A Random Act of Kindness

by Sophie Jenkins

  There’s a fire burning at the far end of the garden and Dinah’s silhouetted against the billowing smoke.

  ‘Moss – what am I supposed to say to her?’

  He raises his hands in surrender. ‘She won’t listen to me,’ he says. ‘God knows, I’ve tried talking.’

  I walk over the soft, dewy grass with no idea how I can help her or how I can stop this desolate act of destruction. She hasn’t seen me in the dark.

  The fire flares and spits and in the dark heart of the flames I can see a garment, black and smouldering. Dinah’s poking it aggressively with the handle of a yard brush.

  ‘Dinah?’

  I’ve startled her. She grabs my wrist.

  ‘Look at it!’ she says contemptuously. ‘It doesn’t even burn.’

  I snatch the brush out of her hand and move away from the intolerable heat of the fire. Muslin garment bags are piled in a wheelbarrow and I feel sick to my soul to see them. ‘That’s your answer, is it? You’re going to burn all of your clothes, your collection, your history?’

  ‘It’s worthless, so who cares?’

  ‘I care! You’ve got to stop this. Think of Moss.’

  She coughs and fans the smoke away with her hand. ‘Why should I? This is all I’ve got to show for my life. What use is it? In the end it’s all ashes anyway.’

  ‘Don’t say that! Don’t destroy them out of anger – it’s just – wasteful. Burning everything isn’t the answer.’

  ‘It’s my answer,’ she says defiantly. ‘Pah! I’m finished with it all.’

  ‘But you looked gorgeous in them. They were perfect for you, you always looked amazing.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says, pulling my arm. ‘Give me my stick back! They’re all fake. His love was fake. Our marriage was fake. What have I got to look forward to?’ She shrugs. ‘I’m eighty-nine. My life’s over.’

  I don’t know how to deal with emotion except by shutting myself away from it and I wrap my coat tightly around me. My eyes are stinging with smoke and tears. What the hell? Maybe she’s right and in the end it is pointless, trivial and all for nothing.

  She stabs the burning jacket and holds it up high. Her gleeful contempt breaks my heart and suddenly I’ve had enough; I can’t cope with her anger. ‘Oh, why should I care? They’re your clothes. Do what you want with them.’

  ‘I will!’ She picks up a garment bag and holds it towards the flames, watching me defiantly, daring me stop her.

  I start back to the house; the windows throw squares of light before my feet.

  ‘I will do what I want!’ she shouts after me. ‘I don’t need your permission for that! Who cares? Who cares what I do?’

  Let her deal with her own problems, because I can’t. I’m shivering with tension despite the warm night and as I get to the steps, Moss is looking out of the kitchen window, his hands cupped around his eyes, trying to make us out in the dark.

  Behind me, Dinah starts crying – a heart-rending wail of melancholy, of grief.

  I’m so close to leaving and I can’t wait to go, but I can’t leave her like this, I can’t ignore her.

  And so I turn and make that dread trudge down the smoke-hazed garden, dragging my reluctant shadow back to her.

  She sees me coming. ‘What are you doing back here? I don’t need you! Leave me alone!’ She kicks a burning log back onto the fire.

  But I can’t go. I owe her. All this time we’ve been together and I haven’t told her what she did for me, how much it meant. ‘I can’t, Dinah. You changed my life ten years ago,’ I tell her, ‘when we first met. I’ve never thanked you for it.’

  Dinah’s silent, looking at me now, all darkness against the flames except for the steady light of her gaze. The wind shifts the smoke towards us in the damp garden.

  She puts the stick down and leans on it heavily, weighed down with age and emotion. She shields her eyes from the glow of the window. ‘No. You and me? We met before?’

  ‘Yes. In Stables Market. It was a sunny May morning. Warm. The cobbles were gleaming like black pearls. It was sleepy at that time of the day; many of the stalls weren’t even open yet.’

  ‘It’s true; I like it best in the morning,’ she agrees.

  ‘Yeah. Me, too.’ That’s something we share. ‘I hadn’t slept. I’d been worrying about my future, after uni. They tell you that you can be anything you want, that there are no limits to what you can accomplish if you put your mind to it, but it’s not true.’ I can feel the pressure of failure crushing me like I felt it then. ‘I’d seen a dress in the market. It was beautiful and it lifted my spirits. It was the one thing that reassured me I still had some capacity for happiness. I’d gone to look at it three or four times and each time I was scared it would have been sold.’

  ‘You should have bought it!’

  ‘I couldn’t.’ The smoke stings my eyes. ‘I didn’t deserve it.’

  ‘Oh.’ She shifts position and her face is lost in the dark. ‘This dress, what did it look like?’ she asks keenly.

  ‘Sleeveless, with a lime green knee-length skirt and a turquoise bodice with a keyhole neckline. The neckline and hem have square-cut faceted turquoise crystals and the fabric, it’s two-tone, turquoise and green.’

  ‘I remember you!’ she says suddenly. ‘All in black and very annoyed when I looked at the dress, like you wanted to kill me. You hated it that an old lady talked to you.’

  ‘Yeah, you made it worse – you were everything I wanted to be: sophisticated, worldly. I hoped you’d walk past and leave us alone. Me and the dress, I mean.’

  At the time I thought I was safely hidden in the shadows of her superiority, but her heels stuttered to a halt beside me.

  ‘Beautiful colour,’ she’d said approvingly, nodding at the frock.

  I’d hung it back on the rack, in the middle, hiding it where it was less likely to catch someone else’s eye.

  ‘I told you it wasn’t my kind of thing – save you thinking I was delusional. But you didn’t go away. You came around in front of me and stepped right into my line of vision, looking me up and down through your sunglasses, your red lips the same colour as your suit. You walked your fingers along the hangers and found it again, the lime green-and-turquoise dress, and unhooked it from the rack, lifted it up to the sunlight to admire. ‘So beautiful,’ you murmured.

  She’d balanced the hook of the hanger on her finger and let the frock dangle. In the breeze the weight of the crystals and the built-in shaping made it flash and dance under the spotlight of the sun. The crystals sprinkled light around us like confetti.

  ‘I thought you were going to buy it.’ If she’d bought it then, in front of me, I swear I would have killed her.

  But after admiring it for herself she made room for it again in the middle of the rail and closed the other dresses around to hide it, just as I’d done, and regarded me over the top of her shades. Her eyes were dark and intelligent. She seemed to look at me for a long time and I didn’t look away – I trusted her in the same way that I’d trust a doctor who’d called me in urgently and was studying my notes, with that same sense of fatalism, of my future being in her hands.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not going to. It’s too small.’

  ‘Not the frock. I mean your plan. You have a plan, don’t you, that you want to carry out? I’m telling you. Don’t.’

  I shook my head, ashamed and confused. It was as if she could see the paracetamol that I’d been popping out of the blister packs into my jewellery box, to see me through my lonely evenings. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Dinah Moss pushed the handles of her bag up to the crook of her elbow and put her hand to the pearls at her throat. ‘My mistake. I apologise.’

  She glanced at her watch and seemed surprised by the time. The gesture seemed overdone, just for my benefit. I shield my eyes from the fire. ‘You said to me, “Buy the dress. It’s waiting for you. It’ll change your life.”’
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  Dinah chuckled. ‘Was I right?’

  ‘Yes. And that’s why I’m here. I owe you a future,’ I tell her. ‘Thank you.’

  I’m breathing deeply, as if I’ve been running.

  Dinah is silent, looking at me now, a steady gleam in her eye. The wind shifts the smoke towards us in the damp garden. ‘So I did that for you, long ago,’ she says, marvelling. She rubs her eyes. ‘And now, you and I, we are friends.’

  ‘Yes. Strange how things work out, isn’t it?’

  The burning wood pops, releasing a shower of red sparks, and she turns and prods the remains of the jacket, sprawled black in the embers.

  Her anger has burned off. The relief feels like the freshness of the air when a storm has passed. ‘Let’s take these clothes back inside.’

  We carry them between us and climb the steps. On the doorstep we lay them down to take off our shoes.

  She goes inside and I hear her say something to Moss. He’s still leaning heavily with his forehead pressed against the window, looking out into the garden.

  Dinah puts her hand on his shoulder and he drops to the floor like a felled tree.

  Moss is on a trolley in a cubicle in A & E at the Royal Free Hospital when Dinah and I get there in our Uber. His eyes are closed.

  A young guy in a pale blue tunic stops by. We look at him eagerly. He could be a doctor, a nurse or a cleaner for all we know.

  ‘It’s good that they’re keeping an eye on him,’ I say to Dinah. She’s picking mud off her jacket. We both smell strongly of smoke.

  ‘Ha! Good for whom?’ She looks at her husband. ‘Look at him! He doesn’t want to be in here. It’s not safe in hospital. Too many sick people in one place.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the idea.’

  Dinah brushes a stray hair from my shoulder. ‘Dahlink, you don’t want to know what goes on in these places. He’s under observation.’ She makes it sound sinister. ‘They’re doing tests with his blood.’

  ‘He’s been working hard.’ I get a pang of conscience. ‘Dinah, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if it was too much for him?’

  ‘Bah! Work? Don’t worry; it’s not the work. They think it’s a virus, maybe. Give me your phone to call David. He’ll want to be here.’

  David joins us twenty minutes later. His hair is mussed up, as if he’s just got out of bed.

  ‘Hello,’ he says distractedly, coming inside the blue screens with us and looking at Moss, who’s propped up by pillows. ‘Poor guy. Do they know what’s wrong with him?’

  Dinah pats a footstool for him to sit on. She smooths her skirt over her knees, covering the holes in her dark stockings. ‘A virus, they think. They’re doing tests,’ she says.

  ‘Tests. Good. How are you bearing up?’

  ‘I’m fine. I called you not for help but because it’s good for you to keep busy. Take your mind off your broken heart.’

  ‘Off my …? Yes.’ He turns his attention to me. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘You’ve got these … black smudges on your face.’

  I get out my make-up mirror. Crikey. ‘Smuts,’ I explain. ‘Dinah was having a bonfire.’

  He looks at me quizzically.

  Dinah takes her husband’s limp hand and strokes his fingers tenderly. ‘I’m thinking we can move into the Otto Schiff care home for the elderly. Where you go, I go.’ She turns to us. ‘You know Otto Schiff?’

  David and I shrug. ‘Sorry.’

  She’s surprised we don’t know him. ‘Otto Schiff helped us to come to this country as refugees. He was a lovely man, very English-looking, in a nice, sober suit, of German origin but looking very British, very understated, apart from the monocle. The first thing he gave us when we got here was a little blue book, a handbook: Helpful Information and Guidance for every Refugee. Written by German Jewish refugees who knew the ropes. You remember the handbook, Moss?’ she asks, shaking his hand.

  Moss’s breathing doesn’t change.

  ‘It was important not to be a burden on our new country. We wanted to integrate. The Jewish community supported us, every last penny. Coming here, I was fifteen, still a child really. I’d left my country, my home, everything – and now I was in a new land feeling … what can I say? Not just relief, but also self-pity. This handbook, it told us how to behave so that we’d fit in and be treated with respect, and it was a very good handbook except for one thing.’

  David and I sit forward in expectation.

  She holds her hands up in the air. ‘It advised us not to dress in a way that would catch the eye! We were guests here, you see, and like now there was anti-Semitism; it was better for us not to attract attention to ourselves.’ She chuckles to herself. ‘After all we’d been through! Don’t catch the eye! It’s crazy! But you know, it was helpful.’

  She straightens the sheet covering Moss’s chest and she sighs.

  After midnight, Moss is moved to a ward and put on an intravenous drip.

  Once he’s settled for the night, Dinah asks David wearily if he’ll take her home. I walk with them to his car, which is parked around the corner, in Fleet Road.

  ‘Jump in, Fern. I’ll drop you off afterwards,’ he says to me.

  At Dinah’s, the grey smoke is still drifting up behind the house and I go with her to her door. She flexes her shoulders and puts the key in the lock, hesitating before opening it. She grips my wrist and looks up into my face anxiously. ‘Who would think that this day would end like this?’

  ‘I know.’ I feel a rush of love for her. ‘I hope you get some sleep. Call me if … well, for any reason,’ I tell her.

  She pats my hand. ‘I will. Good girl.’

  I’m touched; it’s a long time since I’ve been called that.

  As I get back in the car, David turns to look at me.

  I can see part of his face lit up by the street lamp.

  ‘Where to?’ he asks.

  ‘What are the choices?’ I reply, half joking, raking my smoky fringe out of my eyes. ‘Fancy going clubbing, do you? If I stay out long enough, my mother’ll be in bed when I get back.’

  ‘You mean Annabel.’

  I laugh. ‘Yes, Annabel.’

  He looks serious. ‘You don’t have to go back, Fern. You could stay at my place.’

  I feel a sudden adrenaline rush. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got a spare room.’

  ‘Phew, ha ha,’ I say, trying to sound normal in a ‘good old Fern’ way. But, oh, the thought of a real bed, of actually lying flat for a few hours’ sleep instead of bent up on the sofa, is so appealing. ‘That would be brilliant.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He grins. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  He drives towards Chalk Farm and turns left down Harmood Street before pulling up outside a small house with a red front door flanked by two olive trees in terracotta pots.

  ‘This is it,’ he says.

  I look at the house through the car window and time seems to slow. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. It looks so neat and he’s so warm, and now the idea that I’m going there so that I can lie in a spare bed by myself shows a woeful lack of imagination.

  I lean back against the headrest and meet his gaze. His eyes search mine and linger in a way that goes deeper than friendship.

  ‘Fern,’ he says softly.

  I touch the hook at the throat of my blue velvet evening coat and undo it because it’s suddenly too restricting. ‘Yes?’ I can feel the heat between us as I hold his gaze.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says.

  This is it. My heart is pounding. We open the car doors at the same time and, choreographed under the lamplight, we step out over our shadows and walk across the road, footsteps beating rhythmically in sync. He points his remote at the car and it peeps and flashes its lights coyly. From his house there’s a loud eruption of noise: a dog starts barking …

  ‘Shit!’ I say, stopping dead while David carries on up the path alone, keys now jingling in his pocket.

  I feel a rush o
f adrenaline, and escalating panic. I’d forgotten about the dog.

  I am overwhelmed by a sense of danger. It’s barking as if it’s using an amplifier.

  It’s barking a warning bark, a get-off-my-property message, a clear leave-my-owner-alone threat.

  It’s barking with a rage that’s directed at me, so vicious that I can feel myself shrinking, powerless and vulnerable.

  I quickly pull the metal gate closed with a clang. I’ve got to get away before David opens the door, because once that door is open that dog’s going to come rushing out, motivated, impelled, galvanised to attack me by the smell of fear – and that gate’s not going to stop it in its tracks.

  I run back as fast as I can towards Chalk Farm Road, coat flying, my vision pulsing with the throb of my heart, hoping I can find a bar still open in which to take refuge. Reggae music is playing up to the right, so I bowl into Cotton’s Rhum Shack and push into the crowd at the bar, into safety, my breath sobbing in my throat.

  ‘Slow down, lady,’ the barman says over the sound of steel drums. ‘We’re not closing yet.’

  I put a tenner on the bar. ‘JD, no ice, please.’

  ‘Bad night, huh?’

  ‘I’ve escaped from the jaws of death,’ I tell him, getting my phone from my bag to find David’s number to explain the truth about why I ran away.

  But then I stop and think about it, because this is how it’ll go. If I call him, David’ll ask me what just happened and I’ll have to explain to him that I’m scared of dogs. He’ll laugh and tell me that his dog is an old softy who just wants to play. He’ll then want me to go back and make friends with it, not knowing how much I hate dogs and how much they hate me. Only I know that and because of that I won’t be able to do it. I won’t be able to force myself to do it because my fear will cause every nerve in my body to scream at me to get away for my own protection.

  ‘Here you go.’ The barman slides my whisky to me.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I clutch my drink, feeling sick and empty. Never tell a dog lover you’re scared of dogs, that’s what I’ve learnt.

  I message him instead:

  Just to let you know I’m okay and thanks for the lift.

  I add an x and then delete it again.