by Alison Moore
‘Your tortoise ran away?’
‘Yes,’ said Jessie, although even she, who had been there, could not really imagine how.
‘I bet you got some punishment for that,’ said Robert.
‘I didn’t really,’ said Jessie. ‘I thought I would. I kept expecting it. The worst thing was waiting for it.’ She remembered the awful feeling of not knowing when it would come or what form it would take. ‘Perhaps they thought losing the tortoise was punishment enough.’
‘Did you get another one?’ asked Robert.
‘No,’ said Jessie. ‘Another time, I set fire to our chimney. I could have burnt the house down.’ That was her dad’s voice inside her head: You could have burnt the house down.
‘You want to be more careful,’ said Robert, putting a lid on the saucepan and turning the flame right down.
She asked if she could use his bathroom, and he told her where it was. ‘Mind yourself on the stairs,’ he said. ‘There’s no handrail.’
Robert had a retro claw-foot bathtub, whose lion’s paws reminded Jessie of a tomb she had once seen, a sarcophagus with those same feet but made of stone; she had imagined it wandering around in the night, or walking away – one morning, she had thought, there would just be a space where it had been.
On the shelf behind the bathroom sink, there was a glass bottle of perfume, its shade somewhere between blue and green, like a watercolour sea. At the same time as wondering who it belonged to, Jessie noticed a fine layer of dust on the bottle. She had never been in the habit of wearing perfume, but she tried on some of this scent, spraying some onto the pulse point of her wrist and then putting her nose close to her skin. She liked the way it smelt. Replacing the bottle on the shelf, she noticed that she had disturbed the dust on the glass; she could see where her fingers had been. She washed the perfume off with soap before going back down to the kitchen, where Robert turned and looked at her as if he had remembered something or was trying to, and she wondered if he could smell the old, turquoise perfume through the strong, rich scent of the curry that was bubbling away on the hob.
‘We need to put your peas in my freezer,’ he said.
When they had scraped their plates and drained their coffee cups, there was the question of what would come next. ‘Do you want to . . . ?’ said Robert, tipping his head in the direction of the stairs. Jessie smiled and said yes, although he could be suggesting almost anything, she thought, as she followed him upstairs; she might be agreeing to any number of things.
Kissing in a strange bedroom reminded her of her youth, of boys she did not know well enough to be getting into bed with. It was late, dark outside. She worried that Robert would want to have the light on, to see her, but he kept the light off.
She thought of waking up on strange sheets, looking at strange wallpaper, and she wished that she had invited him to her house instead, although his curry had been very good. On the other hand, she might not sleep there, and then there would be no waking up wondering for a moment where she was.
There was an awkwardness to their kissing, as if it were the first time for each of them, as if they were used to not being touched. Jessie was aware of not having cleaned her teeth; she did not have her toothbrush there.
As Robert undressed her, Jessie tried, in the dark, to keep track of where her clothes were going, on which side of the bed they were being dropped. Robert, lying with some of his weight on Jessie, said, ‘I’m all right like this, am I?’ and Jessie, liking the pressure where their bodies touched, liking the weight of him on her, said, ‘Yes.’
He was careful with her, as if he were afraid of harming her in some way, although he was not careful in the way her mother would have meant: they did not use protection; Robert went in, to use her dad’s term, without his wellies on.
She did sleep, until daylight began to intrude around the edges of the blinds’ wooden slats. She was facing Robert, whose eyes were closed. The duvet was down around his waist, exposing his torso; those red hands of his gripped the top edge as if someone might try to pull the duvet off him altogether.
Three-quarters of the way up his arms, his old suntan ended in a line beyond which he was pale; he looked as if he were wearing the ghost of his summer T-shirt. She ran her fingers up his arm, over slack muscles, over the line, touching him with fingers that must have been chilly, waking him up.
‘Good morning,’ he said, and she laughed at the formality; it was the sort of thing one might say to the postman over the garden gate, not to someone lying naked beside you.
‘Good morning,’ she said in reply, her cold fingers creeping over his pallid chest, nearing his heart, nearing its pulse, but Robert was pulling away, turning away to sit up. Perched on the edge of the bed, he was gathering up his clothes, pulling them on. ‘You’ll want to be getting home,’ he said, ‘to that dog of yours. It will be wanting its breakfast, won’t it? It will be wanting a walk.’
‘Yes,’ said Jessie, ‘of course.’ It would have wanted its walk and its supper last night as well, and she felt bad about that. With the duvet still covering her, she tried to reach her clothes, but in the end it was necessary to leave behind the warm den of the bed and hunt around the cold room for yesterday’s underwear.
When she was dressed, she made her way from the bedroom to the kitchen, where Robert was making coffee. It was an echoey house. It was almost entirely devoid of soft furnishings. While her own house had hard floors downstairs, his had hard floors throughout. He had no curtains, just wooden blinds. He had no cushions. She supposed that the hard, bare surfaces were easier to keep clean.
As Jessie came into the kitchen, Robert reached for the iPod and put the Manics on again, a more recent album, Everything Must Go, and Jessie recognised ‘Further Away’, which she recalled seeing described as ‘almost a love song’.
Jessie drank her coffee quickly, while it was still too hot. Her shopping was by the door, put there ready for her to collect as she left. Seeing her putting her shoes on and picking up her bags, Robert came to the door and held it open for her. ‘I’ll see you,’ he said, and she echoed it back to him: ‘See you.’ When she was outside and walking away, he called to her, ‘Take care,’ before closing the door.
This, thought Jessie, was the walk of shame that one might do in one’s teens, in one’s twenties, but surely not, God forbid, at the age of forty-nine. Without having showered, without having combed or straightened her hair, without having brushed her teeth, she walked through the town centre, past her neighbours’ houses and up to her front door with the Morrisons bags weighing her down on either side. She realised, as she let herself in, that she had left her peas behind in Robert’s freezer.
She found The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse standing in the hallway, looking at her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. She saw the look of shame on the dog’s face, and the mess behind the door. ‘That’s my fault as well,’ she said, and she went to the dog and stroked its head and cleaned up the mess. She fed the animals and took the dog down to the river. Already it seemed to have forgotten about what had happened; it seemed happy enough anyway.
Back home, in the kitchen, Jessie saw that where there had only been a hairline crack in the windowpane, she could now see and feel the break; the two segments of glass had shifted like tectonic plates.
She made a cup of tea and settled down to work, trying to make up for the hours lost the day before. She worked through mealtimes, only snacking when she grew hungry, although she gave the dog an extra big supper and took it for an extra long walk. She worked until late and then took a hot shower and got into bed. She read a chapter, in which Lawrence mistreated a dog, and Jessie loved the book for its kindness, for how it tried to understand and forgive Lawrence for his flaws.
❦
At the weekend, Robert drove them out to a nearby village, in the car that he had reclaimed from the compound in Carlisle. They drove with The Four Horsemen o
f the Apocalypse in the footwell.
Wrapped up in woollens and winter coats, they walked in the Cheviot Hills, following a track that necessitated clambering over a gate, which made Jessie feel as if she were trespassing or somehow doing something wrong.
With countryside all around her, Jessie thought of her farm; or she would like to have an animal sanctuary, a place for retired seaside donkeys and rescued battery hens. She kept the dog on its leash so as not to scare the sheep; she thought of Hardy’s ewes, in Far from the Madding Crowd: two hundred of them, and pregnant, going over a precipice one after another, lying dead and dying in the chalk pit, their footprints left behind where the fence was broken through.
When they reached a hilltop, Robert took out his vacuum flask, poured a cup of tea and passed it to Jessie. She drank it gazing towards the border with England, which was close enough to walk to. Then Robert took the empty cup back and refilled it. He placed the cup on the grass while he screwed the top back onto the flask, but the cup tipped over and his tea spilled out. Jessie saw Robert’s jaw tighten. Holding the cup so that Robert could pour the last of the tea into it, Jessie told him about a short story she had recently read, which mentioned Patsy Cline’s belief in parallel universes, and that they touched one another in wet places: ‘puddles, spilled milk, even bits of the body,’ said Jessie. ‘I don’t know if it’s true.’ Robert was not listening or did not respond. He took the cup out of her hands, and she reached out with the pointed toe of her boot and touched the wet patch of grass.
Robert had booked a night’s accommodation above a pub, and they had their evening meal there, with pints of Old Golden Hen. Robert asked Jessie about her plans for Christmas, and she told him that she had no particular plans for Christmas Day, but that afterwards – in between Christmas and New Year – she would be going to visit her parents in their sheltered accommodation, and from there she would go to her sister’s house for a few days. ‘At least, I think that’s the plan,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t speaken to her for a few months.’ She knew something was wrong, but she could not for a moment think how to correct it. Or was it wrong? She tried again: ‘I haven’t speaken to her . . .’ No, it was wrong, but she could not put it right; she could not find the word.
‘You haven’t spoken to her,’ said Robert.
There was the word she wanted; she felt herself relax.
‘Are you close to your sister?’ asked Robert.
‘We used to be closer,’ said Jessie, ‘when we were kids. I haven’t seen her since the New Year. When we were little, we shared a room. We had a cupboard that scared me. It had a mirror on the front, and in the dark the mirror looked like a doorway that you could just walk through, and I imagined walking through it and not being able to come back, getting stuck in this other world, this mirror world. So Gail went into the cupboard, going behind the mirror to show me that there was nothing to be afraid of. But when she spoke to me from inside the cupboard, it sounded as if she had gone into the mirror world and was talking to me from there, calling to me. It begame . . . It begame . . .’ Robert was looking at her as if she had lost the plot. She said, carefully, ‘Became a game.’ She took a sip of her Old Golden Hen; she was nearing the bottom of the glass. ‘I played the game with Eleanor, too, with the same cupboard, in the same house.’
‘Who’s Eleanor?’ asked Robert. ‘Oh, the girl in the museum.’
It was a strange way to put it; he made it sound like Eleanor was still in there.
‘The little girl you lost,’ he said, as if she might need reminding.
She finished her pint, put down the empty glass and said, ‘How strong is this?’
‘About four per cent,’ said Robert. ‘Four point one.’
It was unlikely to be the beer then, interfering with her tongue. Perhaps it was her ear, that muffled feeling, making her lose her words. Or it might be the ghost; it was hard to think straight, knowing there was something there, in the house. Robert would be thinking it was the beer. ‘It’s the ghost,’ she said. Robert glanced around. ‘It’s distracting, exhausting. What do you suppose it wants? There’s always something they’ve come back for.’ She had once read a poem about a ghost that wanted its shoes. She thought about her missing jewellery.
Or perhaps it had not come back; perhaps it had always been there, following her around.
‘You need a good night’s sleep,’ said Robert.
‘Is that all?’ said Jessie.
‘Let’s get the bill,’ said Robert.
They settled the bill, left the restaurant and went up to their room. The dog stayed so close to Jessie’s heels that it tripped her up on the stairs. She swore at it and it looked sorry, but then did it again.
When they opened the door to their room, the dog was eager to get through the doorway with them, and then, when it was inside the room, it was eager to get out again. It pawed at the door, and at the carpet where it went under the door. ‘Come and settle down,’ said Jessie, switching on a lamp and laying the dog’s blanket out on the floor beside the bed. The dog lay down with a sigh and within a few minutes it was asleep. It was all that walking in the hills, thought Jessie; it was all that fresh air. But she had done the same amount of walking; she’d had the same amount of fresh air: she wished that she could fall asleep like that.
Going to the window – approaching her own reflection, which seemed to be on the outside, looking in – she closed the curtains. They took turns in the bathroom and undressed self-consciously before getting under the duvet, where Jessie reached for Robert, who, as he reached for the switch to turn off the lamp, told her that her hands were cold. She blew on them and rubbed them together to warm them up; it reminded her of being out in the snow, her extremities going numb.
Later, when she was lying awake in the dark, with voices from the bar coming through the floorboards and drifting up the stairs, she found it soothing to listen to The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse breathing softly, and when it whimpered and twitched in its sleep as if it were having a bad dream she reached down and stroked its soft forehead and hoped that it would know she was there.
1985
‘You queued?’ shouted Gary. ‘You bloody queued?’
The police queried this too: ‘You queued?’ they said. ‘You queued in the gift shop, before telling anyone that Eleanor was lost? How long did you queue for?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jessie. ‘Probably not as long as it seemed.’
The first few hours were crucial, she knew that. But the hours passed.
The police kept coming back, to see if she had remembered anything else, to see if her story had changed. They kept asking her what she had said to Eleanor before she went missing. ‘I told her to stay outside,’ said Jessie.
‘Outside the bathroom?’
‘I meant outside the cubicles,’ said Jessie. ‘I told her to stay right by the door.’
‘Which door? The cubicle door?’
‘The bathroom door, I suppose,’ said Jessie.
‘You told her to stay outside the bathroom door?’
‘I said outside,’ said Jessie, ‘but I meant, inside the bathroom, by the door.’
‘But that’s not what you said.’
‘No,’ said Jessie, though she hardly knew any more.
‘And what time was that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jessie. ‘It was after lunch. We’d had lunch. I wasn’t wearing my watch. I’d not been able to find it that morning. I think Eleanor had taken it.’
Gary was standing in the living room doorway with his arms folded; he looked like a bouncer. ‘Eleanor was wearing her own watch,’ he said. Eleanor’s watch, her learning-to-tell-the-time watch, would be found outside the museum.
‘You’re wearing a watch now,’ said the officer.
‘I found it later,’ said Jessie, ‘in Eleanor’s bedroom.’ It had not been wound and had stopped.
>
‘What were you doing in Eleanor’s bedroom?’ asked Gary.
‘I was looking for my watch,’ said Jessie.
‘So, after you lost Eleanor,’ said Gary – he was speaking slowly and carefully, as if he were picking his way through a foreign language – ‘you went into her bedroom to look for your watch.’ Jessie could not meet his gaze; she saw the tendons in his neck, and the white of his knuckles.
Jessie’s mum came out of the kitchen; she offered tea and asked Gary to come and help her. He could be heard banging cupboard doors while the questions continued.
‘And you said you spoke to Eleanor after that?’ said the officer. ‘After she left the bathroom?’
‘I thought I was speaking to her,’ said Jessie. ‘I thought she was still inside the cubicle. I asked her if she was all right.’
‘But she wasn’t still inside the cubicle?’
‘No,’ said Jessie.
‘So you weren’t talking to her after all.’
‘No.’
The officer said, ‘When you realised Eleanor was not in the bathroom, what did you do?’
‘I finished washing my hands . . .’ began Jessie.
‘You finished washing your hands?’
‘I finished washing my hands and left the bathroom,’ said Jessie. ‘I thought Eleanor would be just outside. But she wasn’t. So I walked round to the gift shop.’
‘You walked?’
‘Yes,’ said Jessie.
‘You weren’t hurrying?’
‘No,’ said Jessie. She ought to have run, like a greyhound let out of its box. She always felt so sorry for those skinny greyhounds, so thin they might just snap, pelting after a hare that they could never ever catch.
‘So you walked to the gift shop, where you queued. And when you got to the front of the queue . . .’
