Handle With Care and Other Stories

by Ann MacLaren

  Elspeth was obviously having difficulty getting her head around this newly introduced concept. She had been rendered speechless. I decided to take pity on her.

  “Let me explain,” I said, adopting the attitude of a lecturer about to expound on a complex scientific theory to a class of first year students. It’s taken me years to perfect this tone. “It is not generally understood that a Title isn’t merely a combination of a few words prettily joined together. It is, or should be, a succinct and appealing resumé, a précis, suggesting an outline or a summary of what is to follow. Let me give you some examples. A title such as Nightmares in Strange Beds, might explore the themes of fear, the past, inner journeys and so on. A title such as Romance in Rome would deal with love and travel. But I Digress would obviously suggest some well known after dinner speaker’s autobiography. So you see, Title writing is the basis of Literature itself. It’s an art form. Not everyone can do it.”

  Elspeth seemed impressed. “Is there a lot of call for Title writers?”

  “Of course there is,” I replied, warming to my subject. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of work I get. Not just from authors either. Magazine and newspaper editors often contact me whenever they decide to run a Short Story competition, and sometimes songwriters ask for help. And on more than one occasion I’ve been contacted by a film company to help them out when inspiration has failed their own experts in the field. I get a lot of work from Ministers of Religion too, although why a Sunday sermon should need a snappy title I just don’t know. They’ve got a captive audience after all.”

  Elspeth’s mouth was beginning to drop open, in amazement I assumed, but just in case she was trying to get a word in, I hurried on.

  “I also supply Titles for dinner parties and theme nights. The murder/mystery event has, after all, become rather passé. What people want now is the chance to show off their own inventive talents and use their imaginations. So when a group of friends or acquaintances get together for a Title Dinner they all get a chance to contribute something to a collective story. I even had a young mother phone me once in desperation because she couldn’t cope with the prospect of a long car journey with her three bored children fighting and squabbling in the back seat, and thought that story invention just might keep them all quiet. I felt so sorry for her that I gave her three for the price of one. Not that children’s Titles are any easier, but what would you have done?”

  Elspeth was trying hard to hide her astonishment. She didn’t want to appear naïve, but Title writing was obviously something she wanted to learn more about.

  “Does it provide a good income?”

  She must have been hoping that the formality of the question would make her sound polite rather than just plain nosey.

  “Well, most of my friends are astonished when they learn how much money I earn. You see, I can sell a book title outright instead of having to rely on income from the number of copies sold or the pittance from public lending rights. I’m not allowed to divulge the name of the author who has bought any particular Title, so I can’t claim any credit for its subsequent success, nor can I expect remuneration from the ensuing film rights, but I make a living. A very comfortable living. I have my slack periods just like everyone else, of course. The busiest times are just after some big event, like a war or a national sporting success. There was an enormous rush after the opening of the Scottish Parliament, which was only to be expected. You’d be amazed at the number of people who came over all patriotic then, and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you their names, even if I could.”

  “It sounds fascinating! Do you think I could try it?”

  From the way she was leaning towards me expectantly, almost panting with excitement, I knew she wasn’t referring to a hypothetical future.

  “What… now?”

  I had expected our conversation would trail to a polite end now that I had given a good account of myself, but Elspeth plainly had other ideas. Maybe she was planning a career change.

  “You pretend to be an author,” she said, on the edge of her seat with anticipation. “Give me a subject, tell me what you want to write about, and I’ll think up a title.”

  I thought for a few moments, wondering whether to make the task so easy for her she would quickly become bored with this new game, or to make it so difficult that she would have to admit defeat. What I really wanted was for her to feel obliged to go off and find some other lone partygoer to speak to. I decided that deceptively easy might be the best tactic.

  “Okay. I want to write a tourist book about Edinburgh.”

  She thought about this for longer than I had expected before announcing triumphantly,

  “Stay a While in the Royal Mile”.

  “Mmm,” I said as I clenched my teeth, trying not to laugh. It sounded like a Harry Lauder song. “Perhaps a tad location specific?”

  She looked disappointed.

  “Would you like to try again?”

  Another few minutes passed.

  “I’ve got it! “Edinburgh Street by Street”. Titles were obviously not Elspeth’s forte.

  “Not bad,” I lied graciously. “But I think you’ll probably find that one’s already been written. You’ll have to be a bit more original.”

  “Well what would you suggest?” She sounded piqued.

  “What about Scott’s City spelt with a double “t”. Sir Walter Scott’s city and also a Scots, as in Scottish, city. It’s a clever play on words, don’t you think? And it would allow the writer to give a literary slant to his or her work, or to have an introduction dealing with Scott’s connection with Edinburgh.”

  “You make it sound very easy,” she said, then realising that I might take offence at this remark, compounded it by adding, “Easier than writing a whole book anyway. Have you ever thought of writing a whole book?”

  I kept my cool. No point in reducing myself to her level.

  “I’ve never been tempted in that direction,” I replied. “Not that I have any doubts about my ability, we all have a book within us, after all. Well, some of us have. I just don’t have the time. I’m a writer, yes. But I see my profession as much more prestigious than that of the author. I am the supplier rather than the retailer. The owner rather than the manager.”

  I could see that she was struggling to find something smart and witty to say, something clever that would allow her to have the last word before she extricated herself from our encounter with her dignity intact. But suddenly she glanced at her watch and stood up.

  “Sorry, your time’s up,” she announced with a bright smile.

  “What?”

  “Your time’s up,” she repeated. “I’m only supposed to give thirty minutes to each of you. You’re over that already.”

  “What do you mean ‘thirty minutes each’? What are you talking about?”

  Elspeth radiated smugness.

  “I’m paid by the half hour, you see.” And since I obviously didn’t see, she explained. “I’m a professional partygoer. I’m paid to make conversation with the guests. I don’t have to talk to them all, of course, just the ones that no-one else is talking to. The wallflowers. Well…it’s been lovely meeting you.”

  And with that she turned and strode purposefully towards the opposite side of the room where a studious looking young man stood examining a shelf full of books.

  As I said, I hate parties.

  Early One Morning

  When Lizzie’s father collapsed at the table clutching at his chest early one frosty winter’s morning, barely managing to gasp out a plea for help before vomiting his breakfast back onto his plate Lizzie, only eight years old, knew exactly what to do. She dialled 999, explained the emergency, gave her full name and address and, in case that wasn’t enough, instructions on how to get to their isolated cottage and, while waiting for help to arrive, mopped her father’s brow with a cold cloth. She even, her gr
andmother would boast later, went with him in the ambulance to the hospital (although really this was because the ambulance driver didn’t want to leave her alone at home.) Everyone was so proud of her. If her mother had been alive she would have been proud of her too.

  “If you hadn’t acted so quickly your Daddy might have died,” Lizzie’s grandmother told her when she came to the hospital that afternoon to pick her up. She had cried then, big wet sobs as she buried her face in Granny’s soft coat, and she had been cuddled and comforted.

  “It’s okay to cry, darling. You’ve been so brave today.”

  And her grandmother, sure that Lizzie was thinking of her mummy who had never come home from hospital, added:

  “Daddy will be back home with you again very soon.”

  Which had made her cry even more. Lizzie wondered if she should tell Granny that she didn’t want to have Daddy back home. That she didn’t like Daddy sometimes. That he scared her. She wanted to explain why, but didn’t know what words to use. And Granny was a grown-up, like Daddy. Would she say Lizzie was being silly or nasty or spiteful? Just because Daddy came into bed at night with her sometimes. Just for a hug. A squeeze. A kiss. That’s what daddies do with their little girls, Granny would say. Touch and kiss. Your daddy loves you, that’s why he does that.

  Lizzie’s father had stayed in hospital for nearly three weeks. Three weeks of blissful happiness for Lizzie who couldn’t bear to think about what would happen when her grandmother went away.

  “Please take me home with you, Granny. I’d be such a good help to you, I promise. You must be so lonely living all alone. I could keep you company.”

  But Granny had told her how much she would hate living in the city when she was used to the countryside, and how she would miss all her school friends, and how lonely her daddy would be without her. And then Daddy came back from the hospital, and soon after that Granny went home.

  When Lizzie’s father had his second heart attack, she acted just as swiftly as she had done four years before. It was early in the morning again, but this time he had finished his breakfast and was in the small toilet by the back door. He just managed to call out her name before collapsing onto the floor, where he lay, groaning, trousers round his ankles, wedged between the door and the toilet bowl.

  Lizzie couldn’t open the door, so she took a kitchen chair outside and climbed up onto it to look in through the small, open window. Her father’s face, pressed against the cold floor, looked ghostly white, and he was sweating profusely. There was no noise coming from his slack mouth now, but she knew he was still alive because his eyes were opening and closing, as if that was the only painless movement he was able to make. Then they fixed on to her at the window, staring.

  Staring at her standing there in her thin, nylon nightie. The nightie that had been her mother’s. He had told her to wear it because she looked so like her mother. Her warm, beautiful mother. Lizzie clutched her arms across her chest and shivered.

  She jumped down from the chair and ran back into the house. She knew about the pills he kept in his jacket pocket, and how important it was to get one into his mouth quickly. So she knew exactly what to do.

  Her father’s jacket was hanging over a chair in the hall, and she quickly found the bottle of pills. There were only six left.

  Lizzie tipped the six pills into her hand and put the empty bottle back into the jacket pocket. She went into the kitchen, poked the pills down through the sink drain, and turned on the cold tap to flush them away. Then she got washed and dressed for school. It was almost eight o’clock. She didn’t feel like eating breakfast, but she poured herself a glass of milk and put a couple of biscuits into her schoolbag, in case she got hungry later. There was no sound from the toilet as she tiptoed past and slipped out of the back door to bring in the kitchen chair.

  It was a long walk to the main road to catch the school bus, but Lizzie didn’t mind. She had done it before, often, because her father worked on a farm, and sometimes, especially on early spring mornings like this, he would be off at the lambing. He didn’t always drive her to the bottom of the lane. So nobody would be surprised when she told them, later, that she hadn’t seen her father that morning, that he hadn’t woken her before he left, but anyway, she always set her own alarm clock so that she wouldn’t be late for school.

  Somebody from the farm would ring up to find out why her father hadn’t turned up for work, but there would be nobody to answer the phone. They would be annoyed, but she didn’t think they would come looking for him. He was always taking time off without telling them beforehand. That was why he had to change his job so often.

  It would be a big shock for Lizzie, finding her father dead when she got home from school, but she would be very brave. She would keep calm, just as she had done before. She would dial 999 and give her name and address, and instructions on how to get to the cottage. She would phone her grandmother, who would be very proud of her.

  The bus would be along soon. Lizzie looked around her at the familiar patchwork of fields with their crops and cows and sheep, at the fences and gates and gorse hedges, and at the crows flying overhead. She wondered what it would be like living in the city.

  Trout

  Adam was floating on his back in ten inches of heavily salted water, trying to think pleasant thoughts, when the idea came to him. He had been told by the therapist that one of the benefits of a session in the flotation tank would be deep mental relaxation, an emptying of the mind, yet his brain had been working overtime on all sorts of worries and anxieties: such as how he would manage to find the door when it was time to leave this blacked-out cell. He imagined he’d have to stand up and reach out till he made contact with a wall, then move along the surface testing it with both hands – a bit like Britt Ekland in that bedroom scene in The Wicker Man – until he came upon the door handle.

  There was also the problem of what to do with his arms. At the moment he had his hands clasped behind his head, which was fairly comfortable, but he couldn’t keep them like that for the full hour or they’d become stiff and sore. He had tried relaxing them by his sides, but the buoyancy of the water floated them out sideways until his elbows were level with his ears and his forearms dangled in the general direction of his hips. He was tempted to stretch them straight out at right angles to his body and cross his legs at the ankles, but he thought that might be blasphemous. He supported his head again with his hands. He was anything but relaxed.

  Then there was the hygiene issue. Adam couldn’t help thinking about all the bodies that had been floating in the tank before him that day: had they all washed thoroughly first? Was he floating in a pool of dirt and germs, not to mention hair and dead skin cells? The leaflet he had read in the waiting room suggested that the enormous quantity of Epsom Salts in the water would draw toxins out of his body. Where would these toxins go? Was he, in fact, lying there absorbing the toxins of those who had been in there before him? He was sorry he had allowed Marissa to talk him into this so-called therapy.

  “They say it works wonders for anxiety,” she had told him. “And depression. It’s just what you need.”

  Adam wondered who “they” were. Here he was, anxious about being in the tank, anxious about how clean it was, anxious about getting out of it, depressed about not enjoying it and depressed about the thought of having to lie there being anxious for an hour. It wasn’t working, was it? “They”, it seemed, were wrong.

  He toyed with the idea of standing up and finding his way out of this oversized coffin, but Marissa was out there, in the next room, having a facial. She would hear the shower running; she would probably even hear him trying to find his way out of the tank. She had that super-acute, finely-tuned hearing that only a wife can possess. Sometimes he was sure she could hear him thinking.

  It was Marissa’s discriminating hearing that had caused his anxiety and depression in the first place. No, that wasn’t fair. He couldn’t l
ay this one on Marissa’s shoulders. It was his own faulty hearing; dare he say it, even to himself? His own deafness. He just couldn’t be deaf. For a musician in an orchestra, of course, deafness was an occupational hazard: a lot of them became deaf to a greater or lesser degree sooner or later, what with all the noise going on around them all the time. But he was a concert pianist, for God’s sake. It wasn’t expected.

  It had taken him a long time to admit he had a problem. About the beginning of last year, when he was practising for a concert in Dubai, he began to notice a change in the tone of his piano and wondered if it was suffering the effects of the previous two extremely damp summers. When he mentioned this to Marissa she insisted that the piano sounded as good as it always had. She had a good ear, so she ought to have noticed there was something odd about the sound. He had wondered if perhaps she was becoming a little dull of hearing. She was, after all, approaching fifty. Later that year, when Erica came home from South America, en route for Budapest, and unpacked her violin so that they could play a duet together, he was horrified to hear the mistakes she made. She was usually note perfect. Lack of practice, he supposed, because of her busy lifestyle; but when he suggested this to her she became extremely stroppy.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my playing,” she shouted as she flounced out of the room to complain to her mother. “Why don’t you get yourself a hearing aid?”

  Marissa, who had been listening from the kitchen, took Erica’s side.

  “I thought she played the piece perfectly,” she said. “Maybe you should get your ears syringed. Shall I make an appointment for you?”

  He had refused, of course. But gradually all the little bits of the jigsaw had clicked together: the tone of the piano; not hearing Erica’s high notes; the television sounding muffled; even thinking the musicians who occasionally accompanied him sometimes sounded a bit off. It shouldn’t matter, Adam thought. Beethoven managed to keep going when he was deaf. But he wasn’t Beethoven. If he made a mistake while practising, how would he know? It wasn’t just a case of hitting the right keys; he had to hear the tone, the nuances. He supposed it meant his career was over.