by Janet Davey
She hadn’t made any plans. She had kept her thoughts at bay – though she sensed them there waiting to rush in. If her mum’s face got better . . . If Felpo stayed away. These were the good thoughts. She felt that her life, as she had known it, was over. She hoped, maybe, one day, she could have a parallel but lesser existence, eating, sleeping, working, maybe even getting a shadowy boyfriend and having shadowy children – passing the time until she was an old lady. The shadowiness wouldn’t be visible from the outside, but she wouldn’t pretend to be the self she used to be. She sat down on the blanket with her back supported by the staircase and rested her head on her knees.
The telephone was ringing. Ella started. She must have dozed off. Then she was confused, thinking it might be morning. On and on it rang, rattling the china standing next to it – old-style loudness that matched its bulky shape – separate and demanding, with a life of its own. The room was still dark – it wasn’t morning – but she didn’t know how much time had passed. She thought she heard movement upstairs, feet on the floor. Maybe the door clicked open. She tucked herself into a neater shape. With any luck she would be out of sight. The angle that the mirror was leaning at wasn’t steep enough to throw her reflection up. She waited for Trevor’s irregular pattern of steps, his hand steady on the handrail. He had a boozer’s respect for stairs. That wasn’t a good way to go, he said. She felt suddenly responsible for him. What would she do if he tripped and fell all the way down? Seeing her might be enough of a shock to give him a heart attack. She had forgotten what the recovery position was. They’d shown them a video on first aid at school but she hadn’t paid attention. He would go grey and make sick gurgling noises. She knew how he’d look – though not how to help.
Ella hugged her knees tighter. The ringing continued. Trevor still didn’t come down. She was puzzled – then afraid.
The telephone stopped and the reverberations with it. Her ears didn’t adjust straight away. The silence was a sheer drop. She leapt up and threw herself towards the door, knocking into things as she went.
10
TREVOR WAS ON his way back from Borrowdale. He wasn’t a tidy walker, but he built up a weary momentum and this took him along. The street was wide and repeated itself. Similar houses were set back behind the remains of Edwardian shrubberies, separated by scatterings of dead leaves from the evergreens’ summer shedding. There were differences in detail, but the darkness suppressed them. He had left the car at home. He used to drive everywhere, however much he’d drunk, until he found himself late one night on a surface which didn’t feel like the road and the only sure way of finding out was by opening the car door and sticking out his foot. He had guessed he was on some soft sandy part of the Sandwich Golf Course and confirmed this when his vision had partially returned and he’d seen a little flag on a stick. The episode had shaken him. He had been more careful after that. Death wasn’t too bad, but you couldn’t depend on outright death. Near misses didn’t bear thinking about.
He had spent the end of the evening with Francesca. He’d turned up at Borrowdale at around ten. Lights out for the oldsters. He had tapped on the door. There was a doorbell set in a large marble surround. For Admittance to the Home after 5 p.m. Please Ring the Bell. Thank you. But he hadn’t liked to press it. Francesca had let him in after a few minutes. She hadn’t looked surprised to see him. She had already taken off the overall – it was the first time he’d seen her without it – and was wearing a lace vest and a skirt made of some thin black material. She hadn’t wasted time. They’d shared the bottle of wine he’d brought with him and talked about the mundane things they had done during the week. She hadn’t flirted with him but everything had flowed in the same direction. It had been a funny place for love. A room off the front office with a desk and a couch where Matron talked to relatives. Not conducive in sheer aesthetic terms but he’d felt more rejuvenated than he had done for a while. They’d ignored the whimpers and the moans, the cries for Nurse. He’d been coasting home, feeling fairly complacent. Then, at the first loud thump and incoherent shout from down the passage, she’d turned dutiful. She’d moved fast, up and, with a bit of rearrangement, out of the door. It was all right for women. No one had done that to him since he was seventeen. Well, eighteen. In a borrowed car up on the Downs.
As he turned the corner onto the home stretch he fumbled in his trouser pocket for his keys. Something about the street struck him as odd for the time of night. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it but it looked more lived-in somehow, cosier, like an evening in winter. When he got close enough he saw why that was. Light from the window of Lois Lucas & Son was illuminating the pavement in front of it, extending into the road. The empty milk bottles glinted. Cheerful as the run-up to Christmas. He knew he hadn’t left a light on. The sun had still been shining when he left. Kids, he thought, and wondered if they were still in there. Bloody pests. The night wasn’t going to be palliated by oblivion; the essential rest from today’s and tomorrow’s blundering. Old age reached out to him; the sameness of days, the binding limitations. He wouldn’t say no to it if it were offered to him. But he hadn’t quite got there. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and then down over his face, pulling it out of shape. He was outside the shop now. He stared through the glass. A lighted lamp was lying on the floor, otherwise it was the usual shambles. The door was flaky but intact. He unlocked it and pushed. Then, just in case, he held it open, as if he were a bored commissionaire, and waited.
After a few seconds he went inside and nothing else seemed amiss. The shop still held the day’s heat. He stood the lamp upright again. The bulb flickered and then came on brightly. Perhaps a cat had got in through the kitchen window. He wandered into the lean-to. The mugs were lined up on the windowsill. They all had some horrible liquid in them, at different levels of fullness. He piled them into the sink and turned on the tap. Only cold water at this hour of the night. The hot water came on at ten. He decided against coffee and went back into the shop.
‘Tired am I,’ he said aloud.
Lois used to say that. Proclaim it. He never got the intonation right. He could see her now holding on to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, preparing for the ascent. At the end she couldn’t make it. Her breathing was too bad and her legs wouldn’t go. He couldn’t carry her up. Her body was too solid – compact she called it. He shut the shop and made a bed up for her downstairs, nice and clean with all the trimmings. Half a dozen white pillows and the satin eiderdown. She couldn’t settle though. She only put up with the arrangement for a week. She lay there pricing everything up and fretted without the customers. The regulars pushed cards and little gifts that would fit through the letter-box. Soap and cassette tapes and miniature bottles of whisky. She didn’t want visitors – not there, nor at the cottage hospital where she spent the last month. Someone sent a book of poems and prayers – A Celtic Miscellany. He remembered her wheezing with laughter. Finally she got it out. She thinks I’m Welsh, she said. Welsh. He was perplexed. Not necessarily, Mother, he said. Oh yes she does, she does, she said and carried on heaving and trying to get her breath.
He was preparing to climb the stairs himself, taking one last look round. There was a clearing amongst the clutter. He suddenly noticed it. He stood and stared, transfixed by the knitted blanket laid out in a neat rectangle with a cushion at its head. His first thought was that Lois never could have got down on the floor. He closed his eyes and opened them again. So someone had been in the shop.
There was something innocent about the arrangement – not the style of a tramp. Tramps didn’t play house. And whoever came in had a key. Ella then. There was no one else it could have been. He wondered whether to give Jo a call, but it was too late, or too early. He hadn’t seen either of them for a day or two. He felt apprehensive, but casting his mind back, he couldn’t retrieve anything significant. Jo had seemed fine, and Ella too. He had lost track of time. He’d been for that walk with her. She hadn’t looked like someone who was in trouble or about t
o run away. She’d been disgruntled at first but she had soon cheered up. He could be mistaken, but he put his money on their both being happy at that point – mother and daughter. He wasn’t one of those types who think everything is a sham. People led lives right up to the second when everything went haywire. Oblivious they were to what life was about to chuck at them.
He bent down and picked up the bedding. He hung the blanket over a wooden towel rail and lobbed the cushion at the top of the wardrobe. A pallet for one it had been. Whatever reason Ella had for making her bed there it wasn’t fornication. She was below the age of consent, of course – though that never stopped them. He was thinking more that a girl like her would prefer to be on the beach out in the open – or on the side of a bed that was nearer the door. After dark, she’d need the reassurance of a running figure in lights who resembled herself – and the Exit sign. She wouldn’t let herself get trapped indoors with a fellow.
He walked over to the window, cupped his hands round his face and pressed it to the glass. No sign of life, but there was a trace of light in the sky. The day had keeled over into the next. Sunday, he thought. They’ll be round with the papers, and ringing the bell for whatever they call it – Holy Communion – in a few hours. Francesca would go off duty, yawning and waiting for the day staff to show up. He needed to sleep but he felt too lazy to go upstairs. He stretched himself out on one of the tip-up theatre seats. Companionable it was down here. Like a dormitory. Lois and Ella and God knew who else. All of them – dead or alive – who had ever had forty winks in this room.
11
ELLA RAN THROUGH the town and didn’t stop running until she could taste open air. She walked back to the main Dover road. She was always walking. Sometimes she covered distance without noticing her surroundings, surprised to arrive at whichever place she regained consciousness, her body powered by strange energy. At other times, and going at a similar speed, she was aware of the nearby landscape going by so slowly, sticking to her, rising and falling minutely with each sequence of steps. The fields beside the wide road stretched away on either side, as domestic as large gardens in the night. The road passed through them. Only the sky was a comfort – not a place where she was known.
She reached the fast road. Although it was around three in the morning there was still some traffic – cars and container lorries that rattled past. She kept close to the side.
A car slowed down and pulled in about twenty metres ahead of her. She approached the red tail-lights intending to walk past. She heard the doors’ central locking click open. The driver turned his head but he didn’t lean over. The window was electric and had already slid down.
‘Where are you heading for?’ he said.
His voice was matter of fact and he didn’t smile. If he’d leant over or smiled she would have run away. She guessed he was about forty. Not young, anyway.
‘I’m going to France,’ he said. ‘Catching the first ferry of the day from Dover.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Dover’s fine.’
She watched him lean across and move a pile of documents from the passenger seat to the back. He didn’t switch the engine off. It was still ticking over. He opened the door and she got in. He indicated before he pulled away, and checked his mirror, though there were no other cars on the road. Their seats were quite far apart with a wide carpety island between them. The car smelled of clothes that have come back from the dry cleaners. Cleanish, but mixed up with other people’s lives. Out of the corner of her right eye she could see a white shirt with a jacket over it, hanging behind the driving seat.
‘Better put your seat belt on,’ he said.
They were moving already and gaining speed. She couldn’t change her mind. Direction signs appeared ahead. Signs on stilts that were easy to read as you rushed towards them, but which she would have had to walk underneath, had she still been walking. She fastened the belt. He wasn’t talkative and he didn’t play music. But eventually he spoke.
‘I’m going to a wedding way down in the middle of France. Friend of mine is marrying a girl from St Etienne. Her first marriage, his second. The triumph of hope over experience. It’s a hell of a drive. But why not?’
Ella was shocked to be spoken to and surprised by the pattern his voice made. She had nothing to say. She had never heard of the place he’d mentioned.
‘You’ve probably been a bridesmaid?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Shame. You’d enjoy it. A chance to dress up in frilly clothes instead of the regulation jeans and T-shirt. Bit of make-up and you’d be away. If you take a look behind you, you’ll see the present. On the back seat.’
Ella stared at the dashboard that glimmered with luminous green data and wondered what the time was.
‘Go on. Have a look,’ he said.
She turned and glanced briefly at a chunky gold parcel topped with a matching rosette. It looked like one of the fake Christmas gifts they put under the tree in the local garage.
‘Guess what it is?’
She shook her head.
‘Three guesses. Go on.’
She said nothing.
‘I’ll give you a clue. It weighs a ton.’
She tried now, because she wanted him to be quiet, but she couldn’t think of a single object that would fit in a box that size – or any size. Heavy or light. It was as if she existed in a universe with nothing in it.
‘Think kitchen.’
She was silent.
‘Cookery programmes on the TV. Go on. What have those grinning idiots always got?’
She shook her head and wound the bottom of her T-shirt into a ball.
‘I’ll shut up,’ he said.
They drove on.
‘There’s a roundabout coming up. It would be no trouble for me to go round it and back the way we came,’ the man said. ‘I’d take you home.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ Ella said.
‘Where was it in Dover you wanted to go?’ he said. ‘I’m going to the ferry terminal but I’ll drop you wherever you like.’
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
‘There will be fine,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Where you said. The ferry terminal.’
‘We turn off soon,’ he said. ‘To the Eastern Docks. Sure that’s what you want?’
She nodded. She had no idea where she was going. She thought she might leave England though she couldn’t see beyond the journey. She had gone with her French class on a day trip to Calais. The cross-Channel ferry had been a world of its own, like a fun fair with bars and shops. Apart from the safety regulations there weren’t any rules. Everyone seemed to do as they pleased and when they got bored with one part of the boat they moved on to another. Even in an hour and a half she had come to recognise the same people. She had passed them on the stairs.
‘You don’t have much luggage,’ the man said.
‘My mum’s got it,’ she said.
‘Where is she?’
‘With my gran and grandad.’
‘How about your dad?’
‘He’s in Dover already.’
The man nodded, as if working things out. Perhaps he had enough to go on to make a kind of story. A holiday where everyone made their own travel arrangements and somehow met up – like the stable at Bethlehem. You didn’t have to tell people much for them to go off following some trail.
‘I’ve got a daughter, I mentioned her, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘A bit younger than you. How old are you?’
Ella hesitated.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said.
The roundabout was at the bottom of the hill. He drove round it and stopped at the traffic lights on one of the exit roads.
‘We’re nearly there,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a suggestion. I drive on to the dock and park up. Then we call your mum or dad on my mobile and tell them you’re safe. There’s a café there. We can have a cup of something while we’re waiting.’
‘No,’ sh
e said.
‘No to which bit?’ he said.
‘Just drop me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Where?’ he said.
‘At that café. The one you said. We’re all meeting up there.’ She glanced at the clock. She still couldn’t make it out. ‘At five o’clock. I’m a bit early. But they’ll turn up. They’re really reliable.’
‘I thought you said your dad would be waiting for you.’
‘He is. The others I meant.’
He nodded but she could tell that he was doubtful. Her idea of mingling with the crowd on the ferry, making new friends, evaporated under his questioning. He wasn’t even asking her anything personal.