The doctor smiled at us. He sat in the armchair opposite, with a pile of notes and a stethoscope swaying from his shirt.
‘Are they listening to my heart as well?’ I said.
‘I don’t think so.’ Elsie frowned at the stethoscope. ‘I think it’s just to make sure everyone knows who they’re supposed to be.’
The doctor smiled again and asked for our details, and I answered for both of us, because Elsie said I needed the practice.
‘And you?’ I said.
The doctor stared at us.
‘Hello My Name Is?’ I said. ‘I’ve watched Holby City, I know the rules.’
His name was Dr Andrews, and when he’d washed his hands and rolled his sleeves above his elbows, he told us he was going to ask a series of questions.
‘Is there a time limit?’ I said. ‘For us to answer?’
Dr Andrews glanced at the clock above our heads and said that it was quite a busy clinic.
‘The mini mental-state examination doesn’t usually take long,’ he said.
‘Mini?’ I frowned at him.
He told us there were thirty questions, which didn’t sound very mini to me. The world of medicine appears to be littered with understatements – small scratch, slight discomfort, minor abrasion. I offered him a selection of examples I’d experienced, although I didn’t venture into my bowels, or we’d have been there all day.
‘Shall we begin?’ said Dr Andrews, and Elsie and I sat up a little straighter.
It’s strange how easily you can become flustered when someone is watching you. If they were casual questions, asked at a bus stop or in a supermarket queue, I’m sure the answers would come to us easily, but when Dr Andrews is staring down at you with his pen waiting over a piece of paper, you begin to doubt even your own name. He started out by asking the day of the week. Of course, I knew it was Tuesday, but going to Whitby threw me off and I plumped for Thursday before either of us had even really thought about it. Elsie said she was going to choose Tuesday, but she waited for me to answer first, because she wanted to know what I’d say. We were so confused by the days of the week, by the time he got to the month and the year, we just blurted out the first thing we thought of. Of course it wasn’t 1997. 1997 was the year Diana died. I told Dr Andrews, and asked if we could have an extra point for knowing it, but he shook his head.
‘There isn’t a box for the Princess of Wales,’ he said.
Neither of us could remember the name of the hospital, either. It’s not something you notice, is it? And Natasha pressed the button in the lift, so how could we know what floor we were on? I told him Natasha would fill him in, and should I go and get her, but Dr Andrews just moved on to the next question.
‘Take seven away from a hundred,’ he said. ‘And keep taking seven away, until I tell you to stop.’
I looked at his clipboard across the coffee table.
‘You have the answers.’ I pointed. ‘Printed at the side.’
Dr Andrews curled his arm around the sheet of paper, like a child in a classroom. ‘You shouldn’t worry about what I know,’ he said.
‘But of course I should worry about what you know. You’re the person deciding which one of us is going to be sent to Greenbank.’ I craned my neck. ‘Spell WORLD backwards. D-L-R—’
Dr Andrews sprang from his seat like a jack-in-a-box and conducted the rest of the test from the far corner of the room, next to the window. Elsie struggled to hear what he was saying, because it’s her bad side, and I had to repeat everything to make sure she understood. The last thing he did was hold up a piece of paper. It said, Close Your Eyes on it.
‘Why would we want to do that?’ I said.
‘Because I’m asking you to.’ Dr Andrews held the instructions a little closer.
‘Is it a surprise?’ I said.
I heard Dr Andrews sigh. ‘Do you not usually do as someone asks?’
I frowned. ‘Not if I can help it.’
When we’d finished the test, we watched Dr Andrews fill out an entire side of A4. We buttoned ourselves into our coats and I turned to him and asked what we’d got.
He said he would be forwarding on the results to Cherry Tree in due course. He still didn’t look up. Not even when I said, ‘They’re our scores, though, aren’t they? Shouldn’t someone tell us first?’
The nurse herded us back into the care of Natasha and her mobile telephone, and we were marched through the hospital – past the League of Friends – and shuffled on to the back seat of a taxi. I looked out of the window.
‘I didn’t really enjoy that little chat very much, Elsie,’ I said.
When the taxi pulled in at Cherry Tree, it struggled to do a three-point turn, because there was a police car sitting right in the middle of the car park.
Natasha looked up from her mobile telephone for the first time in twenty minutes and stared. It’s strange how we always stare at emergency vehicles. Whenever there’s a siren, everyone appears at their windows to watch it whip past, even though no one has the first clue where it might be going. Perhaps it’s reassuring to hear the sound of an alarm disappear into the distance and away from our own lives. Although the police car at Cherry Tree was silent, it was parked at a peculiar angle, in the way only police cars seem to be able to get away with.
Of course, Elsie and I headed straight for the residents’ lounge, to watch through the glass. Jack had already taken up his position on the sofa, and nodded at us when we walked in.
‘Something’s afoot,’ he said. ‘Although no one is saying what.’
There were two policemen in Miss Ambrose’s office, and their uniforms seemed to take up all the space. Miss Ambrose was crowded into the corner, squeezed up against her desk, watching them lift everything out of the filing cabinets.
‘Fraud, do you think?’ Jack said. ‘Has someone been cooking the books?’
‘Miss Ambrose doesn’t look the type, does she?’ I said. ‘She buys all her clothes from Marks & Spencer.’
Jack wandered over to the noticeboard and lingered by the door.
‘Does shopping at Marks & Spencer offer some kind of indemnity?’ Elsie said. ‘Because if that’s the case, half of Cherry Tree must be sainted.’
Jack wandered back. ‘Can’t hear a bloody word,’ he said.
We sat in a row on the sofa. After a few minutes, Handy Simon appeared through the double doors with a clipboard, but as soon as he saw the policemen, he took three steps backwards and disappeared again.
‘Do you think they’re after the handyman?’ I said. ‘It’s usually the handyman, isn’t it? Or someone in the background, someone you’ve not noticed very much.’
Elsie stared at me. ‘Life isn’t an episode of Columbo.’
‘Sometimes it is,’ I said.
The policemen left ten minutes later, with a selection of envelopes and their hats back on. Miss Ambrose watched us for a while through the chequered glass. There was a moment when I thought I saw her smile, but perhaps I was mistaken. When she finally left the office, Jack opened his eyes and shouted, ‘What was all that about, then?’ and Miss Ambrose said, ‘You tell me and we’ll both know,’ which confused me for a good fifteen minutes.
‘At least it’s taken our minds off the hospital,’ I said.
Jack turned from watching Miss Ambrose disappear along the corridor. ‘And how did that go?’
‘You can only do your best,’ I said. ‘Can’t you?’
Jack looked at me, and his eyes held my words for a moment. ‘You look after yourself, Florence, won’t you? We all need help from time to time. All you have to do is reach out and ask for it.’
‘I don’t think I deserve any,’ I said.
‘Of course you do. Everyone does. What on earth makes you say that?’
The words came out before I had a chance to go through them first.
‘I was so sure it was Ronnie who drowned, not Gabriel Price. I would have put my life on it.’
I watched him hesitate. ‘How can you be so
certain, Flo?’ he said.
I looked him straight in the eye. ‘Because I was the one who pushed him in.’
10.13 p.m.
I remembered in Whitby, I think, but I’d put it in one of the drawers in my mind and tried not to think about it too much.
After Beryl died, neither of us went to the dance again. We couldn’t face it. The night Ronnie drowned, I poked my head around the door of the town hall, but the colours were too bright and the music was too loud, and the whole thing seemed almost obscene. I was just about to leave when I spotted Ronnie. Standing by the bar. Talking to some girl I’d never seen before. Whispering in her ear, a fraction too close, a moment too long. And he was laughing. He was laughing as though the whole board had been wiped clean and he could start all over again.
I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember turning around or closing the door, or finding my way down the steps. The next time I even knew where I might be, I was marching into Elsie’s kitchen, looking for someone to join in with my anger.
The house was silent. Everyone was in bed. I paced around the empty room for a few minutes, and then I stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. You could usually hear Elsie’s mother walking around, no matter what time of the night it was, but even she was still. I remember the clock ticking in the hall and the silent floorboards, and I remember thinking the whole house must have found its sleep. Then I heard it. The crying. At first I thought it was a child somewhere, but it was too complicated for a child and it wasn’t crying that asked for anything. It didn’t even want to be heard. And then it hit me. It was Elsie.
I wanted to go to her. I even put my foot on the first step. Something stopped me, though; something held me back. It wasn’t because it was late, or because it felt awkward to find someone else crying. It was Elsie, and nothing had ever felt awkward with Elsie. It was because I knew that whatever I said, my words would never be able to make a difference. No matter how much I cared for her, and no matter how much I wanted to, I would never be able to help her through it. And so the thing that stopped me, really stopped me, from going to her that night, was the fact that it meant facing up to my own inadequacy.
I was shaking when I got back into the kitchen. I’m not sure if it was anger or frustration, or a cold November night, but I can remember poking at the fire and looking straight into the flames until it made my eyes smart. I must have decided right then, as I watched the coal burn, that I needed to do something. If I couldn’t find the right words, perhaps I could fill all the spaces up between them, and if no one else was going to face up to Ronnie Butler, then perhaps it was down to me.
I left Elsie’s house full of breath. I slammed the kitchen door behind me, and the sound seemed to fill the whole street. But I didn’t turn around. Instead, I headed straight back to the town hall. Of course, everyone had left by that time. Through the windows the evening lay abandoned. The empty stage and a wooden floor littered with streamers, and the pattern of glasses on silent tables. There were no people. They had all disappeared back into the warmth of a kitchen or the softness of a bed. Even the streets were empty. But I still searched. I knew Ronnie was out there somewhere, and I couldn’t face Elsie until I’d found him.
I don’t know how long I walked for. An hour. Perhaps more. I checked all the pubs, because I knew the musicians often found themselves in back rooms, drawing out their evening behind a locked door, and I wondered if Ronnie might have talked his way in there. I walked all the way to his flat, on the other side of the river, but the windows were still and dark. I’d done two circuits of the town, and I was just about to start a third, when I spotted him. At the top of the road, almost at the place I had started to look an hour before. He stumbled on the pavement, and leaned into a wall to steady himself.
I had no idea where he’d been. Perhaps he’d found a conversation in a bar that suited him, or a woman who didn’t look too closely, or maybe he’d just wandered the streets, as I’d done, trying to find a path home. I took a breath to shout, but my voice stayed in my throat. I’m not sure if I was afraid, or it might have been because I’d searched for him for so long, I just wanted to enjoy the satisfaction of finding him at last. He moved up the street, weaving a path between lampposts and fences, and I followed, at a distance, wishing my feet weren’t so loud, and that the breath wouldn’t cloud from my mouth. Ronnie didn’t turn. He was too busy concentrating, and so I edged a little closer, watching from the shadows of the street.
The river slices through the town, cutting a path between the old and the new. The alms-houses and workmen’s cottages on one side, where Elsie and I lived, which peered over the curve of a bridge to the factories and flats, and guest houses on the other. Ronnie lived on the new side. He lived where the streets were wider and the people were unfamiliar. Strangers, drifting through a town and never pausing long enough to be recognised. He could have taken the bridge. He could have spent a little longer getting home, but instead, he decided to follow the river. He made a choice, but I hesitated. The water was fast and wide. It raced through the town, pulled by the tides in the estuary, and my father had always made me promise never to walk there in the dark. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said. ‘Too many opportunities to slip.’ But this was different. This was something I had to do, because I couldn’t lose Ronnie now. Not when it had taken me so long to find him.
The moon was fat and settled in the sky, but every so often, tangles of black traced across its surface, and I lost the figure in front of me. He was a sketch in the distance. A slight movement against the black. I tried to be sure of my feet, to trail my hand through the weeds and grass on my left, but all I could hear was the river, waiting for me to fall. And so I did what I’d always done when I was nervous, even as a child. I counted. I started by counting my breaths, but they were too fast, and I couldn’t find one from another, so I counted my steps instead. I tried to match them to Ronnie’s. Listening for his boots in the distance. The only problem was, I was so busy counting, I didn’t notice he’d slowed down, and before I knew it, he was so close, I could almost touch him. I could smell the beer and the leather of his boots, and the sound of his breathing seemed to fill my whole head. He was leaning forward, his hands on his legs, vomiting on to the riverbank.
When he’d finished, he stood and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat. He was off guard. Disorientated. Light-headed perhaps. It was right at that moment, just as he lifted his head, that I pushed him. It’s strange, because there are some things you do in life, and they don’t seem to have any thought fastened to them at all. It was only at that moment, I decided to do it. I only followed Ronnie to give him a piece of my mind, to tell him exactly what I thought of him, but as I stood on the riverbank, it felt as though pushing him in was all I was ever meant to do. There are some moments in life that just seem to happen. The falling was slow at first, like a plate finding the edge of a table or a child beginning to walk. I could have reached out to him then, in the darkness. I could have stopped it, but there was an inevitability. A certainty. The feeling that this was all meant to happen, and to try to stop it would have been pointless. I whispered. I whispered to him, as he fell. ‘Don’t think I’m going to help you.’ And then I shouted it. I shouted it with all the breath I could find in my lungs.
‘Don’t think I’m going to help you!’
I heard him. I heard him cry out as he hit the water, and I heard the river open its arms. It was the silence, though, the silence after he’d disappeared that was the loudest. I waited in the space where he had stood only a moment before, and I listened. I stood there for a few minutes, being sure, and then I ran. I ran along the side of the water and back to the bridge, and however I managed it without falling in myself, I’ll never know. Luck. God. Destiny. All of the things we thank when we have nowhere else to put our gratitude. When I reached the road, I held on to the walls of the bridge, and wondered if I would ever be able to find my breath again. The town felt as if it had been waiting for me to return from wh
erever I had just been. I could even hear people in the distance. Laughter and goodbyes, and conversation. Someone from the dance, perhaps. Someone who hadn’t just stood on a riverbank and watched a man drown.
I could have found the voices. I could have shouted for help. I could have hammered on the first door I came to. I could have done any of these things, but I chose not to. I’ve spent the last sixty years trying to find the path I took to arrive at that choice, and I don’t suppose, lying here in the dark, I will ever find it now. But it has never stopped me from looking. It has never stopped me from remembering the person I thought I was, and trying to bring her back again.
FLORENCE
They didn’t say anything as I was telling the story. Jack just closed his eyes, as though he needed everything else to go away, so he could concentrate on the words.
‘I was so sure it was Ronnie,’ I said.
Jack reached out. His hand was knotted with age. ‘We all act in the heat of the moment,’ he said. ‘No one is blameless.’
‘I took someone’s life,’ I said. ‘I killed Gabriel Price.’
‘But you thought it was Ronnie.’ Elsie looked across at me.
‘It doesn’t make it any better, though, does it? That it wasn’t the life I meant to take?’
Jack still rested his hand on mine. ‘It could happen to any one of us, Florence, given a set of circumstances.’
‘But no one deserves to die, do they?’ I said.
‘Did you mean to kill him?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course I didn’t. I just wanted to hurt him, like he’d hurt Elsie.’ I looked over at her. ‘Like he’d hurt all of us.’
‘Then there is your answer,’ he said.
‘You’ve got to find forgiveness, Florence,’ said Elsie. ‘You find it so easily for other people, why do you struggle so much to find it for yourself?’
Three Things About Elsie Page 28