I Spy

by Claire Kendal

  I write two short sentences to Maxine. Make this go away. Zac took the pic. Then I save the email to the drafts folder where Maxine will find it.

  I plug Frederick Veliko’s name into every Internet search engine I can think of, as well as a variety of US government websites, as I did soon after Maxine first told me about him. My searches garnered so little, then. Now, there is nothing at all.

  By the time I pull on to the tarmacked parking area in front of my grandmother’s nursing home, it is dark. Katarina is on night duty. She is my very favourite of everyone who works here, and my grandmother’s favourite, too – as far as my grandmother feels such things.

  ‘You look tired.’ Katarina hands me a pen and opens the visitors’ book.

  ‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’ I squiggle an illegible Helen Graham. ‘I promised her I’d come.’

  ‘No problem, Helen.’ Katarina leads me from the reception area to the day room. ‘She’s refused to go to bed. A part of her remembered …’

  ‘That’s good.’

  My grandmother pretends not to notice when I come in. She is in her wheelchair, and alone. I drag across one of the straight-backed wing chairs, which match the blue carpet. Before I sit, I kiss her powdery cheek. ‘It’s great to see you out of bed today, Grandma.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Holly.’

  ‘You’re late.’

  ‘It is so sweet, the way she calls you that,’ Katarina says.

  ‘It is.’ I don’t want to dwell on this. ‘Have you been waiting, Grandma?’ I’m filled with hope that she is tracking time.

  ‘Have you brought Princess Anne?’ my grandmother says.

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘I want to go home. Why have you forced me upcountry?’ My grandmother classes anything above Truro as upcountry.

  ‘To keep you near me. It wasn’t safe for you any more in the place you were before.’ I touch my grandmother’s hand, then toss a smile at Katarina as she slips from the room. ‘I miss home, too. I miss the sea.’ My grandmother was forever shutting windows and curtains, but maybe it was important to her simply to know the sea was there.

  I close my eyes for an instant and I see splodges of indigo and aqua, the view from my bedroom window, high in the attic where my grandmother hardly ever climbed. And the small islands of rock that Milly and I used to imagine invading, living there as two princesses, and Queen Peggy sailing out in a magnificent boat to bring us cakes. And the white torch of the lighthouse, always there to give me my bearings.

  But the sea colours change, and I see the livid white around Jane’s nose and mouth, the congealing blood, the blue tint to her skin. I can taste sick again. I take a large gulp and it goes down as if I am swallowing a rock.

  My grandmother’s ankles are extra swollen today, seeming to spill over the openings of the velvet house slippers I bought her. I crouch in front of her to loosen the Velcro, perplexed that somebody who was once so tall and bony could become so puffy.

  ‘Why bother,’ she says. ‘It’s not as if they’ll let me walk.’

  ‘But they’ve got you out of bed. They’ve even got you taking a few steps with assistance. That’s wonderful.’

  She throws her head back and moves it from side to side with her eyes closed. ‘I am ready to go.’ This is a grand announcement, made with such theatricality I am worried she will injure her neck.

  ‘Go where, Grandma?’ She and I play out this exchange every time I visit.

  ‘You know where.’ She drags out each word, in a sort of dirge. ‘Take me now and bury me. Don’t let my coffin touch your mother’s. I refuse to lie near her for eternity. I will be next to your father when I rot. He was a hero, you know.’

  Despite the absurd dark comedy of my Sarah Bernhardt-esque grandmother, the word rot makes me feel as if my heart is throwing in extra beats. Once more I picture Jane’s mottled face, the features unrecognisable, and her birthmark like a black star sapphire. Her body will be changing still more in death. I can feel myself shaking with pure fury and absolute hate. I want to destroy Zac for doing this to her.

  I pull myself back into the place I am now, into this poor imitation of an elegant room that smells of cabbage and body odour and old people, however many windows they open, however much disinfectant they drench it in.

  I can deal with my grandmother by rote. I have heard her graveyard instructions so many times they no longer shock me. By my mid-teens, I got to the point where I could parody them for Milly, and have her laughing so hysterically she would beg me to stop before she wet herself. The silver lining – and it is a vital one – is that Zac found my grandmother so horrible he was never around her enough to hear these instructions too. He met her once, and that was enough.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know he was a hero. And I’ll be sure to keep him in the middle.’

  ‘In the family vault.’

  ‘Yes, Grandma.’

  ‘The graveyard’s closed to new burials, you know, but not to us.’

  ‘We’re lucky to know so many of the dead.’

  ‘It needn’t have happened. He’d still be alive. They’d both be alive if your mother hadn’t pushed and pushed for them to go that day. She made friends with some other RAF wife, got them invited to that lunch party. Your father didn’t want to go. He hated that sort of thing …’

  ‘What’s so wrong with her making a friend and who was the friend and why didn’t my father want to go?’ How many times in my life have I asked these questions? But my grandmother merely shakes her head and makes a motion of sealing her lips.

  Time and again during my childhood, I searched the house for clues and found nothing. I set up a recorder by the one landline my grandmother had, and monitored her conversations. All I discovered was a litany of complaints about the woes of raising a child in old age, gossip about geriatric infidelity, blackmailing threats to leave her electricity and gas provider for a better deal, and her endless pestering of saintly, patient James about her many prescriptions.

  She is beyond any ability to answer these questions now. ‘Never mind.’ I kiss my grandmother’s papery cheek. I put a box on her lap. She attempts to peel off the plastic but gets nowhere, so I do it for her, then lift the lid. ‘Peppermint chocolates. Your favourite soft ones. No hard centres, so you won’t struggle with your teeth.’

  She puts one in her mouth and starts to chew. Zac said that watching her eat had put him off his food for several days – that was probably the thing that helped most to keep him away from her. And the fact that he said she was a cross between a dragon and Cruella de Vil. I take out a tissue to wipe her lips and chin, but she bats away my wrist.

  She uses her special whisper for what she says next. It is a whisper so loud I imagine the dolphins can hear. ‘You are evil,’ she whispers. ‘Just like your mother.’

  ‘Please, Grandma—’

  ‘Your mother pushed me out of the way at her wedding. When the photographer was going to take the family portrait, and I was getting up to join them, she pushed me down into a chair by the top of my head. She said, “Not this one. We don’t want this one.” I cried to your father. He should have put his foot down with her from the start. But you are always on her side. Your father was too. No matter what horrible things she did.’

  Nobody as sour as my grandmother can be trusted to impart a fair version of history. I found the wedding photo between the pages of my father’s copy of A Tale of Two Cities, on a shelf in his study. My grandmother is in it, in her full brown-velvet glory, standing to my father’s right. He is in his uniform. My mother is on his left, wearing a halter-neck gown. It is simply cut of ivory silk and falls like water. Her amber hair is sprinkled with tiny white flowers, and drops in a sheet to several centimetres below her shoulders. We are so alike, she could be my twin. My father’s arm is around her, and the two of them are smiling on the church steps and leaning into each other. There is a small bump, interrupting the perfect column of my mother’s gown, so I am there too.


  Perhaps my grandmother is thinking of that photo, not imagining I discovered it and have kept it near ever since, and that is why she comes out with her equivalent of an unexpected left hook. ‘What did you do with your baby?’ she says.

  ‘There is no baby.’ My voice cracks.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ But a part of me is not sure at all. It is as if a ghost baby follows me, not as she is in the one photograph I have from the day she was born, but seeming to go through every milestone, so that she is the age she would be now.

  Zac’s child exactly matches the little girl I keep so close. Madly, I wonder if it was all a mistake, and Alice is mine. These are the thoughts I don’t confess to anybody, for fear they will lock me away, and I will have escaped one prison only to find myself in another.

  ‘Was there ever a baby?’ my grandmother asks.

  I pause, feeling as if I have killed her all over again. ‘No.’

  ‘You sent that man again,’ my grandmother says. ‘He pretended to be nice but he wants to murder me.’

  ‘Nobody wants to murder you, Grandma.’

  ‘He does. The bad man from before. The one who scared me.’

  I put my hand on her knee.

  ‘Ouch.’ She smacks my hand, hard.

  ‘Sorry.’ I loosen my grip. ‘What do you mean, the bad man from before?’

  ‘The one with the evil eye, who you brought to see me.’ Despite having only paid a single visit to the previous nursing home, Zac clearly made a lasting impression. All the more remarkable when you consider how faulty her memory is. ‘I detested him. I told him so. When you went away to talk to the waitress, he said terrible things to me.’

  On a better day I might smile at my grandmother’s persistent insistence on referring to the director of the previous care home as the waitress.

  ‘Grandma, I think you must be talking about the old place, not this one. You can’t have had a visitor. No one knows where you are, and the people who work here won’t let anyone in to see you unless I’ve given permission.’

  Katarina returns. She puts a light hand on my grandmother’s shoulder. ‘Are you having a wonderful time with your lovely granddaughter, Mrs Lawrence?’

  ‘No,’ my grandmother says.

  ‘My grandmother hasn’t had any visitors today, other than me, has she?’

  ‘No. Of course not. You know that cannot happen. Not with our procedures.’

  ‘Has she been alone at all today? I mean, is there any way someone could have slipped in?’

  ‘No.’ Katarina shakes her head to emphasise it. ‘That is not possible.’

  ‘In the garden this morning,’ my grandmother says. ‘You are all so stupid. You are always insisting on pushing me out there for air like some big baby put out to nap in a pram. It rained on me. I got wet. I will probably catch pneumonia and die. You are trying to murder me.’

  ‘Can you describe the man, Grandma?’

  ‘I don’t need to. I know who he was. That boyfriend of yours. The bald one with the strange eye. I still detest him.’

  I manage a nod to acknowledge that she has spoken. I have a new thought, and I cannot decide if it is liberating or suicidal. Perhaps it is both. The thought is that I am too tired to run any more, and I am losing the will to hide. Doing these things didn’t save Jane. Doing these things takes every last drop of energy and concentration. Doing these things has taken over my very being. Zac is here, and I need to face that fact.

  But there are more mundane things I need to face, too. ‘Can you please do something for me, Katarina?’

  ‘Of course.’ Katarina slips a black scrunchy from her curly brown hair and re-does the knot at the top of her head, tightening and neatening before fastening it once more.

  ‘Can you get them to dipstick my grandmother’s urine? It wouldn’t hurt to check …’ I break off. My grandmother finds it mortifying for such a thing to be discussed, but she gets bladder infections all the time, and they make her memory and general befuddlement even worse.

  I don’t need to be any more explicit for Katarina to understand. ‘That is an excellent idea.’ She makes a note in the book she keeps in her pocket.

  I am struck by the fact that my grandmother’s skin has a faint blue tinge, like Jane’s this morning. I know that the living can get this too, when their hearts aren’t at full function, so their blood isn’t properly oxygenated. Another piece of knowledge gifted to me by Zac.

  ‘And I think a GP appointment, too, please, Katarina. So that he can have a listen to her heart, and take her blood pressure.’

  ‘I’ll arrange it tomorrow.’ Katarina makes another note. ‘You’ve been more tired than usual, haven’t you, Mrs Lawrence.’

  ‘Nonsense, you silly girl!’ my grandmother charmingly says, despite having spent a good deal of time complaining to me of this very thing.

  Katarina motions me to the other side of the room, where I rest my head against the chalk-pink wall, tastefully decorated in washable, wipe-able paint.

  ‘Don’t talk about me behind my back,’ my grandmother says to us, in her whisper.

  ‘Sorry to ask this, but can you please make sure she isn’t on her own outside again? And the usual vigilance about no visitors other than me?’

  ‘Of course. It was just for a few minutes. No need to worry. Have you had a hard day?’

  I glance across at my grandmother, who is wearing the expression of someone sucking on a sour lemon. ‘It can’t have been as hard as yours.’

  ‘You do know,’ Katarina says, ‘it is the condition that makes them act this way. It can make them mean.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘But she’s always been like this.’

  Then Eavesdropping

  Two years and one month earlier

  * * *

  Cornwall, Early March 2017

  A month after leaving the canister in the gorse for Maxine, I was beginning to wonder if I would ever hear from her again.

  The fleeting pink blossom that I loved so much appeared in Zac’s front garden. The blossom, capped thick with snow, made the ornamental cherry tree look as if it was decorated with cupcakes. Flitting brightly among the branches were the crimson faces of goldfinches and the yellow breasts of blue tits. The birds were drawn by the feeders I put out for them.

  A package arrived, addressed to me at the hospital. Since Christmas, I had developed a habit of visiting the post room as soon as the internal mail was sorted. Unlike the card that Zac delivered to me personally, the seal on this was intact. I took it into the loo, ripped it open and found a book I hadn’t ordered. It was a journal. Each blank page had a different motivational slogan at the top. It seemed that Maxine had not gone quiet after all. It wasn’t so much a thank-you present as a message, and I imagined her ordering it with a curled lip on her usually expressionless face.

  Do more of what makes you sparkle! That was the extra-special encouragement reserved for the journal’s cover. It was Maxine’s sardonic version of a pep talk, telling ‘sparkly’ little me that I had done well to find Jacinda Molinero and Albert E. Mathieson’s names. Given that Maxine was Maxine, she wanted me to ‘Do more’. Those two words were emphasised in gold shimmer, and while the rest of them were inked in a mere flat silver, the purple ‘sparkle’ was fittingly glittery too.

  At work, the red smock with the ugly white polka dots strained to cover my twenty-weeks-pregnant lump. Milly gave me her usual wry smile, and touched my hand when we passed, or put a brief, protective arm around my shoulder if she found me in the supply cupboard, but there was a new reserve.

  Two days after Zac and I discovered that the baby was a girl, Milly passed me a drawing she had done, her own version of the Mermaid of Zennor, honouring the original’s folk art style, but with a touch of her own whimsy. ‘In case you’d like it for the baby’s room,’ she said, and I threw my arms around her. Mostly, though, she sneakily watched me, like someone with a crush, hoping not to be caught stealing glimpses.

&
nbsp; Whenever the nurses clustered for a group talk, whether in twos or threes or fours, and they saw me approach, there was a hush so obvious it made me blush. On one occasion, I heard Zac’s name before they saw me and clammed up.

  One of the nurses, Joanne, only wore make-up during Zac’s shifts. Crimson lipstick, foundation, a fresh wash of dark brown to hide her grey roots. My guess was that she was ten years older than I was – maybe about thirty-five. She was forever finding excuses to put herself in Zac’s path. She laughed loudly at his jokes but no one else’s. In fact, she hardly spoke to anyone else. She was constantly touching Zac’s arm when she said hello or goodbye, as if to a close friend at a party.

  ‘I hate women like that,’ Milly said, taking me by surprise.

  One morning, Zac swanned in post-nightshift to check the ward before going off.

  ‘Life,’ I heard Joanne saying to him, ‘is about dancing, and eating, and making love.’ She bounced up and down and threw her arms around while speaking, as if she was so filled with joy she couldn’t contain it.

  Her back was to me, but Zac saw that I had returned to the desk. I was sorting patient files in order to straighten out the notes trolley.

  He was bristling with the worst form of the cocky arrogance that I first found so attractive but had come to find acutely distressing. He did his usual thing of raising an ironic brow. He said something I couldn’t hear, and Joanne tossed her head to demonstrate that she was laughing in complete abandonment. The implication was that she did other things in complete abandonment too.

  Milly was standing nearby, a hand on her hip, rolling her eyes and glaring at Joanne, and wanting Joanne to see that she was on the verge of getting a slap right across her ecstatic face.

  A few days later, when the ward was quiet and I was about to leave, I heard voices in an unoccupied side room. I was careful not to pass the observation window in the centre of the door, where I might have been glimpsed. It was impossible to pick up more than the odd word without literally putting my ear to the door, but I could tell that one voice was Milly’s. The other was Scarlett’s, a nurse friend of hers. I caught my name, and Zac’s. What I did next happened as a kind of reflex.