The past steps back and I push on, crossing the bridge, averting my eyes from the ravaged gull.
Along the way, I stop to look at an ancient building. The walls are fading – yellowing limestone. The windows are different shapes: rectangular, arched, semi-circular. A doorway leads to a flash of green and the rest is invisible. I can imagine the alleyways, secret rooms and shaded cloisters. Sometimes, I visualise another me moving through them clutching my books: Hardy, Dickens and Pope.
My life – if only things had turned out differently.
The other buildings on the street are tall, elegant houses. I pass restaurants – Moroccan, Greek, Italian – doors open to let out the heat, wafts of garlic and cinnamon and frying meat. Further along, there’s a second-hand bookshop I often browse in, a pub with a literary name I never drink in, the picture house where I sit from time to time, enjoying the peace and the darkness.
A car sounds its horn. A man in a vest appears at a window and yells at someone in the street. A woman pushes a pram while two small children trail behind. People come and go, in and out of shops and houses. Which of them keep secrets? Which of them are masters at dissembling?
Secrets are parasites that devour the best of you. The only way to survive is to pretend they don’t exist. A bit like ghosts and demons.
A queue trails from the cafe on the corner. I spot Tess through the glass, red-faced, wiping the back of her hand across her brow, serving customers. Tess is my boss though she’s younger than me; tall and slim, even her brown-checked overall looks good on her, and she has a lovely Thomas Hardy name. Sometimes I think I only took the job because of that.
Tess spots me and beckons me in. Hurry up, she mouths as I squeeze past the customers. You’re late.
I smile apologetically, keeping my head down as I walk through the cafe and out into the back, trying to be normal.
Normal means hanging my gabardine on its usual peg, taking the freshly laundered overall from my bag and putting it on. Five minutes in the toilet. Transition time as I morph from home Elizabeth into work Elizabeth. Past Elizabeth into present Elizabeth. Academic Elizabeth that might have been to … Stop. Breathe. I splash my face with cold water. It cools me down and it’s good for my skin, constricting blood vessels, decreasing blood flow. A throwback to those magazines I used to read, sharing beauty tips with Rachel.
There’s a pile of dirty crockery on the draining board which means the dishwasher must be broken. I look through to the cafe. The queue’s long and Tess moves fast, piling chosen fillings into rolls.
‘There in a minute,’ I call out, and then duck away before she can beckon me over.
I need time to think.
Turning on the taps, I watch the water splash into the bowl, add washing-up liquid and swirl it around. My fingers look swollen beneath the water, like fat, grey sausages.
I won’t miss this job.
It’s been a few months and that’s not bad. The longest time I’ve had any job is two years. That was in a library. I was at home there, moving quietly, pushing my trolley along the rows of books. I liked working in the museum too – the hush, the reverence for the past. It made sense being there. It was as if I was making my peace. I might have stayed if my boss hadn’t left. As it was, the man who took over was too loose with his hands, too close for comfort. His breath too often on the back of my neck.
I am restless. Changing jobs distracts me. It makes me believe I’m moving forwards, kicking away at the past, moving upwards like a swimmer heading for the surface.
I make a great show of plunging in crockery and banging it down on the draining board. I want Tess to know that I’m busy so she won’t call me in. A few more minutes to collect myself.
There’s a mug. I 
you, the writing says. It belongs to Tess, of course. Her boyfriend gave it to her. It’s exactly the kind of object that Tess would like. I would have liked it too, back when I was fifteen, back when I was trying to be accepted, trying to be loved. Love hearts and face packs. Those beauty tips in magazines. None of it made a difference. I didn’t have that kind of face, or body. I still don’t. Even the man in the museum told me I should be grateful.
Piling more mugs into the bowl, I scrub them with the brush. When I take them out, I discover the handle on the heart mug has cracked. My hand trembles as I set it on the side and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m afraid of what Tess will say, or because I’m remembering the man in the museum, or because I’m still thinking about people in white coats brushing earth from bones.
Eventually I come out and join Tess at the counter. The queue has shortened, but even so, Tess says, ‘About time, I need a break.’
She doesn’t mean to be rude. She’s young, no more than twenty-five, and she’s pretty. I expect she’s had a charmed life; nothing bad has happened to her yet; she has no understanding of misfortune, or of people. She certainly doesn’t understand me.
Perhaps she thinks because of the way I look I don’t have feelings. Perhaps she thinks my heart is so deeply buried beneath the layers of fat that it’s been stifled, that it barely beats at all. She doesn’t realise that, actually, it’s so full of love and loneliness it could burst. That I want to cover my face with my hands and cry.
Tess tells me the area manager is coming in later so the cafe must be tip-top. Then she heads for the back room.
I wonder if she’ll notice the crack in her cup.
I wonder if the people in white coats will notice any cracks in any bones.
There are two people left to serve. I give the first a pot of tea, the second a black coffee and a croissant. The croissant looks sweet and sticky. I badly want to eat one, but I resist. Tess doesn’t like it if I take food without asking, so I don’t.
Besides, despite the Twix and the currant bun, I’m supposed to be on a diet. I’m always on a diet. I don’t know anyone who’s been on a diet who’s ever stopped being on a diet.
There’s a car outside the shop. A girl jumps out. She’s tall and slim and has long, red hair. She swings her shiny shopping bags with their cord handles and gold lettering. She wears a loose dress and flat shoes, and she’s walking, moving effortlessly, like water downstream, like Rachel used to do.
A customer comes in. He orders a prawn mayonnaise sandwich which I drop into a paper bag and swing round to twist the edges. As an afterthought, I put it into another bag and twist that too.
Tess returns. I avoid her, staying at one end of the counter, cleaning items that don’t need to be cleaned, working up a sweat. When it’s my turn, I go to the back room, stare at the wall and, since I’m allowed to eat on my break, wolf down a bacon roll, and then a chocolate eclair, and then a Chelsea bun. I can’t stop eating. Fear has wakened my hunger.
Once upon a time, I used to make myself sick. That was after what happened, when controlling my food intake was a bit like not stepping on the cracks – but all that retching saps your energy, it undermines your self-belief, and if there were two qualities I needed in the end, they were energy and self-belief.
Finishing the bun, I close my eyes. It’s hard to stay normal. To keep my mind from returning to the skeleton in the morgue, to stop imagining the plain walls, the strip lights, those people in white coats searching for clues. I try filling my head with thoughts: my almost empty house with its bare walls and sticks of furniture, its tiny, paved garden. Not much to show after all these years, but then I’ve never wanted much.
Mid-morning, and there’s a lull. We clean the sides and the surfaces and polish the coffee machine until it sparkles. Tess is pleased with my work. She says I’m thorough, she says my experience shows.
She doesn’t know I’ve worked in bookshops and museums and libraries. I never told her I was on my way back from giving in my notice at the museum when I saw the card in the window and enquired.
I said I’d worked in a cafe before, but she didn’t ask where or when, only suggested a trial. I was diligent and got the job. No references required. Maybe Tess thought I had an honest face, the kind of person who wouldn’t steal from the till or cook the books or take more than her fair share of giveaway cakes.
It’s early, but already Tess is sorting through the cakes and sandwiches she predicts will be left over. She likes to do this before lunch as it saves time and means she can leave immediately with her boyfriend who comes to meet her every day.
Now she blushes a bit and says they’re going out for dinner. A special date apparently. The way she looks makes me wonder if she anticipates a proposal. She won’t tell me because she assumes I know nothing about boyfriends – not that I’m a virgin, if that’s what she thinks. I made sure of that when I left school. Who wants a label burdening them for the rest of their life?
I was eighteen. It was my first year in London. I lived in a bedsit in Canning Town which was so dismal I just wanted to get out. I have a vague memory of a pub and a man’s face, narrow and unshaven, and his smell – oil (I think he said he worked with cars) mixed with a citrus aftershave. I have a vague memory of what we talked about – his breaking away from his wife, my breaking away from my mother. His ambition to work hard and retire to Spain. My ambition to keep my head low. I was a watcher. He was a seeker. I didn’t tell him how I’d given up my ambitions long ago.
Tess puts some of the food into a paper bag for me. The cakes will be from yesterday, the sandwiches will be a little stale, bread curling at the edges. I know she’ll take the best for herself but still I accept them gratefully.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
And yet …
I can’t stay here, serving and sweeping and polishing. Smiling at customers as if nothing has changed. Listening to Tess and her good-natured chat.
The feeling grows as time ticks on and when Tess disappears to the loo, I make my decision.
Shedding my overall, grabbing my gabardine, stuffing the cakes into my bag, I step into the street.
Outside, it’s still muggy, the air close. People are quieter than usual. The atmosphere is dreary, colours are muted as if the world’s gone monochrome. It might be my imagination, of course. It might be that I’m the one whose senses have been deadened.
A car zips past, weaving shamelessly around the rest, music cascading through the window, jarring and insistent. It’s Prince. ‘1999’. Singing about judgement day and running out of time. The turn of the century. How did so much time pass? Who would have thought it possible to build a life on such a precarious past? Like building a house on crumbling foundations. Or is that image too grand? It’s more like a rickety old shack and, let’s face it, how could that ever last?
I hurry away, throwing a guilty look over my shoulder. Has Tess noticed that I’m gone? Is she wide-eyed and spinning in circles, wondering how she could have misplaced somebody as big as me?
In the street, there are fewer people around – everyone is red-faced and flustered by the heat. I hear them talking. A woman remarks on how suddenly the hot weather has come. A man joins in, pronouncing it will break. They nod sagely, agreeing it won’t be long.
And I am lost, standing there.
What should I do?
Write it down.
Think the story through.
Stare backwards and wait for the fog to clear.
I am like the fortune teller I visited once, waving her hands over a crystal ball. Mind you, she was searching the future, I’m still looking at the past.
A woman walks past leading a child in a red and grey school uniform.
My uniform was blue and grey. Mum made the skirt, laying down the tracing paper, kneeling on the floor with pins in her mouth. There she is, cutting the shape from a pattern, measuring and fitting and turning me around, hemming and sewing and saying I look fine. There I am, still a way off meeting Rachel, wearing the skirt on my first day at school.
It was raining. A fine mist had fallen on the playground.
I held Mum’s hand, in shoes that were a little too big and a cardigan that was a little too small. As it was, it was two sizes larger than was average for my age.
Mum, in another rare act of loyalty, had seized a pair of scissors and snipped out the label. ‘Puppy fat,’ she’d said. ‘You’ll grow out of it. Wait and see.’
I didn’t believe that, any more than I believed that my scattering of chicken pox scars would heal, or my hair would thicken like Lovely Amanda’s, or I’d become suddenly lovable to people on the street. Or that anyone in this school would like me.
A few of the children were crying; some were alone, digging in the sand or climbing on the frame; others were forming groups or pairs already.
A teacher appeared and clanged a bell.
‘Time to go, love,’ said Mum.
I bit my lip and swallowed hard.
‘Time to go,’ she said again, unpeeling my fingers from where they gripped her wrist.
My eyes filled as she bent down to kiss me.
‘Be good,’ she whispered as the bell clanged again.
She walked away and I watched her go, down the path and out through the white wicket gates. Her hair blew in her face as she turned to wave and then she was gone.
I dug my hands in the pockets of my skirt and lined up with the rest.
Most of the children were small and wiry. Some wore glasses, a few had grubby coats, one had an eye patch. None of them had thin, pale hair that stuck to their foreheads. None of them filled their uniforms like a bag of stodgy suet. My stomach felt empty as I stood there, turning around, as if in slow motion. Empty and cold as if the life had been sucked out of me, leaving only a shell.
‘Doughnut,’ said a boy jabbing his elbow into my ribs. ‘Jelly belly,’ he added when I didn’t react.
I closed my eyes. Sticks and stones.
What next?
Memories, like those flip books – tiny drawings, each one different, creating a story.
Back to school. A few weeks in, waiting in vain for someone to ask me to make up the numbers in a game. Teachers insisting on pairs: for lining up, for walking to assembly, for reading practice, cartwheel practice, cat’s cradle. For taking the register to the office. For fetching the register from the office.
Being alone wasn’t possible.
I needed friends.
I looked around again and saw that there were more people like me. A small, quiet boy with dark hair called John Cox and a stick-thin girl called Debra March who wore the same dirty dress every day and tied back her hair with string.
John was brilliant at spelling and adding. He had a scar on his face and no mother, and I didn’t know why until a few years later when he told me. Four years old, shopping in town, she had bought him a football, told him not to play with it, only he hadn’t listened. He’d chased the ball and she’d chased him, throwing him to safety and herself beneath a bus.
John preferred silence. Debra on the other hand was so relieved to have someone to talk to, she didn’t stop. She talked incessantly about her mother and a man called Frank. ‘He takes me shopping,’ she said, ‘and buys me stuff and he’s much better than my real dad, ’cos he’s a waste of space, that’s what Mum says, and he left when I was two, so it must be true.’
School became more bearable. John and Debra and me. We were the misfits and our friendship became cemented by that fact.
Now, of course, I realise those early school years were my easy years, when my biggest problem was avoiding the kids who called me names or jabbed their elbows in my ribs.
They were straightforward playground issues.
It was only later when the darker side of life appeared that it became obvious. The Devil hiding inside that flasher I’d seen had merely been the beginning.