Diving Belles (22 page)

I shook my head.

‘Twice as much as it’s worth! And some chump will phone in for it, mark my words.’

I settled down in my usual chair and unfolded the paper. ‘One across,’ I read out. ‘Eight letters. Extremely hungry.’

Mrs Tivoli glanced at me. ‘Maria says that you cleaned one of my drawers this morning.’ Maria pressed her suckered mouth up to the tank in a fat, brown kiss.

Snitch, I thought. Out loud I said ‘starving’ and wrote it in, although later it turned out to be ‘ravenous’. ‘It was open. I gave it a quick dust.’

She nodded, still watching the screen. ‘How’s your finger?’ she asked.

I’d got a nasty burn off the toaster that morning before work. ‘It’s nothing,’ I told her.

She pointed to a vase of swan’s feathers on the windowsill and I picked one out and brushed it three times against the burn.

‘I was going to show them to you anyway,’ she said, carrying on from before. There was loud clapping from the television and the name of the caller who had bought the mixer flashed up. Mrs Tivoli pursed her mouth and switched it off with the remote, then put her hands flat on the chair and lifted herself up slowly. I knew by now not to ask if she wanted any help. She went over to the drawer and rummaged around carefully. The bottles clacked together like tongues tutting. She mumbled to herself as she did it: ‘not that one, not that one, too much, too strong, not enough time.’ She picked one out, came back over with it and handed it to me. It was a medium-sized vinegar bottle and it was strangely warm. It might even have been pulsing but it was probably just my own hands because I was suddenly nervous. The label said ‘Rita Adams’. ‘Open it,’ she said to me. My hands lingered on the cap. ‘You know that it’s against the rules for me to take part in your work, Mrs Tivoli.’

She sighed and rubbed a hand over her painful hip. ‘You’re not taking part in anything,’ she said. ‘You just have to watch.’ Her bracelets rattled. ‘But if you’re uncomfortable maybe you should go back downstairs.’

I unscrewed the lid. The air in the bedroom seemed to contract and move, as if a huge line of washing had billowed out and then been snapped backwards by the wind. Mrs Tivoli muttered something and the bottle got warmer. I waited. Nothing else happened except I noticed a strange smell that I could have sworn wasn’t there before. It was a damp, earthy smell, like a pile of wet leaves or a very old jumper. It could have been overripe fruit but there was a bitterness to it that I couldn’t place at all. The bottle cooled down in my hands and another woman appeared in the room. She was hazy. Her body looked watery and brown, as if she had been cut out of a sepia photograph. She was tracing the bobbles and dents in the wall with her index finger and had a vacant smile on her face. The woman, Rita I supposed, looked like she had been beautiful once, but now she was lopsided and awry. She wandered round the room with unfocused eyes and her head tipped to one side. She tripped over my chair and laughed soundlessly as she clawed the hair out of her eyes.

After a few minutes Mrs Tivoli muttered something else and the woman vanished. I closed the lid and took a deep breath. If Mrs Tivoli was summoning ghosts into the establishment I’d have to take it further.

‘Rita’s not dead yet,’ she said, leaning her head back on the chair.

The staff handbook advises us to close any conversations that could lead into uncertain territory. ‘What was that then?’ I asked.

‘I used to know her,’ Mrs Tivoli said. ‘She lived near me. Everyone who saw her fell in love with her. One of my customers suspected her husband was having an affair with Rita and she asked for my help. I was in a rush. I had hundreds of things to do and I didn’t do the work properly. It got messed up. She wasn’t meant to turn out how she did.’ She shrugged. ‘Still, c’est la vie. We didn’t like each other anyway.’ She was breathing a little more heavily than usual and she kept smoothing her dark eyebrows over and over. I had no idea what she was talking about but I smiled and nodded at her reassuringly. I didn’t want her getting upset. She frowned. ‘Everyone has things that follow them around,’ she said sharply. ‘Mistakes, regrets, things they wish they’d done or hadn’t done. It’s far easier to put them somewhere you can keep track of them, stop them sneaking up on you. Don’t you think?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said, thinking suddenly that mine didn’t so much sneak up on me as linger around chest level.

Mrs Tivoli reached over to her wheel-in table and picked up a box of marzipan fruits. Her fingers hovered over it like a pair of moths while she chose which one she wanted. She’s addicted to sugar but her teeth are perfect. She offered the box to me but I shook my head. It was past my break by then anyway and I didn’t want to get into trouble with the duty manager.

That afternoon seemed to start something. Over the next few weeks, whenever I paid Mrs Tivoli a call, she would have picked out one of the bottles to show me. It would be there on the table, waiting. If she expected me at any point and I’d had to work over my shift because of some crisis or other, she would call reception on the internal line. ‘I was just wondering whether it was time for your break?’ she’d ask casually.

‘Gloria has gone AWOL again,’ I’d tell her. ‘It’s all hands on deck.’

‘She’s locked in the supply cupboard in the basement,’ she would say. ‘She was looking for arsenic.’ So then I’d be free to go up and see her.

I saw planes without Mrs Tivoli on board take off through the bedroom ceiling. I saw her give away one of her most treasured possessions (an extremely rare strain of seaweed from the Dead Sea) to someone who didn’t appreciate it. I watched her dig up a shallow grave at a set of crossroads to steal a silver bracelet, the reek of the grave slamming right into the room. ‘Never rob the dead,’ she said to me, shaking her head at the image of her younger self wielding a huge spade. ‘It’s a tricky business and never as useful as you’d think.’ I saw short, awkward meetings with her distant mother. I saw her pour away a bowl of gold liquid straight into her garden, turning the grass and the trees black and steaming. At one point she opened an old milk bottle and a black and white film flickered across the wall. Apparently she’d only ever watched the first half of
Citizen Kane
even though everyone said it was the best film ever made. ‘Maria hated it,’ she told me. ‘She said that it was just a bunch of men slapping each other on the back.’

I gradually realised that the smaller the bottle was, the stronger, more potent the feeling trapped inside. Mrs Tivoli was keeping mainly to the bigger ones, though, and leaving out all those small bottles I’d seen in the drawer. I was glad about it, relieved even. The smallest one she had ventured to show me so far wore us both out in a second. We watched as she placed her hands over a young girl’s stomach, while the girl squeezed her eyes tight shut. I shuddered into my armchair and Mrs Tivoli looked so exhausted I was tempted to call in the nurse.

After that one it was back to medium bottles but I knew from the glimpse of them I’d had that they must be running out. I couldn’t get that young girl’s face out of my mind and had almost decided to ask Mrs Tivoli to stop when I walked in a few days later and saw a tiny nail-varnish bottle on the table. The lid was scarlet and the label was blank. Mrs Tivoli and Maria had their eyes fixed on it. Neither of them looked up at me. I didn’t sit down. ‘I can’t stay,’ I said, stopping in the doorway. ‘There’s a thing I have to do downstairs.’

Mrs Tivoli kept her eyes on the bottle. ‘Please,’ she said. When she unscrewed the cap the smell was instant and overwhelming. It was so strong that you could almost see it draping itself over the room like a dust sheet. I’ve gone over and over it since and the only way I can describe it is this: if homesickness had a smell then it would be that one. My eyes burned with it.

A man appeared in the room. This time, the image was so defined that I could see colours and contours. There was nothing flat or hazy about him. I could see every stitch on his green jumper. He looked like he was in his late thirties and he had dark brown hair that was sticking out in messy peaks at the back. There was something on his cheek that I couldn’t quite make out at first; it could have been a cut or a shadow. The man stared at Mrs Tivoli for a few moments then smiled sadly and went towards the door. He looked back once, fumbled with the handle and then walked through it. The whole thing played out so quickly that I nearly missed it. After he had gone, Mrs Tivoli didn’t move an inch. I leaned forwards to close the bottle for her but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. The image appeared again. We watched him walk out of the door three times before Mrs Tivoli dragged her hand up and closed the lid.

Over the next few weeks we went back to our normal routine of crosswords and cookery shows during my breaks. Mrs Tivoli’s eyes kept straying away from the TV and falling on certain points in the room: the door, my chair, somewhere near the window. I was always ready for her to start talking about what she’d shown me, but she never did. ‘It’s cold in here. Don’t you think it’s cold?’ she would say instead, tucking a blanket around her legs. It wasn’t cold at all. The heating would be on and clunking away through the radiators. Most of the other residents had turned theirs down.

‘It is a bit nippy,’ I’d tell her, and she would nod and ask me to make hot chocolate, so strong and sweet it would make your teeth ache.

I was spending more time away from reception. Most days the phone wouldn’t ring at all so I was roped into doing extra cleaning. There had been a spate of pentagrams appearing on the common room carpet, marked out in salt, and I had to hoover them up. It’s a real pain because the grains bind themselves to the carpet fibres and won’t shift unless you keep a pinch of salt on your tongue. By the end of it you’re parched.

Normally I wouldn’t miss anything when I was away from the desk but yesterday was different. When I got back, the appointment book was out. One of the porters or the nurses must have taken a call for me. I flicked through to see who had a visit scheduled. It was Mrs Tivoli and she had a Mr Webb booked in for the next day.

I didn’t sleep well last night – I kept seeing planes wrapped in green wool, a swan’s feather caught in a spider’s web. When I got into work this morning I stayed on reception without budging. Mrs Tivoli had never had a visitor before and there was no way I was going to miss seeing who he was. Mr Webb wasn’t booked in for a specific time, though. That’s the problem when someone else does your job for you – they don’t ever do it properly. You’re meant to specify an exact time for the visit so that everyone can be prepared. I ate my sandwich at the desk and didn’t even leave to go for a wee. I just clenched and tried to forget about it. By mid-afternoon I thought he wasn’t coming and my shift was about to finish. When he finally walked into the lobby my bladder almost gave out. He had the same face, the same hair as that man I’d watched leaving Mrs Tivoli’s room just a few weeks ago. He came up to the desk and I signed him in, trying all the time to maintain my professional veneer, trying not to stare at his green jumper or the small shaving cut on his cheek.

I took him up to Mrs Tivoli’s room myself and knocked on the door. While we waited, I smiled at him and found myself bobbing at the knees. I’m better over the phone than face to face, I’ll be honest, but I think I just wanted to calm him down, he looked so apprehensive. He was tall and skinny, and when I say skinny, I mean skinny so that his face looked gaunt and shadowy. He had dark, heavy eyebrows that frayed out at each end. They made him look as if he was constantly frowning, but there were laughter lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes. I kept having to wipe my sweaty palms on my blouse and it seemed like hours before Mrs Tivoli called him in.

She’d tidied and changed the room around – her slippers and blankets had gone and there was a throw covering the television. She’d brought her telescope out and set it up by the window and her almanacs were stacked up in place of the magazines. There were also three chairs in the room. I didn’t know where she’d got the other one from. She gestured for both of us to sit down. I stared at that third chair and then up at Mrs Tivoli. ‘I’d better get back,’ I told her.

‘You’ve finished your shift,’ she said.

I sat down. My heavy bunch of keys clanked at the belt of my skirt. Mr Webb glanced over but didn’t say anything. I backed my chair quietly into the corner and huddled down in it.

Mr Webb went up to Mrs Tivoli and bent over her head. As his lips lingered against her hair she closed her eyes, just for a moment. He pulled back slowly and then wandered around the room, picking things up and putting them back down again. He went over to the shelf where she keeps her wrinkled potatoes stuck full of pins.

‘What are these for?’ he asked.

‘You know what they’re for,’ she told him.

Mr Webb picked one up and turned it over. ‘I thought you weren’t going to do that any more,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘Now and again.’

He put it back down quickly. ‘This is a nice place,’ he said to her. Next door’s toilet flushed and we heard muffled footsteps and the creak of someone sitting down on a bed.

‘Maria thinks my room has damp,’ she replied.

‘Everywhere’s damp to Maria; she lives in a bloody fish tank!’ he said and laughed like he was gasping. He cleared his throat. ‘How is she, anyway?’

‘You never liked Maria,’ Mrs Tivoli said to him.

‘We had our differences,’ he said, gesturing at the tank. Maria picked up a stone and spat it out. ‘I told you I would have got used to her.’ His jumper sleeve was fraying and he kept pulling on the loose threads so that it unravelled more. ‘She’s not looking quite as sprightly these days.’