Three Things About Elsie Read online

  The grounds were silent, and she passed vacant benches and a deserted gazebo. She glanced over at the Japanese Garden. It had taken an age to persuade Miss Bissell it was a worthwhile idea. She’d read about Japanese gardens in a magazine. They were supposed to promote inner peace and reflection, but Miss Bissell said it was perhaps unwise to encourage the residents to reflect too rigorously on anything at their time of life.

  Actually, Miss Bissell just said, ‘I don’t think so, Anthea,’ and Miss Ambrose had offered up the rest in an effort to instigate a discussion. Miss Ambrose rarely stood up to Miss Bissell, but on this occasion she had persisted for several months, and eventually, Miss Bissell had given in. Although a line was drawn at lanterns, because of the moth issue. Miss Ambrose wondered if anyone ever used the garden, or whether it just stood as a giant Japanese monument to a time when she thought she could perhaps make a difference. There was no one in there now, of course, because the whole of Cherry Tree was deserted at this time of day. Residents tended to doze off in front of radios and cold cups of tea, and it was perfectly acceptable to fall asleep, as long as one remained vertical. It was very tempting to join them. Each afternoon was a battle for Miss Ambrose. A battle between denial and acceptance. Acceptance of the fact that, although there were no hand rails in her own apartment, there still remained a space on the wall for them to be attached.

  As Miss Ambrose turned the corner, she spotted Gabriel Price. He sat on the very last bench before her front door, under a grey, paper-thin sky, his elbows resting on the back of the seat. Miss Ambrose was so surprised to see another human being this deep into the afternoon, a small sound broke free from the bottom of her throat. As she grew closer, she thought she saw him smile, but she had begun to realise that with Gabriel Price you could never quite be certain.

  ‘Miss Ambrose.’

  ‘Do call me Anthea, Mr Price.’

  He didn’t.

  She decided to plough on, nevertheless.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you out and about,’ she said. ‘Most of our residents are resting at this time of the day.’

  ‘I don’t believe in resting, Miss Ambrose. The devil makes work for idle hands, don’t you think?’

  Miss Ambrose fiddled with the back of an earring.

  ‘Although you wouldn’t know anything about that, of course. Running this place is a twenty-four-hour marathon, I should imagine.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I—’

  ‘But of course you do. Look how you dealt with that debacle in the day room.’

  ‘Miss Claybourne? Well, I suppose …’

  He smiled again. It was a full stop in disguise.

  ‘They get very muddled, the elderly.’ He spoke as though they were a tribe of people he observed from afar. ‘Easily confused.’

  Miss Ambrose tried to summon up one of her understanding head-tilts, but she was distracted by the way he stretched his arms across the back of the bench. The way the light seemed to disappear the lines on his skin and fade the grey in his hair.

  ‘How old did you say you were again, Mr Price?’

  ‘I didn’t, Miss Ambrose.’ He replaced his trilby and stood so effortlessly, it looked as though the bench had somehow helped him on his way. ‘But I’m not quite ready for the dying of the light just yet.’

  ‘Well, no. Quite. Of course not.’

  ‘But a young woman such as yourself wouldn’t know anything at all about that.’

  Miss Ambrose felt a flush on her skin. A jumble of words appeared in her mouth, but by the time she’d organised them into a sentence, he’d already disappeared around the corner.

  ‘How very extraordinary,’ she said.

  Miss Ambrose walked the rest of the way to her flat. It was only when she turned the key, when she heard the door’s click of apology and felt the beige carpet under her feet, that she realised she had arrived there slightly faster than usual, and with a little more purpose.

  FLORENCE

  I waited. I waited until coats had been hung up and kettles had been switched on, and tins of fruit had been emptied into bowls and drowned in Ideal Milk. I even waited whilst Elsie ate spoonfuls of oranges with a look of deep concentration. I waited until all of this was done with before I spoke.

  ‘I need to discuss someone with you,’ I said. ‘Someone from the past.’

  Her chewing slowed a little.

  There are times when sharing a problem only seems to make it grow. Hearing the words out loud gives them a strength they never seem to have inside your own head, and it’s easier sometimes to let them stay there, unnoticed. If you lock something away for long enough, if you can manage to keep it from escaping, eventually it feels as though it never really happened in the first place. But I knew as soon as I told Elsie, as soon as I allowed the problem to leave, I’d lose ownership of my worrying and I’d never be able to silence it again.

  ‘Someone I’ve seen,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’ Elsie placed the spoon at the edge of the bowl, and she became very still.

  I had to force the words from my mouth. I had to push them away.

  ‘Ronnie,’ I said, eventually.

  I watched her face. There wasn’t a jot of reaction.

  ‘Ronnie Butler,’ I said.

  She looked at me for a moment, and she smiled. ‘You daft bugger. You can’t have. Dead as a doornail, Ronnie. They buried him, don’t you remember?’ She reached for the spoon again, but I held on to her wrist.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s out there right now. I’ve seen him.’

  ‘How can you possibly have seen someone who’s been dead sixty years? You’re just getting confused.’

  ‘It’s him.’ I slammed my hand on the table, and Elsie rattled along with the dessert bowl. ‘He’s come back for me.’

  When Elsie spoke again, her words were wrapped up in a whisper. ‘He’s dead, Florence. No one has come back for anyone.’

  ‘Then who have I seen?’

  ‘It must be someone who looks like him. They say everyone has a double, don’t they? You’ve just made a mistake, that’s all.’

  I went over to the window and listened to the leafy quietness of the courtyard. ‘I must be getting confused. It can’t be him, can it? Not after all this time?’

  She always undoes the stitches of other people’s worrying and makes them disappear. That’s the second thing you should know about Elsie. She always knows what to say to make me feel better. ‘Of course it can’t, Florence. People just don’t do that, do they? They don’t come back from the dead.’

  ‘You’re right. Of course they don’t. Let’s forget I ever spoke.’

  ‘Good. Because if Miss Ambrose hears you talking like that, you’ll be lucky to get a fortnight, let alone a month.’

  I reached over for the Radio Times, and that’s when I looked at the mantelpiece. That’s when I noticed.

  The elephant.

  It was facing the wrong way again.

  ‘Stop getting yourself in a twist,’ Elsie said. ‘You’ve made another mistake, that’s all.’

  It’s Elsie all over. Forever telling me I’m worrying over nothing, forever telling me not to tie myself in a knot. I’ve known her since we were at school. We met on a bus. A bus! I wonder how many people meet on public transport these days. A stab in the dark, but I’d hazard a guess and say not many. People seem to put all their energy into ignoring each other instead.

  She didn’t believe me about the elephant any more than she believed me about Ronnie. I could tell.

  ‘You’re off on one of your tangents again,’ she said. ‘Stop hurrying into the future, hunting down catastrophes.’

  I pretended to agree with her, just for the sake of peace. I even stopped looking for Ronnie and moved away from the window, but I couldn’t help glancing over there from time to time. She caught me at it on a few occasions and gave me one of her looks.

  ‘You were exactly the same at school,’ she said. ‘“Do you think that girl looks unwell? What should we do?�
�� or “I’ve heard Norman’s father beats him. Who do you think we should tell?”’

  I didn’t answer. I just shuffled a bit closer to the window, to make a point.

  ‘You shouldn’t witter on about people so much,’ she said. ‘Norman could look after himself.’

  ‘But he couldn’t,’ I turned to her. ‘Norman was short and skinny, and he hadn’t got anyone else to stand up for him. He said he was going to run away to London. London would have swallowed him up.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘It feels like yesterday,’ I said. ‘Sometimes, I think there must be a shortcut between the past and the present, but no one bothers to tell you about it until you get old.’

  ‘You spent so long in and out of other people’s lives back then, you barely had time for your own.’

  I carried on looking through the window, but I could hear her fingers, tapping out her thoughts on the tablecloth.

  ‘Do you remember? It’s how we first met. You were trying to do the right thing.’ She leaned forward and interrupted my viewing.

  ‘I’ve got too much on my mind to be concerned with that,’ I said.

  ‘The girl on the school bus with the twisted ankle?’ She leaned a little more. ‘You gave up your seat, didn’t you?’

  I noticed her glance at my hands. They were folding backwards and forwards in my lap. Sometimes, I don’t even know I’m doing these things until someone points it out to me. ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember any girl with a twisted ankle. You’re getting me mixed up with somebody else.’

  ‘It was you, Florence. She hobbled on to the school bus and no one stood up. No one except you. That’s how you found yourself sitting next to me a few stops later. That’s how we met.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’ My lips closed very tightly, and I could feel all the little lines stitch them together.

  ‘I’m not making it up. It was a long second, don’t you remember?’

  I stopped turning my hands. ‘What’s a long second?’ I said.

  She explained it to me. Even though she said she’d explained it very many times before. I always seem to forget. It’s when you catch the clock, holding on to a second so it lasts just a fraction longer than it should. When the world gives you just a little bit more time to make the right decision. There are long seconds all over the place. We just don’t always notice them. ‘But you noticed this one, Florence. You made your decision. You gave up your seat. And that’s how we met.’

  ‘I don’t remember my life without you in it,’ I said.

  ‘We were just at the age when you start to notice other children. When you pick out who you might be friends with. I chose you long before you chose me.’ She smiled. ‘There was a kindness about you, even then. As if someone took all the kindness other people discard and ignore, and leave lying about, and stuffed it into you for safekeeping.’

  I tried to find the memory and pull it back in, but it felt very far away, and the elastic was too loose.

  She found my eyes with hers. ‘Try to think. There are things in the past you need to find again, Florence. It’s important.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘We laughed, because the seat you gave up was the one next to that boy who was in the scouts, and he did nothing but talk the girl’s ear off about first aid. She hung on his every word. I can’t remember her name. Tall. Dark hair. Her parents owned the little shoe shop on the high street.’

  I felt the elastic tighten. ‘They emigrated, that family, all of them.’ I let the words go very slowly, just in case they were the wrong ones. ‘To Australia.’

  ‘Yes, they did.’ Elsie was pleased with me. I can always tell when she’s pleased with me, because she gets a glitter about her eyes. ‘But the girl stayed here. She didn’t go with them.’

  ‘Men for the land, women for the home. Guaranteed employment. Ten pounds, it cost. Ten pounds for a brand new life.’

  I turned back to the window.

  ‘Ronnie Butler was on that bus,’ I said.

  HANDY SIMON

  Handy Simon wore a St Christopher around his neck, although he’d never travelled further than Sutton Coldfield. His father gave it to him when Simon turned eighteen, and the only time he’d removed it was when they took his appendix out in 1995. ‘Keep you safe,’ his father said. ‘Out of harm’s way.’ Generally, it had. Although whether the last twenty-five years was the work of St Christopher, or because Simon was naturally cautious, remained to be seen. He touched the medallion and stared at the guttering. He might only be travelling up a ladder, but surely the principle remained the same.

  Handy Simon was not a fan of heights. All of life’s bad experiences had occurred when his feet were off the ground. Even his mother died on an aeroplane. A heart attack at thirty thousand feet on the way back from Spain (‘At least it was on the way home,’ his father had said, over the ham tea). It was their first foreign holiday. Simon often wondered whether, if they’d chosen Margate over Malaga, she might still be alive now. Although she was very fond of sweet sherry and never held back at a buffet table, so quite possibly not. That was the problem when your parents were so much older than everyone else’s. You ran the risk of losing them before you’d really got to know each other.

  ‘Was I planned?’ he once asked his mother.

  ‘You were a surprise,’ she told him. ‘A miracle.’

  ‘Like Jesus?’

  ‘Not quite like Jesus,’ she said.

  He tested out the first rung with the heel of his boot. Life at Cherry Tree involved a more than reasonable amount of ladder work. He’d once mentioned the words ‘health and safety’ to Miss Bissell in the staff room, but she had arched an eyebrow in silence and returned to her Sudoku. Simon found this was the main problem with people. They never listened. They were too busy enjoying the sound of their own voices to take any notice of him, and because of that, they missed out on a wealth of information. Not anecdotes or stories, but statistics and proof. Facts. Facts were the important things. Facts stood the test of time. Without facts, the world would become a giant mess of rumour and hearsay, and everything would fall apart.

  He turned his collar against the wind. North-easterly. Bitter. Becoming cloudier as the day progressed. Once the wind found its way into Cherry Tree, it never seemed to be able to find its way out. It was the architecture. The wind took the path of least resistance, it rushed down from the buildings and hid around corners. People thought corners were the best places to escape the wind, but often, they were the most dangerous. Simple physics. He’d tried to explain this to Miss Ambrose one day, but her eyes had glazed over in a most unattractive fashion. He hadn’t given up, mind. It wasn’t in his nature. Instead, he’d printed out a page on the subject from the internet for her. Some people are visual learners, after all. Actually, forty-three per cent of people are visual learners.

  Simon knew he’d made a mistake as soon as he got to the seventh rung. He felt the push of air against the ladder, and heard the creak of metal on the tiles. He wondered if his life might flash before him, or at least the parts with a degree of significance, but all he saw was a cracked roof tile and a pigeon, looking down on him with clockwork curiosity. Perhaps he didn’t have any significant parts. Perhaps his significant parts were yet to come, and would now never arrive, due to a north-easterly wind and his decision to have one more egg sandwich. He’d just begun to feel the inevitability of the slide, an unexpected journey back to earth, when a voice said, ‘Steady on there, young man,’ and the ladder righted itself and the world became vertical again.

  When Simon looked down (which took a surprisingly large amount of courage), he saw the top of a trilby and an overcoated forearm holding up the ladder. The new chap. From the day room. Whatshisname again.

  ‘Price,’ said the man, and shook hands when Simon reached the protection of solid ground. He nodded at the ladder. ‘Health and safety issue, if you ask me.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Simon tried to swallow, but
he couldn’t find anything to do it with. ‘I’ve told them as much.’

  ‘That’s the problem with people today. They never listen.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Simon. He said it a few more times, just for good measure. ‘I need some ties for the ladder. Secure it to the wall.’

  ‘I’ll help, if you like.’ Mr Price straightened his trilby. ‘Give you a hand.’

  Simon wasn’t entirely sure of the average age of a Cherry Tree resident, but he felt it was one more suited to holding up supermarket queues than ladders. The man in the trilby looked more than capable, mind you. As though age had tightened his springs, rather than unwound them.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, Simon,’ he said. ‘I’m not quite ready for the knacker’s yard just yet.’

  A string of ‘no’s came out of Simon’s mouth in a little dance. ‘Oscar Swahn won an Olympic medal in his seventies,’ he said. ‘Fauja Singh ran the London Marathon at ninety-two. History is littered with people who achieved great things in old age.’

  The man lifted the ladder away from the guttering. ‘Those are very interesting facts, Simon. Why don’t you tell me some more?’

  And so he did.

  FLORENCE

  I could tell Elsie thought it was a completely ridiculous suggestion, but she still went along with it. It’s one of the best things about her.