Three Things About Elsie(42)

‘Are you all right, Florence?’

It was the handyman. Big talker, little doer. Always appears slightly confused. Wears training shoes, although he doesn’t look the type who sees the inside of a gymnasium very often.

‘It’s Simon,’ he said.

Simon. That’s it. I would have got there if he’d given me a bit more time.

‘It’s a bit cold,’ he said, ‘to be sitting out here on your own.’

‘Does it make it any warmer if you sit out here with someone else?’ I said.

He didn’t answer, although I thought it was a perfectly reasonable question.

‘It does old people good to get fresh air,’ I said. ‘I read about it. In a magazine.’

‘I was just worried you were getting a bit too much of it,’ he said.

I studied his face. I’ve never been very good at guessing ages, but I thought he might be about forty. Elsie says I guess the same for everybody, but I’ve found it suits most people. His face wasn’t wrinkled, but his thinking had begun to make lines around his eyes. I sometimes wondered if you were supposed to think more as you got older, and so the lines were there just to make it easier for your face to fall into a thought.

‘You need a shave, Simon,’ I said.

I didn’t know it had come out. Sometimes I think the words stay in my head, but then I look at people’s faces and realise my mouth has opened and set them all free. Simon just laughed.

‘I think you’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I walk you back to your flat, and we can have a cup of tea? Warm ourselves up a bit?’

I sat up a little straighter. ‘Not with all that cake,’ I said.

‘Cake?’

‘I didn’t buy it. Everyone will think it was me, and it wasn’t. Even I’m not that mad on marzipan.’

He frowned at me, and so I explained it to him.

‘They were supposed to take it away, but no one came. That’s why I’m sitting here. To get away from it.’

Simon put his hand on mine, and I let him.

‘Why don’t I move it for you, Florence? We’ll go back together, eh?’

I found him an old carrier bag in the back of a drawer.

‘There are twenty-three of them,’ I said. ‘Only one of them is mine. I don’t know who the rest belong to.’

He gathered them up and put them in the bag, and tied a little knot in the top. ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he said. ‘We’ll let Miss Bissell sort it out.’

‘You’ll tell her, won’t you? You’ll tell her they’re not mine, or she’ll use it against me.’

He nodded and smiled at me, and all the thinking on his face disappeared.

‘It looks like they broke your mug when they fell,’ he said.

The Princess Diana cup. It lay on the floor in a lake of tea.

‘It was my favourite,’ I said. ‘I’m worried I’ll forget about her now.’ My voice shook, although I wasn’t really sure where the shaking came from. It never used to be there.

‘I tell you what,’ Simon said. ‘I’ll soon fix that for you. It’s only the handle, you leave it with me, Florence.’

He wrapped the cup in a sheet of newspaper and put it in his coat pocket.

I looked up at him.

‘You can call me Flo,’ I said. ‘If you want to.’

I managed to wait until he’d left before I started crying.

I hadn’t cried in years. There have been times in my life when I’ve cried for so long, I completely ran out of tears, but not so much recently, because there hasn’t seemed to be much point in it. I thought I’d forgotten how, but as soon as Simon left, I realised it was like riding a bicycle.

It’s strange, because you can put up with all manner of nonsense in your life, all sorts of sadness, and you manage to keep everything on board and march through it, then someone is kind to you and it’s the kindness that makes you cry. It’s the tiny act of goodness that opens a door somewhere and lets all the misery escape.

‘We’ll have to monitor your purchases from now on,’ Miss Ambrose said. ‘We’ll have to be sure you’re making sensible choices.’

She said did I want to see a nutritionist? Or the dietician?

I asked her what the difference was, and she just coughed and looked for something in a drawer. I don’t know when jobs became so complicated, where all these names come from. I wonder if the names make people feel better about themselves, or perhaps it just makes other people more likely to listen to them. I told her I didn’t want to see anybody. I told her the only person I wanted to see was someone who believed me. She didn’t even bother to reply.

I’m not even sure Jack and Elsie believed me, although Jack bought me an air freshener. To get rid of the smell of marzipan, he said. Forest Walk, it’s called. Sits in a little plastic cube on the draining board. It smells a bit like Jeyes Fluid, but I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. The shop sells them. There’s Lavender Meadow and Winter Wonderland as well. They all smell like Jeyes Fluid to me. The only difference I can see is the picture on the front. I didn’t buy one. The man with the earphones watches me now. He writes down everything I buy in a book under the counter.