Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  “I don’t have to be rational. My father’s just died!” Rachel hissed.

  “Drink!” Martha shouted again. Claude looked at me helplessly. I shrugged my shoulders and went into the sitting room with the vodka.

  Martha and Laurie were sitting in dimly lit gloom, facing each other, on the two sofas. Martha had taken out some of her hairpins and her hair hung round her shoulders. She had her spectacles on the end of her nose. I picked up a glass and an ashtray from the cupboard by the door and took them to her; she had a cigarette in her hand waiting to be lit.

  “Are you going to pour Laurie a drink?” she said crossly.

  I turned to Laurie, who gave a little shake of her head, as if she was being offered poison. “Thank you so much, no.”

  Martha took a long drag on her cigarette. “Where are you from? Where’s your accent?” she asked, her head tilted to one side.

  Laurie coughed. “Northern California. A town called Modesto.”

  Martha breathed out a plume of smoke. “Modesto—what a seemly name for a town,” she said thoughtfully. “Northern California is so interesting. Those early Spanish settlements, what are they called? Missions? Pueblos?”

  Laurie gave a gay little laugh, which sounded as if it had come from someone else. “Back home,” she said, “there are people who say we’ve a lot to be modest about in Modesto.”

  There was a silence. I could tell the conversation had somehow gone in a direction that didn’t please Martha. She turned away and stubbed out her cigarette. Suddenly there was a squawk from outside, like the sound of chickens fighting, and Rachel ran wailing past the open doorway of the sitting room, her shoes clacking on the wooden floor. Claude came in, looking as if he was going to burst into tears.

  Martha indicated the space next to her on the sofa. “Sit down.” He was shivering. “Are you cold?” Martha asked him. He nodded.

  I was still standing by the sofa and Martha said, “Baby, get Claude that rug that’s in the bottom drawer of the chest.”

  This was too much. “Why can’t he get it for himself?”

  She patted Claude’s knee. “Because he’s life’s delicate child, that’s why.”

  With a lot of clattering, I went over and pulled the drawer practically out of the chest. I grabbed the rug and threw it at Claude. He caught it sheepishly. Martha was oblivious. She put a hand on my arm and said in a whisper, “You’d better go and see that Rachel’s all right. Tell her I’ll be up in a while.”

  I went through the hall and climbed up to the top floor where our bedrooms were. The house smelled stale and unlived-in, as if nobody had opened a window for weeks. Rachel’s room was opposite mine, with a landing between them. She was lying curled up on her bed. I stood in the doorway for a moment. “I can’t wait for today to be over,” I said.

  “Why? Then it’ll just be tomorrow. What’ll be different?” Her voice was muffled because she was talking into her pillow.

  I went and sat down on her bed and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m furious with Claude,” she said angrily.

  “No, you’re not. You’re just furious with everything.”

  Surprised, she turned to look at me. Then her face softened and she said grudgingly, “Well, he did drive us down here, I suppose.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s good that he’s here.”

  “Yes,” she said, in a small, contrite voice.

  “And Laurie, too.”

  She shot me an angry look. “Why?”

  “Arthur was dying by the side of the road …”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “… and she was with him. He wasn’t alone, she looked after him. She didn’t … well, she didn’t have to do that, did she? She’s a tourist. She might have preferred going round Madame Tussaud’s or something.” Rachel was five years older than me: I don’t know why I had to be the grown-up one.

  Rachel put her face in her hands and said something I couldn’t hear properly.

  “What?”

  She took her hands away. “It should have been me,” she spat. “I should have been there.” Then she glanced up at me. “Or you, I mean.”

  I didn’t mind. “No, you’d have done it better. You were the one who put the splint on Jamie.”

  “Oh, Jamie,” she said gloomily. “I’d forgotten about him.” Jamie had been our cat.

  I got up and opened the window. A gust of clear air blew into the room, and the curtains waved and rustled as if someone was moving behind them.

  “I think Mr. Toppit’s out there,” she said. Then she was crying and laughing at the same time. I sat down on her bed again, but this time I pulled my legs up and lay down beside her. She rested her head on my chest. “You won’t leave me, will you?” she said.

  I closed my eyes. I must have slept for a couple of hours. When I woke, Rachel was snoring beside me. My neck was cricked and I ached all over. I pulled the eiderdown over Rachel, turned the light out, crossed the landing into my own room and got into bed with my clothes on. I didn’t know whether Martha had been up to see Rachel or not.

  I hadn’t drawn the curtains so I woke as soon as it was light. The house was gray and silent. Arthur was dead. Yesterday it hadn’t seemed quite so definite. Today it did. When I went downstairs, I could hear Martha talking on the phone in the sitting room. I got a bowl of cereal from the kitchen and went in to see her. As I entered the room, she shook her head and put a finger over her lips. I backed out. She was not to be disturbed.

  For a while, I sat on my own in the kitchen. Before long, I heard creaking overhead. Laurie was getting up, and I could hear her moving from her bedroom to the bathroom, which was above the kitchen. There was a wheezy noise as she turned on a tap, and a shuffling of feet. Then there was a sudden, stifled cry. Her footsteps clattered along the bathroom floor and I could hear her rattling the handle up and down, then banging the door.

  Under normal circumstances, when there wasn’t a death in the family, there was a list of things that anyone who was going to spend any time at the house was warned about: the stone flagstones at the back that were like an ice-rink in the rain, the low door frame between the kitchen and the dining room that everyone banged their head on, the loose stair-carpet that had sent at least one person straight to the emergency room, but most particularly the door to the bathroom on the second floor, which was never to be locked.

  When I got upstairs, she was still rattling the handle. “I can’t get out,” she whimpered. Then she added: “There’s some kind of bug in here!”

  “Laurie? The lock’s broken.” I spoke slowly, as if articulating every word might help her understand what I was saying. “You’re not meant to use the key. There’s something wrong with it.”

  I knelt down to talk through the keyhole. “What you’ve got to do is—”

  “It’s flying around!” she shouted.

  “If you don’t frighten it, it won’t hurt you.”

  It was like one of those films in which a pilot has a heart attack and a stewardess has to take the controls and guide the plane down following radio instructions from the ground. That was me: I was the ground.

  “Laurie? You’ve got to lean on the door, really push it in hard.” The handle rattled again. “Not the door handle, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the key, it’s the lock. Push!” I could hear Laurie grunting. “Push the door, then turn the key.”

  “It’s not turning!”

  “Push harder.”

  “I can’t!”

  I grabbed the handle and pulled it towards me. I could hear Laurie trying to turn the key. There was a loud groan from the other side of the door, then a little click, and I heard the lock scrape as the key turned. I pushed the door open.

  “I’m so sorry,” Laurie gasped, but I wasn’t really listening because I was staring at her. She was covered with towels: one round the lower half of her body, one round the top half, one over her shoulders like a large shawl and one over her head like a veil. She l
ooked like an Egyptian mummy who had taken holy orders.

  I went into the bathroom and saw the thing that was flying round and round near the window. It was one of those beetles that look so heavy you can’t believe it can get off the ground.

  “I hate bugs. I’m sorry,” she said weepily, from the doorway.

  A black shroud covered the bath, and it took me a moment to realize that Laurie’s clothes from yesterday were draped over a drying frame. I went past it, heading towards the window. The beetle’s radar must have been faulty: it almost flew into my face. I flicked my hand up, hitting it a glancing blow, and it spiraled to the floor. Laurie gasped. It had felt hard and heavy against the back of my hand.

  “Don’t kill it!” she said.

  I rather thought she had forfeited the right to an opinion. I grabbed a toothmug from the basin, bent down, and placed it over the beetle. Laurie inched back into the bathroom to see. She had taken off the headdress towel so at least I could see her face.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, leaning over me cautiously. The glass magnified and distorted the beetle. It had a shell as dark and shiny as mahogany. It wasn’t moving, but it wasn’t dead: its feelers were twitching. “Back home, we call these june bugs. You get them in the desert. What are you going to do?” she asked.

  I hadn’t thought it was exclusively my problem. “Do you have any paper?” I asked. “Card would be better.”

  She looked down at herself, as if she thought I expected her to be hiding some under the towels.

  “No—in your room,” I said.

  “I didn’t bring any bags with me,” she said, panicked.

  I was getting exasperated. “There should be some paperbacks by your bed. Go and get one and we can tear the cover off.”

  She seemed doubtful. I spoke very slowly: “Look, I’ll slide the cover under the glass. Then I can lift it up without the thing escaping and I’ll throw it out of the window.”

  She nodded. “Oh, that’s a good idea, yes.”

  Holding the towels in place, she scuttled back to her bedroom along the landing. She came back and breathlessly handed me a book.

  I turned it over to see the front. “Not this one, Laurie.” It was the paperback edition of Garden Grown. I handed it back to her. “This is one of my father’s books. I don’t want to tear the cover off it.”

  She was mortified. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “Get another.”

  When she came back, she was holding a book called Seven Types of Ambiguity. It must have been one of Martha’s. I tore off the cover with a satisfying rip. In her other hand, Laurie was still holding Arthur’s book.

  I slipped the cover under the glass and lifted the whole contraption. Laurie followed me to the window and opened it. I put my arm out as far as I could, then took away the glass. The beetle sat on the book cover. In the end, I flicked it off and it took flight. It hadn’t come to any harm.

  When I got back downstairs, Martha was peering round the sitting-room door. “What was that about, all that banging?”

  “Laurie locked herself in the bathroom.”

  “I hope you told her not to put Tampax down the loo,” she said, closing the door. It was another thing that was usually on the list to warn people about.

  The floorboards were creaking again: Laurie was making her descent. I waited for her at the bottom of the stairs. She was taking small delicate steps as if she might trip, wincing as each stair creaked, and looking at the pictures on the wall. She was holding Garden Grown. “Everything’s so old,” she said. “Which era is it from?”

  “Oh, it’s very ancient,” I said vaguely. I wasn’t great on history.

  When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she said, “I’m so sorry about, you know … the bathroom.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. There was a funny smell coming from her, a sort of wet-dog smell. She was dressed in her black clothes from yesterday.

  “Would you like something to eat?”

  “Oh, no. Well, maybe a cup of coffee. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” I led the way to the kitchen, and she sat at the table. She placed Arthur’s book, face up, next to her.

  Now we sat in silence, except for the little sounds she made with her mouth as she drank her coffee. It wasn’t an awkward silence, exactly, but it was somehow charged. I was having a small bet with myself about how long it would take her to mention Arthur’s book. I hadn’t forgotten “Haymanito hears her calling,” or his name scrawled over and over again. She was tapping the cover of the book lightly with her fingers.

  “I don’t even know your last name,” I said.

  “It’s Clow.”

  I tested it out. “Laurie Clow.”

  “Yeah, weird name.” She laughed.

  “Why ‘Laurie’?”

  “It was my dad’s middle name—Laurence.”

  That was an explanation, not a reason. There was another silence. Finally, I said, “We should take that key out of the lock. Everybody gets confused. The thing is, Martha says that if we take it away it’ll get lost.”

  She seemed perplexed. “But if it doesn’t work, shouldn’t you throw it away?”

  “Well, it’s old, the key. Like an antique.”

  “You could put a tag on it. You know, a little colored one.”

  “Laurie, how did you know the phone number?” I asked, without thinking. It was something nobody had thought to ask at the hospital and I didn’t know why it had jumped into my mind. Her fingers stopped drumming. “Yesterday,” I added for clarity. “You phoned Martha at the flat. How did you know the number to call?”

  She looked up at me with a clear gaze. “Why, he told me, your dad told me the number. He remembered it just like that.” She clicked her fingers. “Isn’t that wonderful, with injuries so bad? After the ambulance took him away, I went and called from a phone booth.” Then, with a little nod, she added, “I work in a hospital.”

  My stomach lurched. “I didn’t know he was …” I stopped. I was finding this hard to say. “… conscious before he died.”

  “Oh, he was real messed up but he talked some, yes,” she said. A sad smile passed over her face.

  Then I did something I really didn’t want to do: I burst into tears.

  “Oh, honey, I thought you knew. I thought I said …”

  Actually, I couldn’t remember exactly what she had told us at the hospital, but if she had said that Arthur had talked to her, had had some kind of conversation with her by the side of the road, I wouldn’t have forgotten.

  She got up from her chair, came round to my side of the table and put her arms round me. She pulled my face against her damp shoulder. “Don’t fret. He wasn’t hurting. I was just holding his hand, keeping him warm. Then the paramedics came and got him hooked up to something for the pain. They looked after him really well.” She let me go.

  “Did he know how badly he was hurt?”

  “I don’t think so. I think the body kind of compensates.”

  “Are you a nurse?”

  “Well, I work in a hospital.”

  “But you thought it was a broken leg.”

  “I’m not on the medical staff. I work at the hospital radio station.” She looked away. “I’m so sorry. When I got through to your mother I began by telling her he had broken his leg and I was going to, you know, say it was more than that but then the phone went on the fritz, cut me off. I didn’t have any more coins.”

  “So what did he say exactly?”

  “Well, he kept saying this one word over and over. I thought he was saying ‘Mother.’ He was talking real soft, it was hard to catch. Then he said a phone number. I thought he wanted me to call his mother—that seemed kind of odd. I wrote it on my hand. Look.” She showed me the back of her hand on which, half washed off, was written the telephone number at the flat.

  “So he made sense?”

  “Oh, yes, he told me his name, said he was called Arthur Hayman.” She nodded, as if his having given his na
me revealed everything about his condition. There was a pause: a perceptible change of gear. “He didn’t say he wrote books, though,” she said, with a bright little laugh, indicating Garden Grown. “Wow, that’s something, a writer.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Mmm?” She was still looking at the book.

  “He must have said something else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said his name and gave you the phone number. That was it?”

  “Well, it was hard to catch, he spoke so soft. They were digging up the road. It was kind of noisy, you know. So, the books—what are they about?”

  “But you heard the phone number.”

  “Yes. And his name,” she said. There was a tiny edge to her voice now.

  I appropriated her little laugh. “It sounds like a war film—you know, just his name and number. No other info allowed. Like The Great Escape.”

  She smiled. “That was a great movie.”

  “We had it at school last term.”

  “You get movies at school?”

  “Every other Saturday night.”

  “I love movies. What else have you seen?”

  I wanted to say I had seen inside her bag at the hospital. I wanted to say I had read her poem. I wanted to ask how many times she had written his name in her notebook. “How long were you sitting with him?”

  She looked up at the ceiling, then round the kitchen. She licked her lips. “Well, let’s see, it’s hard to remember. So much was happening.”

  I leaned across the table and picked up the book. Her eyes followed it. “There are five of these,” I said. “They’re called The Hayseed Chronicles. This is the fourth.” I turned it over in my hand and tapped each side in turn on the table, as if I was straightening a pack of cards.

  “Really?” She sounded only mildly interested, but her eyes were narrow and alert, like an animal’s. She held out her hand for the book.

  “Do you want some more coffee?” I asked. I stood up and went to the other side of the kitchen with the book. “Kettle’s still hot.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You put—what? One spoonful?”

  “Yes, not too strong.”