by Louise Beech
‘Hi Christopher,’ said Norman. ‘Must’ve been bloody cold on your bike.’
‘Never noticed,’ he said. ‘Music.’ A wire and earpiece still dangled around his neck like a miniature noose.
‘This is Katrina. She’ll be starting soon.’
For a second I wondered whom he was referring to. And then I remembered my new name; Katrina. I smiled. Wanted to whisper it aloud, test it.
‘Hey Katrina.’ Christopher plonked the rucksack by Norman’s desk and untangled his wire.
‘You’re the Christopher Chris then,’ I said.
He smiled and his face changed, like he’d taken Prozac and it had just kicked in. No longer black and white, his blue eyes crinkled with the laugh. ‘Only my mum calls me Christopher; actually she calls everyone Christopher.’
I wondered if he had a middle name that no one called him.
‘Katrina,’ he said. ‘Like the hurricane.’
The buzzer sounded again and a dainty woman came in, perhaps late thirties, with two carrier bags, a box of biscuits and a packet of crisps. Her hair had been cut into a sharp red bob that clashed with her green eye shadow; her hands were like porcelain. I eyed them with envy.
‘You staying for the week?’ Christopher asked her.
She hung her tasselled jacket on a chair. ‘Another bus route cancelled. Travellers should be informed before they leave home, via that Twitter thing or text. This is the modern age after all.’
‘This is Jane.’ Christopher rolled up his headphone wire.
‘You must be Jane who’s really Jane,’ I said.
She didn’t look at me; she loaded the food onto the coffee table shelf, her many bracelets jangling like coins. I would call her Jangly Jane. Not to her face. Jangly Jane – to help me remember her name.
‘We’ll get out of your way.’ Norman pushed his chair under the desk. ‘It was a busy night shift – it’s all in the logbook. The sleet unnerved people; they were worried it’d melt and cause floods again.’ Norman picked up a case and locked a drawer. ‘Shall I turn the phones on?’
‘Go for it,’ said Christopher.
They began ringing immediately, out of sync, urgent. It seemed like only yesterday that I’d heard the sound. Christopher and Jangly Jane went straight into the cubicles. Jane hunched over the desk and spoke softly. Christopher said, ‘Hello, Flood Crisis, can I help?’ and stretched until almost reclined.
I followed Norman into the hallway and got my coat and scarf. I’d been too nervous earlier to notice more than the stench of damp clothes and old paper. Now I saw a mustard-tiled kitchen, the fire exit and an open toilet door. All crisis places were the same; their cheerless walls oozed depression and addiction.
Norman fiddled with the main door’s latch. ‘I’ll call you about our brushing-up-on-skills day. Warn whomever you live with that I’ll call you Katrina. You can imagine the chaos it causes when we ring with a new name!’ He threw his emaciated hands in the air again.
I fastened my coat. ‘So that’s it – I’m Katrina now?’
‘Whenever you’re here.’
He opened the door and the outside light blinded me. The temperature had plummeted since I’d entered the building an hour before. Having been cocooned in its airless confines I now shivered. Everything was white, like sleep. I took my time going down the steps; my borrowed shoes were as hazardous as the ice.
‘You’re Catherine again now,’ Norman called after me. ‘But only until you come back.’
The words ‘Catherine’ and ‘come back’ followed me down the path, along the street and onto the bus. They haunted me until I slept that night, after tossing and turning for five hours.
3
Everything can be replaced
Teatime traffic meant a long bus ride home. Though long past now, the floods continued their disruption; a circus of caravans and makeshift canopies lined the streets and slowed commuters, driveways packed with cement bags and industrial machines the sideshows. Snow fell on it all like glitter dust on a final act. In front of me a girl breathed on the glass and drew a clown in her mist.
‘Can’t believe they’ve changed the route again,’ said the woman beside me, jabbing her finger at the window. ‘That skip could be moved into a garden. Blocking a main bus route like that – should be ashamed.’
I guessed she hadn’t been flooded; one of the lucky few.
‘I need my kitchen doing,’ she continued, to a bald man across the aisle, ‘and I can’t get a bloody builder for love or money. They’re all doing flood houses, so I’ll be stuck with shit worktops till next year.’
The man shoved his newspaper under her nose and said, ‘They’ve landed on their feet and all they do is complain.’ He pointed out an article squashed between Fern Fielding’s ‘Wholly Matrimony’ column and a picture of John Prescott with a super-sized marrow. ‘Chap here got fifty grand from his insurance company. He’ll be in Majorca by next Tuesday, mark my words.’
A conversation about a woman who’d claimed for a conservatory she never had, using pictures of the neighbour’s lean-to, drifted my way. When the bus stopped and they all got off by the cemetery I was glad.
The little girl in front wiped her clown off the glass and stuck her tongue out at me.
‘Don’t be rude,’ hissed her mother.
I got off by the street where I’d lived until the rain came; near the house I’d seen ruined that long, wet day. I wanted to walk away, to return when it was rebuilt, when there were walls again, new carpets, doors that weren’t black with mould and a toilet that wasn’t blocked.
But my feet always made the decision and led me there.
Number two was empty; they’d gone to live by the coast. Number four was staying with relatives. A caravan sat on number six’s drive, anchored by piles of bricks. Number eight was mine.
I closed my eyes. Remembered. Snow landed on my cheeks now as rain had that day. That Day. We all called it ‘That Day’. That Day I’d opened the gate, causing a small wave. That Day I’d paused when brown, thigh-high water wet my underwear. That Day waves had lapped at the windowsill, splashed tears against glass. It spilled into airbricks, entered through every hole and crack, uninvited, intrusive. It ruined all that I’d built, all that I had.
That Day.
Now I unlocked the door, forced it open with my foot and stepped inside. No matter how I tried to prepare, the rotten smell always made me nauseous. Wires poked out between the ripped-up floorboards like weeds.
At least the great, alien-like dryers had gone now they’d done their job; my official certificate had come from the drying company a week ago. Dry certificates were the must-have item, like a new games console on Christmas Day. Neighbours called from one caravan to another when they got one. It meant the rebuild could begin. The flood had not won.
Letters fell from the flap when I closed the door: what I’d come for. Still, I couldn’t leave without looking the place over. In the kitchen and living room the lower walls were stripped to brick. The garden beyond the patio doors was overgrown with damp rubbish. Birds pecked for discarded scraps.
I hated to look at the Marilyn Monroe wall, her face dissolved, chin and hair faded. Soon she’d be ripped out and replaced too.
Upstairs, the furniture I’d managed to save was stacked like boxed cadavers awaiting inspection. Sally-next-door had helped me carry stuff up and I’d done the same for her. We’d removed our shoes and walked barefoot through the water. Dog shit and leaves had swirled into our hallways. Those ruined shoes still hung in the cupboard under the stairs, streaked with salt stains. My mother had said I should claim for them. They were from Clarks and cost fifty quid, she’d said. Fifty quid is fifty quid, she said. Everything can be replaced, she said.
Time to leave.
On my way to the flat I bought a supermarket meal for one, a bottle of half-price wine and the local paper. By the time I climbed the rusting metal stairs at the back of the Happy House takeaway my gloveless fingers were blue.
/> A mostly naked Fern greeted me. ‘Can’t decide what to wear.’ She took a bottle of vodka out of the freezer.
‘I wish you would.’ I plonked my bag on the tiny granite surface that our landlord, and the Happy House owner, Victor, called a kitchen worktop. The only other storage was a noisy fridge covered in rusting magnets, a double cupboard with no handles and the two drawers that couldn’t be opened at the same time.
‘I’m meeting Greg,’ said Fern.
‘Like that?’
‘He’s taking me to that new Thai place on Chants Ave.’
I put my wine in the fridge.
She poured vodka into a tumbler and added ice. ‘He looks a bit like Princess Diana, but what the hell. Why’d you buy those crappy microwave meals when Victor will give you chicken madras for a quid?’ She poked my frozen meal with a carefully painted red nail.
‘Victor gives you cheap food because you flirt with him,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake put some clothes on, woman, I want to eat.’
‘You got a newspaper?’ Fern headed to the bedroom.
‘What’s it about this week?’ I called.
‘DIY,’ she said, and slammed the door.
Fern had written the ‘Wholly Matrimony’ column for our local paper for two years. She hadn’t got around to telling her editor she was no longer actually married. Now separated from Sean for four months, she put as much effort into single life as she did her chatty marital column. Sean often threatened to tell her editor it was a sham. I’d suggested she offer them a singleton column, but apparently Mick Mars wrote one on a Thursday.
I found Fern on page ten. A grainy picture painted her as wifely: hair smooth, a shy smile and an egg whisk in hand; ‘Wholly Matrimony – Dilemmas and Delights of Modern Marriage, with Fern Fielding’.
I put my curry in the microwave and read a few lines:
‘After a calamitous weekend of lawnmower shopping, cake making and DIY, Sean and I found ourselves needing a frothy bubble bath and champagne on Sunday evening. He always sits near the taps, tells me I look lovely in candlelight and massages my thigh with his soapy foot. What more can a woman ask?’
‘How do you think it up?’ I opened the wine and poured a generous amount into a pink plastic cup. ‘Will you still write it when you’re officially divorced?’
Fern opened the bedroom door a crack and said, ‘I’m just deciding between the red take-me-now dress and the silver I-have-class blouse.’
Her separation from Sean had come at a convenient time for me. After the flood, I’d needed refuge, and Fern was looking for somewhere to stay while they sold the house and split the money. Rental property was limited. There weren’t enough places for all those the disaster had left temporarily homeless. Still, most families had turned down our tiny flat overlooking a urine-soaked yard. We’d snapped it up, however; it was close to everywhere, and it was cheap. Fern won the coin toss for the one bedroom, so I slept on the lounge sofa, my clothes stuffed in suitcases under her bed. She might as well have a comfortable bed – I rarely slept for more than five hours a night.
I took my meal to the sofa and turned on the TV. Simon Cowell was telling a man he sounded like a choirboy. While I’d done little to make the place home, Fern had marked her territory with clothes, hair accoutrements and lipstick, spreading all of it over the floor. I hated the mess she created. At home my things had been stored in alphabetical order: books, DVDs, even food. I moved Fern’s pyjamas, put my feet on the coffee table and picked at the chicken and rice.
‘This look OK?’
Fern wore a white dress with thin straps. She’d moisturised her shoulders; they shimmered in the soft lamplight.
‘Not the red take-me-now, then?’ I said.
‘No, I’m starving and want to eat first.’
‘You look pretty,’ I said. ‘He’s not coming back here, is he?’
‘You think he’ll want to?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’ I washed down the tasteless curry with wine. ‘I don’t need to hear what you get up to.’
‘You’ve listened to worse stuff on those crisis lines.’
‘I could hang up when they did that.’
‘Why are you doing it again?’ Fern looked into the broken mirror above the oven, fluffing her hair and blending her lipstick. She stopped, a finger still on her lip like a cheap glamour model, and looked at me. ‘You left last time. The calls made you depressed for days.’
‘Someone has to do it,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t have to be you.’
‘I want to.’ No longer hungry, I dumped the half-empty carton of food on the coffee table. On TV, a man in purple leggings sang Celine Dion.
‘Did the interview go OK?’ Fern asked.
I wasn’t sure. ‘If they ring they’ll ask for Katrina,’ I said in reply. ‘I had to change my name. There’s already a Cathryn but without an i – or a personality by the sound of it.’
‘Nearly forgot. Billy … sorry, Will rang.’
The radiator clunked noisily into action. Fern rambled on about me listening to people whining about the flood, how I’d get sick of it and leave. Water chugged into the radiator pipes. How I hated the sound of it now. I turned to ask what Will had wanted but Fern was already gone, bills and receipts flying from the kitchen worktop in her wake.
I put them in the drawer that only opened when the other was shut. Outside a gang of kids ate takeaway food near the phone box and mocked an old woman who’d dropped her bags. On TV, the audience cheered a guy who looked like Rod Stewart. The phone rang.
‘It’s me,’ said Will.
I knew the Manchester accent. I remembered the gentle tone he’d used with me when I hadn’t irritated him. But, right now, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I could only think of the things we had said. The words we’d shared when we were Crisis Care volunteers together. The words we’d listened to on the phones and made into our foreplay.
‘I saw Fern,’ he said after a pause. ‘She gave me this number. Said you’re volunteering again, you had an interview. I was concerned.’
‘Don’t be,’ I said.
‘Why are you being like this?’
I emptied the rest of the wine into my glass. I was sorry for being abrupt but I didn’t say it.
‘I’m just surprised,’ he went on.
‘It’s a flood-crisis line. I was flooded. It makes sense.’
‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I remember.’
He’d offered me his place when mine went under. I could have moved into his spacious, city-centre apartment rent free, for as long as I needed it; forever he’d said. But since I’d left Crisis Care, a few months before the flood, I had been working up the courage to leave Will, too. We broke up shortly after I rejected his offer of sanctuary.
‘Haven’t seen you in ages,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘Great. We love it here.’ I didn’t tell him I was restless, my eczema had flared up again, and I often had insomnia. ‘Why are you ringing?’
‘I didn’t want you to hear from anyone else…’
‘Hear what?’
Two women in gold cat suits sang the theme song to Beauty and the Beast. Simon Cowell put his head in his hands.
‘I’m getting married,’ said Will.
Everything can be replaced, my mother had said of shoes.
‘Congratulations.’ I swigged my wine. ‘Is she pregnant?’
‘No. We’ve been together three months, and it’s good. She’s a great girl: reliable, kind. She doesn’t mess me around.’
‘So does she have a name?’
‘Miranda,’ he said.
Everything could be replaced, I thought again. ‘I’m happy for you,’ I said, and I was. I just wasn’t sure why I needed to know about it, though. ‘I bet your mum’s glad. She never liked me, which is understandable – if I had a son I wouldn’t want him dating me.’
Will laughed. ‘Remember the time she took us to that place in Cottingham and the waiter heard you saying he looked l
ike a rent boy and you were embarrassed and my mother wanted to know what you’d said and the waiter told her?’ I could tell he was smiling. ‘You always made me laugh, Catherine.’
I watched a guy in an advert hold up a wipe with all the dirt he’d cleaned out of his pores.
‘Do you remember that caller at Crisis Care?’ he asked. ‘That guy who cut bits out of himself with a razor. Frank. Had a lisp. Said that by removing those chunks he could disappear. That when he was invisible he might have the power to confront his mother. She’d locked him under the stairs, tied him up, burnt him and bit him.’
‘I remember.’ I pressed my glass to my cheek.
‘He still calls,’ said Will. ‘He took his mother to Home Farm and told her while she ate a prawn cocktail starter that she’d hurt him. He doesn’t cut anymore.’
‘That’s good,’ I whispered.
‘Why did you leave?’
‘I couldn’t do anything for those people,’ I said.
‘I meant why did you leave me?’
I shifted the receiver from one ear to the other. It was a habit formed in my days at Crisis Care. It sometimes helped at two in the morning when I’d been on the phone for hours and my ear throbbed and my neck ached and my heart hurt.
‘I know why you left Crisis Care,’ said Will. ‘But why did you leave me? Didn’t I put up with more than anyone normal would?’
‘Will…’ I said, gently.
‘You’re still calling me that?’ He paused and I thought he’d hung up. ‘No one calls me Will.’
‘It’s just a name,’ I said.
‘Bullshit. All that crap about you calling me Will to make me feel special. It’s to make you feel special.’
A car alarm shrieked outside; I jumped and knocked the wine glass over. ‘Dammit.’ I tried to catch the liquid as it dripped from the coffee table.
‘What do you mean dammit? It’s true.’
‘Not you,’ I said. ‘I spilt my wine.’
‘Enjoy it, Catherine,’ he said.
