How to Stop Time(70)

I don’t want her to know I am going away, so I hide the toothpaste and a bottle of sun tan lotion under a copy of New Scientist.

‘Hey, Mr Hazard!’ she says, laughing.

‘Mrs Bello, hi!’

Unfortunately, we get talking. She says she has just seen Camille on her way to Columbia Road flower market.

Daphne’s eyes dance a little mischievously. ‘If I wasn’t your boss – which I am – if I was just your next-door neighbour – which I am not – I would say that, well, Madame Guerin has, for some crazy reason, a bit of a thing for a certain new history teacher.’

I feel the unnatural brightness of the supermarket.

‘But obviously I wouldn’t say that, because I am a headteacher and headteachers shouldn’t say that sort of thing. It would be totally unprofessional to encourage inter-staff romances. It’s just . . . she’s been very quiet this last week. Have you noticed?’

I force a smile. ‘Fake news, I’m afraid.’

‘I just thought that maybe you’re the person to cheer her up.’

‘I think I may be the last person for that job.’

There is an awkward silence. Well, it is awkward for me. I don’t think Daphne does awkward. I notice a bottle of rum lying in her trolley, next to a bag of pasta.

‘Having a party?’ I ask, trying to initiate a new topic.

She sighs. ‘I wish. No, no, the bottle of Bacardi is for my mum.’

‘She isn’t going to share it?’

‘Ha! No. Bless her. She’s quite a hog with her rum. She’s in an old folk’s home in Surbiton – her choice, she likes the company – and she always gets me to sneak in a bottle of the good stuff. She’s a bit naughty, my mum. I always feel like a bootlegger or something, like in America during Prohibition, you know . . .’

I remember playing ragtime tunes on the piano in Arizona, a bottle of moonshine on the dusty floor beside me.

‘She’s had a bit of kidney trouble and has had a stroke so she should be off the booze completely, but she always says she’s here for a good time not a long time, though she has been here for a long time, because she’s eighty-seven and she’s a right tough old bird. Ha!’

‘She sounds great.’ I try my hardest to engage in the conversation, but my painful, overactive hippocampus is now making me think of Camille at school. How pale she’d been looking. How she had deliberately placed herself at the opposite end of the staff room to me.

But then Daphne says something that snaps me out of my despair.

‘Yeah, she’s a good chick, my mum. Mind you, she’s with a right motley crew in the home. There’s one woman there who reckons she’s so old she was born in the reign of William the Conqueror! She should be in a psychiatric ward, really.’

I stop in my tracks. My first thought is Marion. This is irrational. If Marion was alive she wouldn’t look like an old person. She’d look younger than me. And she was born in the reign of King James, not William the Conqueror.

‘Poor Mary Peters. Mad as a box of frogs. Gets scared of the TV. But a lovely old dear.’

Mary Peters.

I shake my head at Daphne, even as I remember the gossip that surrounded the disappearance of the Mary Peters we knew in Hackney. The one who Rose knew at the market. Who used to get Hell-turded by Old Mrs Adams and had arrived ‘from nowhere’.

‘Oh. Oh really? Poor woman.’

When Daphne has gone I leave my trolley in the aisle and walk with brisk determination out of the supermarket. I get out my phone and start looking up train times to Surbiton.

The care home is set back from the road. There are trees crowding out the whole front of the place. I stand outside on the pavement and wonder what I should do. There is a postman on the other side of the road, but other than that – no one. I inhale. Life has a strange rhythm. It takes a while to fully be aware of this. Decades. Centuries, even. It’s not a simple rhythm. But the rhythm is there. The tempo shifts and fluctuates; there are structures within structures, patterns within patterns. It’s baffling. Like when you first hear John Coltrane on the saxophone. But if you stick with it, the elements of familiarity become clear. The current rhythm is speeding up. I am approaching a crescendo. Everything is happening all at once. That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, ‘I can’t do this life any more, I need to change.’ And one thing happens that you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no say over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.

I take a deep breath, inhale the air.

Ash Grange Residential Care Home. The logo is a falling leaf. A generic leaf. The sign is pastel-yellow and blue. It is one of the most depressing things I have ever seen. The building itself is nearly as bad. Probably only twenty years old. Light orange brick and tinted windows and a muted quality. The whole place feels like a polite euphemism for death.