Three Things About Elsie

by Joanna Cannon

  I got a bit confused in the turnstiles, and Elsie had to come back and help me, and she got confused as well, and in the end we both had to be set free by a member of staff. Jack wandered over to the encyclopaedias, because I think he wanted to keep a distance between himself and all the commotion. When we finally got ourselves inside, I couldn’t believe how big it was. Who knew there were so many stories that needed telling? The shelves stretched as far as you could peer, and above our heads was a whole second floor of adventures.

  ‘Where do we even start?’ I said.

  ‘Local history,’ said Jack, and he disappeared through a gap between the Iron Age and Elizabethan England.

  If you were in the mood for a slice of Captain Cook, you’d found the right place. He was everywhere. He covered all of the tables and waited for you inside glass cabinets, and he was even hung on the wall, looking down on everyone to make sure they didn’t forget about him.

  ‘Pleasant-looking chap, isn’t he?’ Elsie stood in front of the portrait. ‘Kind eyes.’

  ‘I thought Gabriel Price had kind eyes,’ I said. ‘It just shows how deceitful eyes can be.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘We shouldn’t judge a person based entirely upon one aspect of their anatomy, though, should we?’

  ‘I’m not ready to judge him at all yet,’ I said. ‘Not until we’ve spoken to someone who really knew what kind of man he was.’

  Jack turned to us. ‘Captain Cook?’

  ‘No.’ I might have tutted a bit too loudly, because a couple of people looked up from their microfiches. ‘Gabriel Price.’

  ‘Cook was a pioneer.’ Jack walked up to the painting. ‘A man of courage. Can you imagine how it must have felt to sail from England’s coastline and not know what was ahead of you, to not know if there was anyone else out there?’

  ‘I wonder if he was afraid,’ Elsie said, and we both looked into the eyes of the painting, to see if there might be a clue. ‘Because to be courageous, you must have fear, surely?’

  ‘No one experiences that now,’ said Jack. ‘We all know too much. Even astronauts are told where they’re going.’

  ‘Except death,’ I said.

  They both stared at me.

  ‘It’s the last voyage into the unknown, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Like Captain Cook setting sail from a harbour. No idea where we’re off to, no idea whether there’s anyone else out there.’

  ‘And it takes courage, I suppose. To die,’ Jack said.

  ‘Every journey takes courage.’ Elsie turned away from the painting. ‘Even the ones in which we have no choice.’

  Captain Cook was all over the shelves as well. It was difficult to find anyone else, to be honest, although we did come up with an Anglo-Saxon poet, an abbess called Hilda, and an odd mention here and there of Harry Potter.

  ‘I’m going to watch that film,’ said Jack.

  ‘If you’ve still not got around to it, I doubt you ever will,’ I said.

  ‘I will watch Harry Potter before I die,’ Jack put the book back on its shelf. ‘It’s a promise.’

  Gabriel Price was nowhere to be found. I checked each shelf and ran my finger along the smooth, polished wood. From time to time, I was held up by an interesting spine, and Elsie had to jolly me along.

  ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  A young man stood in front of us. Tall. Beautiful smile, and his white shirt looked so flawless, it could have just slid out of a cellophane packet and straight on to his body.

  ‘We’re looking for someone.’ The tip of my finger still rested on one of the shelves.

  ‘He was a musician, called Gabriel Price,’ said Jack. ‘Disappeared after the Second World War.’

  Jack explained. I felt the need to add bits in from time to time and the man’s smile seemed a bit more of a challenge for his face, but eventually, I think we managed to get the point across.

  ‘Oh, that’s vintage,’ said the man, and he pointed to an iPad.

  We sat with the man at a polished wooden table, and I took in a bit of the library. I did it without moving, because I was worried an inch or two either way might bring me in contact with his left thigh. History stretched itself out on the shelves. I tried to find the seams, the places where one piece of time had been stitched to the next, but they were invisible.

  ‘Any luck?’ said Jack.

  The man laced his hands on the top of his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘So there isn’t anything on your machine about a musician from Whitby called Gabriel Price?’ said Jack. ‘Or Gabriel Honeyman?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I can offer you an Anglo-Saxon poet?’

  Jack shook his head and we stood to leave.

  ‘How about St Hilda?’ the man said.

  I pushed the chairs back under the table, because I’d never quite recovered from school, and we made our way to the turnstiles.

  ‘The man who invented the crow’s nest,’ the man shouted, but Jack just waved with the back of his hand.

  We were about to have another go at the turnstiles, and Jack was looking back and being encouraging with his free arm, when I realised there was a man standing there. He was a bit younger than us, I think, but not by much. His clothes had seen better days, and his shoes were all tired and scuffed. He stood very still. I wondered if we were expected to speak first, because sometimes I’m not sure, but then he said, ‘I couldn’t help but overhear.’ He pointed back to where he’d done his overhearing. ‘You were asking about Gabriel Price?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Do you know him?’ I said.

  ‘My mother will have done. My mother knows everything about Whitby history.’

  ‘Your mother?’ I said.

  ‘She’s in her nineties now. But she’s still the full ticket, and she loves any excuse to talk about the past.’ He gave us an address. ‘Just tell her Francis sent you.’

  I watched as he shuffled back to his seat. ‘He had very blue eyes, didn’t he?’

  ‘He did,’ Elsie said.

  She looked down at my scarf, and she smiled.

  We left all the concrete and the glass, and as we walked back towards the town, herringbone clouds rolled across the sky and the seagulls caught a river of air, plunging and swooping across the harbour. I looked up at the seagulls. I could never make up my mind if they were servants of the air, or the masters of it.

  As we walked, I looked down every side street. I checked doorways and alleyways, and stared into shops.

  ‘Whatever are you looking for?’ Elsie said.

  ‘Ronnie.’ I peered into another side street. ‘He’s here somewhere, isn’t he? He’s up to something, and none of us are going to know what it is until it’s too late.’

  HANDY SIMON

  When Gypsy Rosa finally returned to her tent, she was balancing a brown paper bag on top of a cardboard coffee and chatting to someone on her mobile telephone. It wasn’t an image that sat comfortably alongside a fringed headscarf, but Simon supposed he shouldn’t be passing judgement.

  When she saw him stand up from his seat on the little wall, she said, ‘Got to go,’ into the mobile telephone, and she looked at him. It was the same expression as the one in all the black-and-white photographs, and Simon wondered in the absence of Costa Coffee, perhaps he would have been treated to the hand poses as well.

  ‘Are you looking for your fortune?’ she asked, over the top of the paper bag.

  Simon coughed and shuffled his feet, and checked the coast was clear. He said he supposed he was.

  ‘Ten pounds for fifteen minutes, fifteen for the full half-hour,’ said Rosa.

  Seeing into the future was definitely more profitable than clearing U-bends.

  Rosa asked him his name and arched an over-plucked brow. ‘Well, it depends on how interested you are in your destiny, Simon, doesn’t it?’ she said.

  Simon handed over his fifteen pounds, and Rosa unclipped the clothes peg from the tent and turned the little sign to ‘engaged’. Like a toilet, Simon
thought. It was so dark and small inside, the first thing he did was crash into a table. He just managed to catch the crystal ball in time, although Rosa said it was fine, because it wasn’t breakable and anyway, she’d got a spare in her holdall.

  ‘I always carry an extra. You never know what’s going to happen, do you?’ she said.

  Simon’s mouth fell open very slightly.

  ‘It was a joke,’ she said. ‘Even fortune tellers are allowed to make jokes.’ And she took another gulp of her coffee.

  Simon sat on the opposite side of the little table. There wasn’t enough room for his legs, so they had to go in the gap between Rosa’s holdall and an extra deckchair. It smelled musty. A mixture of damp clothing and fish.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse the smell,’ she said.

  He felt a brush of unease.

  ‘It’s the velvet. Lets everything in. I was going to opt for tarpaulin, but it’s not as ambient, is it?’

  Simon shook his head.

  ‘You should smell it when the wind gets up. Some days, it gets so bad, I’m forced into a can of Glade.’

  He coughed and tried to very discreetly check his watch.

  When he looked up again, Rosa had her hands on the crystal ball, and her eyes tipped back into her head. Her face did a little grimace and she started to sway very slightly in her seat. This went on for quite some time and Simon tried to work out different ways he might be able to check his watch without being spotted, just in case Rosa’s eyes happened to tip forward again as he was doing it.

  ‘I see a long journey,’ she said eventually. ‘Of many miles.’

  Simon started to tell her about the M1, but she held her hand up.

  ‘I can’t hear the spirits, Simon. You have to let them speak.’

  He sat back and chewed at his bottom lip. It took at least ten minutes before Rosa spoke again, if you didn’t count the mumbling, and Simon began to wonder whether he was so dull, even the afterlife didn’t want to have a conversation with him. But just when he was on the verge of throwing in the towel, she spoke up again.

  ‘Do you,’ she swayed with a little more violence, ‘know anyone by the name of Ben?’

  He shook his head.

  Rosa opened one eye. ‘Well, do you?’ she said.

  ‘I was letting the spirits speak.’ Simon shifted in his seat. ‘No, I don’t think I do.’

  ‘It might be Bob,’ said Rosa.

  He shook his head again, and then said, ‘No,’ in a loud voice.

  ‘Something beginning with B.’ She cupped her hand to her ear. ‘What’s that? I can’t hear you.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Not you, Simon. The spirits. The longer someone has been dead, the softer their spirit voice.’

  ‘Like they’re further away from you?’ he said.

  Rosa took a large breath and nodded very energetically. ‘Do you know or have you ever known, at any point in your life, anyone whose name starts with the letter B?’

  ‘My mum was called Barbara.’

  ‘That’s it!’ She said this so loudly, Simon jumped and his leg became tangled in the deckchair. ‘It’s your mother. It’s definitely your mother.’

  Simon peered into the darkness. He wondered where his mother might be. Perhaps behind Rosa, although there wasn’t a great deal of space, and she was quite a large woman, to be fair. Maybe she was sitting in the spare deckchair. He moved his leg.

  ‘Your mother wants you to know how very much she loves you.’

  ‘She does?’ His mother had never found it easy to say she loved anyone when she was alive, although perhaps being dead made you a bit more outspoken.

  ‘Oh, yes. She wants you to know she loves you, and not to worry about anything, because everything is going to work out just fine.’

  The character transformation his mother had undertaken was quite extraordinary. Before her death she’d spent most of her time combing through people’s lives looking for potential hazards, and if she was unable to find anything, she would invent one just to be on the safe side. The afterlife clearly suited her. Simon frowned. Perhaps she was talking about Mrs Honeyman. Perhaps heaven gave her a view that no one else could see.

  ‘Does she say what, exactly, will work out just fine? Can she be a bit more specific?’

  ‘Ah, Simon.’ Rosa shook her head. ‘We cannot ask of the spirits. We can only take what they’re willing to offer.’

  ‘Not even a little bit?’ he said.

  She opened an eye again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Although …’

  Simon leaned forward.

  ‘… she keeps saying something about a dog barking. Listen to that dog barking, she’s saying.’

  ‘A dog?’ said Simon. ‘We didn’t have a dog.’

  ‘Oh. A cat, perhaps?’

  Simon shook his head. His mother didn’t like pets. She said they set off her chest.

  ‘And she’s gone.’ Rosa looked towards the ceiling of the tent. Simon looked too, and thought of a small finger wave, but decided against it.

  The stopwatch rang out an alarm on Rosa’s iPhone and she took another mouthful of coffee. Simon picked up his rucksack.

  ‘Could I ask you something,’ he said. ‘Before I go?’

  She narrowed her eyes and nodded at the peg. ‘As long as it’s quick. I don’t want to open that flap and find a queue.’

  ‘Dead people. Do they ever leave things for you to find? Little signs, you know? Something to show you they’re around?’

  ‘Oh, all the time.’ Rosa took an egg and tomato sandwich out of the paper bag. ‘Feathers. Keys. Coins. If you haven’t found anything, it’s only because you’re looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘Why do they do it? What are they trying to say?’

  ‘Times of stress, Simon.’ She took a bite of the sandwich and a small collection of tomato seeds hurried on to her chin. ‘Whenever you’re worried or frightened, they’ll leave something for you, to show you that you’re not alone.’

  ‘I wonder what I’d leave,’ he said. ‘To show people.’

  ‘Only you can work that one out.’ She reached into the bag. ‘Oh damn it, they’ve given me the wrong sodding flavour. I hate these. Do you want them?’

  She pulled out a packet of crisps. They were cheese and onion.

  Simon walked out of the tent and blinked into the sunlight. It felt as if he’d escaped from a parallel universe and it seemed unthinkable that the rest of the world had continued in his absence. His eyes slowly became used to the brightness, and when they finally began to focus he found himself face to face with Miss Ambrose.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

  Miss Ambrose studied the jumble sale poster. ‘I was thinking of having a look through the bric-a-brac,’ she said.

  MISS AMBROSE

  Anthea Ambrose had spent the morning walking around Whitby’s streets. It gave her the chance to search for Mrs Honeyman, or at least feel as though she was doing something constructive.

  She had never lost anyone before. There was a small scare a few months ago, when one of the residents inadvertently locked themselves in a cupboard with the hoover, but no one had ever been gone for more than forty-five minutes. Mrs Honeyman was pushing twenty-four hours. To begin with, she thought she’d spotted her quite a few times. It was a mistake, of course. A flash of grey hair, a stooped figure. Someone else. Miss Ambrose never realised just how many old people there were, until she was trying to locate one. The world seemed to be swarming with them. She’d walked all the way around the east side (although she’d drawn the line at climbing up to the abbey), across the bridge, and once more around the West Cliff. She was just about to cross over again, and at least have a peer up the abbey steps, when Miss Bissell rang her mobile telephone and insisted Miss Ambrose gave the Co-op a once-over, because Mrs Honeyman had previous for getting confused in a supermarket. It would have been a perfect little job for Handy Simon, but he seemed to have vanished as well, so she’d spent the next hour
walking between canned vegetables and cold meats, until the store manager asked if there was anything they could help her with.

  ‘Not unless you sell old people,’ she’d said, and burst into tears.

  It was all too much. She felt responsible. The previous evening, Miss Bissell hadn’t helped matters by saying she had ‘no words’, and then spending the next hour and a half managing to find a whole dictionary full of them.

  They’d put her in the staff room with a weak tea and a shelf-stacker called Chelsea, who said her mum swore by the medium on the West Pier.

  ‘They bring them in, don’t they?’ said Chelsea. ‘When someone’s missing. They’re on telly all the time. They give them an item of clothing, and they can smell the missing person and work out where they are.’

  ‘I thought that was German shepherds?’ said Miss Ambrose.

  But she had still found herself wandering down the boardwalk with Mrs Honeyman’s spare cardigan and a packet of Co-op tissues, which is where she finally found Handy Simon holding a bag of cheese and onion crisps.

  She glanced at the poster for a coffee morning. ‘I was thinking of having a look through the bric-a-brac,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Handy Simon looked back at the tent. ‘Thought I’d have a laugh, you know.’ He tried to laugh, as evidence, but it didn’t quite make it.

  Miss Ambrose held on to Mrs Honeyman’s cardigan. ‘Is she any good, do you think?’

  Simon looked back at the tent. ‘I can’t quite make up my mind. She said I shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘Are you worried?’

  ‘Perhaps more than I was before someone told me I shouldn’t be,’ said Simon. ‘Are you?’

  Miss Ambrose could feel the packet of tissues in her coat pocket. ‘I am, Simon. I keep telling people I’m not, but we’re supposed to be heading back to Cherry Tree tomorrow. What if she’s still missing? We can’t just leave her here.’

  ‘I could stay behind. If you think it would help?’