First Aid

by Janet Davey

  ‘She wasn’t lying,’ he said.

  ‘No? Though she might, if pushed – like most people,’ she said.

  ‘Then she thought she saw him at the Sandrock Hotel,’ he said.

  ‘Thought?’

  ‘He wasn’t actually there. She was in such a state. Does it matter?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘What was she doing at the Sandrock Hotel?’ she said.

  ‘With someone called Vince, apparently. She has too much freedom.’

  ‘He’s nice, isn’t he? Vince. Have you met him? She may not realise how nice. Weird place for them to go.’

  ‘What exactly is their relationship?’

  He said it as he used to say to her, Why did you leave those tomatoes rotting in the fridge, or, Why did you leave the skylight open in the rain? She hadn’t known then and she didn’t know now. She could have said that Vince was a year younger than Ella and that Ella didn’t fancy him, which would have kept Peter quiet but been a cop-out – not fair to anyone. He seemed to know that she wasn’t going to reply.

  ‘Then the evening before she was out with Trevor. Anything to get out of the flat, she said. That’s no good, Jo.’

  ‘You seem to have found out a lot.’

  ‘I made it my business to find out. I wanted a picture of her activities.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Have you got any plans?’ Peter asked. This sounded less personal, a form of goodbye. He would leave soon.

  She replied in the same manner, ‘There are always things to do. No plans.’

  ‘You haven’t come to any decisions?’ he said.

  She sighed loudly enough for him to hear. It wasn’t enough to be in one piece today. She had to promise to be in one piece tomorrow as well, having made New Year resolutions. They had had similar exchanges over the years, a whole clutch of them at the time of his leaving. She had never managed reassurances about uncertainties; they seemed as unconvincing as a horoscope. What Peter wanted for her was monotony, gingered up with graspable events – short breaks, days out, birthdays, Christmases. He’d call it happiness probably, as long as she could afford it. And if the worst happened – for instance, falling in love with an unsuitable person, which would score about the same as being in a road accident, or being attacked by your unsuitable lover, which would be the same as going through the windscreen – then the best you could do would be to carry on as if it had never happened, organising short breaks, days out, birthdays, Christmases . . .

  Ella had jumped; it was brave to jump. Jo hoped, for her sake, it had been as free as it looked.

  ‘She thought she heard him upstairs at Lois Lucas’s,’ Peter said. ‘She thought he was there, waiting in the bedroom. That’s why she ran out. It sounded like some sort of panic attack.’ He shook his head. ‘One and a half nights she spent in that shop.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been there, whatever you and Tara think,’ Jo said. ‘Why would he go to Lois Lucas’s at that time of night? Nothing about it makes sense.’

  ‘She said she thought he was waiting for you,’ he said.

  ‘In Trevor’s bedroom? What’s that supposed to be about?’

  As she spoke, she felt a vague disturbance in her head that was more like the pressure of unequal weights behind her eyes than real pain.

  ‘That’s what she said. It doesn’t make sense, I agree. Why would you be there in the middle of the night?’ he said.

  She smiled hazily, as if she’d discerned the source of a gas leak.

  ‘Thank you for telling me. You needn’t have. Did she tell you what exactly she was frightened of?’ she said.

  ‘No, and I didn’t push it,’ he said.

  He looked at his watch. Jo had no idea what time it was.

  ‘We’re not getting anywhere,’ she said. ‘Let’s forget it. I’ll give Tara a call. Thank her for her help.’

  He looked astonished. ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I’d like to. There’s probably some truth in what she’s been saying.’

  ‘What has she been saying?’

  She laughed. ‘I can guess,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine. You go.’

  He pointed the car keys at the car and the locks clicked – the usual anti-climax.

  She watched him drive away and went back indoors.

  5

  INSIDE THE HALL, the door to the left was propped wide open and Jo could see right through the house to her neighbours’ garden. Cooler it looked down there, smelling of clean washing – the patch of outdoors at the far end, a dark August green. They could perhaps swap, she and the neighbours. Even at this late stage, she could change her mind and choose downstairs. Wear the smaller size of the trainers neatly lined up in pairs on the tiles, take the video lying next to them back to the video shop, peg out the clothes on the line. They seemed to have a simple life – orderly. They had a fuzzy inside to their letterbox and a special holder for milk bottles.

  After the move, she would hear them walking about above her. She would know the lay-out and where their feet were going. They would go diagonally across the floor at night and then stop. There was only one possible place for a double bed, with the head on the inside wall where the fireplace used to be. She wondered if they would pray before they got into it. She had always thought of them as the Christian couple but she had no evidence for so naming them apart from the text on the back of the bike. The Kingdom of God is Within You. Perhaps that was all there was to it. Dilys had always told her that Gail was in heaven, but the fact – since it was presented as such – seemed irrelevant. Gail wasn’t here and that was what counted. Jo was as certain as she could be that there was no such thing as a soul – but she didn’t rule out the possibility of losing one.

  In the evenings, her new old neighbours, Dan and Megan, would bang about in her former flat in a discreet way, hoovering, knocking brooms into corners, painting over the stains. She would give them time to get straight and then, in a hospitable way, she would ask them down. They would have cups of tea in the garden. Annie would hand round biscuits on plates. She knew the sort of person she would be if she lived downstairs. Living where Dan and Megan used to live. Knowing they were above her, setting things to rights. She knew intensely, there was nothing vague about it.

  In the garden a tap was turned on and water splashed into a watering can. Jo moved away out of sight and pushed open her own door. She took her time over climbing the stairs.

  She had long ago given up working out what she was going to say in advance, even beginnings. Sentences she planned – though they started out neutral – acidulated while they were waiting, good for nothing when the time came. Dilys always prepared difficult conversations to audition pitch, not just her part, but the other person’s as well. The advantage of this method was that when you said something different from what she had expected, she carried straight on as if no one had spoken. On the receiving end, you felt not so much misunderstood as bypassed. Peter retrieved signpost phrases from Tara. He liked contemporary clichés; they seemed livelier than his own. When he finally got round to telling Jo about Tara – it had been at the bottle bank at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon – they had dropped into his confession like globs of oil on water, unassimilated.

  Jo had told Peter that she would know what to say when she saw Ella’s face and she still hoped she would.

  Ella was sitting at the kitchen table, sharpening coloured pencils for Annie, taking care over them so that the shavings fell on to a piece of white paper in perfect spirals. Annie was drawing at the opposite end. Rob was up in his room.

  ‘Did Rob manage to eat anything yesterday?’ Jo said. ‘Gran over-fed us as usual.’

  ‘Dad said, “How’s the All Day Breakfast, Rob?” So I suppose he was eating. I didn’t look to see.’

  Ella blew the dust from the sharpening into a tiny pile.

  ‘He says interesting things, your dad,’ Jo said.

  ‘Earlier he said next Sunday was only a week away.’

&nbs
p; ‘That was for Annie’s benefit, was it?’ Jo said.

  ‘No, Tara’s.’

  ‘She’d lost track of time?’

  ‘She kept saying she couldn’t believe she hadn’t read the Sundays yet, she could do with having the weekend over again.’

  ‘Why couldn’t she read them?’ Jo said.

  ‘I don’t know. Too geed up.’

  ‘Was she? Peter said she’d had a heart-to-heart with you.’

  The hair to the left of Ella’s parting was tucked behind her ear. To the right it fell down and brushed the paper and hid her from view. She still hadn’t looked up.

  ‘Is that what he called it?’ Ella said.

  ‘Wasn’t that what it was?’ Jo said.

  ‘Like with a nice WPC. She sat on the bed this morning and wouldn’t let me pretend to go back to sleep. Every time she moved I thought, she’ll get up now, but she didn’t, she just pulled the sheet tighter.’

  ‘She talked, though?’

  Ella raised her eyes from the pencils and gazed up at the grubby line where the walls met the ceiling and the spiders lived. Her face shone with enthusiasm.

  ‘“I like this room. Don’t you? White’s so calming,”’ she said.

  ‘Doesn’t sound too controversial. Do WPCs say that?’ Jo said.

  ‘“I said to Peter after you’d gone to bed, ‘She’s in shock,’ but he said, ‘She’s caught cold.’ Shock isn’t even an emotion,” she said, “There’s no need for him to be so squeamish about it.’”

  Jo smiled. Ella did the voice well, slightly exaggerated but entirely recognisable.

  ‘“Talk if you want to. I remember myself at your age, as if it were yesterday,”’ Ella said.

  ‘Did you?’ Jo said.

  The animation went from Ella’s face and she carried on with the sharpening. She’d got to Annie’s favourite colours that were just stubs. Blue for sky and red for houses.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  ‘What else did she say?’ Jo said.

  ‘Oh, all this stuff about me.’

  Ella wouldn’t tell her that. Even if she remembered word for word, she wouldn’t get into the part. She’d have told her Tara’s other stories. Marcia, at the office, whose hair got caught in the electric fan, or the ex-boyfriend her sister found under the bed. She had told Jo before. The rotating hair, Marcia’s taut scalp. The soles of the boyfriend’s boots caked in mud and dead leaves, the same leaves that were all over her sister’s back garden. In Ella’s case, Tara wouldn’t have got the story right.

  ‘It’s no good people telling you bits of your life back to you,’ Jo said. ‘It never works.’

  ‘No,’ Ella said. ‘They do it when they’re telling you off and they do it to cosy up to you.’

  Jo wasn’t going to do either. There was no point in making Ella repeat the lies, airing them like second-hand clothes. The smell never quite goes. If it hadn’t been those particular lies it would have been others. These things find casual substitutes. In the half hour since Peter had left a sense of recognition, hardly different from resignation, had been growing in her, in spite of the shock. The barrier between knowing and not knowing had been as thin as skin. A few words had broken it.

  She thought back to Friday. The gap between Ella leaving the flat and Felpo coming back. They must have met by chance. Ella wouldn’t have gone looking for him. The next time Jo saw Ella was when she was holding her head, pulling strands of hair off her face, tying them back in again. Rob had been there, running the tap, dabbing her cheek with cotton wool, letting water trickle down her neck, opening a bottle of antiseptic, stinging her with it. They had sat her down, pressed her head between her knees. Afterwards, when she was clearly going to live and the first shock was over, Rob had started to ask questions and Ella had told him to shut up. She had been different – not kind any more. Cold and irritable.

  ‘Did Tara say anything about me?’ Jo said.

  Her daughter looked at her then, her expression bland, but spiked with something. Jo couldn’t tell whether it came from Ella, or from Ella being Tara. She watched as Ella got up from the table, went to the window and leant her hands on the glass. She wasn’t the one who cleaned them.

  ‘“I don’t mean to criticise her, but she should never have had him in the place with you kids there, especially you, Ella, an attractive girl. Well, you are. She should have had more respect. I appreciate some women might find it exciting, but there are limits. She should be giving you advice about sex, not having it,’” Ella said.

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yes. She said it was just an observation.’

  ‘What advice? What advice am I supposed to be giving you?’ Jo said.

  Ella shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘If you’re wearing a tight skirt,’ Jo said, ‘take it right off, don’t hitch it up. I can’t think of anything else. It doesn’t get clearer.’

  ‘No,’ Ella said. She didn’t turn round.

  ‘Come on, Annie. Let’s get those bags unpacked. Tip them all out over my bedroom floor,’ Jo said.

  Her younger daughter had been sitting at the table drawing a picture. It was a house; it always was, with fierce smoke coming out of a chimney. Funny how children put in the smoke. They’d probably be doing it in another hundred years. Annie was still little enough to be talked in front of – up to a point, anyway. If you talk rapidly and unemotionally and smile from time to time, children don’t take much notice, Jo thought. She wasn’t totally convinced – but some things are more important than others. She couldn’t worry about Annie’s ears, as well as the rest.

  6

  TREVOR SHUT THE shop at a quarter to five on Monday and went across to the Co-op. A bell rang when he opened the door and he was hit by the lack-lustre grocery smell of smoked bacon and cheap currant buns.

  ‘Good afternoon, Kathleen,’ he said.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Lucas. Hot enough for you? I see you sitting in the sun over there but if it don’t rain soon you’ll be down at the stand-pipe with your bucket.’

  ‘Right you are, Kathleen.’

  It was best to get the greetings out of the way. Kathleen sat at the check-out, facing outwards, remembering her days at the scrubbed marble counter. She was, as far as he knew, the only person in East Kent who still had a rural accent, but he distrusted it. He was looking for starch. His shirts were limp, not soft to touch, but limp, and threadbare round the collars and cuffs. He recalled that Lois set store by starch and used it to titivate the old pillowcases and table linen before putting them on display. He was sure it came in a packet but here it was in a giant aerosol. He held the canister out at arm’s length so he could read the writing on it.

  ‘You buying that for wasps, Mr Lucas?’ Kathleen said.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ he said.

  She seized the can from him and passed it over the scanner.

  ‘Plenty about. That’s what I use it for. That’ll be three fifty-nine.’

  He dug deep into his pocket and came up with a fistful of change and counted it out. The daylight robbery seemed less glaring if he didn’t part with a note.

  ‘Reckon you’re the last customer, Mr Lucas?’

  ‘I see no others, Kathleen. But there’s time yet. Someone out there may, at this very moment, begin to crave an individual fruit pie.’

  Kathleen snorted and fished out a bundle of keys from under the counter. Trevor left before she pursued him with the stool that she needed to stand on to draw the top bolt. He crossed the road and got into his car. He put his Co-op bag on the floor and opened all the windows. The steering wheel was burning hot and he waited for it to cool down. He thought it was a pity there wasn’t some method of driving with the doors propped open – a motoring equivalent of the brick in the knitted cover he used for the shop.

  He had told Jo he would pick her up some time after five. He’d rung her to find out if she was all right and she’d asked him if he’d mind driving her somewhere. He’d said, did she have anywh
ere particular in mind – Birmingham or Broadstairs? It was all the same to him, but he might need to re-plan his evening. She said that what she wanted to do wouldn’t take long.

  He had half a mind to drop in on Frankie again later. He’d been calling her that in his head – he’d have to try it out on her. Francesca was too long-winded for his liking. Where she came from the name was probably merely Catholic. He’d gone round to Borrowdale again last night, taking a couple of bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon with him. They’d taken two of Matron’s wine glasses out of the cabinet. Frankie had sipped the wine in a ladylike way, holding the glass by the stem, but he noticed she downed it pretty fast, almost keeping pace with him. He liked that in a woman, though there was a cost implication. He said he was sorry about yesterday and she said she hoped he had had a good journey home. Sip, sip. Her English was sometimes rather formal. She said she had telephoned him to see if he had got back safely but there had been no reply. She had been worried about him. He was touched by that. She was prettier at a distance than close to, so he carried on talking to her without drawing nearer, enjoying her smooth, tragic face and the way she crossed her knees. He sat in Matron’s armchair and she sat on the day bed. She told him of her troubles with the bank and the Benefits Agency and the Home Office. In his younger days there seemed to be a bit of a story attached to a woman, he generally came in on the tail end of it. Now women had problems. These were harder to respond to than a story. He took his hat off to them for understanding what they were talking about. He certainly didn’t. The old ones down the corridors had been peaceful. They hadn’t competed with him for Frankie’s attentions. He had moved on to the day bed and given her a cuddle. She smelled nice. Her head fitted between his chin and his collar-bone and she had put both legs over his. He might even have drifted off himself at one point. He had enjoyed the evening and left while they were both feeling benign about each other and before either of them expected anything.

  7

  THE WHEELS OF Trevor’s car crunched on the chalk and displaced surface dust. The dust settled on the windscreen. The coastguard station was one of the only places where the road came near the cliff edge. Sometimes there were two or three cars parked there but today they were on their own. The car windows were already wound down. Jo could hear the amplified voice giving out announcements on a cross-Channel ferry. She couldn’t distinguish the words, just the rise and fall of the voice, then the warning signals for practice. The passengers would be setting out deckchairs to catch the last of the sun, forgetting that the boat turned in the harbour and they would be in the shade.