“Mr. Gibbons is calling an ambulance,” I said, “so don’t worry, you won’t be lying here in the middle of the street for long. There’s no need to be anxious; medical care is completely free of charge in this country, and the standard is generally considered to be among the best in the world. You’re a fortunate man. I mean, you probably wouldn’t want to fall and bump your head in, say, the new state of South Sudan, given its current political and economic situation. But here in Glasgow . . . well, you’ve struck it lucky, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
Raymond hung up and scuttled over.
“How’s he doing, Eleanor?” he said. “Has he come round yet?”
“No,” I said, “but I’ve been talking to him, like you asked.”
Raymond took the man’s other hand.
“Poor old soul,” he said.
I nodded. Surprisingly, I felt an emotion that I recognized as anxiety or concern in relation to this elderly stranger. I sat back, and my buttocks bumped against something large and curvaceous. When I turned around to check, it was a huge plastic bottle of Irn-Bru. I stood up and stretched my spine out, and then started to collect the spilled shopping and put it into the carrier bags. One of them was torn, so I went into my shopper and took out my favorite Bag for Life, the Tesco one with lions on it. I packed all the comestibles and placed the bags by the old man’s feet. Raymond smiled at me.
We heard the sirens and Raymond handed me my jerkin. The ambulance pulled up alongside us and two men got out. They were in the middle of a conversation and I was surprised at how proletarian they sounded. I thought they’d be more like doctors.
“All right,” said the older one, “what do we have here, then? The old boy’s taken a tumble, has he?”
Raymond filled him in and I watched the other one; he was bent over the old man, taking his pulse, shining a little torch into his eyes and tapping him gently to try to elicit a response. He turned to his colleague.
“We need to get moving,” he said.
They fetched a stretcher and were fast and surprisingly gentle as they lifted the old man and strapped him on. The younger man wrapped a red fleece blanket around him.
“Same color as his jumper,” I said, but they both ignored me.
“You coming with him?” the older man asked. “Only room for one in the back, mind.”
Raymond and I looked at one another. I glanced at my watch. The visitor was due chez Oliphant in half an hour.
“I’ll go, Eleanor,” he said. “You don’t want to miss your chiropody appointment.”
I nodded, and Raymond climbed in beside the old man and the paramedic, who was busy connecting drips and monitors. I picked up the shopping bags and lifted them high enough to pass across to Raymond.
“Look,” said the paramedic, sounding slightly tetchy, “this isn’t the Asda van. We don’t deliver shopping.”
Raymond was on the phone, and I heard him talking, apparently to his mother, telling her that he’d be late, before he quickly hung up.
“Eleanor,” he said, “why don’t you give me a call in a bit, and maybe you could bring his stuff over to him?” I considered this, nodded, watched as he rummaged in his coat pocket and took out a Biro. He grabbed my hand. I gasped and stepped to the side, shocked, placing my hand firmly behind my back.
“I need to give you my phone number,” he said patiently.
I took out my little notebook from my shopper, which he returned with a page covered in blue scribble, his name barely legible there, and a series of numbers scrawled below it in an awkward, childish hand.
“Give it an hour or so,” he said. “Your bunions will be dealt with by then, won’t they?”
6
I had barely had time to get home and divest myself of my outer garments when the doorbell rang, ten minutes earlier than I’d been expecting. Probably trying to catch me out. When I opened it, slowly, keeping the chain on, it wasn’t the person I’d been expecting. Whoever it was, she wasn’t smiling.
“Eleanor Oliphant? June Mullen, Social Work,” she said, stepping forward, her progress blocked by the door.
“I was expecting Heather,” I said, peering around.
“Heather’s off sick, I’m afraid; we’ve no idea when she’ll be back. I’ve taken over her cases.”
I asked to see some form of official identification—I mean, you can’t be too careful. She gave a tiny sigh, and began to look in her bag. She was tall, carefully dressed in a black trouser suit and white shirt. As she bent her head, I noticed the white stripe of scalp at the parting in her shiny, dark bob. Eventually, she looked up and thrust out a security pass, with a huge council logo and a tiny photo. I scrutinized it carefully, looked from the photograph to her face and back again several times. It wasn’t a flattering shot, but I didn’t hold that against her. I’m not particularly photogenic myself. In real life, she was about my age, with smooth, unlined skin and a slash of red lipstick.
“You don’t look like a social worker,” I said. She stared at me but said nothing. Not again! In every walk of life, I encounter people with underdeveloped social skills with alarming frequency. Why is it that client-facing jobs hold such allure for misanthropes? It’s a conundrum. I made a mental note to return to the topic later, unhooked the chain and invited her in. I showed her into the lounge, listening to her high heels clicking across the floor. She asked if she could have a quick tour; I’d been expecting that, of course. Heather used to do that too; I assume that it’s part of the job, checking to make sure that I’m not storing my own urine in demijohns or kidnapping magpies and sewing them into pillowcases. She complimented me unenthusiastically on the interiors as we went into the kitchen.
I tried to see my home through the eyes of a visitor. I’m aware that I am very fortunate to live here, social housing in this area being virtually nonexistent these days. I couldn’t possibly afford to live in this postcode otherwise, certainly not on the pittance that Bob pays me. Social Services arranged for me to move here after I had to leave my last foster placement, the summer immediately before I started university. I’d just turned seventeen. Back then, a vulnerable young person who’d grown up in care would be allocated a council flat close to her place of study without it being too much of a problem. Imagine that.
It took me a while to get around to decorating, I remember, and I finally painted the place in the summer after I graduated. I bought emulsion and brushes after cashing a check I received in the post from the University Registry, along with my degree parchment; it turned out that I’d won a small prize, set up in the name of some long-dead classicist, for the best finals performance in a paper on Virgil’s Georgics. I graduated in absentia of course; it seemed pointless to process onto the stage with no one there to applaud me. The flat hadn’t been touched since then.
I suppose, trying to be objective, that it was looking rather tired. Mummy always said that an obsession with home interiors was tediously bourgeois and, worse still, that any kind of “do-it-yourself” activities were very much the preserve of the hoi polloi. It’s quite frightening to think about the ideas that I may have absorbed from Mummy.
The furniture was provided by a charity that helps vulnerable young people and ex-offenders when they move into a new home: donated, mismatched things for which I was most grateful at the time, and continue to be. It was all perfectly functional, so I’d never seen the need to replace any of it. I didn’t clean the place very often, I supposed, which might contribute to what I could see might be perceived as a general air of neglect. I didn’t see the point; I was the only person who ever ate here, washed here, went to sleep and woke up here.
This June Mullen was the first visitor I’d had since November last year. They come around every six months or so, the Social Work visits. She’s my first visitor this calendar year. The meter reader hasn’t been yet, although I must say I prefer it when they leave a card and I can phone in
my reading. I do love call centers; it’s always so interesting to hear all the different accents and try to find out a bit about the person you’re talking to. The best part is when they ask, at the end, Is there anything else I can help you with today, Eleanor? and I can then reply, No, no thank you, you’ve completely and comprehensively resolved my problems. It’s always nice to hear my first name spoken aloud by a human voice too.
Apart from Social Work and the utility companies, sometimes a representative from one church or another will call round to ask if I’ve welcomed Jesus into my life. They don’t tend to enjoy debating the concept of proselytizing, I’ve found, which is disappointing. Last year, a man came to deliver a Betterware catalog, which turned out to be a most enjoyable read. I still regret not purchasing the spidercatcher, which really was a very ingenious device.
June Mullen declined my offer of a cup of tea as we returned to the living room, and after sitting down on the sofa, she pulled my file from her briefcase. It was several inches thick, held together precariously by a rubber band. Some unknown hand had written OLIPHANT, ELEANOR, in marker pen on the top right-hand corner and dated it July 1987, the year of my birth. The buff folder, tattered and stained, looked like a historical artifact.
“Heather’s handwriting is atrocious,” she muttered, running a manicured fingernail down the page at the top of the pile of papers. She spoke quietly, to herself rather than to me. “Biannual visits . . . continuity of community integration . . . early identification of any additional support needs . . .”
She continued to read, and then I saw her face change and she glanced at me, her expression a mixture of horror, alarm and pity. She must have got to the section about Mummy. I stared her out. She took a deep breath, looked down at the papers and then exhaled slowly as she looked up at me again.
“I had no idea,” she said, her voice echoing her expression. “Do you . . . you must miss her terribly?”
“Mummy?” I said. “Hardly.”
“No, I meant . . .” she trailed off, looking awkward, sad, embarrassed. Ah, I knew them well—these were the holy trinity of Oliphant expressions. I shrugged, having no idea whatsoever what she was talking about.
Silence sat between us, shivering with misery. After what felt like days had passed, June Mullen closed the file on her lap and gave me an overly bright smile.
“So, Eleanor, how have you been getting on, generally, since Heather’s last visit, I mean?”
“Well, I haven’t become aware of any additional support needs, and I’m fully integrated into the community, June,” I said.
She smiled weakly. “Work going OK? I see you’re a . . .” she consulted the file again “. . . you work in an office?”
“Work is fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
“What about home?” she said, looking round the room, her eyes lingering on my big green pouf, which is shaped like a giant frog and was part of the charity furniture donation I’d received when I first moved in. I’d grown very fond of his bulbous eyes and giant pink tongue over the years. One night, a vodka night, I’d drawn a big housefly, Musca domestica, on his tongue with a pilfered Sharpie. I’m not artistically gifted in any way, but it was, in my humble opinion, a fair rendering of the subject matter. I felt that this act had helped me to take ownership of the donated item, and created something new from something secondhand. Also, he had looked hungry. June Mullen seemed unable to take her eyes off it.
“Everything’s fine here, June,” I reiterated. “Bills all paid, cordial relations with the neighbors. I’m perfectly comfortable.”
She flicked through the file again, and then inhaled. I knew what she was about to say, recognizing full well the change in tone—fear, hesitancy—that always preceded the subject matter.
“You’re still of the view that you don’t want to know anything else about the incident, or about your mother, I understand?” No smiling this time.
“That’s right,” I said. “There’s no need—I speak to her once a week, on a Wednesday evening, regular as clockwork.”
“Really? After all this time, that’s still happening? Interesting . . . Are you keen to . . . maintain this contact?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said, incredulous. Where on earth does the Social Work Department find these people?
She deliberately allowed the silence to linger, and, although I recognized the technique, I could not stop myself from filling it, eventually.
“I think Mummy would like it if I tried to find out more about . . . the incident . . . but I’ve no intention of doing so.”
“No,” she said, nodding. “Well, how much you want to know about what happened is entirely up to you, isn’t it? The courts were very clear, back then, that anything like that was to be entirely at your discretion?”
“That’s correct,” I said, “that’s exactly what they said.”
She looked closely at me, as so many people had done before, scrutinizing my face for any traces of Mummy, enjoying some strange thrill at being this close to a blood relative of the woman the newspapers still occasionally referred to, all these years later, as the pretty face of evil. I watched her eyes run over my scars. Her mouth hung slightly open, and it became apparent that the suit and the bob were an inadequate disguise for this particular slack-jawed yokel.
“I could probably dig out a photograph, if you’d like one,” I said.
She blinked twice and blushed, then busied herself by grappling with the bulging file, trying to sort all the loose papers into a tidy pile. I noticed a single sheet flutter down and land under the coffee table. She hadn’t seen it make its escape, and I pondered whether or not to tell her. It was about me, after all, so wasn’t it technically mine? I’d return it at the next visit, of course—I’m not a thief. I imagined Mummy’s voice, whispering, telling me I was quite right, that social workers were busybodies, do-gooders, nosy parkers. June Mullen snapped the elastic band around the file, and the moment to mention the sheet of paper had passed.
“I . . . is there anything else you’d like to discuss with me today?” she asked.
“No thank you,” I said, smiling as broadly as I could. She looked rather disconcerted, perhaps even slightly frightened. I was disappointed. I’d been aiming for pleasant and friendly.
“Well then, that seems to be that for the time being, Eleanor; I’ll leave you in peace,” she said. She continued talking as she packed away the file in her briefcase, adopting a breezy, casual tone. “Any plans for the weekend?”
“I’m visiting someone in hospital,” I said.
“Oh, that’s nice. Visits always cheer a patient up, don’t they?”
“Do they?” I said. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never visited anyone in hospital before.”
“But you’ve spent a lot of time in hospital yourself, of course,” she said.
I stared at her. The imbalance in the extent of our knowledge of each other was manifestly unfair. Social workers should present their new clients with a fact sheet about themselves to try to redress this, I think. After all, she’d had unrestricted access to that big brown folder, the bumper book of Eleanor, two decades’ worth of information about the intimate minutiae of my life. All I knew about her was her name and her employer.
“If you know about that, then you’ll be aware that the circumstances were such that the police and my legal representatives were the only visitors permitted,” I said.
She gawped at me. I was reminded of those clowns’ heads in fairgrounds, the ones where you try to throw a Ping-Pong ball into their gaping mouths in order to win a goldfish. I opened the door for her, watching her eyes swivel repeatedly toward the giant customized frog.
“I’ll see you in six months then, Eleanor,” she said reluctantly. “Best of luck.”
I closed the door with excessive gentleness behind her.
She hadn’t remarked upon Polly, I
thought, which was odd. Ridiculously, I felt almost slighted on Polly’s behalf. She’d been sitting in the corner throughout our meeting, and was clearly the most eye-catching thing in the room. My beautiful Polly, prosaically described as a parrot plant, sometimes referred to as a Congo cockatoo plant, but always known to me, in her full Latinate glory, as Impatiens niamniamensis. I say it out loud, often: niamniamensis. It’s like kissing, the “m’s forcing your lips together, rolling over the consonants, your tongue poking into n’s and over the s’s.” Polly’s ancestors came all the way from Africa, originally. Well, we all did. She’s the only constant from my childhood, the only living thing that survived. She was a birthday present, but I can’t remember who gave her to me, which is strange. I was not, after all, a girl who was overwhelmed with gifts.
She came with me from my childhood bedroom, survived the foster placements and children’s homes and, like me, she’s still here. I’ve looked after her, tended to her, picked her up and repotted her when she was dropped or thrown. She likes light, and she’s thirsty. Apart from that, she requires minimal care and attention, and largely looks after herself. I talk to her sometimes, I’m not ashamed to admit it. When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.
A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a potted plant, is she certifiable? I’m confident that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.
I watered her, then got on with some other household chores, thinking ahead to the moment when I could open my laptop and check whether a certain handsome singer had posted any new information. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Windows into a world of marvels. While I was loading the washing machine, my telephone rang. A visitor and a phone call! A red-letter day indeed. It was Raymond.