The Four Last Things

by Taylor, Andrew

  The woman turned towards him and he saw the sour, shrivelled face of Mrs Reynolds. She was carrying a pile of magazines in the crook of her left arm.

  ‘Hello, Eddie. I wondered if you’d like a copy of the parish magazine.’ She edged towards him, and automatically he took a step backwards into the hall; now she was standing on the threshold, her sharp eyes sending darting glances over his shoulder. ‘It’s only twenty-five pence.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  It seemed a small price to pay for getting rid of Mrs Reynolds. Eddie turned back into the hall, wondering where to find some money. Almost immediately he realized his mistake. Mrs Reynolds advanced another step. Now she was actually in the house.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to take it regularly. It’s once a month. I know you’re not a churchgoer, but there’s always something interesting in the magazine.’

  ‘All right. Yes, thanks.’

  Mrs Reynolds looked around, openly curious. ‘You’ve changed the place quite a lot since your mum and dad were alive.’

  ‘How much did you say?’ Eddie rummaged desperately through the pockets of his coat, which was hanging in the hall. His wallet wasn’t there.

  ‘Twenty-five pence.’

  The landing light was on. The door to the basement was shut. Perhaps Angel was still in the bath.

  ‘Is Miss Wharton in?’

  ‘I think so. I’ve been having a nap.’

  ‘My husband saw you today. He wondered if you were all right.’

  ‘I was in a bit of a hurry.’ Eddie cast about in his mind for a diversion. ‘How’s Jenny?’

  ‘No better, no worse.’

  Eddie found some change in the pocket of his jeans. ‘While there’s life there’s hope.’

  ‘It’s not life, Eddie. It’s a living death. She’s in a sort of limbo. And because of that we’re all in limbo. Why did she do it? That’s what I want to know. No one else seems to care.’

  He thrust fifty pence towards her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I.’ She took the money.

  ‘Keep the change.’

  She had shown no sign of wanting to give him any. ‘Will you have children? You and Miss Wharton?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s not that sort of – she’s a tenant, that’s all.’

  Mrs Reynolds stared up at him. ‘It’s your business, I suppose.’ She wheeled round and marched outside. On the step, she turned, her head nodding towards him. ‘Sometimes I wish she was dead. My own daughter. You know what, Eddie? I wish she’d died when she was a kiddie. When she was three or four. When she was a baby, even.’

  Mrs Reynolds squeezed her lips together and glared at him. Without another word, she walked away.

  That evening Lucy was drowsy. When she woke up from her long afternoon nap, she was thirsty and her eyes kept drifting out of focus.

  Angel was very kind to both Lucy and Eddie. She invited Eddie down to the basement. Though he knew what to expect, he could not help being shocked by the sight of Lucy. Angel had cut off most of her hair. For an instant he thought that Lucy was a boy.

  ‘It was getting in her way,’ Angel explained. ‘And she hated having it brushed, didn’t you, pet?’

  Eddie sat in the Victorian armchair and Angel put the little girl on his lap. She warmed a red beaker of milk in the microwave and allowed Eddie to feed Lucy.

  Afterwards, Eddie read Lucy a story about a lion who had lost his roar, while Angel sat cross-legged on the bed and shortened a pair of trousers for him. They made a family. This was how life should have been, how it was, how it would be.

  It was very warm in the basement. As Lucy became sleepier, her body seemed to become heavier. Eddie wondered whether she too had flu. He thought she had fallen asleep. Then she stirred.

  ‘Jimmy,’ she murmured. She smelled stale and sweet, what Eddie thought of as the perfume of innocence. ‘Where’s Jimmy?’

  ‘Here.’ Angel picked up the little rag doll, which had been on the pillow of the bed, and passed it to Eddie. He gave it to Lucy. She stuffed the first two fingers of her right hand into her mouth and with her left hand pressed Jimmy against the side of her nose. Eddie smiled down at the dark head.

  Suddenly Lucy squirmed on his lap. She threw Jimmy on to the carpet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Angel asked sharply. ‘He’ll only get dirty again.’

  Lucy began to cry.

  Eddie patted her thin shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’

  The sobbing stopped for an instant. ‘Doesn’t smell right.’

  ‘I told you so,’ Eddie hissed across the room to Angel. ‘He smells wrong when he’s clean. And she’s probably not used to the smell of our soap powder.’

  ‘I can’t help that. He was absolutely filthy. It’s a question of basic hygiene.’

  Angel’s voice was calm but firm. Hampered by Lucy’s weight, Eddie wriggled forward on the seat of the chair and stood up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Angel said.

  ‘I just want to get something.’

  He carried Lucy towards the bed, towards Angel, who held out her arms. Lucy struggled and pointed at the chair.

  ‘You want to stay there?’ Eddie was secretly delighted, interpreting Lucy’s choice as a sign of favour. He lowered her back into the Victorian armchair. ‘I won’t be long.’

  He was aware of Angel looking strangely at him, but he ignored her. He went upstairs to his bedroom, slowly, because any form of movement made his headache worse. Mrs Wump was in her – his? its? – bed in the shoe box in the bottom drawer of his chest. He took her out and sniffed her. She smelt of cardboard, clean clothes and old newspapers. There was a hint of Angel’s washing powder, but not too much. Mrs Wump had never been through the washing machine.

  He carried her down the stairs, knelt by the chair and said to Lucy, ‘Would you like to meet Mrs Wump?’

  Lucy, curled into a foetal ball, was still sucking the fingers of her right hand with furious concentration. She stared suspiciously at Eddie and then held out her left hand. Eddie laid Mrs Wump carefully on Lucy’s palm. She sniffed it.

  ‘It’s not the same,’ she said.

  ‘Of course she doesn’t smell the same. She wouldn’t smell like Jimmy – she’s Mrs Wump.’

  Still holding Mrs Wump, Lucy rested her head wearily against the back of the chair.

  ‘Time for beddy-byes,’ Angel said. ‘And perhaps Lucy should have some more medication before she does her teeth.’

  Lucy was so tired that Eddie had to carry her into the shower room. Her head flopped against Eddie while he brushed her small white teeth. Afterwards, Angel pushed Lucy’s limbs into pyjamas, settled her into bed and turned off the overhead light.

  The only light was now from a lamp with a low-wattage bulb on the table by the window. Angel gathered up the discarded clothes. She washed out the red beaker and filled it with water in case Lucy wanted a drink in the night. Meanwhile, Eddie sat down in the armchair, which was very near the head of the bed, and passed Mrs Wump and Jimmy to Lucy. She laid Jimmy on the pillow and held Mrs Wump against her face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Eddie whispered.

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘What of?’

  Lucy didn’t answer. Now that her head was shorn, she looked even smaller than before. Her eyes seemed larger, and shadows thrown by the lighting created the illusion that her cheeks were sunken. She reminded Eddie of photographs he had seen of concentration-camp victims.

  ‘I’m going to make some supper.’ Angel climbed the stairs. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘I might stay here a little. Just till Lucy drops off.’

  He dug his nails into the palms of his hands, waiting for Angel to veto the proposal. But her footsteps continued to climb the stairs. He heard her opening the door to the hall.

  ‘All right,’ she called down. ‘But don’t be too long. I think we could all do with an early night.’

  The door closed, and Eddie was alone with Lucy. She stared at him with dark, wary eyes.
The duvet had fallen forwards over the lower part of her face. He was suddenly terrified that she would suffocate in the night. Slowly, so as not to frighten her, he reached out his hand and tucked the edge of the duvet under her chin. The movement dislodged Jimmy, who fell to the floor. Eddie picked up the little cloth doll and returned him to his place on the pillow.

  As he did so, Lucy’s eyes closed. Eddie froze, his hand still resting on Jimmy, unwilling to move in case he jarred her back into full consciousness. He felt her breath, warm against his skin, ruffling the hairs on the back of his hand. He had trapped himself in an uncomfortable position. Soon the muscles of his right arm and lower back were complaining. Just a little longer, he told himself, until she’s properly asleep.

  He watched, fascinated, as Lucy’s hand emerged like a small, shy animal from the shelter of the duvet. It moved slowly over the pillow, the fingers working like miniature legs, and touched Eddie’s hand. Her eyes were still closed. She gripped his forefinger.

  The minutes passed. His finger grew sticky with sweat. He remained there, craning over the bed, his eyes fixed on Lucy’s small, white face, until her breathing became slow and regular, until her grip relaxed.

  When Eddie woke up in the morning, it was still dark. He knew at once that the fever was back in full force. It had receded during the previous evening but he had slept badly during the night, aware of a headache, feeling hot, and needing a drink.

  He felt his forehead and the skin seemed to burn his hand. He was more than ever certain that what he had was flu. He felt aggrieved that Angel was not looking after him properly. People could die from flu. He flung his feet out of the bed and felt for his slippers. The house was very warm. Since Lucy’s arrival, Angel had taken to leaving the central heating on at night.

  Movement made his head hurt. He struggled into his dressing gown, opened his door and padded on to the landing. Angel’s door was closed. He tiptoed into the bathroom and had a long drink of water. The paracetamol seemed to have vanished from the bathroom cupboard. He tried to remember what had happened last night after leaving Lucy. He had gone to bed without any supper; he hadn’t been able to face the idea of food. He rather thought that Angel had given him some paracetamol in the kitchen, in which case they were probably still down there.

  Despite the warmth of the house, he shivered. But it was not the fever that made him shiver. He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror and silently mouthed the words that Lucy had used: ‘I’m scared.’

  There was no telling what would happen now. During the night, fragments of memory had mixed with his dreams, and the boundary between them was no longer clear. He had heard Lucy’s screams again. He had seen the flashing blades of the scissors hacking into the dark hair. The points of the scissors had danced perilously close to Lucy’s eyes. Lucy, struggling so violently in Angel’s grip, could have half-blinded herself with one rash movement. He heard again what Angel had said to him when Lucy had been locked, sobbing, into the basement.

  ‘Next time it won’t be the hair.’

  The face in the mirror was looking at him with Lucy’s eyes. Eddie groaned, and backed away.

  He went slowly down the stairs, clinging to the banister, and automatically trying to make as little noise as possible. Angel slept lightly, and she hated being disturbed. In the hall he paused, leaning on the newel post and listening.

  There was a line of light underneath the kitchen door. All his efforts to be quiet had been in vain: Angel must be already up. Eddie padded along the hall, opened the kitchen door and poked his head into the room. It was empty. Frowning, he drifted over to the worktop where the paracetamol were. He swallowed two of them, washed down with a glass of water from the tap.

  His parched throat cried out for a cup of tea. He wondered whether Angel would like some. Either she had returned upstairs to her room or she was in the basement, probably the latter. Somewhere inside him, excitement turned and twisted like a rope being uncoiled. It would be nice to see Lucy again. She was almost certainly asleep, but she might wake up. Offering Angel a cup of tea gave him a good excuse for going to the basement.

  He put the kettle on and went back to the hall. As he had hoped, the basement door was unlocked. It opened silently; Angel had asked Eddie to oil all the hinges in the house.

  A faint pink radiance filled the room, slightly brighter on the side nearer Lucy’s bed. Angel had plugged in the night light and it was still burning. Eddie could just make out the tiny mound which was Lucy in the middle of the bed. There was no sign of Angel, but an oblong of light outlined one of the doors to the right, the door to the freezer room. He hesitated, wondering what to do. A soft, clear ping filled the basement. The sound was not loud but very clear and silvery, as if someone had tapped a small bell with a hammer. An instant later he recognized it for what it was: the microwave’s announcement that it had reached the end of its programmed cycle. Angel must be defrosting something for lunch or supper.

  He tiptoed down the stairs and crossed the carpet to the door of the freezer room. Unlike the door to the hall, this was not soundproofed. As Eddie drew closer, he heard Angel speaking, her voice muffled by the thickness of the wood. It was difficult to make out individual words. What she was saying had a rhythm, though, like footsteps in an empty street.

  He drew nearer the door, stretching out his hand towards the handle. As he touched the knob, Angel’s voice rose slightly in volume. He heard her say quite distinctly, ‘My body.’

  He had never heard her talking to herself before. But, as he knew only too well, you could do the most absurd things when you thought you were by yourself. His hand dropped to his side. Indecision gnawed at him. Should he disturb her, thereby running the risk of making her feel foolish, or slip silently back to the kitchen?

  ‘Memory of me,’ said Angel, her voice rising once again and then dropping back to an indistinct mumble.

  Eddie backed away from the door. Better not to interrupt, he thought. The door was shut, after all. Angel liked to be alone sometimes. She had always made that clear.

  As he backed away, his attention on the door to the freezer room, Eddie stumbled against the arm of the Victorian chair. He stopped, listening. The murmur behind the door continued. Lucy stirred in the bed. In the faint light he made out her dark head moving on the pillow.

  ‘Mummy,’ she whispered in a thin voice.

  Eddie bent down. ‘Hush now. It’s not time to get up. Go back to sleep now.’

  Lucy did not reply. Eddie counted to a hundred. Then he tiptoed up the stairs, slipped into the hall, and closed the basement door quietly behind him.

  Memory of me. The words wriggled uneasily in his memory, defying his attempts to pin them down. What had Angel been talking about?

  The kettle had boiled. Eddie made a pot of tea. While he waited for it to brew, he parted the kitchen curtains and stared into the absence of darkness beyond. London was never truly dark. When he pushed his face against the glass, he saw the trees at the bottom of the garden outlined against the yellow glow of the sodium lamps far to the north. The three blocks of council flats rose like black monoliths on the right of Carver’s. There were plenty of lights in the flats, on the walkways and landings; over the front doors; at ground level. He wondered if one of the lights belonged to the Reynoldses’ flat.

  On impulse, he opened the window and let the cool air flow on to his face. He felt it blowing away the wisps of his fever and leaving clarity behind. He thought of his mind like an empty desert beneath a starlit sky. Happiness caught him unawares. In the distance a goods train rattled over points and a whistle blew.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Angel.

  He swung round, in his agitation knocking the dishcloth on to the floor. Angel was standing in the kitchen doorway, her face unsmiling, her eyebrows raised. She wore jeans and a jersey and had her hair scraped back from her face.

  ‘I’d shut the window if I were you. The gas bill’s going to be bad enough as it is.’

 
He turned away and wrestled with the catch of the window. He heard her coming into the room.

  ‘You’re early,’ she said.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep properly. I’ve still got a temperature.’

  ‘Have you taken some paracetamol?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh good – you’ve made some tea.’

  He looked away from the window to find her opening the refrigerator. She glanced up at him as she slipped a package wrapped in foil and cardboard on to the top shelf.

  ‘I thought we’d have moussaka this evening. In this weather you need something warming.’

  He poured them both some tea. They sat at the table to drink it.

  ‘I need to go out for a while,’ Angel said.

  ‘Now? It’s not even six.’

  ‘I’ve got one or two things to see to.’ She gave him no chance to ask further questions. ‘I think you should go back to bed. This fever’s really knocked you out, hasn’t it? You’re not yourself.’

  As ever, her concern warmed him. ‘I am quite tired still,’ he admitted. ‘I spent a lot of the night tossing and turning. It wasn’t very restful.’

  ‘You go back to bed with another cup of tea. Lucy will be fine – she’ll sleep until nine, at least. I’ll look in on you when I get back.’

  His body was reluctant to move, so Eddie sat at the kitchen table, sipping tea, and wondering when the paracetamol would begin to work. He heard Angel moving about in the hall and upstairs. A moment later, she returned to the kitchen. She was wearing her long, pale raincoat. On her head she wore a black beret, into which she had piled her hair. The collar of her coat was turned up. She lifted her keys from the hook behind the door. In her other hand she carried a buff-coloured padded envelope.

  ‘You’ll be all right by yourself?’

  ‘Fine. I’ll just get some more tea and I’ll go upstairs.’

  ‘Plenty of fluids.’ Angel touched his arm on her way into the hall. ‘Try to get some rest.’

  He listened to her footsteps in the hall and heard the click of the front door closing behind her. He was alone. This won’t do, he told himself. Must get moving. Move where? If he looked inwards, he seemed to be enclosed by infinite space. As space was infinite, movement of any kind seemed pointless. But Angel would be cross if she found him here when she returned.