Three Things About Elsie(43)

I said to him, ‘It’s like rationing, only it’s just me this time,’ and I tried to laugh a little bit.

He didn’t join in.

When Jack brought the air freshener around, he asked about Beryl again. He tried to hide it in another conversation, but I spotted it straight away because men aren’t very good at that kind of thing. He wanted to know what happened to her. How she died. He said we might be able to use it. He said we could play Ronnie at his own game.

It’s funny, because I can’t tell the difference between those daft air fresheners, but whenever anyone mentions Beryl, all I can smell is the wooden polish of the dance floor and the spilled beer. I can hear the music as well. All those notes, playing in my head. The slide of the trombone and the brush of the piano keys. The tangos and the waltzes and the foxtrots, all spinning around and covering up everything else. I tell him I can’t remember. I tell him I walk down all these different paths in my mind, but the only thing I can find are dead ends. Miss Ambrose says everything is up there, I just have to find a way of getting it out.

‘It’s your retrieval system, Florence,’ she says, whenever I forget something. ‘You have all these memories stored in drawers in your head, and we just need to find the key to open them up again.’ She taps the side of her skull when she says it. Like I don’t know where my head is.

If you sit in the day room for long enough, someone comes along with photographs of film stars and prime ministers, and pop singers.

‘Come on, Florence,’ they say. ‘Let’s open those little drawers.’

I don’t recognise my own face sometimes, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to recognise theirs. I just say Winston Churchill to everything, and they go away after a while and pick on someone else.

I tried to explain it to Jack. I tried to explain that sometimes memories don’t want to be remembered, that they crouch behind all the other memories in the corner of your mind, trying to be unfound.

‘Perhaps there was someone else there, apart from Clara,’ he said, ‘who might be able to remember?’

I looked over at Elsie. She was sitting in the corner of the room, listening to the conversation with her eyes.

‘Cyril was there,’ she said. ‘Cyril would know.’

‘Cyril Sowter?’

‘See,’ she said. ‘You’re not as daft as you think you are. You remembered his name. You opened a drawer, Florence.’

Cyril Sowter lives on a barge. We’d heard rumour, but we weren’t sure whether to believe it or not, because some elderly people have very little else to do apart from exchange nonsense backwards and forwards between themselves to help pass the time. However, on this occasion, it happened to be true.

‘Do you think he’ll remember the night Beryl died?’ Jack said, as we climbed into the car.

‘He’ll have an opinion on it,’ said Elsie. ‘If nothing else.’

‘He has a full set of marbles, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘Or at least, as many as he started off with.’

Chris pulled into a cramped space by a wooden bench and a litter bin, and we spilled out of the car on to the towpath. I hadn’t been here in years. Not since Elsie’s mother used to walk up and down the bank, talking to the fresh air, and we would watch from a distance until she’d exhausted herself. In my mind, the water had a strange smell, but now when I took a breath, there was nothing. Just grass and trees, and a faint scent of diesel. What I remembered was probably just a post-war fragrance, when the whole world smelled tired and worn out.

There was a cluster of boats moored further up. A collection of primary colours and gold lettering. They bobbed together against the canal wall like a group of conspirators.

‘Which one do you think is his?’ said Elsie.

‘Cyril’s will be the odd one out.’ I squinted against the light. ‘Whichever one looks like it doesn’t belong.’

We left Chris and walked towards the boats. A family of ducks followed alongside for a while, cutting through the water in a line of determination, as though they had a very important meeting to attend.

‘You can see the appeal, can’t you?’ Jack tapped his stick along the towpath. ‘Pulling back your curtains in a morning and seeing a view like this, instead of the canteen fire doors.’

‘And the whole world slows down,’ I said. ‘Like someone took out the key to the clock.’

‘No one has keys in clocks any more.’ Elsie put her arm through mine. ‘I think that’s the problem.’

Cyril Sowter sat on a deckchair by his barge. I was right: the boat was painted in a canary yellow, and was called The Narrow Escape. His name had been written in red underneath. For good measure.

‘Sir Cyril Sowter?’ I said.

‘I decided to knight myself. People treat you with a bit more respect when you’ve got a title in front of your name.’ He nodded at the boat. ‘I don’t see why it should be limited to the Queen; I never voted for her, and it’s about time you turned up. I’ve been waiting all morning.’

‘You knew we were coming?’ I said.

‘You came to me.’ He pointed to the empty deckchairs. ‘In a premonition. I have them quite often. I told everybody we’d be getting a change of prime minister, and I predicted there’d be a new Tesco on the ring road. I even foresaw Welsh independence.’