The woman comes into the room and Elsa pretends to be asleep so that she can observe. Through her thin sliver of vision, Elsa can see the woman is moving about quickly, with a careful economy of movement: there is no action that is not precisely intended, no waste or unnecessary gesture that needs to be trimmed around the edges. Elsa approves. She opens her eyes and grunts, satisfied.
‘Hello, Elsa,’ the woman says in a pretty, melodious voice. ‘And how are you this morning?’
The woman approaches the bed and bends over to press something located beneath the mattress that Elsa cannot see. There is a clunking sound and Elsa feels herself being lifted upwards as the bed mechanically angles itself into an upright position.
‘Now, what can I tempt you with this morning?’
Elsa looks at her in confusion, taking in the straight brown-black hair, cut severely into a bob. The woman is wearing a starched pink shirt and matching trousers with a pair of bright purple plastic slippers on her feet. Who is she and what is she doing in her bedroom?
‘You don’t remember me, do you, Elsa?’ the woman is saying, but she is asking it nicely, as though it is a joke they share. The woman gives a theatrical sigh. ‘I don’t know. A more sensitive soul than I am might take offence.’ She has a curious rhythm to her voice, an accent of some sort. ‘Sure, don’t I come in every morning to give you breakfast? You know who I am, you’re just teasing, aren’t you? A big old tease, that’s what you are. You know who it is! You know it’s Ashleigh.’ The woman laughs and all the time she is speaking, she is busying herself with various tasks: straightening the sheets, smoothing down the pillows, drawing the curtains and opening the window so that a pleasant freshness airs the room. She returns to Elsa’s bedside.
‘So Elsa, what’ll it be now? Your usual?’
Elsa nods her head and slowly, she is infused with a sense of familiarity. She is comforted by this woman. She feels safe in her presence.
‘Great stuff,’ Ashleigh says, reaching over to a wheeled trolley that Elsa had not previously noticed. ‘A delicious banana special, prepared with my own fair hands.’
She draws a chair up to the bed, lifts a small green plate patterned with blue flowers in one hand and starts spooning an indistinct yellow mash into Elsa’s mouth with the other. Elsa twists her head away. She does not want this food. She does not want to be treated like a baby.
‘Och, now, Elsa, would you stop it with your fussing?’ Ashleigh says, resting the plate on her lap. ‘You’ll be hungry later on if you don’t have any breakfast. And this is tasty, so it is. Look –’ she lifts a heaped spoonful to her lips and swallows it in one gulp. ‘Mmm. You don’t know what you’re missing out on, sure you don’t.’
Elsa still feels the heated glow of a small, leaden irritation in her chest but her stomach is starting to rumble. She takes the spoonful of banana. It tastes delicious. After a few more mouthfuls, she is happy.
That is how her feelings come these days: one after the other with no explanation. First she is sad, then she is joyful and one might last longer than the other but she never knows which. And yet lately, she has noticed a sense of contentment surprising her when she least expects it.
Elsa smiles.
‘Now that’s better,’ Ashleigh says. ‘You’ve got a beautiful smile, Elsa, and don’t let anyone tell you different.’
Ashleigh spoons the remainder of the banana into Elsa’s mouth and it tastes sweet and satisfying as it slips down her throat. She much prefers it here to that room with the cream walls and the closed windows. She has a memory of that room, of the sun beating down on her scalp as she lay in bed covered in a blanket she did not need. She had been left there by someone, waiting and not knowing why. Who was it who had left her there? She knows she should remember. She has a feeling of familiarity about the recollection and yet she cannot pin it down. It slips and shimmers beneath the muddy-brown waters of her mind like a gleaming coin thrown deep into the tide, a scrap of silver spiralling away from the tips of her outstretched fingers.
Who was it who had left her?
And afterwards, who was it who had come into the room? She can see the shadow of a figure moving towards her, removing the blanket, crouching down to talk to her.
All at once, Elsa feels a surge of agitation. She squirms and writhes underneath her bed sheets, pushing away the spoon from her mouth with such unexpected force that Ashleigh drops it and it skitters across the stripped wooden floorboards.
‘Elsa, what is it?’ says Ashleigh and she leans forwards, putting her face close. Ashleigh’s forehead is furrowed with concern, a pinch of flesh rising up between her pressed-together eyebrows. She puts a calming hand on Elsa’s shoulder.
‘You’re all right now, pet, you’re all right.’
But Elsa can’t hear. Her gaze films over. Her mind hollows out. Her thoughts hiss and spit furiously. Her hands bat away at something just in front of her face: a dark shadow, lurking, waiting for her, ready to pounce.
The shadow is getting bigger now, broadening outwards and looming over her until it shuts out the light streaming in from the windows. It comes towards her and Elsa tries to move but she is trapped in her bed, her muscles unable to work quickly enough, and then the shadow is crushing down on her breastbone, making it difficult for her to breathe. The darkness gets larger and stronger and heavier until it is smothering her, wrapping itself around her. Elsa shrieks, but still the shadow comes, deep and dense and covering her body. She must get away from it.
There is a voice. ‘Elsa, look at me.’
She tries to listen to the voice.
‘Elsa. Elsa. You’re OK. You’re here with me, with Ashleigh.’
The shadow stops expanding. Elsa lies still so as not to provoke it.
‘Look at me, Elsa. Open your eyes. Look at me.’
She looks up and she sees Ashleigh’s face just a few inches above her own. She meets Ashleigh’s calm, level gaze. Her eyes begin to water.
The shadow bursts and trickles away.
Ashleigh has taken her hand and Elsa is reassured by her touch. She is safe with her, she thinks. This woman will not hurt her.
She has not felt that for a long time.
Elsa has good days when the shadow does not come at all. Increasingly, there are more good days than bad. She likes it here. She feels comfortable because the same things happen at the same time each day so there are no unpleasant surprises. Perhaps because of the daily routine, her memory has started to get a bit better. She no longer needs to expend mental effort worrying over what might be happening next and whether she will be able to cope with it. She is less anxious. She begins to trust in the thought that she will not be punished. It is all so much easier now. She knows that Ashleigh will be pleased if she eats all her breakfast. She knows that if she smiles, it will make Ashleigh happy. She knows that if Ashleigh puts the bed into a propped-up seating position, she can just about make out the deep orange tinge of a flowering camellia through the corner of the bay window. These are the things that soothe her.
On a good day, she will be lifted out of her bed on a mechanical piece of apparatus that resembles a livestock winch and she will be deposited in a wheelchair and then someone will wheel her around the house and give her a change of scene. Sometimes, if it is Ashleigh pushing her and if the weather is nice enough, they will go into the garden to see the camellia. Elsa likes to reach out and touch the leaves, to feel the waxiness on her fingers. She giggles when she does this. She cannot help herself. She loves the smell of the outdoors. It is not something she can remember ever appreciating before: the undiluted scent of grass and wind and salt.
She finds that she enjoys watching television, something that Elsa had always previously dismissed as a brain-rotting waste of time. She is drawn to programmes with lots of action: shouted arguments and slaps, grim retributions and promises of revenge played out across the screen. She enjoys the drama of it, secure in the knowledge that it is all happening behind a thick piece of glass, in a box from which it cannot leak out.
The television lounge appears to be the focal point of the house: there are always half a dozen elderly men and women sitting here, watching intently, their viewing pleasure punctuated by the high-pitched hum of hearing aids turned up to maximum volume. Sometimes, Elsa forgets who these people are and she feels a rising spike of panic at the base of her throat when she sees them. She starts to whimper, in an attempt to convey how she is feeling, unable to find the right words. But then Ashleigh will bend down to her level and whisper in her ear to remind her. ‘These are the other residents, Elsa. Sure, you know who they are, don’t you? Nothing to be scared of.’ And although she will never quite remember, although the facts of Elsa’s existence will never entirely shift into sharp focus again, she will be reassured and her mind will temporarily rid itself of the last droplets of fear until the next time something sparks a fit of terrified uncertainty. In this way, Elsa’s days have become an ebb and flow, a quietly played-out battle between fretfulness and tranquillity.
In her moments of stillness, Elsa finds her thoughts are so clear, so brightly defined that it is as though they have been lit up from behind. The memories come to her in pictures. She can make out every twist, every small gap and curve, every fragile hairline crack. She can hold them in her mind’s eye for hours, tracing each tiny delineation.
In her memories, she is always a small girl. She has been told she is a mother, but she cannot see her own child’s face, even though Ashleigh has explained to her that she has a son; has, in the past, shown Elsa photographs of this creature who seems to bear so little resemblance to her. When she looks at these pictures, she feels nothing. She blinks hard and her brow becomes corrugated with concentration. She can sense how much Ashleigh wants her to remember but she can’t. Her eyes lose focus, the lids become heavy, the indistinct face of her son in the photographs – now a man; now an adolescent; now a baby boy – mesh and blur together in a thick, soupy liquid. She feels no sadness. How can she feel sad over someone she does not know?
Instead, as she sits in front of the tinny-voiced television or underneath the leafy canopy of the oak tree in the garden, she finds herself thinking of her father, of Horace. She remembers, with surprising acuteness, that she used to hate him. It feels as though half her life has been swallowed up by hating him and now, as she looks down at her resting hands, she realises she is too tired to carry on. The animosity seeps out of her like liquid tar, and it is as if a pool of it gathers at the base of her wheelchair, sticking on the wheels, on the metal frame, globules of it hardening in the sunlight with the semi-sweet smell of melting liquorice. She waits until she has nothing more to fear from it, until the fear of him can no longer tug her underground, and then she feels lighter, more able to breathe.
She sees Horace as he was when he first walked into that house in Richmond, when he shook her hand and looked at her through the far-away sharpness of his tired eyes. She sees, now, how she must have seemed to him: a small child he did not know, a girl who was claiming to be his daughter, an alien being from another life altogether. A life of families and love and gentleness. A life of normality and goodness and honour. A life where no one knew what it was like to stand next to a man and watch him get shot. A life where no one could understand that even if you got clean of the dirt – that endless, unforgiving dirt that clung to death and disaster – that even if you burned your uniform in the back garden, that even if you never spoke of it again, no matter how hard you tried, the mud would stick to you still.
She thinks of Horace and of the war and occasionally a flash of something like remembrance comes to her, an image, an idea, a half-woken memory of a thing she can never have experienced. And sometimes she does not know which of her thoughts belongs to her and which to her father.
She sees:
Darkness. A man. The whole of his right side is stuck in some kind of clay, a coagulating slowness that seems to be sliding upwards to his waist.
A bird flapping its broken wing against the ground. The bird has gauze-white feathers and black eyes and its head is swivelling from side to side in terror. She knows that she should kill it. She should wring its neck or stamp on the bird’s back with her foot to crack its spine into splintered bone. But she cannot bring herself to do it.
A pool stretching several metres away from her, the size of a small lake or a large pond. She is anxious about the water. She knows that it will keep rising as she sinks further and further into the mire. The mud is not like normal mud. It has desperate qualities all of its own: it will latch on to you and drag you under, it will pull you and crush you and it will spread itself endlessly across the landscape until there is no greenness left.
She becomes aware of a smell, a sweetish aroma like the pear-drop fragrance of chlorine gas. But it is not gas, it is something else, a saccharine smell with a fermented undertone, like an overripe plum that is beginning to go bad. She recognises it but cannot quite place it. At precisely the same moment as she remembers, she sees a floating corpse on the other side of the water.
It is half-submerged and she can just make out the tips of the other man’s boots, the outline of his grossly bloated face. The man’s skin has assumed a variety of gruesome shades: green, black, a bluish purple.
She looks over at the body. She can see the scrappy remains of a uniform. The man’s flesh has been grossly distended, bloated and pushed to the surface of the tar-tainted water as if it were a child’s bath toy. There is a shadow lying across his mouth, furry at the edges. And then, as her gaze adjusts, she realises it is not a shadow but the man’s tongue, lolling to one side: a useless slab of muscle.
A sheet of paper, translucent as the skein of an onion. Written there, in black ink, is the line ‘I am quite well.’ And she knows, as she reads it, that this is a lie. She knows this, because as soon as you tried to explain, you realised the necessary language did not exist.
A woman called Alice who is sitting on a white garden chair, bathed in late evening sunshine, her boots pressing into the daisies and bending their petals to one side. The brim of her hat is obscuring half of her face so that from a distance, you can see only the tantalising curve of her cheekbone, the twist of her shoulder, the elegance of her wrist as she holds a cup and saucer.
She belongs to a different world.
A man lying dead on the ground in a wood. The trees around the corpse are leafless, charred black and broken into unrecognisable shapes. There is no grass. The ground is pitted with holes and bones and chunks of metal, so that the landscape seems to be defined more by absence than presence: a negative of what it should have been.
The man is freshly killed, the blood still trickling out of his mouth, his eyes calcified in surprise. His moustache is caked in crimson spittle. There is a small scattering of violet-blue forget-me-nots, just below the man’s right earlobe. The petals are stained red.
A young girl in a hallway, staring at a man in uniform, unsure of what to do. When the man looks down, he notices that the child is holding a bunch of forget-me-nots. She is clenching them so tightly in her fist that the stems are being crushed against her fingers and a dribble of fluid is trickling down her slender wrist. The child releases her grip on the flowers, sending them falling to the ground, and the man sees that blood is pouring out of a wound in the centre of her palm, a hole that goes right the way through her bones to the other side of her small hand, so that he can look through it like a spyhole in a door.
The man starts to cry.
And then, she wonders where she is.