Bob’s Complaints

The phone's dial tone carried through the reception area with the flat persistence of something that had long stopped expecting an answer. I leaned against the doorframe where the east corridor opened onto the main desk, watching Jamie try Luke's number again. Third time today, maybe fourth. I'd stopped counting, though I rarely stopped counting anything where Jamie was concerned.

He sat perched on the edge of the reception desk, his back carrying that particular tension I'd learned to read over the past few months — the architecture of a man holding himself together through sheer stubbornness. His thumb hovered over the screen, then dropped. The line went dead. And something in his shoulders surrendered, that slight collapse I'd come to know as intimately as I knew the weight of his mouth against mine in the supply closet last Tuesday.

He never left messages. Just kept calling, kept hoping presence would be enough. I understood the impulse, even if I thought it was wasted on Luke Smith. Ten years together, and the man couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone when his partner needed him. Some people didn't deserve what they had.

Jamie hadn't noticed me yet. I didn't announce myself. There was useful information in watching someone who thought they were alone — the version of themselves they didn't perform for an audience. And Jamie, for all his sharp wit and careful deflections, was remarkably transparent when he forgot to guard himself. The unhappiness sat on him like weather.

I'd noticed it the first week I started at Vaucluse. Noticed him, too — the way he moved through the facility with a competence that bordered on autopilot, the flashes of genuine warmth he showed the residents that vanished the moment he thought no one was looking. Noticed the phone calls he stepped outside to take, the careful way he never mentioned his home life unless directly asked.

It hadn't taken much. A few conversations that lasted longer than they needed to. A joke that landed well, followed by another. The particular attention of being seen by someone who was actually paying attention. Jamie was starving for it — anyone could have spotted that, if they'd bothered to look. I'd bothered. And when the moment came, in the corridor near the cleaning supplies where the security camera had a blind spot, I'd been the one standing close enough to take it.

Not love. Nothing so dramatic. Just mutual want, finding a convenient outlet. He was attractive and unhappy and responsive to my attention in ways that felt good to receive. I was attracted and curious and, if I'm honest, pleased to be wanted by someone who'd seemed so carefully unavailable. We'd kissed three times now. Four, if you counted the one that got interrupted by Mrs Woolley's call bell. Nothing more than that — just mouths and hands and the particular thrill of doing something you probably shouldn't in a place you definitely shouldn't do it.

The Tasmanian winter light fell through the reception windows in that flat, grey way that made everything look slightly tired. Beyond the glass, the Derwent would be the colour of old pewter, and kunanyi would be wearing its usual crown of cloud. I thought about the forecast I'd checked this morning — rain coming in from the west, temperature dropping toward evening. My father would be pleased. He'd been complaining about the dry spell affecting his plantings in the Montrose garden, the native groundcovers he'd been nursing along since autumn.

Jamie turned from the phone like someone surfacing too fast from cold water — breath sharp, eyes unfocused, that particular disorientation of returning to a world that hadn't waited. Then he caught sight of the old man approaching the desk.

Mr Gangley.

I watched Jamie's face reset, the personal distress sliding behind professional composure with the speed of long practice. There was history there — I'd heard about the phlegm incident, the way Gangley had coughed directly onto the visitors' logbook a few weeks back while filing one of his endless complaints. Jamie had been on reception that day too. Bad luck seemed to follow him when it came to Gangley.

The old man moved toward the desk with the deliberate gait of someone whose joints had become unreliable translators between intention and action. Ninety-four years old, former postal clerk, possessed of the unshakeable conviction that standards had been declining since approximately 1957 and that it was his personal duty to document every instance of that decline. I'd catalogued him within my first month at Vaucluse — filed him alongside all the other residents whose patterns were worth tracking.

He filed complaints the way other people did crosswords. The smudged windows. The improperly addressed mail. The general moral decay of modern youth. It gave him purpose, I supposed. Something to rail against now that the post office had retired him and the world had stopped caring whether parcels arrived with their documentation in proper blue ink.

The cough came next — wet, rattling, the kind that made you instinctively calculate the radius of potential contamination. Jamie's chair inched backward, a few centimetres of professional distance that wouldn't be enough if Gangley decided to spray. I'd done the same thing myself, more than once. We all had. You learned quickly in aged care which residents required a wider personal bubble.

"I would like..." Gangley's voice emerged shredded and thin, carrying decades of tobacco and Tasmanian winters. A pause for breath that seemed to take genuine effort. "I would like to put in a complaint."

And so it began. The ritual. Jamie's face arranged itself into the particular expression of patient attention that I'd seen him deploy a hundred times — present but protected, engaged but elsewhere. The smudged window, probably. Or the handprint on the glass that was blocking his view of the roses. The standards of correspondence, the declining quality of everything, the slow collapse of civilisation as evidenced by whatever minor imperfection had caught his attention this week.

I half-listened from my position by the corridor entrance, close enough to hear but far enough to seem uninvolved. There was a woman across the room — new admission, arrived last week from somewhere up the coast — watching the exchange with undisguised amusement. She had a pink handkerchief pressed to her mouth, eyes bright with anticipation. She knew theatre when she saw it.

Jamie nodded along to the complaint about the window, his jaw tight but his voice appropriately soothing. He was good at this — the performance of care, the simulation of concern. I wondered sometimes how much of it was real and how much was armour. With Jamie, the line was never quite clear.

"But that's not all," Gangley said, and something in his tone shifted.

I felt it before I understood it — a change in atmospheric pressure, the quality of attention in the room condensing around whatever was coming next. The new woman leaned forward in her chair. Even Jamie's professional mask flickered slightly, curiosity breaking through the fatigue.

"I spied a little mischief this afternoon. It caused me great bother."

Mischief. The word landed with old-fashioned weight, carrying implications from an era when such things were spoken of in careful euphemisms. I watched Jamie's eyebrows rise slightly, interest piquing despite himself.

"Mischief," he echoed, and I caught the edge of amusement in his voice — that particular tone he used when something had surprised him into engagement. "And what type of mischief might this have been?"

Gangley drew closer to the desk, invading the careful distance Jamie had established. The scent reached me even from where I stood — medicinal balm and old tobacco and something sharper beneath it, the unmistakable edge of smuggled whiskey. He'd been at the contraband again. I filed that information away automatically, the way I filed everything. You never knew what might prove useful.

"The hanky-panky type."

The words hung in the air like something from another century. Jamie's face went through several expressions in rapid succession — surprise, confusion, the beginning of a laugh he couldn't quite suppress.

"Oh. My. God. The hanky-panky type."

His voice came out louder than he'd intended, the phrase so absurd in its phrasing that it demanded response. I felt my own mouth twitch, though I kept my expression still. Hanky-panky. As though we were living in some Edwardian melodrama, all moral outrage and smelling salts.

But beneath the absurdity, something cold was beginning to move through my chest. Because Gangley was still talking, still building toward whatever revelation he'd been savouring, and I was starting to understand what he might have seen.

"I don't appreciate your tone, young man."

"My tone? What's wrong with my tone?"

The back-and-forth continued, but I'd stopped tracking it. My mind was elsewhere — calculating, assessing, running through the past week's geography. Where had I been careless? Which moments of stolen privacy might have had witnesses I hadn't noticed?

The stairwell. Yesterday afternoon. The door with the small window I'd assumed no one ever looked through.

Not Jamie. Someone else.

Daniel. New orderly, started three weeks ago, had been giving me looks across the medication room that I'd eventually decided to investigate. It hadn't meant anything — just curiosity, just the pleasant friction of mutual attraction finding an outlet. A kiss that lasted maybe thirty seconds before I'd pulled away, already half-regretting it, already aware that I was complicating things unnecessarily.

Gangley's voice cut through my calculations:

"It was that Ben. I saw him kiss that other young man. He needs a good spanking."

The room contracted.

For one crystalline moment, everything became very clear and very still — the fluorescent lights humming their institutional frequency, the new woman's sharp intake of breath, the particular quality of silence that follows revelation. My name hung in the air like a struck bell, and I couldn't take it back, couldn't unsay what had been said, couldn't undo the window in the fire door or the moment of carelessness that had led to this.

That other young man.

Not Jamie. That was the part that mattered. That was the part that would land differently than the rest of it.

I didn't move. Didn't flinch. The stillness I'd cultivated through years of meditation practice held, a wall against the flood of reaction that wanted to break through. But behind that wall, my mind was racing — calculating damage, assessing angles, trying to read Jamie's response through the professional mask he'd pulled back into place.

He wasn't looking at me. His eyes stayed fixed on Gangley as the old man delivered his moral pronouncement, but I could see the tension in his jaw, the particular set of his shoulders that I'd learned to read in other contexts entirely. He'd heard. He'd understood. And he was processing what it meant — not that I'd kissed a man, but that I'd kissed a man who wasn't him.

The spanking comment passed without registering. Some Victorian absurdity, already fading into background noise. What mattered was the silence between Jamie and me, the space where explanation might go if I had any intention of offering one.

I didn't.

Gangley deflated as quickly as he'd inflamed, the righteous energy draining out of him until he was just an old man in institutional slippers, shuffling back toward the lounge with his complaint delivered. The new woman's laughter broke the tension — loud, genuine, the kind of amusement that came from watching drama that didn't involve her personally. She dabbed at her eyes with her pink handkerchief, clearly delighted.

I watched Jamie's back, waiting.

When he finally turned, his expression was unreadable. Not angry — Jamie rarely did angry, at least not where anyone could see. Something more controlled than that. More careful.

"Well," he said, his voice pitched low enough that only I would hear it. "So I'm not the only one, then."

It wasn't a question. The words landed precisely where he'd aimed them, and I felt their impact somewhere beneath my ribs.

I should have said something. Should have explained, or apologised, or at least acknowledged the hit. But what was there to say? He was right. He wasn't the only one. I'd been enjoying his attention and Daniel's attention simultaneously, because both were available and both felt good and I hadn't bothered to consider what would happen when those parallel lines intersected.

The phone rang. Sharp, institutional, demanding.

He turned away to answer it, and the moment closed like a door. His voice came out professional, clipped, handling whatever enquiry had arrived with the competence I'd admired in him from the beginning. But there was something different in the set of his shoulders now. Something that said this conversation wasn't over, just postponed.

I stayed where I was, leaning against the doorframe, feeling the weight of what had just shifted between us.

My grandmother used to say that secrets were like water — they found the cracks you didn't know you had and seeped through until suddenly everything was wet. I'd thought I was being careful. I'd thought the stairwell was private, the timing safe, the risk acceptable. But I'd miscalculated, and now Jamie knew that his interest in me — whatever it was, however he'd categorised it in his own mind — wasn't exclusive. That while he'd been stealing moments with me in the supply closet, I'd been stealing moments with someone else entirely.

Not love. I hadn't lied about that, even to myself. But something. Something that had felt good enough to risk, until the risk came due.

Jamie's voice continued its professional murmur into the phone. The new woman's laughter had subsided into occasional chuckles. Somewhere down the corridor, Gangley would be settling into his preferred chair, satisfied with the chaos he'd introduced.

And I stood in the doorway, calculating my next move, wondering whether what I'd built with Jamie over the past few months could survive this particular crack — or whether I'd just watched it start to flood.

The afternoon stretched ahead, full of rounds and medications and the ordinary work of caring for people whose bodies were slowly failing them. Eventually, I'd have to face Jamie properly. Have some version of the conversation his silence was demanding.

But not yet. For now, I pushed off from the doorframe and headed back toward the east wing, letting the distance do what distance always did — create space for the immediate to fade into something more manageable.