First Aid (4 page)

He'd been in many rooms like this one. All curtains and carpets and furniture and breakables. Never a window open. They called him round and talked about their possessions. One or two were always singled out for special attention. Valuable, someone or other had told them. That was the word they always used. Not beautiful or unusual. Something that went for ten, twenty quid at the most in the shop. Yet these old women were decent, not grasping. They needed to know it had all been worth it. Often the items they were selling had belonged to their parents. They felt bad about parting with them. They believed that, having been kept for so long, they too must keep them. For decades these objects had stood in exactly the same spot, fixed like eyes, nose or mouth on a face, and rearranging them meant disfigurement. A few, like Ena Tiemann, hid the relics away for years. It took real courage to ditch them. Lois, his mother, had been different. She had known the selling side. She understood what happened to
things
and had gone out like a lady – leaving nothing but a few sticks of good furniture, enough Jardin de Bagatelle to cover the bottom of the scent bottle and a small overdraft at the bank.

The gentility of the shop had ebbed after Lois's death. Trevor hadn't been able to cope with the detail – the drawers slightly open and the inch of lace-edged linen hanging out. The double room with the staircase rising invitingly up the middle had come to look less and less like an over-stocked drawing room and more like auntie's house after a burglary. He had put a notice on the door asking for a few hours' help a day. A WOMAN'S TOUCH, he had written in capitals across the bottom. No one had responded. Then about a fortnight later a woman had called in. She had looked at the books and tried on a few rings from the table. She had eventually come up to him and asked, in a rather starchy way, what the job entailed. ‘Entailed' he had repeated and she had started, embarrassed, and told him that this was one of her gran's words, probably not suitable for general use. She had said she couldn't remember ever having used it before. Trevor had warmed to her then and had waved his arms at the furniture and said it wasn't a pet shop, nothing needed feeding. He said that he'd need her for the mornings only. He had a room upstairs where he lived and sometimes slept, and when he did, he liked a lie-in. She had nodded and glanced nervously up the stairs. He had ignored the glance and asked her name. Jo Price. She had said that she had three children and that she might have to bring the youngest with her. He'd said that was fine – he liked kids. She had agreed to the job. She had stayed and talked to him for a while, accepting his offer of a glass of red. He hadn't shown her the accounts.

Jo told him that she remembered Lois, but not well. When Ella and Rob were younger she used to walk aimlessly round the town with them. She said she liked walking by the sea but Ella and Rob jumped off the breakwaters or threw pebbles at targets. Neither of them feared water and they would chase each other in and out of the sea while Jo shouted at them to come back. She wasn't a strong swimmer. They had looked in windows instead. Front rooms with glass ornaments and wheelbarrows made of shells on the sills. Shops selling multi-coloured chakra charts, crystals and incense sticks. Lois Lucas & Son had been like a peculiar house on display – cosy even in summer. They had always wanted to go in, Jo said.

Trevor was glad that he had taken her on. She smoothed out the days for him; opening on time, dealing with envelopes he didn't like the look of. In return he paid her small sums of money from the tin box. She lit the paraffin stove in the winter and opened the back window in the summer. She made herself a cup of coffee, having sniffed the milk to see if it was off. Lois had assembled a makeshift kitchen in the lean-to at the back and had had it properly wired for the sake of the electric kettle. The electrics in the main part of the shop were dicey, but there had never been the money to put them right, nor the incentive, given the chaos that would have been caused by moving everything to lift the floorboards. The lamps with the two-pin, brown Bakelite plugs at the end worked well enough. They were switched on early when the mornings were dark. Having done the washing up from the day before, Jo settled down with the newspaper in one of the tip-up theatre seats that he had taken advantage of when the Winter Garden at Ramsgate had closed. His mother had had something grander, with a good sweep to the legs, but he had sold it as soon as Probate came through and settled his bill at The Dog. This had mounted up to a sum even more staggering than usual, because he had doubled his intake at the time of her stroke and hadn't subsequently got his average down. He had been fond of his mother. She had been a fighter. Almost to the end she had presided – clamped to her surroundings, short of breath but very much alive – a large woman sliding among teapots, picking up strings of amber beads with delicate stubby fingers, rearranging silver on the yellowish chenille cloth that reminded him of his childhood. He never thought about his father.

Trevor drove home and parked outside the shop. Back at Five, the sign said. Well, it wasn't much past. The three chairs and the old trestle table were still outside. He and Jo and Jo's boyfriendo had sat there the other evening, watching the world go by. He hadn't bothered to take the furniture indoors, nor the tatty books stacked on the window ledge. The weather encouraged indolence. He left Ena's boxes in the boot. There would be time for them later. He'd have to clear a space inside first. He unlocked the shop door and propped it open with a brick in a knitted cover. Then he went back out and settled in one of the chairs. Real heat. He let it spread through him. He could be in a Mediterranean backwater. Some hot arcaded empty square. The cars bearing English number-plates rushed past him – the British chart songs and the smell of British American tobacco gusting from their open windows and sun roofs – but he gave half a thought to the South of France. It was that sort of day. Everyone felt happier. Jo had looked happy this morning. She had left early. ‘Something nice?' he had asked her. ‘Maybe,' she had said.

Out of the corner of his eye he watched a barefooted couple go into the shop. They reappeared again within minutes and stood in the doorway fondling each other. Then they carried on walking down the road and went into Thresher's. A girl wearing a skimpy top stopped and picked up a book, turned to the back, read the final page, laughed scornfully and put it down again.

They weren't numerous, the customers, but on a summer's day people wandered in and out – day-trippers, dawdlers and idlers. This time of year was as good as it got. Most were from England – the south-east corner. London was the limit of where they'd come from so Kent was hardly a challenge to them. They understood the language and the prices. Overheard conversations were all too familiar. The weather was identical. Nothing was a novelty. All this must have been a cause for disappointment. But they liked poking round the shop. He had no idea why they bought what they bought. Carpet sweepers, trivets, hat pins, coal scuttles, jelly moulds. Do you remember – Nan had one of those? He had a box of old holiday snaps. The customers thumbed through them – they bought them. Other people's grandads. It beggared belief. These weren't ancestors in gilt frames. They were someone else's relations wearing shorts and standing in the middle of miniature villages, towering over the church spire and the pub. Yet the customers were adults. They had escaped their childhoods and their parents' childhoods – still they went panting back for more.

There had been several weeks of heat now. Even the nights were balmy. Lying on the bottom sheet with no covers – not even waking in the early hours to retrieve the duvet. A perfect temperature. He planned to sit outside in the street until the sun disappeared behind the houses opposite, then walk across to The Dog.

Someone was tapping on the window behind him. He turned round. He hadn't noticed anyone go into the shop. A man waving a Bunsen burner and a credit card. He didn't take credit cards. It said so quite plainly by the tin box. Bloody time waster. He got up from the chair.

ELLA CLIMBED OVER
the last gate and leant against it, getting her breath back. She had run in a straight line perpendicular to the railway track, through bumpy fields, over gates, between wire fences. From a distance the land had looked flat and tame – easy walking – but at ground level it was hard work. The furrows in the cultivated parts were deep and the wrong distance apart for ordinary steps. She had had to leap or tread clumsily, up and over. For the last half mile she had struggled uphill, passing through saplings and shoulder-high nettles and patches of mud. Gradually she felt the pulse in her head and chest quieten. She leant down and wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt, then she reached in her bag and took out a cigarette and a box of matches. The road facing her was tarmaced but narrow, with a dark hedge on the far side. She lit the cigarette and leant more torpidly against the gate. In fits and starts, she began to register things: the whirr of a small plane high overhead, an ache in her right wrist where she'd steadied herself when she jumped, boys yelling in the distance. And with these came, and also in fits and starts, other symptoms of consciousness: memories of the packing up, the minicab hooting outside in the street and half-formed decisions to walk to a main road, look for a signpost, find her way back.

She went along the lane, surprised at how little effort it was to walk on a made-up road, in spite of her aching legs. Cars passed, but she ignored them and made no attempt to keep close to the side. They had to give her a wide berth. When she came to a junction she turned left, though there were no road signs to show the way. Traffic was moving fast in both directions. She walked almost as carelessly as before and several drivers hooted at her. After about half a mile she came across a concrete shelter. It had no obvious purpose but she stopped there. At the back of the shelter was a bus timetable. One bus an hour it said – nothing on Sundays. She waited.

By the time she was on the bus, Ella was more or less grounded. It was as if the jump from the train had lasted an hour and she had only just landed on her feet. The landscape she saw from the window was familiar, although she'd never seen it before. It was that intermediate territory, which wasn't home, but had the same mix of houses, the same type of lampposts, the same signs advertising a Psychic Festival in Deal, or a Massive Factory Sale of leather jackets in Dover. August Bank Holiday. Hadn't that been and gone?

An elderly woman sitting across the aisle leant across and tapped the handrail.

‘Hang on at the next corner, dear; this driver always makes you fly off the seat. I try not to get him, but I had to catch the late bus today because of visiting my sister. Poor girl doesn't know herself any more. Confusion, that's what it is. Don't get old, sweetheart. Here we are, it's coming up now.'

The bus lurched round the corner at high speed, ploughing into the adjacent hedgerow and crunching off branches and twigs. Ella held on, in spite of herself, but she kept facing forward.

‘You're not travel sick, are you?' the old woman said. ‘You look pale. Not that you'd need to be. This one would turn anyone's stomach.'

She studied Ella's profile.

‘I've seen you somewhere, haven't I? Aren't you a waitress at Bettine's?'

‘No,' said Ella.

‘Must be a shop, then. Do you help in a shop along there?'

‘No,' said Ella, more loudly. She had her mother's instinct for denying things spontaneously, rather than revealing herself. It saved a lot of trouble. She got up, walked to the back of the bus and sat down on the furthest seat. The driver glanced in his mirror to check up on her, but the woman didn't turn round. Ella put her feet up on the seat in front, ankles crossed.

She got off the bus at a stop by the recreation ground. It was deserted, as usual, although it was the school holidays: a flat piece of scrubby land with individual stems of ragwort and some other straggly wild flower bristling out of it and a few swings stranded on concrete at the far end. She walked along a path until she came to a group of about twenty houses, each with a garage where a front room might have been. No one was about here either. She went up to one of the houses and rang the bell. She hoped she had got the right house. The bell played a short tune. She pressed her face to the glass and tried again, though she wasn't ready to see anybody. Vince opened the door. She stepped back and swallowed experimentally, as if she'd taken the wrong medicine and hoped there was still a chance it hadn't gone down. Vince peered at her.

‘Were we supposed to be doing something? I wasn't planning on going anywhere,' he said.

‘No,' said Ella.

Vince leant against the door post and Ella thought for a moment he had forgotten she was there. He was wearing a hat. He knocked it towards the back of his head.

‘What have you been doing? I haven't seen you around,' he said. ‘But there and again, I haven't been out much.'

Ella looked past Vince's shoulder into the hallway and Vince looked over her head at the houses across the street. They were both silent.

After a few moments, Ella said, ‘I wanted to ask a favour.'

‘What's that?' he said.

She could hardly remember.

‘What's the favour?' he said.

‘I need somewhere to stay,' she said. ‘Do you think your mum would let me? I mean, it's not desperate. I'll find somewhere else.'

‘Tonight?'

She nodded.

‘Well, you could've. Like, last week wouldn't have been a problem, but not now.'

‘Not now?' she said.

‘My brother's back. He got chucked out of his flat again. Something to do with an electricity meter. I haven't got a room to myself any more.'

‘I don't need a bed. I'm not fussy,' she said.

‘My stepdad's back, too.'