The Day Of Second Chances
Read The Day Of Second Chances Online
Authors: Julie Cohen
Contents
For Lillian Cohen: grandmother, card player, one-eyed driver, crosshatch doodler,
kneidlach
maker; always remembered, always missed
And we, who have always thought
of happiness as rising, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.
Rilke, âTenth Elegy translated
by Stephen Mitchell'
Honor
THE LAST STAGE
of Honor Levinson's life began at the top of the stairs in her home in North London.
The windows had been cleaned two days before by the young man who came every spring with his bucket and ladder. The sun shone through the glass, warming a stripe of carpet and wall, stroking against Honor's cheek as she passed through it on the way to the stairs, carrying a basket of laundry to be washed.
She was thinking of the laundry she used to have to do: the weight of PE kits and trousers caked with mud at the knees. School uniforms and gardening clothes, shirts that needed ironing, knickers and pants and handkerchieves. So many loads every week, one after the other, unrelenting, just for one child and one woman. Sometimes it had felt as if her home were festooned with dripping clothes. She had to negotiate a jungle of drying socks and tights just to get into the bath. For something that took up so much time and effort, washing clothes was under-represented in literature.
This afternoon her basket contained two blouses, a vest, a skirt, and three pairs of knickers. None of them dirty, really; what did she do to make her clothes dirty these days? Those days of sweat and soil and spills. were over Now her basket was light, as light as the sunshine in the side of her vision.
Honor balanced the basket on her hip and put her hand on the banister. The wood was warm, too, from the sun. Downstairs on the ground floor, the phone rang. She stepped forward to go down the first stair and she missed it.
The shock wasn't that she was falling. It was that she had missed the step, that her body had forgotten the language of the house, how to do this thing she had done every day for most of the years of her life. Honor put out her hands to stop herself but the banister slipped from her grip and she hit the riser hard with her hip and kept falling, slithering down the wooden stairs on her back.
âStephen!' she cried to the empty air.
No pain, not yet, just thuds as she slid down the rest of the stairs, with no one to catch her. The back of her head bounced off a step and she saw stars. They were clearer than anything she had seen in a long time.
She knew this feeling, as if she had played this out in her mind many times before. The last moment, familiar as a child or a lover.
She came to rest at the bottom, splayed on the floor. The phone rang for the second time.
Two rings
, Honor thought.
It all happened in the space between two rings of the telephone.
Now she felt it, or some of it: the back of her head, her hip, her back, her bottom, her elbows â impact rather than pain. Her head was resting on the last step. She lay in another pool of sunlight and dazzle. But she was alive. When she called out, she had been certain she wouldn't survive.
Honor touched the back of her head. It was warm and wet, and her hand, when she saw it, was shaking and covered with blood.
Seeing it, the pain came.
âStephen,' she said again and her voice came from someone else, someone old and weak.
Honor sat up, ignoring the screaming from her back and hip, the pounding in her head. She sucked in a breath and, holding on to the banister, tried to pull herself up.
She immediately fell back down, squealing aloud with pain from her hip.
The phone rang for a third time, or perhaps it was the fourth. Broken hip, old woman living alone, what a cliché she was. All these years of struggling, and she was a cliché. Carefully, gasping, Honor turned herself so she was lying on her left side, the side where her hip wasn't broken. Using her arms and her left foot, pushing herself across the wooden floor, she crawled towards the phone.
There was a telephone on each storey of her house: one in her bedroom, one in the kitchen in the basement, and one here on the ground floor, in the living room. Her mobile was upstairs in her bedroom. Honor crawled through the doorway, slipping on her wet hands, her weak foot, to the Persian rug. She rested for a moment there, the wool scratchy against her cheek. Blood dripped from the back of her head, down her face.
Cold water to wash that out
, she thought, and the phone rang again, for the sixth time? Tenth?
It had been ringing for as long as she could remember and she still had a metre to crawl.
She drew in a deep breath tasting of dust and wool, and pushed herself forward once again. It was more difficult across the carpet. As soon as she was better she was going to put this carpet in the nearest skip, bloodstain and all.
The phone was on a low table by the sofa. She wriggled the last few inches, using her shoulder to propel herself forward. Honor hooked her arm around the table leg, pulled as hard as she could and the table toppled over. Thank God for flimsy furniture.
Luckily the phone landed beside her, the receiver off its cradle. She snatched for it with her good hand. âHello?' she said. âHello, I need help.'
A pause. Her hair had come loose and was hanging in her face, dark with blood. She could feel sweat on her upper lip. It had been some time since she had last sweated.
âYes, madam,' said a voice on the line at last, heavily accented. âGood day, this is Edward from Computer Access Services. I am calling about trouble with your Windows computer?'
âPiss off,' she told him clearly, and pushed the button to hang up the phone. She dialled 999. âI require an ambulance,' she told the operator, and waited the million hours until she was put through.
âAmbulance service, what's the nature and location of the emergency, please?'
âI've fallen down the stairs and I have broken my hip and I am bleeding from my head.' She gave the calm-sounding woman her address.
âAll right, ma'am, I've alerted the dispatcher, and I'm going to stay on the line now and try to help you while you're waiting. You say you've hit your head and broken your hip? Are you having any difficulty breathing?'
âThat's about the only thing I'm not having difficulty doing.'
âGood girl.'
âDon't patronize me, I'm old enough to be your grandmother. My name is Honor.'
âYes, Honor,' said the dispatcher, a hint of humour in her voice. âIf you don't mind me saying, your telling me off is a good sign. Is there anyone with you?'
âI'm alone.'
âIs your head still bleeding?'
âYes.'
âOK, Honor, is there anything you can use to press against it and stop the bleeding?'
She groped upward. A cushion, squashed nearly flat from use, lay near the edge of the sofa. Honor pulled it off. She pressed the cushion against the back of her head, gritting her teeth at the stab of pain. She held the phone to her ear with her other hand. It was slippery with blood.
âI've done it,' she said to the woman on the other end of the line.
âThat's good to hear.' She sounded young and chirpy. Like Jo. Honor closed her eyes and pictured wavy hair, a pink-lipped smile.
âHonor? Are you still with us?'
She shook her head, trying to clear it. Still with us, another cliché, trying to make this whole incident sound inclusive, when she was more alone than she had ever been before.
âI can't walk to the door to let the paramedics in but there is a key under the blue plant pot holding a geranium.' There was a buzz in her ears; blackness grew from the centre of her world. âI'm going to pass out now, so I hope they come quickly.'
She is at the top of the stairs, noise from the party swelling around her. She leans on the banister and sees the top of a man's head below her. He has dark hair, glossy and thick, and is wearing a brown tweed suit. He is taller than the people standing around him. He holds a drink in one hand, whisky, and the other one is resting on the newel post of the banister, on the round ball that crowns it. His hand is slender; even from here she can see the nails are clean, cut short. He wears a watch with a thick black leather strap.
Every detail so clear. Sharp.
âWhat's his name?' she asks Cissy, standing next to her.
âWhat, you haven't met him yet? That's Paul.' Cissy turns to someone else, and Honor keeps on looking.
There are people around him but he is alone. Somewhere, someone laughs loudly and instead of looking for the source he turns his head and looks up, straight into Honor's eyes.
For the first time, she feels as if she is falling.
âHello, love? Can you hear me?'
Honor opened her eyes, tilted her head. A blur above her, two blurs, wearing green and yellow. âPaul?'
âNo, my name's Derek, this is Sanjay, and we're paramedics. Can you squeeze my hand for me? Fell down the stairs, did we?'
â
I
fell down the stairs. I don't know about you.' Her mouth was dry. How much blood, how much time? One of the paramedics was messing about with her head, with any luck stopping the bleeding. She heard the rip of packets opened, the rustle of bandages. She tried to struggle up, get some of her dignity back. She'd called him Paul. How embarrassing.
âWhat's your name, love?'
âHonor Levinson.'
âCan you tell me what day it is, Mrs Levinson?'
âTuesday the eleventh of April. You shall have to ask me something more difficult than that.' Her voice was raspy and hard.
âI'll get these questions out of the way and then I'll start with the Pointless questions, shall I? Are you taking any medication?'
âI'm eighty years old, of course I'm taking medication. It's in the bathroom cabinet.'
âBlood pressure eighty over fifty, Sanjay. Are you feeling dizzy, Mrs Levinson?'