The Last Pharaoh

THE LAST PHARAOH

Ross Sheehy's muddy boots took her down the track to MacLellan's farm
and past the old tyres and rusty bits of iron abandoned at the main
gate. She shrunk into the folds of her fathers old grey coat to protect
herself from the wind that was howling in from across the bay and
threatened to eat her alive. She was pleased she'd had the presence of
mind to grab the coat from behind the front door and hastily button it
over her district nurse's uniform. She reached the farmhouse and took a
look through the dirty glass of the kitchen window. She couldn't see
inside but she could see her reflection. A round, unremarkable middle
forties face, with thin lips, windswept hair and dull green eyes,
screwed in tight against the wind. A face that had never seen the world
beyond Dublin, a face that kept asking itself what on earth it was
doing there.

The bell's of St Mary's carried on the wind from around the other side
of the mountain. Father Robert must be cracking the whip this morning.
She could imagine his voice with its stern timbre and breathless
pauses. Confirmation in an hour. She'd make it as long as MacLellan
allowed her to change his dressing in peace. At seventy-five he was
still a fast talker and she knew what he'd talk about. He wanted to
take her and Mhari the cleaner with him when he passed on. "I'm the
last feckin Pharaoh," he'd say and make them both laugh. Didn't know
what he'd do without his girls. Said the same thing every week. Then
he'd be after her for the latest gossip. Said he was entitled to hear
it. He knew that Ross did not approve but when Mhari arrived she would
pour him a scotch, hold his hand and think up something to keep him
happy.

She put her ear to the rotten wood and blistered paint of MacLellan's
door. There was no sound from within his gin soaked halls. Not even a
belch. That was strange. The old bastard always shouted from his bed in
the piss-covered lounge. He was drunk most of the time and usually
dispensed with accepted forms of natural urinary disposal after three
glasses of cheap Spanish red, gin or whisky, opting for the unorthodox
bucket, or bottle or carpet or a mix of all three. Ross put down her
bag and pulled the coat even tighter around her. She reached into her
bag for a torch, straightened back up to bang on the door and slowly
turned the handle.

The inside smelt bad. Ross flinched as she always did. She moved slowly
through the stillness, fearing an attack in case the bastard had
managed to push himself out from under his mountain of bedclothes and
lurk in some darkened recess. He surprised her last January. She'd
walked in and he was chasing after her on his wheelchair with a bedpan
and trousers unzipped, yelling that he was going to take her with him.
She'd managed to escape somehow. The police and the doctor had calmed
him, injecting drugs into his filthy arteries. But Ross knew the drugs
wouldn't keep him quiet for long. You can't expect to cure an old man
with new drugs. She wanted to turn back but she had made the promise to
her father to nurse MacLellan come what may.

By the cooker now, sliding in inch by precious inch following the
torchlight past it's rust and rivulets of dried milk snaking down it's
blackened flanks. She

disturbed a huge white moth that flew up in front of her face before
spinning off blindly into the darkness. She held her nose, trying not
to cough. You could walk into MacLellan's place a graduate after years
studying medicine at Trinity and within five minutes your intelligence,
your capacity for anything would be reduced to that of a six-year-old.
Once, two summers ago, she'd walked in and couldn't remember who she
was. It took her three hours to get out, mental faculties reducing,
halving in a short space of time then halving again. It was instant and
premature Alzeimers walking on MacLellan's sodden carpets. Dermot
Riordan, the Guard had found her, slumped against the barn door. He'd
rushed her to the infirmary and slowly her faculties had returned. She
wanted them to check, to conduct a scientific survey of MacLellan's
farm but nothing ever happened and science was the poorer for it.

Her leg scraped the edge of the heavy kitchen table. It groaned beneath
a basket of freshly washed laundry, a 25 pound bag of coal, two plates
with a fossilised haddock head on each, scraps of orange peel, a burnt
out toaster, two stained coffee cups and a five litre tin of petrol.
She didn't mind Mhari having her fish but she might at least do the
washing up before she went home. Why MacLellan kept coal and petrol in
the kitchen she never knew and what he kept in his stinking cellar
would have to be left to a future generation of archaeologists to dig
up. MacLellan was still not to be found. Maybe he was there, in the
unnerving blackness of his lounge, hidden by the filth waiting to
spread his germs with that hostile cough. She toured around the ground
floor but the torch couldn't find him. His diseased sofa was empty.
Torn blankets lay on the floor. The ashtray was cold. An upturned
bottle of scotch in the

litter basket and three chairs all with broken arms lying on the floor.
He couldn't have gone out. MacLellan hadn't gone out for two years.
Pissing on carpets, drinking and chewing gum was his idea of an
alternate lifestyle, his wheelchair purdah as he called it. Purdah for
a glorified cripple. She had ten packets of spearmint flavour tucked
away in her bag in case she needed to make a peace offering.

Mhari must have taken him upstairs somehow but how would she have
managed? MacLellan was still a weight despite his infirmities. She
eased through the kitchen and into the narrow passageway that led to
the stairs. The beam of the flashlight moved along the ceiling, picking
out the black timbers and Ross moved slowly, with her back to walls
that had never been covered by any kind of paper. She arrived at the
stairs sweating. It was the sweat of fear. She looked up the stairs and
realised she'd never been this far before. It was like being a tourist
who'd found themselves stumbling accidentally into some off-piste slum.
At the top of the stairs was a world she'd never experienced and didn't
know if she wanted to. Her blood pounded. She pressed an old metal
light switch but it didn't work.

The torch took her up, step by step, past the black and white
photographs of MacLellan's relatives. Of them all it was Kennedy
MacLellan who took pride of place. Kennedy MacLellan was the old man's
grandfather. Hanged for poaching back in the old days. MacLellan
himself had been a notorious smuggler in his day, organising crime
along large stretches of the southern coastline. Guns, alcohol,
anything to make money. MacLellan the gangster, the hard man, the man
they said killed O'Brien's cousin. Yet he'd always been so kind to her,
always treated her so

well. It was hard to belief he was the kind of man who in his heyday
had used violence frequently and often during his long drunken nights.
He was a cripple now, only able to lift himself out of the seat of his
wheelchair in a fit of rage. As she climbed the stairs Ross was aware
of the wind on her face. How in Gods name could wind whistle down a
man's stairs?

She was aware of a noise, of something dropping as she pushed open the
bedroom door. She looked right as she entered and the light came on by
itself. A big cross on the opposite wall. MacLellan lay spread-eagled
on his back, naked as the day, on a big four poster bed in the centre
of the room. Her skin crawled. She stared at him but he didn't move.
She checked for a pulse and tilted her head. White diaphanous sheets
hung from the top rails. What looked like algae on the ceiling. He was
stone dead. There was no movement from his protruding eyes, his long
hair was still and he had a peculiar smile across his face. An envelope
was held between the fingers of one of his hands where it lay still and
heavy across his chest. The bedpan lay beside him. It was full. A razor
floated in the middle and there was some spillage on the sheets. Ross's
senses were caught between the scent of shaving soap and stale
urine.

Ross always prepared mentally for revulsion when visiting MacLellan,
but somehow never for death. She hardly dared move forward. She lifted
the envelope out of his stiff fingers. It was addressed to her. She
paused before opening it and carefully pulling out a piece of lined
paper that had been folded in half. There was no signature and no date,
just a simple message scrawled in MacLellan's familiar slanty

handwriting telling her to look under the bed She patted her pockets
for her mobile phone then remembered that she'd left it in the car. She
bent down and shone the light beneath the bed. It was Mhari,
unconscious but breathing. She was naked and foetal. Her hair was dyed
red and her hands and ankles tied behind her. There was something
written on the soles of her feet. The words "I told you" in bright red
marker pen. Ross jerked backwards. Oh God. How could he .? She wanted
to be sick, to run out, away from the pestilential air, out into the
bitter gusts that rattled MacLellan's roof tiles, but she had to help
Mhari. She fell to her knees and began pulling frantically on one of
her legs but a smell of burning stopped her in her tracks and made Ross
climb back to her feet. Too late she saw the string running from the
door handle to the top of the bedpost and the chiffon scarf wrapped
around the light bulb. MacLellan was the messenger of death. The flames
came at her quickly, driving her back towards the stairs. She half
jumped, half fell down them in her hurry to reach the kitchen. She was
aware of the fierce heat on her head before she even reached the last
stair. The flames had scorched past her, running along the ceiling of
the passageway towards the kitchen, burning the air. She could see the
kitchen table through the smoke, then the petrol can. She thought about
her children and priests and angels and her first day at school and
Mhari. Holy Father, was he going to take them both with him after
all?