Of Things Gone Astray

by Janina Matthewson

  ‘Is it time for me to go home?’

  ‘Almost definitely.’

  ‘Can I please come again, please?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘OK.’

  Mrs Featherby walked Small Girl Bonny to the makeshift door and shook her hand in farewell. She watched her amble over the road to her house and have her hair tousled by the man who was waiting by the front door, and then she pinned her plastic sheet back in place. She carried the tray of tea things back to her kitchen and silently began to wash up.

  Jake.

  JAKE PLANNED IT VERY CAREFULLY. He took his mum’s old glasses from his dad’s office. They hadn’t really been his mum’s glasses. They had belonged to his grandfather and his mum had always liked to have them around. His dad had kept them sitting on top of a small shelf, along with a necklace and a diary.

  He started wearing the glasses to school. He couldn’t wear them for long, because they made his eyes hurt, so when he had to take them off he hooked them in the front of his shirt. When people asked about them, he said, ‘My mum used to do this. They were her father’s glasses,’ and then they usually stopped asking.

  After a couple of weeks, he slipped out of school at lunchtime and placed the glasses under a pile of leaves around the corner, where no one could see him.

  That afternoon, in class, just before the teacher was about to start a spelling test, Jake put up his hand.

  ‘I’ve lost my glasses,’ he said. ‘My grandfather’s glasses. I’ve lost the glasses my mum left.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said his teacher. ‘Has anyone seen Jake’s glasses?’ The class mutely shook its collective head. ‘Jake, dear, you’d better go to the office and see if they’ve been handed in.’

  Jake hid his smile and left the classroom. He walked alone down the corridor that led to the front of the school and the office.

  The office lady was very concerned about his glasses. Jake guessed that the teacher or the counsellor had told her they were his mother’s. She took him straight to the blue door and led him through it.

  The room was not big, and it was not as full as Jake had thought it would be, but there were still a lot of things. The walls were lined with cheap wooden shelves, which were littered with an assortment of childish possessions. There were a lot of jerseys and jackets, some books, a few toys.

  ‘Now, precious, no one brought a pair of glasses to me, but I did go on a break for a while and they may have been handed in then. Can you see them anywhere?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Jake, ‘but I’ll have a good look.’

  ‘You do that, love. I should really go through the lot of it and make a list. Set it up so that as soon as something is turned in we write it down. Then organise this room so that you know where to look for a specific thing. I just get so busy. There’s always something new cropping up just when I think I’m about to get a bit of time.’

  ‘I could do that, if you like,’ Jake said quickly. ‘I could help. I could start now.’

  ‘Oh, you are just too sweet. We’ll see, shall we? Now, are you OK to have a look by yourself? I’ve a pile of things to get on with.’

  Jake nodded and waited for her to leave. She left the door open, but Jake pushed it closed after her. For a moment he just stood in the middle of the room, looking at the shelves. The small things, he decided, as he didn’t have his bag with him.

  There was a pen lying half under an old cardigan. It was silver and heavy, not the kind of pen a school kid would use. Jake picked it up quickly. He knew he should wait till he got home, but he couldn’t. He closed his eyes.

  By the time he left the room, he had five things in his pockets and he was exhausted.

  ‘Heavens,’ said the office lady when he walked past her. I’d completely forgotten you were in there, my love. Did you find them?’

  ‘No,’ said Jake. ‘They’re not in there.’

  ‘Oh, precious. I’m sorry. But they might turn up, you know. Someone might hand them in yet. I’ll keep a special eye out for you, how about that?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jake. He was trying desperately to keep his eyes open.

  ‘Are you all right, love? You look rather pale.’

  ‘I’m OK. No, I feel a bit sick. Can I go home, do you think?’

  ‘I’m sure that’s fine, precious. I’ll send a message to your teacher.’

  Jake had left his bag in his class but he didn’t want to go all the way back to get it. It would still be there tomorrow, after all; the teacher would look after it. He left the school and walked around the corner.

  He went to get the glasses from their hiding place. The street had been swept. The glasses were gone.

  Cassie.

  THE BARK WAS NOW ABOUT the height of a pair of low-rider jeans. Strangely, it was becoming more comfortable. Cassie wasn’t sure if it was because she was growing used to it or because her weight was now supported by wood instead of muscle and bone.

  For once, she and her mother were having a rest from each other. For the first time in weeks, her mother had left the airport, although she’d promised to be back within a couple of hours. Cassie’s best friend, Bridie, had finally shown up and convinced her mother to go home for a while. She dragged a set of four connected chairs over next to Cassie, greeting the protests of the airport staff with a wide-eyed ‘My best friend is turning into a tree’, with which they could hardly argue.

  She sat cross-legged on the last of the seats staring at Cassie’s feet.

  ‘I didn’t believe you, you know,’ she said. ‘I mean, of all the people I know, you are probably the most likely to turn into a tree, but I didn’t believe you’d actually started doing it.’

  ‘What do you mean, I’m the mostly likely person to turn into a tree?’

  ‘You can’t really argue with that now, can you? So, you just decided to park it here? You’re ready to put down roots?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘I will not. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry it took me this long. I didn’t want to have to stop not believing you were turning into a tree. Or something.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Cassie. ‘I’ve been fine.’

  ‘Well, I’m still sorry. Anyway, I can’t believe you’re getting this extreme over that Floss girl.’

  ‘When did she become “that Floss girl”? I thought you liked her?’

  ‘Sure, she was fine. I don’t know. I’m a bit jealous, I suppose.’

  ‘You have a boyfriend.’

  ‘I know, and it’s not like if I didn’t have a boyfriend, I’d be keen on the ladies. I just thought that if you were ever going to go for a girl, I would be the girl you’d go for. But you’ve never even tried to kiss me, not even when you’ve been really drunk.’

  ‘Do you want me to hit on you?’

  ‘Oh no, please. That would be super awkward. I’m not even a little bit not straight.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Good.’

  Cassie laughed. Then she stopped laughing. She hadn’t laughed in days. She shouldn’t be laughing. She’d lost her lover. There were times you shouldn’t laugh.

  ‘Thank Christ I’ve got a laugh out of you. You should never not be laughing.’

  ‘What?’

  Bridie had taken off her shoes and started painting her toenails orange. ‘You laugh. It’s what you do. It’s how you respond to almost every social situation. You are The Girl Who Laughs. When we had that huge argument over Darryn Coates, before you realised you were a vagetarian, even when you were trying to yell at me you were laughing.’

  Cassie wondered if she could convince Bridie to paint her fingernails. Normally Bridie hated doing other people’s make-up or hair or anything like that, but she might do Cassie’s fingernails, considering they were the only nails Cassie had left.

  ‘Then,’ Bridie went on, ‘when that Floss was leaving, you didn’t laugh so much anymore. It wasn’t like you were mopey or anything, you just didn’t laugh as often, or much at all. It’s been really annoying. And it
’s even more annoying now in, like, retrospect, when it turns out that it was all for some strumpet who can’t even be bothered to let you know why she wasn’t on the plane she was supposed to be on.’

  ‘Probably that’s why she’s the right one. If she’s the only one who can stop me laughing all the time.’

  ‘Well, in the first place, you’re only just twenty, you hardly know that she’s the only one that can do that, and in the second, that’s totally stupid because why would you want to be with someone who makes you stop laughing? The right one is the one that makes you happy. That is all.’

  ‘Whatever. Jerm doesn’t make you happy. You’re always complaining about him.’

  ‘Jerm drives me the craziest. Do you know he eats toast with just pickled onions on it? I have to kiss that mouth, and he shows it no respect. But actually, he does make me happy. None of the stupid things he does really stop him making me happy. So there.’

  ‘Well, Floss makes me happy.’

  ‘She didn’t. She made you anxious and insecure.’

  Cassie decided not to ask Bridie to paint her nails. It was a stupid colour anyway, orange. Who would want orange nails? Cassie wanted pinks and pearly off-whites. Bridie was always too brightly coloured.

  ‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,’ she said, folding her arms so her hands were hidden.

  ‘I do too,’ said Bridie. ‘Because, a, I promised your mum, and b, I actually miss you. You don’t get to just stop hanging out with me because you’re all piney over the strumpet and stuck to the floor. I brought my laptop so we can watch Back to the Future if you want. And I have a bunch of books for you, as well, that I have to tell you why you will like before I let you read them. Also, I have things going on that I’ve had to talk to you about in my imagination and it’s just not any good.’

  ‘No,’ said Cassie. ‘I’m annoyed with you. You’re being completely blasé about my having lost the love of my life. Who, I’m finding out for the first time, you didn’t even like.’

  ‘OK, number one, princess, we stopped believing in the loves of our lives when we were seventeen; number two, I didn’t not like her, I just thought you were too much of a different person because of her; and number three, I’m allowed to be blasé about your having lost her if you’re going to be blasé about the tree you’re turning into.’

  ‘That makes no sense.’

  ‘It does and I don’t care if it doesn’t.’

  Bridie had finished her toenails. She had her feet slung over the arm of the seat with her toes splayed apart. It had always made Cassie feel ill, the way Bridie could splay her toes like that. She could keep them like that for ages; they made Cassie think of monkeys.

  ‘Should I do my fingers to match,’ she was asking, ‘or should I do them blue?’

  Delia.

  DELIA WAS LOST, AGAIN, OF course, but this time it was with Anthony so it was a lot more interesting.

  They’d been walking along the South Bank until Delia had decided they should cross the road and turn left. After an hour walking they were halfway down a street of council estates, and Delia’s feet would have been very sore had Anthony not been so fascinating.

  He’d told her old stories of school, of being the interesting British student at university, of buildings he’d designed. The only thing he hadn’t talked about was his son.

  ‘How’s Jake?’ Delia asked after a while. She suddenly wondered when Anthony had last mentioned Jake; she didn’t think he had in a few days.

  ‘What?’ Anthony replied. He was understandably taken aback, given that he’d been in the middle of telling her about the time he’d run over his dad’s dog when he was seventeen.

  ‘You haven’t talked about Jake in a while.’

  ‘Jake.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anthony looked confused for a moment. ‘Oh. I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘He’s fine I think.’

  ‘Good. School going well?’ She didn’t know why the conversation suddenly felt so awkward.

  ‘Oh, yes, seems to be. How’s your mum?’

  ‘My mum? She’s fine. She ordered a new sampler pattern. It’s three metres wide and every evening I have to stretch it out so she can see how much she’s done. Which, so far, is about four-inches square.’

  ‘Has she minded you being out of the house so much?’

  ‘I think she’s enjoyed it, to be honest. She actually had a friend over the other day, first time in years. Makes me almost feel that I’ve been in the way all these years, instead of helping her out.’

  ‘Maybe she’s just liked finding out that she’s not as dependent as she thought she was.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t liked finding I’m much more dependent than I should be.’

  ‘Come on, this isn’t so bad. We would never have seen this row of houses.’

  ‘That is true. We are fortunate indeed.’

  ‘And if she finds she doesn’t need you so much, you can think about what you want to do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you can get back to what you were doing before the accident.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘What were you doing? You’ve never told me.’

  ‘Oh, I was studying. Doing my master’s.’

  There was a silence.

  They walked.

  ‘Is there a particular reason you don’t want to talk about it?’ asked Anthony.

  ‘What? I don’t not want to talk about it.’

  ‘OK. What was it in, your master’s?’

  If left unused, conversations can grow rusty over time. The opinions and feelings we’ve expressed before, when left to their own devices, can grow sluggish and curmudgeonly. They become too used to sitting alone and unconsidered, and if you ask them to move, their joints can ache, or parts of them can crumble away. Sometimes you can return to an opinion you’ve not visited in years and find it’s died and rotted away without you even noticing. Sometimes a feeling we assume we’ll have for ever can abandon us and leave a gap we don’t notice until we suddenly feel the need to call upon that feeling.

  Delia had talked about her plan more often than most people talk about the weather. She’d thought about it so often that it was there, just under her tongue, to be brought out on the slightest excuse. She wanted to paint, for ever, but she didn’t want to just do that. She didn’t want to lock herself up in a studio and paint, all alone, all the time, because people who did that got bored and lonely and crotchety and crazy and cut off their own ears, which didn’t have anything to do with being a genius, she didn’t care what people said. She wanted to be an art seller as well as a painter. She wanted to have a small gallery, and she wouldn’t display any of her own work, because that would be self-indulgent, and there were too many self-indulgent artists already, and she was bored of them. She would have a gallery and she would find exciting people that no one had heard of and she would tell everyone why they had to like them and pay thousands of pounds for their work. Her own paintings would have to find other galleries to be displayed in.

  But she had closed the door of her old bedroom and now her life conversation was stiff and prone to complaining.

  ‘Art,’ Delia said. ‘It was in fine arts.’

  Marcus.

  DAYS HAD ALWAYS HAD STRUCTURE for him. Light breakfast, music, full breakfast, read the paper, call Katharine, go for a walk, lunch, music, write letters, dinner, read, bed. Simple, but what he liked.

  It should be easy to keep it so, he thought. Even on days when he couldn’t bring himself to go into the music room, couldn’t bring himself to touch the alien keys that were not a part of his piano. The keys that were not a part of him. He should still be able to keep to the rest. The rest could continue as it was.

  Except it couldn’t. He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t make it continue as it was. His life couldn’t continue as it was.

  He found himself standing, he never knew how long for, unsure of what he was supposed to do next. He could no longe
r be certain even of when, or if, he was hungry or thirsty.

  Shouldn’t be this hard, he thought. Easy things to know, these are. You just know. And then you just do something about it.

  He didn’t know anymore. He couldn’t tell. She would come over to check on him in the evenings and ask if he’d eaten and he wouldn’t be sure. He couldn’t say for certain. He should lie, he thought, so she didn’t worry. He didn’t want her to worry. But he could never remember to lie until it was too late.

  He had to make it better. He had to try harder for it to be better.

  Cassie.

  CASSIE WAS STARING AT BRIDIE.

  ‘You look really good.’

  Bridie appeared not to notice the sudden change of topic.

  ‘Thanks. I try.’

  ‘Your hair’s all shiny.’

  ‘It’s always shiny.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s crazy and fluffy and full of split ends.’

  ‘Cassie!’

  ‘Now it’s not. Now it’s like it’s almost glowing. And your skin looks amazing as well.’

  ‘No more than usual. I’ve always had good skin.’

  But it was more than usual. Bridie wasn’t wrong about her skin, but more than looking good, it looked luminous. And her eyes were brighter and, although Cassie couldn’t tell this just by looking at her, she hadn’t broken a nail in three weeks. Bridie rarely got through a day without a nail breaking or tearing a cuticle.

  It took Cassie a day or two to notice, but it wasn’t just Bridie, either. Everyone Cassie saw was looking like they’d just returned from a month at a health retreat. People stood near her for five minutes after a missed connection and two long-haul flights and felt suddenly renewed, as if they’d just woken up in cool linen sheets, after the deepest sleep of their lives.

  There was one exception.

  Cassie’s mother was looking haggard and deflated. Her hair was becoming grizzled and her face was creased and sagging. Somehow even her clothes were looking grey and lifeless.

  That was the one development Cassie didn’t notice.