Three Things About Elsie: A Richard and Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Joanna Cannon
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and not bothering to come back.
Elsie was watching me now. ‘Who do you think you saw?’ she said.
‘No one.’ I started straightening the ornaments on the sideboard. ‘I need to visit Boots Opticians. I need to get my glasses changed.’
‘You’ve only just changed them,’ she said. ‘And why do you keep picking things up and putting them back again exactly where they were?’
I let go of Brighton seafront and looked at her. You could fit Elsie’s worries into a matchbox. ‘Did you see anyone?’ I said. ‘On the way over?’
She frowned. ‘No one in particular,’ she said. ‘Why, who have you seen?’
‘Miss Bissell,’ I said. ‘A man delivering letters.’
‘The postman?’
I nodded. ‘And that strange little woman from number four. Round face. Never speaks. Not very good with stairs.’
‘Mrs Honeyman?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘And I saw Dora Dunlop as well. She wasn’t in her nightdress either. Fully dressed, she was.’
Elsie raised her eyebrows. ‘They’re sending her to Greenbank, you know. I overheard.’
I felt all the space behind my eyes fill up. ‘She’ll never cope,’ I whispered.
Elsie didn’t reply, but I thought I saw her shoulders give a little shrug.
‘You haven’t seen anyone interesting, then?’ I said.
‘No, no one.’
I drank some tea.
‘I wish you’d just spit it out, Florence.’
‘I just thought I saw someone we used to know,’ I said, into the china. ‘Can’t remember his name.’
‘Oh, I wonder who it might be. Someone from school? From the factory?’
I swallowed another mouthful of tea. ‘Not sure. Can’t place him.’
‘I’m sure I’ll be able to.’ Elsie inspected the empty courtyard through the glass. ‘I’ve always been better at faces than you.’
She was the only one left. The only one who would know if my mind had finally wandered away and left me all to my own devices. But sixty years ago, we’d packed up the past, and parcelled it away, and promised ourselves we’d never speak of it again. Now we were old. Now we were different people, and it felt as though everything we went through had happened to someone else, and we had just stood and watched it all from the future.
She tried to see a little further into the darkness. ‘I do hope I spot him as well.’
‘Me too,’ I said, into the cup.
There’s all manner of nonsense under that sideboard.
It’s amazing what falls behind furniture when your back is turned. I’d never have noticed if I hadn’t been lying here, but now I have, I can’t stop staring. They don’t make a job of it, the cleaners. They’re all headphones and aerosol cans. Some of them even switch the television on while they’re working. Never ask. I watch from a corner of the room and point things out, and they glance sideways and hoover around my feet. ‘Let them get on with it,’ Elsie says. ‘Enjoy being a lady of leisure, Florence.’ It’s not in my nature to be leisurely, though. Elsie’s more of a sitter, and I’ve always been a doer. It’s why we get on so well.
Occasionally, you see the same one twice. There’s a girl comes on a Thursday. Or it might be a Tuesday. I know it’s a day beginning with a T. Dark hair, blue eyes. One hand on the vacuum cleaner, the other pressing a mobile telephone to her ear. She’s always laughing down that telephone. Pretty laugh. The kind of laugh that makes you want to join in, except I can’t understand a word she’s saying. I think she might be German. When I went to the shop near the main gates, they had a box of shortbread. Made in Germany, it said on the back, and so I bought it, because I thought it might remind her of home. We could have it with a cup of tea, I thought; break the ice a bit. Get to know each other. I mentioned it, but she was so busy talking down that telephone and the front door banged shut when I was halfway through a sentence. I expect she was in a rush. That’s the trouble, isn’t it, everyone is in a rush. We can have them another time, when I get over this fall. No harm done, because they’re still in the packet.
She might be the one to find me. The German girl. She’ll forget about her telephone as soon as she realises. It will fall to the floor, but she’ll ignore it and kneel down on the carpet next to me. As she leans forward, her hair will fall into her face, and she’ll have to brush it back behind her ear. Her hands will be warm and kind, and her fingers will wrap around mine.
‘Are you all right, Florence? What have you done to yourself?’
‘Not to worry, I’ll be fine,’ I’ll say. ‘I don’t want you fretting.’
We will wait for the ambulance, and while we are waiting, she’ll ask me how I fell, how it all happened, and I will hesitate and look away. I’m not even sure what I’ll tell her. I remember the newsreader smiling at me and shuffling her papers, and I remember the silence when I switched off the television. There is a special kind of silence when you live alone. It hangs around, waiting for you to find it. You try to cover it up with all sorts of other noises, but it’s always there, at the end of everything else, expecting you. Or perhaps you just listen to it with different ears. I heard a noise, perhaps. Or a voice? I’m trying to decide what made me fall to begin with, but the only thing I remember is opening my eyes and being somewhere I knew I shouldn’t be.
The ambulance men will get here, and the German girl will be relieved, and all the worry will empty out of her eyes, because you always assume once a uniform arrives, everything will be fine. It isn’t always the way, of course. I know that more than anybody. One of the men will push back the furniture, and the other will put a little mask on my face. The pieces of elastic won’t stay behind my ears, and there’ll be such a fuss made. They’ll strap me into a chair, one of those with a seatbelt on it, and they’ll put a blue blanket over me, and the German girl will make a big point about making sure it’s straight.
‘Are you all right, Florence? Is there anything else you need?’
When we get outside, the cold will pinch at my nose and my ears, and my eyes will start to water.
‘Soon have you there, Flo. You hang tight, Flo,’ the ambulance men will say, and I won’t mind that they call me Flo, because they have kind eyes.
They will lift me up and carry me down the outside steps, and as they do, I will look out over the town, at the liquid ink of the night and the lights that shine from other people’s lives, and it will seem as though I’m flying.
And I will feel as light as air.
Friday was bingo. Elsie forced me to go on the pretext of it being good for me, but I knew it was only because it was a rollover week.
‘You’ve only got a month to prove yourself,’ she pointed out to me, quite unnecessarily. ‘So you might as well start now.’
And so we found ourselves in the corner of the residents’ lounge, watching everyone mishear all the numbers. People sat with their feet suspended on pouffes, and their mouths wide open, staring at pieces of cardboard and wondering what they were meant to be doing with them. Miss Bissell was nowhere to be seen, and her second in command had been left to pull out the ping-pongs.
Miss Ambrose