by Simon Lelic
Sound familiar? Yep, me again. What a fountain of wisdom I’m turning out to be.
It was me who pointed out that flicker in the dark, who ushered Elsie down the burning staircase. I told her about Jessica. I told her how she got out. I even praised her for it! Jesus Christ. I might as well have pushed Elsie in front of that train myself.
—
THE THING I remember clearest was the scream. Not Elsie’s. Elsie didn’t make a sound, nothing I could make out over the clamor of the 8:16. It wasn’t a woman’s scream, either. This, it was a bloke roaring in anguish. A noise there’s no way he’d ever be able to repeat.
I’d spotted her first outside the station. I’d been watching for her constantly since . . . I was about to say since social services had told us they had no grounds to intervene but actually I’d been watching for her before then. I hadn’t stopped watching for her virtually since the day I first met her. But I noticed myself watching after that. In the street. At the playground. From the spare-bedroom window. After a week had passed and I hadn’t seen her I had to restrain myself from marching round the corner and hammering on Elsie’s front door. And then, when I was least prepared—when I was shambling from the coffee queue toward the train queue, on my way groggily into work—there she was. Twenty, twenty-five yards ahead of me and weaving through the crowd like a leaf again dancing on the wind.
I called out to her but she didn’t hear. I started to hurry, spilled my coffee, dropped the whole thing in a passing bin. I almost caught up with her but got trapped at the ticket barrier. Fucking Oyster cards. Fucking running out of credit. By the time I was through, Elsie had disappeared into the tunnel that led toward the platforms. There were three at our local station, though only two that were ever in use in the mornings. One for trains into town, the other out.
I checked the boards at the bottom of the stairwells. There was a train in ten minutes heading into Surrey, another in two for London Victoria. My train, as it happened. I remember half-wondering whether Elsie hadn’t come to the station looking for me. I thought about this afterward as well—whether the timing implied Elsie was sending me some kind of message. I don’t think she could have been. I don’t remember ever telling her how or when I went to work.
But even so.
It took me a minute to spot her. A precious minute. The platform was as crowded as it usually is on a weekday morning and Elsie had made her way along to the far end: the point where the train, as it came into the station, would have been traveling at its fastest. In fact I could see the train approaching in the distance. The rails looped out from the station the way a running track curves toward the finishing straight, and the train was rounding the final bend.
“Elsie?”
I’d called out just loud enough to turn heads in the area around me. I saw Elsie move closer to the edge of the platform. Her attention was away from me, toward the oncoming train. Once again I wondered what she was doing there, where she might have been going. Two men in suits passed between us and Elsie was obscured for a moment by a curtain of pinstripe. When I caught sight of her once more she’d again shifted where she was standing, so that one of her feet had crept beyond the yellow safety line. All along the platform people were beginning to form ranks in anticipation of the scuttle for seats but out where Elsie stood there was barely anyone else around her. She had no reason to be standing so close to the edge. No reason, except one.
“Elsie . . .”
I started to move more quickly. I collided with one of those businessmen, ignored his coffee-splattered curse. I dropped the folder I was carrying, hesitated, left it there.
“Elsie!”
She heard me then. Turned, saw me, seemed confused for a moment—then smiled at me over her shoulder. That smile. I remembered it as her hello to me, that day I’d followed her home from Mr. Hirani’s. I recognized it this time as her good-bye.
“Shit, Elsie, wait, stop. . . .”
Maybe I said those things, maybe I just thought them. To be honest I have no idea. The train was now the same distance from Elsie as I was—right on top of her, in other words, whereas I was still a hundred miles away. She . . .
Fuck.
She just . . . I can’t even describe it. But I think . . . I mean, what they tell me is . . . she hit the side of the train and not the front of it. Or the corner or . . . I don’t know. Maybe she hesitated at the last. Maybe she mistimed her leap. Except she didn’t leap, I remember that too. She stepped. Just as if she were climbing aboard. Calmly. Quietly. She just . . . stepped.
I tried to force my way through to her, didn’t get anywhere close. The man who screamed, I didn’t see who he was. I don’t remember seeing much of anything after that. Just Elsie, through the crowd—lying broken where she’d ricocheted onto the platform, that leaf-green raincoat of hers steadily blooming red.
—
THEY SAY SHE has a chance. They say if she’s a fighter, she might pull through. They actually used that phrase. But it’s bullshit however they choose to say it because, firstly, I could see what they were really thinking when they told me and, secondly, because I know Elsie hasn’t got any fight in her left. That’s the whole entire point. When you fight it has to be for something and as far as Elsie’s concerned there’s nothing in her life that’s worth the struggle. I want to tell her she’s wrong. I want to prove it to her. But even if they were to let me see her there’d be no guarantee she’d be able to hear me—and even less, given everything, that she would listen.
So what am I doing here? Why is it I keep coming back to the hospital? It’s like Jack said: I’m spending every spare minute, it feels like, sitting in the same orange plastic chair.
The truth, if you want to hear it, is that I’m afraid. I don’t like admitting it, least of all to myself, but I am. I’m afraid for Elsie, I’m afraid for Jack, I’m afraid for me. I’m afraid of what’s coming. I’m afraid of all the things I’ve already done. I’m afraid, above all, that everything I’ve been through—everything I’ve put others through—will count for nothing. And so I’m hiding, basically. Here, in the only place that feels safe, like the coward I only ever pretended not to be.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JACK
WHAT HAPPENED TO Elsie happened at the beginning of August. Last month—even though it feels like it happened yesterday. She’s still in hospital. She still hasn’t regained consciousness. The doctors still don’t know if there’s anything more they can do. We’re in a holding pattern, basically. Nothing has changed. Which is odd when you consider that over the same period, for me and Syd, everything has.
Syd says she’s hiding. I don’t blame her, but hiding isn’t going to make any of this go away. I’m not saying I know what will, but writing this, getting things straight, it has to help. Right? It has to. And there’s so much we haven’t covered yet. All the important stuff, in fact. Which, Jesus, makes it sound like I don’t think what happened to Elsie is important, but that’s not what I’m saying, I swear.
It’s just . . . it’s beginning to feel like I’m losing her. Syd, I mean. Like the longer this goes on, the closer she is to giving up. And that just isn’t like Syd at all.
I’m scared, too, Syd. Especially now. Because of the police, yes, but also because it’s starting to dawn on me that maybe—probably—you were right. About what’s been happening. About why. I mean, honestly? The truth is, I’m bloody terrified. But that just makes me want to get on with this all the more. To do something instead of just sitting here, waiting for whatever happens next. And if people are going to understand, it’s up to us to try to make them. Right?
Please, Syd.
Please.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SYDNEY
JACK’S JUST LEFT. He came to the hospital to see Elsie but also I think to check up on me. I got the impression he wanted to talk, though we barely exchanged a word. What could we say, given the cir
cumstances? They still won’t let us into Elsie’s room but you can see her if you press against the glass. Obviously I’ve been doing that on a regular basis and each time I retreat to my chair afterward feeling worse than I did when I got up. Elsie looks so small in that bed she’s in, she barely makes a lump in the bedcovers. There are tubes running from her nose, from her arms, from every part of her, it seems to me, to the extent it appears almost as though it’s the tubes that are trapping her. She’s like a butterfly caught in some malformed web and though I keep hoping she’ll find the strength to break free, whenever I check on her she appears more ensnared than she did before.
But I’m not giving up, Jack. Not on Elsie, not on us. What I wrote before, that was just . . . it was just a wobble. There’s no way I’d ever leave you to face this on your own. Trust me on that. Please. Although I suppose that’s easy enough for me to say. When it comes to judging who to trust or not, my record is about as bad as anyone’s.
—
TIMING HAS NEVER been one of my mother’s strong points. After what happened to Elsie, a visit from her was the very last thing I was in the mood for but when she asked less than a week after it happened I wasn’t in any state to put up a fight. And actually there was a part of me that wanted to see her. Two parts, in fact, neither one of which did me any credit. There was the little girl in me who simply wanted her mummy. And there was the bitch in me who wanted someone to blame. For Elsie. For everything.
I’d never before let her see where I lived. Not since I’d left home. We mainly wrote to each other so she knew where to find me but since I’d first got back in touch with her—five years ago, roughly—I’d made it clear that she was never, ever to call on me uninvited. To be fair to her, she hadn’t complained. She was grateful I was even in contact with her, so anything more than that she would have regarded as a bonus. And it wasn’t that she’d made a particular fuss this time. She’d mentioned how nice it would be to be able to picture where I was living, that was all. To see it in her mind rather than just imagine it. It was because we’d finally bought somewhere, I assumed—her perception that I was approaching a happy ending.
Ha.
“Hello, Sydney.”
She was smiling broadly to cover her nerves. I saw my mother so rarely—twice a year, if that—that I was always caught off guard in some way by her appearance. Today I was surprised mainly by how old she looked. Not old. Tired. She was clothed and coiffed as elegantly as ever. Even though she no longer had access to my father’s money, was these days practically a pauper, she endeavored to present herself to the world as she always had. She still bleached her hair a silvery blond once a month, spent twenty minutes each morning painting her face. The makeup this time, though, didn’t offset her pallor. I knew she struggled with sleep as much as I did and I assumed she was just tired . . . until she moved inside and I noticed her hobble.
It was her hip then. Not tiredness that was weighing on her, pain. Her hip had been broken (had been broken—it sounds so passive. What I mean is her hip was broken for her.) the one time she’d attempted to insert herself between her eldest daughter and her husband. It happened when I was small, soon after my father’s attentions began to wander from my mother toward me, and it was only as I grew older that I started to appreciate what my mother’s actions that day really signified. I’d always blamed her for failing to protect me, for not just leaving and taking me and Jessica with her—and in many ways I still did. But that hip of hers in my mind had become her saving grace. If she hadn’t tried just that once, my leaving home would have been the end of it. I never would have wanted to see my mother again. As it was it had taken me almost a decade to get back in touch and even longer to trust her with anything more revealing about my new life than an e-mail address.
“It’s ‘Syd,’ Mum,” I reminded her. “Only my boss calls me Sydney.”
I pressed myself to the wall to allow her to pass, careful not to let her brush against me. The first time we’d met up, I remember, she’d tried to hug me. There’d been no attempt at physical contact since.
“Oh, darling, this is lovely,” she gushed. “This is yours? All of it’s yours?”
“It’s ours, yes. Mine and Jack’s and the bank’s. The kitchen’s at the back, Mum. Straight through there.”
“But it’s enormous! How on earth did you afford it?”
“We saved, Mum. We worked. That’s the sitting room, Mum. The kitchen’s—”
“At the back. I know, dear, I heard you. But I can’t resist having a nose. Look at those ceilings!”
“I’ll give you the tour, Mum, but let’s just . . . I don’t know. Put the kettle on or something first.”
My mother continued making clucking sounds as we ambled along the hallway and I did my best not to sound irritated by her enthusiasm. Even the way Mum said my name sometimes annoyed me. Not sometimes. Always. I’m not sure she could have said it any other way—apart from by calling me “Syd,” that is, as I’d asked her to about a gazillion fucking times—but somehow she made it sound like a rebuke. A chastisement for having tossed aside the name she’d given me. And that limp. It was more pronounced than I’d ever seen it and I couldn’t help but wonder whether she wasn’t half putting it on. She never would have dared to say so but probably she was disappointed I’d allowed so much time to pass since we’d last seen each other, and playing up her suffering was her way of letting me know.
“Where is Jack?” Mum said, when we finally made it to the kitchen. “Will he be joining us?”
I started to fill up the kettle. “He’s working today,” I lied. “All weekend actually.”
The truth was he’d made himself scarce. Not my choice. His. Rather sweetly, Jack’s always been less ready to forgive my mother than I have. Not that I’ve forgiven my mother either but if it were up to Jack she would have been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. He says he understands why I would want to see her (which is more than I manage, half the time) but that he can’t bring himself to be part of it.
(Just as an aside, I’ve always found it odd that Jack doesn’t apply the same standards in judging his own parents. My mother’s sin was one of omission and Jack’s parents’ failings lie in what they’ve always neglected to offer their child too. Attention, for example. Encouragement. Love. And yet Jack calls them—religiously—every Sunday, with such longing in his voice that my heart aches just listening to him on the telephone. Although I realize that the distance between them is partly my fault because they made it clear they disapproved of me from the beginning.)
“Sit down, Mum. Just shove all that clutter to one side.” I made a start clearing the kitchen table but my mother continued toward the window.
“I’m happy standing for the time being, darling. I was sitting all morning on the train ride.”
My mother’s fingers drifted toward her hip but she didn’t take the opportunity to mention it, which made me wonder whether the pain was genuine after all. In the brightness of the kitchen I could see she was even paler than I’d first thought and all at once I felt a wave of sympathy. Of shame too, that I’d treated her thus far so coldly. My mother had suffered at my father’s hand just as much as I had and being forced to watch what was happening to me must have in itself been a form of torture. And though she’d escaped, eventually, just as I had—after Jessica, after my father went to prison—she’d hit a snake and not a ladder. She was divorced and living all alone. She had a shitty job and a shitty little flat and not even the comfort of any real friends.
That’s why I saw her, I reminded myself. That was the reason I’d got back in touch. As much as I resented her, I also pitied her. As much as I hated her, I also loved her. Because, well . . . she was my mum. No matter what she’d done, no matter what I blamed her for, there was nothing I could do to change that.
We drank tea. Two cups each. We didn’t chat exactly because that’s far too frivolous a
word for it but we talked, cautiously—her about the price of things; me, at her prompting, about my job, which at least distracted me from thinking about Elsie—and I watched her as she nibbled at a biscuit. The hour almost passed by incident-free—until Mum, at the end of it, started crying.
She was still by the window. She’d turned away, so that without knowing it she was directly facing Elsie’s house, but I caught the whimper that escaped her throat.
“Mum?”
Up until that point I’d almost been glad I’d invited her over. My mother was never going to be a shoulder for me to cry on but in a weird, complicated way I’d drawn some comfort from her presence nonetheless. And, for the most part, I’d managed to keep my inner bitch in check. Yet I felt precariously balanced and the sight of my mother sobbing only tipped me closer to irritation. Maybe that’s counterintuitive but as far as I was concerned she had no right to cry. Not in front of me.
“What is it, Mum? What’s wrong?” I tried to keep my tone neutral. The impatience would have been plain for her to hear.
“I’m just . . . I’m happy for you,” my mother said. “That’s all. Seeing you here. In your new home.”
I felt myself frown.
“I just think . . . I just know you’re going to be fine. You and Jack. That it’s all going to work out for you both.”
Which I suppose was meant to be reassuring but only made me think once again about Elsie. And because of that—because my mother was crying—I allowed myself to ask something I knew very well would upset her but that, in light of Elsie, had been playing disproportionately on my mind. The way I saw it, both my mother and I had made a choice: me to intervene, my mother—bluntly—to stand back and watch. The thing I was struggling with was how two contrasting answers to the same question could both end up being so wrong.
