Three Things About Elsie: A Richard and Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Joanna Cannon
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sure. She said it looked like him, but how could it be? I’m not certain what I said next, but I know I ended up shouting, because sometimes you have so much fear, you don’t know where to put it and shouting is the only way for it all to escape from you. Elsie waited patiently for everything to come out, and when it had, she reached for my hand in the darkness.
‘Yours was the first hand I ever held,’ she said.
I was still angry, and my words came out in a snap. ‘Not your mother’s?’
‘My mother’s hands were always far too busy waiting for my father to come back. I suppose I must have held my sisters’ hands at some point,’ she said. ‘But yours are the first I remember.’
She was right. We held hands as we climbed hills, as we waited on pavements, and as we ran through fields, and we held hands as we faced all the things in life we didn’t think we could manage alone.
‘Are you there, Elsie?’ I said.
Her hand was older now. The skin was livered and loosened, and the bones pressed into my flesh, but it still fitted into mine, just like it always had. I needed to feel its strength, and she squeezed my hand, so I could be sure it was there.
‘I’m here,’ she said.
Neither of us spoke for a long time.
‘What do you think he wants?’ I said, eventually.
‘We don’t know that it’s him.’
‘But if it is?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you think we should do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘But I don’t think we should do anything at all right at this moment.’
‘Whyever not?’ I could just make out the shift of her silhouette in the darkness. ‘We’ve got to tell someone.’
‘But what?’ she said. ‘What are we going to tell them? That Ronnie has come back from the dead? No, there isn’t any proof, you’ll just have to take our word for it. You’re on probation, Florence. You’ve got to be careful.’
There was a silence again.
‘They’ll send me to Greenbank,’ I said.
I heard her whisper back to me in the dark. ‘Perhaps that’s just what he wants.’
‘The potting shed?’
Anthea Ambrose put down her calculator and folded her arms so tightly they disappeared into her jacket. ‘What on earth would anybody be doing sitting in the potting shed?’
Handy Simon tried to find something in the room to stare at, other than Miss Ambrose’s eyes, even though they seemed to take up most of the space.
‘I couldn’t really say,’ he said.
‘And what were you doing in the potting shed?’
‘We were getting some rope for the ladder.’
‘We?’
‘Mr Price was with me.’ Simon’s shoes began to shuffle. Whenever he was worried, his anxiety always seemed to make a beeline for his feet.
‘You were having quite the party in there, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, Miss Ambrose.’
He’d known this was a mistake as soon as he’d seen Miss Ambrose was doing the accounts. The monthly accounts always made Miss Bissell irritable, and any emotion experienced by Miss Bissell was eventually passed around amongst everyone else. It was in his contract to report these events: a duty of care, it said. He was told at his annual appraisal that everyone’s opinion mattered. Just because he was a handyman, didn’t mean what he had to say wasn’t valuable. Everyone was valuable at Cherry Tree. No one was defined by their job.
‘What a load of bollocks,’ his dad had said.
‘Is it?’ They had been sitting on the patio, just over five years ago, when Simon first started working at Cherry Tree. The breeze caught the edges of the fly screen, and a row of multi-coloured ribbons applauded against the door frame. ‘Do you think our jobs make us who we are?’
‘Of course they bloody do,’ said his father, who had been known as Fireman John for his entire adult life. ‘Jobs are our identity, aren’t they? Where do you think surnames come from?’
Simon didn’t answer.
‘Wheeler.’ His dad squinted into the sunshine. ‘Mason, Potter, Taylor?’
‘Right,’ said Simon. ‘But that won’t happen to me. I’ll never be defined by my job. Cherry Tree isn’t like that.’
‘What a load of bollocks,’ said his dad.
Handy Simon watched Miss Ambrose, who had picked up her calculator again. He was never really sure when he should leave. Some people didn’t make it clear. He could hear the calculator keys again, and so he shuffled his feet just a little, just to remind Miss Ambrose they existed.
‘You can go now, Simon,’ she said.
‘Right you are.’
He was just about to close the door when she shouted him back.
‘Simon, what exactly was Mr Price doing with you this afternoon?’
‘Moving a ladder, Miss Ambrose.’ He saw the surprise in her eyebrows. ‘He’s very capable for his age.’
‘And what age would that be?’ she said.
‘I’m not exactly sure, Miss Ambrose.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Neither am I.’
As he closed the door, he noticed she had put the calculator down again, and was staring very hard at the line of filing cabinets on the far wall.
Simon turned his collar and punched his fists deep into his pockets. Sometimes, Cherry Tree had that effect. It made him want to push himself into his clothes and disappear. When he was little, he’d wanted to be a fireman, like his dad, but by the time he reached his teens, he realised he wasn’t brave enough. His father had saved almost a whole family once, before Simon was even born. Pulled them out of a burning building one by one, like teeth. He was eighteen and a local hero. Strangers shook his hand and bought him drinks, and made a big fuss of him wherever he went. Even, years later, it was a conversation that was lifted out of a drawer every now and then, and passed around so they could all admire it. His father always left the room when that happened. He said it reminded him of the one he missed, the one who wasn’t saved. Even so, it became the whole of who his father was. Everything else he had done, or would ever do, disappeared in the moment he decided to run towards the flames. As though he shook the rest of himself away, like a second skin. Everyone expected Simon to follow in his father’s footsteps, to travel some strange, imaginary line drawn by genetics, but he couldn’t do it. He knew he was someone who would run away from a disaster, rather than towards it, and the only person he’d ever think about saving was himself.
‘Not everyone can be brave. No one thinks any less of you,’ his mother had said.
She told all her friends it was because of his asthma.
‘I don’t even have asthma.’
‘Best if we just keep that to ourselves,’ she said.
Simon glanced at the day room as he walked past, his hands still pocketed away. There was a scattering of residents in there already, planted in their armchairs, waiting for the evening shift. A television shouted out gardening advice, and a tape of subtitles ran across the bottom of the screen, because there was more than a handful of residents for