Three Things About Elsie Page 3

‘No, no one.’

  I drank some tea.

  ‘I wish you’d just spit it out, Florence.’

  ‘I just thought I saw someone we used to know,’ I said, into the china. ‘Can’t remember his name.’

  ‘Oh, I wonder who it might be. Someone from school? From the factory?’

  I swallowed another mouthful of tea. ‘Not sure. Can’t place him.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be able to.’ Elsie inspected the empty courtyard through the glass. ‘I’ve always been better at faces than you.’

  She was the only one left. The only one who would know if my mind had finally wandered away and left me all to my own devices. But sixty years ago, we’d packed up the past, and parcelled it away, and promised ourselves we’d never speak of it again. Now we were old. Now we were different people, and it felt as though everything we went through had happened to someone else, and we had just stood and watched it all from the future.

  She tried to see a little further into the darkness. ‘I do hope I spot him as well.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said, into the cup.

  5.06 p.m.

  There’s all manner of nonsense under that sideboard.

  It’s amazing what falls behind furniture when your back is turned. I’d never have noticed if I hadn’t been lying here, but now I have, I can’t stop staring. They don’t make a job of it, the cleaners. They’re all headphones and aerosol cans. Some of them even switch the television on while they’re working. Never ask. I watch from a corner of the room and point things out, and they glance sideways and hoover around my feet. ‘Let them get on with it,’ Elsie says. ‘Enjoy being a lady of leisure, Florence.’ It’s not in my nature to be leisurely, though. Elsie’s more of a sitter, and I’ve always been a doer. It’s why we get on so well.

  Occasionally, you see the same one twice. There’s a girl comes on a Thursday. Or it might be a Tuesday. I know it’s a day beginning with a T. Dark hair, blue eyes. One hand on the vacuum cleaner, the other pressing a mobile telephone to her ear. She’s always laughing down that telephone. Pretty laugh. The kind of laugh that makes you want to join in, except I can’t understand a word she’s saying. I think she might be German. When I went to the shop near the main gates, they had a box of shortbread. Made in Germany, it said on the back, and so I bought it, because I thought it might remind her of home. We could have it with a cup of tea, I thought; break the ice a bit. Get to know each other. I mentioned it, but she was so busy talking down that telephone and the front door banged shut when I was halfway through a sentence. I expect she was in a rush. That’s the trouble, isn’t it, everyone is in a rush. We can have them another time, when I get over this fall. No harm done, because they’re still in the packet.

  She might be the one to find me. The German girl. She’ll forget about her telephone as soon as she realises. It will fall to the floor, but she’ll ignore it and kneel down on the carpet next to me. As she leans forward, her hair will fall into her face, and she’ll have to brush it back behind her ear. Her hands will be warm and kind, and her fingers will wrap around mine.

  ‘Are you all right, Florence? What have you done to yourself?’

  ‘Not to worry, I’ll be fine,’ I’ll say. ‘I don’t want you fretting.’

  We will wait for the ambulance, and while we are waiting, she’ll ask me how I fell, how it all happened, and I will hesitate and look away. I’m not even sure what I’ll tell her. I remember the newsreader smiling at me and shuffling her papers, and I remember the silence when I switched off the television. There is a special kind of silence when you live alone. It hangs around, waiting for you to find it. You try to cover it up with all sorts of other noises, but it’s always there, at the end of everything else, expecting you. Or perhaps you just listen to it with different ears. I heard a noise, perhaps. Or a voice? I’m trying to decide what made me fall to begin with, but the only thing I remember is opening my eyes and being somewhere I knew I shouldn’t be.

  The ambulance men will get here, and the German girl will be relieved, and all the worry will empty out of her eyes, because you always assume once a uniform arrives, everything will be fine. It isn’t always the way, of course. I know that more than anybody. One of the men will push back the furniture, and the other will put a little mask on my face. The pieces of elastic won’t stay behind my ears, and there’ll be such a fuss made. They’ll strap me into a chair, one of those with a seatbelt on it, and they’ll put a blue blanket over me, and the German girl will make a big point about making sure it’s straight.

  ‘Are you all right, Florence? Is there anything else you need?’

  When we get outside, the cold will pinch at my nose and my ears, and my eyes will start to water.

  ‘Soon have you there, Flo. You hang tight, Flo,’ the ambulance men will say, and I won’t mind that they call me Flo, because they have kind eyes.

  They will lift me up and carry me down the outside steps, and as they do, I will look out over the town, at the liquid ink of the night and the lights that shine from other people’s lives, and it will seem as though I’m flying.

  And I will feel as light as air.

  FLORENCE

  Friday was bingo. Elsie forced me to go on the pretext of it being good for me, but I knew it was only because it was a rollover week.

  ‘You’ve only got a month to prove yourself,’ she pointed out to me, quite unnecessarily. ‘So you might as well start now.’

  And so we found ourselves in the corner of the residents’ lounge, watching everyone mishear all the numbers. People sat with their feet suspended on pouffes, and their mouths wide open, staring at pieces of cardboard and wondering what they were meant to be doing with them. Miss Bissell was nowhere to be seen, and her second in command had been left to pull out the ping-pongs.

  Miss Ambrose held up a ball. ‘Twenty-two,’ she shouted.

  Everyone started quacking.

  ‘Pardon?’ she said.

  ‘Two little ducks,’ someone shouted.

  Miss Ambrose held up another ball. ‘Number eleven.’

  Of course, everyone whistled.

  ‘Legs eleven,’ shouted someone else.

  Miss Ambrose looked at the ball. ‘It’s like a different language.’

  ‘It’s the language of growing old,’ I said. ‘Like pantry and wireless.’

  ‘How am I supposed to speak it?’ Miss Ambrose played with the back of an earring. ‘I’m only in my late thirties.’

  We all stared at Miss Ambrose. I was just on the verge of saying something when Elsie gave me one of her eyebrows.

  ‘You’ll be there soon enough,’ I said instead. ‘It’s like waking up in a different country.’

  Miss Ambrose pulled out another ping-pong. It was a two.

  ‘I suppose this is one little duck, then?’ she said.

  ‘See. You’re fluent already.’

  Miss Ambrose stopped fiddling with her earring, and coughed.

  We’d only been there ten minutes and my mind started to wander. It can’t help itself. It very often goes for a walk without me, and before I’ve realised what’s going on, it’s miles away. I’m not even sure when that started to happen. Elsie says to think of them as butterfly thoughts, but I can’t help worrying. I never used to be like this, and if you’re not in charge of the inside of your own head, what are you in charge of? Miss Ambrose says it doesn’t just happen to old people. It can happen when people are depressed as well. Perhaps there are times when your life is so unbearably miserable, but the only part of you that can run away from it and leave, is your mind.

  It always happens to me in that blasted day room. I was staring out of the window into the car park, and wondering why silver cars are so popular when they show up all the dirt, when I saw her. Dora Dunlop. Fully dressed. There was a uniform either side of her, and she had a suitcase and three carrier bags at her feet. I could see pieces of her life peeping out of the top. Knitting and a pair of slippers, and the folded edge of a magazine.

&
nbsp; ‘You can’t make me,’ she was shouting, and her voice slid into the room through an open window. ‘I don’t have to do what you say!’

  The uniforms concentrated on the ground and the sky, and anything else within their eyes’ reach that didn’t involve Dora Dunlop.

  ‘YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.’

  A few people looked up from their bingo cards, and Miss Ambrose reached across and closed the window. After she’d dropped the catch, I thought I saw her glance over at me.

  Dora was silenced now. A tiny, grey figure, standing in the middle of a car park, still packed with shouting and despair, except no one could hear any more.

  I nudged Elsie. ‘They’re taking her to Greenbank,’ I said. ‘Look. Out in the car park.’

  ‘I’m concentrating on the numbers. We only need one more for a line.’

  ‘But she’s frightened. We should go and help. Stick up for her.’

  I turned to the window, but the car park was empty. Dora Dunlop and her carrier bags had vanished.

  ‘She’s gone,’ I said.

  I looked back at Elsie.

  She was staring at me.

  When we were finished with the bingo (which no one ever won), everybody took it in turns to go to the toilet, and one of the uniforms passed around a plate of egg sandwiches. Room temperature. Too much cress. Not enough mayonnaise. Elsie disappeared to the ladies’, and I was just considering whether I should eat her sandwich and spare her the disappointment, when Miss Ambrose stood up in the middle of the room and clapped her hands very loudly – and rather unnecessarily, if you want my opinion, as the only thing you could hear at that point was the push of dentures into buttered bread.

  ‘Some news,’ she said, and a flush crept from underneath her flowered shirt and wandered on to her face. ‘We’ve had a new resident join us this week.’

  At that very moment, a mouthful of egg sandwich had been making its way down my throat, and her words brought it to a standstill. People looked up from their plates, and in the far corner, two residents instigated a small round of applause. The only person who didn’t react was Mrs Honeyman, who continued to snore very gently into a side plate.

  ‘As you know, here at Cherry Tree, we like to make our guests feel especially welcome.’ Miss Ambrose clasped her hands to her bosom in a welcoming way. ‘So I’m sure you’ll all join me in saying a very big hello to our latest friend and neighbour.’

  I didn’t realise he was there, standing by the bulletin board, until he stepped forward.

  Over the years, I’ve found my eyesight to be less and less trustworthy. Even with glasses, I’m reluctant to believe a word it says, but this time, there was no doubt. This time, it couldn’t have been more accurate.

  It was him.

  Ronnie Butler.

  I knew straight away. There aren’t many things remaining in the world that I’m sure of, but this was one of them. He was older, of course. Less definite. More worn. Those things don’t really alter a person at the end of the day, though. It’s just the small print. What really matters is the eyes. The smile. The way someone looks across a room as though they had never left.

  I have felt fear many times in my life. I feel it each time I sit alone in darkness, and dare to peel away a corner of the past. I’ve felt it over the years in an unexpected mention of his name, or a casual remark. It was strange, because up until that day, it had been the very absence of him which frightened me, but now he was here, standing not ten feet in front of me, I finally knew what real terror was, and there was nothing quite like it. It felt as though it could pull my heart right out of my chest.

  Because he was back.

  And I had been found.

  ‘A happy, contented community …’ I could hear Miss Ambrose’s voice somewhere outside my own thoughts. Ronnie looked exactly the same. Some faces disappear in-to old age, and their past self and present self are two completely different people, but the lines on Ronnie’s face had only made more of who he was. Even the scar was there. A tiny mark at the corner of his mouth, which disappeared each time he smiled.

  ‘A safe harbour in those twilight years,’ said Miss Ambrose.

  Twilight was a ridiculous word to use. It means dim and confusing, and stumbling about. I couldn’t swear to it, but I was almost certain he expected me to be there. It was the look more than anything. The same look he had in the factory yard and on the bus, and across a kitchen table. When you’ve seen that look you don’t ever forget it. Even a lifetime later.

  ‘So please join me in welcoming the new occupant of number twelve, Mr Gabriel Price.’

  There was a beat of silence before I heard my own voice.

  ‘Gabriel Price?’

  All the breath I’d been holding escaped along with the shout, and there was the scrape of a chair leg, as someone leaned forward to look. Miss Ambrose tilted her head to one side, and she stared at me.

  ‘At your service.’ Ronnie Butler touched the edge of his trilby. He stepped forward, and I felt the back of the chair push into my bones. I could almost smell the night he died. I could almost reach out across the years and take it in my hands, and carry it with me out of the room. A pulse drilled into my throat with such violence, I couldn’t understand how the whole room hadn’t heard.

  Ronnie looked straight into my eyes and smiled, and when he did, the little scar at the corner of his mouth disappeared.

  Like magic.

  ‘We’re off then, are we?’

  I’d waited for Elsie outside the ladies’. I took hold of her elbow as soon as she came out.

  ‘We are,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t it wait? I had my mind especially set on mandarin segments.’

  ‘I’ll open a tin when we get home.’

  ‘And what about the raffle? It’s a rollover week.’

  ‘There’s a box of shortbread in the bottom cupboard. You can have that.’

  ‘It’s not the winning, Florence. It’s the anticipation,’ she said. ‘The thrill of the chase.’

  ‘I just want to get out of here.’ We stopped halfway along the path that led behind the blocks of flats, and I let go of her elbow. Not many people used this path. There were leaves collected around its edges, and the grass there seemed to have forgotten it needed to grow. Most people liked the front path, with its handkerchief borders and opportunities to pass the time of day, because people always seem to like to walk the same way everyone else walks. But I preferred this one. It was a forgotten path. A path that could sort out a problem.

  I saw the tick of confusion in Elsie’s eyes. ‘What on earth’s the matter, Flo?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. Whatever makes you think that?’

  She looked down. ‘Because your hands are shaking,’ she said.

  MISS AMBROSE

  ‘Off her rocker, if you ask me.’

  No one had. However, to Handy Simon, questions were only ever optional. To Handy Simon, the world was a place in need of a running commentary, and he seemed to have volunteered himself to provide an explanation, just in case anyone might find themselves in need of one.

  ‘Hmmm?’ Anthea Ambrose peered into her compact mirror. She had bought it because everything was magnified by the power of ten. This was something she was now beginning to regret, but she found herself unable to look away. It was like watching a car accident on the opposite side of the motorway.

  ‘Leaping up and shouting like that.’ Handy Simon dragged a table back to its rightful place, and the sound of an abandoned plate of egg sandwiches rattled across the empty room. ‘Whatshername.’

  Miss Ambrose shut the mirror, and all her worries hid themselves behind the click of a compact. ‘Florence,’ she said. ‘Miss Claybourne. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before she goes to Greenbank.’

  ‘I don’t know how you tell them all apart.’

  Miss Ambrose returned the mirror to her handbag. ‘It’s my job.’

  Handy Simon took an egg sandwich, and launched it into his mouth. ‘There
’s so many of them, and they all look the same,’ he said, without giving the sandwich an opportunity to leave. ‘I’ll pop outside now, if that’s all right with you. Clean some of the mess out of the guttering. Or we’ll have a blockage to deal with.’

  There was a time when Anthea Ambrose had briefly considered the merits of Handy Simon. After all, trainers can be cleaned. Hair can be trimmed. You see it on television programmes. People buy a whole new wardrobe from John Lewis and part their hair on the opposite side, and all of a sudden they’re completely different people. It was a time when Miss Ambrose had scanned the horizon for a possible husband, like a castaway searching for the arrival of a distant ship.

  ‘Preventing the efficient flow of rainwater.’ He took another sandwich. ‘Which could eventually lead to permanent damage.’

  Although some ships were perhaps best left unboarded.

  ‘And potential structural problems, if the situation isn’t addressed promptly.’

  For fear of having the entire rest of your life explained to you.

  Anthea Ambrose walked back to her flat at the far edge of the grounds. It was separate from the residents’ apartments, but she trod on an identical beige carpet (‘Universal beige,’ said Miss Bissell, ‘goes with everyone,’) and the doors closed with the same faint click of apology. Her flat also offered a similar view, through windows that opened only a fraction of an inch, because the fear of residents slipping through and defenestrating also seemed to extend to the staff. When Anthea Ambrose looked out from her kitchen window, a concertina of old age unfolded before her, beckoning into the future. The flat came with the job (a job she had only planned to stay in for twelve months). She’d applied for others, she’d even got an interview for one, but it was on the day that a new resident had decided to escape en route at the traffic lights, and she was so busy trying to calm the poor woman down, she didn’t make it. They hadn’t ever called her back.

  Miss Ambrose never walked quickly, although she wasn’t sure if it was because she felt ashamed at being able to manage it (against a backdrop of walking sticks and Zimmer frames), or whether old age had somehow leaked into her bones and persuaded her to join in. She’d never meant to work with the elderly. She’d meant to be an air hostess or something in publishing. Something glamorous. Something where she could walk quickly. But it was as though life had an undercurrent, and no matter how hard she tried to swim in the other direction, it was determined to pull her away. It would be so much easier, she thought, if you knew what the world’s intentions were in the first place. It would save such a lot of energy. Instead of paddling around aimlessly, you could swim with confidence towards your target, ignoring the temptation and the distraction, and all the other swimmers, who battled and argued with the tide.