by Alison Moore
She folded the shards inside a few sheets of newspaper and placed them in the bin. Her tea would never taste the same again.
She put down food for the cat and the dog. ‘What happened to my mug?’ she asked them. ‘Was that you? Did you knock it off the side?’ But they were busy eating.
Or perhaps there had been the tiniest earthquake, which she, sitting with her drink in the pub or with her fish supper, had not noticed, but which had sent her favourite mug tumbling to the floor.
She went to the kitchen doorway and called up the stairs, ‘Or was it you?’ There was no answer.
The dog had finished eating and was looking at Jessie. The cat finished eating as well; it licked its lips and looked at the wall.
Jessie sat down, wondering if she wanted another drink, or if she had already had quite enough. She had only had two glasses of red wine at The Bourtree, and she’d had the fish and chips to soak it up, but she was not sure that another drink would be a good idea. She had noticed that red wine was getting stronger. It used to be something like eleven or twelve per cent but it had been slowly creeping up and now it was often fourteen per cent or more, and the glasses were larger than they used to be. She had a cup of tea instead, in a mug that she could take or leave, and she hoped that the caffeine would not be enough to interfere with her sleep.
She got into bed with her book, in which Lawrence and Frieda were living on the outskirts of England, holed up in Cornwall for the duration of the war. (Jessie thought of Eleanor growing cold in her den at the end of the garden.) The authorities watched them suspiciously; they saw the German-born Frieda up on the cliffs, telegraphing messages – so the English supposed – to the other side, to the Germans in their submarines, when it was only her white scarf flapping in the wind, her clean laundry blowing on the line. Jessie thought of the washing she herself would peg out in the morning and imagined someone thinking that the arrangement of her pillowcases might be some kind of semaphore, might mean something more than it did. The misunderstanding was almost comical, but then the Lawrences’ cottage was raided and they were told to leave.
Jessie closed the book, turned off the lamp and tried to sleep, while the wind muttered at the window and the trees shook off the last of their leaves.
1985
After eating their sandwiches in the museum cafe – although Eleanor barely touched hers, sucking instead on her can of cola, while Jessie treated herself to a bottle of beer – they visited the toilets, following the signs with the gingerbread people on them. ‘And then we’ll go to the gift shop,’ said Jessie.
Eleanor wanted to go into a cubicle on her own. There were three cubicles, and Eleanor chose the middle one.
‘Will you be all right?’ asked Jessie. ‘Can you manage on your own?’
‘Yes,’ said Eleanor, closing and locking the door.
Jessie went into one of the neighbouring cubicles.
Through the cubicle wall, Eleanor said, ‘Why does the door look like a fish finger?’ It sounded like a joke: I say, I say, I say, why is a door like a fish finger? But it was not a joke; it was a serious question.
‘Do you mean the cubicle door?’ asked Jessie.
‘Yes,’ said Eleanor.
Jessie looked at it. It was orange. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose it’s because of its colour, and its shape.’
Eleanor did not reply.
‘Eleanor?’
‘Yes?’
‘I suppose it looks like a fish finger because it’s the same colour and shape as a fish finger.’
‘But why?’ said Eleanor. ‘Why did they make the door look like a fish finger?’
‘I expect it’s just a coincidence,’ said Jessie. She heard the flush of a toilet.
‘What?’ said Eleanor.
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to look like a fish finger,’ said Jessie. She heard the unlocking of a cubicle door. ‘Is that you, Eleanor? Have you finished? Stay outside, Eleanor. Stay right by the door.’
When Jessie, adjusting her clothes, came out of her cubicle, she looked around for Eleanor and saw that the door of the cubicle that Eleanor had gone into was still closed. ‘Are you still in there, Eleanor?’ called Jessie. A woman was washing her hands but there was a free sink. Jessie stood next to the woman and turned on the tap. She could hear Eleanor singing quietly to herself inside the cubicle. The woman left and Jessie waited for Eleanor to come out. ‘Are you all right, Eleanor?’ she asked. She heard the movement of the toilet roll inside the metal holder. She heard the flush.
When the cubicle door opened, it took Jessie a moment to understand that the girl coming out of the cubicle was not Eleanor. Now all the cubicles were empty, and the only people in the room were Jessie and this strange girl.
Drying her hands on her clothes, Jessie went to the door. She was ready to tell Eleanor off, to say to her, ‘I told you to wait by the door,’ but, she thought, if Eleanor was waiting just outside the door – on the wrong side but still right by the door – then technically she had done as she was told.
But she was not there.
Jessie walked back down the corridor, into the body of the museum, looking behind the pillars and in the spaces where Eleanor liked to hide. She went to the gift shop; she walked all around it but could not see Eleanor anywhere. She went to the cash desk, where the lady on the till was making small talk with a customer, and while Jessie waited she kept looking around for Eleanor. The till had an LED display that said:
G
O
O
D
B
Y
E
H
O
P
E
Jessie watched as the letters shifted slowly to the left, until it read:
H
O
P
E
T
O
S
E
E
and then:
S
E
E
Y
O
U
A
G
A
I
N
When Jessie reached the till, she asked the cashier if she had seen a little girl, five years old, on her own, looking lost, but the lady said that she had not; she said she was sorry.
Intercourse
I have been inland for a long time, but now I am nearing water. I have left a trail of things behind me: a pair of shoes that were half a size too small and rubbed; socks that were going thin, going through; a cardigan missing buttons, although it’s cold now, here. But I have what I need to complete my journey, and will be crossing soon.
Jessie dreamed that she was by the river; she was kissing Brendan, but in the dream he was still seventeen while she was the age she was now, which was nearly fifty. She woke up feeling ashamed, with the taste of battered cod in her mouth.
It was Saturday morning, and she found herself thinking of Amy, whose father had left the house one morning as if h
e were going to work but who did not come home at teatime nor for years. Then, one weekend, Amy came down to breakfast and found her father sitting at the kitchen table, and her mother said, ‘Your father’s home,’ as if he had just finished a really long shift or as if he had been out to fetch a pint of milk but from a shop on the other side of the world.
‘Now I have to hear them,’ Amy had told Jessie, ‘through the wall.’
‘Hear them doing what?’ asked Jessie.
‘You know,’ said Amy. ‘Through the bedroom wall.’
‘Oh,’ said Jessie.
She had seen them as well; she described something monstrous in the dark of her parents’ bedroom, the incomprehensible shape of them against the wall, a single shape that was darker than the rest of the room, like a creature with two heads and a terrible tangle of limbs, moaning and groaning. ‘I’m never going in there again,’ said Amy.
Jessie had never been aware of her own parents doing any such thing. Her dad had his thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, and her mother had her craft projects. There was nothing to hear through the partition wall in the dead of night.
‘You’re glad your dad’s come home though, aren’t you?’ asked Jessie.
‘Yes,’ said Amy. ‘I just don’t want that going on. They’re far too old.’
The same age I am now, thought Jessie. She tried to think how old she and Amy would have been then, but all she was sure about was that it must have been before the summer of 1985, before Jessie started seeing Brendan, after which Amy vanished: whenever Jessie went to Amy’s house, Amy was out, or so said her mother, standing in the kitchen doorway, guarding the threshold, like Anubis, thought Jessie who felt herself judged and deemed unworthy; Jessie’s heart, if weighed, would be found to be heavy. Jessie was not invited in, and after a few weeks Amy had gone away anyway, to university, while Jessie had deferred her own place.
The last time Jessie knocked on Amy’s door, her mother said Amy was on a gap year abroad, and she made it clear that Jessie was not to come to the door again; she was not welcome. ‘I think,’ said Jessie, ‘Amy’s got one of my singles. Would it be possible to get it back?’ But Amy’s mother, saying, ‘Goodbye, Jessie,’ closed the door. It was ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Kate Bush, and Jessie never did get it back.
Perhaps Amy would have been more forgiving if Jessie had not continued seeing Brendan, if she had not moved in with him, married him, had a child with him. It was more than a little salt rubbed into the wound.
Jessie had looked Amy up on Facebook, but had not tried to make contact with her. She had looked Paul up as well but he was not on there, and she already knew that she would not find Will there. Alasdair from next door was on there but he was not active; all his posts were old.
Jessie’s mind was still on Amy when she heard someone knocking on the door. She pictured her childhood friend standing on the doorstep in the winter sunshine, as if Jessie had brought her there just by thinking about her. But it would not be Amy, who had not spoken to Jessie for decades now, to whom Jessie continued to send Christmas cards – care of Amy’s parents who still lived in the same house, always writing her own address on the back of the envelope – but who did not reciprocate.
It would not be Paul, and it would not be Will coming home – he had a key and would not need to knock.
Thinking then of Robert, she put a hand up to her hair, which was still wild, not yet brushed let alone straightened. She had not washed. She had not even looked at her face; she might have sleep in her eyes and yesterday’s eyeliner adding to the dark circles underneath them. Whoever it was knocked again, and Jessie went downstairs in her dressing gown. She opened the door and felt a mixture of relief and disappointment when she saw that it was not Robert after all.
‘Come in,’ she said to Isla. Jessie had not yet had her first cup of tea of the day, and whether or not she had sleep in her eyes, she did still have sleep in her head – a fuzziness, a softness, and the remnants of her dream, which she began describing to Isla: ‘. . . kissing him by the river,’ said Jessie; ‘he was only seventeen.’ Isla remained in the doorway, with the door open and one hand still on the door handle. When Jessie stopped talking, Isla said, ‘I was wondering if you have an egg. Alasdair wants one for his breakfast and I’ve none in.’ Jessie went to her fridge, found an egg and gave it to Isla; she tried to give her a couple but Isla would only take the one. She closed the door behind her.
Jessie felt the unseemliness of what she had said hanging in the air, as if, by describing her dream, she had opened some door that ought to have been kept shut; she had shown her neighbour something that ought not to be seen.
She went back upstairs and took a long shower, and then set about making a large fruit salad for her breakfast. She always felt that if she had her five-a-day first thing in the morning, she was less likely, in the rest of the day, to go too far wrong.
She sat down with her fruit salad, and wondered if she ought to buy a blender and make herself smoothies, the kind that could cleanse and detox.
She had said the word ‘walk’ to the dog, which it understood, and she had even taken its lead off the hook and had put some dog treats into her pocket – this was the happiest the dog would look all day – when there was another knock at the door. This time Jessie was expecting to see Isla standing there; she thought she could apologise to her for mentioning the dream which Jessie thought Isla might have found distasteful. But when Jessie opened the door, she was greeted by the postman holding post that would not go through her letter box: there was something for Will – for whom post kept arriving, a pile of it accumulating, unopened, on the kitchen counter – and a parcel for her. There were also a few envelopes, amongst which she looked for a postcard that was not there.
Inside her parcel, she found another book that wanted translating, sent by a very small publisher with distribution problems and a history of putting out work that did not sell and failed to attract any attention. She doubted that her translation would ever be read, but she rarely turned work down; it was best to keep busy. She leafed through the book and opened the envelopes, all Christmas cards. In return, she wrote some extra cards of her own, for people she hardly knew or no longer saw. There was one that needed to go abroad, and she suspected that she had already missed the last posting date.
She was used to signing for both of them – ‘Jessie and Will’ – and in some cases continued to do so now. Her name on its own looked insubstantial; she wished that she had bought smaller cards, with less white space to fill. She added kisses, put the cards into their envelopes and sealed the flaps.
By the time she took the dog out for its morning walk, it was almost lunchtime.
She was down by the river, throwing stones into the water – the dog running after each one even though they sank and could not be found and brought back to her – when she saw someone coming along the riverbank, a figure reminiscent of the man she had seen on the nudist beach in her childhood; or in fact, she thought, when he was somewhat closer, he looked like D. H. Lawrence, in his three-piece suit, with his red beard. Staring at him, at this figure that seemed to have come out of her childhood, out of the past, she realised that it was Robert. When she thought he was near enough to hear, she said to him, ‘You look like D. H. Lawrence.’
He had seen her, but did not seem to have heard, perhaps because of the noise of his feet on the pebbles, or the noise of the river.
Raising her voice, she said, ‘You look very smart. Are you going somewhere?’
‘I’m just out for a walk,’ he said. ‘A bit of fresh air.’
‘In a three-piece suit?’ asked Jessie.
‘Why not?’ said Robert. ‘My granddad wore a three-piece suit every day of his life. This was one of his; it came to me when he died.’
‘I expect it would please him to know you’re wearing it,’ said Jessie.
‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ sai
d Robert.
Jessie turned to look downstream. She called out, ‘The Four Horsemen!’ Robert, startled, tried to see what she seemed to be seeing. ‘The Four Horsemen!’ she called again, and the dog came running.
‘Oh,’ said Robert. ‘That’s the dog, is it? That’s your dog?’
‘It was my husband’s dog,’ said Jessie. ‘I suppose it is mine now, yes.’ She clipped the lead to the dog’s collar. ‘Are you walking back?’ she asked, although even as she was asking the question, she was starting to walk, and Robert was walking alongside her.
‘And what else do you do?’ he asked. ‘Other than walking your ex’s dog. What are your hobbies?’
‘Hobbies?’ said Jessie, smiling at the question, which was the sort that one might ask of a teenage penpal.
‘Aye,’ said Robert. ‘What does Jessie Noon do in her spare time?’
Jessie Noon, in the third person, as if Jessie Noon were someone else entirely. Jessie mulled this over: ‘What does Jessie Noon do in her spare time?’
‘Is there an echo?’ said Robert.
Jessie was on the verge of saying, ‘An echo?’ but stopped herself. ‘I work a lot,’ she said. ‘I’m self-employed. I work from home. I can work into the night if I want to.’
‘And do you?’ asked Robert.
‘Sometimes,’ said Jessie. ‘Yes, I often do.’
As they passed the Horse, Robert said, ‘And when you’re not working?’
‘I like to cook,’ said Jessie.
‘You don’t look like someone who cooks,’ said Robert. ‘You’re too thin.’
‘Are you hungry?’ asked Jessie.
‘I’m always hungry,’ said Robert.
‘I can make us some lunch,’ said Jessie. They walked together up the street to Jessie’s front door, and Robert followed her inside. Jessie told him not to worry about his shoes, which were clean and would do no harm on her hard floors. Nonetheless, standing just inside the hallway, he unlaced his brogues and placed them neatly together near the door. There was a hole in one of his socks – his big toe was poking through – and she saw him notice it; she saw his embarrassment. She looked away so that he would not know that she had seen it.