Authors: Elizabeth Day
She pushed the nurse away, refusing the offer of sugary tea. She walked hurriedly down the corridor, balancing one hand against the wall to keep herself from falling. She convinced herself that if she got there quickly enough there would be something of him still alive, a hovering sense of Derekness, a lingering warmth in his heart like the coal-hot embers of a night-time fire. If she got there quickly enough, surely his soul would be waiting for her, resting for a while by the hospital bed until she arrived? She would still be able to feel Derek, wouldn’t she? Her love was too strong for him just to disappear, wasn’t it?
But when she saw him, she had to put a hand over her face to stop herself from crying out. She’d never seen a dead person before, never understood what it meant.
Because the figure in the bed looked like Derek but the essence of him, all those tiny movements that she’d never noticed before – the flicker of a look as she entered a room, the almost indiscernible curl of the lip, the placid sound of his inhalations, the steadiness of his touch as he reached out to take her hand – all of them had stopped, just like that. She realised – for the first time, she properly took it in – that she would never see any of it again.
And outside, birds cheeped, sirens sounded, a wind continued to blow and the world went on as normal without realising what had been lost. The enormity of it.
She stared at him and although she should have been devastated, although the tears should have been running down her cheeks, she caught herself thinking: So this is what a dead body looks like.
It was the shock, of course. It took a while to sink in.
Derek lay on his back, his mouth gaping open to reveal a black, still hole. His eyes were closed, the lids thin and papery. His skin had acquired an unnatural, waxy sheen. Liver spots crept across his naked scalp like lichen on a rock. She wanted to take his hand and yet something stopped her. This strange, stony presence was no longer her husband.
Part of her felt relief. She had been worried about burying the body, sending it into the ground and crushing the frail bones under 6 foot of soil. But she saw now that the physicality of Derek was relatively unimportant. It was what had been cradled within that counted.
‘OK, Mrs Hetherington, if I could just ask you to turn over onto your back . . .’ The therapist’s voice interrupts her thoughts. She shakes the idea of Derek from her mind. It is not good for her to dwell on the past, on what can’t be changed. Vanessa has been encouraging her to pick up her hobbies again and ring round a few of her Book Club friends. Her daughter has started staring at her sideways, with a crinkle above her nose and a concerned gaze. It is as if Vanessa is looking after her, whereas it should by rights be the other way round and Carol can’t get used to it. She feels patronised and quietly furious when she knows Vanessa is only trying to help.
‘It’ll do you good, Mum,’ has become her regular refrain. It’s what Carol used to say when Vanessa was a teenager, lolling about on the settee complaining she was bored, flicking through the TV channels even though it was a blazing sunny day outside.
Whenever she remembered the 1970s, it always seemed to be hotter.
‘Why don’t you go and play in the park?’ Carol would say. ‘Do you good.’
She’s dreading Archie becoming a sullen, moody adolescent. At twelve, he’s just on the cusp of it, but so far he is still the shiny happy boy he has always been. She worries, with Derek gone, that he’ll feel the lack of a male role model in his life. Vanessa is a single mother. Carol has never met Archie’s father – has never so much as heard mention of his name.
The main thing is that he seems to have settled into his new secondary school. Vanessa showed her Archie’s first report the other day and Carol couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
‘He’s got a lot of Cs, hasn’t he? That’s not like him.’
Vanessa bit her lip. She was impatient by nature, but her mother’s slowness always seemed to set her even more on edge than usual. ‘It just means he’s performing at a competent level. They don’t give As and Bs any more.’
‘Don’t they?’
‘No, Mum. It’s all numbers now. And a 7 is really good.’
She looked at the report more closely. When she held it, her fingers trembled slightly. She’d noticed the shaking more lately. She steadied her hand. There were 7s all the way down the page. She grunted, satisfied. That was her Archie.
The therapist is smoothing the palms of her hands across Carol’s collarbone, sweeping them up all the way to her earlobes and back again. It feels good when she pulls firmly at the base of Carol’s neck, easing the muscles gently towards her and then releasing.
‘Oh that’s lovely,’ Carol murmurs.
The therapist laughs lightly.
‘Good. Just relax into it.’
She takes a few deep breaths, trying to concentrate on the pleasurable sensation of the massage while at the same time worrying that her inability to relax means she is not enjoying it enough. She wonders if she could set Vanessa up with somebody. Speed-dating, wasn’t that meant to be the latest thing? Maybe she should suggest it to her. She didn’t want Vanessa to see her as a new project: putting her mother back together again in much the same way as she might renovate one of her flats.
And then, the solution to the problem comes straight into her mind, bubbling up to the surface like a lifebuoy. Alan, she thinks, triumphantly. Her next-door neighbour. He seems nice enough – a bit quiet, but that might just be shyness. Why had she never thought of it before? He’d be good for Vanessa, she is sure of it.
Alan had moved in over a year ago after coming down all the way from Glasgow to make a new life for himself. He’d never been married, he told them when they first met. He was unloading furniture from the back of a rental van at the time. A long-term relationship had just broken up, he explained – even though they hadn’t been prying.
‘Oh I’m sorry,’ Carol said.
He smiled at her, bending his head so that he did not meet her eyes. His cheeks blushed pink.
‘Not to worry,’ he said, his voice accented with a vague burr that she couldn’t place. ‘These things happen.’
He had strong forearms, Carol noticed. She liked arms: it was one of her things. Alan’s forearms, visible beneath a rolled-up sleeve of a red-and-black lumberjack shirt, were tanned and thick veins ran down from his elbow to surprisingly fine-boned wrists. She discovered later, once she’d got to know him a bit, that he was a keen amateur gardener, which explained the tan and the muscle definition. Derek used to tease her about her crush on ‘that fancy-man from next door’ but he didn’t mind. Within a week of Alan moving in, he was giving their new neighbour hydrangea plant cuttings for his flower beds and unwanted advice on the acidic soil content of SW18.
‘You want to watch that, Alan,’ he said one morning, leaning across the garden fence. Alan nodded silently, rubbing the back of his neck, not wishing to be rude because he probably knew it all already. Derek shrugged his shoulders and left him to it.
‘Not a talker,’ he said, on coming back into the house, and that had been that.
How old would Alan be, Carol asks herself as the therapist moves from her neck to her scalp, pressing her fingers down, twisting her hair this way and that so it will probably be an awful mess when she leaves. Mid-forties perhaps? It was so difficult to tell nowadays. He wasn’t a looker, that’s for sure. His face had a pudgy quality, like an uncooked loaf of bread, and his eyes were on the small side. But then looks don’t last, as she was always fond of saying. Vanessa’s at the stage in her life where she should be settling for someone reliable and kind.
Yes, that’s what she’ll do. She’ll invite Alan round for a cup of tea, one of the days that Vanessa just happens to be popping in. With this resolution made, Carol feels happier. For the first time since she stripped down to her knickers and lay on the massage table, she starts, cautiously, to relax – just like she’s been told.
On Monday morning, Beatrice wakes up with a lovely, leaping sensation in her stomach. It is her day off: twenty-four hours of concentrated freedom without a single bed to make or toilet bowl to clean. She smiles at herself in the bathroom mirror as she slicks her hair back with wax and rubs cocoa butter into her elbows, making them soft. Then she catches herself grinning like an idiot and stops abruptly. Her teachers always said she had a happy nature but it seems silly to smile when there’s no one else around.
‘Beatrice always looks on the bright side,’ one of the nuns had written in a school report. She remembers her father had been pleased by that.
‘It’s good to accentuate the positives, Beatrice,’ he said. He was wearing his fancy suit and tie. ‘Life is a big adventure.’
She looked up at him, blinking. She loved her father but was also in awe of him. He was so tall, she thought, that his head almost touched the sky. She was too shy to answer him that day and hid her face in her hands, glimpsing at the retreating shape of him through interlaced fingers. He laughed and walked out of the door, his slim briefcase swinging from one hand. In all of her memories, he is laughing.
He died when she was fifteen of an illness she hadn’t known the name of until she was older. And even then she hadn’t understood. They said it was sexually transmitted, the thing that made him lose weight until his flesh had sunk into his bones, that scarred his conker-smooth skin with scab-sore marks the texture of sandpaper.
AIDS. An odd label for a disease, she always thinks, when, according to her big, red English dictionary, ‘aid’ is a synonym for ‘help’.
Would her father still have loved her had he lived to know the truth of who she was? When the police discovered her and Susan in bed together, tipped off by a surly-faced villager, was her mother right when she said Beatrice had brought disgrace on the family? Would her father have disowned her too?
She will never have the answers. She likes to think he would have understood but people can surprise you. Even the ones you think you know better than anyone. Even the ones who are meant to love you.
She pours a sachet of Mayfair Rotunda instant coffee into a mug of boiled water for breakfast, then gets dressed in deliberately bright colours. After ten days of black uniform, Beatrice is desperate for a change. She picks out a neon-yellow T-shirt from TK Maxx and jeans that she found in a charity shop. They are a bit too tight, but the T-shirt is long enough to cover the slight flabbiness of her stomach. She zips up a red puffa jacket because she knows, even though it is sunny outside, she will still feel the cold. It is one of the things she fears she will never get used to in this country. That and the dark evenings. When she first arrived in London, at the B&B in Manor Park arranged by the trafficker, it had been winter. She did not know what to think when the sun disappeared at 4 p.m. and the temperature dropped. It was as if God had turned off the lights.
It had taken her a long while to acclimatise to the darkness and the damp. She felt as though every breath she took of London air was soaked through with a moisture that blocked her nose and thickened her throat. And then there had been the fog. Beatrice had read about the city’s opaque, settling mists in Dickens, but still her first experience of London fog took her unawares. When it had swept up from the banks of the Thames, rolling through the streets like smoke, she had felt unanchored from her surroundings, cocooned in a strange cotton-white numbness that served only to make her feel more alone. The fog seemed to settle in her chest. She had wheezed for days and when she coughed it sounded as if a small rattling ball had lodged itself in her windpipe.
Beatrice grabs her Primark bag and puts her wallet, the newspaper cutting and her mobile inside. As she leaves, she presses her fingers against the frame of Susan’s photo, and checks her fingertips for dust, automatically. Clean as a whistle, she thinks, proud of the colloquial turn of phrase.
Once outside, she walks up the Jamaica Road to a small stretch of shops: a chemist, an internet café, a Halal grocer and a Chinese takeaway. When Beatrice makes extra tips from work, she likes to treat herself to Peking duck pancakes. Just thinking of the sweet-salt taste of the glutinous plum sauce and the cooling slivers of spring onion is enough to make her mouth water. She doesn’t have enough money this week. Tonight, it will be her regular meal of white bread smeared with tomato ketchup, accompanied by a few Tesco Value chicken nuggets on the side. She isn’t much of a cook and doesn’t particularly like the nuggets but she knows it’s important to eat protein to keep her strength up. And that’s the cheapest way she can do it. She thought she’d miss Ugandan food when she first came here but her taste buds have changed. Or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t want to be reminded of home, of her mother’s matoke and juicy pineapples and the nutty sweetness of a freshly picked banana. Better to have no memories. Better, after everything that happened.
Beatrice pushes the door of the internet café. Manny, a tall, bespectacled Somalian, is standing behind the counter, tinkering with a screwdriver and a laptop. He glances up when he hears the door.
‘Hey, Beatrice! How are you doing, my friend?’
He leans across the counter and does his special handshake: bent fingers, knuckle pressed against knuckle, a sweep of palm. His hand is dry. Beatrice smiles. Manny was the first friend she made in Bermondsey and has been a fund of useful information about housing benefits, community grant applications and government welfare schemes over the years. He has an extraordinary aptitude for making sense of complicated things, whether it be a computer chipboard or an eight-page form from the council, needing to be filled out in block capitals. It was Manny who had given her a mobile phone, handing it over one day with a sheepish smile.