We sat in the day room, in front of a television programme. I said I’d stay, as long as it wasn’t anything to do with cookery, and so they found me something to watch where people were trying to push little counters over an edge and win money. My gaze wandered all over the room, although it wasn’t as bad as when it sits in the middle distance doing nothing.
‘Isn’t it exciting?’ Elsie pointed. ‘The postwoman from Leighton Buzzard is on the verge of winning a hundred and fifty pounds.’
‘I’m not really interested,’ I said.
Jack reached down the side of the settee, and pulled out a carrier bag. ‘In that case, I have just the thing to cheer us all up.’
I glanced over. ‘What have you got there?’
‘Miss Ambrose bought them for me from the jumble sale in Whitby. Don’t say I never keep my promises. Now, which one shall we watch?’
It was a stack of Harry Potter DVDs. The covers were shiny and filled with swirls and swords, and a boy in glasses who grew older with each progressive image.
‘I think we should perhaps see them in order.’ I began sorting through, trying to guess the boy’s age on each one.
‘That’s so typical of you,’ Elsie said. ‘Life always has to have rules.’
Jack picked up the one on the top of the pile. ‘I think there comes an age,’ he said, ‘when you have to worry less about following the rules, and more about living in the moment.’
And so we found Handy Simon, who put a disc in the little slot and sorted out the television, and we all watched the film together. Even Simon, who leaned against the wall for a while, before giving in to himself and sitting on one of the armchairs. Even Miss Ambrose came out of her office. She didn’t tell Simon off, but sat alongside him instead and opened a box of Terry’s All Gold. We escaped from the day room and from Cherry Tree, and into a world of wizards and broomsticks, and ordinary people who were not ordinary, but who were people who turned out, in the end, to be quite extraordinary after all. Because sometimes you need to run away. You need to believe in something without looking for proof. You need to enjoy a thing without finding a need to measure its value. You need to run away from a familiar life, into something quite unfamiliar. Even if you are so old, the only running away you will ever do again is in your mind.
I watched the film from the corner of the room. My eyes following the story, and my mouth following the words. I could remember a time when our whole lives felt like that. Unread chapters. Waiting stories. I didn’t want the film to end. I wanted it to keep on running, because I knew as soon as the credits began to roll, all my thoughts would return to Ronnie, and if I could just hold us all in this room forever, we could unremember everything that lay waiting for us on the other side of the door.
They found Jack the following morning. I was with Elsie when they told me. Simon said he looked really quite peaceful, and Miss Ambrose said dying in your sleep was the very best way to go.
‘But I never got a chance to say cheerio.’ I sat in Miss Ambrose’s office with a glass of water. ‘He never said goodbye.’
Although when I thought about it, perhaps he had. I just didn’t manage to hear it.
I looked for Jack over the next few days. I listened for the tap of his walking stick and the sound of his voice, interfering in other people’s conversations. It felt as though there had been a terrible mistake and someone would come running up to me and say it hadn’t really happened and it was all just a false alarm. The world seemed so incomplete without him there. So unlikely. I think the hardest part of losing anyone is that you still have to live with the same scenery. It’s just that the person you are used to isn’t a part of it any more, and all you notice are the gaps where they used to be. It feels as though, if you concentrated hard enough, you could find them again in those empty spaces. Waiting for you.
I thought the funeral might help us accept Jack had gone, but it all passed by in a moment. Elsie and I sat right at the back, because Elsie was worried I might need some fresh air. Miss Ambrose and Miss Bissell took it in turns to look over their shoulders at us, and when Chris left the church, he stopped and squeezed my arm.
We stood at the graveside afterwards, Elsie and me. The minibus waited in the car park, and for once, Miss Ambrose didn’t try and hurry us along.
I could smell the earth, resting against the October air, and the rain, gathered into pools on the plastic. It was the kind of cemetery where everything was tidy and careful. All the flowers were in vases and the edge of the grass was clipped. Even the dead waited in neat lines, as if even the afterlife required you to form some kind of orderly queue and take your turn.
After a while of silence, we walked along the path towards the car park, past rows of unremembered people, carved into stone and left behind.
‘Do you believe in life after death?’ I said.
Elsie answered without even looking at me. ‘Of course,’ she said.
‘How can you be so certain?’
She smiled. ‘Doesn’t it make so much more sense, Florence?’
At least Ronnie had the decency not to show his face. We didn’t see him on the morning of the funeral, or even at the tea Gloria put on in the residents’ lounge afterwards. I didn’t have much of an appetite, and I stood in the corner for most of it, watching people move through the space where Jack used to be.
‘Are you sure we can’t tempt you?’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘A small plate of something?’
I shook my head. ‘I think I might go back to the flat,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll just go and find Elsie.’
Miss Ambrose took my hand. ‘Stay here for a while longer,’ she said. ‘Just until I’m sure you’ll be all right.’
After everyone had eaten, they drifted into the day room and sat around a television, searching each other for clues as to how they should behave. Miss Ambrose decided the best approach was to take our minds off it all. I heard her use those words to Simon, when she asked him to get the Activity Box down from the cupboard in the day room.
‘Give them something else to think about,’ she said. As though any thought in our minds could be taken out and immediately replaced with another.
I saw Simon frown, but he didn’t say anything.
Scrabble, they decided on, in the end. Elsie wasn’t there, and I don’t think for one second she’d be particularly disappointed to have missed out. There were four of us, people I didn’t know or had never spoken to, all sitting round the big table, staring at letters spread out in front of us on a little rack. Simon and Miss Ambrose and Gloria all walked around the table, leaning over our shoulders and rearranging the letters and making suggestions. I didn’t know why they couldn’t just play the game themselves, and let us go back to staring into a television set.
They had arguments about which words were allowed and which weren’t, and when the woman from number seven asked why some letters were worth more than others, it led to a debate that went on for fifteen minutes. I just looked across at the chair Jack used to sit in. No one had used it since. It felt like trespassing, even though we all knew he’d never sit there again. I suppose when someone finally did, it would be the end of a chapter, because it would mean we’d all moved on, and he had been left behind in the past.
‘You’ve got some good letters there, Florence.’ Simon looked over my shoulder. ‘Have you found any words, yet?’
I hadn’t even looked at the tiles.
‘Car, star, acts,’ he said.
He reached over and moved all the tiles around. ‘You’ve got a six, look: tiaras.’
Simon seemed very pleased with himself.
‘Oh, I think we can do even better than that, young man.’
It was Ronnie. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. I wanted to turn around, but I couldn’t, because if I did, he’d see the fear in my eyes and then he’d know straight away that the game was over.
‘I can’t see a seven,’ said Simon. ‘Is there a seven?’
I could hear Ronnie smiling. ‘There is, but I think it’s best if we let Florence find it for herself, don’t you?’
I felt Ronnie’s hand rest on my shoulder.
‘Don’t think I’m going to help you,’ he said.
‘What?’ I spoke without turning. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I said,’ his breath was a little closer, his voice just short of a whisper, ‘don’t think I’m going to help you.’
The room felt very far away. Miss Ambrose talking to someone, and the scream of the television set in the corner, and Jack’s empty chair, waiting to be used again. It was as if I was watching it from the ceiling, or the next room, or somewhere in the future. A tangle of colour and light, and confusion, that didn’t seem to belong to me any more, and so I stood.
‘I don’t want to play this game now,’ I said. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘But you’ve only just started,’ I heard Ronnie say. ‘Don’t give up before it’s over.’
‘Sit down, Flo.’ Simon straightened the tiles. ‘You’re doing really well.’
‘I don’t have to play. I can do whatever I want, and I want to leave now.’ When I turned, I caught the edge of the board, and all the letters scattered to the floor.
‘Now look what you’ve done.’ Simon crouched down and started collecting them up. ‘They’ve gone everywhere.’
When I looked up, I was staring right into Ronnie’s eyes.
‘It was you,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it?’
He didn’t reply.
‘I knew it was. I knew it was you.’ I think I was shouting, because Simon stood and frowned at us both.
‘You’re right, Florence. It was me,’ Ronnie said. He glanced at Simon, who was frowning at us even more. ‘I caught the edge of the table, I was the one who upset the board.’
‘Right.’ Simon put the tiles back on to the table. ‘I see. Although I think you’ll find it was actually Florence.’
‘It might look that way.’ Ronnie reached out and patted my shoulder. ‘But it’s just a case of mistaken identity,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it, Florence?’
‘I really wish you’d stay, Florence.’ Miss Ambrose had picked up the last of the tiles from the carpet. ‘I’d feel much more comfortable if you were over here, with us.’
‘I want to go back. I don’t want to be in this place any more.’ I pulled the coat around my shoulders. ‘I’ve had enough.’
‘I can’t force you,’ she said. ‘But we’re all here, if you change your mind.’
I wasn’t going to change my mind. I’d had a bellyful of small conversations and side plates, and games of Scrabble. I looked for Elsie on my way out, but she was nowhere to be seen, and so I left Miss Ambrose and the sound of people carrying on with their lives, and I started walking down the corridor towards the courtyard.
I knew he was behind me.
I knew before I even looked.
‘Haven’t you got time for one more game?’ he shouted.
I stopped. I turned. I walked back until I was so close to him, I couldn’t take even one step more.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘All of it.’
He smiled, and the scar at the corner of his mouth disappeared. ‘Was it?’
‘The binoculars. The Battenberg. Even ordering the pizzas and the taxis. All of it was you.’
‘Don’t forget the elephant, Florence. Imagine the irony of forgetting an elephant.’
‘You killed Gabriel Price, didn’t you? You were the one who pushed him in the water.’
‘You were the last person I expected to see on that riverbank, Florence. I was waiting for Gabriel. I had it all planned. I needed an identity to borrow, a name I could steal without too much fuss being made.’ His expression never changed, even as he said the words. ‘Things were getting a little too complicated.’
‘You were waiting for him?’
‘I knew he’d take a shortcut back to his digs. Then you popped up. Perfect timing, Florence. Strangely enough, because of you, becoming someone else was so very much simpler. If anyone would have kicked up a fuss and dug around, it would have been you. But you were hardly going to say anything under the circumstances, were you? You just underestimated how easy I found it to swim back to the bank and carry on with the job I’d set out to do in the first place.’
‘And the police didn’t suspect anything.’
‘I became a missing person. A few weeks later, a body washes up. Similar build, similar age. I knew it might happen, but by then Gabriel was unrecognisable. None of this DNA identification nonsense in those days, the police just used their powers of deduction. Lucky for me they managed to deduce incorrectly.’
‘And no one missed Gabriel. No one thought it might be him?’
‘Of course not. He was a traveller. A nomad. People just assumed he’d moved on to the next town. Being missing generally relies on someone bothering to notice you’re not there any more.’
‘And you just took his place. You stole his ID card and became a whole new person.’
Ronnie simply smiled.
‘I’m going to tell them,’ I said. ‘I’m going to tell them everything. Right from the beginning.’
‘And do you really think they’ll listen?’
‘People have always listened to me. My whole life. No one has ever doubted anything I’ve said.’
‘Florence.’ He leaned forward and the words tiptoed into my ear. ‘When are you going to face up to it? You stopped being the person you used to be a long time ago.’
I could still feel the breath of his words on my face, even as I walked away.
When I got back to the flat, Elsie was sitting at the table, waiting for me.
‘Where did you get to?’ I knew I shouldn’t have shouted. ‘Why weren’t you there?’
‘Whatever’s happened, Flo?’ She shrank back in her seat and made herself very small. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘It’s Ronnie,’ I went over to the window and drew the curtains. ‘He pushed Gabriel Price in the water. He waited for him by the river, and he killed him. He confessed it to me, just now, when we were playing Scrabble.’
‘Scrabble?’
‘He swam to the side and got out. He was down there waiting, planning to drown Gabriel Price. He said me coming along just made it easier for him, because it meant I wouldn’t stir up trouble.’
When I turned back, she had gone.
‘Where are you now?’ I said. ‘Where have you got to?’
‘I’m in here. You’ve had a shock, I’m making you a sugary tea.’
I went into the kitchen and put the milk back in the fridge. ‘I don’t want any sugary tea. I just want you to listen to me.’
By the time I’d closed the refrigerator door, she was back at the table with a piece of paper.
I snatched it from her hands. ‘Will you just keep still and stop moving around. I can’t keep track of you.’
Elsie became very quiet, and she watched me from the corner of the room. ‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do,’ she said eventually. ‘Tell me what to do.’
‘I just need you to listen. He confessed it to me, now I need you to help me decide what’s best. Jack would know. If Jack was here, he’d have a plan.’
‘He isn’t, though, is he?’ she said. ‘It’s just you and me, and all those secrets. Who will ever believe us?’
‘Someone has to, surely? For Ruth Honeyman? For Beryl?’
She didn’t reply.
‘I don’t understand why you’re here,’ I said. ‘If you’re not going to help me.’
‘I’ve helped you already. I helped you to find out the truth. That’s exactly why I was here,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you been listening?’
When I looked down, I realised my hands were shaking, and I had ripped the paper into tiny pieces.
‘I think you need to lie down, Florence. Just for half an hour. Give your mind a rest.’
I didn’t remember getting into bed. But I found myself lying there somehow, in curtained light, thinking about Ronnie.
I stood on the bridge for a while after he’d fallen. Instead of finding help, I decided to find Elsie. She was the only one who would understand. The only person I could tell. Not my father, who was too forgiving. Not Gwen, who would fashion an excuse for me, but Elsie.
Elsie was my best friend.
She was the only person who would have the right words.
Because Elsie always knew the right thing to say to make me feel better.
I started to run back to Elsie’s house, along the pavements and the cobbles and the dark streets. I’m not sure what I noticed first, but I think it was the smell. I couldn’t understand why I’d started to cough, why I found it more difficult to breathe, but as I grew closer, it was everywhere. Black smoke. Filling the streets. Twisting and winding its way through the night. Then I heard it. The crack of the flames. The whip of orange and red against the sky. I knew. I knew before I’d even turned the corner. I knew, because I remembered looking into the coals and losing my judgement in a fireplace full of thinking. I didn’t put the guard back across. I poked at the fire and left it to smoulder, and a spark must have caught the carpet. Elsie’s house was burning to the ground, and it was all my fault.
The fireman saved almost all of them. Almost a whole family.
All of them except one.
I never usually slept in the middle of the day, let alone fully dressed, and when I woke, the sheets were twisted and unhappy and there was a lacquer of sweat on my forehead. Elsie had gone. I knew straight away, because the flat felt empty of her.
‘Are you there?’ I shouted, just in case. ‘I’m going to tell everything to Miss Ambrose.’
My voice fell into the silence.
‘I need you to come with me.’
When I got out of bed, I tripped over the bedspread on the floor and I felt the pain shoot up my leg. It didn’t seem to matter, though. The only thing I could think about was finding Elsie. I went outside into the courtyard and looked at all the flats. I wanted to knock on Elsie’s door, but I couldn’t decide which one was hers. She always came to visit me. She said my window had the better view. My eyes tried to find their way inside each house, through the glass and past the curtains, but all I could see was myself reflected back, potted plants on windowsills and bottles of washing-up liquid, and other people’s empty lives. Jack would know which door to knock at, and I had to keep telling myself that he wasn’t there to ask. My mind couldn’t find its way out of sleeping, and each thought I had needed to be pulled through the slurry in my mind.
Perhaps Elsie had gone ahead. Perhaps she had thought for herself for once, and was already with Miss Ambrose, waiting for me.