Should We Stay or Should We Go

by Lionel Shriver

  It’s terribly rare that public servants are negligent when you want them to be, although they often oblige when you don’t. Two days later, the front door pounded peremptorily, and what would prove the spare key from the Samsons slid into the lock. As Kay hurried to the door, a policeman walked in, and they both jumped.

  The mask provided the officer an unaccountable anonymity, and the surgical gloves conveyed distaste. He was a big fellow, and although Kay had remained slender with some discipline, she sometimes experienced her size as a social handicap. The policeman was one of those towering specimens of a younger generation that had evolved effectively into a different species. He made her feel evolutionarily backward, as if in the classic Darwinian developmental sequence from ape to homo sapiens Kay was one of the hairy, hunched-over creatures two or three stages to the left. This bloke was further girded by the hardened stoicism with which one might prepare to confront decomposition. “Ma’am, we had a report of self-harm at this address.”

  When she identified herself, he seemed put out that she was not collecting flies on the floor. “I’m sorry awfully,” she said. “I’m afraid this is my husband’s idea of a prank. Perhaps a tasteless prank. You see, Sunday was my birthday, and he . . .”

  “Ma’am,” he said again, looming overhead. “Mind if I look round?” It was not a question. When he barged past her into the sitting room, he seemed to be sniffing the air. Regrettably, Cyril was out, which made it more difficult to demonstrate once and for all that she had not stuffed his body in a trunk.

  The officer seemed rather a bully and insisted on poking about all three floors, as Kay cowered behind him blithering. Typically, the presence of law enforcement made her feel guilty, apologetic, and timorous. At once, the intruder gave rise to an indignation that she was obliged to repress, as if clapping her hand over the mouth of a child whose crying might give their location away as they hid from the Gestapo.

  Back at the door, he withdrew a crumpled piece of blue stationery, on which Cyril had signed both their names. “Can you please verify that you and Mr Wilkinson originated this ‘prank’?”

  “Well, yes, but again, I’m so—”

  Grandly, the officer withdrew his booklet of stencils and his all-powerful Biro. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to issue you a summons for wasting police time. A lenient magistrate might let you off light with a ninety-pound fine, but your offence is decidedly not small beer. It carries a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment.”

  “Is that really necessary?” she asked. “This was merely a misunderstanding that got out of hand.” Despite her efforts to stifle it, the indignation was surfacing. British police had clearance rates for theft, fraud, and assault at near zero, whilst some forces had not arrested a single burglar for months. They pushed around elderly taxpayers because frightened, compliant law abiders were easy pickings.

  When the high-handed policeman demanded her details and got to the phone number, Kay drew an unprecedented blank. It was fairly commonplace not to recall your own mobile number, which one tended to communicate to others by texting or ringing up, and she’d misplaced her iPhone all morning (perturbing in itself). Of course she didn’t know Cyril’s; her phone knew Cyril’s. Yet now she couldn’t even retrieve the landline. When a selection of likely digits eventually danced in her head, she struggled to remember whether the last four numbers were 8406 or 8604. It is strangely difficult to locate your own phone number, and she excused herself upstairs to Cyril’s study, rifling water bills and annual TV licences and finally scrounging a hard copy of a tax return from three years ago that included the landline. Aside from changes to the London prefix, they’d had the same phone number since 1972. Rattled, she no longer gave a toss about the silly summons, and when she returned to the foyer the officer, who when she’d suffered her so-called senior moment had seemed to vacillate between pity and contempt, had clearly made up his mind. He went with contempt.

  * * *

  The sure sign that the peculiar lapse bothered her on a profound level was that she did not tell Cyril. As time went on, there were other things she did not tell Cyril. She must have added the salt to her scone dough more than once; when she chucked the inedible batch, which tasted like colonic irrigation powder, she spirited the bag to the outdoor wheelie bin to conceal the fiasco. She’d have written off the botching of the baked goods as the kind of mistake any cook might make on occasion if it weren’t for the other mistakes. She put capers instead of currents in her spotted dick and then lied about having been experimenting. After weeding the back garden for over an hour, she returned to the kitchen to discover that she’d left the hot water running in the sink. She heated four tablespoons of sunflower oil in a cast-iron skillet in preparation for making a crispy grated-potato cake and got distracted by a pile of laundered tea towels that needed folding. She was only reminded of the oil because of the smoke, and she was really not telling Cyril about that inattention; a minute or two later, the oil could have exploded. As a treat, she picked up a whole duck, but when she put the bird in the oven she left its plastic wrapping on. That slip she couldn’t hide from Cyril, because the smell was horrendous, and her attempt to find the oversight comical failed. It wasn’t funny.

  As Kay had noted herself, people in their twenties also suffered from a sudden, inexplicable inability to recall the name of one of their favourite authors like L.T. Hartman . . . that is, L.P. Hartman . . . no, L.P. Hartley—and didn’t conclude that their brains looked like Chernobyl. So when she got lost on the roundabout at Elephant and Castle on the way to Borough Market and ended up instead on Westminster Bridge—after having driven this local route thousands of times—she reasoned that all the new development in the area had understandably made an already complex intersection unrecognizable. When she ordered ten bolts of cotton for converting her friend Lacy’s library into a bedroom-with-half-bath for yet another live-in immigrant carer—when the window to be curtained was on the small side and one bolt would have more than sufficed—Kay could dismiss the error as the mere addition of an accidental zero. Why, anybody could misplace the odd decimal point.

  Yet she went through a solid couple of days during which she couldn’t conjure the name of the medical school where she and Cyril had trained. Chatting over the fence, she found herself avoiding the use of their next-door neighbour’s Christian name, though they’d lived beside Whatsherface Samson for decades. It was one thing to be a bit hazy on the precise definition of “louche,” quite another to pull out a stainless-steel bowl with many little holes in it and not know what it was called. Appalled, Kay placed the bowl-with-holes on the countertop and stared it down; she would not allow herself to proceed with dinner until after twenty minutes she finally produced “colander,” a word that had never afforded her such relief. Yet her grasp of the syllables remained perilous, and forever after “colander” had a tentative, barely-within-reach quality. The word was changed. She couldn’t trust it.

  “Do you realize what you just said?” Cyril noted that autumn. “We need more ‘Abyssinian foil.’”

  “Not at all,” she said. “I said we need more Abyssinian foil.”

  “You just did it again. It’s aluminium foil.”

  “That’s what I said.” She was getting annoyed. “Abyssinian foil.” She didn’t care for the look on his face. The expression was something like—horror.

  It was when she put two sponges in the toaster that Cyril announced he was taking over the cooking. She was consternated. Simon might have got all very cheffy, but theirs was a more traditional household, and the kitchen was her field day . . . her falafel . . . her fife and drum . . . her fiefdom.

  * * *

  “She’s not a completely different person,” Cyril said. “She just has to be watched very carefully.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Hayley said. “My real mother doesn’t put sponges in the toaster. For that matter, my real mother doesn’t have to be ‘watched very carefully.’”

  They were doi
ng it again, talking about her in her presence as if she weren’t there and couldn’t hear them.

  “It’s understandable that you’re angry,” Cyril told their daughter, “but it’s not fair. You have to distinguish between there being something wrong with someone and her doing something wrong.”

  “I’ve had quite enough of your criticism!” Kay said, bustling about the kitchen and putting dishes away, though goodness knows where the utensils belonged; in desperation, she stuck the spatula in the spice rack. “I don’t think I should be held to a standard that for anyone else would be unreasonable. We all have our . . . our . . . our moments of doing something strange. Why, just this morning I found the box for that stainless-steel soap dish in the fridge! How sensible is that? Rest assured, I didn’t stash it there.”

  There was that look on his face again.

  They wouldn’t let her drive any more, and it wasn’t lost on Kay that nowadays when Cyril was away there was always someone else underfoot: that vaguely familiar-looking woman she’d seen in the garden next-door, or Hayley, or Simon, or whatever his wife was called. Once, she was escorted home by a policeman, who was obviously persecuting her over that summons nonsense; she seemed to recall having sent them a letter, and this pettifogging officer must have been dogging her because the phone number under her address had been incorrect. The next time she decided to strike out on her regular South Bank constitutional, the front door was chained from the outside. From Kay’s perspective, she had remained the same and all the people around her had gone insane. Yet some voice outside her whispered that the problem was quite the other way round. When she was petulant, this was the voice that informed her from overhead, “You’re being petulant.” When she grew exercised that her whole family was conspiring to convince her that she was cuckoo, this was the voice that said, “You’re being paranoid.”

  That voice might have provided an anchor, but it was also a source of torture, for it was when she heard the overmaster direct, “You should know this” or “You used to know this,” or press her sternly, “That is not an overweight stranger here to steal your wedding china; that is your daughter,” that she was most apt to collapse into tears. Accordingly, little by little the voice shut up, and Kay felt fine. It was possible, of course, that she was sometimes misguided or in error, but heavens, so were most people.

  Pleasantly, Kay entered a state of confidence and airy surety. Because everything had achieved a sense of surprise, the physical world was the source of eternal captivation. Picking at a hole in her favourite grey cardigan, she found that the threads could unweave into a fringe that was frightfully pretty, and eventually the hole was big enough to put her whole fist through, and how handy to have designed an extra sleeve. She darted her fingers in and out of the sunlight streaming through the parted crimson drapes in the bedroom, fascinated by how her hands kept going bright and then dark. Tiny maggoty grains on her plate could be arranged along the rim like a necklace, or pinged one at a time with her thumb and forefinger a quite astonishing number of feet, which made her laugh. A smooth soft white pile next to a sausage doubled as make-up, and she slathered the pale foundation over her cheeks, certain that the application would make her eyes appear less baggy—and a girl did need to look after herself. The red sauce in the plastic bottle with the small hole in the top was good for drawing on the table, and sometimes she squeezed it to make a volcano that went everywhere, and that was hilarious.

  Then there was the brown stuff whose texture was so various, dense in bits and watery in others, though it wasn’t entirely clear where the substance came from. It had a nice strong farmy smell, and could make intricate patterns on her ankles, like henna. She used the same paste to smear her hair from her forehead, streaking the strands back in a dramatic do. Perhaps it would be a nice change of pace to go brunette.

  “Mum, for God’s sake, that’s disgusting!”

  “Hayley, calm down. Believe it or not, she doesn’t know what it is.”

  This rather pudgy woman shoved Kay into the shower and hosed her down roughly. She didn’t mind the warm water, but the gruff mishandling seemed impolite.

  For a time, Kay confided in a handsome middle-aged man, who suffered under the peculiar impression she was his mother. (Tired of correcting this extraordinary mix-up, at length she humoured the fellow—though she couldn’t determine whether he was innocently delusional, or a fraudster.) She whispered in his ear conspiratorially that she was keeping a deep and devastating secret, which must at all costs be kept from her husband: she was a Leaver. This chap so fiercely convinced that he bore her some relation kept insensibly urging her to stay put.

  “I’d urge my kids to come by more often,” the middle-aged pretender said, “if she could keep her clothes on. It’s not fair on Geoff to expect him to keep a straight face with her tits hanging out.”

  “It’s unusual at her age, but she still has hot flushes,” said an older gentleman who’d been making free with the house rather a lot. “So she breaks out in a sweat, and tears her top off.”

  “Listen, Dad, I’m afraid this is even more awkward,” the scam-artist-slash-fantasist said. “After this collapse in the City—whatever they’re telling you on the news, it’s not just a recession this time, ‘great’ or otherwise—I’m not going to be able to keep subsidizing your mortgage payments. Our portfolios have tanked, and Ellen and I just don’t have the dosh. You’re going to have to downsize big time, like, to a one-bed flat—and maybe out of London. Sell off this monster, even if the timing could hardly be worse. You’ll take a hit.”

  “Oh, it was good of you to chip in, but I’ve been expecting this,” the old man said. “Maybe a smaller place would make it easier to keep an eye on Kay. Here, I’m always afraid she’s going to burn the house down.”

  “To be honest, I can’t for the life of me understand why you spent down your savings to the last penny and refinanced the house to the gills in the first place. Were a few foreign holidays worth it? I finally told Roy that he won’t be inheriting two bits, and he’s livid.”

  The older gentleman slumped in a dejected attitude that made Kay feel sorry for him. Whilst he could come across as strident, he still seemed like a very nice man. “Well, son, you’re missing a piece of the puzzle. We didn’t want to tell you kids in advance, because we didn’t want you to try and stop us. And we didn’t tell you afterwards, either, because we didn’t want to cause you undue anxiety or to incite you to become interferingly protective. But in 2020 it was your mother’s and my original intention to, um. Beat a mutual retreat.”

  “You mean, leave the country?”

  “Leave the country and everything else besides.”

  “Why on earth would you do that?”

  Kay didn’t care for the fact that both these two gentlemen were visitors in her home, and yet they ignored their hostess. She herself was better brought up than that. Also owing to a proper upbringing, she often avoided pointing out that other people did not always make a great deal of sense. Here the strident chap wanted to find a missing piece of a puzzle, in which case they should all be on their hands and knees searching under the sofa. Which is just what she did.

  “Well, both Grandpa and Nanna Poskitt met such a discouraging end,” the older chap said, moving his legs out of the way as Kay patted the rug under the coffee table. “So your mum was afraid she might have inherited a susceptibility to dementia. On my own account, I also wanted to head off any sudden short-of-fatal stroke or something that might burden you kids with caretaking and burden the NHS with bills. It’s not that unusual, Simon. When your mum and I spent that fortnight in Key West, we met a paramedic at a local bar who was vowing to get out of his line of work. What was the problem? The island has become a destination for elderly couples having a final fling—maybe arriving with diagnoses, maybe just falling apart. So emergency medical teams are constantly called to the scenes of messy double suicides, and the poor fellow found it all too depressing to bear.”

  “I can’t
find it,” Kay said, sitting up on the floor.

  “Find what, bab?” the nice old man said, though he didn’t sound very interested.

  “The piece, the piece!” Kay said. “You said you wanted it.”

  “Well, we all want peace,” he said with a sigh, looking at the pretend son as if they had a special secret.

  “It’s like having a dog,” muttered the middle-aged one.

  “I assure you, it’s considerably more difficult than having a dog.”

  “Mummy won’t let me have a dog,” Kay said, happy to join in. “But Percy wants one, too.”

  “Why didn’t you and Mum go through with it, then?” the younger one said.

  “Our health was roughly holding, and your mother changed her mind. She was still enjoying her life, and sticking to the plan myself would have meant abandoning her. But not long after that, she started to decline.”

  “Do you really want her into the Quality Street?”

  Kay had discovered a tin of shiny packages, all twisted up like tiny presents. There was gold and red and blue. She smoothed the wrappings flat to lay out a tapestry, and then lined up the lumps inside as an audience on the rug.

  “Oh, let her play with the sweets. Better the Quality Street than treacle,” the nice old man said. “That was a right nightmare. She turned the whole house into a giant sticky toffee pudding.”

  The other one chuckled. “Though she used to make a cracking sticky toffee pudding, remember? That stayed in the bowl.”

  “I’ve inevitably wondered whether, that night she got cold feet, she’d have gone ahead with it after all, if she could have seen herself now. What a misery.”