by Julie Cohen
I couldn’t help but stare. This beautiful girl, with her X-Men backpack and her easy, confident walk, dared to go right up to a stranger and ask something like that. I never would have dared that in a million years. What kind of girl was this? Was she even safe? Why would she choose me, of all people?
‘Oh, that’s so kind, Avril,’ said Mum in her gentle voice. ‘Lydia doesn’t know anyone either.’
I elbowed Mum, who was making me look bad in front of this girl. But the girl just smiled at Mum, and then she smiled at me. ‘That would be really great,’ she said.
There was a little waver in Avril’s voice as she spoke. A little tiny waver, that maybe she was hoping no one else would even notice.
I noticed it.
‘OK,’ I said.
Mum went to hug me, and I stepped back a little, wanting a hug maybe but also knowing it wasn’t really cool, and Mum took the hint (for a miracle) and put her hands back into her pockets. ‘Have a wonderful day, Lyddie. Tell me all about it afterwards.’
‘All right,’ I said, and the beautiful girl Avril and I walked through the school gates together. We walked, not saying anything, shoulder to shoulder, and all I could think was, I am walking next to the most beautiful girl in the school.
When we got into the middle of the playground, I risked a glance backwards, but Mum was gone. She would be walking quickly back home, and she would have that smile on her face that she got when she was trying not to cry. I was glad I didn’t have to see it.
‘Do you like X-Men?’ asked Avril. ‘It’s my favourite film.’
‘I like it, too.’
‘What would be your mutant power?’
‘I’d be able to see everything.’
‘I’d be invisible. But if you could see everything, you would be able to see me!’
I could look at you for ever, I thought. My heart pounding, I said, ‘We’d have to work together.’
‘Thank you,’ said Avril. ‘I was a little bit scared back there, but as soon as I saw you and your mum I knew you would help me.’
‘There’s no need to be scared,’ I said, and at that moment, I knew I was saying the truth. ‘It’s all going to be fine. You can hold this for a little while, if you want.’ I took out Daddy’s watch and put it into her hand. ‘It’s a magic watch. It can make you feel brave, because my Daddy was brave, and it was his.’
She took it, and turned it over in her hands, and she nodded. ‘I feel better already,’ she said.
And that was the beginning of everything.
Chapter Eight
Honor
‘NO,’ SAID HONOR. ‘That is not a good idea.’
She felt rather than saw the hurt on Jo’s face, and heard the recoil of her body. It was literally as if she’d been slapped.
Jo never could hide anything. From the first time Stephen had brought her home, his new and beautiful girlfriend, Jo’s face had been open and childlike, every emotion written on it plain to see. The emotion had been worse, more exposing, than her cheap dress and bad shoes, the books she hadn’t read. Everything about her screamed, Will you be my mother, too, my new mother, to replace the one I’ve lost?
Honor had winced in embarrassment for her.
‘But it’s the best thing,’ Jo insisted. ‘You wouldn’t have to worry about meals, or company, or getting around. There won’t be any stairs for you at all, not like at home.’
‘The key word,’ said Honor, ‘being home. I have no desire to leave my home, where I have lived nearly all of my life. The home my father bought and furnished.’
‘Mrs Levinson, you’ve had a serious accident.’ Honor didn’t know the consultant, and she didn’t remember his name. He was a strip of a thing with a high-pitched voice.
‘Don’t talk down to me. I know what you’re trying to say: I’m old. And yes, I am old, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that I fell down the stairs. Anyone could fall down the stairs, no matter what their age. I don’t plan to do it again.’
‘Nobody’s saying you’re old,’ said Jo. ‘In fact, I think you’re in amazing shape, Honor. You rode your bicycle every day, didn’t you, up until you fell?’
Honor pressed her lips together. This was the worst of it, worse than the pain: the condescension. From everyone, not only from Jo, but from Jo it was worse. Jo, who no longer wore cheap clothes or bad shoes but who otherwise hadn’t changed at all. A beautiful blur of bouncing auburn hair, flowery dress, cheery voice. She wore rose-scented perfume and a necklace made out of string threaded through pieces of dried pasta, which clicked together as she moved and advertised I am a mother of small children.
‘What we’re saying,’ Jo continued, ‘is that you should be somewhere that you can be looked after, while you recover.’
‘Nonsense. I’ll hire a nurse.’
‘You should be with people who care about you.’
‘And that is you, is it?’
‘Well … yes. Of course.’ But the slight hesitation gave her away.
‘You don’t like me,’ Honor said. ‘We have never liked each other, and Stephen’s death has set us free from each other. You don’t want me in your home; you don’t like visiting me. You’re offering out of guilt.’
‘I’m offering because you’re Stephen’s mother, and Lydia’s grandmother, and you need help, and I’m happy to give it. And of course I like you in my home, Honor. You are always welcome there.’
How did she manage to say things like that, and sound so sincere? It was a skill that Honor had never possessed.
‘No,’ she said.
‘As I’m sure you know, Mrs Levinson, we aren’t happy about discharging elderly patients unless there is a homecare plan in place.’
‘Dr Levinson,’ she told him. ‘My name is Dr Levinson. It is not Mrs Levinson. If you don’t like calling me “doctor”, since I’m not a medical person like you, perhaps you will be so kind as to call me “Honor”.’
The doctor shuffled his notes.
‘We have a bedroom on the ground floor with an en-suite bathroom,’ said Jo.
‘That’s Lydia’s, isn’t it?’
‘Lydia will be happy to let you use it. We’ll repaint the room and hang new curtains. My friend Sara’s husband Bob says he’ll drive his van up to London and fetch any of your furniture you’d like to have with you, so you can sleep in your own bed, if that makes you more comfortable. And Dr Chin says he’s happy to refer you to the Royal Berks if you need any follow-up care.’
‘You seem to have this all arranged,’ said Honor drily.
‘The children would love to have you, too,’ said Jo.
Honor grunted.
‘They’d be excited,’ insisted Jo. ‘Lydia was going to make you a card – she really wanted to – but she had homework. It’s her exam year, you know.’
Honor had five cards. One made by Oscar, a finger painting that had been labelled in Jo’s neat handwriting as ‘a dinosaur’. Two made by Iris, with the same fingerpaints but no discernible subject. One from Jo, with a picture of hyacinths. One from her neighbour Charvi, who was in her fifties and complained about her sciatica every time she walked up the front stairs. The cards jostled for space on the tiny bedside cabinet, along with a plastic jug of water and a cardboard kidney dish containing Honor’s toothbrush and toothpaste. They fell down whenever a doctor or nurse drew the curtains around the bed of the snoring woman who was next to her in the ward, and Honor had given up trying to keep them upright.
She also had one balloon. This was new; Jo had brought it today, along with grapes, a novel that Honor would never read, and a plastic box of homemade brownies, ‘to keep your strength up!’ Jo had bounced in, smelling of roses, her shoes whispering on the floor, and the balloon trailing behind her. It had taken Honor a few moments to work out what it was. It was silver and yellow, round, with a streaming yellow ribbon, and it said GET WELL SOON on it.
‘What is that?’ Honor had said, looking up from the book she wasn’t reading.
&nb
sp; ‘I thought it might cheer you up!’ said Jo, as bright as the balloon, even though Honor could see that her flat question had hit home. Jo tied it to the railing at the foot of the bed and said, ‘There – that looks jolly.’
It was ridiculous. It would get in the way of the nurses when they changed the bedlinen. It would lose its gas within a day and droop. It made her appear to be a child. Honor planned to ask a nurse to remove it as soon as Jo left.
But Jo did not seem eager to leave. She was eager, instead, to have Honor moving in with her.
‘No,’ Honor said again. ‘I’d rather have a nurse.’
Jo turned to the doctor. ‘Maybe Honor and I need some time to—’
‘I’ll let you talk it over,’ he said, and left them. Jo sat down in the chair next to the bed.
‘Honor,’ she said softly, so bloody kindly, ‘I understand that you want to stay in your own home, but this is just a temporary measure. Nurses are expensive, and although I’m sure the council can help you, with us you wouldn’t have to—’
‘I am perfectly able to take care of myself. You needn’t worry. I’ll be up and on my feet in no time.’
‘But all those stairs—’
‘I,’ she said firmly, ‘will be fine.’
‘You must have put me down as your next of kin for some reason, Honor.’
Honor was gratified to hear the exasperation in Jo’s voice. It was better than this cheeriness and this patience that must be false, that she must be putting on for the doctor’s benefit, for her benefit.
‘I didn’t have anyone else,’ she said. ‘And I don’t need anyone else, either. I am absolutely fine on my own.’
The mattress underneath the sheet was lined with plastic. It rustled every time Honor moved; it kept moisture on the surface so that at night her body felt steamed, like a slice of fish.
Until now, she had never spent a single night in hospital. Even when she’d had Stephen, she’d insisted on going home the same day, before dark. The woman across from her had dementia and spent every morning from two o’clock to four o’clock calling for someone called Twisty. The woman next to her snored. When Honor did get to sleep, nurses woke her up to take observations, and she would lie awake afterwards, staring into the half-light, waiting for the pain to begin again.
The medication they gave her helped, but it wore off. First there was a dull throbbing, then a slow knife through her hip. By the time the nurse came with her pills, she was on fire. This evening she had caught herself nearly snatching at the pills, wanting to cram them into her mouth and down her throat, under the steady gaze of the nurse.
She had carefully returned them to the paper cups. ‘I don’t think I need them today,’ she had said.
And now it was three in the morning, not that you would know it, with the lights on and the nurses wandering back and forth on their crepe soles, talking in low murmurs. The balloon bobbed at the end of her bed and made crinkling sounds every time someone passed.
She had not read her bank statements for some time, but her memory was good. She knew her expenditure, her income. Her only asset was her house, the house her father had bought, which she would not sell. The Occupational Therapist who had come to see her this afternoon after Jo left had told her what a private nurse would cost. It was more than she could afford. And what would the council be likely to provide?
‘We would move you to a rehabilitation centre,’ said the OT, who was brisk and smelled of mint gum and cigarettes. ‘You would stay there until you were able to cope on your own, perhaps with someone to pop in once a day to help you. The benefit of this would be that you would be in the system, if you need more help in the future.’
In the system. The system that led to trading your home for an institution, losing your life to dependency. The system that crunched up old people who were past their use, and shoved them into strange bare rooms and the condescending voices of strangers.
Honor lay back on her pillow, took a deep breath of air that smelled of hospital laundry and disinfectant, and closed her eyes. She thought about Stephen, as she always did. First thing upon waking, last thing upon falling asleep. Stephen’s hair slicked to his head when he was born, and the way his squashed-up face turned to hers. Stephen running in the sunshine in Clissold Park, his knees covered in scabs and grass stains. Stephen after a nightmare, climbing into bed with her, pushing his sweat-dampened head under her chin, against her neck, sighing into that heavy childish sleep. Her one precious boy. She thought about Stephen until the pain swam away somewhere else, and she was able to sleep.
She is in the synagogue, her father’s synagogue, in a little room to the side, waiting to be called to her son’s funeral. She wears a black dress; a torn ribbon is pinned to her breast. She is alone, the only mourner, as she was at her father’s funeral. But this is her son’s.
This is a dream, and she knows it even as she’s dreaming. Stephen’s funeral wasn’t like this; his funeral was in the Brickham crematorium and it was crowded with flowers and people. She sat in the front row and Jo was there beside her, her arms around Lydia. The air was hot and June-heavy. There were no ribbons to tear, no way to show grief but crying.
The door opens by itself, into the main body of the synagogue, and Honor walks to the front, painfully as if moving through a forest of knives. She expects a closed coffin, simple blank pine, but this one is open. Stephen lies inside in his black suit. His face is peaceful and unmarked. He could be asleep, except that he is lying flat on his back with his hands folded on his stomach, and Stephen always slept on his side, curled up.
There is no one else in the synagogue but her and her dead son. No rabbi, no congregation. Wife and child of the deceased are also official mourners, but Jo and Lydia are not there. Honor’s footsteps echo in the room. She lays her hand on Stephen’s.
‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ she whispers to his handsome, still face. ‘You should have kept on running.’
Stephen does not stir. But behind her, she hears a muffled footstep, and she turns and Stephen is standing at the back of the synagogue, in the light shining through the tall windows. He wears his running clothes: T-shirt, shorts with a hole in the hem, battered trainers.
‘Why did you never tell me?’ he says to her, across the distance of pews and time.
His voice sounds exactly as it did in life. Exactly as it did when he asked her those questions. She did not reply then. She cannot reply now. She wants to run to him, to take him in her arms, to breathe him in deep, but the anger in his eyes roots her to the spot, her hand still on the hands of her dead son.
‘Why did you keep him a secret from me?’ he says. ‘All my life, why did you never tell?’
Honor woke up suddenly and completely. Her hip screamed with pain, but she had only made a gasp. It echoed in her ears, along with the pounding of her heart.
Her dream had been bright and clear, every colour sharp, but now the half-darkness of the ward pressed on her eyes and on her chest. It was silent, as it never was in a hospital, and the curtains were drawn around her bed and she was alone. Alone always and forever, with all of the choices that had left her alone.
She groped for the call button and before she could press it she knew that she would go to her daughter-in-law’s house. She would go. She would have no choice, if only to hear the noises of other people in the middle of the night, to feel their gravitational pull, when it was dark, when she was alone and in pain, unable to stop hearing the questions, remembering the omissions she had made, the people she had lost, the prayers – that mourner’s Kaddish by the graveside, familiar as the rhythm of her heart – that she had never said.
Chapter Nine
Lydia
EVERY DAY I run through a hundred scenarios of where it could happen. On the top of a bus, in the back of a classroom, on our walk to school. On a wind-blasted moor. In the back row of the cinema. On a sleepover in my bed.
In every single one of those fantasies, I’m blushing and stammering. I wis
h I could imagine myself eloquent and passionate, but I can’t. I’m blushing and stammering and I look like I’m terrified.
And in every single one of those fantasies, Avril takes my hand and pulls me close. ‘Me too,’ she says. Or even better, she whispers it.
It could happen. It is possible. Maybe Avril’s been hiding how she really feels, all of this time. Or maybe she just doesn’t realize it, but when I confess, her eyes will widen. Everything will click into place. The world will make sense at last and we will be exactly who we are meant to be.
And the world will explode into flowers and unicorns and happy-happy-joy-joy balloons and streamers and confetti, and wars will cease and there will always be rainbows.
It isn’t possible. I know it isn’t.
It’s not like I’m afraid of being gay. It’s the twenty-first century. Being gay is all right. The gay kids at school stick together like a tribe. Georgie and Whitney are practically the couple of the year, though sometimes I wonder if they’re mainly together because they’re the only out lesbians in the entire school. So they don’t have a lot of choice but each other.
If you can stick it out, if you’re popular enough and weird in the right kind of way, if you can laugh off the insults and the teasing and not mind being defined by this one thing about you instead of by all the myriad other things that you also are. If you can live your life as a caricature of yourself and fit in with what people expect of you – if you can adapt from one kind of pretending to an entirely different type of pretending – it’s all right. It’s survivable. You can even be proud of it, if it makes sense to be proud of something that you’ve had about as much choice in as the colour of your eyes or the shape of your nose.
If you’re brave enough – and also if you don’t happen to be in love with your best friend.
Teachers thought they knew what went on in the classroom, but they really didn’t have a clue. As Mr Singh droned on and on about quadratic equations at the front of the room, doing all the whiz-bang stuff on the interactive whiteboard that he thought made up for the fact that his lessons were boring on a galactic scale, a piece of folded paper was being passed from desk to desk around the classroom. When it got to someone, they unfolded it, sniggered, and wrote something down before folding it up again.
