First Aid (7 page)

In the distance, beyond the stack of deck chairs, Ella saw an old man dragging a low box on a piece of cord. He pulled it behind him as if it were a kind of sledge and, every now and then, when it got stuck, he turned to face it and heaved with both arms from the front. There was no one else, just the old man. The shoreline stretched away behind him, interrupted by the breakwaters. She turned her back on the sea and walked back up the shelves of the beach, placing her feet carefully, so that the old man wouldn't hear her – but the crunching she made got louder and faster as she moved further away from the sound of the waves. The shingle ended suddenly with a wall. Ella pulled herself over on to the pavement. She waited for a burst of traffic to pass, then crossed over and turned into the first of the smaller streets behind the promenade. She stopped and lit a cigarette, then walked down the middle of the road between the parked cars.

She forgot the old man with the box and felt merely depressed. She had thought of herself as the kind of person who could sleep rough, though she had never tried until then. Even saying the word, rough, to herself, marked her out. Bus shelters, shop doorways – just pairs of words. Since she hadn't been brave enough, she felt let down. She took the usual route home. Beyond the town cottages was a short row of shops, the end one of which was the junk shop, Lois Lucas & Son. Ella took a step back and looked up. The curtains of Trevor's upstairs room were closed. She reached into the bottom of her bag for her keys. As she put the key in the lock she pressed her face to the glass in the door. The street lamp across the road gave a queasy light, revealing the forms of the items of furniture and the stacked-up boxes, the glints of the glass and the brass. She went in.

The shop felt different at this time of night. Enclosed and silent – somehow more inland. By day, there was a sense of the sea not far away; seagulls and a seaweedy kick to the draught through the open door, but this had vanished. The smell was familiar, but concentrated – musty, like stale tea spiked with alcohol. Breathing it in steadied her. She crossed the floor, careful not to bump into anything, aware of moving between patches of shadow and half-light, and nervous that someone passing might see her. There was the blind at the window which was made of shiny black-out stuff – it squeaked if you tried to move it. She wouldn't make the effort. It was better to be able to see. She went across to the table where Trevor dumped the books when he brought them in from the window ledge at the end of the day. He never had anything she wanted to read. She pulled one of the books out and took it to the front where she could see by the street lamp. She turned the pages of dense type until she reached a passage of conversation. No one could ever have talked like that, not even Herbert and Ivy, or whatever they were called. She glanced at the date at the front. They'd be dead by now anyway, so they were doubly dead, never having lived.

She knew her way round. Somewhere among the clutter would be a cushion or two, maybe a rug. Under Lois's management, Ella would have found enough props for a stage-set bedtime – chaise longue, white lace-trimmed night-dress, silver candle holder – but that was all over. She found an alarm clock in the under-a-pound box and set it for six o'clock; hours earlier than Trevor would saunter down the stairs. She moved a typewriter out of the way, spread out a blanket made of knitted squares on a section of floor furthest from the window and placed a cushion at one end. Having taken off her shoes, she lay down, stretched out on her back and looked up. Directly above her was a stain the size of a man's hand, beginning to flake now and still unpainted – even in the poor light, it was visible. It had appeared at the beginning of March. Her mother would remember the date.

At that time, she and Jo had been getting on not too badly. They annoyed each other but they were still connected. Jo expected her to do things that her friends didn't have to do, such as look after Annie or help in the shop. She didn't mind doing them but, since they were favours, she resented being called unreliable when they didn't quite work out as planned. On that particular Saturday, for example, she had promised to go and open up the shop. The weather was foul. Her room was on the side of the house that was squashed against taller buildings, so, although the curtains dipped at the top because the rail was bent, the daylight hardly changed the look of things if it was a dull day. But apparently it was morning. Someone was banging and banging on her door. Rob was shouting, saying she ought to get up. Who says so, she shouted back. Mum, he said. Why can't she tell me herself, she said. She's got a headache, he said. So have I, she said. Lazy cow, he said. She's a lazy cow, she said. It was the usual sort of argument. Jo would have got the gist of it too. Ella willed herself to get out of bed, switch the radio on, wash her face in the bathroom. Eventually she put on some clothes and went into the kitchen. Annie was at the table eating biscuits. Ella felt sorry for her, sitting there on her own. She scooped her up and took her with her to Lois Lucas & Son.

She and Annie had hardly been there half an hour when Jo showed up. She was out of breath from running and her jacket was pulled over her head against the downpour.

‘I thought you were supposed to have a headache,' Ella said.

‘I have,' Jo said.

‘Why did you come out then?'

‘Because I had no idea where any of you were,' Jo said.

‘You knew I was here.'

‘I hoped you would be but I didn't
know.
You could have left a note. And how stupid was it to bring Annie with you? You've never done that before,' Jo said.

‘You weren't awake,' Ella said. ‘And Rob had gone out.'

Jo didn't reply. All they could hear was the rain striking the lean-to – loud as beads on a tin plate.

‘And look at Annie,' Jo said.

Annie's hair was clinging to her head in damp stripes, making her ears stick out, but she was laughing. She looked fine. A bit of water never did anyone any harm. Jo took her into the kitchen to rub her down.

While she was gone a man appeared at the window jumping from one foot to the other in a kind of dance and miming to be let in. Rain was cascading from the gutter and splashing on to the ground below. Ella ignored him.

‘Why doesn't he just come in?' Jo said when she came back.

Ella shrugged her shoulders. ‘Some nutter,' she said.

Jo went over to the door. ‘It's locked,' she said. ‘Did you lock it?'

‘Could have done.'

‘Why?'

‘You said you didn't trust me. Obviously I can't be left on my own here.'

Actually, she hadn't done. Her mum had banged the door so hard behind her it had locked itself. It did that sometimes.

Jo took a deep breath and turned the open/closed sign round before unlocking again. The man came in, smiled at them, said he wouldn't get in the way, and started to wander round the shop. He was skinny and medium tall, wearing jeans and an old black coat with a funny-looking woven bag slung over his shoulder. His eyes drooped slightly at the corners which made him look nervous and pleased with himself at the same time. Jo went through the usual routine – unlocking the cash box, doing Trevor's washing up from the day before, sniffing the milk to see if it was off – though everything she did was louder than usual. Ella knew she wanted to carry on quarrelling but she behaved herself because a stranger was there, watching.

‘Nice jug,' the man said.

He was at the back of the room, over by the stairs. He was holding out the jug, trying to line it up to catch drips that were coming through the ceiling. It was quite ugly – bright yellow with a kingfisher as a handle. They hadn't noticed the drips. Jo said that if he wanted to buy the jug he would have to look round and find something else to put under the leak. After a few minutes he said that it wasn't rain coming in. Jo said she knew it wasn't – there was a bathroom up there, not the roof. The whole place was falling apart. He said, sorry, he only knew because the places he lived in always seemed to end up under water. He'd learned to recognise the different types. Leaking water had got a particular smell, hadn't it? A stale, plumbing smell. You walked in and knew straight away. He didn't like the sound either; he had to talk himself into it. Sometimes he took a lot of persuading when water was gushing out like Niagara Falls or he was paddling round like a granny at the seaside.

He was one of those people who never shut up. But Annie was fascinated and kept staring at him. He noticed her staring.

‘Tigers don't understand water, do they,' he said to her. ‘They don't appreciate its good points. I suppose that's why your tiger's stopped in today.'

‘I don't have a tiger,' Annie said.

‘This is what they particularly enjoy,' he said.

He positioned the jug on the floor, knelt down beside her and moved his thumb in a slow circle. ‘You may not think they like their ears flattened, but if you do it right they do.'

Ella stared too then, although she didn't want to. It suddenly seemed that there might really have been a large cat that had come in out of the rain. He smiled when he saw them gazing at nothing.

‘Let's find her somewhere more comfortable,' he said.

He looked round the shop.

‘That'll do,' he said, pointing at one of the tip-up chairs.

‘It's from the Ramsgate Winter Garden,' Jo said. ‘It closed down.'

A customer came in. A woman. She was wearing full-on waterproofs, like a fisherman. She stood and watched the man pick up the invisible tiger, stagger across the shop with it and place it on the chair. Then she cleared her throat and said she would like to leave some leaflets about a spring flower event. She called it an arrangeathon. She jabbed one of her pieces of paper at the man and said that he looked like someone who could stick a notice in a window. He said he'd do better than that; he would distribute them personally around the streets. He took the whole clutch from her hand. She said, ‘
Not
under windscreen wipers, please.' He said he wouldn't dream of it. He said people with his sort of problems always liked a bit of community work.

‘Are you still annoyed?' he said to Jo.

‘No,' she said.

‘Good,' he said.

Then he left.

‘What an unusual man,' the spring flower woman said after he had shut the door behind him. ‘Perhaps we could get him involved in the Fun Run.'

The next week he moved in. During the time in between her mum behaved quite normally. She didn't look as if she was planning to fall in love.

JO LAY ON
the sofa and felt the tilt of it and the crenellations in the upholstery that came up through the sheet. As soon as one cluster of noises ended another started up – cars and beeping, clacketty heels and shouts of laughter. There were extra layers of sound in London. You could never guess from the
A to Z
how many people were crammed in the gaps between the streets. She was glad to hear voices. The series of overlapping goodbyes. The household had been peaceful for hours. Her grandparents hadn't talked for long in the room above her. Alone together at the end of the day, they read library books and imposed wordlessness on each other that Jo admired. But she couldn't sleep. The shadows of the furniture, the china plates and the pictures on the walls wouldn't let her rest. They weren't neutral – having been there from the beginning. She had left but they had stayed.

She was hardly ever out this late, though she and Felpo had absconded a few times. They had done it to be somewhere different, away from home. Not the Sandrock Hotel car park, which was a local venue for seducers, but places less flagrant, starrier. Though this was a distinction which Dilys's wardens of conscience – the parents and grandfather, the minister of the Congregational chapel – would have seen as spurious. Jo remembered each occasion quite separately, though they had done the same things. Three times they'd got back in the flat and into her bedroom uninterrupted. On the fourth, the lights had been on indoors. She was afraid that Annie had been crying for her. She had smoothed down her skirt and tucked Felpo's shirt in. It was Ella who was awake though, not Annie. She had locked the bathroom door and refused to come out. Jo tried to talk to her through the keyhole, asking her, pointlessly, if she was all right. She had emerged in the end, saying they could use the toilet if they were quick, so they'd gone in, she and Felpo, one after another, like children allowed to go in lesson time, but only with the teacher standing outside. Then Ella barged back and knelt on the floor. Jo had hovered over her, asking her if she felt sick until Ella said, of course she felt sick, and told her to go away. Jo had gone to bed, leaving her there. She hadn't managed to get to sleep though, even after the cistern stopped heaving and Ella's bedroom door had clicked shut. Felpo knew Jo was awake and had stayed awake too. He had put his arms round her. There had been no need to say anything.

She turned on her side – the side which wasn't sore – trying to find a position she might rest in. It felt strange to be sober. She was used to sharing a bottle of wine with Felpo every evening. They had got into the habit of it. She saw the ludicrous pile of luggage in the middle of the floor and closed her eyes. She could still feel the tightness in her skin, though the sensation was lessening and the sharp pain had gone. She resisted touching the wound – not because she'd been told only to touch her face with her elbow but because she didn't want it to be true. She finally slept. Her dreams were old stock. He was present in the last of them. The same as he always was. Bare feet, old jeans, strong hands, old T-shirt, the dark clumps of hair which would never lie down on his head. He touched her – fleetingly – then the dream moved on. They had nowhere to go and were looking for a place to be alone. Searching room after room in a strange house where all the rooms interconnected. A sick feeling came over her as she surfaced from the dream. Then she slipped out of consciousness again, as into an un-named lake.