First Aid

by Janet Davey

  Jo thought, what has happened to me would never have happened to her. She would have known, for a fact, that behaving as I started to behave six months earlier – and behave would be exactly the word she’d have used – would lead to being stared at by a stranger on the train. Dilys didn’t acknowledge there was Anyone There, but she abided by the rules set by those who thought there had been. They had all moved on to a less personal billing arrangement. No one called to check the numbers, but they had to pay just the same, she believed that.

  Rob and Geoff began to sort out the dishes.

  ‘Don’t use the tea cloth for the pans, Rob,’ Dilys called out. ‘There’s an old towel for that.’

  She settled herself into her chair as if she meant to stay there. ‘So how is the shop, then?’ she said.

  ‘Just about ticking over,’ Jo said.

  ‘Got some nice things, has he?’

  ‘Not really. The good stock was Lois’s and that’s mostly gone. Trevor doesn’t seem to bother. He doesn’t go looking properly.’

  ‘Needs a bomb under him,’ said Dilys. ‘I expect you do your best. I’d like to meet him one of these days. You’ve never mentioned a wife.’ She looked sharply at her granddaughter. ‘Or is he not the marrying kind?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ Jo said. ‘Though probably not in the way you meant.’

  ‘You get on with him though?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jo said.

  ‘Do you ever think about it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Marrying again.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I expect you get some interesting types come into the shop.’

  ‘Not many.’

  ‘It only takes one.’

  ‘One what?’

  ‘One interesting one.’

  ‘The interesting ones are women,’ Jo said.

  She looked with longing into the kitchen. Rob and Geoff were free to restore order, walk to and fro, crash the pans, disappear into the steam. She couldn’t sit there any longer.

  ‘They’ve nearly finished,’ she said. ‘I’ll go up and see if Annie’s asleep, before Rob goes to bed.’

  ‘You’d hear her,’ said Dilys.

  ‘I’ll go and make sure.’

  ‘Let sleeping dogs lie, was always my motto.’

  Jo got up.

  ‘She was very quiet, our baby girl,’ Dilys said. ‘I don’t think we heard her voice once.’

  ‘You will,’ Jo said.

  ‘She wouldn’t let you out of her sight. I thought she’d grown out of that,’ Dilys said.

  ‘She was tired. She’ll get used to you.’

  ‘I should think so, darling. She’ll be different in the morning. Funny little thing,’ Dilys said.

  Jo went upstairs into the small back bedroom. A triangle of light from the landing extended through the open door. Beyond it, Annie was tucked up in a sheet, one hand loose beside her face, where it must have fallen when her thumb dropped out of her mouth. Jo touched her cheek. Her face was the same as last night and the night before – untroubled. Maybe she had already forgotten what she had seen that afternoon. Jo drew the curtains slowly so as not to make a noise and turned down the cover on Rob’s bed.

  She went out on to the landing and listened. She heard the burble of voices on television and her grandparents putting things away in the kitchen. She closed the bedroom door carefully.

  ‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ said Geoff.

  ‘Don’t make one for me,’ Jo said.

  ‘I’ll go and shake the cloth then,’ he said.

  Dilys was folding up the day’s newspaper and putting it in the bin.

  ‘Look, I’ll finish off tidying up, as I’m sleeping down here,’ Jo said.

  ‘It’s all done,’ said Dilys. ‘Geoff only needs to lock up.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Jo said.

  ‘No need,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind some fresh air,’ she said.

  ‘Fresh air,’ said Dilys, turning round and looking at her granddaughter. ‘If you want to use the phone, dear, you’re welcome to. We’ve got a perfectly good one here.’

  ‘That’s not what I said. I didn’t mean go out like that. You can lock up the front. I’ll walk round the garden.’

  ‘That won’t take long,’ Dilys said.

  ‘You won’t see what’s out,’ Geoff said.

  ‘You can show me tomorrow,’ Jo said.

  ‘It hasn’t been a bad year,’ he said. ‘All that rain we had in the spring. It was good for the roses.’

  Dilys gathered up her bag and her cardigan to take upstairs.

  ‘Rob’s watching the TV. Turf him out when you’re ready for bed,’ she said.

  ‘He’s all right for a while,’ Geoff said.

  ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable. I wish you’d let him sleep down here. Boys his age can get to sleep anywhere,’ Dilys said.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Jo said.

  ‘If I’d had a bit more notice I’d have got myself organised,’ Dilys said.

  ‘I know,’ Jo said.

  ‘We’re just glad to see you. Don’t forget to put the bolt across, love,’ Geoff said.

  Jo waited until her grandparents had gone upstairs, then she opened the back door and went out. The air was still warm, and in spite of the murky London sky, the stars were visible. She stood looking at the dark backs of the houses, the even pattern of jutting out and bitten into of the terrace, which meant house to her more than anything plainly symmetrical. A few windows were without curtains. They lit up the deep outdoor passages formed by the back extensions. By day they had always been gloomy places for the frightening parts of made-up games. She could remember feeling brave and cold, venturing down there, and the relief of rushing back into the light. She envied her earlier self the knack of shedding an unwanted state of mind in an instant. The mechanism had clogged up along the way. She remembered how it had been but she couldn’t do it.

  She was worn out, though not in quite the same way as before. She had had to rouse herself to cope with the talking. She couldn’t sit there, dumb, with her head on the table. The questions family asked were of a different weight from other people’s – loaded, even the random ones. She needed, mentally, to keep her arms whirling round so that they landed beyond her. Even avoidance took effort.

  She glanced up at the back windows. Rob would go to bed soon. He was tired too. She hoped Annie would sleep until morning. She walked back to the house and looked through the window. The kitchen looked strange, as rooms do when seen from the outside. The fittings were old, not as clean as they used to be. Her grandparents couldn’t see as well these days, and some of their elbow power had gone. The things on the shelves were familiar, but had lost the significance they had had when she was young. The dish in the shape of a lettuce leaf, which needed scrubbing in the crinkles. The fruit bowl with blue dragons chasing round it, which she used to make wishes on. Now, they weren’t so different from the chipped china and glass in the under-a-pound box in Trevor’s shop. The most recent object was a picture she had painted at school – cooking apples piled in a dish. Dilys had taken a fancy to it and had it framed. Jo had given up art soon afterwards – when she left school, in fact. She hadn’t even thought about picking up a pencil until she began working at Lois Lucas & Son. Then, something about sitting there, without much to do, reminded her. The peace and disorder of the school art room came back to her. There was no shortage of still life in the shop and the dust was a challenge; it blurred the edges. The new drawings were tentative to begin with, of wispy thinness; less bold than the cooking apples. Then they grew darker. It was as if she were gouging out lines and shapes on a block. She took a chance, identified the light, but didn’t know how the shadows would fall. It was only when she finished that the blackness remaining made sense.

  She went back indoors, shivering slightly. She felt for the key and turned it, then shot the bolt into place.

  6

  ELLA PUT HER shoes back on and carri
ed on walking – along the shore, past the golf links and the bungalows, until she was within sight of the beacon at the mouth of the River Stour and the gasometer on the far bank. She walked for the moment without feeling troubled, or, at least, her troubles flowed in and out without getting clumped into knots. It wasn’t too bad, the cut on her mother’s face, more like a deep scratch, really, though it stayed in Ella’s mind like a sliver of moon in the sky. She came this way most evenings when she wasn’t out with friends. She didn’t like being at home. Even when she stayed in her room she heard Jo and Felpo through the door talking and laughing in the kitchen – and the gaps when they went silent. She hated the gaps. Her mum always used to eat with them but then Felpo started to cook and the two of them always ate late. He said the cooking was for all of them but she didn’t like the smell or the way he tipped everything in the pan together. She lit candles in her room and sprinkled scented oil on them but the cooking smells came under the door. If she was out of the flat she didn’t know what they were doing. When they ate or when they went to bed, when they used the bathroom. Time passed and she didn’t have to think about them.

  She turned round and headed back south along the beach. She stayed calm, not minding that the sun had set and that the air was finally cooling. Things looked different in darkness. The colours changed. The glow from a tropical fish tank in one of the windows was bluer and brighter. The sea was like dirty copper.

  Her courage left her when she was back on the stretch of beach closest to home. She was tired and her arms were beginning to feel cold without a jumper. She rubbed them to get rid of the gooseflesh. The pebbles had used up the heat from the day: cold water seeped from them. The damp came through her shoes. She spent about ten minutes beside the water’s edge trying to guess the sea’s movements. She thought that she would choose a pitch and settle down for the night once she had worked out where the high tidemark was likely to be. Though, since she had no blanket or newspaper – nothing to put between her and the pebbles – settling down just meant lying on the ground.

  In the distance, beyond the stack of deck chairs, Ella saw an old man dragging a low box on a piece of cord. He pulled it behind him as if it were a kind of sledge and, every now and then, when it got stuck, he turned to face it and heaved with both arms from the front. There was no one else, just the old man. The shoreline stretched away behind him, interrupted by the breakwaters. She turned her back on the sea and walked back up the shelves of the beach, placing her feet carefully, so that the old man wouldn’t hear her – but the crunching she made got louder and faster as she moved further away from the sound of the waves. The shingle ended suddenly with a wall. Ella pulled herself over on to the pavement. She waited for a burst of traffic to pass, then crossed over and turned into the first of the smaller streets behind the promenade. She stopped and lit a cigarette, then walked down the middle of the road between the parked cars.

  She forgot the old man with the box and felt merely depressed. She had thought of herself as the kind of person who could sleep rough, though she had never tried until then. Even saying the word, rough, to herself, marked her out. Bus shelters, shop doorways – just pairs of words. Since she hadn’t been brave enough, she felt let down. She took the usual route home. Beyond the town cottages was a short row of shops, the end one of which was the junk shop, Lois Lucas & Son. Ella took a step back and looked up. The curtains of Trevor’s upstairs room were closed. She reached into the bottom of her bag for her keys. As she put the key in the lock she pressed her face to the glass in the door. The street lamp across the road gave a queasy light, revealing the forms of the items of furniture and the stacked-up boxes, the glints of the glass and the brass. She went in.

  The shop felt different at this time of night. Enclosed and silent – somehow more inland. By day, there was a sense of the sea not far away; seagulls and a seaweedy kick to the draught through the open door, but this had vanished. The smell was familiar, but concentrated – musty, like stale tea spiked with alcohol. Breathing it in steadied her. She crossed the floor, careful not to bump into anything, aware of moving between patches of shadow and half-light, and nervous that someone passing might see her. There was the blind at the window which was made of shiny black-out stuff – it squeaked if you tried to move it. She wouldn’t make the effort. It was better to be able to see. She went across to the table where Trevor dumped the books when he brought them in from the window ledge at the end of the day. He never had anything she wanted to read. She pulled one of the books out and took it to the front where she could see by the street lamp. She turned the pages of dense type until she reached a passage of conversation. No one could ever have talked like that, not even Herbert and Ivy, or whatever they were called. She glanced at the date at the front. They’d be dead by now anyway, so they were doubly dead, never having lived.

  She knew her way round. Somewhere among the clutter would be a cushion or two, maybe a rug. Under Lois’s management, Ella would have found enough props for a stage-set bedtime – chaise longue, white lace-trimmed night-dress, silver candle holder – but that was all over. She found an alarm clock in the under-a-pound box and set it for six o’clock; hours earlier than Trevor would saunter down the stairs. She moved a typewriter out of the way, spread out a blanket made of knitted squares on a section of floor furthest from the window and placed a cushion at one end. Having taken off her shoes, she lay down, stretched out on her back and looked up. Directly above her was a stain the size of a man’s hand, beginning to flake now and still unpainted – even in the poor light, it was visible. It had appeared at the beginning of March. Her mother would remember the date.

  At that time, she and Jo had been getting on not too badly. They annoyed each other but they were still connected. Jo expected her to do things that her friends didn’t have to do, such as look after Annie or help in the shop. She didn’t mind doing them but, since they were favours, she resented being called unreliable when they didn’t quite work out as planned. On that particular Saturday, for example, she had promised to go and open up the shop. The weather was foul. Her room was on the side of the house that was squashed against taller buildings, so, although the curtains dipped at the top because the rail was bent, the daylight hardly changed the look of things if it was a dull day. But apparently it was morning. Someone was banging and banging on her door. Rob was shouting, saying she ought to get up. Who says so, she shouted back. Mum, he said. Why can’t she tell me herself, she said. She’s got a headache, he said. So have I, she said. Lazy cow, he said. She’s a lazy cow, she said. It was the usual sort of argument. Jo would have got the gist of it too. Ella willed herself to get out of bed, switch the radio on, wash her face in the bathroom. Eventually she put on some clothes and went into the kitchen. Annie was at the table eating biscuits. Ella felt sorry for her, sitting there on her own. She scooped her up and took her with her to Lois Lucas & Son.

  She and Annie had hardly been there half an hour when Jo showed up. She was out of breath from running and her jacket was pulled over her head against the downpour.

  ‘I thought you were supposed to have a headache,’ Ella said.

  ‘I have,’ Jo said.

  ‘Why did you come out then?’

  ‘Because I had no idea where any of you were,’ Jo said.

  ‘You knew I was here.’

  ‘I hoped you would be but I didn’t know. You could have left a note. And how stupid was it to bring Annie with you? You’ve never done that before,’ Jo said.

  ‘You weren’t awake,’ Ella said. ‘And Rob had gone out.’

  Jo didn’t reply. All they could hear was the rain striking the lean-to – loud as beads on a tin plate.

  ‘And look at Annie,’ Jo said.

  Annie’s hair was clinging to her head in damp stripes, making her ears stick out, but she was laughing. She looked fine. A bit of water never did anyone any harm. Jo took her into the kitchen to rub her down.

  While she was gone a man appeared at the window jumpin
g from one foot to the other in a kind of dance and miming to be let in. Rain was cascading from the gutter and splashing on to the ground below. Ella ignored him.

  ‘Why doesn’t he just come in?’ Jo said when she came back.

  Ella shrugged her shoulders. ‘Some nutter,’ she said.

  Jo went over to the door. ‘It’s locked,’ she said. ‘Did you lock it?’

  ‘Could have done.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You said you didn’t trust me. Obviously I can’t be left on my own here.’

  Actually, she hadn’t done. Her mum had banged the door so hard behind her it had locked itself. It did that sometimes.

  Jo took a deep breath and turned the open/closed sign round before unlocking again. The man came in, smiled at them, said he wouldn’t get in the way, and started to wander round the shop. He was skinny and medium tall, wearing jeans and an old black coat with a funny-looking woven bag slung over his shoulder. His eyes drooped slightly at the corners which made him look nervous and pleased with himself at the same time. Jo went through the usual routine – unlocking the cash box, doing Trevor’s washing up from the day before, sniffing the milk to see if it was off – though everything she did was louder than usual. Ella knew she wanted to carry on quarrelling but she behaved herself because a stranger was there, watching.

  ‘Nice jug,’ the man said.

  He was at the back of the room, over by the stairs. He was holding out the jug, trying to line it up to catch drips that were coming through the ceiling. It was quite ugly – bright yellow with a kingfisher as a handle. They hadn’t noticed the drips. Jo said that if he wanted to buy the jug he would have to look round and find something else to put under the leak. After a few minutes he said that it wasn’t rain coming in. Jo said she knew it wasn’t – there was a bathroom up there, not the roof. The whole place was falling apart. He said, sorry, he only knew because the places he lived in always seemed to end up under water. He’d learned to recognise the different types. Leaking water had got a particular smell, hadn’t it? A stale, plumbing smell. You walked in and knew straight away. He didn’t like the sound either; he had to talk himself into it. Sometimes he took a lot of persuading when water was gushing out like Niagara Falls or he was paddling round like a granny at the seaside.