Читать книгу Paradise City - Elizabeth Day - Страница 12

Carol

Carol is lying on a massage table having her shoulders pummelled by a nice girl called Stacey. The problem is she has forgotten how to relax. She used to love being pampered. Once a year, for her birthday, her daughter Vanessa would arrange a spa day in a hotel in the New Forest and the two of them would get the train down from Clapham Junction, wheeling their overnight suitcases and anticipating the fluffy robes, a haze of essential oils and glasses of iced water delicately flavoured with cucumber slices.

Whoever came up with the idea of putting cucumber in jugs of water, Carol always wondered. Or lemon, for that matter. Because you wouldn’t dream of flavouring water with banana slivers, would you? Or carrot sticks. But somehow lemon and cucumber worked.

The massage had been Vanessa’s idea.

‘Do you good, Mum,’ she said on the phone. ‘You deserve some R&R.’

Carol was sitting in the front room, staring at her slippers. She hadn’t got dressed yet, even though it was past ten in the morning.

‘R&R? What’s that when it’s at home?’

There had been a suppressed exhalation on the other end of the line.

‘Rest and relaxation, Mum.’

‘Oh. Right.’

But since Derek died, Carol has found it almost impossible to stop thinking. She’ll be drinking a cup of tea in front of Bargain Hunt and she’ll notice that all her muscles are tightly wound, her shoulders up by her ears, and instead of concentrating on the discovery of some valuable ashtray in the attic of an old-age pensioner from Basingstoke, her head will be filled with the image of a coffin and service sheets and dying flowers and she’ll realise that she hasn’t been relaxing at all. She seems to have lost the knack.

‘Relax, Mrs Hetherington,’ the therapist says but the more Stacey tells her to relax, the less she feels able to. Carol’s face is pressed through the cut-out circle on the massage table, like one of those seaside paintings where you pose for photos by peering out from underneath a frilly bathing cap or a pair of donkey ears. The hole is slightly too small to contain her features and she can feel the edges of the lavender-scented padding digging into her cheeks. She wonders if there will be marks there when she turns over. Her skin has lost its elasticity of late. She can be pottering around the supermarket, picking up things for lunch, and the side of her cheek will still be stippled with red-pink indentations from where the sheet left its mark over an hour earlier.

Stacey folds the towel neatly to one side, uncovering Carol’s leg and prompting a spray of goose-bumps to prick up along her calf. Carol is worried that her feet are ticklish and she won’t be able to stop twitching when the therapist touches them.

‘Relax,’ Stacey says. ‘Just think of something soothing.’

Carol tries to imagine faraway beaches and gently lapping waves but instead finds her mind wandering. As Stacey’s fingers knead against her calf muscles and the herby, sweet scent of the aromatherapy oil floats around the room, she wonders whether the amount you love someone dictates the nature of their death. Whether, if you loved a person – if that person made you happy and you got to enjoy life more because of them – the punishment for this is to make their death as cruel and painful as possible. A cosmic joke, she’d heard someone call it. Like karma, but inverted.

She’d never believed in God. If He existed, Carol thought, He was a right old so-and-so. All those starving children and poor people with AIDS. What kind of person would allow that?

Whereas she’s noticed that if someone hasn’t been loved at all and has brought nothing but pain and misery to those around them, they seem to slip easily into oblivion at the end of their lives with the minimum of fuss. Because there’s no one to mourn them, is there? And Carol is for ever being told – by magazines, by Sunday-morning TV shows, by well-meaning friends who bring her spiritual self-help manuals called things like The Day After Grief: Finding and Overcoming your Inner Sorrow’ – that there is a sort of dignity in mourning; that by accepting the death of a loved one, you accept your own mortality and come to a greater understanding of life. That’s the theory, anyway.

Load of old claptrap, Carol thinks.

She only poses the question because Connie’s husband Geoff has just died peacefully in his sleep of old age and a nastier, more narrow-minded little man you couldn’t imagine. Even Connie couldn’t wait to be rid of him by the end. And yet for all Geoff’s vindictive, ignorant and penny-pinching ways, he had been spared the wretchedness of a terminal illness. No incontinence nappies for him.

‘It was a blessing,’ Connie said at the funeral. It was also, Carol couldn’t help but feel, hugely unfair.

Because Derek … well, Derek was the shining love of her life, a man with whom she spent forty-odd years of married contentedness, with whom she never had to explain, only to be, a man who still made her laugh, who could make everything all right just by squeezing her shoulders and calling her ‘pet’.

Oh, he had his failings, of course he did. He snored loudly, left teaspoons on the counter, never wanted to go to the cinema because ‘it will come out soon on video’, but now that he’s gone, Carol sees these petty irritations as lovable quirks. His snoring used to keep her awake. Now she finds she can’t sleep without it.

Everyone loved Derek: the postman whose name he remembered, the shop assistant at Sainsbury’s on Garratt Lane whose grandchildren he would always ask after and the dozens of friends and colleagues he’d got to know in and around Wandsworth through the years. It wasn’t just old people either. Their grandson Archie could spend hours building model aircraft with him in the back room.

The two of them were like cuttings from the same plant. She’d catch them sometimes, heads bent over a Spitfire model in the dusky half-light of a weekend evening, and when she asked if they wanted a sandwich, they would look at her in exactly the same way – heads slightly to one side with a quizzical squint of the eyes.

‘I’ll take that as a no then,’ she would say, closing the door behind her, unable to stop herself from smiling.

Even the kids on the council estate opposite would nod at Derek in the street. She never understood how he did it, how he made friends without seeming to try. The day of the funeral, a couple of them came round and rung the bell at Lebanon Gardens while the wake was in full swing. Carol could make out the looming shadow of two hooded figures and had been afraid to open the door at first. She kept the chain on and, peering through the gap, saw two bulky teenagers standing on the front step, wearing bright yellow-and-black trainers and jeans that seemed to be falling off their waists.

‘Mrs Hetherington?’ one of them said and his voice, when he spoke, was timid. He had chubby cheeks and his right eyebrow had thin stripes sliced through it. They must have been done with a razor, Carol thought.

‘Yes,’ she said, bracing herself. She honestly believed they were going to mug her. There’d been a gangland murder on the estate last year and she kept expecting to see them pull a knife.

‘We wanted to pay our respects,’ said the one with the fat cheeks, the phrase sounding stilted, as though he had been told what words to use.

His friend hung back, face shrouded by a baseball cap pushed low on his forehead. ‘Sorry for your loss.’ He handed over a beautiful bunch of hyacinths, wrapped tightly in Sellotaped brown paper. In the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger, there was a small tattooed circle: half black, half white.

‘Thank you.’ She was so surprised she forgot to ask them in.

She still feels bad about that. She knows Derek would have ushered them in, told them to join everyone in the front room and got them to tell him about their lives. He was like that. No prejudice. Treated everyone the same.

When Derek was diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was the most awful thing that had ever happened to her. They were worried about how Vanessa would take it, of course, and about Archie, about how they would cope, but mostly they were pitched into a feverish, gnawing anxiety about what was going to happen when the two of them were parted. They had grown so used to each other, you see. Never been apart for more than a week.

‘Just relax, Mrs Hetherington,’ Stacey says again, her voice soft against the rising and swelling of tinkling water and rainforest sounds, piped in from the iPod in the corner of the room. ‘You’re carrying a lot of tension.’

As if tension could be carried. As if it were a bag of shopping, Carol thinks.

Derek had died in hospital. They hadn’t wanted it to end like that and she still can’t forgive herself for it. He’d asked to be discharged so that he could come home and die in his own bed and Carol had rushed back to Lebanon Gardens to get the house ready. She’d wasted her time doing silly things: putting flowers in a vase on the chest of drawers upstairs, cleaning the windows so that he’d have an unobstructed view of the tree-tops outside, buying a special tin of Fox’s chocolate biscuits even though he was hardly eating by then.

Why had she done all that? Why hadn’t she realised that the time they had left was so precious that she couldn’t afford to waste a single second of it?

Because, by the time she got back to the hospital, Derek had died. The Irish nurse, the nice one with the curly hair and fat arms, had been the one to tell her. And although, of course, she’d been expecting it, had been told again and again that Derek’s illness was terminal, that the chances of recovery were nil, that she had to prepare herself for the worst … when it happened, she was shocked.

‘He’s gone,’ the nurse said. ‘He died half an hour ago.’

Carol’s stomach curved in on itself, punched by some invisible hand. The beige-green hospital walls seemed to slide towards her, squeezing the air out of the strip-lit corridor. She tried to walk towards Derek’s bed but, instead of the solidity of the linoleum floor that she had been expecting, her foot slipped into nothing and she felt herself spiralling into space. The nurse steadied her, sat her down and told her to take her time but she couldn’t rest. She was desperate to see Derek, to hold his hand and tell him she loved him. Tell him she was sorry for not making it in time.

She pushed the nurse away, refusing the offer of sugary tea. She walked hurriedly down the corridor, balancing one hand against the wall to keep herself from falling. She convinced herself that if she got there quickly enough there would be something of him still alive, a hovering sense of Derekness, a lingering warmth in his heart like the coal-hot embers of a night-time fire. If she got there quickly enough, surely his soul would be waiting for her, resting for a while by the hospital bed until she arrived? She would still be able to feel Derek, wouldn’t she? Her love was too strong for him just to disappear, wasn’t it?

But when she saw him, she had to put a hand over her face to stop herself from crying out. She’d never seen a dead person before, never understood what it meant.

Because the figure in the bed looked like Derek but the essence of him, all those tiny movements that she’d never noticed before – the flicker of a look as she entered a room, the almost indiscernible curl of the lip, the placid sound of his inhalations, the steadiness of his touch as he reached out to take her hand – all of them had stopped, just like that. She realised – for the first time, she properly took it in – that she would never see any of it again.

And outside, birds cheeped, sirens sounded, a wind continued to blow and the world went on as normal without realising what had been lost. The enormity of it.

She stared at him and although she should have been devastated, although the tears should have been running down her cheeks, she caught herself thinking: So this is what a dead body looks like.

It was the shock, of course. It took a while to sink in.

Derek lay on his back, his mouth gaping open to reveal a black, still hole. His eyes were closed, the lids thin and papery. His skin had acquired an unnatural, waxy sheen. Liver spots crept across his naked scalp like lichen on a rock. She wanted to take his hand and yet something stopped her. This strange, stony presence was no longer her husband.

Part of her felt relief. She had been worried about burying the body, sending it into the ground and crushing the frail bones under 6 foot of soil. But she saw now that the physicality of Derek was relatively unimportant. It was what had been cradled within that counted.

‘OK, Mrs Hetherington, if I could just ask you to turn over onto your back …’ The therapist’s voice interrupts her thoughts. She shakes the idea of Derek from her mind. It is not good for her to dwell on the past, on what can’t be changed. Vanessa has been encouraging her to pick up her hobbies again and ring round a few of her Book Club friends. Her daughter has started staring at her sideways, with a crinkle above her nose and a concerned gaze. It is as if Vanessa is looking after her, whereas it should by rights be the other way round and Carol can’t get used to it. She feels patronised and quietly furious when she knows Vanessa is only trying to help.

‘It’ll do you good, Mum,’ has become her regular refrain. It’s what Carol used to say when Vanessa was a teenager, lolling about on the settee complaining she was bored, flicking through the TV channels even though it was a blazing sunny day outside.

Whenever she remembered the 1970s, it always seemed to be hotter.

‘Why don’t you go and play in the park?’ Carol would say. ‘Do you good.’

She’s dreading Archie becoming a sullen, moody adolescent. At twelve, he’s just on the cusp of it, but so far he is still the shiny happy boy he has always been. She worries, with Derek gone, that he’ll feel the lack of a male role model in his life. Vanessa is a single mother. Carol has never met Archie’s father – has never so much as heard mention of his name.

The main thing is that he seems to have settled into his new secondary school. Vanessa showed her Archie’s first report the other day and Carol couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

‘He’s got a lot of Cs, hasn’t he? That’s not like him.’

Vanessa bit her lip. She was impatient by nature, but her mother’s slowness always seemed to set her even more on edge than usual. ‘It just means he’s performing at a competent level. They don’t give As and Bs any more.’

‘Don’t they?’

‘No, Mum. It’s all numbers now. And a 7 is really good.’

She looked at the report more closely. When she held it, her fingers trembled slightly. She’d noticed the shaking more lately. She steadied her hand. There were 7s all the way down the page. She grunted, satisfied. That was her Archie.

The therapist is smoothing the palms of her hands across Carol’s collarbone, sweeping them up all the way to her earlobes and back again. It feels good when she pulls firmly at the base of Carol’s neck, easing the muscles gently towards her and then releasing.

‘Oh that’s lovely,’ Carol murmurs.

The therapist laughs lightly.

‘Good. Just relax into it.’

She takes a few deep breaths, trying to concentrate on the pleasurable sensation of the massage while at the same time worrying that her inability to relax means she is not enjoying it enough. She wonders if she could set Vanessa up with somebody. Speed-dating, wasn’t that meant to be the latest thing? Maybe she should suggest it to her. She didn’t want Vanessa to see her as a new project: putting her mother back together again in much the same way as she might renovate one of her flats.

And then, the solution to the problem comes straight into her mind, bubbling up to the surface like a lifebuoy. Alan, she thinks, triumphantly. Her next-door neighbour. He seems nice enough – a bit quiet, but that might just be shyness. Why had she never thought of it before? He’d be good for Vanessa, she is sure of it.

Alan had moved in over a year ago after coming down all the way from Glasgow to make a new life for himself. He’d never been married, he told them when they first met. He was unloading furniture from the back of a rental van at the time. A long-term relationship had just broken up, he explained – even though they hadn’t been prying.

‘Oh I’m sorry,’ Carol said.

He smiled at her, bending his head so that he did not meet her eyes. His cheeks blushed pink.

‘Not to worry,’ he said, his voice accented with a vague burr that she couldn’t place. ‘These things happen.’

He had strong forearms, Carol noticed. She liked arms: it was one of her things. Alan’s forearms, visible beneath a rolled-up sleeve of a red-and-black lumberjack shirt, were tanned and thick veins ran down from his elbow to surprisingly fine-boned wrists. She discovered later, once she’d got to know him a bit, that he was a keen amateur gardener, which explained the tan and the muscle definition. Derek used to tease her about her crush on ‘that fancy-man from next door’ but he didn’t mind. Within a week of Alan moving in, he was giving their new neighbour hydrangea plant cuttings for his flower beds and unwanted advice on the acidic soil content of SW18.

‘You want to watch that, Alan,’ he said one morning, leaning across the garden fence. Alan nodded silently, rubbing the back of his neck, not wishing to be rude because he probably knew it all already. Derek shrugged his shoulders and left him to it.

‘Not a talker,’ he said, on coming back into the house, and that had been that.

How old would Alan be, Carol asks herself as the therapist moves from her neck to her scalp, pressing her fingers down, twisting her hair this way and that so it will probably be an awful mess when she leaves. Mid-forties perhaps? It was so difficult to tell nowadays. He wasn’t a looker, that’s for sure. His face had a pudgy quality, like an uncooked loaf of bread, and his eyes were on the small side. But then looks don’t last, as she was always fond of saying. Vanessa’s at the stage in her life where she should be settling for someone reliable and kind.

Yes, that’s what she’ll do. She’ll invite Alan round for a cup of tea, one of the days that Vanessa just happens to be popping in. With this resolution made, Carol feels happier. For the first time since she stripped down to her knickers and lay on the massage table, she starts, cautiously, to relax – just like she’s been told.