Three Things About Elsie(91)

‘There you are.’ Miss Ambrose and her clipboard were waiting on the pavement. ‘I was right on the verge of worrying.’

‘No need to worry about us, Miss Ambrose.’ I beamed at Eric as I climbed on board. ‘We’ve just been saying goodbye to the sea.’

Miss Ambrose started to speak, but she changed her mind and shook her head at Handy Simon instead. Eric started the engine and said, ‘That’s the job, then,’ and we all made our way back to Cherry Tree. Everyone except Mrs Honeyman, of course. We never did see her again. I sometimes worried she’d been sent to Greenbank, but I preferred to think she stayed in the room filled with sunshine and the smell of soap, and the weightlessness of self-forgiving that can only ever be found in time.

‘I don’t understand why I have to go.’

I’d been pacing the room for the last twenty minutes. I’m not usually a pacer; Elsie’s the one who walks out her anxiety. I’m more of a hand-wringer, a fidget, but on this occasion I had decided to pace, and nothing Elsie said or did could make me stop. We’d been back at Cherry Tree less than twenty-four hours, and my pacing had to take into account my suitcase, which still sat in a corner of the room, waiting to be unpacked.

‘I failed, didn’t I?’ I said. ‘I failed my probation period, and now they’re trying to get rid of me.’

‘I’m sure it’s just a precaution,’ Elsie said. ‘They’ll be sending everyone in their turn. It won’t be anything personal.’

I stopped pacing. ‘Then why do I have to go first? Why haven’t they sent for you before me? This is it, Elsie. This is the beginning of my last goodbye.’

‘We’ll go together,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to do it alone. No one will mind if I’m there as well.’

I slowed down. ‘What if I don’t pass the test?’ I stopped altogether. ‘What if they send me to Greenbank?’

‘Of course you’ll pass the test. Just think of it as a chat. Just a doctor asking a lot of ridiculous questions. You’ll run rings around him.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Of course.’ Elsie didn’t look at me as she spoke, but pointed through the window instead. ‘And look how beautiful it is out there. How could anything bad happen on a day like this?’

She was right. It was the kind of October day when the weather forgets who it is, and tiny clouds whisper at the edges of a perfect blue sky. Sunlight warmed all the colours and mopped up yesterday’s rain, and everything was so bright and so happy, it looked as though someone had given God a new set of felt tips.

One of Miss Bissell’s helping hands went in the taxi with us. Her name appeared to be Natasha, although she didn’t introduce herself. Purple tabard. Obsessed with telephone signals. Smelled of chewing gum. I have no idea what the taxi driver’s name was, because he didn’t utter a single word between Cherry Tree and the hospital, preferring instead to hum along with Radio 2 and tap his fingers on the steering wheel. Elsie sat next to me in the back, and I spent the entire journey swallowing and wondering who I’d become.

‘It will be fine. It’s all going to be fine,’ Elsie said every few minutes, as though she were reciting the words to a lullaby. ‘We’ll be out of there in no time, and we’ll go to the League of Friends and have a custard tart.’

I looked at the sky. Somewhere between Cherry Tree carpark and the bypass, it had changed. It’s strange how that happens. You look away for a moment, and when you glance back, everything is different. The rain drew lines across the glass and made the whole world look disappointed.

‘Or an Eccles cake. You like Eccles cakes,’ Elsie said.

‘I’ve fallen out with currants.’ My gaze didn’t leave the heavens. ‘They’re far too complicated.’

No one spoke again until we arrived at the hospital. The taxi driver pulled into the dropping-off zone and we struggled out of the car on to those strange, hatched yellow lines, which were wet with an October downpour.

‘This is it, then,’ I said. ‘I haven’t taken a test since I was at school. I thought I’d finished with being tested.’

‘Don’t think of it as a test, think of it as a conversation,’ Elsie said. ‘A chat.’

Natasha walked behind us, thrusting her mobile telephone towards the rooftops. ‘If I lose you, I’m for the high jump,’ she said.

We walked along painted lines in a corridor. ‘When you get old, it sometimes feels as if your whole life is just one long exam,’ I said.

The waiting room was crowded, yet strangely silent, and each time a door opened everyone turned, hoping it would be a doctor or a nurse, or some reassurance that the queue was moving forward. It was a holding point for many different clinics, and we fought our way past walking frames and pushchairs, and outposts of small children, to find a seat in the corner. Natasha immediately gravitated to a window, where she held her telephone up to the ceiling and frowned.

‘I could really do with a cup of tea. Is there no tea?’ I said. ‘Like there is at the hairdressers?’

There was a machine against the far wall, but it had a sign taped to the front suggesting we all went to A&E.

‘I’ve probably got a Mint Imperial in the bottom of my bag somewhere,’ Elsie said.