Sedating Elaine, page 17
Every year there is one day that is the hottest, and this was that day. Crickets cried out from the parched earth, pigeons squatted in the green goo that lurked in the bottom of the bird baths. The grass had grown tall during the virile rains of previous months, but the recent drought had withered it back to a flat, matted straw. The winding weeds and wild flowers which co-existed ecstatically in the borders had flung themselves about in an orgasmic tangle of nubile limbs and pouting buds during all the damp and delicious spring; now, they collapsed, exhausted, upon one another, gasping in remorse. All nature—the hushed trees and silent birds and static puffs of cloud—seemed stuck in an expectant pause, awaiting the one blessed gift of mercy: rain. The only movement at all was the shuddering haze of heat rising from the earth, as if all the souls beneath the surface—the worms, the bugs, the moles—were jointly trembling in fear and fury for a bit of fucking respite.
One plant alone was thriving. In the ditch, the nettles stood robust and green. Hand-sized leaves open, a dense and threatening crowd, like the poisonous palms of prisoners reaching up out of a pit, ready to snatch whatever they could.
Frances was ten. She skipped down the garden with a jug of water and two glasses, still wearing her blue-and-white-chequered school dress, planning to lie in the shade of the shed and chat to her mother awhile. She came to a halt when she looked up and saw a little boy of three or four standing on the lawn, as if he had shot up from the earth. For a moment the two just looked at each other. “Who are you?” Frances eventually said, and the little boy didn’t answer. “How did you get in here?” she asked, and he pointed to a gap in the hedge, through which she could see a woman hanging clothes on a washing line. It was Ben, the boy from next door. She hadn’t seen him in a while. She was surprised he wasn’t a baby anymore. His mother used to push him in a pram with a red hood and she’d always stop to say hello to Frances. She’d let Frances hold him once, when he was small and jellyish. He wasn’t a baby anymore, though. He stood very still, chewed on his thumb, and stared at her.
“There’s your mummy, hanging out the clothes,” she said. “Where’s your daddy?”
“Work,” the little boy said wetly.
“So is my daddy. He works a lot. He works very hard. He’s always at work.”
“Where’s your mummy?” the little boy asked.
Frances shifted the glasses from one hand to the other and said, “Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Just gone.”
The little boy blinked back.
She shrugged. “I don’t know where. I don’t remember her. We don’t talk about her. One day she was here, then she was gone.”
Ben looked over at his mother as if to check she was still there. She was. Other people’s mothers never left. Frances looked down at the two glasses in her hand.
“You’re lucky to have your mummy,” she said.
Ben scratched his nose and blinked at her again.
“Do you want to play a game?” she asked him, and he nodded eagerly.
He had a line of sweat on his upper lip, like a translucent moustache. His bare feet stood fat upon the prickly grass and his belly poked out in perfect roundness as he sucked his thumb. He wore blue shorts with a yellow boat sewn on a pocket. Even from several feet away, Frances could smell sun cream. She suddenly felt responsible for him. After all, she knew about mothering; she had been mothering herself for years.
“Wanna play,” he garbled sloppily through his thumb.
She had a ball in her bedroom, stolen from the school playground. She kicked it against the wall of the house sometimes, or lay in bed and threw it in the air, counting. She looked at the jug of water and glasses in her hand and said, “Wait here. I just need to put these down, then I’ll go and get a ball for us to play with,” and hurried down the garden to the bridge.
She couldn’t have known he had run after her; barefoot, bare-chested, in only a pair of cotton shorts, he didn’t make a sound. Enticed by a new friend, he had waddled behind her, bright-eyed and curious, thinking the game had begun. Frances crossed the ditch slowly, one foot in front of the other as she had done hundreds of times before, and she put the jug and glasses down on the grass. Nothing felt abnormal, no sense of trepidation, but by the time she turned around it was too late: He was already halfway across the bridge, arms out either side as the wood wobbled.
“No, no,” she shouted impulsively, sticking a hand out. “Get back. Go on,” and she shooed him like he was a dog, not wanting him on her special side. A mischievous grin spread across his face, drool dribbling down his wrist. His blond hair wafted slightly: a shudder in the atmosphere, more a tremble than a breeze. But he didn’t budge.
“Go on.” She urged him with her hands. “Get back. We can play in the garden but not in here.”
He giggled at her and still didn’t move. He was having fun. Frances did not like it.
“Get back or I won’t play with you at all,” she said haughtily, putting her hands on her hips, but this only made him laugh louder. Dribble ran off his chin. Infuriated, she stepped forwards with her hands out, repeating through gritted teeth, “I said, get back,” and the boy squealed, turned, too close to the edge, much too close.
He wobbled on one foot for a fraction of a second, arms still straight out either side, as if on a tightrope. The waiting palms in the ditch reached greedily, each tiny hair erect with its sting. His arms flapped briefly, and for a moment he was steady. Then, without a sound, he tumbled from the bridge into grappling grasps of green below.
Frances stood, frozen.
There came a pause, so long that she thought he might have disappeared, lost to the stingers, consumed by them. But then one long, solid, piercing scream came bursting out, so sudden and so shrill it sent the pigeons into the air. From nowhere specific, just deep within the ditch, the dreadful noise rang out, seeming to go on forever, as Frances clasped her hands over her mouth, then over her ears. She could just about see his white skin, flashes of blond hair, the jerky movement of the nettles as he struggled, flinched, fell in pain. And this was how she was, with her hands over her ears, as the woman from next door burst through the hedge shouting, “Ben! Ben! Oh my God,” ran over to the ditch, and without hesitation plunged her arms in, raising up her screaming son. His white skin was turning scarlet, his face a tightened knot. “What happened?” she yelled at Frances, but before she could respond, before she could explain, the woman was gone, bellowing, “Michael! Call an ambulance. Call an ambulance,” and they vanished back through the hedge.
Frances stood on the bridge and looked down at the dark hollow where he had fallen, barely discernible now. The nettles had come up and over his head. From the house next door she could hear a mix of screams and voices. She ran back indoors, up the stairs, and into her bedroom. She drew the curtains and climbed into bed, where she waited, waited, waited. An ambulance wailed into the street, followed a short time later by doors slamming, then it tore off, bellowing up the road, blue lights flashing on her bedroom wall until they grew distant, faded, and vanished.
She stayed in bed and watched the daylight dwindle, dim, and eventually disappear. In the middle of the night her father came. She did not remember this part clearly, just the presence of him in the room and the movement of the bed as he sat down beside her. He stroked her cheek once and explained quietly: Ben had allergies and asthma—the poor boy had had a seizure in the ambulance and had gone into shock, then died in hospital. It wasn’t her fault, her father said. It was an accident; she mustn’t blame herself. He had kissed her forehead and told her not to be upset. You have not done anything wrong. He stayed with her awhile, even though she did not speak, just lay there with her eyes closed. Then, when perhaps he thought she was falling asleep, he whispered, “I’m sorry,” and she was too traumatised to wonder what he had apologised for. He left her alone and went to bed.
It had just been an accident, she hadn’t pushed him, he had lost his balance. You have not done anything wrong. And yet she felt she must be to blame; she had asked him to play, she had walked over the bridge, she had urged him back across it. She had failed to jump in to rescue him. The guilt of it sank inside her in a most heavy and physical way, a solid lump, like a block of ice, that rushed through her veins when she saw the tiny coffin leave the house, a shadowy pair return two hours later, childless, bereft. Returning from school some time later, she found the shed and bridge fuelling a fire at the bottom of the garden as her father stood upright, for hours, watching over it. A few days later, a four-foot fence was erected along the ditch and she was cut off from her land and view altogether. Action taken to protect her by the father who felt it was all his fault, but interpreted as punishment for grievous wrongdoing, confirmation of blame and guilt. And it signalled the end of her childhood and any sense of who she was in the world; there was no more make-believe after that, she could not conjure her mother up, could not find her anywhere. No more talks, no more stories, no more walks home together, no more comfort, no more discipline, and she knew that she’d never see her again. Her father grew even more remote. She and her mind were left unchecked, to their own devices. She was guideless.
“You are not a murderer,” a therapist had once said. “You know that, don’t you? It was not your fault,” and she felt she had fooled them all, was continuing to get away with it, had somehow escaped trial and judgement and walked around, free, like any other person. She thought herself capable of great evil because of one accident a long time ago, an accident guilt had proportioned blame to. Not the deed itself, nor the facts of it, but the unshakeable sense of culpability.
10
The rise and fall of Elaine’s chest was so slight Frances could barely see it, especially as she was peering through her fingers.
She had hurried—in a most ambivalent way—home from the doctor’s office and now stood at the foot of the bed, taking in the scene before her. Any hope of an awakening had been dashed within two seconds of entering the flat: Here was Elaine, just as before. She did not look like Evelyn McHale. She looked, unsurprisingly, like a poor woman who had been drugged and doused in tea.
Frances floated around the quiet flat, enveloped and shut away from the world, looking at the mess and absurdity. The remnants of implausible previous days—champagne flutes, cactus flower, discarded underwear—felt staged now, as if someone had placed it all there to taunt her. From some other planet came a minute vibration, barely even a sound—a bus in the road below—and as a galaxy imploded so came the sound of car horns and shouting women far, far away. Here, in the flat, nothing happened. Four rooms in an isolated universe all of their own, untouched by time until a big bang occurred. Elaine slept on.
* * *
—
Just a London café, like any other.
Frances took an espresso to her usual seat at the back. The cleaner was new—she didn’t recognise him—and someone had mended the tear in the cushion with gaffer tape. The sounds were the same: the slam of the till, the hiss of the machine. The posters were the same, the beaming Kenyan, the beetle-like coffee bean. The drink was the same, with its sugary kick. But, like the doctor, it all seemed different now.
She considered her options. She could take the seventy-seven pounds from her account to a casino, but luck didn’t seem to be on her side at the moment. She could run away, but go where? And what about her home, and Elaine? Busking, prostitution, theft, and false moustaches all raced through her mind. At one point she imagined climbing in through an open window at Elaine’s parents’ house, wearing a balaclava and carrying a kitchen knife (Elaine had brought a nice set of santokus into the house), and holding them hostage whilst she stripped the place of fine art and sped away in the Bentley, but it seemed a bit far-fetched, and she knew nothing about fine art. “What about calling an ambulance and the police and confessing all?” a little voice said, but nowhere near loudly enough to be taken seriously—in fact, the burglary stood a better chance. She realised she was beginning to feel like both the villain and the victim, the hunter and the hunted, which left her very few options—few appealing ones, anyway. She remembered a poem she had read at school. It often went round and round in her mind, drumming along in a continuous pattern, rearing up at random moments like these, like it had a point, like it was trying to be heard.
Trying to be good
has become the mission of my life, but
I’m moving mainly map-less, and
I can barely drive.
No. Fucking. Sightseeing.
Just show me the way;
I’m sure if I could find the gear I’d get there in a day.
But the damn car keeps stalling, and
I find that I am driving
into some place uninvited, saying,
“Oooh, this looks exciting…”
Yes, just show me the way, she thought. It sounded like a plea to God. She’d never had much time for religion but it suddenly came to her, with offerings of comfort and safety, like she’d heard it did on death row. A place she might escape to, even if only temporarily, and get a break from herself, her thoughts. Churches were always open, weren’t they, full of comfort and warmth and hope. And one thing was for sure: Betty wouldn’t be there. She finished her coffee and left.
The nearest church was only half a mile down the road, an ugly 1970s build, all square edges and teak furniture and plastic collection pots. Frances stood on the path, which ribboned between flat sheets of green, buttoned up with rows of grey headstones. She dithered in the doorway like the sinner she was until an aged gardener passed by with some decapitated rose heads in his hand and said hello, and she fled inside.
It smelled of tea, books, furniture polish, and the sort of dust continually being troubled into the air. Frances was surprised to find it felt strangely hollow, a cold lung waiting for the resuscitation of prayers. She slid along the nearest pew and sat down, already wondering what she was doing here: She knew nothing about God, or the Bible, and had no idea how to pray, nor where to begin if she did. Have you got all day, God? Pull up a pew—we’ve got some talking to do. Knowing her luck, He’d be in a meeting. Beneath the vaulted ceiling of curved wood, in the joyless gaze of several stained-glass saints, she felt even smaller and insignificant than usual. Like at the bank, she was out of place, unwelcome, nervous. A board outside had said god is love. She wondered how a place could feel so chilly on such a stifling day, did they polystyrene the building for insulation, or did God not function above twelve degrees? She shivered. Movement caught her eye: a perfectly permed parishioner puttered about amongst the flowers by the pulpit. Other than that, she was alone.
God, do you receive me? Testing, testing, one, two, three…
She had heard of those in need receiving signs from the Lord and wondered what to look out for. Did one have to ask for them, or did they just appear? If only there were instructions, perhaps pasted into the front of the prayer books, one of which she now opened and flicked through, a quick fan of the pages, releasing a waft, a smell of sleepy words. The permed lady disappeared through a side door. Frances put the book back on the little ledge before her, then didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she sat on them, and bowed her head. She squeezed her eyes closed as tightly as she could and tried with all her might to do it, to pray.
Just show me the way. It doesn’t have to be huge, God—anything will do. I will listen, I promise. I will try. I want to be good. Would a sign be possible, if you’re not too busy? Slap a sunbeam across my face, stick a dove on the doorstep, a car radio playing “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for meee, for meeee, for meeeeeeee…”
