‘Heather’s handwriting is atrocious,’ she muttered, running a manicured fingernail down the page at the top of the pile of papers. She spoke quietly, to herself rather than to me. ‘Biannual visits … continuity of community integration … early identification of any additional support needs …’
She continued to read, and then I saw her face change and she glanced at me, her expression a mixture of horror, alarm and pity. She must have got to the section about Mummy. I stared her out. She took a deep breath, looked down at the papers and then exhaled slowly as she looked up at me again.
‘I had no idea,’ she said, her voice echoing her expression. ‘Do you … you must miss her terribly?’
‘Mummy?’ I said. ‘Hardly.’
‘No, I meant …’ she trailed off, looking awkward, sad, embarrassed. Ah, I knew them well – these were the holy trinity of Oliphant expressions. I shrugged, having no idea whatsoever what she was talking about.
Silence sat between us, shivering with misery. After what felt like days had passed, June Mullen closed the file on her lap and gave me an overly bright smile.
‘So, Eleanor, how have you been getting on, generally, since Heather’s last visit, I mean?’
‘Well, I haven’t become aware of any additional support needs, and I’m fully integrated into the community, June,’ I said.
She smiled weakly. ‘Work going OK? I see you’re a …’ she consulted the file again ‘… you work in an office?’
‘Work is fine,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine.’
‘What about home?’ she said, looking round the room, her eyes lingering on my big green pouffe, which is shaped like a giant frog and was part of the charity furniture donation I’d received when I first moved in. I’d grown very fond of his bulbous eyes and giant pink tongue over the years. One night, a vodka night, I’d drawn a big housefly, Musca domestica, on his tongue with a pilfered Sharpie. I’m not artistically gifted in any way, but it was, in my humble opinion, a fair rendering of the subject matter. I felt that this act had helped me to take ownership of the donated item, and created something new from something second-hand. Also, he had looked hungry. June Mullen seemed unable to take her eyes off it.
‘Everything’s fine here, June,’ I reiterated. ‘Bills all paid, cordial relations with the neighbours. I’m perfectly comfortable.’
She flicked through the file again, and then inhaled. I knew what she was about to say, recognizing full well the change in tone – fear, hesitancy – that always preceded the subject matter.
‘You’re still of the view that you don’t want to know anything else about the incident, or about your mother, I understand?’ No smiling this time.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘There’s no need – I speak to her once a week, on a Wednesday evening, regular as clockwork.’
‘Really? After all this time, that’s still happening? Interesting … Are you keen to … maintain this contact?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I said, incredulous. Where on earth does the Social Work department find these people?
She deliberately allowed the silence to linger, and, although I recognized the technique, I could not stop myself from filling it, eventually.
‘I think Mummy would like it if I tried to find out more about … the incident … but I’ve no intention of doing so.’
‘No,’ she said, nodding. ‘Well, how much you want to know about what happened is entirely up to you, isn’t it? The courts were very clear, back then, that anything like that was to be entirely at your discretion?’
‘That’s correct,’ I said, ‘that’s exactly what they said.’
She looked closely at me, as so many people had done before, scrutinizing my face for any traces of Mummy, enjoying some strange thrill at being this close to a blood relative of the woman the newspapers still occasionally referred to, all these years later, as the pretty face of evil. I watched her eyes run over my scars. Her mouth hung slightly open, and it became apparent that the suit and the bob were an inadequate disguise for this particular slack-jawed yokel.
‘I could probably dig out a photograph, if you’d like one,’ I said.
She blinked twice and blushed, then busied herself by grappling with the bulging file, trying to sort all the loose papers into a tidy pile. I noticed a single sheet flutter down and land under the coffee table. She hadn’t seen it make its escape, and I pondered whether or not to tell her. It was about me, after all, so wasn’t it technically mine? I’d return it at the next visit, of course – I’m not a thief. I imagined Mummy’s voice, whispering, telling me I was quite right, that social workers were busybodies, do-gooders, nosy parkers. June Mullen snapped the elastic band around the file, and the moment to mention the sheet of paper had passed.
‘I … is there anything else you’d like to discuss with me today?’ she asked.
‘No thank you,’ I said, smiling as broadly as I could. She looked rather disconcerted, perhaps even slightly frightened. I was disappointed. I’d been aiming for pleasant and friendly.
‘Well then, that seems to be that for the time being, Eleanor; I’ll leave you in peace,’ she said. She continued talking as she packed away the file in her briefcase, adopting a breezy, casual tone. ‘Any plans for the weekend?’
‘I’m visiting someone in hospital,’ I said.
‘Oh, that’s nice. Visits always cheer a patient up, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never visited anyone in hospital before.’
‘But you’ve spent a lot of time in hospital yourself, of course,’ she said.
I stared at her. The imbalance in the extent of our knowledge of each other was manifestly unfair. Social workers should present their new clients with a fact sheet about themselves to try to redress this, I think. After all, she’d had unrestricted access to that big brown folder, the bumper book of Eleanor, two decades’ worth of information about the intimate minutiae of my life. All I knew about her was her name and her employer.
‘If you know about that, then you’ll be aware that the circumstances were such that the police and my legal representatives were the only visitors permitted,’ I said.
She gawped at me. I was reminded of those clowns’ heads in fairgrounds, the ones where you try to throw a ping-pong ball into their gaping mouths in order to win a goldfish. I opened the door for her, watching her eyes swivel repeatedly towards the giant customized frog.
‘I’ll see you in six months then, Eleanor,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Best of luck.’
I closed the door with excessive gentleness behind her.
She hadn’t remarked upon Polly, I thought, which was odd. Ridiculously, I felt almost slighted on Polly’s behalf. She’d been sitting in the corner throughout our meeting, and was clearly the most eye-catching thing in the room. My beautiful Polly, prosaically described as a parrot plant, sometimes referred to as a Congo cockatoo plant, but always known to me, in her full Latinate glory, as Impatiens niamniamensis. I say it out loud, often: Niamniamensis. It’s like kissing, the ‘m’s forcing your lips together, rolling over the consonants, your tongue poking into ‘n’s and over the ‘s’. Polly’s ancestors came all the way from Africa, originally. Well, we all did. She’s the only constant from my childhood, the only living thing that survived. She was a birthday present, but I can’t remember who gave her to me, which is strange. I was not, after all, a girl who was overwhelmed with gifts.
She came with me from my childhood bedroom, survived the foster placements and children’s homes and, like me, she’s still here. I’ve looked after her, tended to her, picked her up and repotted her when she was dropped or thrown. She likes light, and she’s thirsty. Apart from that, she requires minimal care and attention, and largely looks after herself. I talk to her sometimes, I’m not ashamed to admit it. When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.