Elizabeth Is Missing (31 page)

“Mum?” someone says.

It’s Helen. She rushes to put her arms around me, pressing my face against her collarbone. She smells like wet soil. When she stands back she gives me a little shake with one hand. Her phone is in the other.

“Who were you shouting at?” she says. Her eyes run over my face, and the hand on my shoulder squeezes. “Mum, you don’t live here any more. You know that, don’t you?”

“Elizabeth is missing,” I whisper, looking up at the house. It’s familiar, but I don’t know whose it is. I put a hand to my throat.

“No, Mum, she’s not. You know where she is. And you have to accept it. Or you have to let it go, and either way, you have to stop telling people that.” She speaks very low and starts to lead me away towards the road.

“Telling people what?” I ask.

“Elizabeth is missing.”

“You think so, too?”

Her face freezes into a closed-eyed smile. “No, Mum. Never mind. Let’s get home, shall we?” She opens a car door and helps me in and then goes back to the house to gather some things that have been strewn over the path. A man bends to help her.

“Thank you so much,” I hear her say. “I was only out ten minutes. I thought it would be okay.”

He says something I can’t catch.

“I know. I know it isn’t the first time. She’s still adjusting.”

I try to make sense of it, but it’s impossible. There’s such a jumble in my head. My house and strange people and Katy on the stairs and fish and chips for dinner and Sukey gone and Elizabeth gone and Helen. Gone? But, no, Helen’s here, getting into the car and driving me off somewhere. I look back the way we’ve come. “Helen,” I say. “I moved house, didn’t I? I moved in with you.”

“Yes, Mum,” she says. “That’s right.” She reaches a hand out for me, but has to take it back to change gear.

“Well,” I say, “at least I’ve got one thing right today.” I watch the road swerve about in front of me with satisfaction, and Helen doesn’t stop me reading the signs aloud. I concentrate very hard on them: they are solid and unjumbled and I don’t have to understand what they mean, because I’m not driving.

A man wavers ahead of us, thin and fragile-looking. I think at first he’s hovering on a single slender leg, but soon I see it is one of those things to move about on: two wheels, handlebars. Not a wheelbarrow. We catch him up and pass very close, and for a moment I think he will be pushed off centre, we’ll make him topple, one touch on a spinning top. My insides go tight.

“Helen!” I say. “You nearly knocked him down.”

“No, I didn’t, Mum.”

“You did. You nearly got him. You ought to be careful. People can die from that.”

“Yes, I’m aware, but I was nowhere near him.”

“That poor woman got knocked down in front of our house. When was that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. She was standing over my bed and then she ran away and you knocked her down so she wouldn’t come back.”

“I have never knocked anyone down.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I say. “I wasn’t in the car at the time.” I was in Douglas’s room, playing the “Champagne Aria.”

I heard the sudden screech of car brakes over the deep laughter of Ezio Pinza, and then my mother’s voice, calling. I couldn’t make out her words as I banged through Douglas’s door and followed the shouts out on to the street, but I soon saw the huddled shape in the middle of the road. It was the mad woman. She lay on the ground, her head bleeding, her arms and legs at funny angles. Ma was kneeling over her, a hand on her cheek. Mrs. Winners must have heard the noise, too, as we arrived at the same time. She hurried back inside to use her telephone to call an ambulance and Ma sent me for blankets to cover up the misshapen limbs.

After that I didn’t know what to do, so I just knelt by Ma and held the mad woman’s hand. Her eyes rolled about and she whispered things I couldn’t catch, but she didn’t seem so frightening now, crumpled up and tiny on the tarmac. She didn’t even have her umbrella. There were bits of plants lying by her sides, things she’d had in her hands when she fell: stripped hawthorn twigs, red nasturtium flowers, brooklime and dandelion leaves, honeysuckle, watercress and lemon balm. They lay scattered about her so she looked like an old Ophelia who’d mistaken the road for a river.

“It’s all stuff for eating, look,” Mrs. Winners said. “Dandelion leaves, nasturtiums. Making herself a salad. Not so daft, after all.”

When I began to gather up the leaves and flowers, the mad woman made a harsh noise in the back of her throat. Ma bent to hear her words and the woman, with her eyes on my face, found my hand and pushed something against my palm. I took it, unresisting, feeling the thing, small, delicate, and crisp, but not looking down at it.

“
Birds?
” Ma said, trying to catch the low words. “What birds? Whose head?”

But she couldn’t seem to get any sense from the woman and so we just made soothing noises while Mrs. Winners paced about, wondering loudly where the ambulance had got to and asking whether we thought she ought to make use of her telephone again.

“How old d’you think she is?” Ma said to me, adjusting the blanket so it lay as lightly as possible over the mad woman’s jagged form.

I told her I didn’t know. “Does it matter?”

“I don’t suppose it does. Only, she’s younger than I thought. Might even be my age.”

By the time the ambulance arrived the mad woman had stopped whispering, her mouth had stretched open, and her cheeks had turned concave. There was a moment when she seemed to come round; her eyes met each of ours in turn and she closed her jaw once as if trying to say one last thing. But then a dark trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth and she faded back.

“She died in my arms,” Ma said, as the men took away the small figure, still wrapped in one of our blankets.

We, all of us, stared down the road for several minutes, long after there was anything to see, and Mrs. Winners was the first to shake herself and rub her hands and glance up at the sky to decide if it looked like rain. Eventually she ushered us into her house for tea.

“Was bound to happen,” she said, settling us into her front room. “Always in the road that one. Jumping in front of buses.”

“It wasn’t a bus that got her,” Ma said. “It was a Morris.”

Mrs. Winners said she didn’t see how that made a difference. She switched on her little electric fire and put a shawl round my mother’s shoulders before pouring the tea, and I realized Ma was shivering. I asked her what the matter was, but Mrs. Winners made a face and waggled her head and I knew to shut up.

“What you got there?” she said, nodding at my closed fist.

I put down my cup and finally opened the hand that held the mad woman’s gift. It was a flower from a squash plant, dry and faded and falling apart, like an old gramophone horn.

“From the woman, was it? Summer squash flower by the looks. A real treasure, I don’t think. What did she give you that for?”

“You can eat squash flowers, can’t you? Same as nasturtiums. But I think it might be because she dug up some squash in a man’s garden,” I said. “He nearly caught her digging them up. I was passing, and she knew I’d seen her.” I thought of the man shouting to his neighbours in the dark and running his hands over the pebbles on the wall.

“And that’s her confession? Blimey, she
was
barmy. Oh, I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, and she was honest, I suppose, in her own way. I’m fairly partial to a summer squash myself.”

“It was Frank who helped plant them,” I said to Ma, thinking she might react if that was significant, but she only nodded, cradling the warmth of her cup, but not drinking.

“She said all the little birds were flying round her head,” Ma said. “Like one of those cartoon films at the pictures. And then she talked about her daughter. Told me we’d both lost our girls. I s’pose she meant Sukey. I didn’t think she knew anything about me; you wouldn’t expect her to be aware, somehow. But she kept talking about our girls.”

“Sounds like ravings to me,” Mrs. Winners said.

“No,” Ma said. “She knew me.”

“It’s just for the weekend, Mum. I’m sorry, but I’ll be back on Monday morning to take you home. Mum?”

I don’t say anything. We’re in a small room with plain blinds and pretend flowers in a vase, there’s a strong smell of cheap gravy coming from somewhere, and disinfectant. Helen is crouching by the bed I’m sitting on; she says she’ll be back, but I know she’s lying. I know she’s going to leave me here for ever. I’ve been here weeks and weeks already.

“It’s only two nights. And they’ll let you do some gardening.”

“I don’t like gardening,” I say, and then am annoyed at myself for answering.

“Yes, you do. You’re always asking about planting vegetables, and you certainly seem to enjoy digging things up when we’re at home.”

I remember not to answer this time. She’s lying about this, too, I never liked gardening. I’m not like her, out in all weathers, telling people where they should gouge the earth to put in great ponds, or explaining what kind of soil is best for growing vegetables. Not that she ever thinks to tell
me
. She never thinks
I
might need to know how deep you have to dig to sow summer squash seeds, or how far into the ground the roots grow. I resist asking now. Anyway, the room is empty except for me. At some point, Helen must have gone, and now I’m just sitting here. There’s a notice up on the wall.
WELCOME TO KEEBLE HOUSE
. It’s an old folks’ home, and I can’t think why I’m here. I look at my notes and find the home’s name is written on a bit of pink paper, along with the address. Keeble Road. I used to have a friend here. She’s dead now, and I can’t remember her name. It wasn’t Elizabeth, though, I know that; it was a different friend.

“Tea in five minutes.”

A big, solid young woman ushers me into a corridor with bedrooms all the way along it. I think for a moment of the Station Hotel, but these doors stand open and I can hear television sets droning on as I walk past, and people calling out in low voices. I catch a glimpse of legs stretched out on beds, of slippers and surgical stockings. There is a constant beeping coming from somewhere. We reach a lounge and the smell of gravy recedes. I’m folded into a chair, facing a lot of other similar chairs, which slowly fill up with old people, their clothes and faces creased as if they’ve just got out of bed. Another TV is on in the corner and the noise of it confuses everything.

“I’ve been waiting hours and hours,” I say to the solid girl.

“What have you been waiting for?” she asks.

“Ages and ages I’ve been waiting. Over two hours.”

“What for?”

But I can’t think what for, and the girl sighs, pushing her fringe back with her forearm. She passes me a cup of tea and I watch an old woman on the other side of the room. There is a bright scarf over the old woman’s hair and she is very bent over. She can’t seem to help dipping her nose into her tea as she drinks. Droplets drip off when she lifts her head, soaking her sweater. When she’s finished, she puts her head in her hands, taking the weight off her bent back. Someone comes to get her crockery, a man, elegant and smiling with light-brown skin. Spanish, perhaps. I watch him stack cups into a gleaming spine. The sun starts to angle in through the window and he rolls a blind down with a quick movement, like a bullfighter shaking out his cloak.

It’s getting late and I’ve been here a long time; all the dancers are heading home, but I can’t go home yet. I must wait to see if Sukey turns up. There’s a bit of tape on the seat of my chair and I begin to pick at it. “‘When will the dancers leave her alone?’” I say, the poem’s words clearer than the ones from the television. “‘She is weary of dance and play.’”

“What?” a woman with long white hair barks as she comes in, leaning on a walking frame. “Is someone in my seat? Where the hell is it?”

I have a sudden panic that I’m sitting in it, but the Spanish man points to the chair next to me.

“Here it is,” he says, dancing to the left and waving at it.

She puts her head down as if she’ll charge the chair, but twists at the last moment and lands gracefully. “You’re not doing that very nicely,” she says, pointing to my fingers picking at the bit of tape.

I can’t think of the next line of the poem, so I don’t know how to answer. I smile instead, trying to sing the beginning, so at least she’ll know I remember the tune.

“She thinks it’s funny,” the woman says to a man on the next chair. “
I
don’t.” She rounds on me again. “If you went home and told your mother and father that you were doing that, they wouldn’t be very pleased.”

“She can’t go home to her mother, can she?” the man says, brushing some crumbs off his pullover.

“No, not yet,” I say. “I have to wait here until someone comes. A matador with a great cloak. He’s got my sister. He’s got her under his cloak and he won’t let her go until I dance with him.” No one seems to be listening and the image of the matador is too vague to hold on to. A dark woman sitting by a vase of cloth flowers waves at me.

“These are fake, you know,” she says. “But quite nice anyway.”

I look at the flowers and nod.

“Fake,” the dark woman says again, rubbing the petals between her fingers. She pulls one of the flowers from the vase and hands it to me. “Quite nice, though.”

I take the flower and close my fist around it as she pulls the whole bunch of plastic stems from the vase and thrusts them at me. They hang their heads sadly without the vase’s support, and the petals look worn from handling. There are several stems without any heads at all, and they make me think of Douglas, in our kitchen, and the way his stooped back echoed the shape of his shabby bouquet.

The electric light was flickering, and ghostly insects had begun to flatten themselves to the outside of the kitchen window by the time Douglas got back. The range had nearly gone cold and we were drinking the last of the tea. Ma often couldn’t sleep and I sometimes stayed with her, doing the crossword in the
Daily Echo
and listening to Dad snoring at the top of the house.

“Your dinner’s in the top oven,” Ma said as Douglas came through the door. “It might be a bit cold. I’d have done something about it if I’d known you’d be late, but I didn’t know.”