Three Things About Elsie Read online

  ‘Of course I’ll come with you. That’s what friends are for,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t want to argue about it?’

  ‘Sometimes it’s easier,’ she said, ‘just to agree. Or I’ll spend the entire rest of the day listening to you talk me into it.’

  The potting shed, I told her. If we sit in the potting shed, we’re bound to spot him sooner or later, and you can see for yourself. I wanted to prove I wasn’t hallucinating, that I hadn’t lost my mind.

  ‘Of course you haven’t lost your mind,’ she said.

  I wasn’t so sure. Although it’s such a silly turn of phrase. It implies it’s somehow your fault. It suggests you were being careless, or became distracted along the way and mislaid it somewhere, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier. Or a husband, perhaps. Although I suppose losing your mind can prove quite helpful sometimes, because it does hint there is a possibility, however slim, that you may find it again.

  It smelled of creosote, the potting shed. Creosote and soil. We were surprised it was unlocked, but there are times Cherry Tree seems stuck somewhere in the 1950s, when the whole world was unlocked but no one had yet thought to steal from it. It was dark too. There was a feathery light, but it didn’t quite meet up with the corners. There were shelves at the back, with all manner of bottles and jars stretched along them – many of which, I suspected, did not contain what they claimed to. Below the shelving, a row of gardening equipment rested against the wood, and made odd shadows on the walls. I didn’t know all their names, but there was a giant spade, still holding on to lumps of earth. Elsie asked me what each of the tools was called, because she said she was always looking for an opportunity to stretch my mind. I told her my mind wasn’t in the mood for being stretched. I told her, if she wanted to know the names for all the different tools, she could find them out for herself, and I pulled out some old deckchairs for us to sit on instead. As soon as I opened them up, I could tell they weren’t safe, but she said they’d be perfectly fine if we stayed put and didn’t move around too much, and so we rested on decayed canvas and peered through a window smeared with last year’s gardening.

  ‘We could be at home instead of sitting here,’ she said. ‘With a full pot of tea and Radio 4.’

  I ignored her. She was used to it by now. Whilst I ignored her, I listened to a blackbird singing outside the shed window. You wouldn’t think something so small would have such a lot to say for itself.

  She spoke a bit louder. ‘We could be at home,’ she said, ‘instead of sitting here.’

  I turned, and the glass in my spectacles found the light. ‘You need to see him for yourself, Elsie.’

  We sat in silence for a moment. Even the blackbird.

  ‘I know the name,’ I said, after a while. ‘Gabriel Price. I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘You always say you know people, Florence. It’s one of your habits.’

  I sat back, and the deckchair creaked at me.

  ‘Here’s the best place to get a good look at him,’ I said. ‘And I have seen the name before. It isn’t one of my habits. It’s the truth.’

  The potting shed does have a useful view. Cherry Tree consists of four blocks of flats, called (rather unimaginatively) A, B, C and D. Miss Ambrose once spearheaded a campaign to have them renamed a little more romantically, but, like many of Miss Ambrose’s ideas, it never really took off. The main buildings crouch in the middle, and on either side are two courtyards. From where we sat, we could see both of them: a patchwork of perennials and ceramic planters, and gravel paths with no real purpose, like an elaborate board game. We watched old people shuffle from bench to bench, passing parcels of conversation between themselves and trimming their afternoons. We saw Miss Ambrose, dawdling back to her flat as usual, with the world pressing down on her shoulders, and Gloria, from the kitchens, having a smoke in the back yard of the canteen. But no sign of Ronnie Butler.

  ‘Or whoever it was you think you saw,’ said Elsie.

  ‘He’ll be along in a minute,’ I told her, ‘and then we’ll be well away.’

  ‘We should have brought some sandwiches,’ she said.

  I started to stretch my legs out, but then I remembered the deckchair and put a stop to myself.

  ‘And a flask,’ she said. ‘We always did that when we went anywhere, do you remember?’

  I said yes, but I had half a mind on the window and I wasn’t really concentrating. I could feel a seed of worry begin fidgeting inside my head.

  ‘What if one of the gardeners finds us first?’ I said. ‘Or that handyman. I can’t remember his name.’

  ‘Simon,’ she said. ‘You know full well he’s called Simon. You would have remembered if you’d thought about it for long enough. You need to think about things for longer before you give up, Florence.’

  I didn’t answer, and we were stuck in a wordless argument for a while.

  ‘Do you remember taking sandwiches on holiday, when we were children?’ she said eventually. ‘Do you remember going to Whitby?’

  I said I remembered, but I wasn’t sure. She could tell straight away, because nothing much gets past Elsie.

  ‘Think, Florence,’ she said. ‘Think.’

  I tried. Sometimes, you feel a memory before you see it. Even though your eyes can’t quite find it, you can smell it and taste it, and hear it shouting to you from the back of your mind.

  ‘Ham and tomato,’ I said. ‘With boiled eggs!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes! We ate them on the beach at Saltwick Bay, when we went looking for fossils.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘We never found any fossils, though, did we?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. We didn’t find any fossils.’

  There was a silence again, before I spoke.

  ‘Why is it,’ I said, ‘I can remember what was in my sandwiches at Saltwick Bay, but I can’t remember the name of the handyman?’

  There was a tremor in her voice, and she had to speak a bit louder to make a way through it. ‘If we knew that, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it now, would we?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t suppose we would,’ I said back.

  ‘Now tell me his name again, Florence. The handyman. Don’t give up so easily. What is he called?’

  I didn’t answer.

  It was another ten minutes before we saw him. I spotted the handyman first, marching through the grass, holding on to a ladder, but I couldn’t tell who was at the other end with all the darkness and the dirt.

  I started tapping on Elsie’s arm. ‘Look. Do you see him? Do you see him?’

  She said, ‘Give me a chance,’ and she got her glasses out and peered through the window. ‘I can’t make anyone out from here except Simon; they need to be a bit closer.’

  ‘They will be in a minute,’ I said.

  And they were.

  Very close.

  So close, they couldn’t have been heading anywhere else.

  She still didn’t see him. I know she didn’t. Not until the door was pulled open, and the shed was flooded with light. She saw him perfectly then, even though he was standing behind Simon. He seemed to fill the entire doorway, and he showed not even the smallest indication of surprise, but looked as though he fully expected us both to be there. Simon didn’t say anything at all. I knew he was still looking at us when he reached for a piece of rope on one of the shelves, but I was more concerned about the man in the doorway.

  When Simon left, the inside of the shed was a box of ink again and I could hear my own breath, needling the air. ‘Well?’ I said.

  We stared at the space where they had stood. We stared for a very long time, and eventually Elsie said, ‘But it makes no sense.’

  I stopped staring and turned to her. ‘It’s him, though, isn’t it? It’s Ronnie?’

  She told me she wasn’t sure. She said it looked like him, but how could it be? I’m not certain what I said next, but I know I ended up shouting, because sometimes you have so much fear,
you don’t know where to put it and shouting is the only way for it all to escape from you. Elsie waited patiently for everything to come out, and when it had, she reached for my hand in the darkness.

  ‘Yours was the first hand I ever held,’ she said.

  I was still angry, and my words came out in a snap. ‘Not your mother’s?’

  ‘My mother’s hands were always far too busy waiting for my father to come back. I suppose I must have held my sisters’ hands at some point,’ she said. ‘But yours are the first I remember.’

  She was right. We held hands as we climbed hills, as we waited on pavements, and as we ran through fields, and we held hands as we faced all the things in life we didn’t think we could manage alone.

  ‘Are you there, Elsie?’ I said.

  Her hand was older now. The skin was livered and loosened, and the bones pressed into my flesh, but it still fitted into mine, just like it always had. I needed to feel its strength, and she squeezed my hand, so I could be sure it was there.

  ‘I’m here,’ she said.

  Neither of us spoke for a long time.

  ‘What do you think he wants?’ I said, eventually.

  ‘We don’t know that it’s him.’

  ‘But if it is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you think we should do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘But I don’t think we should do anything at all right at this moment.’

  ‘Whyever not?’ I could just make out the shift of her silhouette in the darkness. ‘We’ve got to tell someone.’

  ‘But what?’ she said. ‘What are we going to tell them? That Ronnie has come back from the dead? No, there isn’t any proof, you’ll just have to take our word for it. You’re on probation, Florence. You’ve got to be careful.’

  There was a silence again.

  ‘They’ll send me to Greenbank,’ I said.

  I heard her whisper back to me in the dark. ‘Perhaps that’s just what he wants.’

  HANDY SIMON

  ‘The potting shed?’

  Anthea Ambrose put down her calculator and folded her arms so tightly they disappeared into her jacket. ‘What on earth would anybody be doing sitting in the potting shed?’

  Handy Simon tried to find something in the room to stare at, other than Miss Ambrose’s eyes, even though they seemed to take up most of the space.

  ‘I couldn’t really say,’ he said.

  ‘And what were you doing in the potting shed?’

  ‘We were getting some rope for the ladder.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Mr Price was with me.’ Simon’s shoes began to shuffle. Whenever he was worried, his anxiety always seemed to make a beeline for his feet.

  ‘You were having quite the party in there, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Ambrose.’

  He’d known this was a mistake as soon as he’d seen Miss Ambrose was doing the accounts. The monthly accounts always made Miss Bissell irritable, and any emotion experienced by Miss Bissell was eventually passed around amongst everyone else. It was in his contract to report these events: a duty of care, it said. He was told at his annual appraisal that everyone’s opinion mattered. Just because he was a handyman, didn’t mean what he had to say wasn’t valuable. Everyone was valuable at Cherry Tree. No one was defined by their job.

  ‘What a load of bollocks,’ his dad had said.

  ‘Is it?’ They had been sitting on the patio, just over five years ago, when Simon first started working at Cherry Tree. The breeze caught the edges of the fly screen, and a row of multi-coloured ribbons applauded against the door frame. ‘Do you think our jobs make us who we are?’

  ‘Of course they bloody do,’ said his father, who had been known as Fireman John for his entire adult life. ‘Jobs are our identity, aren’t they? Where do you think surnames come from?’

  Simon didn’t answer.

  ‘Wheeler.’ His dad squinted into the sunshine. ‘Mason, Potter, Taylor?’

  ‘Right,’ said Simon. ‘But that won’t happen to me. I’ll never be defined by my job. Cherry Tree isn’t like that.’

  ‘What a load of bollocks,’ said his dad.

  Handy Simon watched Miss Ambrose, who had picked up her calculator again. He was never really sure when he should leave. Some people didn’t make it clear. He could hear the calculator keys again, and so he shuffled his feet just a little, just to remind Miss Ambrose they existed.

  ‘You can go now, Simon,’ she said.

  ‘Right you are.’

  He was just about to close the door when she shouted him back.

  ‘Simon, what exactly was Mr Price doing with you this afternoon?’

  ‘Moving a ladder, Miss Ambrose.’ He saw the surprise in her eyebrows. ‘He’s very capable for his age.’

  ‘And what age would that be?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not exactly sure, Miss Ambrose.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Neither am I.’

  As he closed the door, he noticed she had put the calculator down again, and was staring very hard at the line of filing cabinets on the far wall.

  Simon turned his collar and punched his fists deep into his pockets. Sometimes, Cherry Tree had that effect. It made him want to push himself into his clothes and disappear. When he was little, he’d wanted to be a fireman, like his dad, but by the time he reached his teens, he realised he wasn’t brave enough. His father had saved almost a whole family once, before Simon was even born. Pulled them out of a burning building one by one, like teeth. He was eighteen and a local hero. Strangers shook his hand and bought him drinks, and made a big fuss of him wherever he went. Even, years later, it was a conversation that was lifted out of a drawer every now and then, and passed around so they could all admire it. His father always left the room when that happened. He said it reminded him of the one he missed, the one who wasn’t saved. Even so, it became the whole of who his father was. Everything else he had done, or would ever do, disappeared in the moment he decided to run towards the flames. As though he shook the rest of himself away, like a second skin. Everyone expected Simon to follow in his father’s footsteps, to travel some strange, imaginary line drawn by genetics, but he couldn’t do it. He knew he was someone who would run away from a disaster, rather than towards it, and the only person he’d ever think about saving was himself.

  ‘Not everyone can be brave. No one thinks any less of you,’ his mother had said.

  She told all her friends it was because of his asthma.

  ‘I don’t even have asthma.’

  ‘Best if we just keep that to ourselves,’ she said.

  Simon glanced at the day room as he walked past, his hands still pocketed away. There was a scattering of residents in there already, planted in their armchairs, waiting for the evening shift. A television shouted out gardening advice, and a tape of subtitles ran across the bottom of the screen, because there was more than a handful of residents for whom the shouting would never be loud enough. Everything at Cherry Tree was set at a high volume. The radios, the televisions, even the people. Shouting became acceptable, almost expected. The staff even shouted when there were no residents about, as though everyone who worked there had been recalibrated. It was only in the muteness of his flat, where he wallpapered his evenings with tea and silence, and where the only song was the hum of a refrigerator, that Simon discovered just how loud the rest of the world could be.

  5.49 p.m.

  I have never done anything remarkable. I’ve never climbed a mountain or won a medal. I’ve never stood on a stage and been listened to, or crossed a finishing line before anyone else. When I look back, I have led quite an ordinary life. I sometimes wonder what the point of me was. ‘Does God have a plan, and where does he see me fitting into it?’ I asked the vicar once. He came to Cherry Tree with his leaflets, handing them around and trying to persuade us all into being religious.

  ‘We each have a role to play, Miss Claybourne,’ he said. ‘Jesus loves everyone.’r />
  ‘I’m sure he does,’ I said. ‘But love isn’t enough, is it? You need to have some kind of purpose. I was wondering what mine might have been?’

  I looked at him. I thought he might give me an interesting answer. Something comfortable and reassuring. But he just checked his watch and started talking to Mrs Honeyman about harvest festivals.

  So even the vicar doesn’t know why I’m here.

  Elsie says I shouldn’t dwell on things so much, but when you get to this age, it passes the time.

  ‘There has to be a reason, though, doesn’t there?’ I said to her once. ‘Or have I spent the last eighty-four years just sitting in the audience?’

  ‘Of course you haven’t been sitting in the audience. No one sits in the audience. Even the seats in a theatre are still a stage.’

  I’ve no idea what she meant. Times like that I just nod, because it’s less time-consuming and it makes life easier for both of us. She just comes out with these things. Like the girl with the twisted ankle. I’m sure she makes half of it up. It makes you wonder, though. It makes you wonder if you did have a purpose, but it floated past you one day, and you just didn’t think to flag it down.

  Lying here, there’s not really very much else to do except wonder. Of course, I’ve wondered about Ronnie more than anyone. He was right under Elsie’s nose in that potting shed, but she wasn’t having any of it. She was exactly the same, even when we were at school. She’d tell me to stop worrying, before I’d even given her all my evidence. Before she’d heard the full story. The only difference is, no one will ever hear the full story this time. I never thought it would come to this. You always think a secret will only be a secret for so long, that one day you will turn to someone else and say, ‘I’ve never told anyone this …’ and the secret will vanish and become something else. It’s only when you get to the end of your life, when you’re lying on a wipe-clean carpet with only yourself for company, you realise that you never did manage to find the right someone to tell.

  FLORENCE

  ‘Justin’s bringing his accordion this afternoon.’