her beloved husband had been dead and buried of a congenital heart defect for far longer than that.

Eleanor’s fingers brushed against a framed photograph of a blonde woman embracing two children, a teenage girl and a little boy. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to the night. Painfully, she swung her legs out of bed and wrapped a shawl the colour of cobwebs around her shoulders to ward off the chill of the room.

It was time to make some tea, she reckoned. Led by eyes greyed slightly by the first signs of cataracts, she slowly felt her way to the kettle in the corner and boiled some water.

* * *

Across the hall in Room 312, Frank was unable to sleep as well, but for different reasons than Eleanor. Panic attacks didn’t bother him – rather, it was his lungs keeping him up. Another epic jag of coughing had rendered him doubled-up on his bed, emitting wet and soggy masses of phlegm into his old handkerchief. Little flecks of blood speckled the edges of the fabric.

“Ah, Frank ye ol’ git – dinnae have too much time left, ferfucksake.” A wee little flask sat on his end table and he tipped it to his lips and took a healthy swig of the sweet, sweet nectar. The Jameson’s burned his throat satisfactorily, and suddenly out of nowhere he felt the need to urinate. Sweet Jaysus I fuckin’ hate bein’ old, he thought.

He mentally pictured a calendar in the musty attic of his mind and realised that Thursday was two long days away – too long, in any sense, for him to wait for Kora, the beleaguered woman who changed his bed-sheets and kept his room in a somewhat liveable state. Think I’ll piss in the toilet then. He hobbled to his walker and made slow tracks to the door. The last time he rang Kora for an early cleaning, she surreptitiously messed with his existence in subtly passive-aggressive methods; she moved furniture further away from the bed, she removed the tennis balls from the legs of his walker, she hid his whiskey in weird and remote locations, and to add insult to injury, she removed the two littlest toes of his left foot.

Wait, that hadn’t been Kora. That had been the diabetes. Sweet Jaysus.

Frank manoeuvred himself out the door, and – perhaps after realising the hour and the fact that there were people trying to get some sleep in the building – let the door slam loudly behind him.