Three Things About Elsie

by Joanna Cannon

  Mabel went back to apologising, although to be honest, the room didn’t seem a mess at all. Even though light flooded through a stretch of glass, and picked out all the toys and the clothes, and the colouring books, it looked as though everything was exactly where it was meant to be.

  We explored pockets of the past. Favourite stories were retold, to make sure they hadn’t been forgotten. Scenes were sandpapered down to make them easier to hold. When we talked about the war, we didn’t mention the loss and the fear and the misery; we talked about the friendships instead, and the strange solidarity that is always born of making do. There were people missing from our conversation, and others were coloured in and underlined. Those who made life easier were found again, and those who caused problems were disappeared. It’s the greatest advantage of reminiscing. The past can be exactly how you wanted it to be the first time around. This meant, of course, that no one mentioned Ronnie Butler, but just as I was trying to think of a way in, Mabel’s daughter appeared with a pot of tea, and said it was such a coincidence we’d rung, because her mother came back from the British Legion only last week and said she could have sworn she saw Ronnie Butler on a bus.

  There was a piece of fruit cake exactly halfway between the plate and my mouth, and it waited there for a good minute before I remembered I was eating it.

  ‘Ronnie Butler?’ I said.

  ‘But of course, it wasn’t.’ Mabel took another slice of cake. ‘It would be impossible.’

  ‘Impossible,’ I said.

  ‘Although …’ Mabel put the cake down again. ‘I really did think it was him for a moment. It was the voice as well, you see, when he spoke to the driver. Exactly the same. Took me right back.’

  ‘It did?’ I said.

  ‘And when he walked down the bus, he had a little scar, right in the corner of his mouth.’

  She pointed, and we all pointed along with her.

  ‘I said to him, “You look just like someone I used to know.”’

  ‘You spoke to him?’ said Jack.

  Of course she spoke to him. Mabel speaks to everyone. She’d find someone to speak to in an empty room.

  ‘What did he say?’ I leaned forward on the sofa.

  ‘What did you talk about?’ said Elsie.

  ‘Nothing much. He said he’d only recently moved, and he didn’t really know anyone around here.’

  We all exchanged a look across a laundry basket.

  ‘It gave me quite a turn, it did.’ Mabel didn’t seem like the kind of woman who turns easily, but I would imagine that would almost certainly do the trick. ‘Reminded me of the last time I saw him.’

  We waited. I was on the absolute edge of speaking. Elsie glanced over again and we had a conversation between us with our eyes. Elsie always says, if you leave someone to use up a silence, they will eventually fill it with far more enthusiasm than they would have done if you had said something. I don’t like to admit it, but she’s right. Mabel found the story all by herself.

  I allowed Elsie a small nod of triumph.

  ‘It was the night Beryl died. I was just turning the corner on the way up to the town hall, when his car came tearing down the road like a bat out of hell. Nearly knocked me off my feet.’ Mabel pressed her hand to her chest. ‘It could have been me,’ she said, and her fingers left little red prints of thinking on her flesh.

  ‘Was Ronnie on his own in that car?’ Jack said.

  I tried to swallow, but my throat point blank refused to go along with it. I was concerned I’d begin to cough, or have a choking fit, and the more concerned I became, the more likely it seemed it was going to happen. My body has always had a habit of failing to cooperate whenever it’s called upon.

  ‘Of course he wasn’t. But I’ve no idea who was with him. Don’t think I haven’t tried to work it out over the years.’

  ‘Nothing?’ said Jack.

  Mabel shook her head very slowly. ‘All I remember is a flash of red. A scarf, perhaps.’

  She stared at us.

  ‘Or a hat?’ she said.

  One of the children barrelled into the room waving a piece of paper, and everyone reappeared in the present. A strange conversation ensued between Mabel and the child, and I followed every word with my mouth. I held out my hand for the child to come forward, but instead, he helicoptered back into the main part of the house.

  ‘I hope I see him again.’ Mabel watched the child disappear.

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘The man who looks like Ronnie. Perhaps he’s a relative of his?’

  ‘I’d steer well clear, if I were you,’ Jack said. ‘And of anyone calling themselves Gabriel Price.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Just remember the name,’ he said. ‘And be careful.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She took a mouthful of cake. ‘I’ve got my own resident copper.’

  ‘There’s a policeman in the house?’ said Elsie.

  ‘Our Sandra married a detective. Retired now, of course, but he still thinks like one. Then there’s my Norman.’

  ‘Norman?’ I said.

  ‘You must remember Norman from school. We’ve been married nearly sixty years.’

  Norman. Short. Skinny. Can’t stand up for himself. ‘But I thought he ran away?’ I said.

  ‘Ran away?’ Mabel frowned at me.

  ‘To London,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘My Norman’s only been to London once in his life, and that was under protest. Do you want to say hello? He’s only in the garden.’

  I looked through a window to where a man stood on the lawn, hands on hips, surrounded by children and chickens. He was skinny and short, but he had that settled, reassuring look that only seems to come from old age and good health.

  ‘We won’t trouble him,’ I said.

  I looked at Elsie. ‘We found the long second, didn’t we?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time we were on our way,’ I said.

  She smiled at me. ‘It’s always later than you think.’

  As we climbed into the car, and Chris did the little cough he always does before he starts the engine, I looked back at the wedding-cake house, filled with children.

  ‘I would like to have lived somewhere like that,’ I said.

  Jack peered through the side window. ‘In the middle of nowhere?’

  I watched a line of grandchildren follow Norman back into the house. ‘That’s part of it,’ I said. ‘You always think “one day”, don’t you, and then you realise you’ve reached the point when you’ve run out of them.’

  Elsie turned to me. ‘How many more “one day I’d like to”s do you have hidden away?’

  ‘One day I’d like to learn to play the piano,’ I said. ‘One day I’d like to go whale-watching.’

  ‘Whale-watching?’

  ‘I’ve always fancied it.’

  ‘You get seasick on a canal boat,’ she said.

  ‘One day,’ I said, ‘I might be the kind of person who doesn’t get seasick.’

  ‘I’ve never fancied it,’ she said. ‘All that bobbing about.’

  ‘No one’s putting a gun to your head, Elsie. No one said you have to come with me. We don’t always need to do everything together.’

  I saw Chris and Jack give each other side-looks. Elsie pushed herself as far as she could into the seat beside me, and her chin made a home in her coat.

  Jack cleared his throat. ‘Can you think,’ he said, ‘who might have been in that car? Who might have been wearing red?’

  Elsie shook her head. I could see her face fighting with the past, and the sight of it was so hard to bear, I had to look away again.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ I said. ‘I don’t even remember being told Beryl was dead. It’s as though I’ve always known it.’

  I rested my forehead against the glass and watched the traffic. So many cars. We’re running out of roads, I thought. Soon, it will be a stalemate. An endless line of people looking out over their steering wheels, searching for
a destination they’ll never reach and stuck on the tarmac forever.

  ‘Some experiences are like that.’ I heard Jack from the front seat. ‘They affect you so much, you can’t remember what life was like before they happened.’

  ‘But I need to remember,’ I said. ‘We need to find out who it was.’

  ‘You will,’ he said. ‘You will.’

  I leaned further into the glass and closed my eyes. I’d almost drifted off when I heard Elsie’s voice.

  ‘They make wristbands now,’ she said, ‘for travel sickness. Very effective they are, by all accounts.’

  I reached over and squeezed her hand.

  When we pulled into the grounds of Cherry Tree, Chris said, ‘What’s all this then?’ and put the brakes on so violently, Elsie and I lurched forward in our seats.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  In the courtyard, there were fire engines – two of them. Fire engines are like cows, in that you don’t realise how large they are until they’re standing right in front of you. There were people walking around with their hands on their hips, and mixed in with the helmets and the high-visibility jackets, the residents drifted like leaves. Simon appeared to be attempting a head count, but Miss Ambrose had to keep retrieving the heads for him and appealing to their better nature.

  ‘All hands on deck!’ said Jack. He unfastened his seatbelt.

  I tapped Elsie’s arm. ‘I thought he was in the army, not the navy.’

  ‘It’s interchangeable,’ she said, ‘in a crisis.’

  It was only when Jack marched across the gravel that I realised his stick lay forgotten in the footwell of the car.

  ‘Ah, here you are.’ Miss Ambrose spotted us from a distance and made a beeline. She stamped across the courtyard with her arms folded, and pieces of gravel launched themselves into the grass in fear. ‘I was wondering when you’d be back.’

  ‘What’s happened? What have we missed?’ I said.

  She looked over at the flats. ‘There’s been an incident. Quite a serious one, I’m afraid, but no one has been hurt, so we should count our blessings.’

  ‘What kind of incident?’ said Jack.

  Miss Ambrose bit her lip. ‘A fire.’

  We all joined in and looked over at the flats. Nothing seemed out of place. ‘A fire?’ Elsie said.

  ‘Well, more explicitly, a near miss.’

  ‘People should be more careful,’ I said. ‘Chip pans, gas fires. Everything you put on yourself these days is Chinese and flammable.’

  ‘Where did it start?’ said Jack. ‘This near miss?’

  Miss Ambrose looked at us with a tilted head. ‘Well, actually,’ she said, ‘it was in Florence’s front room.’

  My mouth became very dry.

  I stopped looking at the flats and looked at Miss Ambrose instead. ‘My front room? What on earth is there to catch fire in my front room?’

  ‘You left the iron on,’ she said. ‘It burned a hole in the ironing board. You really should be more careful, it could have been disastrous.’

  A fireman walked past. He stared.

  I carried on talking, although I wasn’t sure anyone was listening any more. ‘I don’t even use an iron. I’ve not ironed anything in years.’ And then, ‘There’s been a mistake. Where is Miss Bissell?’

  ‘We need to do some paperwork,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘We’ll have to fill out an incident form.’

  ‘But I didn’t cause the incident. The incident wasn’t me.’ I knew I was shouting, because Jack put his hand on my arm.

  I pulled my arm back. ‘I’M NOT AN INCIDENT—’

  ‘And we should all be very grateful to Mr Price,’ said Miss Ambrose.

  ‘Mr Price?’ The three of us repeated back, in a chorus.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded over to the corner of the courtyard, where Ronnie Butler was shaking hands with a high-visibility jacket. ‘He was the one who smelled the burning and alerted us.’

  Jack reached for my arm again.

  ‘What was he doing sniffing around my flat?’ I said, but Miss Ambrose ignored me and beamed her smile across the gravel.

  ‘He’s our Resident of the Month.’

  ‘What’s a Resident of the Month?’ said Elsie.

  ‘We don’t have a Resident of the Month,’ I said.

  ‘We do now,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘I’ve made a decision.’

  8.41 p.m.

  That pigeon’s back.

  Miss Ambrose says they’re all the same, but that’s only because she doesn’t look properly. The shade of their wings, the songs they sing. Each one is quite different. Miss Ambrose just glances over, sees a pigeon and colours the rest in with her mind. This is the evening pigeon. Its tail is darker, and its chest is a beautiful purple-mauve. It’s much more softly spoken than the morning pigeon, although they both always have a lot to say for themselves. I pass the time of day with them sometimes. Just for a bit of fun. Of course, I’d never let on, or Miss Ambrose would send me off to the funny farm in the blink of an eye. But it isn’t a crime, is it, to speak with a pigeon? In the same way it isn’t a crime to climb the stairs one by one? Or to sometimes forget to draw the curtains? People can be so judgemental. The woman from social services, for a start. Round, pale, far too much to say just for one side of A4 paper. The one that set the ball rolling to put me in here.

  ‘You’re not coping with your ADLs, Miss Claybourne,’ she said. ‘Your activities of daily living.’

  She didn’t know what my activities of daily living were. She didn’t daily live with me. She just barged into my front room one morning and accused me of all sorts.

  ‘You can’t reach your feet,’ she said.

  ‘And what business would I have down there?’

  ‘You can’t do up your buttons.’

  ‘Marks & Spencer do a perfectly good range of clothes without a button in sight,’ I said.

  The clock ticked in the corner of the room, and grew the distance between us. The woman glanced at the clock and glanced away again.

  She blinked a few times and then she said, ‘That’s not the point, Miss Claybourne. We need to make sure you’re being looked after. We only want what’s best for you.’

  ‘Do we?’ I said.

  It didn’t take them long to undo my life. I had spent eighty years building it, but within weeks, they made it small enough to fit into a manila envelope and take along to meetings. They kidnapped it. They hurried it away from me when I least expected, when I thought I could coat myself in old age and be left to it. A door doesn’t sound the same when you close it for the last time, and a room doesn’t look the same when you know you’ll never see it again.

  ‘I’ve left something behind,’ I said to them. ‘I need to go back and get it.’

  And so I walked around an empty house for one last goodbye, because I was afraid there might be a day when I’d forget what it looked like, and there would be no one left to remember it except for me.

  When I got into the car, they said, ‘We’ve only got a short drive to Cherry Tree – we’ll be there before you know it.’

  It was the longest journey of my life. When we stopped at a set of traffic lights, I opened the door and tried to leave.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said. ‘I’m going home.’

  They chased me across the high street, and I realised for the first time in my life that I no longer had a mind of my own to change.

  I have always lived alone, but this was a stairless, hand-railed alone. The rooms smelled of paint and someone else. It took me ages to work out where to put all my things, and even now I keep changing my mind.

  Elsie wasn’t here then, of course. She moved in a few weeks later. I spotted her walking through the grounds, in a coat that had seen better days, talking to herself and looking up at the sky. I shouted across the courtyard, and she turned to me and waved.

  ‘I didn’t know you were here too,’ I said. ‘When did you arrive?’

  ‘This morning,’ she said. ‘You can show me th
e ropes. It’s going to be fine, Florence. It’ll be just like the good old days. You don’t have to worry any more.’

  And she was right. I didn’t.

  FLORENCE

  We’d cornered Simon in the corridor. As soon as we asked him to help, he said, ‘Yes.’ It threw Jack a bit, because I think he was expecting an argument, and he ended up with all these words and nowhere to put them. Simon took us into the staff room. The staff room! I’d never been in the staff room before, although it was a bit of a disappointment, if I’m honest. Lots of tired furniture and piles of magazines that had clearly never been read.

  ‘We don’t know how to cancel the subscription,’ Simon said.

  He pulled out two chairs. Jack sat on the settee, and Elsie and I settled ourselves down next to a big screen on a desk. It jumped to life the minute Simon pressed a button. He took the piece of paper from me and said, ‘Let’s have a look on the internet.’

  ‘I’ve never been on the internet before,’ I told him.

  ‘You could soon learn, Flo. I could teach you. We could set up a little class.’

  ‘Sign me up,’ shouted Jack from behind one of the magazines.

  Simon pressed some buttons and then he turned the screen so we could see properly.

  ‘It’s a music shop,’ he said.

  ‘A music shop?’ I said.

  We peered into the computer.

  ‘In Whitby,’ he said.

  ‘Are you certain?’ Elsie moved forward until her face was right in front of the picture.

  Simon enlarged the image on the screen. The outside of the music shop was painted shiny black, and its name was written in gold lettering. It was the kind of font you never seemed to see any more, swirled and decorated with the past. The more Simon enlarged the photograph, the more blurred it became, but you could still see instruments in the window. Saxophones and trombones with their Glenn Miller curves, and violins watching from the back, straight and serious, like a row of old ladies. There were lines of silvered flutes and guitars with hourglass figures, and a washing line of sheet music, pegged across the top.