The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

‘Jeannie Gaffney,’ he says in his rumbling voice, crisp and enunciated. Like a Roman senator. Or God. Martha moves now and stands beside Mrs Atkinson.

  He speaks again as they tap at the keyboard. Polite but magisterial.

  ‘She might be listed as Jeannie Flynn. Or possibly Ryan or Rideout.’

  Martha and Mrs Atkinson come up blank on all counts.

  ‘Double check. If you would. Please.’ An order.

  Mrs Atkinson puts on her brightest and best customer service voice. ‘Certainly I can. Could you spell Rideout for me?’

  I hear the plastic creak as she turns the monitor towards him so that he may see for himself. He spells out the name.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, nothing coming up. We don’t have any Gaffneys listed. No Rideout. There are a couple of Flynns although I don’t think you’re looking for Dave or Bernadette. I don’t know what else to suggest, Mr…?’

  ‘Did you check under Ryan?’

  ‘Yes. Three Ryans…no Jeannie Ryans I’m afraid, Mr…Ryan, is it?’

  He doesn’t volunteer his name. There are more clicks on the mouse.

  ‘Electoral roll perhaps?’ Mrs Atkinson suggests brightly, ‘Harvey could…’

  ‘No. Thank you.’ Authoritative, in charge. Mrs Atkinson has a sudden thought.

  ‘Ruby might know. Where’s Ruby?’

  My heart suddenly begins again and decides to rumba around my ribcage to make up for lost time. I stand very still. Make myself as thin and bookish as possible.

  ‘Think she’s in the archive,’ Martha states.

  ‘No. I saw her with the trolley earlier…Ruby?’ Mrs Milligan spots me. I have no choice. Nathan has turned, is looking towards the shelving now, patient. I step out from my hiding place and approach the desk. I can’t look at him. I can’t gauge whether he knows or not. It seems that the library is about a hundred miles long, each footstep I take as slow as a moon landing. My breath as heavy as moon breath captured in the bubble of a helmet. I reach the desk.

  ‘What is it?’ I manage, my voice thin. Actually I sound like a very conscientiously quiet librarian.

  ‘Take a look at this photo?’ Mrs Atkinson turns. Martha doesn’t notice that I lift her glasses from her desk space, put them on as if they are my own, squint out through them at the picture. I daren’t take the picture from her because every nerve I have is jangling and sparking. It is the photo I knew it would be. The day at the races. Nathan owned that horse, with Liam, until it fell in the National and he shot it.

  ‘No one I know, sorry.’ A casual shrug.

  ‘The name? Does it ring a bell perhaps?’ he asks. This Roman senator. This God. I glance at the monitor and make a shrugging face. Keeping it as simple as I can. Trying to be convincing. But he has spoken to me. I think he knows.

  As I turn I’m relieved that Mrs Longden is waiting to check her books out. I turn away from Nathan, from Mrs Atkinson. Mrs Milligan moves over to the information desk now. Martha is tappity-tapping. Harvey is hovering ready to go for the sandwich run.

  ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t be more helpful,’ Mrs Atkinson says. I can see him reflected in the computer screen. I can see that he isn’t looking at Mrs Atkinson. He is checking out Ruby.

  ‘Is there anything else we could help with?’

  Nothing. A silence. The chickenwired doors to the lobby fab open, fob closed.

  It is hard to know which burns fiercer, the tears scorching down my face or my pee as it wends and weaves its way down my leg, drips onto the carpeting. Drip. Drip-drip. Drip. The wand beeps on Mrs Longden’s books and it is the last sound I hear.

  Kotowazu: ‘Yabu so tsutsuite hebi wo dasu’

  Japanese Proverb: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’

  ‘Who is he, Ruby?’

  Half carried into Mrs Atkinson’s office by Harvey, I feel their eyes upon me. Mrs Milligan has propped me up on the chaise sofa thing that Mrs Atkinson, I now learn, brought here from her house. It is the only thing she didn’t cut in two for her husband. Everything else was divided up, as Mrs Atkinson put it later, ‘the furniture, the kitchen utensils, my heart’. Everything split down the middle.

  Not that the errant Mr Atkinson ever had much use for the kitchen utensils, it seems; nor that utensils are on anyone’s mind right now. It’s like chinese whispers beyond the door, ‘Is she all right? What’s going on, Georgia?’ They all know it can’t be good. A detective has come looking for me so at the very least I am an axe murderer or an internationally renowned jewel thief. Mrs Atkinson is smoothing her hand over my forehead, I realise. She is not wearing her white gloves but her hand is very cooling, very soothing.

  ‘Who is he?’

  But I can’t answer. Mrs Atkinson leans forward, folding her arms around me as the tears come, and before I’ve finished sobbing she looks as if she’s been caught in a squall.

  ‘Sandwich run. D’you want anything Ruby?’ Harvey pops his head round the door, terribly matter of fact. That is Harvey all over, he will do the sandwich run for the end of the world. The suicide bombers are here, anyone fancy an avocado and chicken mayonnaise baguette? Mrs Atkinson gives a what do you think Harvey? sigh.

  ‘Cake,’ she says simply. ‘Bring cake.’

  Harvey nods. Cake is his specialist subject. Martha brings tea and Panadol.

  ‘Who is he Ruby?’ Mrs Atkinson asks in a very quiet voice.

  ‘Is he a detective?’ Martha asks. I nod. He is, isn’t that funny? A guardian. A protector. He is the law. I feel so exhausted. I can’t seem to keep my eyes open as Mrs Atkinson asks again, still quiet, her eyes looking anxious, her brow furrowing.

  I have put a lot of lines into that brow lately. But I’m slipping under now, every part of me has let go of itself and not even the hiccups of my sobs are going to keep me awake. I see Nathan standing in the door. Not this door of course. That door. Then.

  ‘My husband,’ I whisper.

  There was nowhere I could go without wiping myself out again. Without beginning another beginning and never ending. Who could I be next time? No one. I was me. I had come to like Ruby, Ruby was all right. Ruby wanted a home to go to.

  * * *

  It was dark when I woke up. I was under a blanket and the anglepoise lamp was on the desk. Everywhere seemed quiet and I could hear a bus pulling away from the stop opposite. I sat up with a jolt.

  A claggy fug of my own smell puffed up at me as I moved. As I stood up to head out to the ladies and try to wash up I noticed that a washbag had been left, along with a hairbrush and toothbrush. Beside that were clean clothes. One of Martha’s velvet vintage numbers and a big intricately cabled purple sweater. Someone had been to the supermarket and bought fresh knickers in my size. I gathered it all up and made my way out to the ladies’.

  Looking at my reflection in the rather manky mirror, I wondered how Nathan had found me. I didn’t look like me anymore. Or possibly I did look like me, I had been an impostor before, pretending to be the lovely, lively, blondie Jeannie. I hadn’t thought back in a very long time, it was far too dangerous to start sifting through memories. Now, as I swished cold water over Jeannie’s face, I thought back. I thought long and hard. He couldn’t find Jeannie. Jeannie was dead. Couldn’t I just hide? Please, just let me. Just this once.

  Begging again. This, from the woman who felled Tierney and brought down the knicker thief. Ha.

  When I pushed through the doors into the staffroom, they were waiting.

  The evening sun was shining in through the window and they all seemed to be in glorious Technicolor. Angharad, her red hair crackling and flaming as she made teas and coffees, Ellen Freethy with her precision cut white hair, slicing cake. Iris, in her customary sleek black, washing out mugs at the sink. Mrs Atkinson and Vanessa Milligan and Martha. They said nothing. At least not with their mouths. Eyes and breathing and a plate of cake spoke volumes.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said. They had left my favourite chair, my window chair, free on purpose, that was easy to see. Martha was standing beside my
chair, one hand on the polished wooden back.

  ‘Well, we’ve got time,’ Vanessa Milligan volunteered.

  ‘Story time.’ Martha’s voice was very low. There were smiles. I hesitated, for effect more than anything. Because I, out of all the women in that room, knew that it was indeed story time.

  I took the five steps towards the chair and sat down. They were all waiting.

  ‘Once, upon, a time…’

  Part Two

  A game called Hunter

  Urtica dioica

  stinging nettle

  carry it in your pocket to give protection

  from lightning strikes

  * * *

  Once upon a time there was just Jeannie Gaffney and her dad. Ted. A music teacher.

  Once upon a time there had been Jeannie Gaffney and her dad and her mum. But those were the days before Mr Greenhalgh. So, while Jeannie Gaffney and her dad lived in a nice enough, middle-class enough semi with a big enough garden in a leafy enough suburb, the ex-Mrs Gaffney lived in France somewhere with Mr Greenhalgh. Mr Ted Gaffney never spoke of them although there was a secret joke in his head where he called them ‘Les Gites’ because that was what they had gone to France to do. To run away together and run a gites complex. What a pair of gites, Mr Ted Gaffney thought.

  But he kept his thoughts to himself and concentrated on bringing up his daughter alone. He was forever shocked at the way that his wife had discarded their daughter. He could puzzle out why she might have left him, in fact when she first absconded he made a long and comprehensive list on the Don’t Forget… shopping-list pad that hung on the back of the kitchen door.

  Mr Greenhalgh had taste in clothes. Mr Greenhalgh didn’t play chess. Mr Greenhalgh didn’t find himself vanishing into the space-time continuum of a Bach prelude. Mr Greenhalgh had more money and more body hair. Mr Greenhalgh laughed with an expansive freeness of spirit. Mr Greenhalgh was (hazard a guess) better at sex, possibly Olympian in both skill and endowment. An Olympic-size penis.

  So it was easy for him to work that one out and each day, depending on his mood, he was more certain that one particular reason as opposed to another was The Reason. He never, never could work out why she didn’t contact Jeannie.

  Mr Ted Gaffney also took to annoying Mr Greenhalgh’s ex-wife and ex-daughter by asking if they would forward photos of Jeannie to France. The ex-Mrs had left no contact numbers or forwarding address and Mr Greenhalgh’s ex-family, although they were in on the conspiracy, were not forthcoming.

  ‘She has her reasons and it’s nothing to do with me,’ the ex-Mrs Greenhalgh would snap. ‘Stop bloody bothering, you’ll get nowhere.’

  Mr Ted Gaffney bothered them because he was bothered. He felt like a burglar throwing a grappling hook up a sheer wall only to find it clanging down on his head each time. In the end he gave up. Not on Jeannie. He never did give up on Jeannie.

  They played piano together and when Mr Ted Gaffney was appointed to the music college in the nearby city, Jeannie often found herself hanging around the rehearsal rooms and concert hall and her life was filled with music and the idea that she and her dad were a team, working together.

  She used to make lists too. But Jeannie’s lists were in her head instead of scribbled on the Don’t Forget… shopping list. She dropped off to sleep at night cataloguing reasons why her mother would leave her without one backward glance. If things had gone wrong during the day, awkward and ugly moments at school, small father–daughter arguments, Jeannie would go over and over them finding the faults and the cracks and being certain that these were the things that had made her mother go. Her lateness. Her dislike of peas. Contributory factors.

  So by the time she reached secondary school, Jeannie Gaffney was on a mission of self-improvement. She was not brilliantly academic but she was bright enough and as all her school reports bleated year after year she was, above all things, diligent.

  They didn’t clear the dishes. It was a lovely evening, warmed by a rosy pink light and the sun bronzing the horizon. Even though it was September it was still warm enough for Dad to have left the doors to the garden open. There was the first tang of autumn in the air, the slightly sweet chill that came as the garden started to go over. Jeannie had made a trifle and the kettle was on.

  Dad had donned wellies and now she was watching him through the kitchen window as she waited for the kettle to boil. The garden stretched for a long way, all the way down to the railway line at the very bottom, screened by a vast hedge of Corsican pines. She could just make Dad out as he made his way down the lawn towards the pond.

  The fishing net she used to go rockpooling with was leaning up against the apple tree and he picked it up as he passed. He was going to clear the weed. There would still be a lot of frogs and Dad was always careful to tip the netted weed onto the edges of the pond so that anything that needed to could crawl back to the water. Jeannie watched him. As he stood up at last and began his soggy welly trek back to the house, Jeannie gasped. She had not noticed how grey his hair had become.

  Jeannie was diligent in convincing her father that she had forgotten about the existence of a mother and France, although the school curriculum involved French and Jeannie was very good at French, and it tore her heart out every time she had to utter a word of it. This was the language her mother would be speaking now. Would she be fluent? Would this be a way they could communicate? Jeannie could pretend to be French. Could get a summer job at a gites. But she dropped French in Year 9 and chose instead Spanish and German.

  There was something about language for Jeannie, something about the difference of babble, as if in rolling a sentence off her tongue in Spanish she was letting go of something. Easing and smoothing herself, for herself. Jeannie was diligent in smoothing and easing and not causing any fuss.

  There were lots of friends. Who weren’t really friends. They weren’t really people that Jeannie could confess anything heartfelt to. Social butterfly that she was, by the time she was in Year 11 she was relied upon for her organisational skills at a lot of school events, school council meetings, fund raising. If it needed to be done, ask Jeannie. When people looked at Jeannie Gaffney they saw her long shiny hair and her shiny bright face, smiling as if she was Miss World. Everyone liked Jeannie.

  Except, quite frankly, for Jeannie herself. She thought being Jeannie Gaffney was a bit of an effort, it took a lot of concentration. It wasn’t just the hair and the make-up and stretching her face muscles into that optimum smile. No, it was heavy industry, the twenty-four-hour mental mechanics of keeping her thoughts and emotions in check, trying not to ruffle people or let them know if she disagreed or was grumpy or low or bereft. People had enough to cope with without having to cope with Jeannie Gaffney.

  * * *

  The year that Jeannie Gaffney turned seventeen was the year she found out too much about herself. That was the year that she worshipped Elspeth Rideout.

  Elspeth Rideout. The academic supernova of the school.

  The thing about Elspeth. The aura. The sounding note. Was that she was just Elspeth. She was not afraid to be herself. At least, that’s what Jeannie always thought back then. She’d wear the uniform, probably the only girl in the school to wear the absolute regulation kit, and yet she made it her own. She made it her own because she didn’t follow fashion. She didn’t follow anyone. She didn’t lead either. She just was.

  She used to travel to school on a boy’s racing bike. Jeannie would be dropped off by the bus stop at the end of the road. She’d be milled about with the crowd of other kids who hogged the bus and annoyed the early bird pensioners just by their youth and smoothness. Jeannie felt constricted on that bus, hemmed in, and not just by the girl who sat next to her, turned her back to talk to friends in the seats behind. Jeannie felt hemmed in by the noise, the sharp voices, the loud laughter, the wearying quality of people who think they are rebellious and, knowing it all, are devil-may-care. Jeannie felt hemmed in by the smells. Chemical perfume. The sticky choke of hairspra
y. The bitterness of smoke.

  Jeannie wasn’t very good in the mornings; it took her a while to find the right gear. None of her social butterflies took this bus with her. And that’s it, that’s what she was really hemmed in by. Because on that bus in the morning she was alone and she was entirely and truly Jeannie Gaffney. There was nowhere to hide.

  And then there was the morning when she stepped off the kerb and her brain was on a poplar-lined road in rural France and there was a woman with her back to her in the daydream. A woman wearing slim black trousers. And Jeannie found herself almost mown down by a tall, rangy girl on a racing bike.

  ‘Watch it!’ Elspeth Rideout called out. The bike veered across the tarmac, cars pipped. That’s how it is with people. They crash into your life and yet you are just on the kerb of theirs. Some pedestrian, glimpsed on the periphery of their vision.

  I’ve never…Jeannie had never…been tall or rangy. Sitting here now, in this room telling this story I can see that who I really want to be is the girl on the bus. Afraid of herself, yes, but knowing exactly who she was.

  Later in the empty staff corridor by the lockers Jeannie saw Elspeth Rideout walking towards her. It was one of those slow-motion moments and Jeannie endlessly replayed it in her head. The motion of Elspeth’s body as she walked, the length of her stride. There seemed to be an exacting balance between all the bits and pieces of Elspeth. She appeared engineered, the long range legs, the precise torque and thrust of her hips. A carving in of waist above the band of her skirt. The easy but pendulum-precise sweep of her arms. Elspeth’s hands too, their square practicality. Graceful. Sculpted.

  ‘…right?’

  Jeannie was so deep in the daydream that only the last syllable arrived on time. Jeannie Gaffney looked round. Elspeth Rideout had halted a few paces away and half turned. Jeannie looked blank.