‘He helped me with the ladders.’
‘I might try it on the residents,’ Gloria said. ‘Although I’d have to call it something else.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If I say it’s curry, no one will eat it. If I call it “Spicy Somerset Stew”, they’ll come back for seconds.’ She tapped the side of her head.
Simon looked back at the form.
‘You’ve got all weekend to fill that out,’ Gloria said. ‘Unless you’ve got other plans?’
Simon thought this was the worst thing about Fridays. People’s sudden interest in what you did with your free time. He knew what his plans were, because they were exactly the same plans he had every weekend. He would watch football on the television, and perhaps a film, if he could find one he hadn’t seen before. He would go to McDonald’s Drive-Thru on Sunday and eat his meal watching all the cars on the bypass through his windscreen, and he’d lick his fingers, and gather up the empty sachets of barbecue sauce and the salty cardboard, and push everything into the litter bin before it got on his upholstery. Then he might sit in the park for a bit. Think about getting a dog (although he knew he never would). Perhaps have a wander round Morrisons. Complain about the Christmas stuff being out so early, and then buy himself a box of mince pies.
‘Usual,’ he said. ‘Bit of sport; out for Sunday lunch. Go for a hike somewhere and see something of the countryside.’
Simon was quite shocked he’d managed to make himself sound slightly interesting, so he decided to ride the wave.
‘I was thinking of going to the pictures,’ he said. ‘If either of you are interested. As friends. People going to the pictures together. Work colleagues.’
Gloria shook her head. ‘I can’t, Simon. I’m on a yoga retreat, quietening my chakras.’
Simon looked at Cheryl. Cheryl said a very faint, ‘No, thanks,’ without even offering up any kind of excuse. She just carried on staring at her wrist.
Gloria threw her cigarette end towards the gravel and pulled down the window.
‘She’s still out there. I wonder if we should tell somebody.’
‘Leave her be,’ said Cheryl. ‘I like Florence.’
Simon and Gloria stared.
‘There’s a kindness about her,’ Cheryl said. ‘It pops out when she thinks no one’s looking.’
Simon looked back at the questions. The blank spaces hadn’t got any smaller.
‘Stop fretting over it.’ Gloria fished a lanyard from her cleavage. ‘It’s only a bloody form.’
He thought of saying something, but he chewed his words into a pen top instead. When they left, he turned back to the first page, but he found the questions hadn’t got any smaller either, and so he went over to the ledge where Gloria had sat, and he watched Florence instead. And all the time he did, the only thing he could hear was the ticking of a clock.
FLORENCE
I couldn’t decide which bench to sit on. The one on the far end was near the flat, but it was the furthest away from any of the main buildings, and the one near the day room had bird nonsense all over it. I changed my mind quite a few times. I saw Gloria staring at me from the staff-room window, but it’s a free country, and I could change my mind as many times as I wanted to.
I wish I’d never offered her a piece of cake. I was only being civil. It was the girl with pink hair. Green tabard. Tiny feet. Chews her fingernails right down to the skin. You look tired, I said to her. She was changing the bed-sheets. Spending far too long on the corners. Why don’t I make you a cup of tea? Take the edge off things.
‘We’re not allowed to, Miss Claybourne,’ she said. ‘Miss Bissell doesn’t let us take anything from the residents. Not even cups of tea.’
‘Well, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,’ I said.
I put the kettle on and I decided she could have my best cup. The one with Princess Diana on it. I bought it after she died. To remember her by. I don’t even let Elsie have that cup, because she’s too clumsy.
‘I’ll put two sugars in,’ I shouted. ‘Give you a bit of a boost.’
I was stirring when she came in. Yawning. No effort to put her hand over her mouth. No one seems to bother these days.
‘Why don’t we have a bit of cake?’ I said. ‘Push the boat out?’
‘I couldn’t, Florence. Really.’
‘Oh go on, I’m not going to tell anyone. I’ve got a lovely Battenberg. Just in that cupboard above your head.’
She looked up and reached for the handle. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. I couldn’t work out what was going on at first, where it was all coming from. They fell all over the worktop and a few of them spilled on to the floor.
The girl stood in silence.
‘I didn’t buy all those,’ I said. ‘I only bought one. Who put all those in there? Was it you?’
She didn’t say anything. She just carried on staring.
There were twenty-three. She counted them. I wanted her to take them away, but she said she wasn’t allowed to, that she’d have to tell Miss Bissell and someone would come over.
No one did.
I waited.
In the end, I had to go outside, because I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was the smell. The marzipan. It’s funny, because I used to love the smell of marzipan. It reminded me of Christmas and mixing bowls, and my mother, dusted in flour and smiling. Now the smell filled the whole flat, and it made me feel sick. I even sat in the bathroom with the door shut to get away from it, but it crept in somehow. I could taste it. Jack had gone off with Chris somewhere and I couldn’t find Elsie, so I decided to sit on a bench until someone came to take them away.
‘Are you all right, Florence?’
It was the handyman. Big talker, little doer. Always appears slightly confused. Wears training shoes, although he doesn’t look the type who sees the inside of a gymnasium very often.
‘It’s Simon,’ he said.
Simon. That’s it. I would have got there if he’d given me a bit more time.
‘It’s a bit cold,’ he said, ‘to be sitting out here on your own.’
‘Does it make it any warmer if you sit out here with someone else?’ I said.
He didn’t answer, although I thought it was a perfectly reasonable question.
‘It does old people good to get fresh air,’ I said. ‘I read about it. In a magazine.’
‘I was just worried you were getting a bit too much of it,’ he said.
I studied his face. I’ve never been very good at guessing ages, but I thought he might be about forty. Elsie says I guess the same for everybody, but I’ve found it suits most people. His face wasn’t wrinkled, but his thinking had begun to make lines around his eyes. I sometimes wondered if you were supposed to think more as you got older, and so the lines were there just to make it easier for your face to fall into a thought.
‘You need a shave, Simon,’ I said.
I didn’t know it had come out. Sometimes I think the words stay in my head, but then I look at people’s faces and realise my mouth has opened and set them all free. Simon just laughed.
‘I think you’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I walk you back to your flat, and we can have a cup of tea? Warm ourselves up a bit?’
I sat up a little straighter. ‘Not with all that cake,’ I said.
‘Cake?’
‘I didn’t buy it. Everyone will think it was me, and it wasn’t. Even I’m not that mad on marzipan.’
He frowned at me, and so I explained it to him.
‘They were supposed to take it away, but no one came. That’s why I’m sitting here. To get away from it.’
Simon put his hand on mine, and I let him.
‘Why don’t I move it for you, Florence? We’ll go back together, eh?’
I found him an old carrier bag in the back of a drawer.
‘There are twenty-three of them,’ I said. ‘Only one of them is mine. I don’t know who the rest belong to.’
He gathered th
em up and put them in the bag, and tied a little knot in the top. ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he said. ‘We’ll let Miss Bissell sort it out.’
‘You’ll tell her, won’t you? You’ll tell her they’re not mine, or she’ll use it against me.’
He nodded and smiled at me, and all the thinking on his face disappeared.
‘It looks like they broke your mug when they fell,’ he said.
The Princess Diana cup. It lay on the floor in a lake of tea.
‘It was my favourite,’ I said. ‘I’m worried I’ll forget about her now.’ My voice shook, although I wasn’t really sure where the shaking came from. It never used to be there.
‘I tell you what,’ Simon said. ‘I’ll soon fix that for you. It’s only the handle, you leave it with me, Florence.’
He wrapped the cup in a sheet of newspaper and put it in his coat pocket.
I looked up at him.
‘You can call me Flo,’ I said. ‘If you want to.’
I managed to wait until he’d left before I started crying.
I hadn’t cried in years. There have been times in my life when I’ve cried for so long, I completely ran out of tears, but not so much recently, because there hasn’t seemed to be much point in it. I thought I’d forgotten how, but as soon as Simon left, I realised it was like riding a bicycle.
It’s strange, because you can put up with all manner of nonsense in your life, all sorts of sadness, and you manage to keep everything on board and march through it, then someone is kind to you and it’s the kindness that makes you cry. It’s the tiny act of goodness that opens a door somewhere and lets all the misery escape.
‘We’ll have to monitor your purchases from now on,’ Miss Ambrose said. ‘We’ll have to be sure you’re making sensible choices.’
She said did I want to see a nutritionist? Or the dietician?
I asked her what the difference was, and she just coughed and looked for something in a drawer. I don’t know when jobs became so complicated, where all these names come from. I wonder if the names make people feel better about themselves, or perhaps it just makes other people more likely to listen to them. I told her I didn’t want to see anybody. I told her the only person I wanted to see was someone who believed me. She didn’t even bother to reply.
I’m not even sure Jack and Elsie believed me, although Jack bought me an air freshener. To get rid of the smell of marzipan, he said. Forest Walk, it’s called. Sits in a little plastic cube on the draining board. It smells a bit like Jeyes Fluid, but I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. The shop sells them. There’s Lavender Meadow and Winter Wonderland as well. They all smell like Jeyes Fluid to me. The only difference I can see is the picture on the front. I didn’t buy one. The man with the earphones watches me now. He writes down everything I buy in a book under the counter.
I said to him, ‘It’s like rationing, only it’s just me this time,’ and I tried to laugh a little bit.
He didn’t join in.
When Jack brought the air freshener around, he asked about Beryl again. He tried to hide it in another conversation, but I spotted it straight away because men aren’t very good at that kind of thing. He wanted to know what happened to her. How she died. He said we might be able to use it. He said we could play Ronnie at his own game.
It’s funny, because I can’t tell the difference between those daft air fresheners, but whenever anyone mentions Beryl, all I can smell is the wooden polish of the dance floor and the spilled beer. I can hear the music as well. All those notes, playing in my head. The slide of the trombone and the brush of the piano keys. The tangos and the waltzes and the foxtrots, all spinning around and covering up everything else. I tell him I can’t remember. I tell him I walk down all these different paths in my mind, but the only thing I can find are dead ends. Miss Ambrose says everything is up there, I just have to find a way of getting it out.
‘It’s your retrieval system, Florence,’ she says, whenever I forget something. ‘You have all these memories stored in drawers in your head, and we just need to find the key to open them up again.’ She taps the side of her skull when she says it. Like I don’t know where my head is.
If you sit in the day room for long enough, someone comes along with photographs of film stars and prime ministers, and pop singers.
‘Come on, Florence,’ they say. ‘Let’s open those little drawers.’
I don’t recognise my own face sometimes, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to recognise theirs. I just say Winston Churchill to everything, and they go away after a while and pick on someone else.
I tried to explain it to Jack. I tried to explain that sometimes memories don’t want to be remembered, that they crouch behind all the other memories in the corner of your mind, trying to be unfound.
‘Perhaps there was someone else there, apart from Clara,’ he said, ‘who might be able to remember?’
I looked over at Elsie. She was sitting in the corner of the room, listening to the conversation with her eyes.
‘Cyril was there,’ she said. ‘Cyril would know.’
‘Cyril Sowter?’
‘See,’ she said. ‘You’re not as daft as you think you are. You remembered his name. You opened a drawer, Florence.’
Cyril Sowter lives on a barge. We’d heard rumour, but we weren’t sure whether to believe it or not, because some elderly people have very little else to do apart from exchange nonsense backwards and forwards between themselves to help pass the time. However, on this occasion, it happened to be true.
‘Do you think he’ll remember the night Beryl died?’ Jack said, as we climbed into the car.
‘He’ll have an opinion on it,’ said Elsie. ‘If nothing else.’
‘He has a full set of marbles, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘Or at least, as many as he started off with.’
Chris pulled into a cramped space by a wooden bench and a litter bin, and we spilled out of the car on to the towpath. I hadn’t been here in years. Not since Elsie’s mother used to walk up and down the bank, talking to the fresh air, and we would watch from a distance until she’d exhausted herself. In my mind, the water had a strange smell, but now when I took a breath, there was nothing. Just grass and trees, and a faint scent of diesel. What I remembered was probably just a post-war fragrance, when the whole world smelled tired and worn out.
There was a cluster of boats moored further up. A collection of primary colours and gold lettering. They bobbed together against the canal wall like a group of conspirators.
‘Which one do you think is his?’ said Elsie.
‘Cyril’s will be the odd one out.’ I squinted against the light. ‘Whichever one looks like it doesn’t belong.’
We left Chris and walked towards the boats. A family of ducks followed alongside for a while, cutting through the water in a line of determination, as though they had a very important meeting to attend.
‘You can see the appeal, can’t you?’ Jack tapped his stick along the towpath. ‘Pulling back your curtains in a morning and seeing a view like this, instead of the canteen fire doors.’
‘And the whole world slows down,’ I said. ‘Like someone took out the key to the clock.’
‘No one has keys in clocks any more.’ Elsie put her arm through mine. ‘I think that’s the problem.’
Cyril Sowter sat on a deckchair by his barge. I was right: the boat was painted in a canary yellow, and was called The Narrow Escape. His name had been written in red underneath. For good measure.
‘Sir Cyril Sowter?’ I said.
‘I decided to knight myself. People treat you with a bit more respect when you’ve got a title in front of your name.’ He nodded at the boat. ‘I don’t see why it should be limited to the Queen; I never voted for her, and it’s about time you turned up. I’ve been waiting all morning.’
‘You knew we were coming?’ I said.
‘You came to me.’ He pointed to the empty deckchairs. ‘In a premonition. I have them
quite often. I told everybody we’d be getting a change of prime minister, and I predicted there’d be a new Tesco on the ring road. I even foresaw Welsh independence.’
‘Wales isn’t independent,’ said Jack.
Cyril tapped the side of his nose and smiled.
‘Well you can’t have predicted us very well,’ I said. ‘There are only two spare seats.’
Cyril made a pot of tea and we sat in September sunshine, watching the ducks. Elsie had to make do with a footstool, but it was fine, because she’s from a big family. Whilst we listened, Cyril stretched out in his deckchair and gave out the same opinion he’d been generous enough to share with everyone sixty years ago. Another prime minister, different wars in countries with unfamiliar names, a new set of people to blame, but the viewpoint was unchanged. He had just recycled himself for the modern age.
‘And that’s what’s wrong with this country today,’ he said. ‘Too many do-gooders, clogging up the place with their namby-pamby nonsense.’
‘Do-gooders?’ Jack said.
‘You’ve only got to look at charity shops.’ Cyril paused a mug of tea on the shelf of his stomach. ‘Everywhere, they are. Stretched along the high street like bunting.’
‘They do a lot of good, Cyril—’ But the end of Jack’s sentence was never allowed to make an appearance.
‘Not for me, they don’t. I never see a penny of it.’
‘What about Age Concern?’ said Jack.
He snorted. ‘No one’s concerned about my age. Why should they be?’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘All in the mind,’ he mouthed.
‘Is it?’ Jack turned in his deckchair. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Stands to reason.’ Cyril placed his mug on the fold-up table with the kind of precision people use when they have what they feel is a very important point to make. ‘You expect things to happen, so they do.’
‘They do?’ said Jack.
‘Of course they do.’ Cyril moved his mug half an inch to the left. ‘You expect to get indigestion after a big meal. You expect to feel cold when it snows. So that’s what happens. Same with ageing.’
‘Is it?’ said Elsie.
Three Things About Elsie Page 13