Poppet (15 page)

‘So this was at about the time of our party encounter?’

‘Uh huh,’ she murmurs into the crook of her arm. ‘The divorce nearly killed me. That night was the first night of me trying to bounce back.’

‘Shit. Why didn’t I step up to the plate?’

‘I don’t know. Why didn’t you?’

He gives a sorrowful laugh. ‘I think you know that. We talked about it last night. You didn’t seem like the sort of woman who’d be interested in the dating world according to AJ.’

It’s difficult for AJ to accept what he’s been missing all these years, but he also understands that he was a different person back then. He wasn’t like Jonathan Keay – who was canny and confident enough to pick up the baton he’d dropped. Keay and Melanie kept the affair from anyone in the unit secret for a long time. It was almost four years before he walked away.

‘It took him that long to work out I wasn’t going to quit, I wasn’t going to give up looking after the clients and stay at home baking him cakes. Mind you,’ she says thoughtfully, ‘I might have been through hell but at least I’m losing weight for the first time in living memory. So maybe it’s not all bad – silver linings, etcetera, etcetera.’

Melanie is getting more and more human by the second – coming more and more into focus for AJ. He is amazed by how relaxed he is in her company. It’s like they’ve been doing this for ever – chit-chatting about their pasts. Admitting their flaws.

They drink coffee together and eat toast, which she has burnt. A muntjac stalks through the frosty grass in the garden, and AJ watches silently, thinking it could have been a muntjac last night. Maybe. And if it
was
, then isn’t it a kind of benediction? Like a little of his countryside creeping all this way into town as if to say, It’s right. It’s perfectly right. The bewildered exhaustion he’s felt all week has evaporated like Scotch mist and instead he’s wildly invigorated – as if this is the first day on Earth. The first sunshine, the first blue sky, the first bed, pillow, carpet, window known to man.

He has so much energy that he finds himself doing a few DIY jobs around the house as Melanie gets ready for work. As if he owns the place already. A broken handle in the kitchen and the panel of the bath has come loose, so now he’s fixing that – feeling like the first guy on Earth – muscled and worthy, as if he’s got those black-guy footballer’s legs he always wanted. He lies on the floor in his boxers and T-shirt, trying to make Melanie’s girlie pink-handled toolset do something useful other than look cute. Meanwhile Melanie is in the bedroom putting on make-up – also looking very cute. She’s wearing a short pink kimono in satin that would be cheap on anyone else. On her it’s stunning.

‘What?’ she says, catching him looking at her. She opens her arms and looks down at herself to check the kimono isn’t showing anything. That’s the funny thing about women – they let you do all sorts of incredible things to their bodies then they’ll suddenly, out of nowhere, get self-conscious. ‘Am I fat?’

‘Huge. I wonder how you live with yourself.’

‘What?’ she says, panicked. In fact she’s got a tiny tummy on her, just one little roll of fat which he thinks is unbelievably sexy. She spent a lot of last night worrying about that roll of flesh, putting her hands over it, pleading, ‘Don’t look at me – please don’t.’ ‘Seriously?’ she says. ‘What can you see?’

‘Melanie – it’s nothing. I’m looking at you, and if you want the truth, I’m not thinking about your thinness but about how much I’d like to fuck you again.’

She relaxes at that. Gives a giggle, a wave of the hand. ‘Oh, honestly.’

‘I’m serious.’

Her face colours, she opens her mouth – seriously considering this option – then seems to remember work. She checks her watch. ‘Awwww, AJ … ?’

‘Tonight then? After work?’

‘I can’t see why not.’

‘It’s a deal.’

He goes back to wrestling with the bath panel. It’s not that straightforward – one of the screws looks as if it’s been forcibly pulled out – ripping at the fibreglass. He wonders how it happened – it’s sort of violent, he thinks. Jonathan Keay’s face comes into his head. He’s surprised Jonathan didn’t get busy around Melanie’s house. Maybe he wasn’t much of a DIY guy.

‘That’s strange.’

He stops what he’s doing and squashes his chin down so he can see Melanie in the bedroom. She’s got her handbag open on her lap and is frowning. Puzzled.

‘What’s strange?’

She glances up at him. ‘I don’t know. My bracelet. It was in here. It’s gone.’

‘Bracelet?’

‘Yes, I …’ She rummages in the bag. ‘I put it in here yesterday morning – I took it off at work – didn’t want it to draw attention to this.’ Grimly she raises her bandaged hand. ‘Thought it would make everyone stare more.’

‘What sort of bracelet?’

‘It’s a little thing, just a little thing. Jonathan gave it to me.’

He shuffles out from the bath and props himself up on his elbows so he can see her properly. She is genuinely anxious, hurriedly pulling things out of her bag. ‘Damn,’ she says. ‘Damn.’

She catches him watching and stops. She composes herself and gives him a weak smile. ‘Oh well.’ She rubs the back of her neck wearily – as if to say this is all to be expected. ‘It wasn’t worth anything. Nothing at all.’

AJ thinks she’s lying. He thinks the bracelet wasn’t ‘nothing at all’ to her. He thinks it meant a lot. An unexpected spasm of jealousy gets him. He has to swallow it down. He shuffles back half under the bath and carries on fixing the panel.

Zelda’s Locker

ONE OF BEECHWAY’S
long-term residents was discharged yesterday – and ordinarily that change in dynamic would have made the remaining patients unsettled. But today, if anything, the opposite seems to happen. In fact the unit seems far calmer than it has for months. There are no alarms going off, no crises, no ambulances, no threats or tears or episodes of incontinence. The unit drifts in a dreamless state of tranquillity.

AJ’s office is so different in the daylight. He can’t understand why he hadn’t wanted to stay here the other night. What’s to be nervous of? Darkness brings fear – the most basic human instinct. Was it the same fear that conjured the track in Melanie’s garden last night? No – the track was there. They didn’t imagine it. It’s just that the atmosphere in the unit – all the crazy ideas and rumours – has made his and Mel’s imaginations work overtime.

He tries to find the maintenance records for when Moses spooned out his eye, but Melanie is right: they’ve either been destroyed or buried so deep in the great bureaucratic engine that they won’t be found again. Some of the paperwork associated with Zelda’s death is in his office – so he turns his attention to that. There are forms to be filled in, letters to be written, her belongings to be dealt with, and when her body is released by the coroner the unit is going to have to make a show of involvement with funeral arrangements. Probably Melanie will attend the service, out of respect. AJ could accompany her, but it would be hypocritical – he couldn’t stand Zelda. He can’t go to her funeral and act sad for her family.

There’s a folder on his desk containing all Zelda’s rehabilitation papers. The in-house social workers have left it here with a note:
Found this in Zelda’s therapy centre locker. Does it need to go to the inquiry team? Family? If not please destroy – no further use
. He leafs idly through it: endless tasks she’s been set, including theoretical CVs for theoretical jobs. Lists of things she thinks she has to offer the world (she has written:
attractive, a peoples person, always ready to lissen
). Recipes she’s copied from the Web, artwork, drafts of complaint letters detailing marauding patients, staff and demons raping her every night. One is to Barack Obama. AJ shakes his head. He imagines the White House having a dedicated team to deal with the crank mail – men in suits and Brooks College girls, like in
The West Wing
.

AJ is about to drop the lot into the bin when something about one of Zelda’s paintings makes him stop. He sits back in the chair with the folder on his lap and unfolds the huge picture on the desk. In his experience, artwork produced by the mentally ill is either highly intricate – obsessively so (people constructing the London skyline inside a perfume bottle sort of thing) – or numbingly childlike.

Zelda’s work falls into the second category. It’s the kind of thing a year-four primary-school student would be proud of. There are crudely drawn horses ridden by something that is possibly meant to be Heathcliff thundering across the moors, but could be Dracula too. What’s drawn AJ’s eye is something in the top corner. It appears to be a second figure, watching the scene from a distant mountain. It is mostly human in form, except for the face, which is eerily smooth and featureless. It is wearing a white dress. It has hair that bushes out to the sides, and the arms are striped orange and brown. In both hands it’s clutching what appear to be small puppets.

AJ drops the paper hurriedly. He stands up quickly and walks two or three paces up and down the office, wiping his hands, shooting uneasy glances at the drawing. Eventually he pulls the reading lamp across the desk and studies it more carefully. Now he sees that Heathcliff resembles Dracula because his tongue has been drawn bright red and swollen in his mouth. His arms are bleeding. AJ drags his eyes back to the gnome-like figure on the horizon. Squatting? Or simply small? Like a dwarf. Anyone who has ever described The Maude has said it has a smooth, almost featureless face.

He’s angry with it all. Just as his mood was getting good, just as he was hoping to stop thinking about The Maude,
this
has to come along.

Peach Stone Cave

THE ROOM IS
small and low-ceilinged. Its walls are like a polished peach stone, the floor is soft underfoot. It smells of pine and it is dark – so dark that Penny should be afraid. But she never is. She is sure that this blackness will pass, and that somewhere in this tiny cramped place is a doorway, a wormhole that leads to something greater. She feels around blindly, certain the entrance is hereabouts. Sometimes in the dream she imagines she’s searching for a cork lodged in the wall which needs unstoppering. Sometimes it’s a small doorway leading to a minuscule passageway that she will be able to squeeze into. Other times it’s a plug on a chain. Tugging at the chain will open the hole – it will ignite stars and suns and whole solar systems.

The dream always fizzles and dies at the moment she believes she is about to find the gateway. The image peels away, winds race by, and then it’s just plain Penny – lying on her back, blinking at the ceiling in her bedroom at the Old Mill. Her heart thumping loudly.

Instinctively she puts her hand out, reaching for Suki on the other side of the bed. And then she remembers. Ah yes. That part of her life is over. All gone. She lets her hand trail across the quilt, sure there is a faint warmth – as if something living has been there. But it’s her wishful thinking. Her ghost dog.

Again she notices how ragtag the quilt is. There’s a piece missing, she sees – a piece from a dress she used to wear – she remembers it well: a purple, flower-sprigged design with twined leaves. Bell sleeves and an asymmetrical hem. The piece has come unstitched and disappeared. It makes her think of a boy – a boy she knew years and years ago. He used to steal people’s clothes. Tiny scraps: a snip of a blouse here, a thread from a coat there. Poor boy. Poor sick boy. So dangerous and so sad. Penny puts the quilt down and gets out of bed. There’s no time for self-pity – no time to mourn and complain, to cry and regret. This is her busiest time of year, and after two days of nursing Suki the work has piled up.

She throws open the shutters, quickly showers, dresses and pads down the stairs to the ground floor. Her business, Forager’s Fayre – which has been going since before the divorce, before the affair with Graham – operates from this floor. There are two huge industrial cookers at the far end and the brick walls are covered with shelves on which are stacked the tools of her trade. Jam jars, chutney jars, boxes of labels, files containing details of all her customers. The mill was built in the early nineteenth century when the area was thriving on the profits from the wool industry – there’s a whole additional lower storey that has never been modernized; the stream racing down there was harnessed to drive the mill, wash the fleece. She could expand into it, but Forager’s Fayre has worn itself into a comfortable groove in this room. She hasn’t the energy or the desire to make it bigger.

Breakfast is a hunk of bread dipped into the cooled, jellied froth she skims from the tops of her jam vats. Most people throw it away; she saves it in little earthenware bowls in the fridge. Things in this house get reused, recycled.

She goes into the prepping room. Three days ago she took delivery of twenty kilos of medlars. Already semi-bletted, they will need to be turned this morning to rot them thoroughly, ready for jam making. Then there are two dozen straining muslins to be boiled, labels to be printed. She’s not in the mood – not without Suki to keep her company. Nevertheless she ties on her apron, fixes her hair up in a cap, and sets to work.

It’s the muslins that jolt the memory. She has boiled them and is hanging them out in the drying room when a memory of what happened at Upton Farm comes back to her in such a rush it makes her legs weak. It’s something to do with the smell and the distinctive ginger-wine colour on the strainers. She realizes then that this was exactly what she was doing that morning fifteen years ago. The medlars are early this year, just like that year – and that day they were bletting in the drying room, just like they are now. There were muslin strainers hanging out to dry too. It’s the stained cotton and the whispery scent of iron that gets to her. Like dried blood.

She has to go back into the kitchen. She stands there in shock, conscious of how similar it all is – the jars piled up, the lids, the circular discs of wax paper standing by until it’s time to set them on the surface of the jam. In the boot room she can see the steaming mash of seeds she’s dumped ready to take to the compost heap. The same sugar and bubbling-syrup smell is in the air.