Three Things About Elsie: A Richard and Judy Book Club Pick 2018

‘I’ll help, if you like.’ Mr Price straightened his trilby. ‘Give you a hand.’

Simon wasn’t entirely sure of the average age of a Cherry Tree resident, but he felt it was one more suited to holding up supermarket queues than ladders. The man in the trilby looked more than capable, mind you. As though age had tightened his springs, rather than unwound them.

‘Don’t look so worried, Simon,’ he said. ‘I’m not quite ready for the knacker’s yard just yet.’

A string of ‘no’s came out of Simon’s mouth in a little dance. ‘Oscar Swahn won an Olympic medal in his seventies,’ he said. ‘Fauja Singh ran the London Marathon at ninety-two. History is littered with people who achieved great things in old age.’

The man lifted the ladder away from the guttering. ‘Those are very interesting facts, Simon. Why don’t you tell me some more?’

And so he did.

FLORENCE (#ulink_d3e6ecb5-0822-5477-83fd-d086f8ac9457)

I could tell Elsie thought it was a completely ridiculous suggestion, but she still went along with it. It’s one of the best things about her.

‘Of course I’ll come with you. That’s what friends are for,’ she said.

‘You don’t want to argue about it?’

‘Sometimes it’s easier,’ she said, ‘just to agree. Or I’ll spend the entire rest of the day listening to you talk me into it.’

The potting shed, I told her. If we sit in the potting shed, we’re bound to spot him sooner or later, and you can see for yourself. I wanted to prove I wasn’t hallucinating, that I hadn’t lost my mind.

‘Of course you haven’t lost your mind,’ she said.

I wasn’t so sure. Although it’s such a silly turn of phrase. It implies it’s somehow your fault. It suggests you were being careless, or became distracted along the way and mislaid it somewhere, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier. Or a husband, perhaps. Although I suppose losing your mind can prove quite helpful sometimes, because it does hint there is a possibility, however slim, that you may find it again.

It smelled of creosote, the potting shed. Creosote and soil. We were surprised it was unlocked, but there are times Cherry Tree seems stuck somewhere in the 1950s, when the whole world was unlocked but no one had yet thought to steal from it. It was dark too. There was a feathery light, but it didn’t quite meet up with the corners. There were shelves at the back, with all manner of bottles and jars stretched along them – many of which, I suspected, did not contain what they claimed to. Below the shelving, a row of gardening equipment rested against the wood, and made odd shadows on the walls. I didn’t know all their names, but there was a giant spade, still holding on to lumps of earth. Elsie asked me what each of the tools was called, because she said she was always looking for an opportunity to stretch my mind. I told her my mind wasn’t in the mood for being stretched. I told her, if she wanted to know the names for all the different tools, she could find them out for herself, and I pulled out some old deckchairs for us to sit on instead. As soon as I opened them up, I could tell they weren’t safe, but she said they’d be perfectly fine if we stayed put and didn’t move around too much, and so we rested on decayed canvas and peered through a window smeared with last year’s gardening.

‘We could be at home instead of sitting here,’ she said. ‘With a full pot of tea and Radio 4.’

I ignored her. She was used to it by now. Whilst I ignored her, I listened to a blackbird singing outside the shed window. You wouldn’t think something so small would have such a lot to say for itself.

She spoke a bit louder. ‘We could be at home,’ she said, ‘instead of sitting here.’

I turned, and the glass in my spectacles found the light. ‘You need to see him for yourself, Elsie.’

We sat in silence for a moment. Even the blackbird.

‘I know the name,’ I said, after a while. ‘Gabriel Price. I’ve seen it before.’

‘You always say you know people, Florence. It’s one of your habits.’

I sat back, and the deckchair creaked at me.

‘Here’s the best place to get a good look at him,’ I said. ‘And I have seen the name before. It isn’t one of my habits. It’s the truth.’

The potting shed does have a useful view. Cherry Tree consists of four blocks of flats, called (rather unimaginatively) A, B, C and D. Miss Ambrose once spearheaded a campaign to have them renamed a little more romantically, but, like many of Miss Ambrose’s ideas, it never really took off. The main buildings crouch in the middle, and on either side are two courtyards. From where we sat, we could see both of them: a patchwork of perennials and ceramic planters, and gravel paths with no real purpose, like an elaborate board game. We watched old people shuffle from bench to bench, passing parcels of conversation between themselves and trimming their afternoons. We saw Miss Ambrose, dawdling back to her flat as usual, with the world pressing down on her shoulders, and Gloria, from the kitchens, having a smoke in the back yard of the canteen. But no sign of Ronnie Butler.

‘Or whoever it was you think you saw,’ said Elsie.

‘He’ll be along in a minute,’ I told her, ‘and then we’ll be well away.’

‘We should have brought some sandwiches,’ she said.

I started to stretch my legs out, but then I remembered the deckchair and put a stop to myself.

‘And a flask,’ she said. ‘We always did that when we went anywhere, do you remember?’

I said yes, but I had half a mind on the window and I wasn’t really concentrating. I could feel a seed of worry begin fidgeting inside my head.

‘What if one of the gardeners finds us first?’ I said. ‘Or that handyman. I can’t remember his name.’

‘Simon,’ she said. ‘You know full well he’s called Simon. You would have remembered if you’d thought about it for long enough. You need to think about things for longer before you give up, Florence.’

I didn’t answer, and we were stuck in a wordless argument for a while.

‘Do you remember taking sandwiches on holiday, when we were children?’ she said eventually. ‘Do you remember going to Whitby?’

I said I remembered, but I wasn’t sure. She could tell straight away, because nothing much gets past Elsie.

‘Think, Florence,’ she said. ‘Think.’

I tried. Sometimes, you feel a memory before you see it. Even though your eyes can’t quite find it, you can smell it and taste it, and hear it shouting to you from the back of your mind.

‘Ham and tomato,’ I said. ‘With boiled eggs!’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes! We ate them on the beach at Saltwick Bay, when we went looking for fossils.’

I thought for a moment. ‘We never found any fossils, though, did we?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. We didn’t find any fossils.’

There was a silence again, before I spoke.

‘Why is it,’ I said, ‘I can remember what was in my sandwiches at Saltwick Bay, but I can’t remember the name of the handyman?’

There was a tremor in her voice, and she had to speak a bit louder to make a way through it. ‘If we knew that, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it now, would we?’ she said.

‘I don’t suppose we would,’ I said back.

‘Now tell me his name again, Florence. The handyman. Don’t give up so easily. What is he called?’

I didn’t answer.

It was another ten minutes before we saw him. I spotted the handyman first, marching through the grass, holding on to a ladder, but I couldn’t tell who was at the other end with all the darkness and the dirt.

I started tapping on Elsie’s arm. ‘Look. Do you see him? Do you see him?’