Anything You Do Say

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Anyway. Her surname’s Tarling. Pretty unusual name. I’ve googled her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she’s … she’s nice. She was going to present on law reform. To do with the NHS. How it runs. Lefty stuff,’ he said with a twisted smile, a nod to when he once called Reuben’s job lefty stuff and Reuben’s nostrils flared like a horse’s.

  I stared at the ceiling, enjoying the slow, unravelling feeling of my brain waking up again. Not intellectually but – something else. Interpersonally. Not just making friends for self-preservation.

  ‘As long as you seem normal, I’d be flattered that you were checking me out,’ I said. ‘Most women would be flattered, I think.’ I went to add something self-deprecating like, ‘But then, what would I know?’ but stopped myself.

  Alan would say I was good enough. Even with a third-class degree. Even while imprisoned.

  My entire life I’d been so bloody frightened of what everybody thought of me and my failed existence and yet, when I failed spectacularly – sank so much lower, so much worse than failing a degree – I realized the truth of it: nobody cares what you think as much as you do. Not even close.

  ‘What’re you gonna do?’ I asked Wilf.

  ‘I thought – well, I thought I might Facebook her? If you don’t think that’s nuts?’

  ‘Tell me about the smile,’ I said.

  ‘She was waiting – I think. Just looking at me and smiling widely, her eyes all lit up. Like she was coaxing me to do something.’

  ‘Yeah – Facebook her.’

  Wilf’s persistence was nothing like Sadiq’s. Here was true, happy chivalry.

  ‘Consider it done,’ he said.

  We talked of other stuff then. Of the counselling diploma I was doing. Who my friends were. How Reuben and I were managing. I didn’t get to find out what happened until the next visit. Prison was a serialization of my social life.

  Now, at home again – wherever that is – I tell Wilf I’ll see him as soon as I can, and hang up. I can no longer avoid thinking about the difference between Wilf’s and Reuben’s visits. Wilf’s eyes had always been squarely on mine, as though I was a person who had lost a leg and it was his job not to look at the stump, to make me feel as normal as possible. Reuben’s eyes had drifted around. To other prisoners. To the guards. Lingering on the multiple locks, the procedures they went through in a closed prison to ensure the dangerous prisoners – me – did not get out.

  I wander down the hallway and into the bathroom. I could run a steaming bath, my first in years. Grab a book. The freedom doesn’t feel glorious; it feels frightening. How does anybody ever decide what to do?

  I wander further inside. It smells of bleach, which tangs my nostrils.

  There’s a tiled windowsill that is empty apart from one shower gel and what looks like a flyer, folded in four. It must have come out of Reuben’s pocket. Tentatively, wanting to know more about this man I’m living with after two years, I unfold it.

  I’m surprised to see his name in the upper-left quadrant. Reuben Oliva. Jazz pianist. There’s a photo of him. He’s silhouetted, but I can tell it’s him. That head-bent pose. That theatre. It used to be just for me. It used to be classical music, not jazz. He hated jazz, said it was pretentious. And now … I blink, reading the rest of it. He plays at a jazz club. Every third Thursday of the month.

  I discard the flyer. It’s not a big deal. I’ll ask him about it. Later.

  Standing in the bathroom, I strip my clothes off, but stop, naked, pick my white T-shirt up, and clutch it in my hands. I bring it to my nose. It smells of nothing. Not the grimy prison smell I used to be able to detect, in those awful early days. Not the dust and the stale food and the cheap detergent. It smells – I realize, as I hold it to my mouth – of home. I can’t take it off. I can’t wash it. I slip it back on over my head. I’ll take it off soon.

  I reach my hands down underneath the T-shirt to skim my stomach. Thirty-two. I feel the skin move underneath my fingertips. Thirty-two and I’ve not got much time left to have that auburn-haired baby.

  I need to start trying now. Now or never. I’ll ask Reuben that, too. Somehow.

  35

  Conceal

  It’s time for the hospital again, I hope for the last time. I’m sitting in the waiting room. I always shake when I’m here, at my consultant’s office, though I don’t know why. There is nothing scary here. I did an online CBT course, and I try to put it into practice now. One by one, I look at the objects around the room, listing any ways in which they could harm me. The wooden desk in the corner? No. Not scary. The wastepaper bin, full of sheets of paper and one green prescription? No. The photocopier behind the desk? No. I am safe. I am okay.

  It is a hospital in the suburbs of Birmingham. A large, white building set back from the street. As I sit in the makeshift waiting room with its high ceilings and dado rails, it is bright, hot sunshine outside. Almost summer. The pavement moves in and out of shadow as a tree blows its leaves around. There’s never a receptionist here. My consultant calls patients himself.

  ‘Joanna.’ Mr Dingles appears in the door of his office.

  I cross the foyer, my shoes squeaking on the linoleum, and follow him.

  A total hysterectomy due to the severity of the pelvic trauma. It was the gearstick that did it. I often wonder if it was so severe because I was so slim, without padding, but the medics tell me not.

  A punctured lung. I still can’t walk far. I need to sit down on benches in shopping centres and pause for breath at bus stops.

  An old tendon injury my hand will never recover from, improperly looked after, and made worse in the crash.

  That’s what I did.

  That’s what I did to myself.

  ‘Our last appointment,’ he says kindly. ‘How have you been?’

  Mr Dingles is polite to a fault, always enquiring after me, right from my first outpatient visit when I could barely get out of the taxi. He always asked me how I was, as though I wasn’t a patient; enquired as to my weekend plans.

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  I don’t avoid the hospital appointments, evading treatment, as I might once have done. I turn up, every single time, and battle through. Learning to live with it. My injuries, and the rest.

  He gets out his checklist. We use the same one every time I see him, though he is more relaxed about it now.

  ‘Hot flushes?’ he says.

  ‘Calming down.’

  ‘Leg pain?’

  ‘Still there.’

  ‘Hand pain from your old injury?’

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Breathing.’

  ‘Shot,’ I say, with a rueful smile.

  ‘It’ll get there,’ he says, then puts his glasses back on and regards me. ‘Paranoia?’ he says.

  I shrug. ‘It’s gone now,’ I say.

  I’ve said that in every appointment for the last year, but he still asks.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said once. ‘Where would paranoia have come from? It doesn’t fit with your other symptoms.’

  It had been on my notes, from A&E and intensive care. I had tried to play it down, because it certainly wasn’t medical. But now, two years on, and looking back, I wonder if maybe it was. The ongoing strain of the guilt. The stress hormones in my system. They clouded things over in my mind until I became sure that people were after me. But then I see Ed’s eyes in my mind and still feel sure that he knows.

  I don’t know what’s true. I don’t know what’s real.

  ‘You’re doing well,’ Mr Dingles says.

  I nod, quickly. He doesn’t know, of course. He thinks me incredibly unlucky, is all. A woman who forgot to look right, once, as she approached a roundabout. A woman who lives alone in Birmingham. Who is never accompanied by family.

  Reuben came to see me in the hospital, and I reiterated our break-up, there and then. Told him I was moving away, to Birmingham. Told him to tell Ed. That I would tell everybody else myself. Reuben argued, until I sai
d I really didn’t love him any more, and then he dropped it. Conceded obediently, like a dog who’d been abused in the past.

  Mr Dingles runs his usual batch of tests on me. Scraping things along the soles of my feet. Asking me to spell words backwards. Assessing my gait. Giving me puzzles, which I ace, of course.

  He performs a final test on me – making me touch my fingers to my nose – and then we are done. Over a year after. Almost two. We are done.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ve never met someone quite so … who faces up to things so well,’ he says, nodding twice, little head bows as he looks at me. ‘Head on,’ he adds.

  I very nearly laugh. Me facing things head on. But he’s right. I read about avoidant personalities on the Internet. It was like I had found a definition of myself in a dictionary. I turned the words over in my mind, and then I changed.

  I shake my head quickly, and say goodbye to him.

  He lingers in the reception area. ‘Jo,’ he says to me as I turn to leave, extending a hand towards me. Evidently he’s not ready for this to be my last visit, either.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It will get better,’ he says, holding his hands out, palms up. ‘This isn’t … the end of your improvement.’

  I flush with pleasure. I want him to like me. Of course. I’m glad he likes me. I wonder if I am his best patient.

  I look around the empty foyer and he stills, looking at me carefully. ‘Take care,’ he says. ‘And give less of a shit.’

  ‘What?’ I say, a tiny giggle escaping.

  ‘You care so much. About everything.’

  ‘My recovery,’ I say, unsure of myself. I’m glad there are no other patients here to hear.

  He leans against the reception desk. His clinic is almost always empty. The rows of chairs give it an abandoned feel. It’s not private, but it feels it.

  He shrugs then, still looking at me, but saying nothing for a moment. ‘Yes. It’ll come. That’ll come,’ he says.

  I nod.

  He opens his mouth, hesitates, then says it anyway. ‘I mean about life, Jo,’ he says. ‘That would be my number-one tip for … recovery. Try to care less. You’re obviously a striver.’

  I smile, a twisted, ironic smile. It’s not actually very funny.

  ‘So just … relax more,’ he says.

  He doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t. He has never asked why I am cagey. Why I left London, why I am unmarried – now – or about what preceded the accident. He probably knows there is something. But he’s never asked what.

  I look across the foyer and out of the window. A couple of cyclists ride past, their wheels spinning like speeded-up second hands on a clock.

  ‘I promise – you will get better,’ Mr Dingles says to me.

  For a moment I wonder if he means something more than my medical recovery. I wonder what he’d do if I told him. If I told him everything from the beginning.

  ‘Be less serious,’ he advises me.

  I let out a tiny laugh. My first in months. ‘How?’ I say.

  ‘Try it,’ he says again, before disappearing back into his room.

  I look sadly at the spot where he was standing, my doctor, before he discharged me. It would work, his advice, for almost anything – anyone – else. But it is not really for people like me. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know who I am. What kind of person I am. That advice is not sound for bad people who’ve done bad things. Who need punishing. It is for good people. Good people who can’t say no. Who put themselves down. Who flagellate themselves over their degree result for ten years. Who don’t do enough ironing or who feel guilty for not going to the gym. People like the Joanna Before. Not the Joanna After.

  I step outside. I don’t feel the cold like I used to. I’m fatter again. Not at my old weight, but almost. It’s true what they say – well, sort of. Time doesn’t heal, but it does help.

  Birmingham is leafy. Run-down, in places. Upmarket in others. It is nothing – absolutely nothing – like London. Real London. Reuben’s London, with its ancient corner pubs. The cobbled streets. The blue Bloomsbury signs on buildings. Our London.

  And so, exactly contrary to Mr Dingles’ advice – but perhaps being discharged has been a catalyst – I suddenly know what to do.

  It is time to stop avoiding everything. It is time to face it.

  36

  Reveal

  I can’t remember how to top up my Oyster card. The wallet I kept it in – a Cath Kidston one – is faded, looking dated and tattered around its sides. The machine seems incomprehensible. Was it always touch-screen? I try again.

  I use my bank card; a new one arrived halfway through my sentence, after the old one had expired. I hope it’s got the same pin.

  After a few seconds, I see there’s no slot for the chip and pin. I scan the machine, feeling like a tearful alien.

  ‘You just need to put the card there,’ a Scottish man using the machine along from me says. ‘There,’ he says again, indicating a panel on the front of the machine that I hadn’t noticed. It’s yellow and has three curvy lines on it, like a Wi-Fi sign, and as I press the card to it, it beeps. I look to him, hoping he’ll explain, but he doesn’t. He merely does the same on his machine, then turns away from me to the station.

  I’m almost afraid to try getting through the barrier in case that’s changed, too. I wonder if everybody can tell? My lack of knowledge of how the world works. My prisoner’s pallor. Perhaps I am unknowingly branded, somewhere.

  But then I think about what the counsellor said, and tilt my chin up. It doesn’t matter what they think of me. And, besides, nobody cares. I wrote to Imran, while I was in prison. Alan told me he wouldn’t write back, but he did, just once. The writing was shaky and all over the place. I traced those letters as I cried. I am getting a little better every day, he wrote at the end, the letters huge and sloping down the page. And it was that childish sentence that did it. As though he needed to apologize to me for his condition. I cried for the rest of the night in my cell, too.

  I walk through the barrier – that hasn’t changed – and board the tube to Laura’s.

  She still lives on the barge, and it’s like a step back. There are things on it that I didn’t know I’d remembered. The Rosie and Jim dolls in the window. The way they have all sorts littered on the roof. Plates and cups and cutlery.

  There’s a cat, a long-haired black and white cat on the roof, I know to be called Sampson, who I’ve never met. I heard about him during Laura’s sporadic visits.

  Laura dashes out, her arms outstretched, before I can finish truly looking and reacquainting myself.

  ‘You’re back, you’re out,’ she says. She tilts her head, looking at me.

  ‘I’m out,’ I say, and her scream of pleasure, the way she embraces me, quickens my heart. I forget her infrequent visits. The way she started speaking to me like I was a distant acquaintance.

  Jonty emerges from the boat, waves briefly, and we follow him in.

  And although I recognize the objects – the teal mugs, the patterned cushions – it’s the smell that does it. That old-fashioned, dusty, tannin smell. Like the bottom of a teapot. A caravan smell. I breathe in deeply.

  But that’s when I see the boxes. They’re everywhere. Ten or fifteen of them.

  ‘Been on Amazon sprees?’ I say.

  ‘I said – we’re moving.’ She’s lighting the gas underneath a hob kettle, her back to me as she says it. ‘I meant to say, when I came, that we’d found a buyer, but it didn’t seem –’

  ‘Oh,’ I say quickly, nodding.

  People never feel they can tell you anything when they come to visit you in prison. Or their news will be caveated. It’s nothing compared to what you’re going through, but … they will say, or, No, no, enough about me, I’m here to see how you are. It was well-meaning, but not what I wanted.

  ‘Where to?’ I say, trying to keep my tone casual.

  Jonty is sitting at the very end of the barge, outside in the sunshine. His tanned skin
is illuminated. He looks older. Everybody looks older. I saw them ageing, in weekly or bi-weekly snapshots, but everybody’s skin looked old under those fluorescent lights.

  Laura’s hands are veiny. Her crow’s feet obvious even when she’s not smiling. Two deep lines either side of her nose. Jonty is fuller in the waist. He still has his boyish body language, but, a few years ago, he’d have been over here, showing me something, talking to me about his jobs. And now, he’s over there. Maturely giving us our space. But then, I think, frowning, I forced us all to grow up. Of course he’s giving us space. I have just been released from prison. I made this maturation happen.

  When Wilf came back to visit me, two days later – the Thursday after he first saw Minnie on the train – he, too, looked older. He had greying hair at his temples. My brother, I found myself thinking. The boy I used to play in rock pools with, pointing out darting crabs and tiny fish.

  ‘Okay, so,’ he said, sitting down opposite me again. He kept his eyes trained on me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting forward.

  It seemed easy. There were none of the barbed comments, no competing. No gloating about his houses. He had done that, hadn’t he? Or had I just read that into what he’d been saying? I couldn’t tell, but I wanted to ignore it. Just concentrate on him.

  ‘Your beard’s greying like Monty’s,’ I said, with a laugh. Monty was Mum and Dad’s old tomcat.

  ‘Is it?’ Wilf said, laughing self-consciously as he reached to touch it.

  Where previously he’d been swarthy – we both always tanned easily, but he had golden-brown hair, too, which lent him the look of somebody who spent all his time outside – his palette now had silver in it, and it made him look completely different, somehow.

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  He reached to touch my hand, then, even though it was banned. The pleasure of it. Of another warm hand upon mine, so delicately it may as well have been an insect landing on my bare skin in the summer. It was exquisite, that pleasure, but I didn’t tell him so.

  ‘I Facebooked her.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I could feel myself smiling widely. I had known that prison would be upsetting. That I would be lonely. But I hadn’t anticipated how often I would be bored. It was all the time: relentless boredom, time moving as slowly as honey off a spoon.