Poppet

Long Johns and Boots

SO, THE BIG Lurch was right – Melanie Arrow and Jonathan Keay were an item. AJ stands for a while in the staffroom looking at a photo of Keay that’s pinned on the board half lost under various notices and postcards and flyers. He’s with the other nursing staff at some long-forgotten Christmas party in some long-forgotten pub. He’s wearing a paper hat and a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. AJ studies his eyes, hunting for a hint, a trace of evidence of what was happening between him and Melanie. He can find none.

He’s not at all sure why he went into her office just now. Does it matter to him what happened to Pauline and Moses and Zelda? Was he trying to show her that he cares what goes on in the unit? Stand proud, little soldier. Or was it because he wanted to find out the truth about Melanie and Jonathan Keay?

He’s still asking himself when he leaves the unit, wondering about her. The thoughts would get lurid if he let them, but he’s old enough not to let them go that route. Instead he kids himself it’s natural professional concern for a colleague’s mental well-being. At home, Patience doesn’t complain that he’s late. She’s mellow, and especially forgiving when he gives her the Forager’s Fayre jam she likes. She clicks a jar open, sniffs and gives an approving cluck.

‘Like, like, like. Whoever it is makes this stuff uses good ingredients. I take my hat off to her.’

‘How do you know it’s a her and not a him?’

‘Please,’ Patience says tolerantly. ‘Don’t make me say something sexist.’

Breakfast is ready. On days when Patience has no produce from the garden to fry, poach or broil, she shops in Thornbury and does the sort of cooking her mother taught her – half Caribbean, half Deep South. Sometimes it’s saltfish and fritters, pancake towers with maple syrup and four miniature buttermilk scoops melting on top. Today it’s banana porridge followed by soft biscuits, gravy and link sausage. There’s Patience’s home-made lovage brandy too. Two or three thimblefuls in a ceramic flask with a steaming mug of black coffee out of the espresso pot on the Aga. He can drink coffee by the barrel load – even before he goes to sleep.

He sits with Stewart at his foot and eats, using the biscuits to mop up the gravy. Biscuits. He’s always been a bit split-headed about biscuits: are they cookies or are they, like these, a kind of savoury scone? He doesn’t ask Patience because she’s fretting over the form on the Cheltenham Showcase. She and Mum had the betting habit – they both claimed it was passed down in the genes from their mother. AJ recalls the many long afternoons he spent as a small child, waiting outside the bookies’ in Thornbury while his mum and Patience went inside, armed with their purses and newspapers. He was too young to join them inside, so the two women would come out to compare the form with him, asking him what he thought. ‘You’re our lucky mascot,’ they’d laugh. Lucky, lucky.

‘So much for my inheritance,’ AJ says as he moves the sausages around the plate. ‘You put it all on Rude Boy to win at Wincanton.’

Patience dumps the skillet down with a bang. He likes winding her up because she is fabulously tetchy on this subject. ‘Yes, and what’s your point?’

‘I dunno – I suppose you could have put it each way? At least you’d have covered your ass.’

‘There’s not enough money in the world to cover my butt,’ Patience says, straight-faced.

‘Stop being such a stereotype, Patience. You’re behaving like something out of Gone with the Wind. Talking like it too. You’re half white.’

‘So? Why should I stop? Give people what they expect, it makes life a whole lot simpler.’

‘Yes, but you’re only perpetuating negative images of your race.’

‘My half race. And that – what you just said – it’s all psychobabble. You got that from that place you work.’

‘It’s not psychobabble, it’s a vernacular far more rooted in the sociological sciences than in psychology,’ he says loftily. ‘And I didn’t get it from the unit. You can pick up a comment like that on any street corner.’

Aunt Patience can’t answer him when he starts talking that way, so she gives a big stage yawn, and turns away to check her texts. That’s how her tips come in these days. Not from the biroed circles on the back pages of a newspaper, the way he remembers as a child, but from bookies who have her phone number on their lists and text her.

As much love and company as Patience provides, there is a price. She’s as bad with money as Mum was. AJ’s convinced that, if he wasn’t around to keep an eye on her, this home and everything in it would have long since been gambled away. Not that it’s much, a funny old place made up of three tiny cottages tacked together. There are three staircases – and that suited him and Mum and Patience. The communal space was downstairs, while each individual had their own bedroom and bathroom on the first floor. Mum’s bedroom was the centre one. He and Patience could use it as a storeroom or something now that Mum was dead, but neither of them want to raise the subject so the room sits empty. A hole above them. They don’t mention it because then they’d have to talk about Mum’s death.

Yes, he thinks, feeding the rest of his link sausage to Stewart, when it comes to the way Mum died there are some things that will probably never get said.

He is inked in to work tomorrow morning so he’s got to readjust his sleep patterns (for the millionth time). He goes to bed at two p.m., hoping the lovage brandy will help him sleep until maybe four the next morning, but the whole thing with Melanie keeps nagging at him and, although he drifts off by two fifteen, and although it’s a deep, dreamless sleep for a change, four hours later he’s wide awake.

He lies there for a while, looking out of the window at the countryside. He misses Mum. He misses her so much. But he takes a very special comfort from the countryside, and his place within it. His neighbours are the local wildlife; when he’s shooing the deer away from Patience’s pink roses, he can recognize each individual from its markings, height, scars. He likes the solitude. He likes the fact that his clothes can smell of a bonfire without people wrinkling their noses. It’s so remote out here that on days when he’s really tired he doesn’t have to bother getting dressed – he’ll walk around the garden in long johns and boots like a character in a cowboy movie.

He’s not lonely. But he’s not sure that’s good enough any more – the simple state of not being lonely. Maybe this means mourning Mum has moved into a different phase – maybe he’s ready to start being with people again. Maybe it even means he’s ready to be a proper grown-up, have a proper adult relationship? At the spring-chicken age of forty-three? It’s a big, big step. Not something he is going to do lightly.

He glances at his watch. Six twenty. He yawns and gets up and goes into his bathroom and showers. As he’s shaving he notices a measuring spoon on top of the medicine cabinet doing a silent balancing act, as if it’s hovering on the edge. He puts down the razor and goes to it. The plastic double-ended spoon is only sitting there upright because it has become lodged in the sticky, unwiped residue of some ancient cough linctus. As a coordinator, he’s responsible for compiling weekly reports on the hygiene of the wards. Now that’s a laugh.

He gets a bin bag and sweeps everything into it, using a rag to mop up the crystallized green syrup. He drops empty cartons of paracetamol dated 2009 and a carton of Q-tips he remembers having when he got his first job aged twenty. What sort of woman would put up with this, he thinks impatiently. Really. What sort of lunatic would buy into this dump? Certainly not a mature, sensible woman.

Melanie Arrow probably lives in one of those Scandinavian houses – walls of perfect white, furniture of driftwood and linen. He imagines row after row of exquisitely tailored blouses hanging in dry-cleaning bags. And – if he’s honest – he imagines silk knickers too.

‘Hey,’ he tells his reflection. ‘You can stop it there. Wrong. All wrong.’

His reflection blinks back at him. He holds its gaze for a long time. Then he puts a hand up at the mirror. To hell with it. He’s going to do something about it.