I didn’t feel myself at all. Ailsa was right about the weight. I did seem to have lost a bit recently. A floral Jigsaw skirt from Cancer Research gaped at the waist. I had to fix it with a couple of safety pins. I had less energy than usual and at night my heart would seem to beat alarmingly fast.
It was listlessness that took me into Collard & Wright. The office is above a nail bar on Bellevue Road, and the name is printed in old-fashioned black typeface on the first-floor window. I must have walked past it every day for twenty years. One dull afternoon I found myself ringing the buzzer and walking up the stairs. The son of the founder, Richard Collard, was on a tea break and could see me then and there. It’s very straightforward, making a will. I answered lots of questions and he jotted down the answers in black biro on a foolscap sheet and a few days later, I returned to sign an official typed-up form. In the event of my death, I wanted the cheapest coffin (cardboard) and a quick cremation: no fuss. I bequeathed the fruitwood chest of drawers in Mother’s bedroom to Maeve and Sue, a dark oil painting of a portly gentleman holding a quill pen to Bob, and to Fred I left the books – he’d enjoy sifting through them. Everything else, my share of ‘house and contents’, in recognition of the close bond between us, I gave to Max – to be held, until he attained his majority (in this case twenty-one), by Ailsa.
She deserved it, I thought as I strode home, after everything she had done for me. It would give her financial independence. Freedom. She could leave Tom. How much easier, after the divorce, to live next door, so much less disruptive for the children; a loose form of the arrangement I’ve read about called ‘nesting’. I enjoyed thinking all this. I began to imagine her delight at discovering this good fortune – tempered, of course, by sadness at my passing. My generosity would add a new intensity to her grief, and as the years went by, she would often dwell on our time together, with a tear or a smile. During this reverie, at the back of my mind, I suppose I must have been aware that pre-deceasing her was far from a given. But this awareness was very much at the back of my mind, in the further recesses, shoved against the far wall like the operating instructions for defunct kitchen equipment.
Outside the dress shop on Bellevue Road, a pretty establishment with a fondness for slogans like ‘LOVE’, was a pile of bin bags filled with folded-up cardboard. I was having a celebratory pick through (they often throw away perfectly serviceable wire hangers), when I heard my name.
I straightened.
‘Hello, Verity. No dog today?’
It was Delilah. She was in shorts and walking boots, carrying a large polystyrene tray of white flowers. Her van was parked in the waiting bay; she had left a trail of dried globules of compost.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s at home. Somerset took it out of her a bit.’
‘Don’t think I’ve ever seen you without a dog attached.’
‘Well . . .’ I began to retort that was blatant nonsense, but I stopped. What was the point? She was lightly mocking me, that was all it was. Some little private joke she and Tom shared.
I glared at her instead. ‘You appear to be dropping earth,’ I said.
‘I’m doing the window boxes for the wine bar next door – I did them a couple of months ago, but they need refreshing. It’s where the smokers stub out their cigarettes. All that artistic endeavour and they just think they’re giant organic ashtrays. Anyway. Yeah. I’ve got the contract for most of the restaurants around here.’ She rolled her eyes as if to say, Busy me.
I thought then how keen Delilah always was to shoe-horn self-promotion into conversation. ‘Glad to hear you’re so successful,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised you have time in between canoodling with other people’s husbands.’ Only I didn’t have the courage to say the last bit.
I stuffed the hangers I was holding into the pocket of my mackintosh and was about to move past her, but she put her head on one side and said, ‘Lovely house, wasn’t it?’ She placed the tray carefully on the pavement.
‘Yes, I felt very privileged to be included. It was kind of Ailsa to invite me.’
‘She’s good on the saintly gesture, is Ailsa. Mind you, I’m sure it suited her too. Nice to have an English tutor and a doting slave on tap.’
A woman on the other side of the glass was holding a dress to her body in front of the mirror, twisting her hips. ‘I’m happy to help out however I can,’ I said. ‘She has a lot going on. Someone has to keep the show on the road.’
She laughed. ‘Oh, Verity. You really have swallowed it whole, haven’t you? She likes to maintain she’s so busy and important but she’s off all the time, having fun, doing her own thing, whatever that might be, while quietly, behind the scenes, without letting anyone know, Tom does everything. He’s the one keeping the show on the road.’
I lowered my eyes to the plants at my feet; I could see an insect, a green beetle with a shield-like shell, crawling along a thin tendril.
‘I know what’s going on,’ I muttered. ‘Between you and Tom. I’m not blind.’
My face had got very hot and my heart was pounding. The top of the hanger was digging into the flesh on my hand and it felt as if it were drawing blood.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ She bent down to pick up the tray, her hands gripping the far side, fingers splayed. ‘The problem with you is you think you know everything, but you don’t notice what’s happening right under your nose.’
I was expecting the Tilsons back on the Friday but by Saturday night there was still no sign. With the blinds pulled shut in all the windows, upstairs and downstairs, the house looked asleep. Dead, even.
I picked up my phone several times to text her. ‘Looking forward to seeing you,’ I wrote and then deleted. ‘When are you back? Can I get milk?’ also written and deleted. She hated neediness. Perhaps I’d got it wrong and they had the house until Sunday. Or they’d be back any minute now. I’d hear the engine roar onto the off-street, and stutter to a halt.
An ambulance shrieked past the house, and quickly after, a police car, its light pulsing red against the walls of my front room. I looked on the BBC news website for a fatal accident on the A303 and when nothing came up I felt only temporary relief.
Sleeping in your clothes saves a lot of time in the morning, and I was through the door with Maudie just after dawn, out on the common as the sun sent pink streaks across the sky. Walking is a natural sedative, and I ended up doing a big circuit, down to Clapham Junction and up and down the gentrified backstreets ‘between the commons’. They’re more concerned with loft conversions than dug-out basements in Nappy Valley, as the estate agents call it: another bedroom for the baby. Still, it made no difference to me. Whatever the type of improvement, householders still see the advent of builders as an opportunity to empty their cupboards.
I wasn’t home for several hours. Sod’s law, they’d drive up just as I was approaching my front gate. I saw the flash of Ailsa’s face in the passenger window as the car slowed. I’d longed for this moment, agitated with anticipation for it, but now I wanted to hide. Using the legs of a stool, I pushed the gate open and scurried up the path, pulling Maudie behind me and dropping a few items as I fumbled for my key. I left everything in a heap in the hall and went up the stairs to watch them from Mother’s window. Car doors were flung open and Melissa and Bea, boxes of food, suitcases and, last of all, large black plastic bags which – I now know – contained plants all emerged. Tom was shouting at Max: ‘For God’s sake, can’t you take anything out without dropping it?’
She didn’t come round to say hello – too busy, I was sure, unpacking, washing, re-nesting. It didn’t matter. The relief that they were safe was enough.
The following morning, I was at my desk in my dressing gown trying to do some work, when I heard her voice, out the front: ‘. . . and then round you go,’ she said. ‘Like magic.’
A man’s voice then. ‘Between seven to ten per cent. No question.’ I ran upstairs to look out of the window. The man was wearing a suit and holding a clipboard. Ailsa was showi
ng him the parking turntable. He was staring up at the house, and then over at mine. I drew back so he didn’t see me.
It took me a few minutes to throw on some clothes, but by the time I was on the path with the dog, they’d both gone.
Chapter Twenty
Gluten Free 4 Multiseed Sandwich Thins
Homeless, adjective. Having no home or permanent
abode; spec (of a person) having no home, shelter,
or place of refuge owing to destitution, living on the
streets.
It was warm, walking down to Balham, particularly in the cardigan I was wearing, but the full heat of the day hit me when I turned the corner at the Tube station onto the high road. The sun glared over the railway bridge, the air thick with particles, rich with exhaust and urine. A pigeon pecked at a paper bag outside Costa, its feet mutated. Two men were collecting signatures for a petition against the Heathrow expansion. Kids and women with buggies loitered by McDonald’s.
I began to regret coming. My limbs felt heavy, as if they were filled with sand. But still no knock on the door from Ailsa, and I’d needed to distract myself. Tutoring would surely resume that week and I decided to buy Max some new stationery. He likes a nice new pen.
Outside TK Maxx lay a bundle of dirty cloth: a woman, swollen legs splayed out across the pavement. About my age, she was wrapped in too many layers – a dirty sleeping bag coiled behind her head. She had a dog with her, a collie cross I think, and I let the dog sniff my hand and tried, unsuccessfully, to engage the woman in conversation. We’re all so near to the edge, I thought, as I moved away; just a couple of wrong turns, a few doses of bad luck, and everything can fall away.
The breathlessness got worse as I waited to cross the road. I stared at the ground, at a cigarette butt, at the blue streak of bike lane, the wheels of a huge delivery lorry, the rattle of its towering metal sides, its exhaust. When the beeps told me to cross, I put one foot in front of the other, struggling a bit.
Entering the store, the smell of bread and fruit and refrigerated meat clogged my airways. I tried to cough, but I couldn’t. Someone had rammed a trolley into the back of the line by the door and the whole procession rattled violently, shifting forwards towards me. The self-service tills emitted a constant high-pitched squawk. A child in a buggy threw a plastic cup and it skidded across the floor and under the display of flowers. A kid about Max’s age whizzed past me on a scooter. It was all movement and humming and words. Can Britney report to the kiosk? Can Britney report to the kiosk?
What is wrong with you, I told myself. Box files. Highlighters. Get to it.
A few more steps and I stopped again. A sharp pain in my chest now. Nausea. An extreme sense of tightness and panic. I put my hand out to balance against a shelf. ‘Deliciously free from’ read the sign above it. Free from what, I was thinking as the world went black and white. I had an image of the woman outside, her legs across the pavement. And that’s the last thing I remember.
An expanse of speckled tile. A dust-ball. And a coat button. Or was it a Rolo? Perhaps a lone sprout. A sign closer to me read: ‘Warburtons gf 4 multisd swch thins 172g’. Incomplete words. Had I had a stroke? A soft, itchy texture under my cheek with an intense smell: synthetic perfume, sweat, something cloyingly sweet like custard.
‘She’s coming round,’ a voice said.
A woman brought her face close. ‘You’re all right, darling.’
Or perhaps it had been a question: ‘Are you all right, darling?’
I tried to answer, but my throat had closed. I panicked, struggling to get up, and a paper bag was brought to my face and the same voice told me to breathe in as deeply as I could. An ambulance was on its way, she said. I wasn’t to be alarmed. But she said it in a way that made me realise she was alarmed, that it wasn’t that there was nothing to be alarmed about, but that alarm would make whatever it was worse.
A blur after that. Swirling. Noises. ‘Prosecco on offer’. The boy with the scooter, staring. Can Britney report to the kiosk? The homeless woman’s swollen legs. And then a bluster of activity, movement, new voices. Hands cupping my head, cold straps, a mask across my mouth. A taste, chemical and cool, a small release. My shirt buttons undone. One. Two. Three. Cool air between my cheek and the custard-smelling fabric, legs up, and onto a stretcher. And then movement above: a strip of white light, the ceiling tiles, and pipes – a whole world of shapes and gullies and bulk up there. PRICE LOCKDOWN. And out, and up a ramp and into what I now know was an ambulance.
I don’t like to make a fuss, so I’m not going to go on too much about what happened next. I didn’t die – but you know that because you’re reading this.
I remember very little of the journey to hospital. No siren or screaming or pumping of chests. Mainly I concentrated on taking in what I now know is albuterol, an intensive blast of the drug you get in a common or garden inhaler, while they concentrated on saving my life. Turns out they did do that. The heat, and the stress, my increased anxiety, had led to compromised lungs, narrowed airways, tightened muscles, restricted airflow, etc, etc. Arriving at hospital I was swung in, past the drunks and the broken arms and the colds that wouldn’t shift, to a cubicle all of my own. A nurse I could have married got me into a gown and put pads on my chest, and a cannula in my hand, and for the first time in, well, forever, I lay on a bed and gave myself over to the ministrations of others, and there was so much relief in that, in the gradually feeling better, that I could have wept.
Time passed. At first everything had happened quickly, but I became aware of the periods of lag, of measuring things out by hours. ‘I’ll come back in an hour,’ the nurse said, several times. The curtain, a cheerful blue, was whisked back and forth. Blood was taken. Oxygen levels were tested. I saw other doctors. Notes were unhooked from the end of my bed, eyes flicked over them. Questions were asked: had I been ill recently? Any allergies? Cats? Dogs? Had I suffered from asthma before? Any unusual stress?
I was moved to a different bed, out of a cubicle and into the observation ward.
I was observed.
More time went by.
Can we call anyone, someone had asked early on: family? I’d shaken my head. I thought about my mother, the constant worries about her health; the way each passing pain, each tiny twinge, was subject to discussion and debate and investigation. I had a pang for my sister, then. A terrible, hopeless pang. One of the nurses wasn’t happy. ‘Is no one coming to visit you? Do you have support? Will there be someone to look after you when you get out?’
When the lights above the curtain rail were dimmed it struck me how late it had got. I pushed the blanket off and stood up. A machine started beeping. A nurse came – a different one, less friendly – and when I told her I had to go, that I’d already been there too long, she told me I couldn’t leave: the doctor wanted me under observation. I was here at least until tomorrow. I need to get home, I repeated. My dog’s on her own. My dog depends on me. No food. No company. No visit to the garden. How long now? I looked at my watch. Eight hours. My throat began to constrict; my chest to feel tight. I tried to breathe again, to quell the rising sense of panic, the self-disgust that rises from awareness of neglect. Her voice softened then. Wasn’t there a neighbour I could call?
I had no choice then. I found my phone in the bottom of my bag, and dialled her number. It took me four tries until she answered. There was music behind her voice, and chatter. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Verity, I’m sorry I haven’t been round. I’ll pop in to see you tomorrow if that’s OK?’
I told her briefly what had happened.
‘You’re in hospital?’
‘I’m fine. I’ll be out . . .’
The nurse was standing just across from me. I looked at her enquiringly. ‘Tomorrow afternoon, I expect,’ she said.
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Are you OK?’
I told her I was fine, but hoped she would be able to look after Maudie for me. I told her where the food was, and asked if she c
ould let her out and take her home with her. She said she would and I directed her to the front door key that was hidden in the toolbox on the front porch.
‘Which one?’
‘The blue metal one.’
‘The blue metal one,’ she said. ‘Is it obvious?’
‘Yes. There are other keys. The front door key’s the one with the elephant tag. Not the Chubb, that’s for . . . Not the Chubb.’
‘Got it.’
We disconnected and I lay down. I should have felt calmer, but the call had inspired other anxieties. She was out; I could tell that from the background noise. Did that mean there would be further delay before Maudie was rescued? Maybe she would ring Tom and ask him to go in? In that case he would go into my house. And, even putting that danger aside, other matters were unresolved. I hadn’t specified water. She would give Maudie water, wouldn’t she? Even a non-pet owner knew to give a pet water. And a walk? Should I ring her back and ask her to walk her? But maybe it would be better if she didn’t. Ailsa was so lax. Oh, let her off. No sheep, or farmers with guns, but squirrels, and cars. If I rang her back, either way, it would annoy her.
All these thoughts churned. It strikes me now how odd it was that I didn’t think more about the music behind her, the distracted snippiness of her tone. I think I had already begun to perceive I could be an irritation. She hadn’t, for example, asked if she could visit me, or whether I needed anything. Does that sound self-pitying? I suppose it does. I had often had the sense that something was going on in her mind, that her reactions were fed by a deeper well. But I had become too wrapped up in myself. I just think if I had spent a bit more time wondering what was up with her, things might have turned out differently.
One more thing, too: would it have been so awful if Maudie had spent the night alone? It seemed unimaginable at the time. In the end the consequences of my efforts to avoid it were much worse.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 22
