by Nina Stibbe
And thirdly, You Jolly Fucker, Mr Simmons’ car, had gone—presumed stolen by Matron. No one else had the ignition keys and no one even tried to defend her.
No one knew for sure where she’d gone but everyone doubted it would have been St Mungo’s.
‘Where did she say she was going?’ I asked.
‘St Mungo’s,’ said Eileen.
I telephoned St Mungo’s on the phone, in the hall, without batting an eyelid. It answered after about fifty rings. I told a nice man I was trying to track down a relative (I knew to say relative since the Emma Mills at the Royal incident) and described Matron in great detail. The man at St Mungo’s had no knowledge of a Maria Moran (which was apparently her name, according to the paperwork Sister Saleem had found) and advised me to call the police. They’d had only one new resident in a month and she was from outside the county and definitely not called Moran and not in a nurse’s dress. I took this to be good news but the others reminded me that the Midlands had many such shelters and Matron might have gone to any of them. She had a car, after all.
It should have been a relief to be rid of Matron really—especially as we were trying to make improvements, and her always being so awful—but everyone was terribly upset about it. Paradise Lodge was poorer without her. The patients, who we’d kept in the dark regarding the Owner’s Wife’s departure, knew straight away she was gone. We couldn’t possibly have kept it from them because they missed her being there and felt the loss of her too keenly.
Mr Simmons worried that his chivalrous act over the camera had sparked everything and Lady Briggs felt it was her fault—for dropping the camera and not being sensitive to Matron’s state of mind. Sister Saleem wrung her hands over not making it clear that sacking her didn’t mean she was throwing her out with immediate effect. We all blamed ourselves but no one more than me. I counted a hundred things I could have done—people I could have spoken to about Matron—to get her some help and understanding, instead of colluding with her and half protecting her when I should have turned her in to get the help she needed.
Lady Briggs kept asking where Matron might be living. I told her it seemed she hadn’t gone to St Mungo’s, even though she’d repeatedly said that that was where she was going. Lady Briggs understood that Matron’s unreliability and vulnerability were one and the same thing and asked if I couldn’t help her find more reliable details about Matron. For instance, was her name really Moran? Lady Briggs thought not. She remembered her from years before, and didn’t recall that name. She had a book, somewhere, that Matron had lent her years ago with her name written on the flyleaf. Could I help her find it perhaps, when I had time?
Eileen and I searched Matron’s old room for clues. There was nothing there, not even the Goblin Teasmade.
‘Would you take a Goblin Teasmade to a homeless shelter?’ I asked.
‘Matron would,’ said Eileen.
We got used to Matron not being around but no one liked it. It was like when the Owner’s Wife was suddenly not there—but a hundred times worse. The patients didn’t stop asking about her.
It wasn’t Mike’s fault but I started to hate him. I was fed up with being in love and feeling so on edge all the time. I tried to tell myself I was kicking out at him because I was feeling low about various things. But it wasn’t that—that only happened in an actual relationship.
It was that he started to seem too good-looking. I felt shallow for loving his beauty and felt inferior and not worthy. It was like the time my mother had driven us to Dorset to join a family holiday and it had been an embarrassing misunderstanding and we’d sat in the beach car park having a cheese cob while our mother summoned the strength to drive all the way home again. Even from the car, the beach had seemed too beautiful for us and we hadn’t been welcome and I just longed for the muddy ruts of a Leicestershire field or the messy verges of the motorway. It was all we deserved.
Plus I’d begun to feel furtive and sleazy at my deviousness. My manipulating Miranda into divulging personal things about him, running into the drive just to say hello and look as if I were on the brink of weeping. And my betrayal of Mr Simmons in return for getting back into the ‘O’ Level group—which had been very much under Mike’s influence.
I imagined married life and having to see his face all the time and how its niceness would soon become sickly, like winning by cheating or eating too much pudding. Like when I’d begged for another slice of strudel and cream and Granny Benson had finally agreed and made me eat every last flake until I was sick.
Why did I love him anyway? Probably just because Miranda had paraded him and his love for her. She’d worn his love like a new mohair jumper and we’d all wanted its softness. It was probably nothing to do with his being so good-looking, so good and philosophical.
The planning of the wedding was well under way. We’d booked the registry office and would be having the wedding party at the Paradise Lodge open day. But we still couldn’t decide who to invite.
I never really understood my mother’s friendlessness. She was funny and nice to be around. Still is. She was unshockable—pretty much (not counting overpriced lunch buffets and cruelty)—and very jolly and not too serious and didn’t mind when awful things happened.
But because of a faraway boarding school, an early marriage and move to London and then back and then a long bout of druggy drunkenness and a slide into poverty, she’d ended up quite alone, friend-wise.
After she started cohabiting with Mr Holt and began her rehabilitation, she met Mrs Goodchild across the road. Though Mrs Goodchild was friendly and supportive, I wouldn’t have called her a friend exactly—my mother didn’t like her very much and I don’t suppose Mrs Goodchild liked my mother. But they were thrown together due to virtually being able to see each other from their kitchen windows and having babies around the same time. But then my mother started weeing in the sink and Mrs Goodchild ruined everything by mentioning it.
My mother’s only other friends were Carrie Frost and a woman called Celia whose husband my mother had had sex with in 1972 but Celia hadn’t minded until 1975 when the menopause sent her round the twist due to sleeplessness and hormone headaches and her husband had come clean about some affairs on his deathbed.
My mother had been at the husband’s funeral and had spoken to Celia and had said how selfish of him, coming clean like that just to get into Heaven, but Celia wanted the drama and told her to fuck off.
My mother’s lack of good friends reminded me that I’d let my best friend Melody slip away. Not because she’d seen me weeing in the kitchen sink or anything serious, but because I’d pretty much stopped going to school. Melody Longlady, Miranda’s sister, had been the prettier twin all through childhood but things had switched for the twins during puberty (as previously mentioned) plus Melody hadn’t taken care of her skin and drank insufficiently diluted cordials. Melody had had a miserable year coming to terms with being judged for not being pretty after a lifetime of being admired. Going punk hadn’t occurred to Melody until one day she went babysitting with another friend and the friend suggested it (punk) and gave her a glass of orange liqueur and by the time the people came home (for whom they were babysitting) Melody had pierced her own ear and had literally become a punk.
All of a sudden she looked fabulous and exciting, like something in a magazine. And Miranda, her non-punk twin, in gipsy skirt and fluffy bolero, looked nothing next to Melody in a plastic mini-dress.
During Silver Jubilee week, everyone got cross with Melody about her punk attitude but Melody stuck up for herself.
‘I’m not really saying I hate the Queen. I’m glad she’s made it to twenty-five years. I just don’t suit any other fashion and it’s who I am for the time being,’ she said, cleverly keeping her options open.
Melody’s punkishness really brought out the best in her—for instance, in the inevitable arguments with her parents, she called her mother a ‘waste of space’. A phrase I’d never heard before, but was so accurate.
&nbs
p; In the run-up to the open day wedding day I’d felt slightly nervous about meeting Melody now she was a full punk and so comfortable with it. I had the same ridiculous preconceptions as other people and thought it conceivable she might beat me up for not being a punk. That was because the press always tried to show punks in a bad light doing awful stuff and saying upsetting things. But the truth was they were just people, like Melody, who happened to like wearing a bin liner and hanging around in a group with others who hated the mainstream.
I missed Melody and our friendship but wondered if I could be fully friends with her now she’d committed so strongly to punkhood. I worried that she might dredge up something from our past and want to get even with me—I’d heard punks bore grudges. Like the time I wouldn’t help her with her European studies project even though I knew a hell of a lot about Denmark and Holland and the Low Countries. And in the end she wrote a load of nonsense about Belgium and Belgian artists being only interested in patterns and not realism. But she got a B for it because of her good vocabulary and knowledge of chocolate.
29. The Joy of Sex
The building work began. All staff had annoying extra jobs so that the owner didn’t have to pay the builders to do things we could do. Having the builders around was most inconvenient. For instance, no cars could park in the courtyard because the paving stones were being levelled and fixed on the drive. And the builders constantly needed cups of coffee and cigarettes and made the nurses feel uncomfortable. None of us wanted to go anywhere on our own because of the feeling of embarrassment when they said things and laughed.
One day I was given the job of moving the contents of the larder into the morgue, along the corridor—it had to be done that day as the dry-lining of the larder was due to start the next morning. I began but, because the builders were in and out and couldn’t help but shout things at me (‘Nurse, Nurse, prick my boil’ etc.), I decided I’d do it after 5 p.m. when they’d gone home.
Then at 5 p.m. we were all called to the kitchen to have pancakes with lemon juice and sugar to celebrate Eileen’s birthday. Sister Saleem gave her an eyelash- and brow-tinting kit and someone gave her Tweed by Lenthéric, which she was spraying around. Carla B gave her a strawberry pendant because she was known to love strawberries and I gave her a tiny tin of La Sirena anchovies with a beautiful mermaid illustration and foreign writing that I’d found in the larder. I knew it was worth having because my mother had bought an identical tin from Casa Iberica in Leicester and displayed it like an ornament even though it only cost 20p. Mike Yu was there—peeling vegetables and doing odd jobs to prepare for the builders—and he was embarrassed not to have a gift for Eileen.
‘You do so much for us, Mike, it’s more important than any gift.’
After the pancakes most of us—though not Mike or the owner—went to the Piglet Inn for vodka and gin drinks. As we left, I heard Mike quietly ask Miranda what time she’d be back and should he wait for her—to do some kung fu practice.
Her response, ‘For the last time, Mike, I’m not fucking doing it,’ made Mike look so sad.
I never liked going into the pub. I was always questioned by the landlord about my age and had to swear on my mother’s deathbed, out loud, in front of all the blokes at the bar, that I was eighteen, and then he’d burst out laughing. I hated the pressure to have vodka and lime and how, even though I sipped it really slowly, it made me red in the face and unable to think straight.
A few of Eileen’s old friends turned up, including Nurse Gwen. Feeling out of my depth, I turned and chatted to Miranda even though I hated her for being so mean to Mike.
‘How’s the kung fu demo coming along?’ I asked.
‘I’m not doing it. I’m sick of Mike,’ said Miranda, taking a swig of her vodka, ‘and all that Chinese stuff.’
I shrugged.
‘He’ll have to find someone else,’ she said.
‘Have you dropped him?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, probably, I don’t know, I’m torn between him and Smig,’ she admitted. She scrabbled about in her bag, ‘Look, I’ve made a pros and cons list, because honestly, Lizzie, I just don’t know which way to jump.’
Even though I was mildly drunk, Big Smig came out yards ahead of Mike on the pros and cons front. Mike only having his future foil container business and a possible life in America going for him (Miranda, like me, was wary of his strong family bond). Big Smig had, first and foremost, a love of sexual intercourse and all types of sex, a sense of adventure, humour, an interest in reggae music, motorbikes, skiing and amateur dramatics, plus a wealthy family (with weak family bonds) and an unusually attractive penis.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Miranda whined.
Then, with perfect timing, Big Smig appeared at the door with his helmet on and she went off with him.
I left the pub quickly before anyone could engage me in conversation. And I went back to finish clearing the larder—running, so that I wouldn’t miss Mike Yu. I’d decided that if Mike was still there, I’d offer to stand in and do the kung fu dance instead of Miranda. I had to dash, so as not to miss him and then change my mind. The drive was out of action so it was difficult to know whether or not he was there, but scanning the street outside Paradise Lodge, I couldn’t see his car.
I shuffled into the back corridor and gazed into the larder at all the giant tins and jars I had to move. I wasn’t in the mood to finish the job but I had to—the builders would arrive at eight in the morning. Now I’d had the vodka, the job seemed almost insurmountable. I wandered out to the kitchen and asked the night nurse if she’d seen Mike. And if not, to see if she might be able to give me a hand. And if not, if Mr Simmons might be around.
Mike had been around, she said, but she hadn’t seen him for a while. Mr Simmons was watching a drama and the night nurse was doing her nails. I went back to the larder and moved a few 10lb tins of apricot jam and some marrowfat peas into the morgue. I put the sweet things (tinned fruit, grapefruit segments, fruit pie fillers and jams) along one wall. And savoury things (tinned stew and mince to the left, and then soups) along another, and the things in-between (like flour and rice) in the corner.
If Mike was still here, waiting for Miranda, he’d soon give up and leave and when he left, he’d have to walk past the morgue door. I stopped caring about doing a good job and just waited to see Mike, and the more he didn’t walk past, the more I wanted him to, and the more I daren’t turn away from the corridor. I kept nipping to the kitchen to see if he was there, but he never was.
After a while, I heard ‘Kung Fu Fighting’—the track for Mike and Miranda’s story-dance—faintly playing, drifting down the backstairs. When it finished, it started again. It made me feel really sad for Mike. He must be upstairs in the nurses’ quarters, rehearsing on his own, waiting for Miranda to turn up, not realizing she’d sped off on the back of Big Smig’s Kawasaki Z1B 900 and wouldn’t be seen again until the next morning, with today’s eyeliner still on.
Mike’s ordinary, everyday expressions made me want to sob; his hopes and dreams, his tenderness towards his grandfather made me want to sob; his hair made me want to sob. He had the nicest hair I’d ever seen on a man. It was straight but had a spring in it that meant it didn’t flop down over his forehead but stood away and danced around his face in clean wisps. And strands of it reached down his neck. It was cut into a sort of kung fu feather cut, but because he had such good face bones it looked wonderful. His eyes were black and his lips were like an elongated heart. He was a work of art that you could just look at and look at. He was like a teenager’s drawing of a boy. He was actually rather like David Cassidy—a calm, smiling, Chinese David Cassidy who’d never pose in a cowboy outfit or with his shirt off.
And sitting there, on a tin of marmalade, in the morgue thinking about Mike’s unusual hair—knowing that Miranda wasn’t going to do the dance with him at the open day because she was going to do a Barry Sheene demo in hot pants with Big Smig—I did actually sob.
I went to the
kitchen to blow my nose on some kitchen paper and make myself a cup of coffee. The night nurse was fiddling with the breakfast trays. I asked her if Miranda had come in. ‘No,’ she said, ‘the day nurses are all at the pub.’
I went to the sluice and checked my face. I looked perfectly normal and actually the drunken pinkness was a good look on me and I seemed on the brink of weeping. I crept into Ward 2 and saw Lady Briggs sitting up in bed looking at her papers with a torch.
‘Miranda has gone off with another boy,’ I told her, in a whisper.
‘I think you told me this already,’ said Lady Briggs.
‘Yes, but she has actually dropped him now,’ I said.
‘Is this about the Chinese horoscopes again, dear?’
‘Not really, well, yes, sort of.’
‘I suppose it was inevitable,’ said Lady Briggs, ‘and good for you, since you like him, hmm?’
‘I’m going to offer to do the dance with him,’ I said.
‘The what, dear?’
‘The kung fu dance,’ I said, ‘at the open day.’
‘Oh, yes, I see,’ she said.
‘What do you think?’ I asked.
‘He won’t be surprised,’ she said, smiling and taking my hand, ‘I’ve told him all about you, how much you care about him and how well suited you are, and he was thrilled.’
And though her words were ridiculous, they gave me a real boost.
‘Oh, you know Mike, do you?’ I laughed.
‘We’ve spoken on the telephone,’ she said.
‘Well, thanks,’ I said, ‘wish me luck.’
I knew the kung fu dance was a love story involving a girl and a boy and a flock of magpies. And I knew the soundtrack off by heart. I was going to step in and I was going up to tell Mike, now.