First Aid (15 page)

‘Your mum wouldn't have liked that,' Ella said.

‘She went ape.'

They carried on walking.

‘I think he was in there,' Vince said.

‘Who?'

‘Your mum's boyfriend.'

‘Probably,' she said.

‘Are you scared of him?'

‘No,' she said.

They stopped outside Lois Lucas & Son. The building looked featureless out of hours, part of the street. A boy passed by on the other side, kicking a tin can on and off the kerb. The hollow din sounded in the silence. The boy was too alone and cowardly to find his voice and yell abuse. Vince peered through the glass of the shop.

‘Not a lot going on, is there?' He kept his voice low.

‘No,' said Ella. She got out her key. ‘You go.'

‘Are you really spending the night here?'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘I'll wait till you're inside,' Vince said.

‘No,' she said. ‘It would feel weird, with you looking in. Like being a dummy in a shop window. I wouldn't like it.'

‘Do you think Trevor's there?'

‘I've no idea. I wish you'd shut up about him.'

Vince moved away from the window.

‘You're all right now? You're not feeling sick any more?' he said.

‘I'm fine. Promise. You go,' she said.

She gave him a small shove in the back. He set off down the street. At the corner he stopped and turned round. Ella was still standing outside the shop. He hesitated. She waved. He looked away again and broke into a run. She waited until his footsteps died away – and unlocked the door.

Ella felt restless. She took off her shoes and padded over the floorboards. She picked things up and put them down again. She arranged the jugs and vases in order of height on a sideboard. One of them had a dead fly at the bottom. It had dropped, dopey, in mid-flight and starved. A sudden lurching fall. Then, looking round for something else to occupy her, she decided to put all the figurines together on a dresser shelf. She gathered them up – any tat with a head or a face – and placed them in pairs so that they seemed as if they might be talking to each other. The balloon lady with the Home Pride flour man, a glass mouse with St Francis. Her scene needed a background, a street scene or a garden. She found a place mat of Windsor Castle and propped it up behind the figures. She heard a creak above, somewhere over her head. The building made noises. Because it was old it adjusted, shifted position. She was nervous of the noises, so, in order not to set them off, she walked more carefully. She went across to the place where she'd slept the night before. Opposite her was a full-length mirror, propped at an angle. She felt uneasy about having slept in view of it as if it might have acted like a video camera recording her. She caught sight of herself across the two lengths of floor, the real floor and the one beyond the mirror that sloped downwards. She put her tongue out, but she couldn't, at this distance, see the girl in the reflection doing the same. The girl was pale and young-looking. She started to lay out her bed – the cushion and the blanket of knitted squares. Without even looking in the mirror she saw herself repeating the actions of the previous night: unfolding the blanket, spreading it out, plumping up the cushion. Playing. ‘You'll stay there forever, will you, gathering dust?' Vince had asked her and she'd thought it a stupid thing to say, because, of course, she wasn't going to stay forever.

She hadn't made any plans. She had kept her thoughts at bay – though she sensed them there waiting to rush in. If her mum's face got better . . . If Felpo stayed away. These were the good thoughts. She felt that her life, as she had known it, was over. She hoped, maybe, one day, she could have a parallel but lesser existence, eating, sleeping, working, maybe even getting a shadowy boyfriend and having shadowy children – passing the time until she was an old lady. The shadowiness wouldn't be visible from the outside, but she wouldn't pretend to be the self she used to be. She sat down on the blanket with her back supported by the staircase and rested her head on her knees.

The telephone was ringing. Ella started. She must have dozed off. Then she was confused, thinking it might be morning. On and on it rang, rattling the china standing next to it – old-style loudness that matched its bulky shape – separate and demanding, with a life of its own. The room was still dark – it wasn't morning – but she didn't know how much time had passed. She thought she heard movement upstairs, feet on the floor. Maybe the door clicked open. She tucked herself into a neater shape. With any luck she would be out of sight. The angle that the mirror was leaning at wasn't steep enough to throw her reflection up. She waited for Trevor's irregular pattern of steps, his hand steady on the handrail. He had a boozer's respect for stairs. That wasn't a good way to go, he said. She felt suddenly responsible for him. What would she do if he tripped and fell all the way down? Seeing her might be enough of a shock to give him a heart attack. She had forgotten what the recovery position was. They'd shown them a video on first aid at school but she hadn't paid attention. He would go grey and make sick gurgling noises. She knew how he'd look – though not how to help.

Ella hugged her knees tighter. The ringing continued. Trevor still didn't come down. She was puzzled – then afraid.

The telephone stopped and the reverberations with it. Her ears didn't adjust straight away. The silence was a sheer drop. She leapt up and threw herself towards the door, knocking into things as she went.

TREVOR WAS ON
his way back from Borrowdale. He wasn't a tidy walker, but he built up a weary momentum and this took him along. The street was wide and repeated itself. Similar houses were set back behind the remains of Edwardian shrubberies, separated by scatterings of dead leaves from the evergreens' summer shedding. There were differences in detail, but the darkness suppressed them. He had left the car at home. He used to drive everywhere, however much he'd drunk, until he found himself late one night on a surface which didn't feel like the road and the only sure way of finding out was by opening the car door and sticking out his foot. He had guessed he was on some soft sandy part of the Sandwich Golf Course and confirmed this when his vision had partially returned and he'd seen a little flag on a stick. The episode had shaken him. He had been more careful after that. Death wasn't too bad, but you couldn't depend on outright death. Near misses didn't bear thinking about.

He had spent the end of the evening with Francesca. He'd turned up at Borrowdale at around ten. Lights out for the oldsters. He had tapped on the door. There was a doorbell set in a large marble surround. For Admittance to the Home after 5 p.m. Please Ring the Bell. Thank you. But he hadn't liked to press it. Francesca had let him in after a few minutes. She hadn't looked surprised to see him. She had already taken off the overall – it was the first time he'd seen her without it – and was wearing a lace vest and a skirt made of some thin black material. She hadn't wasted time. They'd shared the bottle of wine he'd brought with him and talked about the mundane things they had done during the week. She hadn't flirted with him but everything had flowed in the same direction. It had been a funny place for love. A room off the front office with a desk and a couch where Matron talked to relatives. Not conducive in sheer aesthetic terms but he'd felt more rejuvenated than he had done for a while. They'd ignored the whimpers and the moans, the cries for Nurse. He'd been coasting home, feeling fairly complacent. Then, at the first loud thump and incoherent shout from down the passage, she'd turned dutiful. She'd moved fast, up and, with a bit of rearrangement, out of the door. It was all right for women. No one had done that to him since he was seventeen. Well, eighteen. In a borrowed car up on the Downs.

As he turned the corner onto the home stretch he fumbled in his trouser pocket for his keys. Something about the street struck him as odd for the time of night. He couldn't quite put his finger on it but it looked more lived-in somehow, cosier, like an evening in winter. When he got close enough he saw why that was. Light from the window of Lois Lucas & Son was illuminating the pavement in front of it, extending into the road. The empty milk bottles glinted. Cheerful as the run-up to Christmas. He knew he hadn't left a light on. The sun had still been shining when he left. Kids, he thought, and wondered if they were still in there. Bloody pests. The night wasn't going to be palliated by oblivion; the essential rest from today's and tomorrow's blundering. Old age reached out to him; the sameness of days, the binding limitations. He wouldn't say no to it if it were offered to him. But he hadn't quite got there. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and then down over his face, pulling it out of shape. He was outside the shop now. He stared through the glass. A lighted lamp was lying on the floor, otherwise it was the usual shambles. The door was flaky but intact. He unlocked it and pushed. Then, just in case, he held it open, as if he were a bored commissionaire, and waited.

After a few seconds he went inside and nothing else seemed amiss. The shop still held the day's heat. He stood the lamp upright again. The bulb flickered and then came on brightly. Perhaps a cat had got in through the kitchen window. He wandered into the lean-to. The mugs were lined up on the windowsill. They all had some horrible liquid in them, at different levels of fullness. He piled them into the sink and turned on the tap. Only cold water at this hour of the night. The hot water came on at ten. He decided against coffee and went back into the shop.

‘Tired am I,' he said aloud.

Lois used to say that. Proclaim it. He never got the intonation right. He could see her now holding on to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, preparing for the ascent. At the end she couldn't make it. Her breathing was too bad and her legs wouldn't go. He couldn't carry her up. Her body was too solid – compact she called it. He shut the shop and made a bed up for her downstairs, nice and clean with all the trimmings. Half a dozen white pillows and the satin eiderdown. She couldn't settle though. She only put up with the arrangement for a week. She lay there pricing everything up and fretted without the customers. The regulars pushed cards and little gifts that would fit through the letter-box. Soap and cassette tapes and miniature bottles of whisky. She didn't want visitors – not there, nor at the cottage hospital where she spent the last month. Someone sent a book of poems and prayers –
A Celtic Miscellany
. He remembered her wheezing with laughter. Finally she got it out. She thinks I'm Welsh, she said. Welsh. He was perplexed. Not necessarily, Mother, he said. Oh yes she does, she does, she said and carried on heaving and trying to get her breath.

He was preparing to climb the stairs himself, taking one last look round. There was a clearing amongst the clutter. He suddenly noticed it. He stood and stared, transfixed by the knitted blanket laid out in a neat rectangle with a cushion at its head. His first thought was that Lois never could have got down on the floor. He closed his eyes and opened them again. So someone
had
been in the shop.

There was something innocent about the arrangement – not the style of a tramp. Tramps didn't play house. And whoever came in had a key. Ella then. There was no one else it could have been. He wondered whether to give Jo a call, but it was too late, or too early. He hadn't seen either of them for a day or two. He felt apprehensive, but casting his mind back, he couldn't retrieve anything significant. Jo had seemed fine, and Ella too. He had lost track of time. He'd been for that walk with her. She hadn't looked like someone who was in trouble or about to run away. She'd been disgruntled at first but she had soon cheered up. He could be mistaken, but he put his money on their both being happy at that point – mother and daughter. He wasn't one of those types who think everything is a sham. People led lives right up to the second when everything went haywire. Oblivious they were to what life was about to chuck at them.

He bent down and picked up the bedding. He hung the blanket over a wooden towel rail and lobbed the cushion at the top of the wardrobe. A pallet for one it had been. Whatever reason Ella had for making her bed there it wasn't fornication. She was below the age of consent, of course – though that never stopped them. He was thinking more that a girl like her would prefer to be on the beach out in the open – or on the side of a bed that was nearer the door. After dark, she'd need the reassurance of a running figure in lights who resembled herself – and the Exit sign. She wouldn't let herself get trapped indoors with a fellow.

He walked over to the window, cupped his hands round his face and pressed it to the glass. No sign of life, but there was a trace of light in the sky. The day had keeled over into the next. Sunday, he thought. They'll be round with the papers, and ringing the bell for whatever they call it – Holy Communion – in a few hours. Francesca would go off duty, yawning and waiting for the day staff to show up. He needed to sleep but he felt too lazy to go upstairs. He stretched himself out on one of the tip-up theatre seats. Companionable it was down here. Like a dormitory. Lois and Ella and God knew who else. All of them – dead or alive – who had ever had forty winks in this room.

ELLA RAN THROUGH
the town and didn't stop running until she could taste open air. She walked back to the main Dover road. She was always walking. Sometimes she covered distance without noticing her surroundings, surprised to arrive at whichever place she regained consciousness, her body powered by strange energy. At other times, and going at a similar speed, she was aware of the nearby landscape going by so slowly, sticking to her, rising and falling minutely with each sequence of steps. The fields beside the wide road stretched away on either side, as domestic as large gardens in the night. The road passed through them. Only the sky was a comfort – not a place where she was known.