Three Things About Elsie

by Joanna Cannon

  I took another sweet for later. ‘Now we’ll end up in the middle of a field, overlooking the bypass.’

  We reached Greenbank. There was low cloud, a cliff-top of a sky, and it started to spit down at us. The building waited for us through a windscreen crowded with rain, and the edges of it blurred against the clouds until the chalk white of the bricks vanished into nothing.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Chris, quite unnecessarily.

  No one moved.

  I reached for the door handle, but then I changed my mind and put my hand back on my lap.

  ‘Shall we head inside?’ Jack nodded towards the rain. ‘Are you coming, Chris?’

  Chris took a CD and a Boots meal deal out of the glove compartment. ‘I think I’ll wait here. Listen to a bit of ABBA. Pass the time.’

  ‘It’s warmer inside,’ Jack said.

  Chris looked up at the glass mouths of the Georgian windows and shook his head.

  ‘I’m going in,’ Jack said. ‘I’d rather face Greenbank than sit here and watch you eat a prawn sandwich.’

  The woman who opened the main door was dressed in varying shades of beige, as if her wardrobe had been selected entirely from a row on a paint chart. Small eyes. Thin lips. Elephant’s Breath.

  She made an ‘o’ without a sound to go with it, and stepped back to allow us inside, where we fell into a world of beige carpets and beige wallpaper, and weighted velvet curtains. It was the air you noticed first, though. Still and polished with age, like walking into a room that is only used at Christmas, and each time you breathed in, your lungs filled up with the past.

  ‘You’ll find Clara in our west wing,’ said the woman, and she turned down a long corridor. It was less than a minute before she launched into the brochure.

  ‘And on the left, we have our secondary day room, with a forty-eight-inch plasma television screen and a constant staff presence.’

  I glanced in. The television was switched off. All forty-eight inches of it.

  ‘And on the right, our award-winning gardens can be enjoyed through the French windows.’

  ‘Award-winning?’ I whispered to Elsie and tried the handle.

  ‘Which are locked at all times, for health and safety purposes.’ The woman turned and smiled at us, and I smiled back and lifted my fingers away from the glass.

  I looked into each room as we passed. They were silent and empty, except for the occasional glimpse of a distant uniform. ‘Everyone must be on a trip,’ I said.

  We arrived in another hallway, which drifted with lavender and old age. ‘Visitors are not usually permitted in residents’ rooms,’ said the beige woman, ‘but Clara is –’ She consulted her notes. ‘– not comfortable in communal areas.’

  ‘She never was,’ I said. ‘She was terrified of people, especially her father.’

  ‘It took us ages to persuade her to come to the dance,’ said Elsie.

  ‘The dance?’ I pushed my thoughts into a frown.

  ‘Florence, that’s why we’re seeing her. To ask about the dance,’ Elsie said.

  The woman looked at her notes. ‘Dance? It doesn’t say anything about a dance in here.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’

  ‘We’re on the third floor.’ The woman looked at Jack. ‘Would you like to use the lift?’

  The lift waited for customers in the corner of the hall. It had an iron gate and a very complicated pulley system, which appeared to be suspended from the ceiling.

  ‘I think I’ll go with the stairs,’ said Jack.

  ‘Don’t mind the stick,’ I said. ‘He only uses it to boss people about.’

  Jack was still laughing when we reached the first landing.

  As we climbed, the scent of lavender disappeared, and was replaced with the wipe-clean fragrance of a waiting room. Its aroma was rather like a doctor’s surgery or how you would imagine an operating theatre to smell. The furnishings altered, too. Vases of flowers were exchanged for cages of bedsheets, and the oil paintings became health and safety notices, drilled into the plaster and yellowed with age. Even the carpet turned to lino beneath our feet, as though gravity had pulled all the soft furnishings to the ground floor.

  The woman turned right down another corridor. The doors became numbered, and the brochure descriptions disappeared along with the dried flowers. Within each room was a small piece of torment. Eyes were glazed with vacancy. Mouths gaped. Limbs rested on angry, twisted sheets, although perhaps worse were the ones who lay silent in perfectly made beds. The ones who had run out of arguing. I stared into each room, and a parcel of life stared back. Outside each door was a photograph, and the corridor looked as though a giant family album had been unfolded along its walls. People posed in gardens and on seafronts. They lifted children on to their hips and looked out at us from beneath Christmas trees. The woman saw us staring.

  ‘It shows the staff who they used to be,’ she said.

  I tried to match the people in the rooms with the people under the Christmas trees. The ice-cream people on promenades, creasing their eyes in the sunshine, the people smiling at me from their black-and-white lives. But they had all disappeared.

  ‘Here we are.’ The woman waited outside a door numbered forty-seven. Further down the corridor, I heard singing.

  ‘“Onward, Christian Soldiers”,’ I said.

  ‘Onward indeed,’ said Elsie.

  The woman coughed. ‘Shall we?’

  Room forty-seven was filled with light. As we’d walked through Greenbank, the clouds had hurried across a September sky, exchanging the rain for a watery sunlight. The harsh lines, the sharp edges of a windowsill, the white stare of a pictureless wall, were all diluted with a butterscotch kindness. On the bedside table were a box of tissues and a beaker of water. The room had an echo.

  The woman said, ‘She has everything she needs,’ before all of us were even inside.

  I looked up at the ceiling, and it looked back at me with a magnolia indifference.

  ‘We couldn’t trace any family.’ The woman ran a finger down a page in her notes. ‘She used to live in Wales. Husband died years ago.’

  ‘Husband?’ I said.

  ‘She married Fred. From the dance,’ said Elsie.

  ‘The one who always smelled of fish?’

  ‘He worked in the fishmonger’s, Florence. I keep telling you, but you don’t take it in.’

  The woman looked through her notes. ‘Fish? It doesn’t say anything about fish in here.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’

  ‘We went to his funeral, don’t you remember?’ said Elsie. ‘Clara stood by the grave in the pouring rain, because she couldn’t bear to leave him behind. You persuaded her to get in the car. No one else could.’

  ‘She was still swinging when they found her,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ Elsie took hold of my coat sleeve. ‘Don’t you remember? Measure twice, cut once. Trim the thread at an angle.’

  She waited for a few minutes.

  ‘I helped her?’ I said.

  We both looked at the clock on the wall, measuring out the seconds. ‘You did.’

  A door opened and a girl in a brown uniform armed an old woman back to a seat. It took me a moment to realise the old woman was Clara. Her shoulders were too small. Her eyes were too quiet. Her hands were worn and shot through with veins. All I could see were the crumbs of a person, the leftovers of a life, but then she smiled, and I wondered how I could have failed to recognise her in the first place.

  ‘Here’s Clara,’ Elsie said. ‘Talk to her, Florence. She knew you best of all.’

  The old woman frowned at us. ‘Who is it?’

  I looked at Elsie, and I looked at the old woman and I took a step forward. My shoe leather squeaked on a mopped floor and I folded the belt on my raincoat.

  ‘It’s Florence,’ I said. ‘Florence. From the factory. Do you remember?’

  I watched the woman’s eyes, milky with too much seeing. I watched the q
uestion tread through her mind, and the confusion steal away her answer.

  I said, ‘Florence,’ again, then I took another step and said, ‘Flo.’

  There was a touchpaper silence.

  Clara clapped her hands and a happiness filled all the spaces in the room. ‘Flo!’ she said. ‘Have you come to take me home? I’ve been waiting ever such a long time.’

  Clara moved between the past and the present, like slipping a coat on and off. We struggled to follow her. Jack was completely lost. She stole between the two, taking what she needed from each. Cherry-picking the past, until it became one that kept her warm and secure, in the room with a blank ceiling and pictureless walls. We tried to manage a conversation. We tried to guide it past anything dark and unsafe.

  The woman in beige looked at her watch.

  ‘Do you remember Beryl?’ I said.

  Clara repeated the name.

  ‘Elsie’s sister.’ I searched for an explanation. I looked at Elsie and said, ‘How would you describe her?’

  ‘Try three things,’ Elsie said. ‘You’re good at three things.’

  ‘Dark hair.’ I hesitated. ‘Bit of a temper. Always looked like she’d rather be somewhere else. She died, do you remember?’

  Clara looked up at us, and her eyes began to fill. ‘Beryl died?’ she said.

  ‘She did,’ I said, ‘but it was a very long time ago. She used to dance with Ronnie. Do you remember him?’

  We waited. A search was clearly being conducted in the corners of Clara’s mind.

  ‘Drowned,’ she said eventually. ‘Washed up on Langley Beach. The fish ate most of him.’ She smiled. ‘My Fred would have been so proud.’

  ‘Do you remember the night Beryl died?’

  My words fell into a silence, and in the silence, I could hear my own breathing. The shift of Jack’s walking stick. The woman in beige turning a page in her folder.

  ‘At the dance?’ Clara said.

  I nodded, and held on to my breath.

  ‘I’d love to hear Al Bowlly again.’ Clara looked up at the ceiling, as though Al Bowlly himself were floating right above her head.

  I turned back to Elsie and Jack.

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember anyone called Gabriel Price?’ said Jack. ‘Was he at the dance with you?’

  Clara thought for a moment, and then she began to sing.

  Midnight, with the stars and you …

  ‘The night Beryl died,’ I said. ‘Can you remember anything?’

  Midnight, and a rendezvous …

  The woman in beige closed the folder. ‘You’ve lost her now. Once she starts singing, she can go on for days.’

  But as we turned to leave, Clara stopped singing and she called out: ‘What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘It’s Florence, Clara. From the factory. Flo.’

  When we reached the door, she shouted, ‘You’ll come back for me, won’t you, Flo? You won’t forget?’

  Her words followed us all the way down the corridor.

  We returned in silence. Just the shuffle of Elsie’s shoes and the tap of Jack’s walking stick on linoleum. When we reached the ground floor, the feel of carpet beneath her feet seemed to give the woman in beige a newly found optimism, and she began to hum.

  ‘What’s the difference between humming and singing?’ I asked Elsie, but she didn’t have an answer.

  The woman in beige opened the front door and stepped on to the porch. ‘Well, that went splendidly,’ she said.

  ‘Did it?’ I took a bodyful of September air.

  ‘Much better than the last visitor. She was very calm this time.’

  I’d just reached the last step when I heard Jack’s voice. ‘The last visitor? Who was that, then?’

  I waited.

  ‘Elderly chap. Healthcare assistant said he whispered something in Clara’s ear and Clara became quite hysterical. No idea what it was, although it never needs much. Took us days to calm her down.’

  ‘What did he look like, this elderly chap?’ said Jack.

  I turned to listen. Although I don’t know why, because I already knew what she was going to say.

  We walked back to the car in a knot of thinking. When we got inside, Chris wiped mayonnaise from his mouth with the back of a hand.

  ‘Get what you want, then?’

  Jack looked straight ahead, somewhere into the distance. ‘Oh, I think we got a little more than that,’ he said.

  I pushed at the condensation on the window with the sleeve of my coat.

  ‘Let’s just get back home,’ Elsie said.

  I spoke through the smear of breath on the glass. ‘Wherever that may be.’

  The journey was quiet. I’d given up reading road signs, and Jack decided Chris was trustworthy enough to drive the car all by himself. The rain started again, but it was slight and indecisive, and every so often, the windscreen wipers shouted out in frustration, as they ran out of things to wipe.

  HANDY SIMON

  Handy Simon chewed the end of his pen and frowned at the form. Miss Bissell had handed it to him right at the end of his lunch break. He’d frowned at it then, and his eyebrows hadn’t really had a minute to themselves since.

  ‘Everyone has one, Simon,’ she’d said, when she saw his expression. ‘I’m not just singling you out.’

  Personal Development Plan, it said at the top of the first sheet. There were several pages, but he hadn’t ventured further than the first for now.

  Where am I now? Where do I want to be? How am I going to get there? it said across the top. Simon gave an enormous sigh and started to write.

  ‘That’s not what they mean, Simon.’ Miss Ambrose looked over his shoulder.

  ‘It says here there are no wrong answers.’ He tapped the page with the top of his pen.

  ‘They say that, but there always are,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘And that’s definitely one of them.’

  Simon crossed it out.

  ‘Perhaps come back to it.’ Miss Ambrose pointed to further down the page. ‘There’s an easier one. Why not answer that instead?’

  What are my best qualities?

  Simon chewed the end of his pen again.

  ‘I can’t think of any,’ he said.

  ‘There must be something? What are you good at?’

  ‘Crosswords,’ said Simon. ‘And I can always get the top off a jar of marmalade when no one else can.’

  ‘Write that, then,’ she said. ‘Only put “problem-solving” and “kindness”. Miss Bissell loves that sort of thing.’

  ‘Should I not mention the marmalade?’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘Best not.’

  What are my weaknesses?

  ‘Prawn cocktail crisps?’ Simon looked up at Miss Ambrose, who shook her head.

  ‘Try and be a little less specific,’ she said.

  He smoothed at the creases on the page. ‘It’s too difficult to think of weaknesses.’

  ‘It’s easy when you put your mind to it.’ Miss Ambrose lifted her coat from the back of a chair. ‘I needed an extra side of A4.’

  After she’d left, Simon flicked through the rest of the form. Miss Bissell said Personal Development Planning was all the rage. ‘It helps us to be more aware,’ she said. ‘More in tune with our minds.’

  Simon wasn’t sure his mind played a tune he especially wanted to listen to. He looked at the other sections. There was a whole page devoted to goals. Short-term, medium-term and long-term.

  Replace roof tiles on day room, he wrote in the short-term section, then he crossed it out and moved it to medium. It was better to be realistic.

  Being realistic, he wrote in the strengths section. He smiled. Perhaps it wasn’t as difficult as he’d thought it was going to be. He had a look at the last page.

  How do you make a difference to those around you?

  Simon scratched his head with the end of the pen.

  How do you measure your success?

  How did anyone measure their success? It was
all right for his dad. His dad had a medal to show how successful he was, how many lives he’d pulled out of that building, although he never got his medal out of the drawer, because in his own eyes, he was a failure. Other people had certificates and letters after their name. Even his Auntie Jean’s dog had a rosette. He had an O-level in woodwork and a Blue Peter badge, and he’d bought the Blue Peter badge from a car-boot sale. For all his love of measuring things, Simon realised he didn’t really have any way of measuring himself.

  He was still thinking about it when the door went. It was Gloria, and Cheryl from the salon. Simon smoothed down the back of his head, because he was always worried his hair was being judged.

  ‘Have you filled one of these things out?’ he said.

  Gloria looked over his shoulder. ‘My dad did mine. Spent a whole weekend on it. Quite enjoyed himself.’

  Simon thought his own dad could have filled one out in a matter of minutes.

  Cheryl didn’t answer. Cheryl very often didn’t answer and everyone was used to it. She would sit in corners and stare into coffee cups, or rub the inside of her wrist. Like some people twisted their wedding rings, or played with their hair.

  ‘Are you stuck?’ Gloria said.

  Simon tapped on the page with his pen. ‘How do you make a difference to those around you?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do,’ he said.

  Gloria sat on the arm of the sofa. ‘Of course you do. Everybody does.’

  Simon waited for her to elaborate, but she went to the window instead, and perched herself on the ledge. Then again, Simon very often thought there was more to a sentence than anyone else seemed to.

  ‘She’s off again,’ said Gloria. ‘Florence.’

  Simon tried to look, but he couldn’t see over the top of a filing system someone started and never got around to finishing. ‘What’s she up to?’

  ‘Wandering around the courtyard. Staring up at windows. Having a bit of a shout. She’ll be Greenbanked soon, at this rate. I heard them talking about her when I was restocking the fridges.’

  ‘She’s worse since the new bloke arrived,’ said Simon. ‘Whatshisname.’

  ‘Gabriel.’ Gloria flicked ash out of the gap. ‘I like Gabriel. He gave me a brilliant curry recipe.’