The Keeper of Stories, page 3
She is suddenly caught by a line of conversation. She couldn’t really fail to be – the man is talking so loudly. A young couple. Friends rather than lovers, she thinks.
Him: “You heard of banana Jack Daniels?”
Her: “That sounds gross!”
Him: “It is. I can’t get enough of the stuff.”
And that’s it. It looks like it ends there and she has no desire to follow it.
From behind her she hears a couple of women talking. Lower tone, middle-class. Pleasant women, she imagines. Friends.
“I was walking through the theatre car park and there he was.”
“Who?”
“You know … that actor. He’s everywhere.”
“Hugh Bonneville?”
Good guess, Janice thinks, on so little information.
“No, not him. He was in The Observer. You must have seen it.”
Why should she?
“Bill Nighy?”
“No, not him. He’s black.”
“Bill Nighy’s not black! Oh, you mean the man in the car park. Idris Elba?”
That would have been Janice’s first guess too.
“No, older, he was in that film with…” and here the woman mentions the National Treasure and for a split second Janice thinks they know she is listening. She shuffles a little uncomfortably in her seat.
“Oh, I do like her…”
And they are off about the National Treasure. She doesn’t blame them; she really is a very good actor. But this is not where Janice wants to go, so she returns to studying the rain drops on the window. And that’s when she sees her.
First it is her reflection. Janice turns her head slowly so she can watch her from the corner of her eye. She had noticed her earlier as she is standing up when there are plenty of seats available. She is a young woman, probably in her late twenties, tall and willowy. She wears a striped woollen dress and long matching cardigan in shades of deep green and gold. Her black tights are a shade darker than the skin on her hands but the same colour as her hair. She appears to be standing still, eyes half-closed. Motionless – but not quite. One leg is stretched out a little further than the other in front of her and Janice can see the muscles in it flexing slightly. Her head is moving too, just a fraction. Tiny movements back and forward. That is when she notices the headphones almost hidden in the corkscrew curls of her hair. Suddenly, as if in spasm, her arm sneaks out in a rippling wave. It is an elegant, joyous movement and Janice wonders if the young woman is a dancer. Then the arm is tucked back by her side but the other infinitesimal movements continue.
Janice wonders what the young woman is listening to. She would give much to hear the music that made an arm sneak out and dance on its own. She used to love dancing. She never had this woman’s dancer’s build but when she heard certain songs her body sang along with them. Her muscles would flex, her toes tap, and she knew, whatever she looked like to others, that she was completely in tune with the music. In those precious, glorious moments when her hips swayed in rhythm and her arms snuck free from her sides she really didn’t care what anyone else in the room, or even in the world, thought of her. When she dances she is a lioness.
As her bus stop approaches, she pulls herself reluctantly to her feet. She is loath to leave the young woman, but in this moment, in this life, she is far too much of a mouse to interrupt her private reverie and ask what she is listening to. Stepping onto the pavement she hears the bus doors sigh behind her and in that gap between the last gasp and the noise of them shuddering closed, she hears a voice. She turns expectantly.
“Night, love,” the young bus driver throws out cheerfully after her.
As she walks away she begins to think maybe the gods really are mocking her.
Five
A husband’s story
There are some days when she approaches their (un-deceptively) small semi that Janice thinks it will take two hands to get her through the door. One each side of the doorframe to pull her reluctant body over the threshold. If her husband is speaking at her before she has even got her foot over the step it can take all her strength from both arms to propel herself forward. She wonders if one day she is going to need a stiff push in the middle of her back to get her across. She knows not to expect an extended arm, a helping hand from her husband. She does not allow herself to listen to the breath of a voice that sometimes whispers in her ear. “Would you not just think of turning on your heel, Janice, and walking back down that path?” For some reason the whispering voice has an Irish accent. She thinks maybe this is to do with the kindness of Sister Bernadette – one of the few nuns she has ever met who seemed to actually fancy the idea of loving thy neighbour.
Tonight the house is quiet when she opens the door and it is easier to get over the threshold. It is not the absolute still silence of an empty house but the hushed quiet of a house in which someone is sleeping. She finds her husband, Mike, sitting on the sofa, head thrown back. His feet are up on the coffee table and he has a half-empty bowl of crisps balanced on his stomach. She returns to the hall, kicks off her shoes, flexes her toes, and heads for the kitchen. She knows the first thing he will say when he wakes is, “What’s for dinner?” He doesn’t ask this in a nagging or demanding voice, but in a jolly tone that suggests they are all in it together. She is no longer fooled.
When he appears in the doorway, eyes bleary from sleep, he surprises her – really surprises her – by asking about her day. This distracts her from her worry about seeing him by the library earlier, when she knows he should have been at work. As she begins to describe her day she wonders why, tonight of all nights, has he asked about her work? Then, there it is. He starts before she has even finished her sentence, which makes her realise he wasn’t really listening. She can’t believe that after all this time she fell for it, that her heart had lifted when he had taken an interest in her.
“It’s good you like your work.”
Had she said that?
“Good you’re busy. Oh, what’s for dinner?” he smiles at her.
“Shepherd’s pie.”
She had been thinking of making pancakes for pudding. They had come into her mind in that moment, that heartbeat, when he had asked about her day.
“No pudding tonight?” He is a large man with a sweet tooth and his mum always made fantastic puddings, as he often reminds her.
“There are yogurts in the fridge.”
As a rebellion she knows it’s pathetic.
“You were saying it was good about my work?” she prompts. She wonders why she is helping him. Maybe just to get it over with.
“Yes, yep, the truth is, Jan…”
Here it comes, with the affectionate name she hates…
“I don’t know how much longer I can stick this job.”
And there it is: her husband’s story.
In the thirty years she has known Mike, he has had twenty-eight different jobs. The one thing she can say about Mike – and maybe this is what has kept her coming back through that door – is that the man is not workshy. The twenty-eight jobs he has had have been remarkably different. He has been a salesman, a health and safety trainee, a driver, a fitness instructor, a barman, a hospital porter, and now a porter at one of the largest colleges in Cambridge. He has worked in small businesses, large companies, and on the road on his own; at different stages in their marriage they have had everything from BMWs to second-hand vans parked in their drive. One summer it was an ice cream van. Mike has also driven tractors and forklift trucks, but thankfully never brought those home. In his different capacities he has strolled, with his easy rolling gait, through shops, factories, warehouses, bakeries, colleges, and hospitals offering all around him the benefit of his advice. He even spent some time working as a financial advisor, the irony of which is not lost on Janice.
Mike is a pleasant man. He has a sense of humour and does not immediately push his ideas onto others. Janice thinks this is one of the reasons he is so successful at getting new jobs. Mike can be very likeable, the reasons for his varied career can appear plausible, and she is certain many employers have taken him on feeling rather sorry for him. She certainly knows of one or two female bosses who saw him as a man who has never been understood. For all his growing paunch and flabby jowls, Mike is still a good-looking man.
The thing that all his employers come to realise in time is that Mike knows so much more than they do. The first few weeks can go well. Sometimes this stretches into months. But soon they will find Mike correcting them. It will be a small suggestion to start with, but before long Mike has singled out someone who, in his opinion, is doing a shocking job and he feels this needs to be addressed. He becomes passionate about this and talks about the good of the company. He identifies the issues and has, on occasion, got that individual removed from their role. One down, just a few more to go.
Over time – and it can take some time – his employers start to ask themselves, how can this man have the time to pull the planks out of so many other eyes? He often turns up late and when he is needed to complete a task, perhaps deliver a consignment on time, he is inexplicably missing. (She sees him again in her mind’s eye, walking past the library in the middle of the day when he should be in the Porter’s Lodge.) Then the doubts start to creep in. Janice understands this transition period better than most. In the early days of their marriage she lived each job with Mike, she felt for him as he tackled the problems, was annoyed with the colleagues who let him down, angry with the bosses who didn’t appreciate him. It was only when he was fired from his fourth job that she had had a light-bulb moment of disturbing brightness: maybe it’s not them, maybe it’s Mike.
Over the years, Mike’s timing has got better and he has learnt to jump before he’s pushed. Not that the timing has always suited her – pregnant with their son, Simon, or when they had just taken on a mortgage, and now, when she is… What is she? She has no idea. But she knows this is not the time to tell her what is wrong with the college authorities, especially when she has Sister Bernadette whispering in her ear.
Janice lets Mike launch into the latest diatribe about who is at fault and why he needs a new opportunity. She is no longer listening. She wonders what exactly is her husband’s story? Is he simply the man of a thousand jobs? Is he Walter Mitty? Certainly his world bears little resemblance to anybody else’s, as far as she can tell. Or is it more sinister than that? Is it the story of an illusionist? A hypnotist? Because as much as she tries to pull herself away from the world he has constructed for himself, she can’t help feeling that he has got some part of her wedged in there with him too. He may not hold her hand but she is pretty certain he’s got the end of her coat caught firmly in one fat fist and he’s not going to let it go. When she asks herself if she is frightened of this fist, she knows the answer. Mike is not a man to be physically feared. He is too large and slow for that. She knows it is the small sinewy men you need to be truly afraid of.
When dinner is over and Mike has gone to bed, leaving her to clear up (“You don’t mind Jan, do you? I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”) she closes the kitchen door and stands for some time staring out of the window at the crescent of identical houses and the green beyond. She wonders where the young girl on the bus is now and what she might be dancing to. She would like to listen to some music in the kitchen as she tidies up but doesn’t want to bring Mike, complaining, down the stairs. Then she remembers the headphones Simon bought his dad for Christmas. Their son is now twenty-eight and he works in the City, doing she knows not what. It is many years since he has spent any proper time with them. One foundation of Mike’s constructed kingdom was that his only son would go away to private school, and it needed to be one that other people would have heard of.
“You can’t deny him the best, Jan.”
“You wouldn’t want him to suffer because we”—he meant she—“didn’t do everything we could.”
That had been the start of her cleaning career. She had little else to offer and any thought of studying to improve her opportunities had been squashed early on.
“You have to put the lad first, Jan. And with this job not working out like I wanted… They really are the biggest bunch of incompetents. The things I’d like to tell the board about the way things are run…”
The irony now being that their well-educated son wants little to do with her or his dad. His dad, maybe, because he has seen through him. Her, she fears, because he blames her for letting him be sent away. Visits from Simon are rare and a few Christmases ago he gave up sending presents and just sent them a cheque. It was a generous cheque but she ripped it up into tiny pieces before stuffing it deep into the recycling. Perhaps he realised it had never been cashed because since then he has given them John Lewis vouchers. Easy to send and he need never know if they have been used. She still has hers from this Christmas tucked into her purse but she remembers her husband used his on a pair of expensive headphones.
“Look at these, lads” – to the boys in the pub – “great bit of kit from our Simon. He only gets the best.”
As Janice goes searching for Mike’s headphones, she wonders if it is pity, or maybe atonement for colluding in sending Simon away, that keeps her living with a man she no longer loves or even likes.
Mr Mukherjee (who played cricket for the under twenty-one Indian team) stops to wait for his dog, Booma. He averts his eyes politely from the squatting form beside him and watches as his neighbour, Janice, shimmies across the back-lit kitchen window. She spins on the spot and one arm snakes up in an arc above her head. There is something rather beautiful about her rhythmical movements, and for Mr Mukherjee, not a little surprising. He thinks perhaps he should turn away, but the small dancing head and shoulders (that is all he can see) are mesmerising and he finds himself standing on the green, in the cold winter air, smiling.
Six
Every story needs a villain
(The notable exception)
A good cleaner can, in the main, pick and choose who they work for. Janice likes all the people she cleans for, with one notable exception.
The large modern house in front of her is built in a V-shape, which is made of interlocking concrete blocks. It sprawls arrogantly across a plot that once formed part of the grounds of one of the more modern colleges. The house reminds her of a large man – legs akimbo – taking up far more room than is necessary or polite. As she crunches up the Brazilian slate shingle drive she feels a mix of dread and happy anticipation.
The door is opened by the owner of the house (she is not allowed a key here). The woman in front of her is a handsome, fifty-something-year-old. She is wearing one of her own creations – a dress coat in royal blue slashed all over with brass zips the colour of urine. Out of these slashes Janice can see silk fabric printed with neon horse heads. Each week she wears a different dress coat and Janice has gathered that she sells a range of these at fairs held in her friends’ houses. When she is not selling her dress coats she likes to ‘give back’ to charities. This seems to involve gathering staff from any number of charities in her house and donating her acquired wisdom. “You can’t put a price on that. It would be worth, literally, thousands.” Occasionally she donates a dress coat to the charity. Janice likes to be there when she does this just to see the faces of the fundraisers she has gathered around her.
The woman has a name but to Janice she will always be Mrs YeahYeahYeah. This is what she says when on the phone, when talking to friends, and when discussing her wisdom with the staff from whichever charity is flavour of the month. She presumes the woman is actually trying to say, “Yes”, or maybe even, “Yeah”, but one is never enough for Mrs YeahYeahYeah.
Mrs YeahYeahYeah’s husband also works from home. Janice thinks he was something very successful in the City and, having made his money, he spent part of it on building the architectural monstrosity they now call home. It is a house full of large spaces and gleaming empty surfaces – so in some ways, she shouldn’t complain. There may be a lot of it, but it is very easy to clean. At the back of the house is a large cube that the husband uses as an office. If Janice ever tries to venture near this area to clean (as instructed by Mrs YeahYeahYeah) her husband waves a paper/folder/finger at her, and without ever looking up, barks, “No, no! Not now.” So Mrs YeahYeahYeah is married to Mr NoNoNotNow. She wonders if her husband is the reason they never had any children.
Mrs YeahYeahYeah pays Janice well for the work she does. She does not shout at her or leave revolting saucepans/toilets/baths/ovens for her to tackle, but she has committed two cardinal sins for which Janice cannot forgive her. In the kitchen, one of the few things allowed to sit on the side is a state-of-the-art Italian coffee machine. It is a thing of real beauty. Janice can dismantle it and clean all the working parts, but she has never been invited to drink a coffee from it. In the cupboard above the machine is a jar of Tesco’s own brand instant coffee just for Janice’s use. As far as she can tell (and she has looked) this is the only thing Mrs YeahYeahYeah has ever bought from Tesco.
