by Ruth Jacobs
From her mobile phone, she could see that it was 10.02 a.m. on Monday. She deduced that she’d passed out sometime the day before. She didn’t know what time, but the fact that the curtains were open led her to believe it was before dusk. Passing out didn’t concern her; it was regular occurrence. What was most irregular was someone at her door so early in the morning.
“Who is it?” she asked over the intercom.
“Why aren’t you at work? Are you not well?”
“Auntie Elsie! What are you—? Come up.”
Shelley slammed down the receiver, ran through to her bedroom and ripped off the stinking tracksuit she’d been wearing since Friday night. As she changed into her pastel-pink, long-sleeved pyjamas, her mind raced with reasons why her aunt had arrived unannounced.
There was a knock on her front door. “Coming,” she called from the bedroom at the other end of the flat.
In the hall mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself. Her complexion was pale, uneven with spots, and her eyes didn’t look like her own. Reluctantly, she opened the door. “I don’t want to come too close. You might catch it.”
“I thought you’d be home.” Aunt Elsie leant forward to hug her. “I know you’re not one to skive.”
“Has something happened to Mum?”
“Not yet. I’m going over there later to try and make something happen. Something has to change.” Aunt Elsie took off her fuchsia anorak and marched through to the lounge then into the kitchen.
“Why are—?” Shelley began, then realised her question could be rephrased more politely. “What are you doing in Hampstead?”
“You weren’t at work.” Elsie held the kettle under the running kitchen tap. “Where’ve your teacups gone?”
“There’s mugs in that one, there.” Shelley pointed to the cupboard above the sink. As she lifted her arm, she felt it tremble. “How did you know I wasn’t at work?”
“Because you weren’t there. That’s why I came here.”
Adrenaline surged through Shelley’s body. She felt electrified. “You were in Foxtons?”
“I had a good mind to have a word with your boss too, swanning around like—”
“Did you? What did you say?” Shelley thought her time with the borrowed eyes was up. They felt ready to launch out of her sockets and into the sink where she’d averted them.
“I bit my tongue this time, but if he keeps it up, I won’t be doing it next time. They’re working you too hard. I knew this would happen. Look at the state of you, you poor thing.” She rubbed Shelley’s shoulder. “It’s not catchy what you’ve got. You’re run-down. It’s exhaustion. What did the doctor say?”
“What did you say to them?”
“What did the doctor say is wrong with you?” Elsie asked, not looking at Shelley but at the poster with black lettering, sellotaped to the side of the fridge. “Oh, this is good, positive thinking. Choose life. Choose a—”
“What did you say in Foxtons?”
“Not a lot.” Her aunt continued looking at the poster. “This isn’t nice at all. It’s full of swearing. Go in the lounge and I’ll bring in your tea.”
Shelley wouldn’t leave the kitchen. She couldn’t because her quivering legs had taken root through the tiles. “What happened in Foxtons?”
“Calm down. Don’t worry. I didn’t get you into any trouble.” Aunt Elsie shunned the poster and looked at Shelley. “I only spoke to the receptionist. Is it legal to employ people that young? Being new isn’t an excuse either, not to know who you are – it’s ridiculous. You have been to the doctor, Shelley?”
“Not yet. What did she say to you?”
“You have to see the doctor. Call him.” Aunt Elsie removed the lid from the cream tin labelled ‘tea’. “And I bet you haven’t had that allergy test done, have you?”
“Not yet, but I will... What did she say?”
“Who’s she?”
“The receptionist. What did she say?”
“You mean he. Haven’t you met him yet? How long have you been off?” Elsie poured boiling water into the purple mugs on the work surface.
“Only today.” Shelley thought quickly. “He must be a temp.”
“Call the doctor. Please, for me,” Elsie said.
When her aunt walked past her, Shelley’s formerly entrenched roots retracted from the black and white floor tiles. She followed Elsie into the lounge. Her shaking hadn’t abated and tea splashed out of her mug, leaving a puddle trail on the floor. She kept her eyes straight ahead, pretending not to notice as she walked over to the couch. She saw a needle lying underneath the coffee table. Before sitting down, she kicked it under the sofa with her bare foot.
Aunt Elsie sat next to her on the sofa and picked up Shelley’s brick-like mobile phone from the table. “Make an appointment. I’m worried about you,” Elsie told her.
“I’ll do it later. I promise.” Shelley convinced her aunt that it wouldn’t make any difference whether she called now or in the afternoon. The doctors’ surgery was always booked up so far in advance that she’d probably be better by the time she got an appointment.
Aunt Elsie went to make Shelley some toast. Thankfully, Shelley had brought herself some new bread for the freezer. The cold bank was well hidden in the sealed Black Forest gateau box, so Shelley didn’t fear its discovery – not until her aunt called out from the kitchen that she’d disposed of all the food past its best before date.
Shelley rushed into the kitchen and opened the tall, silver bin. Inside she saw her savings – thousands of pounds – buried under a box of frozen burgers and a bag of frozen chips, topped with two leaking teabags. The Black Forest gateau box, she hoped, would provide shelter enough to keep dry the hundreds of pairs of fifties inside. The notes would need to be left out to air to remove the bin-odour they’d be acquiring in their current habitat. And the cold bank container would need to be replaced – she’d been using the same one since she’d started working in 1994, just after Will died that summer. The cake had been bought for him, but he’d never got to eat it.
“I’ll replace your food.” Aunt Elsie rubbed Shelley’s arm, causing pain around the areas of blown veins and lumps. “Don’t be upset. I’m sure lots of people forget to throw out their old food.”
A tear rolled down Shelley’s cheek to the corner of her mouth. A cardboard box was a stupid thing to be sentimental over, she told herself.
After Shelley ate her toast and drank a second cup of tea, she followed her aunt’s suggestion of having a bath and changing her clothes to make herself feel refreshed. She didn’t waste any time relaxing in the bath as she’d been directed; she worried what her aunt might find if she continued her mission of reorganising the contents of her flat.
“Are you trying to be a Uri Geller?” Aunt Elsie asked when Shelley returned to the lounge.
Sure that she’d misheard, Shelley pushed the baby-blue towel covering her wet hair away from her ears and walked closer to where her aunt sat on the sofa. “Am I what?”
“Your dessert spoons are all bent.” Elsie waved her index finger at Shelley. “Really, at your age, you should know better.” She laughed.
In the kitchen, Shelley left the cold tap running while she checked her cutlery drawer. There were no dessert spoons – the single, essential piece of cutlery for an intravenous addict. She lifted the lid on the bin and there they were. Her silver spoons now joined the cold bank and the other rejects from the freezer, topped with several soaking teabags.
Shelley carried a glass of water into the lounge and sat next to her aunt on the couch. Inside she felt like a furnace. She needed a hit. As she fantasised about the fix, she suddenly remembered Jay was on his way, as he had been since she called him yesterday. Now that it was midday, he would most likely be awake, though when he’d turn up, it was impossible to know.
“I’m really tired. Do you mind if I go to sleep?” Shelley faked a yawn and stretched out her aching arms. I am tired. I will be asleep, in a way.
“You
have a nap, and I’ll have it all tidy in here for you when you wake up.” Elsie smiled. “Then we can go for a walk and get you some lunch. You really should get some fresh air.”
“I’ll be fine on my own. You go and enjoy your day.” As Shelley stood up from the sofa, she knocked off a velvet cushion and exposed a bloody syringe. “How come you’re not at work?” she asked in an effort to distract her aunt while she grabbed the cushion from the floor and replaced it over the needle.
“There was a fire at the school. Didn’t Mum tell you? They’re saying it was arson. You should see the mess. We’re meant to be off for a week, but I can’t see how they’ll have it ready by then. At least I’ll be around for a few days to look after you.”
There was no chance for Shelley to have a hit in her aunt’s presence. Moreover, she worried what her aunt might find if she persisted with the tidying, how she would deal with Jay’s arrival if he came and how she’d retrieve his money from the bin. Staying in the flat was no longer an option.
“It’s a lovely May day. Let’s go for a walk now, then I can have my sleep after,” Shelley said enthusiastically. “You don’t need to hang around here. You should be enjoying your time off.” She picked up her handbag, this time being careful not to move the cushion when she stood up.
“I don’t have to go to Mum’s today.” Elsie picked up her fuchsia anorak from the back of the dining chair. “You need looking after too.”
“No. You should see Mum. Don’t let me stop you.” Shelley wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She was dying to roll up the long sleeves of her red blouse, but she couldn’t expose the war zone on her arms.
“If you eat something, I’d feel better about leaving. I’ll treat us to lunch at The Coffee Cup,” Elsie said.
Shelley agreed. If her aunt saw her eat, she’d be more likely to leave – and while she was in the restaurant, she could sneak to the ladies’ room and call Jay with her request that he delay the delivery.
22. Shutting Down
Shelley tried to ignore the painful feeling of her face and hands chapping in the wind. For early May, the weather had been mild but in the depths of the graveyard, she felt the cold. She sat on a grey bench a few feet away from Nicole who stood at her mother’s grave.
By the time Shelley stood up to leave, her body was stiff. Every bone felt like it had been replaced with ice. She struggled as she threaded her frozen arm through Nicole’s.
“Does this cemetery have a Resident Lurker?” Shelley asked as they followed the twisted paths that crisscrossed between the gravestones.
“What’s that when it’s at home?”
“When it’s in the cemetery, you mean.” Shelley smiled. “There’s a creep I keep seeing when I go to see Will.”
“Like a flasher?” Nicole asked.
“No, otherwise he’d be a Resident Flasher and this one doesn’t flash. He only does lurking.”
“Maybe you just haven’t seen him.”
“No, he couldn’t. He wears a shell suit. You need a raincoat to flash, otherwise how do you get it out?” Shelley shivered, and she didn’t think it was purely due to the cold air. For warmth, she drew Nicole closer, pulling tighter on the link of their arms. “He stares at me, like he’s looking through me. He really creeps me out... I don’t know why I’m making a joke out of this.”
Nicole steered them onto the main path that led back to the car park where she’d left her Chimaera. “You were trying to cheer me up... and it’s a coping mechanism.”
“I was trying to give you a coping mechanism? How very generous of me.” Shelley grinned.
“No. Well, actually, yes, but that’s not what I meant.” Nicole tucked a few rogue strands of blonde hair back underneath her black beret. “It’s your coping mechanism.”
“Crack is for coping.” Thank fuck I didn’t say junk.
“Crack’s what happens when your coping mechanisms internally stop working. You look for others, externally. But then they stop working too, and that’s when you’re really fucked.”
“That’s me,” Shelley said, half joking. She pulled out the box of Benson and Hedges from her handbag. “You’re talking very textbook. Is this what you’re doing with Doctor Fielding?”
Nicole nodded. “I’ve got inappropriate coping mechanisms.”
“Is that what she told you?” Shelley stopped to light her cigarette by a gravestone so worn by the elements the lettering was illegible scribbles, and so overgrown that it looked like it hadn’t been tended to once during the twentieth century. “That’s not very nice of her to say that.”
“She’s being honest, that’s her job. Some are choices I made – crack, working, sex, food, spending – what I do to myself. But what’s happened to my mind, shutting down, I didn’t choose that.”
“It’s a learned response to past experience. I remember she used to say that. But I think it’s a good thing. It’s like your mind’s got its own way of protecting itself.” Shelley held her purple Clipper under Nicole’s cigarette.
With her cigarette lit, Nicole carried on walking. Shelley tucked her lighter into the front pocket of her handbag and tottered along the path behind her friend. Once she caught up, she slipped her arm through Nicole’s and slowed down their pace.
“I hardly remember anything nowadays and what I do... it’s just snippets, unfinished,” Nicole said.
“There’s not much that happens that I wanna remember.”
“I wanna remember normal things, like what I did last week.” Nicole took a deep breath. “For some people, some things might be too painful to remember, but it’s not helpful when it happens on everything. Sometimes I don’t even feel like I’m in my own body.”
“I like being absent, dissociated enough that I can’t feel. Automatic protection in advance, just in case it’s needed.”
“I don’t wanna be a machine. I’m a human being.” Nicole untangled her arm from Shelley’s. She stamped her cigarette into the ground and shoved her hands into the pockets of her red coat. Without Shelley slowing her down, Nicole returned to taking her standard long strides and Shelley couldn’t maintain their walking in sync. To keep up, she had to jog.
“It’s like I get told a white lie to protect my feelings.” Nicole stopped by the black obelisk, the memorial for the Katyn Forest massacre. “Actually, it’s not. I don’t even get a lie. I just don’t get the truth. And it doesn’t protect my feelings ’cos I still get them anyway, the fucked up emotions, and they’re fucking up my mind, only with less information.”
Nicole’s eyes were shining. Shelley took a tissue from her handbag and passed it to her. As Nicole wiped her eyes, Shelley read the sorrow the vandals had graffitied on her friend’s face.
“The fear, the anger, the dread, the pain, I’ve got it all,” Nicole said, her hands now out of her pockets: one holding the white tissue, both gesturing in the air, “but I don’t know all the facts. It’s like my mind rejected them, or stored them in my subconscious because it would’ve been too shocking to know, to really know, to fully remember everything.”
“Some things are best left unknown,” Shelley told her.
***
The plan was to drive from the cemetery in Gunnersbury to Tara’s in Earl’s Court, so they could work on what they had in store for the rapist. To Shelley, it didn’t feel right to be doing it on a day when Nicole was clearly distraught. Shelley tried to talk her round.
“He could be out raping other girls. We can’t just leave him to it,” Nicole said.
Having strapped on her seatbelt, Shelley took out one of the pre-rolled joints from her cigarette box. She lit up as they were driving out the cemetery. She hoped the dope would satisfy her enough that she wouldn’t end up on the pipe. After the conversation in the cemetery with Nicole, her heart wasn’t in the meeting. Even more so, because it was at Tara’s where they always ended up on the pipe. Although she wanted a hit, she didn’t want it to be crack, not on its own without heroin and a needle. She
lley was adamant that today there would be no crack at Tara’s.
“My dad’s been in touch,” Nicole said, as they zoomed down Chiswick High Road. Nicole explained that she’d received a letter from him before the trial, but had only just decided to reply. Shelley was upset that Nicole hadn’t confided in her sooner, but then – like Shelley – Nicole never spoke of her absent father. They’d only ever had one conversation on the subject and that had taken place in 1995 – the year after Shelley started working and had met Nicole.
“Do you want to see him?” Shelley asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll speak to the others first. I don’t want anyone upset.” Nicole took a deep drag on the joint Shelley passed her.
Unlike Shelley, Nicole knew her father. Though he had abandoned her too, he was present for the first few years of her life. He’d left Nicole’s mother for another woman when Nicole was young. Shelley couldn’t recall the exact age, maybe six or seven. She’d told Shelley that from the day he left, he’d never come back to see her or her younger brother and sisters. He’d had a new family. He’d remarried and had more children. So she had more than her three siblings but she didn’t know the names of the others, their ages, if they were boys or girls, or how many of them there were. Shelley wondered if Nicole would be able to forgive her father. Nicole’s mother had blamed him for her alcoholism, which is what sent her to an early grave. Briefly, Shelley asked herself the same question, but it was a waste of time.
***
On a side street off the Cromwell Road, Shelley and Nicole stood waiting outside Tara’s building. Was her intercom really broken or was there someone she was avoiding? Again, Tara didn’t answer.
Eventually, she buzzed them in after Nicole phoned from her mobile. Walking up the stairs, Shelley recalled the state of Tara last time she’d seen her. On entering the airless flat, Shelley noted there was no improvement today. Her dirty clothes consisted of a well-worn, grey tracksuit top and baggy sweatpants. In her imagination, Shelley added an orange bib and pictured her friend in prison.