by Libby Page
Hope phones several times during the week; she hasn’t had her flu vaccination so Rosemary doesn’t let her visit in person. Rosemary takes the phone into her bedroom and closes the door while they speak. Kate can hear the hushed voices from the other side of the door as she washes up and makes Rosemary a fresh pot of tea. While she waits for Rosemary to finish her conversation she texts Erin, who is eager to hear about Rosemary’s condition and whether she’s getting any better.
“Honey and lemon,” writes Erin. “Remember Mum making that for us when we were little? It did the trick. E x.”
Kate adds a spoonful of honey and a squeeze of lemon to Rosemary’s tea.
In the middle of the week Jay comes to visit. He arrives with coffee for Kate and flowers for Rosemary. He pulls books from the shelves that Kate can’t reach for Rosemary to read, piling them around the sofa where Rosemary sits during the day, Kate’s sleeping bag rolled up neatly and tucked away under the window.
“You’re doing a great job,” he says to Kate as he leaves. “The flowers are for you too.” They are pink and white stock and fill the flat with the smell of summer.
After a week Rosemary’s temperature is back to normal and she is eating again.
“Thank you,” she says. They are sitting in the living room together, both reading, Rosemary on the sofa and Kate leaning against it on the floor. Rosemary puts down her book and puts a hand on Kate’s shoulder. She squeezes.
“Thank you,” she says again. “I’m lucky to have a friend like you.”
“That’s okay,” says Kate, a surge of feeling running through her at the feel of Rosemary’s hand on her shoulder. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
Rosemary pauses for a moment, looking out the balcony windows.
“I think we’re running out of time,” she says softly. Kate looks across at her. She has lost a little weight during the week, but the color is back in her face and her eyes look blue again, not the dull gray they had seemed for most of the week.
“What do you mean?” she says.
“The lido,” replies Rosemary, gesturing out the window. “I know you say the petition has more signatures, but it’s been a week since the protest, and what, a month since the hearing? And still nothing. I think it might be coming to an end.”
Kate doesn’t know what to say. She is exhausted, but her need to reassure Rosemary, and perhaps herself, overwhelms her.
Despite her own fears, Kate says, brightly, “Don’t worry. There’s still plenty of time. The most important thing now is that you’re feeling better.”
With Rosemary recovered, Kate decides it is safe to pack up her things and head back to her house. Before Kate leaves for home Rosemary shuffles into the kitchen to get something.
“I want you to have this,” she says. “I have them all in my head really. You’ve cooked for me, now I want you to cook for yourself.”
And she hands Kate George’s black notebook of recipes.
CHAPTER 46
Back at work the next week Kate tries to chase away Rosemary’s words about the lido coming to an end. Over the weekend several local groups, schools, youth groups, and even a band who formed when the members all lived in Brixton, shared the petition and it has now reached fifteen hundred signatures. On Monday Kate writes an article about it.
In the office, a rubber duck sits proudly on Phil’s desk. Kate gave it to him after the protest when the image of the pool full of ducks made the front page. He was delighted and called the duck Debbie, chuckling to himself whenever he caught a glimpse of it.
The protest had certainly helped drum up some support, but they have still had no response from the council. Kate wonders what they must have thought when the delivery of rubber ducks arrived at the town hall. She imagines the middle-aged councillor opening the box and taking out a grinning rubber duck; the thought makes her smile.
“Good morning!” says Jay, arriving with three coffees, one for him, one for Kate, and one for Phil. They settle down to work, Debbie watching them from Phil’s desk, a dazed grin on her plastic face.
At one o’clock Jay stops by Kate’s desk and asks her to lunch.
“You read my mind again,” she replies, taking her bag off her desk. They go to ask Phil if he wants them to bring anything back for him, but he is on the phone, a frown puckering his plump face.
As they walk from the office to the main street, the sun is warm on Kate’s shoulders. She breathes deeply; she knows the air is full of exhaust fumes from the passing buses but in the sunshine it seems clean and sweet. They talk as they walk, about their families and how lovely London is in the summer.
“It’s like everyone gets half a stone lighter,” says Jay. “People don’t walk, they bounce.” He tells Kate what a London summer means to him: cider in Brockwell Park, lying on his back in the grass and watching airplanes and imagining where they are traveling. She nods, saying she loves the long evenings that make you want to actually go out and do things for once rather than eating microwave meals in front of your laptop on your own. She stops, wondering if she should have told him that, but he just smiles. They walk quietly for a while—silence being as comfortable as conversation with him. She thinks about all the times before when she snuck out of the office to eat lunch on her own and regrets it.
When they return to the office Phil is staring at his computer screen. Kate notices that Debbie has gone from his desk.
“Kate, come into my office, I need to talk to you,” he says. Phil doesn’t have an office, so Kate pulls up a chair next to his desk and the piles of books and files that surround it like a wall. Jay watches from his desk on the other side of the room.
Phil picks up a book and examines its spine.
“I need you to stop writing about the lido,” he says, running his hand down the spine of the book, eyes down.
“What do you mean? Who is going to be writing about it instead?”
“No one.”
“No one? But it’s one of our ongoing stories, we can’t just stop it.”
“It’s not one of our stories anymore.”
“But I just wrote a story about the petition for the paper—your paper!”
Phil puts down the book. “That’s today’s news; it won’t be tomorrow’s.”
“But I don’t understand. I thought you loved the story. Where’s Debbie?”
Kate looks around the desk, desperately looking for a flash of yellow, only half registering the madness of it as she looks up and down Phil’s book piles and around the rest of the office.
“Paradise Living has offered us some extremely lucrative advertising,” says Phil quietly. “It’s too much to refuse. It would be diplomatic if we stopped the story.”
Kate can feel her stomach tensing. She worries that she will cry, and she feels absurd for it.
“Diplomatic? How could you? After all the articles we’ve written about Paradise Living and how they’re messing up the Brixton we know and love. It was you who asked me to write this story in the first place! That’s not diplomatic, that’s selling out.”
She is aware that her voice is coming out of her body louder than she expected. Jay is watching her, half standing in his seat as though he is about to say something.
Phil picks the book up again and then slams it down on the desk.
“Selling out? This is not your newspaper, Kate. Do you think that local papers make any money? No, they don’t. You’re lucky to have a job. Jay’s lucky to have a job.” He is waving his arm now, pointing at Kate and Jay and then at himself. “I’m lucky to have a job. I’ve done my best, but this is just the way the world works. People advertise, and it pays our wages. Stop being so fucking naive.”
Kate flinches, tears hot in her eyes.
“And I think you should step back from your involvement in it too,” continues Phil. “It doesn’t look good to our advertisers if one of my journalists is out there with a placard. I think you’ve become much too involved personally—this is your job, Kate.”
She stands up, her body shaking. Jay is standing up too.
“I think that’s enough,” Jay says firmly.
“I do too,” replies Phil, turning in his chair so that his back is facing the room. “Take the afternoon off, Kate. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Kate leaves the office crying hot, angry tears, but as she walks farther they become tears of panic. She replays Phil’s words over and over in her mind, but it is more than that—it is a feeling of spinning wildly out of control. It hits her outside Sainsbury’s and she slumps to the floor.
This is what it looks like to see a person crumple. You think that bones and skin are suitable scaffolding for a person, but when a person is crumpling you realize that we are not built of strong enough stuff. Being a human can be like being a cobweb in a storm.
Kate’s are not dainty tears that she can uncry by breathing and sniffing deeply and looking up quickly. They are heaving, wretched sobs that rack her body. They are violent tears that make her shake and gasp for air like a tortured animal. Her brain tells her to stop, please stop, but her heart spills out of her eyes. Her nose streams and sweat drenches her skin. She is drowning in her own terror. She is a soft toy gripped in the teeth of an angry dog and it’s shaking her and shaking her.
People walk past her, embarrassed by the sight of her crying on the pavement. The people look to Kate like they are on a television screen. Normal life is suddenly a complex show. People walking and laughing with friends or dashing down the escalator seem like skilled actors, getting through the day and managing to play life with a conviction that Kate suddenly cannot muster.
The attack of the Panic is not a fight she feels she can win. Instead she sits and waits for the pummeling to be over.
Finally a woman with a pram looks down at her and asks if she is okay.
“I’m fine,” Kate replies. Because what would anyone do if she said no?
She sits on the floor and cries.
“Kate.”
The voice comes to her like a hand, softly prodding her and reminding her where she is. She looks up. Rosemary is standing over her, leaning on her shopping trolley, a look of deep concern on her face. And in that moment there is no one else in the world that Kate would rather see.
“It’s okay,” says Rosemary, and as Kate pulls herself off the floor the old woman wraps her arms around her and hugs her tightly, fiercely. And she holds her together.
CHAPTER 47
Kate tucks her legs beneath her on the sofa and takes the cup of tea that Rosemary is handing her.
“Thank you,” she says quietly, wrapping both hands around the mug for the warmth. She looks out the balcony doors. A butterfly lands on one of the lavender plants and Rosemary’s swimsuit drips quietly onto the floor. The sun is high and warm and Kate imagines it sparkling on the surface of the lido. She feels like she has just been shaken awake from a very long sleep full of troubled dreams.
Rosemary sits in the armchair and faces Kate, watching her.
“I guess I should explain what happened,” says Kate. She starts to recount the argument with Phil about Paradise Living and the articles, but Rosemary interrupts.
“Right now I don’t want to hear what’s happening with the lido, I want to hear what’s happening with you.”
Kate wonders whether there is much difference between the two. She thinks, not for the first time, that it has only been since she discovered the lido—or it discovered her—that she has really started to live. When she floats in the cold water it is as if her sense of self and all the anxieties that are carried with that float away too. She is not Kate in the water, she is just a body, surrounded and protected by water and sky. The water makes her feel like she could do anything.
“I started getting panic attacks when I moved to London,” she says, remembering her mother and stepfather driving her from Bristol with all her things, Kate wrapped up in her duvet because it wouldn’t fit anywhere else in the car. Her excitement grew as they got closer to the city and her new home. Even being stuck in traffic seemed exciting: the traffic looked different from Bristol traffic with its red buses and beetle black taxis.
“I had always been anxious, but it got so much worse once I was in London,” she says. “I loved it here, I still do. But I found myself feeling overwhelmed.”
After Kate’s parents had left she had gone out for a walk, deciding to leave her unpacking until later. She wanted to smell the new smells and feel the warm pavement under her feet. People walked faster in London and she found herself picking up her pace to match theirs. She loved the music of the people, cars, and buses; she loved the cinema with the film names spelled out in tall letters; she loved the smell of cooking spices and coffee in Brixton Village. She soaked it all in until she felt dripping with it day after day until she just couldn’t absorb anything more. And soon she found herself looking at her feet rather than around her; London became a muddle of feet and sidewalks. Every now and then she would look up and find the view terrifying.
“I can’t explain it when it happens,” she says. “I think of my panic as a creature that follows me and can suddenly kick me in the back of the knees. But it’s like it lives inside me, too—sometimes I feel like it wants to rip me apart.”
She thinks about the people she lives with whom she doesn’t know one bit. She thinks about the people she watches on Facebook, like Joe and her former friends in Bristol, and wonders for the first time whether they really are having the best time or whether, like her, uncertainty sits on their shoulders like a child with its arms gripped tightly around their necks.
Rosemary watches her.
“It has gotten better. I do feel so much better. But it still catches me every now and then. I’m sorry, I feel embarrassed.”
“There’s no need to feel embarrassed,” says Rosemary. “You’ve seen me when I couldn’t look after myself, when I could barely stand. And you looked after me. There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.”
Kate is crying quietly, the tears dripping down her face without her really even noticing them.
“Have you talked to your family about this?” Rosemary asks.
“I spoke to my sister when she came to visit,” Kate replies, remembering her sister’s hand reaching out for hers on the side of the lido. “It took me a long time, though, and I still haven’t told my mum and stepdad. I don’t want to worry them.”
She pictures being back in Bristol with Erin when they were young and both still lived together, and the feeling of home fills her up like water rushing into a canal lock. Sometimes she wants to float on this feeling and rush right back into the past. She wonders if Rosemary feels the same way and she reaches for her hand.
Rosemary squeezes it, her skin dry but warm, and doesn’t let go. They stay like that for a while, holding hands in the quiet of Rosemary’s living room. Both women feel a sense of relief, their hands reminding each of them of something they had nearly forgotten. Rosemary feels Kate’s warmth flowing through her fingers and up her veins, feeling like the piece of wool that holds a child’s two mittens together, stopping each one from getting lost.
The door buzzes. Rosemary stands up and walks slowly to the phone, listens, and then presses the buzzer. A few minutes later there is a knock on the door of the flat. Rosemary opens it and Jay follows her into the living room.
“I tried your house first,” he says. “This was my second choice. I was going to try the lido next.”
Kate sits up on the sofa, wiping her face and feeling aware of the mascara rings around her eyes.
“You found me,” she says quietly.
“I’ll make you a cup of tea, Jay,” Rosemary says, disappearing into the kitchen and opening and closing cupboards and drawers, louder than Kate thinks is quite necessary.
“Phil was out of line,” says Jay, moving to the sofa and sitting next to Kate. He looks at her intently as he talks, his eyes bright like a child’s.
“He shouldn’t be taking the money, and he should
n’t have said any of that to you.
“But fuck him. I have something more important to tell you. I just got a phone call from the Guardian. A journalist who works there lives in Brixton and heard about the protest. They want to buy one of my photographs for the paper. They like the story—antigentrification, community in the big city, rubber ducks . . .”
He is talking quickly, and Kate can feel his body vibrating slightly next to her.
“The Guardian?” she asks, trying to imagine how it would feel to see her name printed in a national paper. She imagines what Erin and her mum would say—how excited they would be. She feels her heart racing.
“But that’s not all, they want a comment piece to go with it. An article about the lido and what it means to people and how the community has been fighting to save it. I told them I knew someone but I needed to ask her first. You will do it, won’t you, Kate?”
And then he kisses her. He takes her face in his hands. She is so surprised that hers stay by her side. He lets go and steps back, looking dazed.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know why I did that. I’m just excited, and I’m really angry too.”
“Do you always kiss people when you’re angry?” asks Kate.
“Not always.”
They both laugh. Heat flows through her as if she has just taken a deep sip of whiskey. She is not sure how she feels about the kiss, or him, but she doesn’t mind—she feels comfortable and safe and the warmth tickles her whole body. Rosemary appears with a tray.
“Let me take that,” says Jay, standing up and taking the tray with the teapot and mug from Rosemary.
“You need to help me persuade Kate that she’s brilliant: the Guardian wants her to write an article for them about the lido.”
“Kate, that’s wonderful,” says Rosemary, looking at her proudly. “A byline in a national paper!”
Kate blushes.