How to Measure a Cow (22 page)

Maybe it would become a regular date.

LEAVING WORKINGTON EARLY
on a wet afternoon, with the road shining blackly ahead and great arcs of spray rising as cars passed each other, Tara felt a strange kind of excitement. She was on the move again, sprung from the deadly routine she’d once thought would be the making of her. This hopeful feeling lay somewhere in the pit of her stomach, pulsing almost rhythmically, like a steady heartbeat. She had to quieten it down or it would take over and make her panic. Panic, obviously, was not good. Panic made her do silly things, dangerous things.

She was gripping the steering wheel too tightly. The windscreen wipers were working overtime and seeing clearly was difficult. This was the coast road, but she could hardly glimpse the sea. Once, she peered into the little mirror, stuck into the flap which hung down over the driving seat. How she’d changed! Quickly, she pushed the flap back into position. She didn’t want to look at herself. How, when had she begun to look so different? It was this
look
that struck her as weird. She wondered how her features could possibly have changed so much without recourse to plastic surgery.
Her face had surely once been almost fox-like, narrow, cheekbones sharp. And then, later, early in her marriage to Tom, the happy years, her face had filled out, her eyes becoming not so dominant. Her body had not put on weight, she’d remained slim, but something happened to her face, her
look
. Then, she wasn’t quite sure when, the tight-face returned. Was it at the time she first began to suspect what Tom was doing, where his money came from? Or maybe it was when she was given that research project at work, and had her own team, and though she loved what she was doing the stress was considerable.

‘Give it up,’ Tom said. ‘You don’t need to do it.’

But she did need to. Once, he’d understood that.

What do you do if you don’t like your own face? Well, make-up could change a lot, but not enough. She was, she reckoned, still quite attractive. The last vestiges of prettiness were still there, just. She’d done such damage to her look through being Sarah Scott. There must be no more head down, shoulders hunched. She must throw it off, hold her head up, square her shoulders, smile, let all that vitality within her come through. It would be like lighting a fire from a bed of ash with a couple of twigs. It would splutter and smoke and then a flame, a little one, would leap up. Her old challenging look would return, her don’t-mess-with-me defiance which Tom once said was what had attracted him in the first place.

The crash happened while she was still thinking of what she must do in yet another ‘new’ life, the car coming towards her swerving, herself swerving, and then the impact, the roar, her own screaming.

‘Hello?’ a voice said. ‘Hello, can you hear me?’

Tara could hear the voice, but didn’t recognise it. She tried to say something, but only a grunt came out. Her hand was patted.

‘You’ve had an accident. We need to find out where you’re injured so that we can treat you.’

Tara closed her eyes. She was on some sort of trolley which was now being wheeled along. She heard doors opening and slamming shut. An accident. She struggled to think about this. An accident. Where? How? Her face, she remembered looking at her face, in the car … So it was a car accident. Her head began to throb.

Nancy’s telephone so rarely rang late in the evening that the shrill sound shocked her. She was on her way to bed, clutching a hot-water bottle, and paused on the stairs. A wrong number, almost certainly, or what they said was ‘a cold call’. It happened. Who would be ringing her at nearly ten o’clock? And if she answered it, she wouldn’t be nicely settled in bed ready for the news on her radio. But nevertheless, she put the hot-water bottle down, turned, and carefully went back downstairs, holding the banister firmly. A telephone ringing was not going to make her hurry and slip on the stairs and break a hip and be done for.

‘Yes!’ she shouted into the receiver as she picked it up. She knew she sounded angry, but then she was.

‘Good evening, madam,’ a calm, male voice said. ‘Am I speaking to Mrs Nancy Armstrong?’

‘Who wants to know?’ Nancy said. She was on the alert now, ready for this to be some sort of trickster.

‘The police,’ the voice said. ‘I’m PC Mike Pattinson, and I’m calling with regard to a friend of yours who has had an accident and is in the hospital.’

For a moment, Nancy was silent, taking these words in.

‘A friend?’ What did this mean? Why would she be rung up because someone who said they were her friend –
said
– was in hospital? She wasn’t next of kin to anyone. Expressing neither curiosity nor concern about the state of this ‘friend’s’ health, she said:

‘How do I know you’re a policeman?’

‘Because I’ve told you I am,’ the voice of this Pattinson man said.

This did not seem at all satisfactory to Nancy, but the man’s tone had been stern.

‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘what are you bothering me for at nearly ten o’clock at night?’

‘I am bothering you,’ said the man, ‘because your name and address and telephone number were found in the pocket of a woman who is currently in a serious condition in Cumberland Infirmary after a car crash on the A66 road between Workington and Cockermouth.’

Nancy hadn’t missed the edge of irritation in how the policeman had pronounced ‘bothering you’. He thought she was heartless, unfeeling.

‘Hello?’ he was saying. ‘Are you still there, Mrs Armstrong?’

Nancy managed to gasp that she was.

‘I’ll have to sit down,’ she said.

‘Good idea,’ the policeman, whose name she’d already forgotten, said.

But there was no seat where she kept the telephone. The nearest seat would be on the stairs and the cord of the phone wouldn’t reach that far.

‘Oh,’ she repeated, ‘I’ll have to sit down. You’ll have to wait while I sit down.’

She let the phone dangle on its cord and went and sat on the bottom step. Accident. Car crash. Hospital. Slowly, her mind made sense of the words. It must be Sarah Scott who was in hospital (why Carlisle, why not Hensingham?) and had had a car crash. That, at least, was clear. But what about this note in her pocket? Why was that there? Hesitantly, she got up again and took hold of the phone. There was a lot of noise in the background but she could distinguish the policeman’s voice.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Hello, hello, hello, I’m here again, hello …’

And at last she was answered. She meant to apologise, for being ‘short’, but somehow she didn’t. She just said, ‘What happened? How is my … my friend?’

Early next morning, a policewoman came to take Nancy to Cumberland Infirmary. It was a matter of identification, they said. The only clue they had, as yet, was this piece of paper with Mrs Armstrong’s name on it, and a date a week ahead. The car was a write-off, though the registration number was being traced and some items salvaged. But the woman hadn’t spoken, and since she was seriously ill her relatives should be informed as soon as possible. Nancy’s help was vital. Eventually, documents from the car, however badly damaged, would reveal a name, but Nancy could give that information quicker, if she were willing. Nancy had agreed to go and look at this injured woman
though, as she’d explained to the policeman, she didn’t need to. It could only be Sarah Scott. The minute she said the name, she corrected herself.

‘I mean Tara, Tara somebody, I forget the surname.’

The policewoman was interested in this.

‘Two names?’ she said.

‘She changed it,’ Nancy said. ‘I don’t know why.’

A lie, but she wasn’t going to tell the police that Tara had been in prison. They could find that out for themselves. All the thirty or so miles to Carlisle, Nancy was fretting about what she’d already said. Tara might not be pleased to have Sarah mentioned. She should have kept her mouth shut. The policewoman driving her tried to chat to her, perfectly pleasantly, but Nancy ignored her except for a grunt or two. She was feeling uncomfortable wearing, as she was, her best skirt which for some time now she’d known perfectly well was too tight for her expanding waistline. And her jumper was too warm, and itched, and her jacket made things worse but she didn’t want to take it off. The policewoman had offered her the seat next to her but Nancy had elected to sit in the back. It was a foolish decision. She could see now that the two front seats were better upholstered, and also of course she would have been able to see more without having to turn her head. She ended up spending a lot of the journey with her eyes shut, trying to prepare herself. She’d seen lots of medical programmes on the television so she knew what an intensive-care ward would look like, and what the doctors and nurses would likely be wearing, so none of that would surprise or overawe her. But what she didn’t know was how Tara would look, and that scared her.

The policewoman went into the hospital with her, to Nancy’s relief. She wouldn’t have found her way anywhere, so confusing were the signs and so endless the corridors. Her heart began to beat uncomfortably rapidly as they reached the intensive-care unit. It was as eerie as she’d expected, with some machine bleeping but otherwise silence, the nurses moving about without making any noise at all, seeming to glide between patients. There were four there, all with their eyes either closed, or their eyelids flickering, and two with tubes in their mouths. Sarah – no, Tara, Tara, she mustn’t call her Sarah now – had no tube. Nancy was beckoned closer by a nurse. Lord, what a mess. Stitched cuts all over her face and half her hair shaved off. But Nancy recognised her.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that was my neighbour. Sarah Scott. My friend.’

Adding ‘my friend’ choked her. She’d never said it before. Sarah – no, Tara, Tara – was such a new friend. And she’d said the wrong name. Oh, God. The nurse had already written it down, and was now saying it, gently, to Sarah.

‘Hello, Sarah,’ she said. ‘Can you hear me, Sarah? Your friend is here, Nancy your friend is here.’

Tara heard these words clearly. She wasn’t Sarah any more. Being Sarah was an experiment that had failed.

‘Tara,’ she said, ‘Tara.’

The nurse frowned, whispered to Nancy, ‘She’s confused.’

‘No,’ Nancy said, ‘she’s just telling you her real name. She was only pretending to be a Sarah Scott.’

The nurse raised her eyebrows, then wrote something down, and motioned to Nancy to leave the
room. Before she did, Nancy lightly touched the side of Tara’s damaged face, stroked it gently. Tara’s eyes filled with tears.

It was all so upsetting. Nancy could hardly compose herself on the way back to Workington. She felt she’d done everything wrong. She’d let that poor woman down. The policewoman, whose name Nancy didn’t seem able to grasp though she’d been told it often enough, had questioned her closely about Tara, alias Sarah. How long had she known her, what did she know about her, who were her other friends, who were her relatives? They had stuff from the car by then, documents, driving licence and suchlike, and they were all in the name of Sarah Scott, but there was no clue as to background. Why was she driving on the A66, did Nancy know? The Cockermouth address was duly noted – she was asked what else she knew about the injured woman.

‘Nothing,’ said Nancy. ‘She was quiet, went to work, kept herself to herself, never mentioned relatives.’

‘And friends, besides yourself?’ the policewoman prompted.

‘I don’t know them. They were down south,’ Nancy said. ‘Old friends, she had old friends down there.’

She was still not going to mention anything about prison. Keeping quiet about that was the least she could do.

The dreams were long and vivid. Tara went in and out of them all the time, sometimes even when she was awake. These dreams slipped in and out of her mind, plaguing her, tormenting her because in them she was so happy, so full of vitality, and out of them she could
hardly raise her head or move a limb. Claire, Liz and Molly, young again, were all around her, their faces alight with laughter, their bodies moving feverishly around her, round and round, an endless mad dance, and herself in the centre, screaming.

But sometimes Tom was there too, shoving the girls aside and enclosing her tightly, too tightly, in his arms, and then she struggled and pushed and a nurse would appear because she’d been shouting, and she’d be given another pill. But then, slowly, these dreams, which were more like hallucinations, began to lessen, and there were periods of calm when she was able to work out where she was and what seemed to have happened. She still had no memory of this, but the policewoman who came to her bedside several times filled her in. Nobody had been killed, that was the important thing, and it had not been her fault. She’d been caught between two speeding cars, one overtaking her, one coming round a bend too far into the centre of the road. That was all she needed to know, all she wanted to know. She couldn’t, yet, take in information about insurance claims and so forth.

Repeatedly, she was asked if there was anyone she would like the police to contact. A social worker – or someone she assumed was a social worker, though she failed to take in either the woman’s name or proper title – also came to make the same offer.

‘You’ll need help when you’re out of hospital,’ the woman said. ‘Is there someone who could come and stay for a while?’

Tara shook her head. She was Sarah Scott again, timid and alone in the world, except for Nancy Armstrong. But no, she’d promised herself, no more Sarah Scott.
Of course Tara had friends. And she had Nancy, who appeared at her bedside a week after she came out of intensive care, bearing a tin of shortbread. She was just there when Tara opened her eyes one afternoon, sitting there with her handbag clasped tightly on her knee and a solemn expression on her lined face.

‘Nancy!’ Tara said.

‘Oh, you’ve come to,’ Nancy said. ‘I thought I was going to have had a wasted journey, with you asleep, and the bus goes at half-four and I can’t miss it.’

Tara smiled, but smiling still hurt, with her right cheek in the shape it was, so she also winced.

‘My, you’re in a state,’ Nancy said. ‘What a to-do. Who’d have thought it’d come to this. Well, you’re mending. They say you’re mending. Take it easy, though, don’t let them turn you out afore you’re good and ready.’