September Starlings (6 page)

‘Who?’ I whisper.

‘Well, I think it’s time to go.’

‘Ben!’ He is slipping through my fingers like water from the tap, trickling away to leave me alone, thirsty. ‘Ben!’

‘There is no need to shout, Laura, because I am not deaf. Where’s that bloody woman? The trouble with these people is that they’re never here when they’re needed.’

‘The nurse?’

‘Yes. She doesn’t know about the strawberry yoghurt. I haven’t told anyone else about it. Could she be trusted? Do you think she’s on our side?’

‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’

He grunts, allows his eyes to travel round the room. ‘So many allegiances, so many partisans. I am late for school,’ he announces clearly. ‘The bell went ten minutes ago, I’ll need to hurry. Will you come with me?’ So he sleeps, goes back to school in his dreams. Still, school is better than the other place. A shiver travels the length of my spine, pricks my scalp with its sharp and chilly fingers. There is a place in Ben’s past and I can’t find it. But it finds him day after day, pushes him into a nightmare whose duration increases as the days move on.

And I fear that he will be consumed by his memories, that soon he will go into that horror forever. ‘No, Ben.’ I am answering his latest question. ‘No-one can go with you.’ I cannot save him and my tears begin again.

‘The answer is Winston Churchill. It really is this time. Honest, Les. Cross my heart and hope to end up losing. See, it says here, “Winston Churchill”. Now, do you believe me?’ She waves the card beneath his bulbous nose. ‘He was made an honorary citizen of the United States. And that’s an end of it.’

It is not the end, because they continue their argument for several minutes, quarrelling loudly about Churchill and any other subject that might have cropped up in the game since it began an hour ago. When I intrude, when I dare to ask for my own question, they carry on fighting about bits of trivia.

It’s great being the mistress of your own house. You just get ignored while the neighbours come to blows over a game that’s supposed to be pleasurable. It occurs to me that a room containing Ruth and Les Edwards can seem very full, can render me all but invisible. ‘Would anyone like a drink?’ No response. I am now sure that I’m not really here.

There is a lull in the shouting, and they both glare at me as if it’s all my fault. Something childish giggles in my breast. ‘I’m not playing. And you’re not playing any more either. This is my toy, so you can both go home to Mummy, see if she’ll put up with the tantrums.’

Ruth and Les are mortallious when it comes to Trivial Pursuit. Ben never played the game – I bought it just before his absences began. Ruth arches the perfect brows. ‘Are you sulking, Laura Starling?’

‘Yes.’ I fold up the board and sweep all the awkward little playing pieces into the box. ‘You are both becoming
extremely naughty. I can’t manage all this “I’m cleverer than you are.” It’s like being back at school in the infant department.’ I wear what is meant to be an expression of sweet innocence. ‘Shall we try Scrabble?’

The noes are simultaneous. We have played Scrabble for so many years that the board is almost worn away. Ben was good at Scrabble. I blink, swallow, suggest three-handed bridge.

‘I’d sooner wrestle with a crocodile.’ Les makes another exit towards the cloakroom. He has been talking lately about cutting out the middle man by pouring the beer directly into the toilet. ‘I worry about his prostate,’ laughs Ruth. Then, suddenly sober, ‘When do you see the quack again?’

The ‘quack’ is the specialist who saved my life. ‘In a week or so.’

‘Worried?’

I shake my head. ‘The results will be negative. I’m all clear. Oh God, Ruth, I wish I could say the same about Ben. There I was all those months, wrapped up in myself—’

‘You were very ill.’ Her voice is as soft as a caress. ‘There were times when we thought … when Les and I thought we were losing you.’ Her little face is grave. It wasn’t the idea of my death that frightened her, because she had been convinced from the start that I would be saved. It was the aftermath that terrified her, when my mind took a holiday. So Ruth and Les watched Ben with Alzheimer’s and me with a total breakdown. It must have been very unpleasant, and now I blame myself all over again. Perhaps I should have been a Catholic – my enormous sense of guilt would surely have been big enough, even for the Church of Rome.

I get up from the kitchen chair, remove the Trivial Pursuit from the table, fuss about with cheese, biscuits, coffee. Ruth is my best friend. She’s an accountant, but she manages to be human in spite of this dry calling. And Les is the salt of the earth, a Liverpool lad with his own
business and a sense of humour that is wicked and lively. I love them both, I owe them much. ‘You’ve done a lot for us, you and Les. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.’

She snorts. Ruth’s equine snorts would frighten the real horses. ‘Segal said that love means never needing to say “sorry”. The same applies to “thanks”. Anyway, we need you. We weren’t going to let you off the hook so easily, Laura. Are you sure you’re in the clear now?’

I shrug. ‘I’ve to be tested regularly, but I’ve as good a chance as anyone else.’ I swivel, grin at her. ‘I’m a miracle.’

Les finds us laughing, then we sit for an hour or two discussing their daughter, my scattered children, the state of the building trade. He waves his arms a great deal, gets excited about recession, lack of development, the poor quality of cement. We have had many evenings like this one, and we all continue to miss Ben. When Ben was here, we played four-handed bridge and the dummy freshened drinks, filled the peanut dishes. There is no dummy these days. Except for me. I was stupid enough to crack up when I was truly needed. He drifted then, my dear Ben, got worse when I stopped visiting him. Though Ruth insists that this might have happened anyway, that I noticed the deterioration because I had not seen him for a couple of months. The analogy she used was odd, yet so right. ‘When a child goes away to school, the parent notices how he has grown during term time. If the son or daughter had remained at home, such changes would have gone unnoticed.’ Ben is a child, yet he is not a child. Children learn, grow, mature. Here, we have that process in reverse …

Ben is upstairs in the land of Nod. I realize that Les has been up to see him, has pretended to visit the bathroom. My Ben is in a world of his own. And we are all lonely without him.

We have lived here for years, on an expensive road that faces the erosion. When I first arrived, I had to roll the
word around my mouth for a while, taste its oddness before allowing it to spill from my lips. Erosion. There’s something medical about the term, as if it is meant to describe a weeping sore or a time-worn wound in the gynaecological department. It does not seem appropriate when applied to the wide neck of Liverpool’s famous river.

When he was a pup, Chewbacca and I began our walks along the shore, one of us picking her careful way across mud-coloured and oil-streaked sand, the other cavorting in pools of grim grey water, his neck usually festooned with dirty seaweed. Even at his best, Chewy is far from beautiful. He is large and stupid, is the sole owner of a broad and vacant smile and a tail that might, in its cleaner moments, do justice to a Coldstream Guard’s helmet. Covered in grease, sewage and discarded picnic debris, he is not a pretty sight. He also has a marked penchant for discovering and collecting used condoms, an activity that can be embarrassing to his innocent companion. Especially when the vicar approaches with that yappy Yorkshire terrier.

We took the dog’s name from the Star Wars films, because he bears an uncanny resemblance to the matted creature who threw in his lot with the good people like Harrison Ford. Yes, he is very like a Wookie. We have loved him for five years now, but I cannot allow him anywhere near Ben. Ben used to take the dog everywhere, has been known to walk him all the way to Formby at low tide. With the demise of so many brain cells, my husband has acquired a terrible fear of canines. And no matter what the medics say, I know that Ben is stuck in some abominable time warp, that he is revisiting a place in his past, an awful place. When he was whole, he could cope with the memories, could keep them in perspective. Yes, he has Alzheimer’s, but he has not lost all his yesterdays.

When our walks began, I started to understand the word ‘erosion’. The river/sea is eating its way inland. In a hundred years, perhaps less, this area could well be
flooded. There are stones heaped upon stones, every item rounded by a million tides. Were these boulders at the start of time, did dinosaurs clamber around them, hide behind them? Yes, there is erosion here, and it is contained, held back by concrete walls and ugly steps. For the moment, the wearing away of Blondel’s villages has been postponed.

The dog and I enter the house by the rear porch, find Ruth waiting for us. She has been husband-sitting for me, has kept an ear cocked for sounds from upstairs. And she has visited him, I know that, has talked endlessly into ears that blank out most sounds. Ruth and I have occupied this kitchen for hours without speaking. Like most true friends, we enjoy comfortable silences. She occupies herself four times a year with my VAT forms, once annually with Income Tax. She is a person who does not interfere during working months, when Georgina Dawn, my
alter ego
, labours to give birth to characters and plots that will suit the True Hearts editor. Unlike so many friends, she chooses not to visit when I’m sweating over a hot computer, understands that I cannot indulge in small talk while one of my little stories is germinating.

Chewy hurls himself at Ruth, washes her face, woofs his loud way through the usual enthusiastic greeting. Handel, my large and largo cat, is unmoved, sits by the sink, mesmerized by a slowly dripping tap. A Garfield in the furry flesh, Handel is economical with his movements except when organizing some form of destruction. His superiority over the dog is never questioned; Chewy has been known to run a mile from those sharp if slothful talons.

We sit, drink coffee. The dog gets bored, claws his way outside and barks at the birds. ‘Ben’s quiet.’ She waves a hand towards the upper storey. ‘I suppose you can’t just go out and leave him, can you?’

I shrug. ‘Sometimes, I have to. Ben-sitters are not always available.’

Ruth stirs, clatters the spoon, sips the black and
sugarless Nescafé. ‘Aren’t you afraid that he might walk out one of these weekends – if he remembers how to walk, that is? I mean, what if you came back from one of your strolls and found his room empty? He could fall under a car or into the water …’ Her voice fades, trails away. ‘Sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I’m not meaning to pile guilt on top of everything else.’

‘He’s probably happier here, even on his own.’ That’s a lie, because Ben isn’t happy anywhere, has lost all joy in life. And that was the most noticeable thing about him. He had joy, and he expressed it daily. ‘At Heaton Lodge, I’ve watched him becoming agitated when the others scream or cry.’ The fact that I’ve also seen him totally unresponsive does not bear talking about. Anyway, she knows, she’s seen it all. I remain quiet for a moment, dare not attach speech to my thoughts. If he walked out and died, I would be grateful on his behalf, calmer about my own part in his downfall. If I hadn’t been ill, if I’d worked with him … No, don’t even think about it. ‘He won’t walk, Ruth, doesn’t seem to have the strength to make any kind of effort,’ I manage. ‘He’s made no strides in any direction for the past six months, either physical or mental. Even when he did walk a bit, he just paced about, four steps this way, four steps back, always counting under his breath.’

She catches the full lower lip under teeth that are white and even. ‘What’s going to happen to him, Laura? Are you absolutely sure that he can only get worse? Is there no hope, no chance that somebody, somewhere might find an answer?’

‘I don’t know. I’m seeing that specialist about Ben. Thank God I can afford to have him looked after properly. I’m going to make as much noise as I can, try to get some new treatment, anything at all that’s on the market. You know, Ruth, I’ll even offer him up as a guinea-pig if I get the chance. There must be a doctor, even at the other side of the globe, who would be willing to have a go.’ I nod wearily, am made aware yet again of my post-operative
tiredness. ‘I’d send him to the moon if that would make him well.’

‘I know you would.’

‘And I sometimes think he’d be better off …’

‘You’ll be ill again if you’re not careful,’ she whispers. ‘You can’t keep your mind fixed on Ben all the time—’

‘If I don’t think about him, who will?’

‘I’m not tellng you to stop thinking, I’m just asking you to slow down and—’

‘And accept the inevitable?’

A blush stains her cheeks. ‘Not exactly. I mean, try for a cure, put some feelers out, but consider yourself as well. What about your children? Do they know the score?’

I shrug. ‘They know what they need to know. Or what they want to know. They can take care of themselves.’ There are still a few gems in an upstairs safe, I remember irrelevantly. I must make a real effort to find Ben’s contacts, get the valuables out of the house. He would want everything to be tidy. Though locating Ben’s business associates will not be easy.

She is studying her solitaire. ‘He was a good cutter and polisher, Laura. He made this for our twentieth anniversary – remember? Les said it was so cheap, it was criminal. Ben should have had a shop, he would have made a fortune.’

‘He has shops.’ And God knows where they are. I’ve no chance of reaching them, no easy way of offloading the gems into hands that are friendly and fair. Because Ben never let me see inside his business … ‘Pardon?’

‘I asked about the shops. Are they in London?’

I raise shoulders and eyebrows. He never said much, but the calls and letters came from far and wide. ‘There are several partners, I think. Probably in European cities. He talked about Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva – visited those places too. But he never brought his work home, always kept his home life separate.’

‘Except for the cutting in the attic.’