‘Why?’ said the nurse.
We looked at Mrs Honeyman and looked back at the nurse. No one replied.
‘Because she’s old?’ I said, eventually.
‘Forgive me,’ said the nurse. ‘I think you are all around the same age?’ We nodded. ‘Do you sleep a lot?’
‘Not especially,’ I said.
‘I think then, perhaps, we need to look further than someone’s age to explain why they behave the way they do.’
We all agreed with her, and I found a watery smile.
‘Ten minutes.’ This was not presented as a question, but as a starched, blue statement, and the nurse left us alone with Mrs Honeyman in the room washed with soap and sunlight.
Mrs Honeyman. I realised I didn’t know her first name, and I looked up at the felt-tipped board above the bed. Ruth Honeyman. Ruth.
‘Ruth?’ I said. There was not a flicker of acknowledgement, her eyes finding something no one else could see, her hands curled into fists on the bedsheets.
‘Ruth, it’s Florence. From Cherry Tree.’
Nothing.
‘We came to see if you were all right? If you needed anything?’
I heard Jack take a breath out of the silence. Everything was quiet, except a clock in the corner of the room, tutting away at the seconds.
‘Ruth, we need to talk to you.’ I drew a chair up to the side of the bed and tried to take one of her fisted hands. ‘We haven’t got long and we need to talk to you about Gabriel.’
Now she looked at me, eyes wide and white, busy with anxiety. ‘He’s not my Gabriel.’
‘We know he isn’t,’ I said.
‘But we can’t tell anyone,’ she whispered, and uncurled a finger to hold against her lips.
‘Try not to worry,’ I said.
‘The police are going to come asking, he said, and when they do, we’re to say it’s him.’
The fear stretched across her face.
‘What did he say to you? Whatever did he do to make you disappear like that?’ I said.
Mrs Honeyman lost herself in the distance again. I could hear her breathing. Soft, damp breaths held by a heart that had outstayed its time.
‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Mrs Honeyman wasn’t speaking to us any more. I wasn’t even sure if she was speaking to anyone at all, to be honest, because I know that sometimes words just need to be let go of, and it doesn’t really matter where they land. ‘I hadn’t been drinking. I just fell. Gabriel didn’t leave me because I murdered my own child. He just …’ She searched for a word. ‘… disappeared,’ she said eventually.
Her eyes met mine. For someone who was usually so noiseless and absent, her eyes were sharp. Quick. It felt as though they’d seen everything.
‘I missed my footing,’ she said. ‘Didn’t judge it properly. I reached out to save myself, but there was nothing there.’
Looking back, I think that was the moment I started to remember what happened with Ronnie, when the pieces stitched together and finally made sense.
‘He didn’t leave you, Ruth,’ I said.
‘He didn’t?’
‘No. He really didn’t. I can’t explain right now, because I’m only beginning to understand it myself,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to just believe me. He didn’t leave you. He never left you.’
I reached for her hand, and when she reached back, something fell from her fingers. It was a fossil. An ammonite. A spiral of the past; proof of a time long since gone, a reminder of something that once existed. I picked it up.
‘I know where she’s been,’ I said.
I held on to the ammonite in my pocket as we walked along polished corridors and out of the hospital. Mrs Honeyman wouldn’t take it back. Perhaps it had served its purpose for her, or perhaps she gave it to me for safekeeping. Either way, I couldn’t let it go. We walked slowly, finding our thoughts in careful steps, and when we finally got outside, the wall of bright sunlight and the smell of the morning made it feel as though we’d been on a very long journey.
We sat in the hotel dining room, still in our coats, staring at a blank table stripped of everything except a thick white cloth. I put the ammonite in front of us. It looked so insignificant. So small. It was strange to think something so unremarkable held thousands of years of history inside itself.
Handy Simon walked past and backtracked when he saw what was in front of us.
‘A fossil,’ he said, rather unnecessarily. He peered down at it. ‘Fascinating things, fossils.’
‘They are,’ I said.
‘Sometimes, they’re the only evidence we have to prove something once existed.’
‘Do you really think that’s true?’ I said.
Simon straightened up and folded his arms. ‘Geographical Scientist magazine thinks it’s true.’
‘But what about you, Simon? What do you think? What’s your own opinion?’
Simon swallowed a little air to help him digest the question. ‘I don’t rightly know,’ he said after a while. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’
‘Well, why don’t you think about it now?’ Jack asked.
Simon shifted his weight and took a large breath. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to be able to see something for it to be significant.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Before this fossil was found’ – he had another little peer for good measure – ‘it was still influential, wasn’t it? It still changed the universe in some way. We just don’t know how.’
Jack gestured for him to go on.
‘And everything it influenced,’ Simon said, ‘all those things will change the universe in some way, too. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the impact it made.’
‘I don’t suppose we will,’ I said.
Simon stood back, as though the realisation that such a small thing had such a large consequence meant that he should allow it a little more space in the world.
I picked up the ammonite and held it in the palm of my hand. ‘No matter how long or how short a time you are here, the world is ever so slightly different because you existed. Although I’m not sure how anyone can ever prove it.’
‘Perhaps we don’t have to,’ said Simon. ‘Perhaps just knowing that is enough.’
After Simon and his new viewpoint on life had left the room, the three of us sat in silence around the table.
‘What now?’ I said, because it seemed like no one else was going to speak.
‘Perhaps,’ said Jack, ‘perhaps we should just let Ronnie disappear again.’
‘How can you say such a thing?’ It was the closest Elsie ever got to a shout.
‘That’s not like you, Jack.’ I frowned at him. ‘Where’s your fighting spirit?’
‘All fought out,’ he said, and he tried to smile. ‘The police obviously don’t believe us, Ronnie’s managed to terrify anyone who could identify him, and who’s going to listen to what we’ve got to say anyway?’
‘We can’t just let him win.’ I looked at the ammonite. ‘We can’t just let him alter the world as he pleases.’
‘But how can we stop him?’ Jack stood and held on to the back of a chair. ‘The bus leaves in a couple of hours, Florence. I think I’m going for a lie-down.’
We watched him shuffle out of the dining room, worn down by all the years and all the thinking. Perhaps it was the sea air. It made a body tired somehow, as though the salt pulled away all your energy. I looked at Elsie.
‘So, are you going for a lie-down as well?’ I said.
‘Of course not. You’ve gone and forgotten, haven’t you?’
‘Forgotten what?’
She winked at me. ‘We’ve got to say goodbye to the sea.’
We walked past the stalls selling Whitby fudge and thick sticks of rock, past the shells and the beads, and the rows of postcards, towards the abbey steps, where the shops lay hidden on cobbled streets, waiting to be found.
‘Do you remember,’ said Elsie, ‘we used to spend hours trying to choose what to take home with us?’
‘Nothing much has changed, then.’ I looked at my watch. ‘We have to be back soon, or Miss Ambrose will have a coronary.’
Elsie gazed in the window of a gallery.
‘Perhaps I’ll buy a painting,’ she said, ‘of the harbour. Or perhaps a picture of some beach huts.’
I thought about the skip outside number twelve and the crash of glass against metal. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Why ever not? Who doesn’t love a row of beach huts? They look just like a smile.’
‘Perhaps a tin of biscuits,’ I said. ‘More practical.’
‘Holidays aren’t the time to be practical, Florence. You can save practical for all the other weeks of the year.’
We walked a little further, to a window filled with Whitby jet, smooth and dark, with a reflection that felt almost like a mirror. There were rings and necklaces, bracelets and earrings, all shining back at us from their trays.
‘It’s a beautiful stone, isn’t it?’ said Elsie. ‘Whitby jet.’
I stared into the window. ‘It’s a fossil,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘Well, fossilised wood. Thousands of years’ worth of existence, carved into a shape we can recognise.’
‘How do you know that?’ said Elsie.
‘I read about it,’ I said. ‘In a magazine. The Victorians wore it as part of bereavement. As a remembrance of their loss.’ I pointed to a brooch in the far corner of the display. ‘Although how something so beautiful can be associated with sadness is a little bit beyond me.’
‘Perhaps it helped them to accept the loss, knowing something from so long ago still had a place in the world.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
The brooch watched us through the shop window. It was a perfect circle, flawless and shining and inky black. Surrounding it was a silver rope, which held it forever in a polished frame.
‘Why don’t you treat yourself,’ said Elsie. ‘Something to look back on.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not? You obviously love that brooch.’
‘It’s a gift you’d buy for someone you love, isn’t it? Not something you buy for yourself. Anyway, I don’t wear jewellery.’
‘Perhaps you should start?’ said Elsie, but I had already moved along the street.
‘Shortbread,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy a box of shortbread, and if I don’t get around to eating it, Miss Ambrose can have it for the raffle.’
In the end, we both decided on a box of shortbread, and while Elsie disappeared to the toilets, I listened to the church bells and bought us both an ice cream, and we made it last all the way back to the hotel.
‘There you are.’ Miss Ambrose and her clipboard were waiting on the pavement. ‘I was right on the verge of worrying.’
‘No need to worry about us, Miss Ambrose.’ I beamed at Eric as I climbed on board. ‘We’ve just been saying goodbye to the sea.’
Miss Ambrose started to speak, but she changed her mind and shook her head at Handy Simon instead. Eric started the engine and said, ‘That’s the job, then,’ and we all made our way back to Cherry Tree. Everyone except Mrs Honeyman, of course. We never did see her again. I sometimes worried she’d been sent to Greenbank, but I preferred to think she stayed in the room filled with sunshine and the smell of soap, and the weightlessness of self-forgiving that can only ever be found in time.
‘I don’t understand why I have to go.’
I’d been pacing the room for the last twenty minutes. I’m not usually a pacer; Elsie’s the one who walks out her anxiety. I’m more of a hand-wringer, a fidget, but on this occasion I had decided to pace, and nothing Elsie said or did could make me stop. We’d been back at Cherry Tree less than twenty-four hours, and my pacing had to take into account my suitcase, which still sat in a corner of the room, waiting to be unpacked.
‘I failed, didn’t I?’ I said. ‘I failed my probation period, and now they’re trying to get rid of me.’
‘I’m sure it’s just a precaution,’ Elsie said. ‘They’ll be sending everyone in their turn. It won’t be anything personal.’
I stopped pacing. ‘Then why do I have to go first? Why haven’t they sent for you before me? This is it, Elsie. This is the beginning of my last goodbye.’
‘We’ll go together,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to do it alone. No one will mind if I’m there as well.’
I slowed down. ‘What if I don’t pass the test?’ I stopped altogether. ‘What if they send me to Greenbank?’
‘Of course you’ll pass the test. Just think of it as a chat. Just a doctor asking a lot of ridiculous questions. You’ll run rings around him.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Of course.’ Elsie didn’t look at me as she spoke, but pointed through the window instead. ‘And look how beautiful it is out there. How could anything bad happen on a day like this?’
She was right. It was the kind of October day when the weather forgets who it is, and tiny clouds whisper at the edges of a perfect blue sky. Sunlight warmed all the colours and mopped up yesterday’s rain, and everything was so bright and so happy, it looked as though someone had given God a new set of felt tips.
One of Miss Bissell’s helping hands went in the taxi with us. Her name appeared to be Natasha, although she didn’t introduce herself. Purple tabard. Obsessed with telephone signals. Smelled of chewing gum. I have no idea what the taxi driver’s name was, because he didn’t utter a single word between Cherry Tree and the hospital, preferring instead to hum along with Radio 2 and tap his fingers on the steering wheel. Elsie sat next to me in the back, and I spent the entire journey swallowing and wondering who I’d become.
‘It will be fine. It’s all going to be fine,’ Elsie said every few minutes, as though she were reciting the words to a lullaby. ‘We’ll be out of there in no time, and we’ll go to the League of Friends and have a custard tart.’
I looked at the sky. Somewhere between Cherry Tree carpark and the bypass, it had changed. It’s strange how that happens. You look away for a moment, and when you glance back, everything is different. The rain drew lines across the glass and made the whole world look disappointed.
‘Or an Eccles cake. You like Eccles cakes,’ Elsie said.
‘I’ve fallen out with currants.’ My gaze didn’t leave the heavens. ‘They’re far too complicated.’
No one spoke again until we arrived at the hospital. The taxi driver pulled into the dropping-off zone and we struggled out of the car on to those strange, hatched yellow lines, which were wet with an October downpour.
‘This is it, then,’ I said. ‘I haven’t taken a test since I was at school. I thought I’d finished with being tested.’
‘Don’t think of it as a test, think of it as a conversation,’ Elsie said. ‘A chat.’
Natasha walked behind us, thrusting her mobile telephone towards the rooftops. ‘If I lose you, I’m for the high jump,’ she said.
We walked along painted lines in a corridor. ‘When you get old, it sometimes feels as if your whole life is just one long exam,’ I said.
The waiting room was crowded, yet strangely silent, and each time a door opened everyone turned, hoping it would be a doctor or a nurse, or some reassurance that the queue was moving forward. It was a holding point for many different clinics, and we fought our way past walking frames and pushchairs, and outposts of small children, to find a seat in the corner. Natasha immediately gravitated to a window, where she held her telephone up to the ceiling and frowned.
‘I could really do with a cup of tea. Is there no tea?’ I said. ‘Like there is at the hairdressers?’
There was a machine against the far wall, but it had a sign taped to the front suggesting we all went to A&E.
‘I’ve probably got a Mint Imperial in the bottom of my bag somewhere,’ Elsie said.
I shook my head. ‘I only wanted it to take my mind off things,’ I said. ‘Sometimes that’s what a cup of tea is for.’
I lo
oked at the criss-cross of walking sticks around the waiting room and all the people, drawn in grey and beige, with whispers of white where their hair used to be and shoes too big for their feet. My father always said distraction was the best way to address anxiety, but the magazines all appeared to have been disembowelled and divorced from their staples, so I picked up a leaflet instead.
Living With Dementia, it said.
It was filled with statistics. Handy Simon would have had a field day. See, I remembered his name! It told you how likely you were to get dementia, and how old you might be when you first welcomed it into your life. There were lots of photographs of elderly people with full heads of hair and rosy cheeks, and relatives overflowing with patience and understanding. On the second page, there was a list of symptoms written in bold, and held within a box.
Elsie fought around in the bowels of her handbag for a pair of glasses, but she gave up. ‘What does it say?’
‘Problems with reasoning,’ I said. ‘Although that’s never been one of my strongest suits.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Communication problems,’ I said.
‘You never have any trouble communicating.’
‘Quite the reverse,’ I said.
‘What’s the third thing?’
I looked at the little box. ‘Mood swings.’
Elsie started to laugh, and I laughed along with her. We laughed so much, Natasha was forced to put down her mobile telephone for a moment and ask if we were all right.
‘Perfectly fine, thank you. Do you ever have mood swings, Natasha? Do you find yourself struggling to reason?’ I looked at the mobile telephone. ‘Do you have problems communicating with other human beings?’
Natasha frowned and decamped to the far corner. She was still staring at us over the top of the screen when a nurse appeared from one of the rooms and waved us inside.
‘This is us then,’ I said, and gave a very big sigh.
The room was quite pleasant, considering it had a doctor inside of it. There were flowers on the windowsill, although I strongly suspected they were of the pretend variety, and a display of the same leaflets I’d been reading just a moment before, only they were arranged in a little fan on the coffee table, like after-dinner mints. Instead of hard plastic seats, there were armchairs. There was even a cushion, although I put it straight on the floor, because cushions always play havoc with Elsie’s lumbar region.
Three Things About Elsie Page 27