Scissors, Paper, Stone

Sometimes, he would knock on her door on his way upstairs.

‘Charlotte?’ He waited until she replied before he pushed the door open, but even then he refused to walk over the thin metallic strip that separated the dark red hallway carpet from the light, beige tones of her bedroom floor. It always felt awkward, his standing there as if on sentry duty, casting his wordless eye over what she was doing.

‘Busy day?’ he asked.

‘Sort of,’ Charlotte said and then couldn’t think of anything else to add. She smiled at him as neutrally as she could. He stood looking at her in silence for a few seconds, loosening his tie with one hand.

‘Good,’ he said. He shifted on his feet, as if he were about to step forward and move closer to her. She saw this and instantly she felt her shoulders jolt backwards, a movement so slight it might not have happened, but he noticed and immediately he turned from her and walked out, making long strides towards the bathroom. After a few minutes, she heard the sound of running water.

She did not know if her family was normal or not. She had few friends to confide in. She was a very lonely child, scared of other children and terrified of new experiences. She had no siblings and was unsure how to relate to people her own age. There was nothing she hated more than her mother saying she must go to a party ‘because so-and-so’s daughter will be there and she’s the same age as you’. Or those horrifying dinners where her parents would sit on one table with the adults and all the children would be expected to gather round a shaky fold-out picnic table with novelty napkins and coloured paper crowns. ‘It’s more fun for them that way, isn’t it?’ the hostess would say, with a facile smile on her face, when actually everyone knew the only reason for their annexation was that the adults couldn’t be bothered to look after them.

It wasn’t ever more fun, thought Charlotte. As a rule, she found that most children regarded her with a naked distrust that soon turned into a virulent mutual loathing. The worst thing was getting stuck with a group of girls who were already, through a series of esoteric family connections, the firmest of friends. They would either gang up on her and whisper about her behind cupped hands, or she would try to be friendly to one of them and immediately be accused by another girl of ‘trying to take her away from me’. She never seemed to wear the right clothes or to have done the right things. Once, when she admitted she had never watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a girl called Kitty with frizzy blonde hair and shiny lips said she was ‘odd’, which had seemed the cruellest possible insult at the time.

Instead, she revelled in isolation. At home, she would spend hours reading in the shed at the back of the garden, sandwiched between old deckchairs and the greasy oiliness of lawnmower spare parts. The shed was her favourite retreat. Sometimes, when things in the house got almost too much to bear, she would come to the shed and imagine that she had run away. She would sit for hours in between two coal sacks wondering if anyone had noticed that she was no longer there and then, when the floor got too hard and the night-time draughts started to seep through the cracks in the wood, she would be forced back inside and neither of her parents would remark on her absence. And it was this – the fact that they had not been worried about her – that used to upset her more than any unhappiness she might have felt in the first place.

‘Get out of the fucking way!’ she screamed as a moped screeched to a halt in front of her. She swerved just in time and saw the familiar outline of the London Bridge Hospital down a road to her left. She indicated, then remembered that the left light wasn’t working and she had yet to get it fixed. Her father had always told her she should do hand signals out of the window if this ever happened, but she was too embarrassed, so she took her chances when she saw a gap in the traffic.

The thought of him made her shiver.

Once inside the hospital car park, where a space was hardly ever available despite the outrageously high charges, she felt the familiar sense of unease settle like a shroud. She hated hospitals: the smell of disinfectant and surgical gloves, the squeaky linoleum, the endless corridors without windows, the collapsed grandmothers shuffling to the loo in their slippers, the enforced cheerfulness of the nurses that made everything seem so much more terrifying.

‘Deep breath,’ she said to herself. ‘You’re not the one who’s ill, after all.’ She picked up her battered handbag, put it over the crook in her arm and walked inside. The automatic glass doors whirred open into the reception area. Along one wall was an ersatz gift shop which sold newspapers (the Daily Express always went first, she had noticed) and sad-looking teddy bears with sickly purple bows tied round their necks. The lift pinged when she pressed the call button and she was soon on the fifth floor. She walked to the end of the hallway, pausing to squeeze a blob of alcohol on her hands from the anti-MRSA dispenser on the wall, and pushed the door on her right, sliding it slowly open.

‘Hello, Mum.’

Her mother was standing by the window, looking outwards to the indistinct greyness of the sky. She turned suddenly when Charlotte walked in. ‘Oh, hello,’ she replied absent-mindedly, as if she had not been expecting her.

‘How is he?’

‘Much the same,’ her mother said, her eyes obscured by the pair of pastel-framed bifocals she wore for reading. ‘The doctor says we should try to talk to him.’

Charlotte looked at the crumpled figure of her father, shrunken and pale against the hospital sheets. She felt unhappiness wash over her. The light in the room seemed to bleach at the edges, draining the room of colour so that everything became shaded in a matt greyness.

It was time to start acting the role that was expected of her. She pushed her shoulders back and smiled too brightly.

At the foot of the bed hung a thin wire basket in which was slotted a cheap blue ring binder containing his hospital notes. Above his head, on an easy-wipe noticeboard, a nurse had written hurriedly in red felt-tip: ‘Charles Redfern. 55 yrs’.

‘Hello, Dad.’

Anne

Anne loved her daughter so much it felt like a glass splinter lodged deep in her heart. Yet she found herself incapable of expressing it and this, more than anything else, seemed to drive them apart.

She was unaccountably cross that Charlotte was late. She had promised faithfully to be at the hospital at 6.30 p.m., but it was now 7.15 p.m. In that time, Anne had worked herself up into a state of highly pitched emotion that was a complicated knot of fury, fear and the suspicion that Charlotte simply didn’t care enough about her to turn up. The anger had crept up on Anne so imperceptibly that she had been unable to stop it leaking out in small but significant gestures; a succession of cold stares and raised eyebrows.

She knew that Charlotte picked up on it immediately, that her daughter sensed the tension in the atmosphere as soon as she walked in the room.

‘How was the traffic?’ Anne asked, trying to pepper her voice with lightness, but sensing in spite of herself the dried-up husks of her words.

‘Oh, pretty rubbish, you know. Rush hour. That kind of thing,’ Charlotte said abstractedly.

‘It’s terrible the traffic in London these days,’ Anne said, because nothing else came to mind. She gave a dry little cough. ‘What time did you leave work?’

Although Charlotte’s face remained perfectly immobile, Anne could see that the tendons in her neck were taut with some indeterminate strain. When she replied, her voice was prickly.

‘Normal time. Six-ish.’ She put her handbag down on the floor, shrugging herself out of her jacket. She sighed, audibly enough that Anne could not help but hear it. ‘You know, I didn’t mean to be late. It’s not deliberate.’

Anne said nothing. She hated it when Charlotte became irritable. She had wanted her to notice her obvious discontent but only because she had craved an affectionate, apologetic response. And now it was too late to backtrack.

‘Well,’ Anne heard herself say. ‘You’re here now.’

The air between them crackled.

Charlotte shook her head, so slightly that no one else but Anne would have seen it. But she noticed every tiny movement Charlotte made. It was her substitute for spoken intimacy. If nothing else, she could watch her. She could know her like a collector knows his butterflies: beautiful samples, pinned up in glass cases, wings outstretched so that every marking was clear. And by knowing her this way, by checking every nuance of her light and shade, by detailing each twitch and tremble, every gentle susurration of an unintended sigh, Anne could move as close to her as she dared. She gazed at Charlotte from a safe distance.

She was worried that she loved her daughter too greatly, that to reveal the extent of it would be to overwhelm the precarious balance of their relationship. She felt her emotions were calcified by guilt at not having been a good enough mother, a deep, unspoken, dug-away sort of shame that burrowed away inside like a creature with vicious teeth and claws. To let Charlotte see how much she cared, to be honest about her imperfect love, would be somehow to reveal this failing. Anne was scared at the thought of it.

They both knew where this guilt came from and Charles, when he had been awake, he had known too, but they never spoke of it. Instead, there was a triangulation of silence, a delicate construction of half-accepted ignorance that was as brittle as spun sugar.

Charlotte drew up a hospital chair to sit beside her father’s bed. She was close enough that, if she had wanted to, she could have touched him, but Anne saw that she stayed a little apart, in her own separate space. She did not take his hand.

Charlotte’s hair hung loose around her face, strands of wavy dark brown that were neither entirely straight nor tightly sprung enough to be curly. It annoyed her, Anne knew, that her hair could never be relied upon. She would use these dreadful hair straighteners each morning that seemed almost to frazzle her hair to a cinder. Sometimes Anne would notice she had burned herself on the top of her forehead, a small reddish imprint that no one else would see. In spite of the straighteners, Charlotte’s hair would always be crinkled by the end of the day. Anne preferred it like this, untampered, but she knew that her daughter hated its uncontrollable nature.

Her daughter was a pretty girl, not that she had ever told her this. But Anne knew it, objectively, because other people remarked on it when they saw her photo or when they first met her. She had an oval face and smooth skin with a faint splattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were large and light blue and quizzical-looking. She had dainty earlobes, carefully defined and covered with soft downy hair that Anne stopped herself from reaching out to touch. Today, she was wearing earrings that looked like pieces of birch bark: silvery brown crescents that shivered when she spoke.

She was speaking to her father in a low, careful voice. The doctors had insisted that talking to Charles could have a positive effect on his recovery but Anne could not shake the unnaturalness of it; the slight embarrassment of a one-way conversation consisting almost entirely of the sort of mundane trivialities that Charles had always hated being subjected to. Listening to her daughter’s hesitations and forced jollities, Anne realised that Charlotte felt it too. It had never been particularly easy to talk to Charles. Now, it seemed almost impossible.

She tuned into what Charlotte was saying and realised she was talking about the holiday she had just been on with her boyfriend, a man Anne neither liked nor trusted.

‘. . . so then we went to this beautiful hilltop village and it took ages to walk up to the top because it was unbelievably steep.’ Charlotte broke off and poured a glass of water from the plastic jug on the bedside cabinet. She furrowed her brow, thinking of the best way to continue and then, before she started to speak again, Anne saw her quite deliberately force a smile on to her face. She wondered why she did this and then she realised that Charlotte’s words now sounded warmer as she spoke them, the curve of her lips shaping each sentence with a brightness that had not been there before.

‘When we finally got there, we were both so exhausted and sweaty that the first thing we did was find a nice outside table at this café on the square to drink a citron pressé and just look for a bit at the view. It really is the most lovely part of France – un-touristy, for some reason, I suppose because it’s not that close to the coast, but . . .’

‘Where was this?’ Anne asked a little too loudly.

Charlotte looked up, surprised and slightly flustered by the interruption. ‘Oh, it’s a region called the Tarn.’ She stopped and Anne waited for her to continue, just long enough that the silence started to feel scratchy. ‘I’d never heard of it, although it turns out that Claudia – you remember Claudia don’t you? – well, her parents have a house fifteen minutes from where we were staying, but I only found out when we got back, otherwise we would have dropped in.’

‘What’s Claudia doing with herself these days?’

‘She’s, um, she’s in banking. Something to do with hedge funds. I don’t really understand it.’

‘She was always such a nice girl. Very polite. I remember she wrote the most charming thank-you letters when she came to stay.’

‘Yes,’ Charlotte said, and Anne could see instantly from the vague wrinkle between her eyebrows that she thought she was being unfavourably compared.

‘Well, anyway, I’m sure your job is much more interesting.’

‘Mm-mm.’

And so the conversation juddered on, halting and uncomfortable and never entirely real, as if they were both reading from a bad script and neither of them knew what to do about it. And there was Charles, lying gloriously in the middle of it all like a stone figurine sculpted for the top of a medieval king’s tomb; static yet simultaneously alive, able to hear yet not listening, her husband, Charlotte’s father and yet, at the same time, neither of these things. Not really. Not now.

Later, as they stood outside the hospital doors saying their awkward goodbyes, Anne leaned forward and gave her daughter a half-peck on the cheek. She inhaled the fig-scented perfume that Charlotte always wore, taking a deep breath in and then holding it for a moment, like something precious and breakable, in the pit of her stomach.

‘Anyway,’ said Charlotte, pulling away, pushing up the shoulder strap of her leather bag that kept slipping down her arm. Her smile was pained, almost embarrassed. ‘See you.’

Charlotte turned and strode towards the car park, her silver birch earrings swinging as she walked. Anne watched her climb into the driving seat and for a brief moment their eyes met through the windscreen and both of them seemed surprised by this unexpected moment of recognition. Charlotte smiled and raised a hand. Anne nodded, more curtly than she’d intended.

Anne drove along the main roads to get back to Kew, past the fried chicken shops and the sari emporiums and the queues of tourists outside the London Dungeon and Southwark Cathedral, through the endless traffic lights that turned to red just as she approached them. It would have been quicker to go the back way but she felt the need for bright streetlamps and noise and urban chaos. It felt reassuring to see it all going on as usual, everyday life continuing undaunted beyond the hospital’s distillation of loss and hurt and illness.

Her mobile phone rang, the screen flashing up with a ghoulish light. It was Janet. ‘Oh no,’ Anne said out loud, fumbling to connect the hands-free set with one hand on the steering wheel. ‘Janet?’

‘Hello, Anne. Just calling to see how things went at the hospital today?’

It was typical of Janet to call at just the wrong moment, proffering just the wrong sort of concern – the kind that required exhaustive explanation and a decent show of emotion. Speaking to her always left one with a residual feeling of baseless unease, a sense of not having quite met up to the exacting standards of her goodness. She was so unremittingly nice it was impossible not to be irritated by her and yet simultaneously ashamed of this irritation. It made for draining conversations.

They had met years ago at the local Salvation Army Christmas carol concert, an event that Anne had found herself attending with dreary regularity in an attempt to paint herself as an upstanding and contented member of the community, a family-oriented mother and wife, a fund-raiser for assorted charities and a dedicated watcher of Antiques Roadshow. For a while, she had believed that pretending her life had some sort of meaning would actually give it some, as if the acting was half the effort.

Charles had never come along with her – he called himself an atheist and made a great show of shirking any sort of religious pomp – and this had been a relief, in a way. It allowed Anne to create an alternative persona: one of wholesome cake-baking goodness and jumble sales. She found a safety in this pretence, singing along heartily to rousing carols and contributing generously to the collection plate. She liked Christmas and discovered that seasonal festivity was the perfect opportunity for anonymity without isolation. Strangers smiled at her and caught her eye, but it was easy to elude conversation, to slip out just as the mulled wine was being poured.

That was until she met Janet. Janet had suddenly appeared one year, wreathed in jollity and home-knitted scarves, bearing Tupperware boxes filled with mince pies. She made a bee-line for Anne as soon as she spotted her trying to leave.

‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’ Janet asked, a beaming smile on her face. Anne looked at her and noticed the filmy eyes, perpetually on the brink of some extreme enthusiasm and the garish, orange-red lipstick beginning to bleed into tiny lines around her trembling mouth. She felt sorry for her, a small, unfamiliar twinge of empathy, a sense that Janet too was struggling to fit in, was desperate to find her own place in all of this communal bonhomie.

‘I was just on my way home, actually.’

‘Oh go on!’ Janet tinkled cheerily. ‘One mince pie won’t do any harm. I made them this morning. Grab one while you can.’

So Anne had taken a mince pie and the pastry had crumbled all over her coat and Janet had been so pathetically grateful that Anne stayed far longer than she wanted, trapped by the force field of Janet’s self-conscious jollity.

The friendship had stopped and started over the years, like a wheezy old car that struggled to accelerate up hills. But each time it threatened to extinguish itself completely, Janet had come up with some novel ruse to keep it going – free tickets to Chelsea Flower Show, a cake recipe she’d been dying to try out on someone, the chance to go to a lecture on Darwin’s evolutionary theory at the Natural History Museum, a new cheese shop that had just opened round the corner and was meant to stock the most fabulous Pecorino. And each time, Anne had capitulated – partly because it was easier that way and partly because, in spite of herself, she found Janet’s company strangely soothing. She never had to make any conversational effort in her presence and found it easy to let Janet’s cheerful monologues wash over her, smiling and nodding her head when it was required. She was, Anne supposed, her only real friend.

Once, but only once, Janet had stared at her across a café table and said, out of nowhere, ‘You never really listen to me, do you?’ Anne had protested unconvincingly and was mortified to see tears well up in Janet’s eyes. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she had lapsed into silence. After a while, the tears receded and Janet flapped her hands in front of her face. ‘Sorry. Ridiculous. Don’t know what’s wrong with me today.’ And that had been that.

This Friday, they had been due to go to Paris for the weekend – ‘A girls’ trip,’ Janet had said when they booked their Eurostar tickets – but now it all had to be cancelled. Janet was being purposely cheery about it, as if living up to her own notions of what a ‘trooper’ she was. She had insisted on dealing with all the paperwork, in enquiring about refunds and phoning up the hotel to let them know they would no longer be requiring two single rooms with en-suite showers. And then she had told Anne all about what she’d done, seeking approval with a single-mindedness that recalled a dog gripping a stick between its teeth. Anne knew that what Janet most wanted was someone to reassure her how selfless she was, how wonderful she’d been in a crisis, to say, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ and yet it was precisely because she was so needy, so oppressively grateful for any morsel of attention, that Anne found herself feeling perversely disinclined to play the game.

She knew this was mean and she was half-horrified by her own capability for small cruelties, but she couldn’t help herself. To an extent, her friendship with Janet enabled her to vent the frustrations accumulated in the rest of her life: it was the only situation she remained entirely in control of. For some reason, that was important.

‘You sound tired,’ Janet was saying now on the phone. ‘Was it a terribly draining day?’

‘No, no,’ said Anne. ‘It was fine.’ A mini-van stopped suddenly in front of her without warning. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

‘Anne? Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Just a van driver who doesn’t know his highway code.’

Janet tittered on the end of the line. ‘So is there any update from the doctors?’

‘Much the same. They never really want to say anything in case they get sued. In any case, they’ve got to wait for the brain swelling to go down before they can be sure.’

‘Sure of what?’

‘Of whether there’s any permanent . . . well, you know, brain damage.’

There was a self-consciously dramatic intake of breath on the other end of the line.

‘They said that if he’d been wearing his bicycle helmet he might have walked away unscathed. I kept telling him to wear it,’ Anne said, rather pointlessly, she thought.

‘Are they any closer to finding out what happened?’

‘No. The police say there were no witnesses, which frankly I find hard to believe, but they never care much about cyclists, do they? The doctors think his bike was clipped by a passing car and he was thrown off. He was lucky to have landed on the road. If he had fallen into the path of a moving car, then it could have quite possibly been fatal. As it is . . . well, he’s in this coma.’

‘Goodness, Anne. How horrific.’

‘I suppose it’s just something we’ll have to deal with,’ Anne said, her impatience breaking through. ‘He might wake up tomorrow and be absolutely fine.’ She found she was unable to muster the requisite good cheer that this thought should have provoked.

‘I think you’re being a tower of strength, I really do.’

Anne stayed silent for a beat too long.

‘And you needn’t worry about Paris. Because we cancelled more than forty-eight hours in advance, the hotel has very kindly reimbursed our deposit, although it took quite a bit of doing, I tell you. My schoolgirl French isn’t what it used to be.’

Another tinkle of forced laughter.

‘Anyway, Anne, I should let you get on if you’re driving. Did you see Charlotte at the hospital?’

‘Yes, she came after work. Turned up late, obviously.’

‘Oh . . . well. That was nice of her to make the effort.’

‘Mmm,’ said Anne, non-committally. ‘I think she had a nice holiday in France with the man, although she never really tells me anything.’

‘Well, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it, Anne?’ Janet cleared her throat, preparing to take a leap into dangerous territory. ‘Perhaps she feels you might not approve.’

‘I don’t approve of him. He’s married, for goodness sake.’

‘I thought he was separated?’

‘Separated, maybe, but certainly not divorced from what I can make out.’