Back to Box Hill - Chapter One

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

I was in bed with Emma when I heard a car door slam, a smug breach of the afternoon. The other four worst sounds in the world would follow, so I slipped a chewed pencil inside Emma and got dressed. A man, assisted by a servant, dressed beside me, fine and tall, in a high-necked white shirt, waistcoat, woollen cream breeches and dark green frockcoat, finished off with a wide cravat. Underneath my Dunlop trainers, skinny jeans and Tokyo Police Club tour t-shirt, I was naked.
Footsteps amplified the car door. Two sets; one female, pointed and ninnying, the other regimented with a slight drunken quality, male. If I was unlucky, the footsteps would belong to my parents, come to haul me home for burnt roast beef; if I was very unlucky – and I was usually so polite to Mrs Stock – you had to be polite in my position – performing any chore requested of me on the days her ankles commanded her attention. I guessed you reached old age when bones drowned out the parts of the body that made you feel how you knew you felt anyway. Heart, throat and stomach; hospitals should have departments to deal with all three at once. I’d not seen a doctor for several years, not since I was a kid; the thought of phoning for an appointment made me feel unwell. Shyness could be disguised as solemnity when you were as old as Mrs Stock.
Knock knock. Who’s there? The third of the five worst sounds. I didn’t kill Mrs Stock; I only suggested she might die. I’d returned from the office Friday, my mind red and ragged from fending off phone calls about a typo in a legal document (for which I allowed John and Alan to blame each other), only to find Mrs Stock between me and my room, a porcelain grin with a urge to talk. I did not want to talk, even to the only single woman I knew.
Mrs Stock invited me to partake of weak tea and a tin of out-of-date biscuits. I pleaded tiredness, dreading a web of doilies and words poured into my ear from a willow pattern teapot that’d served as a makeshift toilet in an Anderson shelter. My plea was ignored and I suffered again the darling family’s endless search for the best possible care home, not that she minded, independence was important with her husband dead in the shed and you could leave the door off its hinges to call a spade a spade, digging for victory and reading by searchlight. As Mrs Stock talked and talked of all she’d done before her retirement to the wooden hills of Bedsit-shire, I became angry in a way I couldn’t express; my shoulders sunk and I stared at the ground, hoping it would swallow her up.
Knock, knock. What a joke. I gave a longing look to Emma, propped up on the pillow. The pencil fell from the ruffled folds, dropping onto the TV guide, where it had written an unpleasant message during the night. Mrs Stock couldn’t stop talking to save her life, so I silenced her with the truth; no matter how constant the barrage, she would one day lose her voice. Speech was rigged evidence; for Mrs Stock, talking, like illness, signified life and you couldn’t die if you kept talking. It took a lot of time on my own to think of that. Anyway, Mrs Stock stopped talking and later she died, as if to annoy me by proving my point.
Dressed, I opened the door and averted my gaze; I found it difficult to look people in the eye at the best of times, let alone when I might have helped an old lady to die (was it OK if I helped her to die?). I gained an impression of a Sunday shirt and tie rolling towards a second trip to the carvery at the Crown, standing next to bullet-proof make-up and a reptilian handbag containing a copy of the parish news. (Unlike my old-fashioned friend in the frockcoat, I wasn’t sure I even lived in a parish). My eyes settled on black Derby shoes worn with argyle socks and dark blue slingbacks, a foot or so past their best.
‘Good afternoon, I’m Jill Heyward,’ said the slingbacks, as if reading the news for the 1950s. ‘Mighten you be Mr Watson? I understand you found my poor mother yesterday?’
Yes, she’d left the door open for me. Meals-on-wheels would have found her on a weekday, but Saturday Kitchen was filling enough for the old folks now. Mrs Stock had died in her armchair, eyes closed, legs apart, mouth open, reaching towards the telephone, talking to the end. As I stared into that parched darkness, her upper set of false teeth fell onto the bottom set with a cheery clack. A putrid fire filled my throat and I made it in time to the kitchenette sink before providing the scene with a little local colour. This set off Henry, Mrs Stock’s canary, perched in a cage held aloft from a stand in one corner of the room. The bird had chirped an elegy ever since.
‘Mother thought a lot about you,’ said Mrs Heyward. ‘She always talked about her ‘lovely young man.’ Such a comfort to her.’ The dead did nothing for my esteem and I folded inside as Mrs Heyward took me in. ‘Goodness though, you are young, aren’t you?’
Mr Heyward bobbed up and down on tiptoe, hands in pockets. ‘We just popped round to see what bits and bobs of hers needing moving.’
I’m confused, I wanted to say. Someone had called round the previous evening and moved her bits, as well as her bobs, a hooded grandson in Dr Martens, with angry ankles inside. I wanted to say these things, but I’d never met Mr and Mrs Heyward before and didn’t want them to think ill of me. I slipped past the couple, showing them the key I’d been left by the landlord. My throat dripped heavy oil into my chest, from where it swilled into my stomach.
The shock of finding Mrs Stock to be the late Mrs Stock was such I'd phoned the landlord; he swore and then advised me, between coughing fits, to phone for an ambulance. I asked who for, realised, and asked what use an ambulance was for a dead person, but the landlord intensified like a cat that didn’t want to be picked up. I apologised to him, and then to Mrs Stock, and summoned the courage to dial 999. Is it an emergency I was asked. No, it was a dead old woman, I replied. Phone a doctor, they said. The old woman needed a certificate to prove she was dead.
‘Would you be at the funeral?’ asked Mrs Heyward. ‘It’s just that we thought...’
My head shook with knowing what they thought and ached with knowing what everyone thought. The prospect of begrudged British hymns, followed by a strange house filled with coughs and crisps was enough to make my entire body sweat like cheap cheese.
I opened the door to a room that, like my little brother on his birthday, had apparently grown overnight. The furniture, the TV, the fusty photographs, the cracked crockery and the groceries I’d fetched last week had all gone; the bed had gone, and the imprints on the carpet where the bed stood had gone because even the carpet had gone. All that remained was the telephone, my fingerprints, Henry in his cage, an odour like cold stale porridge, an awful lot of light and Mrs Stock’s false teeth, her body snatched and her smile abandoned in a jar. Henry preened before his little mirror as I stared at my feet.
‘Well, I say,’ said Mrs Heyward, taken aback by the present. ‘Well, I say.’
The telephone rang, beading the room with a fear exaggerated by knowing the ultimate worst sound would be next. Helpless, I stared at the telephone. The canary changed key to harmonise with the witless ringing.
‘If you could answer that,’ said Mr Heyward, who handed his wife a white handkerchief with the letters ‘AH’ hemmed into one corner. I needed a handkerchief myself, several magical white handkerchiefs with all the letters of the alphabet, one to wave surrender, one to wave goodbye to the surrender, another to wipe the waterfall from my back and another to pick up the receiver. Hollow footsteps led me to the worst of the worst sounds in the world, all sounding at once.
‘Hello?’ I said. Hell. O. ‘Yes, I’m Will Watson. How did you find me?’