Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine(16)

“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 toward 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’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.

A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a potted plant, is she certifiable? I’m confident that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.

I watered her, then got on with some other household chores, thinking ahead to the moment when I could open my laptop and check whether a certain handsome singer had posted any new information. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Windows into a world of marvels. While I was loading the washing machine, my telephone rang. A visitor and a phone call! A red-letter day indeed. It was Raymond.

“I rang Bob’s mobile and explained the situation to him, and he dug out your number from the personnel files for me,” he said.

I mean, really. Was all of me on show in buff folders, splayed wide for anyone to flick open and do with as they wished?

“What a gross abuse of my privacy, not to mention an offense against the Data Protection Act,” I said. “I’ll be speaking to Bob about that next week.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Well?” I said.

“Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry. It’s just, you said you would call and you didn’t, and, well, I’m at the hospital now. I wondered, you know . . . if you wanted to bring the old guy’s stuff in? We’re at the Western Infirmary. Oh, and his name’s Sami-Tom.”

“What?” I said. “No, that can’t be right, Raymond. He’s a small, fat, elderly man from Glasgow. There is absolutely no possibility of him being christened Sami-Tom.” I was beginning to develop some serious concerns about Raymond’s mental capacities.

“No, no, Eleanor—it’s Sammy as in . . . short for Samuel. Thom as in T-h-o-m.”

“Oh,” I said. There was another long pause.

“So . . . like I said, Sammy’s in the Western. Visiting starts at seven, if you want to come in?”

“I said I would, and I’m a woman of my word, Raymond. It’s a bit late now; tomorrow, early evening, would suit me best, if that’s acceptable to you?”