First Aid (20 page)

‘You and Tara did?' Jo said.

‘We'd thought about going somewhere inland with more atmosphere. But it turned out all right,' he said.

‘Annie got a splinter,' Rob said.

‘Did you, Annie? Show me,' Jo said.

Annie held both hands out. She hated splinters. She rubbed her hands over any grey and grainy-looking wood until she was sure she wouldn't get one. Jo always carried a packet of needles with her. It was no good telling her.

‘I can't see anything,' Jo said. ‘It must be better.'

‘It was all a bit of a pantomime but I won't go into it now,' Peter said.

‘Fine,' Jo said.

‘We've brought some of the bags up,' Peter said. ‘They're on the landing. I'll go and get the rest.'

‘Don't worry,' Jo said. ‘You'll be late getting to work. I'll come down.'

‘Like that?' he said.

She looked down at herself, surprised. Yesterday's T-shirt and skirt. She'd worn them in bed. She smoothed down the skirt.

‘Yes,' she said.

She followed him down the stairs and into the hallway. Megan, the downstairs neighbour, was letting herself in. She must be taking the day off work, Jo thought. She smiled and Megan smiled back. She found it restful that they didn't say hello – and somehow more intimate, though they knew nothing about each other.

She and Peter went out into the street. He unlocked the boot of the car and leant inside for the battered holdall and the plastic laundry bag with its handles tied together. He put them on the ground.

‘Leave them there,' she said. ‘I'll manage.'

‘You'll be all right?'

‘You've done most of it,' she said.

‘I meant, in general.'

‘Yes, I'll be all right,' she said. ‘Thanks for helping out.'

‘Ella seems to be calmer,' he said.

‘I'm glad.'

‘Tara had a good talk with her yesterday morning. It might have made it easier for you, paved the way,' he said.

‘Yes,' she said.

‘She'll need time to recover. Tara would talk to her again, if you wanted her to. She's sympathetic. She seems to understand what she's been through.'

‘Once is probably fine,' Jo said.

‘She did her best. So did I. You didn't see Ella, last night, down at the ferry terminal. Sitting in the café there, in the middle of the night. That kind bloke had picked her up – a total stranger. Christ, we were lucky.'

‘Yes,' Jo said. ‘She was lucky too.'

‘Has she really no idea how dangerous it is to take lifts?'

‘She knows,' Jo said. She paused. ‘I'm glad the man who gave her the lift didn't tell her. She probably wouldn't have agreed to use his mobile to call you.'

‘She was a mess. Crying, shivering. I've never seen her like that.'

Neither of them spoke.

‘She was crying when you found her?' Jo said.

‘No. When she saw me. Relief, I suppose. I was bloody relieved too.'

Jo nodded. ‘What happened to the man?' she said.

‘He had to leave to catch the ferry. He had a wedding to get to. He left her in the care of the café attendant. I thanked the woman, of course. She made light of it all. Said she didn't know what I was talking about. I'd like to get hold of the fellow's address. Send him a crate of wine or something.'

Jo imagined the man on his own again after his encounter with Ella. She saw him flicking through his travel documents, leaning across to the left-hand side of the windscreen, maybe re-sticking a loose corner of his tax disc, driving up the ramp to the car deck. Peter used to do those things. Before the ferry sailed he might have looked back and seen the girl and her father in miniature before they disappeared from the terminal buildings.

Peter was prodding the near tyre with his foot, as if gauging the pressure.

‘She was frightened of him,' he said. ‘That's why she jumped off the train. She saw him.'

‘She told you that?' Jo knew who
him
was.

‘More or less. Well, I needed some explanation.'

‘That's probably why she gave you one,' she said.

‘She wasn't lying,' he said.

‘No? Though she might, if pushed – like most people,' she said.

‘Then she thought she saw him at the Sandrock Hotel,' he said.

‘Thought?'

‘He wasn't actually there. She was in such a state. Does it matter?'

She shook her head.

‘What was she doing at the Sandrock Hotel?' she said.

‘With someone called Vince, apparently. She has too much freedom.'

‘He's nice, isn't he? Vince. Have you met him? She may not realise how nice. Weird place for them to go.'

‘What exactly is their relationship?'

He said it as he used to say to her, Why did you leave those tomatoes rotting in the fridge, or, Why did you leave the skylight open in the rain? She hadn't known then and she didn't know now. She could have said that Vince was a year younger than Ella and that Ella didn't fancy him, which would have kept Peter quiet but been a cop-out – not fair to anyone. He seemed to know that she wasn't going to reply.

‘Then the evening before she was out with Trevor. Anything to get out of the flat, she said. That's no good, Jo.'

‘You seem to have found out a lot.'

‘I made it my business to find out. I wanted a picture of her activities.'

‘I see.'

‘Have you got any plans?' Peter asked. This sounded less personal, a form of goodbye. He would leave soon.

She replied in the same manner, ‘There are always things to do. No plans.'

‘You haven't come to any decisions?' he said.

She sighed loudly enough for him to hear. It wasn't enough to be in one piece today. She had to promise to be in one piece tomorrow as well, having made New Year resolutions. They had had similar exchanges over the years, a whole clutch of them at the time of his leaving. She had never managed reassurances about uncertainties; they seemed as unconvincing as a horoscope. What Peter wanted for her was monotony, gingered up with graspable events – short breaks, days out, birthdays, Christmases. He'd call it happiness probably, as long as she could afford it. And if the worst happened – for instance, falling in love with an unsuitable person, which would score about the same as being in a road accident, or being attacked by your unsuitable lover, which would be the same as going through the windscreen – then the best you could do would be to carry on as if it had never happened, organising short breaks, days out, birthdays, Christmases . . .

Ella had jumped; it was brave to jump. Jo hoped, for her sake, it had been as free as it looked.

‘She thought she heard him upstairs at Lois Lucas's,' Peter said. ‘She thought he was there, waiting in the bedroom. That's why she ran out. It sounded like some sort of panic attack.' He shook his head. ‘One and a half nights she spent in that shop.'

‘He wouldn't have been there, whatever you and Tara think,' Jo said. ‘Why would he go to Lois Lucas's at that time of night? Nothing about it makes sense.'

‘She said she thought he was waiting for you,' he said.

‘In Trevor's bedroom? What's that supposed to be about?'

As she spoke, she felt a vague disturbance in her head that was more like the pressure of unequal weights behind her eyes than real pain.

‘That's what she said. It doesn't make sense, I agree. Why would you be there in the middle of the night?' he said.

She smiled hazily, as if she'd discerned the source of a gas leak.

‘Thank you for telling me. You needn't have. Did she tell you what exactly she was frightened of?' she said.

‘No, and I didn't push it,' he said.

He looked at his watch. Jo had no idea what time it was.

‘We're not getting anywhere,' she said. ‘Let's forget it. I'll give Tara a call. Thank her for her help.'

He looked astonished. ‘You don't have to.'

‘I'd like to. There's probably some truth in what she's been saying.'

‘What has she been saying?'

She laughed. ‘I can guess,' she said. ‘I'll be fine. You go.'

He pointed the car keys at the car and the locks clicked – the usual anti-climax.

She watched him drive away and went back indoors.

INSIDE THE HALL
, the door to the left was propped wide open and Jo could see right through the house to her neighbours' garden. Cooler it looked down there, smelling of clean washing – the patch of outdoors at the far end, a dark August green. They could perhaps swap, she and the neighbours. Even at this late stage, she could change her mind and choose downstairs. Wear the smaller size of the trainers neatly lined up in pairs on the tiles, take the video lying next to them back to the video shop, peg out the clothes on the line. They seemed to have a simple life – orderly. They had a fuzzy inside to their letterbox and a special holder for milk bottles.

After the move, she would hear them walking about above her. She would know the lay-out and where their feet were going. They would go diagonally across the floor at night and then stop. There was only one possible place for a double bed, with the head on the inside wall where the fireplace used to be. She wondered if they would pray before they got into it. She had always thought of them as the Christian couple but she had no evidence for so naming them apart from the text on the back of the bike. The Kingdom of God is Within You. Perhaps that was all there was to it. Dilys had always told her that Gail was in heaven, but the fact – since it was presented as such – seemed irrelevant. Gail wasn't here and that was what counted. Jo was as certain as she could be that there was no such thing as a soul – but she didn't rule out the possibility of losing one.

In the evenings, her new old neighbours, Dan and Megan, would bang about in her former flat in a discreet way, hoovering, knocking brooms into corners, painting over the stains. She would give them time to get straight and then, in a hospitable way, she would ask them down. They would have cups of tea in the garden. Annie would hand round biscuits on plates. She knew the sort of person she would be if she lived downstairs. Living where Dan and Megan used to live. Knowing they were above her, setting things to rights. She knew intensely, there was nothing vague about it.

In the garden a tap was turned on and water splashed into a watering can. Jo moved away out of sight and pushed open her own door. She took her time over climbing the stairs.

She had long ago given up working out what she was going to say in advance, even beginnings. Sentences she planned – though they started out neutral – acidulated while they were waiting, good for nothing when the time came. Dilys always prepared difficult conversations to audition pitch, not just her part, but the other person's as well. The advantage of this method was that when you said something different from what she had expected, she carried straight on as if no one had spoken. On the receiving end, you felt not so much misunderstood as bypassed. Peter retrieved signpost phrases from Tara. He liked contemporary clichés; they seemed livelier than his own. When he finally got round to telling Jo about Tara – it had been at the bottle bank at three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon – they had dropped into his confession like globs of oil on water, unassimilated.

Jo had told Peter that she would know what to say when she saw Ella's face and she still hoped she would.

Ella was sitting at the kitchen table, sharpening coloured pencils for Annie, taking care over them so that the shavings fell on to a piece of white paper in perfect spirals. Annie was drawing at the opposite end. Rob was up in his room.

‘Did Rob manage to eat anything yesterday?' Jo said. ‘Gran over-fed us as usual.'

‘Dad said, “How's the All Day Breakfast, Rob?” So I suppose he was eating. I didn't look to see.'

Ella blew the dust from the sharpening into a tiny pile.

‘He says interesting things, your dad,' Jo said.

‘Earlier he said next Sunday was only a week away.'

‘That was for Annie's benefit, was it?' Jo said.

‘No, Tara's.'

‘She'd lost track of time?'

‘She kept saying she couldn't believe she hadn't read the Sundays yet, she could do with having the weekend over again.'

‘Why couldn't she read them?' Jo said.

‘I don't know. Too geed up.'

‘Was she? Peter said she'd had a heart-to-heart with you.'

The hair to the left of Ella's parting was tucked behind her ear. To the right it fell down and brushed the paper and hid her from view. She still hadn't looked up.

‘Is that what he called it?' Ella said.

‘Wasn't that what it was?' Jo said.

‘Like with a nice WPC. She sat on the bed this morning and wouldn't let me pretend to go back to sleep. Every time she moved I thought, she'll get up now, but she didn't, she just pulled the sheet tighter.'

‘She talked, though?'

Ella raised her eyes from the pencils and gazed up at the grubby line where the walls met the ceiling and the spiders lived. Her face shone with enthusiasm.

‘“I like this room. Don't you? White's so calming,”' she said.

‘Doesn't sound too controversial. Do WPCs say that?' Jo said.

‘“I said to Peter after you'd gone to bed, ‘She's in shock,' but he said, ‘She's caught cold.' Shock isn't even an emotion,” she said, “There's no need for him to be so squeamish about it.'”

Jo smiled. Ella did the voice well, slightly exaggerated but entirely recognisable.

‘“Talk if you want to. I remember myself at your age, as if it were yesterday,”' Ella said.

‘Did you?' Jo said.

The animation went from Ella's face and she carried on with the sharpening. She'd got to Annie's favourite colours that were just stubs. Blue for sky and red for houses.