This Is Where I Am (2 page)

Disgusted, I pulled free. Emptied the contents of my purse, everything: the twenty-pound note and the pound coins, the bits of fluff and the coppery snash, all of it tumbling in like a tawdry waterfall. All that evening, my hands smelled of coins and fish. I didn’t sleep. Spent hours before the light returned staring across our street. Wondering what would drive someone to do that, and feeling righteous rage and feeling . . . ugly.

Months before, I had taken to devouring the obituary column, my own columns of workings scrawled alongside, showing how I had added and subtracted to extract each age of death.
Older, older
. And then, the occasional triumphant:
Younger
. I stopped playing that game when I found myself fleetingly superior to
Clarke: Alan and Connie
. Who had lost their baby son.

What will I say if they ask me at the interview?

My new pal is called out of the waiting room. ‘Fraser Blair. Could you come on through, please?’

‘Right. Cheers.’ The lad jumps up. Brushes down his trousers with clenched fists. Upright, he is surprisingly small, his hands and head (especially his ears) all out of proportion to his condensed frame. The girl looks up and frowns.

‘Good luck,’ I say.

‘Right. Cheers.’

The girl swigs her lemonade.

I didn’t go out for three days after the boy and his box. Sometimes, I wish Callum didn’t have a pension, that the mortgage was not paid, because it would force me to go outside more. I would have found a job by now, engaged with the world. But then, look what happens when I do. Left unable to open a window for fear the ghosts will come in. I couldn’t sleep at all. Nothing unusual in that: my every night is spent in long dark laps, in fitful dozes, in damp moments where you feel you’re falling until a slapping pain yanks you up. The pain itself varies: it can be headaches or me grinding my teeth, or a dull deep agony which never truly shifts, but can dive and resurface at will. And that’s when those special pills start beckoning, cluttering slyly in their white plastic tubs, or the wine whispers silky promises of oblivion. But this was a restlessness. An angry, escaping impatience, and I turned on the computer, just to see. I wasn’t looking for bingo or chatrooms, nor forums or soft porn. I suppose I was looking for another kind of window, into the world of that boy. He was bothering my mind like an annoying Jehovah’s Witness. He just kept knocking and wouldn’t go away. It’s like when you see, really
see
a face in a tree bark or a swirl of sheets. You can’t unsee it, and once you’ve noticed it, you wonder how you could have been so dumb not to see it before. You wonder about all the other hidden shapes and undulations and where they live and you go seeking them out.

A window? My God, there were hundreds. Pages, pages of relentless words; reports and case studies and charities and images. Eyes like that beggar boy’s and stoic shoulders and mouths all ready to speak. Through my tiny portal they came pouring, the screen blurring at me, its pixels reaching out in sleekit, twining threads, in thick black leeches, in burrowing worms. I slammed at the keys eventually to make it stop. Lay the rest of that night in the lounge, telly on for company. I’m not a stupid woman. I know these things exist. I’ve not led a particularly sheltered life either; I’ve simply led my own. I give to charity. At Christmas, I give to Barnado’s, and the ones who save people’s sight.

When I was a kid, I used to cry. A lot. At pretty much anything:
Lassie
films; my dad shouting; the news; seeing the rag and bone man; reading
Oliver Twist
.

You need to toughen up, young lady.

But it’s not fair. Those poor orphans –

Life’s not fair.

I vowed not to speak in homilies when I became a mother. And I would grow up to make a difference. I would right those wrongs, and get angry and campaign – ach, but you don’t, do you? You settle for what you can grab as life pitches you on. You find your own twig or log or luxury island, and leave the currents to swirl. Until a bloody great tidal wave comes crashing over your head and –

I watch the girl in the waiting room swipe at the bee, which is clearly dying and just wants somewhere quiet to rest. It buzzes round her head, then, as I think she’s about to scream – or worse, appeal to me for help – it does a body swerve and flits through the door wee Fraser left ajar. She gets up, shuts it firmly. Neither of us say a word. Then the door clatters open, almost instantly, and an even younger girl sashays in. Gold skin, lush black hair with near-white highlights on the fringe and a sari of purple and gold.

‘No, I amny. I telt you – I’m on the fucking bus. Ten minutes, tops. Bloody hell.’

There’s a musical cadence to her ‘bloody’ that’s not Glaswegian. The girl winks as she removes her phone from her ear. Cracks her gum, and a silver stud twinkles from her tongue. ‘Ho. D’yous know where the Ladies is?’

The bee-girl tells her it’s second on the left. She has a very reedy voice.

‘Cheers.’ The young girl exits with an easy sway of her hips, leaving a sense of clumsiness in the room. Me and bee-wumman go back to staring at our knees.

I was drawn to the computer the next night too. I’d been dozing on the couch, woke to the hum of empty TV (we’re not cable subscribers) and floury, sore teeth. Got up to go to bed, take some painkillers (white or blue, or those thick-feeling fuzzy ones?), reheat my milky drink. Bent to switch the PC off and . . . did not. Instead, I sat down. I was the most fully awake I’d been in weeks – so sharp I thought I was dreaming. Not a gradual transition from sleepy-head-stretching to blinking, but a warm steady focus which pulsed like the pain in my teeth. The pain was my metronome, it set the rhythm. I left sentiment beside my cup of hot chocolate, and moved methodically through the pages I’d saved. To tame them? Compartmentalise? Pretend I could ‘do some good’? I wasn’t even clear on the distinctions: asylum seeker, refugee. Illegal immigrant, economic migrant. People-trafficking, sex-trafficking, drug mules. Were they all one and the same? All manifestations of the great vast dispossessed? The sea that washed that boy here, who else did it bring?

Halfway through, I went to the window. We have a little balcony, more of a railing than anything, but it’s wide enough you can put your tiptoes on the sill, lean from bedroom into air. Lovely in the summer, but this was autumn, and I was wearing it like a cool, dark skin. Just me and the navy sky. The clamping in my jaw had stopped. I could taste amber leaves, could feel flakes of paint rise like hairs beneath my fingers as I leaned out. Everything was round and curved and sparkling. Me, alone, seeing microbes scurry in circles, clouds of manic electrons binding their protons and neutrons and gluing us all to gravity. I wondered if I
had
taken the Tramadol by mistake but the feeling was too good to dismiss. Had I loosened my grip on the railing, tilted a tiny bit forwards and pushed off with my toes (which were full of distant tinglings themselves), I know I could have flown.

And I was having this conversation with myself, saying is this
happy
, you silly besom? Don’t you know where you are? Who you are? Perhaps you are asleep and dreaming, and tomorrow they’ll find you spread across the pavement, your skull split in a crazy smile and, my God, is that why? Have you finally decided? Stupid, stupid woman. You thought
this
was purgatory? Well, hey, that’ll be nothing compared to what’s coming if you jump, because He knows, He always knows the secrets of your heart, and even if you made it look so much like an accident that you believed it yourself, you’d still be fucked.

It was the swearing that drew me up. I rarely swear (well, not the ‘f’ word) – and never in my dreams. The anger doesn’t seem to permeate there. It’s more of a wistfulness, a melancholic reaching out for . . . a place that is unreachable. In my dreams – and it doesn’t matter if they’re the waking or sleeping ones – I imagine a shape beside me, a mote in my peripheral vision. That’s where I think our memories lurk. They’re not behind you at all, but perpetually dancing like sprites just outside the corner of your eye. Desperate for you to notice them, and you, blinking like fury and just getting on with life. Or sometimes they lie heavy on your shoulder, and then I imagine them as fatter entities, goblins maybe – but wheezy, old ones who mean no harm.

Away with the fairies, her.

I don’t think I’m mad, though – and I did
not
imagine hearing tears. The actual smash of them striking a wooden floor, a slo-mo pause, then the elegant tinkle of hot salt specks bouncing upwards in sprays. A grief so profound that I opened wide into the night to lap it up.

The waiting room’s full of leaflets. I take one, crack it like an open fan.

Our street is a beautiful terrace. Modelled on Grecian and Egyptian lines, it’s a dark and leafy sleeve. Rich foliage clads sandstone walls; laurels, conifers and patient spreading beeches all jostle for position in the scraps of fenced-off gardens. Occasionally, a breeze will shift a bough and you catch a glimpse of egg and dart sculpting, fine cornice work and corbels over the door. You’ll see flashes of bright tulle at a window, and know the dance school are practising for their end-of-term show, or a shiver of pink feather will tell you Mrs Gilfillan is dusting again before her home-help comes. An amazing woman, Mrs Gilfillan. Studied mathematics and languages at Oxford, served at Bletchley Park during the war. And now she wears an orange pendant round her neck, which she can press if she falls and an alarm will ring at some central location and someone will, eventually, come. I’ve told her just to carry a mobile, ring me instead, but she’s terribly private, is Mrs Gilfillan. We all are, I suppose.

For a while, it seemed as if those private barriers were being erased, a war-spirit camaraderie melting the rigid squares and circles we draw round ourselves, just as it once melted garden railings. I definitely felt it. Between me and my neighbours, there was a brief melding of our separate lives. As they saw me lugging shopping bags and struggling with the wheelchair, when I had to tap on doors and ask if they could listen out or sit in for five minutes while I nipped to the chemist’s for a prescription, when the nurse’s little green car became our most frequent visitor, it seemed too ridiculous to care if I knew the woman two doors along’s name before I spoke to her. All I would know is she was in and that my husband had fallen and I needed another pair of hands to lift him up. So I would go and ask. Politely brusque, not caring if I offended some hidden sensibility, upset some social more. But people were lovely, in the main. They would respond with generosity and care, they would treat him with dignity and me with genuine, open concern.

If there’s anything else I can do . . .

Please don’t hesitate to ask . . .

So I didn’t, and they did. They did lots of things, and we would speak, animatedly, when we met in the street. Folk would touch my arm, frown and nod and it might be the first person who had spoken to me all day. Allison Black would call with her toddler twins, ask if I needed anything at the shops. Sophie, who runs the deli in Nithsdale Road, would bring in the occasional casserole.
Oh, please. We cooked too much.
Mr Patel’s mother-in-law made us gallons of delicious lemonade, guaranteed to slake even the most desperate thirst.

His throat was paralysed at that point.

Yes. If it hadn’t been for the part where my husband was dying, I would say it was all very jolly indeed.

And I would find myself, at eleven o’clock at night, standing in my nightie in the garden, pegging out another load of sheets and joking with Moira over the fence who’d nipped out for a fly cigarette about incontinence pads and did she know there was such a thing as the Bristol Stool Chart. Funny then how, afterwards, folk began to retreat. They would smile, but would no longer stop for a chat. Allison would hush her joyous twins, as if
I
were the actual spot where his grave lay. I was treated with kindly respect. People never know what to say, so often tend to say nothing at all.

That person crying, that raw weight I could feel as I stood on my balcony, was eloquent. They were sending their entreaty skywards, and my head kept pecking to trace the source. It was staring me in the face. Coming from a top-floor room in the house facing ours; I could see a girl behind the window, which was shut. It was shut and all the desperate miming muted noise was held inside, but I swear I could hear it.

I can hear it still.

At first, I didn’t recognise her. Young girl with wide cheekbones over which her distorted skin played, her mouth shaping sobs. Possibly she was shouting, her twisted brow suggested exertion. And yet, by the way she stuffed the curtain-edge into her face, I guessed she was stifling her cries. It was too young for Naomi, the woman who lived there, and far too old for Naomi’s little girls. The girl’s face was in profile, and then she turned. Eyes meeting mine, and that disturbing elation which had fired me drained away.

I could have been looking into
his
eyes. His dead dead eyes when he was still alive. I knew her then, realised it was Naomi’s au pair. Rula or Tula. I had seen her pram-pushing in the park when I was last out wheeling Callum; we had nodded, shyly, at our separate loads. Most mornings, you could catch her serving breakfast in Naomi’s east-facing morning room, bright teeth and bouncing hair, and the children clamouring for hugs. You never saw them tug at Naomi like that. As she registered my presence, the girl withdrew, yanking on the curtains to close them tight. I finished my water, left my computer burning, and went straight to bed. Sleep came quickly, and I despised myself for feeling as comforted as I was appalled.