“Whoa there.” She holds up her hand in a comedy stop gesture but without smiling. “I don’t need a sermon.”
“I nearly died.” He wants very much to have the house to himself again. “I’m not asking you for thanks, but the least you can do is to take this seriously.”
She crumples and starts to cry. Are they real tears? He’s not sure.
“I should take you to hospital. Someone needs to sort out that cut on your leg.”
“I told you. I’m really, really frightened of hospitals.” This feels like the truth.
“Because…?”
“I told you. They get inside your mind.” She puts her hand against her head as if her thoughts are precious or painful. She is still shivering.
It seems obvious now, the possibility that she’s mentally ill. He feels like an idiot for not having thought about it before. She was trying to kill herself. It’s not like the signs were hidden. He has no idea what to say. He has never known anyone who is mentally ill.
She says, very quietly, as if she might be overheard, “Everything talks.” She sounds younger now. Twelve? Ten? Eight years old?
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Trees, walls, that clock, this wood.” She touches the table and for a second she really does look as if she’s listening. “Your dogs.”
She’s so sure of herself that he very nearly asks her what the dogs are saying.
“Stones just repeat themselves,” she says, “over and over. I’m a stone, I’m a stone…It’s raining, it’s raining…Walls gossip all the time. The stuff they’ve had to listen to over the years. If you go into a graveyard you can hear the dead talking to one another underground.”
She’s crazy, obviously, but she doesn’t sound crazy. She sounds like a sane person who lives in a different world to this one.
She cocks her head slightly, the way Leo and Fran do when they catch an interesting smell. She says, “This house is not happy,” which unnerves him more than it should. “I used to think everyone could hear these things. Then I realised that it was only me.” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Some days the only thing I want is silence.”
He asks if she has any family. He needs to find someone else who can be responsible, someone who can take her off his hands.
“My brother fucked off to Wales. My dad’s got emphysema.”
“Your mum?”
“She’s got a shitload of her own stuff to deal with.”
“You haven’t got a boyfriend, a husband…?”
“Yeh, right.” Another humourless laugh.
He thinks what hard work she must be, and wonders how many times she’s tried something like this.
“I don’t want to be here.” She’s crying again.
He assumes at first that she is referring to his house and he’s relieved. Then he realises what she means and he’s scared of what she might do. Fran is out of the armchair, both dogs pacing now, the way they do during storms. He says, “I need a hot drink,” and leaves the room, to give himself space to think.
He puts the kettle on and leans against the sink. The garden is a mess. A plank is missing from the fence that separates him from the angry Turkish couple next door. Three footballs of unknown provenance are dying slowly in the spring grass which is already too long to mow. He should gravel the whole thing over, get a couple of hardy plants in big tubs, but he hasn’t got round to it, the way he hasn’t got round to so many things.
“Why are we still married?” Maria had asked.
Companionship? The comfort of sharing your life with someone who knew you better than anyone else in the world?
“I’m afraid of being alone,” she’d said. “Isn’t that a terrible reason for staying with someone?”
It seemed like a pretty good reason to him.
He’s still freezing on the inside. He squats with his back against the radiator. Now he is out of her presence he can see things more clearly. He should have listened to the voice of reason and taken her straight to hospital. He quietly retrieves the cordless from the hall table, closes the kitchen door and dials 999. Ten minutes, the woman says. He feels warmer suddenly. In a quarter of an hour he can put something in the microwave, bring the duvet down, dig out a box set.
He makes the coffee and returns to the living room. She’s hugging the green seashell cushion. “You were a long time.”
“Sorry.”
She looks at him, hard. “Did you ring someone?”
Does he answer too quickly or too slowly?
“Fucking hell. Who did you ring?”
“Look…” He puts the coffee down and sits on the arm of Fran’s chair.
“You rang for a fucking ambulance, didn’t you? You rang for a fucking ambulance. Jesus. All that being-interested bollocks. Fuck you.”
He grabs her arm as she pushes past. “Get your fucking hands off me.”
She’s in the hall.
“Wait. You need shoes.”
She fumbles with the lock, the door opens and she runs out. He sees the car before she does. The driver hits the brakes hard, the bonnet goes down and the tail rises. A squeal of hard rubber on gritty tarmac that will leave two black marks for weeks afterwards. She turns towards the car, holding up her hands like Moses parting the Red Sea, and it comes to a halt only inches from her legs, aslant, tyres smoking, like she’s a superhero and this is her power. Then she’s gone, down Asham Way in his socks.
The driver gets out. “What the fuck are you playing at? What did you do to her?”
The man doesn’t seem real enough to warrant a reply. Nothing seems real. He goes back inside where the dogs are waiting for him and reaches the sofa just before his knees go weak with the shock and he is forced to sit down. Both coffees have been knocked over and are soaking into the carpet. The heat from the bar fire stings his lower legs. Leo slides his drooly jaw over the arm of the chair and he lays his hand flat along the dog’s warm flank to calm himself.
He stares at the tatty rainbow of VCR cases, the twelve-year-old Banbury half-marathon medal, the framed photo of Timothy at Wicksteed Park, his rare smile making up for the sun flare bleaching the right-hand side of the picture. A row of dog-eared postcards stand along the mantelpiece — the beach at Barmouth, King Kong on the Empire State Building, the Bruegel painting with the hunters. There is still a gap where Maria’s porcelain chimney sweep used to sit.
He forgets about the ambulance. The male paramedic seems vaguely pissed off by the wasted journey and not quite convinced by his story. He shows them the pile of wet clothes on the kitchen floor. “I saved someone’s life.”
“Hey, buddy, we’re all having a tough day.” The man looks not much older than a student.
The woman gives him a tight little smile which might or might not be an embarrassed apology on her sour colleague’s behalf. She is plump and ginger, her eyebrows almost white.
The man radios in a description of the woman. “Nope. Nothing as helpful as a name.”
Perhaps he’s asking too much. They save lives every day. How often does anyone thank them?
They leave and he returns to the sofa. His body does not feel cold as such, just restless and wrong and unwell. He picks up the seashell cushion and hugs it. He can hear the deep, dull sluice of his blood in his ears and behind it, far away, that faint high whine, not really a noise at all, the background radiation of the mind.
You have to let him find his own way. When he hits the buffers he’ll know where to come.
Or maybe he’ll just break into a hundred pieces.
He sits and listens.
I’m a stone, I’m a stone, I’m a stone.
He pictures her heading straight back to the river. He checks the newspapers, wanting reassurance that his failure wasn’t catastrophic. He looks forward to being congratulated at the office for his heroics then realises that it will work only if someone else tells the story and he downplays his involvement. Anyone would have done the same thing. In any case, the heroics aren’t important. Something else happened which he can’t articulate, and which he might not risk sharing if he could.