Six Rings and a Splatter

"There's a particular kind of patience you develop in aged care—the sort that involves smiling through biological hazards whilst your personal life quietly decomposes in the background."

The dial tone droned on like a flatline. I counted the rings—three, four, five—each one a small fuck-you from the universe. By the sixth, I knew. I'd known before I'd even picked up the bloody receiver, but some pathetic part of me had needed to try. To reach across the distance that had settled between Luke and me like mould growing in the spaces we used to fill with conversation.

"Hi, you've reached Luke Smith. I'm not available to take your call right now, but if you leave me your name and number, I'll be sure to call you back when I can."

His recorded voice—bright, friendly, the voice of someone who actually answered their fucking phone—filled my ear. I didn't leave a message. What would I say? Hey, just checking if you still remember you have a partner. Just wondering what's so fascinating in your study that you can't spare five minutes to talk to me. Luke would see the missed call. Whether he'd bother calling back was anyone's guess.

I set the receiver down too carefully, like the act required concentration. The click seemed to echo. Outside the tall windows of Vaucluse, the July sky hung low and grey, the colour of dirty dishwater. Tasmania in winter had a particular talent for this—trapping you in a kind of suspended misery, never quite delivering the storm that would at least give you something to push against. Just this endless, suffocating grey.

Much like home.

The thought landed before I could deflect it. I shoved it aside. There was work. There was always work—the one reliable constant in a life that had started feeling less like a life and more like a waiting room.

I turned back to the reception counter and the elderly man who'd apparently decided I was his afternoon's entertainment. Mr. Gangley stood there like something time had forgotten to collect, his skin a roadmap of stubbornness, his clothes whispering of decades when things were done properly and young people knew their place. His walking frame—battered aluminium held together by spite and habit—supported him with the resigned patience of a long-suffering spouse.

He cleared his throat.

Christ.

The sound ripped through the quiet like someone dragging a rake across concrete—a wet, hacking eruption that seemed to originate somewhere around his ankles before clawing its way up through his chest and exploding outward. I felt my whole body tense, shoulders climbing toward my ears as I instinctively rolled my chair back a few inches. Subtle. Defensive. The kind of evasive manoeuvre you learn after you've been caught in the splash zone one too many times.

Because I had been. God, I had been.

The memory surfaced like something dead floating up from the bottom of a pond. Mr. Gangley in fine form, weeks ago, raging about some trivial bullshit I couldn't even remember now. His face cycling through shades of red and purple like a sunset in hell. Me standing my ground, young and stupid, thinking I could win an argument with a ninety-four-year-old man who'd survived the Depression and two world wars and wasn't about to back down from some jumped-up care worker half his age.

The argument had escalated. Words flying. And then he'd leaned forward, his whole body convulsing, and I'd thought—here it comes, the big one, he's going to drop dead right here and I'll have to do CPR on this cantankerous old bastard—but no. What came instead was worse.

The gob.

Dark green. Almost luminous. Launching from his mouth with the trajectory of a well-aimed missile and landing with an audible splat on the paperwork in front of me. On the intake forms. On my hand.

I'd washed seven times. Scrubbed until my knuckles cracked. Didn't matter. Some things don't wash off. They just embed themselves in your memory like shrapnel, flaring up when you least expect it.

Mr. Gangley shuffled closer, and I had to physically stop myself from wheeling further back. The reception area felt smaller suddenly, the winter light through the windows doing fuck-all to warm the space. On days like this—understaffed, dragging, the kind of shift where every minute felt like an hour—the residents could smell weakness. They circled like sharks scenting blood.

This was aged care. This was what I'd signed up for—the bodily fluids, the complaints, the slow parade of decline. The work had taught me patience, or at least a convincing performance of it. Resilience. A kind of empathy you could only develop in the trenches, elbow-deep in other people's deterioration.

Lately, though, the work felt less like purpose and more like hiding. A place to pour the energy I couldn't spend at home, where Luke vanished into his study for hours doing Christ-knows-what while I made dinner for one and pretended not to notice how quiet the house had become.

"I would like..." Mr. Gangley began, his voice a harsh scrape that forced me to lean in despite every instinct screaming retreat. He paused, dragging in a breath that rattled through his chest like dice in a cup, gathering strength for whatever pronouncement was coming. "I would like to put in a complaint."

Of course he would.

I arranged my face into something resembling professional concern—the mask settling into place with the ease of long practice. This dance was familiar. Mr. Gangley complained; I listened with theatrical patience. He pushed; I pushed back, gently. It was almost comfortable in its predictability. Some days I even enjoyed it, the way you might enjoy a crossword or a tricky hand of cards. Mr. Gangley was a puzzle. Not impossible, but complicated enough to keep things interesting.

"What would be your cause for concern this time, Mr. Gangley?" I asked, loading my voice with patience I didn't feel. Inside, my eyes were rolling so hard I was surprised they didn't make an audible sound. Outside, I was the picture of attentive service—leaning forward, hands folded, every inch the professional who definitely gave a shit about whatever cosmic injustice had befallen Robert Hugh Gangley this afternoon.

His complaints were as reliable as sunrise. Each one delivered with the gravity of a death sentence. This morning's grievance had been particularly spectacular in its pettiness—a smeared handprint on the kitchen window, left by some visiting child whose small fingers had committed the unforgivable crime of touching glass.

"I look down at the roses in the garden from that window every day. I was very disappointed to say the least," he'd announced, his voice heavy with the kind of betrayal usually reserved for discovered infidelities. The handprint wasn't just a smudge. It was an affront. A personal attack on everything Mr. Gangley held dear.

I'd nodded along, making sympathetic noises, while mentally listing the dozen more pressing things requiring my attention. The absurdity wasn't lost on me. Here was a man who'd survived the Depression, lost his brother in the Pacific, buried most of everyone he'd ever loved—and his greatest outrage was reserved for a kid's fingerprints.

But there was something almost endearing in it. The way he clung to these small battles, these petty skirmishes against the indignities of institutional living. Easier to rage against smudged windows than to acknowledge the real losses—the independence, the privacy, the right to eat dinner whenever you bloody well wanted. Mr. Gangley fought the battles he could still win, even if winning meant nothing more than being heard.

I understood that strategy better than I wanted to admit.

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

The word mischief landed differently. There was something in his voice now—the usual outrage, yes, but threaded through with something else. Something almost gleeful.

"Mischief," I echoed, curiosity getting the better of me. "And what type of mischief might this have been?"

Mr. Gangley leaned closer. The distance between us shrank to nothing, and I caught the full archaeology of his existence—old age, certainly, that particular sweetness of time and fragility, but layered beneath it, the unmistakable evidence of contraband. Stale tobacco clinging to his cardigan. And whiskey. Actual fucking whiskey, which was absolutely not on his approved beverage list and which I filed away for future leverage. The old bugger had a stash somewhere. Still breaking rules at ninety-four.

I found myself almost charmed.

"The hanky-panky type," he confided, dropping his voice to barely a whisper. The phrase was so unexpected, so deliciously old-fashioned, that I forgot to be annoyed.

"Oh. My. God. The hanky-panky type," I repeated, the words escaping before I could stop them. My voice climbed with each syllable, surprise and amusement colliding into something that sounded far less professional than it should have.

Mr. Gangley straightened, offended dignity radiating from every inch of his ninety-four-year-old frame. "I don't appreciate your tone, young man."

Behind him, I caught the sound of barely suppressed laughter—Ben and another resident, her name escaping me, both failing miserably at keeping straight faces. The woman had her pink handkerchief pressed to her mouth, shoulders shaking, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. Best entertainment she'd had in months, probably.

"My tone? What's wrong with my tone?" I kept my voice balanced between respect and playful defiance. There were rules, professional boundaries, the expectation that we wouldn't antagonise the residents—but there were also relationships built over time, operating according to their own unspoken agreements.

Mr. Gangley and I had one such agreement. He complained. I listened with theatrical patience. It was our dance, our private soap opera, and most days it kept us both from losing our minds entirely.

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

Mr. Gangley's face was a portrait of righteous disgust, entirely unaware of the double meaning lurking in his choice of punishment. Behind him, the woman with the handkerchief had given up any pretence of composure, her laughter now punctuated by actual tears.

But I wasn't looking at her.

I was looking at Ben.

He stood near the corridor entrance, his expression carefully neutral. Where the woman found hilarity, Ben found something else. His dark eyes met mine for just a moment—a flash of recognition, of understanding, of something that felt almost like kinship—before he looked away. No laughter in his face. No amusement at Mr. Gangley's accidental innuendo. Just quiet acknowledgement of what had been revealed.

So I'm not the only one?

The thought crystallised with startling clarity. Relief? Curiosity? A strange loneliness suddenly sharpened by the possibility of connection? I tried to catch his eye again, to send some silent message across the space between us, but he'd already turned away.

Mr. Gangley, having exhausted whatever reserves had fuelled his outrage, seemed to deflate. His shoulders sagged. His grip on the walking frame tightened as if it were the only thing holding him upright. One moment a pillar of moral indignation—the next, just a tired old man who'd spent more than he could spare. He shuffled away without another word, the rubber feet of his walker squeaking against the linoleum.

I watched him go, still processing. The atmosphere had shifted, charged with something that hadn't been there before. The woman with the pink handkerchief was still chuckling to herself, but my attention stayed fixed on the corridor where Ben had disappeared.

The reception phone shrieked, cutting through my thoughts.

"Well, a good spanking he will get then," I muttered under my breath, releasing tension I hadn't realised I'd been holding. I reached for the receiver, feeling the mask of professionalism settle back into place.

"Vaucluse Nursing Home, this is Jamie speaking..."