‘Don’t worry. I’ll be OK.’
Anthony was silent for a moment. ‘Can you just call me if you’re not?’ He held out a card.
Delia didn’t reply.
‘You’re not a helpless woman who needs help from a man to do something women can’t do, you know. You’re a human that needs help with something she’s finding difficult, just at the moment.’
‘Fine.’ She reached out a hand and took his card. ‘I’ll call you if it takes me more that two hours to find my house.’
‘One hour.’
‘An hour and a half.’
‘One hour.’
‘No deal.’
‘Good lord, woman.’
‘It’s an hour and a half or I’m not calling at all.’
‘You leave me with no choice.’
‘Deal with it.’ Delia grinned suddenly. It was at that moment that she learned that Anthony’s left cheek crinkled more than his right when he smiled.
She thought about that crinkle a lot as she walked from the station to her house, unaware that she circled it four times before finding it.
Robert.
IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF the night and Robert lay awake as the numbers on the clock changed. In his mind he was filling out a job application. Trying to fill out a job application. It wasn’t for any job in particular, he hadn’t bothered to imagine that far. All the applications he’d looked at and failed to complete over the last couple of weeks had become indistinguishable from one another so there was no need to be specific in fraught late-night fantasies. All the time now there was a phantom phalanx of HR officers hovering over him as he stared at questions he no longer had any answers to. What is your previous work experience? Why did you leave your last job? Who are your referees?
How was he supposed to convince someone that his inability to account for the last six years of his working life was no reason not to give him a new job?
He tried to construct an elaborate explanation that would be more believable than the sudden vanishing of his workplace. He could say he’d spent a few years caring for an elderly aunt well off the grid in the highlands, although he’d have to try to reverse the Londoning that had happened to his accent over the years. He could say that when he got married he decided to be a home maker for a few years while Mara worked. He could claim to have spent a few years travelling, exploring the hidden and dangerous areas of deepest Africa, and only now came to realise that the world he’d left, the world he’d studied, the world of corporate finance was really where his heart lay.
The main problem with the lie option, apart from the impossibility of choosing between the available options, was that Robert had never successfully lied in his life. He was pathologically honest. It was a problem.
Part of him was relieved every time he let himself give up on a vacancy. Now that he’d stopped working, now that he was thinking about what he should be doing, everything he was qualified for seemed strangely unappealing. He wanted to find something to do, he just wasn’t sure what, and the more he thought about it the less clear it became.
And there was another, less important, but somehow equally unsettling problem.
Robert was bored. It was a long time since he’d been bored. Well, he’d been bored by what he was doing sometimes, but he’d never actually had nothing to do. Not that there was nothing to do entirely; he’d been able to take charge of Bonny’s continued education, which left Mara free to work, and he was enjoying that, but it still left him with hours to fill every afternoon.
It was nice for a few days. He read books he’d been lent months earlier. He weeded the garden. But it wasn’t long before the guilt at being so unproductive began to rub away at him.
He couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that he should be achieving more with his time. That he should be achieving anything at all. That he shouldn’t be wasting his days.
Cassie.
THE CLEANERS WERE THE FIRST to notice the floor – naturally. Few people pay close attention to the floor in an airport, there are generally much more important concerns.
It happened like this:
Cherry, the cleaner Cassie liked the least, the one who stared and never spoke, was polishing the floor on the far side of the terminal.
Cassie didn’t know, because she’d never tried to find out, but Cherry had been cleaning the airport terminals for twenty years to support her daughter, who was deaf. Cherry herself was deeply superstitious and believed the deafness was due to a curse.
Cherry was using the floor buffer over by the least popular of the cafes when it suddenly shuddered and stopped. She slapped the side of it and pressed its big red button and it shuddered some more. After a few more tries and three solid kicks, she picked up her radio. Cassie watched her from across the hall as she spoke into the handset, her free left arm flailing wildly in the air. She watched as Cherry returned the radio to the holster and waited.
It was Burt who came to Cherry’s aid. Burt had a daughter, and his daughter had too many boyfriends. He smiled at Cassie when he saw her, but in a manner that was clearly based on trying to avoid conversation.
Burt approached Cherry and Cherry threw her hands in the air, wailing about how the machine hated her, how it had been battling her from the first, how it was out to get her, how she wouldn’t let it see her cry.
Burt pressed the big red button. He kicked the machine. He pressed the button again. He sighed.
Eventually the two of them got the machine onto its side and, on their hands and knees, started peering at its undercarriage. Cherry put her hand deep into the bowels of the beast and pulled out something that appeared to be blocking it.
She and Burt stared at the green mulch in her hand.
They looked up at one another’s confused faces.
They looked at the floor.
Slowly, Burt put out his hand and ran it over the surface of the floor. He grasped something between his thumb and forefinger and pulled at it. He held it up in front of Cherry’s eyes, which were rounded in amazement.
Sticking out from between Burt’s fingers was a slender and perky blade of grass.
The two cleaners gazed down at the sparse lawn spreading over the floor beneath them. From their unusually low angle, it was so apparent they wondered how they’d missed it up until this point. The grass seemed to get thicker further away from them, the green hue it gave the floor getting stronger as it neared the bark-covered feet of Cassie, until it faded into the white corners in the distance.
Burt pulled out his own radio and spoke into it. Cassie watched from the other side of the room as Burt and Cherry stood and waited.
Eventually they were joined by the security guard. The young security guard. Jasper.
Cherry hung back with her arms crossed as Burt talked to Jasper. He pointed at the floor and at Cassie and at the floor again. Jasper ran a hand over his face, nodded a couple of times and ambled over to Cassie.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Hi,’ said Cassie.
‘Right,’ said Jasper. ‘The thing is, we’ve had a complaint.’ He cracked a knuckle nervously.
‘About me?’
‘Not really. Kind of. You looked at the floor recently?’
Cassie was confused. She didn’t like looking at the floor. No one does, really, it’s always so much dirtier than we like to think, but for Cassie it was also the place where she didn’t have any feet.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Do you … Do you want me to?’
‘Oh, yes please,’ said Jasper.
Cassie stared at him for a moment before glancing down.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s green. The floor’s green. What have you done to it?’
‘I haven’t done anything. No one’s done anything. It’s grass. There’s grass growing on the floor. Of the airport.’
Cassie looked down again, her puzzled gaze travelling slowly out from where her own roots entered the floor to the further, whiter edges of the arrivals lounge.
‘Right,’ said Jasper. ‘Thing is, the cleaners need to polish the floor. But they can’t because of the grass. They asked me to just see if there’s any way you can stop it.’
‘It’s not me. It’s the floor that’s doing it.’
‘Right. There’s just some debate amongst the cleaning staff about whether you’re responsible for the whole, ah, situation, or, well, not. If you can do anything about it.’
‘It’s not my fault.’
‘Right. Well. I just said I’d check.’
‘You don’t believe me. How am I supposed to make it stop? What do you expect me to do? I didn’t start it; it’s happening to me. I can’t control it. I can’t fight it.’
‘Can you not, then?’ said Jasper. ‘Righto.’
Cassie watched him has he strolled back to the two cleaners. He talked to them for a moment. They didn’t look happy, but they packed up their equipment and left. Jasper watched them leave and then walked back over to Cassie.
‘I’ve told them they’ll have to make other arrangements. But if you think of anything …’
Cassie said nothing.
Jasper looked at Cassie for a moment. He seemed undecided about something.
He signed. ‘And if you need anything,’ he said, as he turned to walk away, ‘give me a shout.’
The Watch.
ITEM: WATCH
Place found: supermarket floor, confectionery aisle.
The tall man had had the watch all his life. It had belonged to his grandfather and didn’t work, but he wore it all the time. Most of the time. When he went running he left it in the bathroom and one day, when he was travelling on business, he forgot to put it back on.
The hotel found it and called his office who confirmed that it was his. Someone in the hotel’s administration department was charged with posting it back to him, but she was new and distracted and chose the envelope poorly.
By the time the envelope reached the tall man it contained only a hole in the bottom left corner.
The tall man didn’t want to tell his mother that he’d lost the watch. She hadn’t wanted him to have it, but his grandfather had given it to him directly just before he died. So he didn’t go home for Christmas that year. Or the year after.
Delia.
AIMLESS WANDERING CAN BE STRANGE and romantic if you do it occasionally, unexpectedly, and in a nice place; meandering through strange towns and foreign cities, strolling down country lanes. But aimless wandering in your own neighbourhood in North London is rarely romantic or interesting, and never so when you do it on a daily basis. Your head isn’t paying attention, so your feet simply follow the path you’ve led them down before. Your mind stops noticing, but your eyes look at the same houses and shops they’ve seen every day for most of forever.
Ever since the accident, Delia had been walking with no goal but that of temporary escape. She’d walked with no interest in what was around her, because there was nothing around her she hadn’t expected to see. She would walk, she would turn, she would walk back, and she would notice nothing.
Now that she was lost, as soon as she walked a few metres from her front door, she’d begun to pay attention to everything around her, in a vain attempt to find her way. She was discovering streets she’d never been down, finding shops, squares, cafés.
As terrifying as it was to be completely lost, there was something about it she enjoyed, something that made it worth the fear.
On this particular day, although she didn’t know it, she was walking towards the scariest place she had been in years.
She’d left the house two hours earlier, having first set her mother up with enough easily reachable food to last a village for a week.
She was walking down a street that seemed purely residential when she saw the sign. The building it was sitting outside was your common or garden brick house. It advertised weekly art classes, with one starting that evening. She found herself rooted to the spot, wide-eyed and much sweatier than she’d been a moment earlier.
She stood staring at the sign, not noticing the small, wispy man who was standing in the doorway of the house beyond.
‘Yes?’ he said eventually. ‘Hello?’
Delia jumped. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hello. I just … the sign. I saw it.’
‘What? Oh. Art. All right. It’s, er, my wife. She’s just … come in. I’ll make you some tea.’
Delia followed the creature into a bright hallway and through to a kitchen, wiping her palms on her dress.
‘She’s just on the phone. Bit of a panic, I’m afraid. Sure it’ll work itself out. I was just about to get some tea ready, though. Just in case. You’re an artist, are you? Can’t draw at all myself, I’m afraid. History. That’s where I’m at home. History makes sense to me, you see. You can understand people, whole cultures, from looking at what happened to them. At what they’ve done. Art is, well, it’s more, I suppose … isn’t it? My wife’s incredible, though, truly astounding, truly. That’s hers, you know.’
He pointed to a small painting on the wall. Blocks of colour showing hills and a horizon, with a figure silhouetted against it. Somehow it looked both lonesome and hopeful.
‘It’s lovely.’
‘Isn’t it, though? Marvellous, she is.’
He spooned tea into a pot and filled it from the kettle. As it brewed he filled a plate with scones and got jam and butter out of a cupboard.
‘Look good, don’t they?’ he said, nodding at Delia. ‘Made them. Made them myself. Just out of the oven half an hour before you knocked at the door. Best thing about being retired, that. Baking. My wife’s a disaster at baking, a complete disaster. Doesn’t pay attention, you see. You’ve got to pay attention. It’s a science, getting it right.’
Just as he was bringing the tea things over to the table, a tall, gangly woman came soaring into the small kitchen.
‘Well! It’s all an absolute fucking catastrophe, beloved, naturally, isn’t it? They’ve no fucking commitment, these youths of today, have they? Not to employers, not to fucking art. She may say she’s ill, but I know perfectly well that she just feels fucking fat today. And try as I might to tell her that nobody fucking cares, that fat is fucking interesting, I cannot make any headway. She just gets all fucking offended, as if it’s my fault she has such low fucking self-regard. Oh, hello, who are you?’
The woman peered at Delia while pulling out a battered silver cigarette case and lighting a cigarette.
‘This is – oh.’ The elfin little man suddenly seemed to realise he’d forgotten the niceties of introduction. ‘She wants to talk about the art classes.’
‘I’m Delia,’ said Delia. ‘The sign is what I saw. Outside.’ She blinked a couple of times. She didn’t know why she was suddenly so nervous.
‘There may not fucking be any classes, my darling. It’s all going fucking up in fucking smoke. These scones, beloved, are a marvel.’
‘Thank you, my dear. Is there no one else?’
‘No there bloody isn’t. I’ve called everyone except that nymphet, Rena, Lena, whatever it was, and I’m not fucking calling her; she posed as if it were a playboy shoot or some fucking such nonsense, she was a complete fucking waste of time.’
Delia was completely overwhelmed by the magnificent person in front of her. She’d never heard such spectacular swearing.
The woman suddenly interrupted herself. ‘Would you like more tea, my dear?’
‘Oh, thanks, that would be lovely. What’s gone wrong, exactly?’
‘My fucking model’s cancelled for tonight’s class.’
‘Is it a life drawing class?’
‘Yes, yes, but there’s no fucking life to draw, so I’m afraid I don’t know what to tell you.’
Delia was silent for a moment. An art class had seemed exciting when she first came into the house, when she saw the painting on the wall. But when she thought about actually being in one, about having a paintbrush in her hand and a blank sheet of paper in fr
ont of her, she didn’t think she could do it. She hadn’t so much as doodled a flower in years.
But maybe she could be a part of the class without attending it.
‘I could sit for it,’ she said suddenly.
The woman stared.
‘Would you actually? I thought you wanted to take the class yourself?’
‘Oh,’ said Delia. ‘No. No, I don’t want to take a class. I don’t want to take an art class. No.’
‘Oh. I thought that was the reason you came in. Was it not? But yes, would you fucking actually? Have you done it before? I don’t want to force you into it, you know, it’s not for everybody, but you would really be saving the whole thing and probably single-handedly restoring my faith in all of fucking humanity.’
‘I think it would be fine.’
‘Amazing. Fucking amazing. You said your name; what was your name?’
‘Delia.’
‘Delia, fabulous. I’m Mattie. This is Donald.’
‘Charmed,’ said Donald. Delia grinned.
Mrs Featherby.
THERE WAS A CHILD-SHAPED BLUR on the other side of the plastic sheet. Mrs Featherby noticed it at twenty-seven minutes past three. Certain it would disappear before long, she elected to ignore it.
At thirteen minutes to four, when it had not moved, she retreated to the kitchen, deciding it was high time she made a start on that cake she’d been meaning to bake. The two fruit loaves she’d had in the pantry had had to be thrown out that morning. She measured out flour and sugar and cracked eggs and softened butter. She whisked and stirred and mixed and when the cake was safely in the oven she thoroughly cleaned all utensils, bowls and surfaces.
There was half an hour still left on the timer and the kitchen was not a comfortable place for one to sit with one’s book, so Mrs Featherby returned to the sitting room. The blur had not moved on.
Mrs Featherby stood, unsure of what to do for several moments. She edged slowly towards the blur. And more slowly, a little closer.
Of Things Gone Astray Page 8
