First Aid (14 page)

The last time she bolted Ella had found herself on the loose shingle by the East Kent railway line. This time she was in a dingy hallway at the back of the hotel. It was quiet, cut off from the noise of the bar by the walls and the old velvet curtains that hung dustily over them. In front of her was a flight of stairs with a cardboard notice saying Private propped on the bottom step. Behind her was the door from the bar that said the same. The Sandrock Hotel had no bedrooms for guests, in spite of its name. She moved the notice to a higher step and sat down and rested her head on her knees. The carpet in the dark gap between her feet was grubby and fixed with a tarnished stair rod. Her right leg was shaking. She couldn't stop it. Panic was still rising in her like pumped water in a tank.

She tried to concentrate on the image that had ejected her. From the ordinary pattern of people and glasses and bottles and smoke, some fragment had produced an uprush of recognition. A quarter of a head of dark hair, a sliver of blue shoulder, like a piece of sky in a jigsaw puzzle, a bare elbow. A kaleidoscope trick. She didn't trust herself to know whether it had been Felpo or not. She must be unhinged, she thought – as bad as Vince's nan, only fifty years younger.

The back hallway of the Sandrock Hotel was dark and smelled of those blocks that people hooked over the rim of their toilets. Ella couldn't stay there. The smell and the notice marked Private unnerved her. Whoever lived in the place was entitled to do whatever they wanted beyond that point. They might finish what they were doing and come down the stairs. She listened for scuffling or talking but upstairs was silent. She only heard the faint thud of music coming from the bar.

There was another door to the side of the stairs. It was barricaded by a table, with a leafless potted plant on it. She got up from the step, lifted the plant, light with dryness, on to the floor and moved the table away. The door had bolts that had been painted in, but she managed to move them. Flakes of toughened paint fell on to the carpet. She wondered what was on the other side and hesitated for a few moments. She had lost her sense of direction and didn't want to walk in on some sideline business of the landlady. But when she opened the door cautiously the night air that came through the gap was real. She was out in the car park.

‘What happened to you?' asked Vince, when he found her. ‘I've been looking for you for the last half hour. I hung around the front. I walked up to the main road. I went in the Ladies. I even went in the Gents. I came round the back here. I was just bracing myself to start looking in the cars. What are you doing sitting on the ground, anyway?'

‘I felt sick,' said Ella.

‘You must have moved fast. Levitation or something.'

He was standing over her and she could see him shifting from foot to foot in front of her. She didn't reply.

‘I saw some woman do that at the Odeon in Dover when I was a kid,' he said. ‘I refused to go again for about a year and then it closed down.'

A car on the far side of the car park, as dormant as the others, suddenly started into life. The headlights went on, windows were lowered, gristly singing burst out and was instantly consumed by an overused accelerator. The car sped past, bucking at the bumps at the exit, like a boy doing stunts on a bike.

‘What was the film?' asked Ella, raising her head.

‘I can't remember,' said Vince.

‘But you remember the levitation bit.'

‘That wasn't in the film. It was real. She was sitting in the row in front.' He looked down at her. ‘Are you going to stay there all night? Because I'm going home.'

‘No, I'll come too. Vince, can you do me a favour?'

She leant forward and rubbed her shin. It had stopped shaking, but still felt peculiar.

‘I thought I might walk past my house and see if anyone's there. If they're not, I'll go and sleep there,' she said.

‘I told you to do that right from the start,' he said.

He paused. She still hadn't got up. ‘Well, what's the favour?'

‘Could you come with me?' she said.

A couple came out of the hotel and walked past them to their car. The woman, who was only wearing one shoe, was clutching a handful of the man's shirt and trying to keep upright.

Vince was looking puzzled.

‘You mean, I walk all the way over to your place, drop you off and walk all the way back,' he said.

‘Yes,' said Ella.

‘All right,' said Vince. ‘But I wish you'd thought of it before, then we could have gone to The Dog.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Ella.

‘You've never said that before,' he said. ‘Ever.'

She looked over his shoulder at the far side of the car park.

‘Let's get moving, then. It's going to take a while to get over there,' he said.

He pulled her to her feet and kept hold of her hands, but once she stood up she shrugged him off.

THEY WERE ALL
startled by the doorbell. The television was on and no one had spoken for nearly an hour.

‘I'll go,' Rob said.

He got up from the sofa.

‘Who is it?' Dilys said.

‘I'll come with you, son,' Geoff said. ‘It's late.'

‘If it's that duster boy,' Dilys said, ‘put the chain on.'

Jo listened, suddenly brought back to her present surroundings. She had been in the mental equivalent of half-light; groping around, bumping against her thoughts. The intent look on Rob's face made her more alert. She heard the door open – opened wide without the check of the chain – then a man's voice, then Geoff's.

‘Who is it?' Dilys said.

‘I don't know, Gran,' Jo said.

Rob came back into the room and collapsed back on the sofa. He curled both hands over his nose as he used to do when he sucked his thumb.

‘He doesn't say who it is,' Dilys said. ‘Can't have been anyone.'

For a moment Jo had hoped – a freakish lift to her spirits. But the hope had been stupid.

They heard the front door shut. Geoff returned to the sitting room.

‘That was Gareth, Marion's boy. He's asked us in for a tipple,' he said.

‘Whatever for?' Dilys said.

‘He said he wanted to say thank you to us for looking after Marion when she had the burglars.'

‘Very nice of him,' Dilys said.

‘I said we'd just look in. We won't have to stay long,' he said.

Dilys looked at him in astonishment.

‘Why not?' Geoff said. ‘We're just staring at the four walls. It'll be nice for Jo to get out.'

‘She won't want to go anywhere,' Dilys said.

‘She might,' Geoff said.

‘Oh, come on, Gran,' Jo said. ‘Let's just go.'

She pulled herself out of the armchair before she changed her mind.

‘No, I'd have to put my other shoes on,' Dilys said. ‘I'll stay with Annie.'

‘I'm not moving,' Rob said.

Marion had a soft thick carpet the colour of porridge and a well stocked drinks cabinet with a little light inside. There were several comfortable chairs squashed close together and a large coffee table bearing bowls of crisps and nuts and olives with red centres. The lighting was low, coming from shaded wall fittings. Two matching vases of pink, shop-bought chrysanthemums balanced on the mantelpiece. The effect was luxurious compared with their house next door. Jo felt, as she walked in, that she was looking at a framed picture on the far side of a room, somewhere self-contained and separate from the turmoil in her mind. She hadn't been out to anyone's house for months. She wasn't sure she knew what to do.

She sat down and Gareth poured the drinks. He said he'd spent the afternoon trying to scrub the glass-fitter's putty marks off the window. It had been some sort of indestructible putty, more like chewing gum. Marion, with the brave bright lipstick shakily applied to her powdery lips, retold the story of the burglary. Jo paid attention to the relevant features: the drawers of the lacquered desk that the burglar had opened, the replacement pane of glass which Gareth had cleaned up that afternoon. No one interrupted, although they all knew the sequence of events. Gareth topped up the drinks then sat next to her, his legs stretched out, looking too big for the room.

Jo began to relax, finding it restful to be with these people who didn't know her but were well disposed towards her. Dilys and Geoff had put in the graft by being neighbourly over the years, and because she was their granddaughter she was given alcohol and plied with salty nibbles. When Marion asked her what her news was, she found, with the help of the sparkling wine, that she was able to answer. She said that Annie was due to start at nursery school in September and that Rob had been on a life-saving course at the local swimming baths during the holidays. Ella would be taking GCSEs next summer. She said what amazing weather they had had for the last couple of months and how not going away didn't matter when the kids could be out of doors. All that sort of thing. It sounded, to her ears, not entirely plausible. As she mentioned each of her children she could see them peacefully conforming – looking as if they lived with a different mother and smelled of newly ironed clothes. Marion smiled and nodded, not disappointed in the slightest by the meagre information. Gareth was jocular and chipped in with similar facts about his own pair who were university age. They would both need driving to their respective destinations for the beginning of the new term: Falmouth and Ripon. They could hardly be further apart so they'd use two cars. Paula would take the route west because she didn't like the Mi and he'd do Yorkshire. We could go on like this for hours, Jo thought, and what we said wouldn't be true or untrue.

The wine made her sleepy. There was no need to say anything significant, or make particular sense. Marion posed the well-meaning questions about her plans for the rest of the week and the cut on her face. She dealt with them as if they were someone else's intentions or memories, saying more or less what she had said to Dilys about not having decided – and the gas stove. Then they talked about gardening in the drought. Then it was time to leave.

‘Marion's a good sort,' Geoff said as they went back up the front path. ‘Perked you up to have a change of scene. I was worried about you.'

‘We haven't been out together for a long time, have we?' Jo said.

Geoff shook his head and smiled, remembering those occasions when they had eluded Dilys and got away to the local pub for a pint in the late afternoon. She and Geoff had been the only ones in the bar who talked. The others, a handful of solitary men, including the barman, read the paper and smoked, grunted to one another on arriving and leaving.

As if recalling the quiet of that far-away time, they stood for a while in the front garden listening to the street noises. They could hear the hum of the traffic on the main road and rowdy male shouts. Someone in a house further down was practising drumming – a ripple of thuds followed by fitful banging.

IT WAS QUIET
off the main routes from the Channel ports. From time to time cars leaving the Sandrock Hotel swept past them, riding the bends. Sheep munched in the nearby fields. The dark had settled on them but they carried on eating. Ella and Vince went single file. They didn't talk. They reached the outer edges of the town and the small housing developments that were set away from the road. They were safer off the fast road but the town didn't feel quite safe. It wasn't, but unless they were unlucky the trouble would happen somewhere else: asylum seekers and local thugs slugging it out, asylum seekers and rival asylum seekers slugging it out, drug dealing tipping into violence. Most of the rest was predictable, the kind of stuff that's been going on for centuries: drunkenness, smuggling, domestic commotion, domestic brutality. Some of it might have spilled on to the street, though not on that particular night. The rest was out of sight.

The road suddenly narrowed. Clapboard houses crowded together. The old town had a few hours to be itself, to close out the present and go back in time, though the light wasn't right. There shouldn't have been light at all, except from the sky. Some of the windows made squares of brightish haze behind drawn curtains. People were hidden inside – insomniacs who had given up the pretence of sleep, the sick and the anxious dozing in front of videos, wakeful babies. The street lamps stayed on but there were dense patches of darkness between the houses and around the old churches.

They reached Ella's house about an hour after leaving the Sandrock Hotel. The ground-floor flat was hidden by drawn blinds. Upstairs a light was on and both front windows were open, top and bottom. Ella looked for a van – battered and covered in swirls of colour – but it had gone. She and Vince stood staring up. They could see the back of one of the green-painted chairs up against the kitchen window – just the struts with spaces in between. There was no one sitting on it. She saw the pots and pans on the shelf above the stove and the edge of the calendar that her gran had sent at Christmas. She couldn't remember the August picture. The squares for the days were mostly blank because her mother only wrote down things like the dentist – not what actually happened. Ella wanted to return to Friday morning, living inside the minutes when she watched her mother washing Annie's hands at the sink, locking herself away till the danger was past. But she had missed the chance to leave life as it was. She hadn't understood then that this was an option that could be consciously taken.

She nudged Vince.

‘Let's go,' she said.

They turned round and didn't speak again until they were further down the road. The Dog had turned out an hour or so ago. It was shut-up and peaceful. No one was about.

‘Shame those people downstairs weren't in,' Vince said.

‘I don't really know them,' Ella said.

‘We had Christians next door once. They put a leaflet through the door called
Controlling Children through the Power of Prayer
,' Vince said.