Once in a Smile

Once in a Smile

  Leaning into his cane Eddie Salthouse took in the queue, sizing up the others waiting for the No. 93. Five women and a man. None were smiling. He tried to gauge it, observing a woman in her mid-twenties at the head of the queue – expensively dressed, her left foot tapping impatiently, sending an echo skulking back through the interchange. She might be harder work, that one; might need slapstick or tomfoolery. Younger ones were always trickier nowadays. The majority had an anxiety that used to be reserved exclusively for the elderly. The guy looked more promising, tired-looking but content, softly gazing into space, stroking a lustrous, flame-red beard every so often. Two of the women were identical twins, dressed in matching baby blue anorak, navy tracksuit trousers and matching mousey hair in a fallen perm. Each twin held one half of a resigned scowl. Twin babies, twin toddlers and twin children are by and large acknowledged the world over as ‘cute’, ‘adorable’ and sometimes even considered ‘magical’, yet as middle-aged adults, identical twins in identical outfits seem somehow to give them a look of absence, Eddie reasoning that perhaps they were lacking something mentally. Behind the twins, slouched against the wall, was a teenage girl with pallid skin made paler by her dark-makeup, torn black jeans, long black overcoat and heavy black boots. She seemed made of cloth, porcelain and panic; a slumped puppet awaiting new strings. Stood near to the queue – perhaps in it, perhaps not – was the final woman waiting. She was short, neat and slim and wore a sari. Eddie wanted to encourage her to join the queue but his friend from work, Gordon, had once told him how he’d put his hand on a woman’s arm to gently urge her toward a bus once, thinking she’d not seen it pull up to the shelter and there’d been an accusation, police involvement and mortification on Gordon’s part that people had taken him as a pickpocket, or someone working up the courage to commit an indecent assault. Eddie knew he’d have to start somewhere and guys smiled less generally. Look too long and you miss your moment. Staring puts people’s guard up.

With surgical precision Eddie held the eye of the guy in the queue and gave him a warm smile. The guy smiled back openly, without apprehension. “See, that’s it! Easy to smile innit!” Eddie said to the whole queue – all at once and one at a time. The guy nodded and smiled again. “You see that everyone – now ‘ere’s a man understands smiles get you by, get ya through the day.” Eddie added. His tone was excited and he shuffled cane-wise up and down the queue as he talked, aiming to catch the eye of everyone else in turn 

“Anyone else fancy ‘aving a go?” Eddie allowed a few seconds to pass, checking the queue for hints of a smile – a softening of a gaze here, a slight curl at the corner of a mouth there. The lady in the sari went next, her broad smile liberating unexpected dimples and bringing a dewy glimmer to her eyes. “Brilliant!” Eddie exclaimed with a clap of his hands, quick enough to clap and return to his cane without it falling. He’d done that before. “A smile don’t cost nowt! Next!”

  Shuffling a step closer to one another the identical twins managed a smile between them. Proud possessors of one half of a smile each, they gazed flatly. It was what the majority of observers would probably classify as a smile. If there were scorecards, it would average a ‘5’. Tasting the momentum at the back of this throat Eddie moved nearer to the girl at the head of the queue who had rebuffed his earlier eye contact with a rehearsed look of disdain, which had in a second, taken him in from head to toe and back again. "What about you lady, what would it take for you to smile today?” 

“For you to fuck off and stop mithering me.”

  Eddie was no stranger to those kinds of responses. People felt under pressure to remember how to smile. They had sadness and didn’t know him. He held her gaze for a second, gently but with insistence. “Will that guarantee a smile?” Her response was to fake a smile, an exaggerated in-your-face smile; half-smile, half-wind. Eddie nodded graciously in thanks, without speaking again and turned away. She fumed at the limping old man with his choppy silver crew cut, his grubby tracksuit and his rudeness in thinking it was acceptable to start demanding people smile. It was an anger that stayed with her day long. Later that evening, sat alone in her flat, she tried to feel better, savaging Eddie through a series of Whatsapp messages. People she knew only by the small round photograph accompanying their message.

  Last to smile was the puppet without strings. As Eddie struggled to catch her eye he realised she had earphones in and wouldn’t hear him. She had seen him, sneaking glances in his direction whilst he was talking to the others in the queue. He scared her. Everything scared her. Life scared her. In fifteen years of being alive she had experienced a brace of quivering parents telling her life was unpredictable and dangerous, wringing their hands together as they hinted at an unnamed cast of monsters and unseen enemies ‘out there’ who will hurt and lie and steal. Supporting her parents was an ever-changing carousel of wooden teachers with flaking paint telling her the same.

  Recently, at the behest of her gossamer parents, a GP with dandruff and a worn grey suit that blinked at the corners – a man who didn’t know her and who had spent the majority of her appointment staring at her breasts, a man who had told her to tick boxes on countless forms that all looked the same to her, when she’d wanted to talk, wanted to be heard – had pronounced that she had anxiety, something he had decreed in scrawled capital letters she would carry with her for life. Since that day, believing nothing beyond the sound of his pen scratching into paper, she had often wondered whether had she listened more to her Grandma – her Grandma who’d always told her with a wink and a chuckle how “life is a beautiful thing that sometimes stings, sometimes makes you feel like you’re flying, but is always changing, always amazing!” – she might feel different. After Eddie had turned away from her she allowed a small smile to play over her lips, feeling February against her teeth as deep inside of her, chiming like a far distant bell, she felt warmth for the first time in weeks.

  Several minutes later Eddie took his place in the single seat behind the driver. He liked to ask about their day, about how the traffic had been. He liked to tell the driver’s back about Agnes, about their many years of marriage. He spoke about Agnes with rolled eyebrows and asides, always with warmth and if anyone had been listening it would have been evident he loved her dearly. The driver, only partially aware of the conversation attempting to breach the slender gap where the tickets and money are exchanged, negotiated badly parked cars, badly parked people and cavernous potholes donated to the people of Bury by the local authority. In between talking Eddie scribbled into a small black notebook with a chewed stub of a pencil. He recorded the smiles, always, as a living record of his efforts. Nowadays it was more about listing, about capturing the frequency and dedication with which he managed to make people smile – help people smile – he liked to tell Agnes each night.

  His current notebook was his ninth. The previous ones all full. They were the same in that they were lined and in each he had recorded the day of the year, his location and the number of people he had helped smile. If the same person crossed his path, later in the day, in a different place, he’d still record it if he was involved in their subsequent smile. He was well into the thousands. He’d managed to get the same type of notebook each time, picking them up in a three-pack from the 97p shop in town. They were red and black and fit into the pocket of his outdoor coat. He liked to complete them in a heavy pencil but had become aware over time that as a result, some of the content of the earlier notebooks was badly faded. The previous notebooks lived lined up neatly on a shelf in the lounge where he liked to keep the remote controls for the TV. He kept them together to remind himself of his commitment to Agnes.

  Often he got to thinking of when this had begun, that first time. He remembered it had been a Sunday. And it had been September, definitely September. It had been in the launderette and his initial approach had been clumsy and rushed; pawing a woman on the shoulder as she unloaded her damp clothing into one of the hefty dryers. She’d snaked free of his hand and not thanked him for it, pointing out that helping her might have been more useful than asking her why she wasn’t smiling.

  That first time had been a couple of months after he’d retired from work. He’d been given a watch, a bottle of wine and £25.00 cash. He’d danced around the kitchen a bit after the wine. Agnes was usually the one to go to the launderette – she’d gone for many years. Back then she’d ask him to come with her at times, but he never did; he’d never really wanted to. The launderette was a different world, her world where she talked to Bet and Gwen, sometimes smoked a cigarette out front. With retirement having left Eddie like an uprooted potato missed by the plough, after years of not accompanying her, he’d suggested he’d go, stumbling along the hallway with four full bags of washing. So on that day of firsts, encouraging smiling and exploring a launderette, he’d also shrunk one of the jumpers Agnes liked to wear. One of the jumpers she needed when the house still had that chilliness of early morning, that coldness you find upon waking too soon, catching the house before it’s ready. Man, he’d been in trouble when he got home. When Agnes didn’t fancy smiling, there was nothing Eddie could do; her face would set like concrete. Even before she was ill.

  Eddie let himself into the unlit hallway of his house. There was a time it might have smelled of baking bread or perhaps a cake. Friday nights, coming in from the pub after work all hot-cheeked and giddy, it might smell of fish in a sauce, or sausage, mash and onion gravy. Concealed behind those aromas, would be a hint of polish when Agnes had dusted, or the fragrance of her shampoo. It smelled like strawberries and he used to rib her daft for using what he referred to as the shampoo of a little girl, when she was well into her fifties.

  After the warmth of the bus the hallway felt ice cold. The heating came on at 6pm which was well over an hour away. He’d always tried to stick to that. Without the vague odour of heat the hallway had opted for a mottled damp, moulding reek not unlike standing water. Eddie realised he’d gotten used to that in the last few months or so.

 “Hiya love, Am ‘ome,” Eddie called out as he struggled from his coat, slinging it over the round wooden ball that finished off the shiny teak banister rail. Each time he did that he always wondered how many other people across the country kept their coat in a similar place. “Six today, well, five really. One of ‘em faked it a bit.” He added as he slipped off his shoes, laying them neatly beside the closed front door, before swapping them for worn slippers. He locked the door on the inside and drew a curtain over it, behaviour that had long since become automatic.

  Eddie walked toward the kitchen, the oppressive mulberry coloured wallpaper stealing all light from the hallway. Pausing to look momentarily at the frosty bird bath in the garden beyond the patio doors, he rubbed the small of his back with both hands as he let out a long, low sigh. He sighed often. Usually in there. The kitchen was wood and Formica, in shades of rhubarb and custard. Opening a cupboard with custard panels and a rhubarb handle he brought out one of a pair of heavy glass tumblers and a bottle of supermarket own-brand whisky. He remembered when they’d got those tumblers, back when they’d cost a fistful of petrol vouchers. As he poured himself a measure, he heard Agnes’ voice: “Six? ‘Well five really’.” The words came as a mocking mimic of his own a few minutes earlier. “Is that it?”

  Eddie didn’t respond straightaway but instead sat down on one of two chairs at the small kitchen table. All were a rounded, beige wood and over the table was an uncomplicated, thin white cloth. In the centre was an arrangement of artificial flowers that bore no resemblance to their real-life counterpart. He set his drink down in front of him, the bottle still on the kitchen unit. “I tried my best love. S’getting ‘arder, I swear it is.” He looked up toward the corner of the room by the patio doors. Agnes made no reply. Sometimes she would do that, just stand silent with a look playing over her face, a look he took for the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Other times she’d laugh no matter how many people he’d made smile. Sometimes she’d sneer with arms folded. It was not the Agnes he knew. Even after a local football match, having made hundreds of people smile in one afternoon, she’d been reluctant to offer anything beyond passing praise, acknowledging he’d done well, only to add “though your team winning made it easier”. He’d lost count of the times he’d sat at that kitchen table seeking her approval, finding only the razor-sharp edge of her disappointment. She always stood in that same corner, in the same pleated grey skirt, the heavy oatmeal jumper that drowned her, brought to life by a string of pearls. Always unsmiling and untouchable. If he reached for her, tried to touch her, she’d be off.

  It had started with just bruising. She’d slipped in the bath and banged her hip and stomach. He’d hurried in and immediately supported her like a broken bird as she panted and trembled. Five weeks later when the bruise had not retreated, when it had become a dogged impostor neither of them spoke about, she’d gone to see a doctor. He had sent her for further tests and within a space of time that was as short as it was painful she had sat him down at the kitchen table, playing with her pearls as she dragged the oatmeal jumper around her for warmth and told him:  

 “Eddie, I have cancer of the stomach. There’s nothing can be done with it. I’ve loved you, I really have but I’ve not forgiven you for not smiling more, I can’t seem to. We had something good you and I but you let it run loose; let it get lost between Gordon and the pub, work, grumbling about bins and roadworks…and treating me as a wife. Never as a person. And it’s just too late now, isn’t it?” She had spoken calmly, without malice or criticism. He’d taken the question as rhetorical. Ten days Agnes Salthouse was dead.

  Urging the whisky to blunt the teeth of the coldness within the house, Eddie recalled how she’d derided his idea of going out to make – to help – people smile. He sat there at that silent table and remembered why he’d started this:

  It had been in the last days Agnes was in hospital. There was so little left of his wife – what he’d found hardest was the way in which she vanished in a handful of days, like she’d been stolen from the inside out, right under his nose. He had held the bones of her hand and dredged a promise from his dried out throat, a promise to never stop helping people smile. Sitting carefully on the edge of her bed as often as he was allowed to, that last week had shown Eddie a lot. He learned how the weather in the morning affects birdsong, how different species offer different tunes to the day depending on whether it rains or shines. Magpies, for example, don’t mind getting wet. Finches are more precious. He became aware of the taste of mangoes. Someone kept bringing them to the hospice. He’d cut them up – no easy job in itself – and share them with Agnes, the juice sweet and sticky, running over his hands. He noticed that although Agnes had eyes that were the shining brown of newly-popped conkers, there was a delicate blue corona ringing each iris. It was the gentle blue of holidays in Cardigan Bay. He realised how he loved his wife and wouldn’t cope – wasn’t ready to cope – with her absence; permanent and deadening.

  That had been nearly three years ago now. In the days after her funeral – the days when those people who said they’ll be around for you “as long as you need” have gone back to somewhere, the days when the house took on a silence that fell like an avalanche, overpowering everything and anything that might once have made a sound –  Eddie had walked to the Post Office in his slippers and dressing gown and bought the first of his notebooks. It wasn’t that long after, eager to keep things clean and tidy like Agnes had, he’d hastily filled bags with clothes and gone to the launderette. He’d gone out to start something, something he now intended to carry on every day, all the way up to his last breath. He’d gone out to help people smile.