‘Mrs Benson? Margaret? I’m so pleased to meet you.’
She shook my hand, bent towards me in a brief show of deference, and then her second hand joined us and my own was lost in her purple-mittened grip.
‘Oh. Sorry,’ she laughed and let me go.
She yanked off her gloves and appeared to toss them into the air before her, but when she lifted her arm, I saw one bob from a ratty string running up her sleeve. We faced one another.
‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘I’ll go get a drink. Would you like something? Another perhaps?’
‘Yes. Yes, please. A latte, thanks.’
I sat back down, hot and graceless, and tried to transfer the top of my coat to the back of my chair while still sitting on the bottom of it. Behind me, a woman swore second-hand, quoting a mate. Two terriers tied outside yapped a short and accurate volley.
I watched her weave around the packed-in tables. She got to the counter and switched into another language with the girl behind it. She brought two coffees back on a tray, hers short and black, and we started.
‘Mrs Benson, I hope it is OK for us to meet. I wanted to say thank you, and also to know you a bit?’
‘Yes. Well, don’t worry. It’s quite all right.’
‘No. It was a frightening thing. You didn’t have to help.’
A thick even layer of foundation covered her face, beige and moist. A naked look but bloodless too. Smoothed of edge and contour. Her eyebrows had been over-plucked, and then drawn back in, in thick black crumbling lines.
‘You speak very good English. Anja.’
Her name came out like an apology.
‘Oh and please call me Maggie. God. No one calls me Mrs Benson.’
‘Thank you, Maggie. I like the name. I learnt the language on YouTube. I can only speak well. Reading and writing not so much.’
‘Of course. I tried the CDs once. To teach myself Italian. The Michel Thomas Method. Was that? Did you?’
‘Mainly the Internet. When I was growing up.’
Her attention on me was complete. Her eyes followed me unblinking, and she seemed forever on the edge of a smile. As a result, I babbled.
‘So not. School. No, of course not. I don’t suppose they taught you at school.’
‘English? No! I did it myself. And now I am glad because I am here.’
Her face took on a look of posed wonder and she made a twirling gesture with a hand. It was exotic and at the same time naive. I wondered if she was joking.
‘Oh. Yes. So you like it?’
‘Of course. And they have lent me a bike. All day I ride around in the streets and the parks. It is wonderful. But my legs ache!’
‘A bit wet though, lately? But you seem to have a decent coat!’
A bright and breezy statement, the like of which I never make.
‘It’s fine. So you have children yourself, I think?’
‘Yes. Older though, of course. No one that needs fussing over.’
Two girls on an adjacent table watched and tried to work us out. She had drunk her coffee in a few swift sips, and I offered her another.
‘No, thanks. It sucks, no?’
It did. This was a cafe of an earlier age, the all-day breakfast sort. Plate-glass window from the waist up, completely steamed. A child finger-painted Catherine wheels or lollipops or maybe snails in the condensation. There was a bell on the door, yanking my eyes to it every time it rang. But even Maureen wouldn’t come in here. I didn’t know what else to say.
‘So where are you living now. Somewhere close?’
‘Temporary accommodation. It’s very nice. Fourteen beds.’
‘And will you stay, do you think?’ I asked.
She leant across towards me. Her eyes were dark and textureless.
‘It is a long process. I am working with the police.’
‘Oh goodness. That must be. Stressful.’
‘But I will stay. You will see. And I have skills. I am good with the computer.’
‘Ah yes. Me too. My work is typing.’
‘But it’s boring, no? In an office? I would prefer to clean. There is lots of work, I think? But either way, I will work hard.’
‘Well, if there’s anything I can do. To help. In fact. I’ve just had a thought. I have a dog, you see. He makes a mess. You could help me. Clean my house, if that’s what you want. I mean. It’s up to you, of course.’
‘Maggie, you are kind. I am not supposed to work yet.’
‘But they wouldn’t know. Cash in hand. For coffee. Or savings. If you like. They pay twelve pounds an hour round here. In the big houses. A friend of mine said.’
My heart was racing and I took hold of her forearms. The wool wasn’t wool, it was something thinner and scratchy but I felt the warmth of her beneath it.
‘Think about it. If it helps. I don’t want to get you into trouble. And please take the money for the coffee.’
I let go of her and scrabbled around in my purse. I had four fifty pences and pressed them into her hand.
‘Maggie, you are so kind.’
Her face was broad, thick cheekboned, perfectly symmetrical. A strong face; the features of a woman who would endure.
She pulled her arms free and took my shoulders, bent in for what would have been a hug had there not been a table between us. Instead her head hung before me, her scalp dry and visible, sore from the dye. Some ghastly emotion travelled up my throat but I willed it back down. We stayed that way for what seemed like a while. God knows what we looked like.
9
We left, uncomfortable now; me at least. Outside was a relief. When she said she was taking the bus and pointed towards my stop, I said, ‘OK. Bye,’ and looked down into my bag.
She took her place in the line, close enough for one last acknowledgement. Our eyes met and she lifted a hand, then turned decisively. That helped, but still I stood, beached, pawing through my things. Hair blown horizontal, strands in my mouth. Unclear what to do next.
‘Maggie? Maggie? Is that you?’
I felt a reprieve, and looked up with a smile straight away too familiar for its subject. The woman it landed on showed surprise.
‘You recognise me!’ she said. ‘Most don’t!’
I didn’t. She was a woman about my age, sun-deprived and soft-looking, entirely unfamiliar until she did a thing with her eyes, opened them wide, just for a second, perfect circles of astonishment, and I saw that it was Sheila.
She’d been fat – obese – last time I’d seen her, years ago at Rose’s leavers assembly. Her daughter was finishing too, though the girls were not friends. I had thought her shy. She arrived late with another woman, the pair of them clambering over cringing laps to the last free seats next to mine. I felt for her, and gave her my programme. She had started to cry as soon as she looked down at it and continued, through the skits and certificates and blown-up photos and finally the school song, her sobs punctuating a strong contralto that surprised me.
Now she looked entirely changed. Her clothes were novice, as if she had not yet learnt to dress her new shape, but she wore an assurance, a swagger, even. ‘I’ve been ill. But I’m OK now,’ she said, laying her shopping bag between her feet. Made over as a survivor.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘You look well.’
‘Oh, I am. Everyone says that!’
She smoothed down where her belly had once been.
‘I’m fine. I feel great. Fancy seeing you though,’ she said, and touched my arm briefly but quite hard, so it felt more like a poke.
‘I’m not over this side much. I met a friend,’ I said, and gestured backwards, but the queue had emptied into a bus.
‘What a coincidence, though. And I’ve just been talking about you. With Annie. Remember her? Misha Reynold’s mum? I think she did hockey with your Rosie?’
Rose had hated hockey. All sport.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘So it is you?’ she said next.
‘Me? Of course.’
; ‘No. In the paper, I mean. Hold on. I’ve got it here.’
She reached into her shopper and took out a huge purse.
‘That’s my Leila. Remember? And the grandkids.’ She lifted up a flap and showed a photo behind plastic. A round-faced woman flanked by two similar boys. A proof from a cheap studio shoot.
‘Oh yes. Lovely,’ I said.
‘Here we go.’ The page was roughly folded but she opened it carefully as if something was hidden inside. She’d drawn a wonky circle in a thick felt-tip around the piece.
‘I took it to show Annie. See if she remembered,’ she said. ‘So. Is it you?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘But it was nothing much.’
The paper flapped thinly between us. I thought of snatching it but she seemed to read this thought and plucked it back towards her, dropping it down into the deep of her bag.
‘Knew it! Doesn’t sound like nothing though! So what happened?’
She had more front than I remembered. And a brimming sort of energy that hadn’t been there before.
‘Just what they said.’
‘Oh right.’ She showed me her annoyance in the prolonged lift of her eyebrows.
‘And we were wondering too,’ she said, ‘me and Annie, earlier, about your Rose. Did she get back all right? India or somewhere, wasn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t her.’
There had been another girl, in trouble with drugs, who never came home.
‘That was Stella,’ I said. ‘Not me. Not Rose. Oh look. My bus.’
I left her and ran for it unnecessarily. Took a seat, pavement side, laid my novel on my lap and waited for her to walk by, willing the bus to move. I remembered Stella. She had looked a bit like Rose. Outside the showy mainstream. And the mother. A single woman – there was that connection too. I saw her at the doctor’s after it happened, her face blanked by the prescription she had come there to repeat.
They had thought that I was her.
Still the bus didn’t go.
I looked around the head of the person in front and saw the hold-up was a wheelchair, the driver out of his seat, and just as I thought I would look – I couldn’t help myself – Sheila walked by. She had forgotten me, the flesh-and-blood me; that much was clear. She was entirely oblivious, tapping into her phone with two agile thumbs and moving her lips as she did. Margaret Benson, spotted.
And so my story spread. And my unease, though there was no logic to it. What did it matter? The chat of a few London housewives. Their views had no traction and would not travel far. I would bob along the surface of their memories while they tried to join the dots between my action and what they knew of me, or thought they knew. She wouldn’t correct her misinformation. I would remain, for her, the mother of a disappeared child. Odd, really, when it was I who had been hiding. I who once believed it possible to vanish.
10
Work called. Nancy, on her out-of-town number. She spoke like a singing teacher tutoring a child, her sentences bizarrely modulated and prone to leaps and drops of the scale. ‘Hello, Maggie, how are you?’ Falsetto till the last word, then a plummet. I imagined she thought it made her sound perky yet caring. It did, in fact. The good news was she had a backlog of transcriptions. As much work as I could do. A pinch of tension, barely there, disappeared. A woman needs to feed herself.
I am a medical transcriptionist – a virtual medical secretary, if you like, though the agencies like to position our role as supplementary. I type up doctors’ notes, hundreds of them, thousands, across my working life. It’s all online now, a voice speaking out of my computer, somehow more remote than the old way, with a dictaphone, though I can’t say why.
The process has something of the race about it. A moment of poised wait in the space between my tap of the play button and the doctor’s last inhale, and we’re off. You can nearly always hear that final breath, technology as it is. Sometimes it’s a sharp tug, others a longer thoughtful pull, and in that sound I form my first impressions. Male or female, most obviously, and in this, I’m nearly always right. And something of the speaker’s temperament too. In playful mood I pause and let a picture take shape. Once I start though, I am pitted against that voice; to press stop, to fall behind, is, for me, to fail.
My method is as follows: I type the first draft exactly as I hear it, listen again and amend, just the once. Sometimes the doctor has made a mistake. He has not said what it is clear to me that he means. In these situations I write up my own interpretation. I have never had a transcript returned.
My role is, of course, invisible though occasionally I find myself acknowledged. If a doctor is over-prepared, or speaks as if reading from a script, I know he is thinking of me. It’s a shame, and a waste of his time. Sometimes the pitch of voice will change midway and I am addressed directly, with some discomfort: ‘And. If you wouldn’t mind inserting the address of the hospital here, please. I’m sure it’ll be online. Or something. Thanks.’ Or: ‘I’m not certain of the spelling of this name. He is a surgeon at City. Oncology. Perhaps you can …’
And I always can. Accuracy is key.
Over time I have come to recognise some of these doctors and hear in their tones that they are easier with me now. They ask for me personally, the agency has said, though they never know my name. But it works best when I am forgotten and I know that this has happened from the altered acoustics, an increase in sound effects, more slurps, sniffs and rustles.
How do you become such a thing? I can only describe my route, which had no map.
I once was a doctor’s receptionist, back when school hours were an issue, I felt a value in getting out and about, and I could still smile on demand.
My qualifications: I was, and still am, an exemplary typist – I took a secretarial course in Brighton at seventeen and have only got faster and more accurate since.
I was single and had a child, and the doctor liked to appear generous.
The clincher: my obvious discretion, though he rephrased it later, saying that I had a way of viewing a thing outside its context that was rare in a woman. He joked that he would happily walk into war by my side. What he meant was that I could show a woman in for her cancer diagnosis with my same smooth smile, but also that my heart was hard and this would keep his safe.
I worked for him for ten years, and slept with him for five and he cried when I left. But by that point I was sick of the public, so the move to transcription was ideal. Nowadays you’d probably have to do a course.
I logged on to the website, keyed in my password and found the reassuring nest of files that Nancy had saved for me there. It took a couple of hours to complete; not a slip.
I checked my emails – nothing that mattered – and an old account that I had largely abandoned when it became overrun with spam. Still a problem, I found, but supplemented now with pages of Facebook requests. The work of Sue. On this last holiday she had suggested that we start a group, online. When I asked her why, I was laughed at, vigorously. To talk to one another, share tips, make plans, it seemed. I wasn’t on Facebook, or any other site, and the idea made me anxious, which they couldn’t understand. After wine I had let her borrow a laptop and set me up.
I offered the minimum of information. Where a picture should go, I left the default image – a silhouette of a young man, I think, with a silly tuft of hair. I gave this old email address, thinking myself clever, which she opened on an adjacent page. Immediately it filled with messages, ping upon ping. I accepted the advances of the people who sat before me and got rid of the rest. Still they came all evening, announced each time by that tinny little bell. The overtures and suggestions – so-and-so wants to be friends – the vernacular of a pushy child. I asked Sue to log out in the end, but still.
At home, I selected all and pressed delete. The intimacy of it gave me the shivers.
11
The police had said they would call – a follow-up, for feedback – and next day I found myself circling the telephone like a teenager; a
lert to it, reluctant to move beyond its reach. There was pleasure in waiting though, and I thought again of Anja. I wondered what she had wanted from our chat, and whether she got it. What, if anything, came next? Perhaps we are all done now. How would that make me feel?
The clothes were half out of the machine when the phone finally rang and by the time I got there, it had clicked onto message. I saw an 0207 number, and heard a bright head-girlsy voice.
‘Hello there. I’m calling for Mrs Margaret Benson,’ it said.
I grabbed for the handset, keen to know how I’d done. Expecting praise.
‘Yes. Hello. Sorry. It’s me. I was just – I’ve just come in,’ I said.
‘Oh brilliant. Well, if I could introduce myself. My name’s Vicky Bernard and I’m calling about Anja Maric?’
‘Yes. Yes. Of course.’
I took the phone through to the sitting room, sat down, and reached for the nearest part of the dog.
‘Ah. You’re expecting me?’ she said.
‘Well, yes,’ I replied. I scratched hard at that place that made his leg kick out like a piston.
‘Oh fantastic. I didn’t get that message. All the better. Should we get together? So much nicer than the phone.’
‘I suppose so, if that’s necessary. They said it would just be a chat. To check everything went OK with Anja and me?’
I could hear traffic and her echoey steps.
‘Oh. I see. I must be a bit behind. So you’ve spoken, have you, you and Anja?’
Suddenly she was louder and the background noise diminished. There was something under the surface of her voice, an appetite that I couldn’t make sense of.
In My House Page 4