'Thank you,' I said. 'Thank you very much for being there.'
'She didn't leave me much choice. But that's okay.'
'Could you please stop talking!' Sheree raised her voice. 'I could be giving birth to goodness knows what. I'm really scared.'
'You don't have to be scared.' I exchanged a glance with Kevin. Look what women have to put up with. He shifted uneasily, getting ready to make his escape. 'People do this every day — give birth. You're young and strong.'
'I don't want to do this. Here it comes again! It could be a murderer in my belly. Una said.'
'Oh God. Did she really? But you know that's nonsense. You can't believe that.'
A smiling young nurse with very white teeth bore down on us, waving a ballpoint pen. 'Hello there. Looks like you're in a hurry, dear. What name was it?'
'Who the fuck cares?'
'We care very much, believe me. Name?'
Kevin had gone home to his jet-lagged wife and I was allowed, compelled, to accompany Sheree into the delivery room. She seemed to want me there but made little sign that she was grateful. She was busy, of course. Sitting behind my mask — there had been a case of MRSA on the ward — I tried to say the right things to encourage Sheree in her noisy labour, but the right things came out all wrong and sounded faintly ridiculous. In a way I was glad of the mask to hide some of what milled inside my head, but perhaps this flap of cotton filtered communication and censored out reality. Somehow I was there in Una's place, reliving my own birth experiences that had been in another century and no doubt I'd sentimentalised them quaintly. Nothing sentimental about the way Sheree was behaving, bossing the Indian doctor about. He had stopped in for only a moment and cast a sympathetic grimace at me as he left. Perhaps he believed I was the girl's mother.
Would Sophie have to go through this in Berlin, perhaps, without me in attendance? I'd go over of course, if I was asked. Like a shot. Why wasn't Sophie pregnant? Chlamydia or selfishness? Didn't my daughter know how fertility declined as the clock ticked?
'You're doing really well,' I said.
'How would you know?'
I wouldn't bring up Una's name. I didn't want Sheree to repeat that crazy stuff about carrying a murderer in her womb. How could the woman say such a thing to a sixteen-year-old? And why? Supposing that Una had actually said the words. Lies, lies, lies. How did you choose what to believe?
The young doctor had come back and things were moving along. I gulped, choking behind my mask and felt tears spilling down onto the white rim of the cotton. No one would hear me with all the noise going on, so I sniffed and sniffed, tasting salt. And moments later, blinking so that my eyes cleared, I witnessed the tiny form patterned with lacy mucus sliding free into the man's dark hands.
Plunging the back of one wrist across my eyes, I gave one last sniff and stepped forward. A little girl with eyes sealed tightly against the world. Sheree had reproduced herself and she was jerking with hiccups of laughter as if she had told the funniest story and expected everyone to join her in the joke. I didn't want to laugh but my lips had peeled open in an involuntary smile that was almost a grin. My reaction had taken me by surprise. It wouldn't have been surprising if it were Beryl gulping with emotion, but I wasn't Beryl. In fact Beryl should have been here in my place: she'd have done this much better than me. Or Una — no, perhaps not a good idea for Una to be present spreading messages of doom, an evil fairy at the celebration.
'Looks like me,' Sheree announced with a note of satisfaction. 'Not him, anyway.' She was holding the child where the nurse had placed her against her chest, and stared, puzzling down at her for a few seconds. Then she handed the bundle back and watched while the nurse weighed her in the scrap of blanket. 'Good. That's it then. You can go now,' she said to me. 'Where's my bag? Thanks.'
'You should sleep,' I agreed. 'She's lovely. Well done.'
Sheree didn't answer or even turn her head. Her eyes were shut, like the baby's. The nurse was searching for something in the pink zip bag and the new little animal squirmed mewing in the hospital cot. No one was looking to see me raise a hand that wobbled slightly, in farewell.
A curious numbness encased me as I walked down through the hospital grounds, grateful that it was no longer raining. When I reached the main road I stopped walking, slowed to a statue. Something had frozen my mind processes so that I couldn't for a moment think what to do next or where to go. A baby had been born and would go on to have a life. Fifty-nine years ago I began this way. So what? The apartment was just streets away and I had only to turn right and keep walking. Suddenly I was cast back in time to the house I lived in when I was pretending to be happy with my children and a temporary replacement husband — a house with a front and a back door and a rockery and a gate. I remembered it as a comforting memory, a cosy family photograph. But if I'd never existed it would hardly matter. I hadn't done anything special with who I was. How could I feel so much more real and worthwhile than Beryl — let's confess, I did feel that way. But how were Beryl and I different? Beryl had few friends but who did I have? In thirty years I might be dead and what would I have been doing wasting a life when someone more worthy could have lived mine. Hang on, Clarice. I deserved to live. My children would say so. I was kind to other people on the whole. Una had laughed at me for finding lame ducks, but Una was another lame duck: she seemed to have missed that fact, and now she'd swum off, looking for worms. Or perhaps she'd found one.
The apartment would be empty unless Una had decided belatedly to come home. Kevin had his wife sleeping in the bedroom immediately below. She would look up at the ceiling I'd contemplated the first time I borrowed that bed, and her husband. Was the same spider watching them? Bugger it.
The statue I'd become shook itself. I hitched my handbag onto my shoulder and turned left, toward Beryl's street.
Beryl
Beryl cut herself when she was dicing pumpkin to add to the pork stirfry. She had been making an effort to eat sensibly and restore herself to the modern world Clarice appeared to inhabit so easily. Lately she had noticed Greg Preston changing his habits in a way that unsettled her, making her wonder if she might be going mad after all. It was okay to have an imaginary friend, but why now did he choose to converse with her only in the mirror, peering down over her shoulder, in shadow save for the lightly clenched teeth and narrowed blue eyes? She and a school friend had played a Halloween game as children, holding up a flickering candle at a dressing-table mirror to evoke the reflection of a future husband in the glass. It had never quite worked until today, and today it was no future husband gazing at her but only Greg, a shadowy television image. Yet she could hear his voice as clearly as ever.
The hall mirror was the best, the tallest and widest, although it wasn't so well lit. The swirly patterned glass panels at the side of the front door lent something mysterious to the hall lighting, even at night when the street lamp reached in.
'Shouldn't you have put disinfectant on that?' Greg asked her later when she stepped aside on her way from the bathroom cupboard. She had knocked her hand so that the cut started bleeding again and needed a plaster.
An echo of her mother's advice when she was a child. She couldn't understand what she was doing being sixty-four years old. How could she have come so far from her youth? It must be a mistake. 'It was only bleeding a bit.'
'You have to be careful as you get older. Wounds tend to take longer to heal. Haven't you noticed? Sometimes they never heal at all and turn into gangrene.'
'I don't believe it. I hardly felt it when the knife slipped.'
'Liar. You just forgot it quicker. You're getting older. Little wounds don't matter as much. Don't think you're going to forget the old wounds so easily.'
'That's not true either. I am forgetting. I haven't thought about Donald, not a scrap, not for weeks. And I don't think about my babies, or . . . not like I used to. I don't!' She had raised her voice. 'I don't! Oh go away!'
That was when she turned and saw the shadow on one of the
front door panels. It was a real person. It was Clarice.
'I'm sorry, I shouldn't have called at this hour. I wasn't going to knock but then I heard you on the phone . . .' I looked down the hallway, puzzling. Behind Beryl, who was clad in pyjama trousers and a chunky jumper, the passage narrowed, furnished with a low wooden chest and a spindly table that bore a shallow pot pourri bowl but nothing else. No sign of even a cordless phone, so who was she talking to? 'And you were going to bed.'
'No, no. Please come in.'
'I'm not disturbing . . . anyone else?' I glanced past Beryl, thinking of Greg, the aging boyfriend, but not prepared to ask and make a fool of myself.
'I was just going to have a bedtime drink. What can I offer you?'
'I've come from the hospital. Sheree had her baby.
A little girl. She was very fast once she got going, and pretty noisy. A cup of tea would be lovely. I'm still feeling a bit stunned actually.' I followed Beryl down the hall, past a big gilt mirror. She was walking quite fast without looking over her shoulder until we reached a badly lit living room and the friendlier colours of a 1960s kitchen appeared ahead of us. Then she turned smartly, her face wearing a stretched smile that seemed belatedly imposed.
'A little girl! That's lovely. I'll have to go in and visit her. She wouldn't mind, would she?'
'Well, you know what she's like. You just don't know how she'll be.'
I thought Beryl must have noticed how uncomfortable I was feeling for her tone of voice changed, taking a sudden decisive plunge. She said, 'You must think I'm mad. You heard me . . . I do talk to myself sometimes. It's a bit of a habit I've got into. It's being alone so much. But it can't be healthy, can it? I know it's not healthy.'
I was embarrassed. 'You can do what you like in your own home.'
'Can I? First sign of madness they say,' she laughed. 'Talking to myself. Or not to myself exactly.' She must have seen my eyebrows lift; she fell silent.
'I would like that cup of tea, if you're having one.'
'Oh yes. Of course. What am I doing? I shouldn't be telling you my problems.' She stepped down into the little kitchen and reached for the electric jug. 'What's the news of Una?'
'Nothing. I'm pretty worried about her, as a matter of fact, but I don't want Sheree to know how worried. That's supposing she'd care if her boyfriend's grandmother took an overdose. But she might. She doesn't give much away.'
When Beryl turned around with two cups and saucers on a painted tray I noticed the short chunky jumper she was wearing had a picture knitted into the front. A city of skyscrapers. It looked like New York. 'Goodness. You're wearing the Twin Towers!'
'Am I? Oh this.' She wagged the knitted top. 'It's old. I got it at the Presbyterian shop. I knew it was America, but I hadn't thought . . .' She twisted her chin, angling the jumper to allow herself a squint-eyed view.
'That'll be a relic now. Hang onto it.'
'I don't throw much out. Do you like it?'
'There's so much going on out there in the big world. Why do we bother?' I drank my tea, which tasted stale.
'Bother with what? How do you mean?'
'I'm not sure what I mean. Sometimes I feel so far away from everything important . . .'
'I know exactly what you mean. I feel far away too, sometimes,' Beryl nodded.
'From New York and London.'
'Oh. Yes. New York. I thought you meant something else.'
I sipped tea, juggling the saucer. Una and I didn't bother with saucers. I considered what Beryl might have been trying to say. Her problems.
Loneliness? 'We could go in to see Sheree together if you like,' I offered.
'I have to tell you something,' Beryl said, shifting her bottom on her chair. 'Well, I don't have to, but I want to. I'm usually an honest person and I can't keep lying.'
I stared at her over the rim of my cup.
'It's Greg.'
'Oh yes?' I screwed my head around, looking to where the bedrooms must be.
'You must have had an imaginary friend when you were a child?'
'No. I can't say . . .'
'Well, it's quite common. Very. I came across it a lot when I was working at the library. There was a little girl — It was quite charming really, the way she talked to her friend.'
'So when did you work in a library? Have you told me about that?'
'And that's what Greg is. For me. Or was.'
I leaned forward because my ears didn't seem to be working properly. 'Was?'
'An imaginary friend.'
A clip of laughter cut the air before I could rein it back in. 'Oh! You don't mean Greg isn't real? You made him up?' I held my breath and waited for Beryl's nod of apology. 'Well, that explains why no sex! Oh Beryl! I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh.'
'I know it's mad. I know it's not right at my age, but I'm dealing with it. I really am. At least I know he isn't real, don't I?'
'It sounds like it.' I frowned. 'But that's who you were talking to when I was in the porch?'
'Not really. Sort of. It's more like I was talking to myself.' A little shake of her head and her cup settled in its saucer. 'So tell me about the baby. How much did she weigh?'
I walked all the way home. It was quite a step from Beryl's house tucked in front of the zoo. Women approaching sixty didn't often walk these streets in the middle of the night and counting the people I passed on Riddiford Street I realised very few people of whatever age lingered in the lamplight. There was a small group of Somalis helping someone on the hospital steps and over the road a light still burned in a restaurant, although it appeared deserted. Two tall transvestites walked past me, the nearest swinging shiny high-heeled sandals in one hand. I could have phoned for a taxi — I'd noticed Beryl's telephone hanging on the living room wall. I walked, not because I wasn't weary, but because I wasn't in a hurry to get home and I wanted to think.
I'd passed the op shop where Beryl had — so she said — bought the Twin Towers jersey that she wore over her flat chest and her cotton pyjamas. There was no one waiting in the bedroom for Beryl, any more than there was anyone waiting for my own key to turn in the door of the apartment. Could the time come when I felt compelled to invent company, an imaginary friend? Surely not. Beryl clearly was 'far away from everything' but it was uncomfortably close to the way I was feeling myself, almost as if I were dreaming or certainly not wide awake. We'd talked about the new baby and I hadn't liked to suggest that the child might not be there at Sheree's bedside when we called to visit. The arrangement for adoption was still unclear. As unclear as the future for the apartment if Una didn't return and her mortgage payments stopped. This made me think, not kindly, of Roy and the blackhead prickling beside his eyebrow. I swiped my card on the street entrance and mounted the stairs, deliberately suppressing a glance toward Kevin's floor.
There was something different from silence inside the apartment: a faint clicking noise, too irregular to be mechanical, as haphazard as a snore. I cocked my head and switched on the main light with a fierce swatting action of my hand, intended to intimidate an intruder. The clicking sound continued, coming from Una's halfopen glass door. When I moved forward and inclined my head I could smell Una: not Estee Lauder this time but something alcoholic and slightly rotten, like spew. Una was sleeping, beached like an unlucky seal, cast carelessly across the bed, one nostril clicking while the other was buried in a pillow.
It was still quite early on Thursday morning. Something had woken me but when I listened I could hear no evidence of life in the apartment. I opened my door to find Una, who stood immobilised, her arms sagging at her sides and hair smeared like seaweed on her forehead, an upright version of drowned Ophelia, but old and fat. She was wearing a towelling wrap over her daytime skirt and T-shirt, seemingly unsure whether to be asleep or awake. When I spoke to her she still didn't move.
'Una!' I called again. 'Are you all right?'
She turned then, considering. 'No. Not really.'
'We've been worried about you! Sheree had her baby
— a little girl. She's in the hospital. You missed all the fun.'
'Fun?'
'Well, it wasn't really fun, no. So what have you been doing? Apart from giving yourself a hangover?'
Una walked, stiffly, as if her bones hurt, towards the bathroom door. I stepped out in front of her. 'Sorry — can I have a quick piddle?' Jimmy Riddle, I thought, and remembered Beryl and her invented friend. 'If you're planning on having a bath, that is. I won't be a sec but I'm bursting.'
Una stepped back submissively. She must be feeling really bad to act so out of character: she'd barely acknowledged the birth of her great-grandchild. When I came out, leaving the flushing sound of the toilet behind me, Una was still standing patiently waiting. Her round face looked numb, as if she'd forgotten what she was about to do next.
'It's okay,' I told her. 'Bathroom's free. I need coffee. I'll make a pot — I'm sure you could use a cup. Thank God it's Thursday.' No work.
I'd drunk one cup of coffee from the plunger — nothing as classy as Kevin's sleek coffee-maker — and Una was still ensconced behind the bathroom door. I hadn't hung about to hear whether the taps were running and now I took a quick look down the passage to check that water wasn't seeping again. I had a sudden disturbing vision of Una lying in the bath with her wrists dripping blood and darkening the water. Something was definitely wrong.
'Do you want to talk about it?' I asked when Una surfaced from the bathroom.
She looked questioning. She was gulping at her coffee mug but almost unwillingly, as if she had decided despite herself to do what she was told.
'About what's been happening to you?' I asked her. 'What's Garth done to upset you? You can tell me about it. I won't be judgemental, truly.'
'You'll know soon enough.'
'Will I? How will I know? Oh! You're not telling me that stuff on the news was true? It wasn't Garth who shot the wild dog? You're not telling me that was Garth?'
Playing Friends Page 15