This morning when I open my bedroom door to go downstairs, the radio is on—Radio 4 today. A poet talking about the Industrial Revolution—and I am expecting to find Louise, as usual, at the padded bottle-green cushioned chair at the head of the kitchen table, where she sits with murky cups of mint tea and giant crossword books. But as I turn to descend the stairs, I see the silvery top of her head, the ball of her neat bun at the nape of her neck. She’s sitting on the second-from-last step, her hands on her knees.
“Louise? Louise, are you okay?”
Louise turns to look over her shoulder, the skin of her face pale.
“I, uh, I dropped the vase. Lost my balance. I was emptying the old flowers.” Louise’s voice is strong and clear as it always is, but I can’t help but notice the wobbles at the edges of her words. I trot to the bottom of the stairs, and bend to pick up the vase. I place it on the wooden radiator cover where she always keeps a spray of fresh lavender. There is a puddle of water by her feet, staining the brown carpet black.
“Let me get some cloths.”
Louise nods. “In the top cupboard. Next to the sink.”
I go through to the kitchen—clean but cluttered, and straight from the seventies, with pale yellow units, and a lino floor in brown and mink squares and circles—and return to the hallway with a roll of paper towels. Louise is trying to pull herself up on the banister, but groans, then sighs, and stays where she is, on the steps. I wonder, crouched down onto the wet carpet, how long she’s been sitting there.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
Louise sighs raggedly. “Fine. I just lost my balance, as I said. Almost fell. Grabbed on to the banister, dropped the bloody vase.”
I nod and carry on, pressing squares of paper towels onto the puddle of water. “Well, better it be the vase and not you.”
She makes a sound in her throat; an amused scoff, as if to say, “Is that so?” and says nothing else as I blot up the water. In the eighteen months I’ve lived here, Louise and I have probably only had two conversations that have lasted longer than a few minutes. She isn’t rude, but abrupt. That’s the word for her. I imagine she was once the head teacher for an all-girls’ school, or a matron in a hospital. She says what needs to be said, with no filler whatsoever, because filler would just waste everybody’s time. No “Did you sleep well?” No “They say we’re going to have an Indian summer, don’t you know.” Just “This is what needs to be done” and “Oh, stop sniffling, it’s only your spine that’s utterly irreparable. Accept it and move swiftly on.”
“You didn’t eat dinner,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“Last night. You came in, went straight up to bed, and I didn’t see hide nor hair of you until just now.” Louise watches me, her breath slowing, her thumb and finger twiddling the rings on her hand, all large colored stones and pewter.
“I was really tired.” I stand and slot the scattered lavender back into the vase. “Got into bed and fell straight to sleep,” I lie. The truth is that I got home from Lucas’s yesterday, got into bed, and couldn’t face food, or even seeing a single face. Something about Eliot and what he’d said about chance, how he laughed at me. Something about Lucas letting me down with the lift to the port. Something about not being able to afford the taxi. Last night, I felt like I was sixteen again. Alone.
“And how was it?”
I look at Louise blankly.
“France,” she says shortly.
“Oh.” I ball the wet tissue in my fist. “It was nice. We went suit shopping. Lucas tried white.”
“White?” Her mousy eyebrows raise, her mouth downturned at the corners as if to say, “So that’s what the youth of today think looks good, then, is it?”
“It looked terrible,” I say, and Louise gives an exasperated sigh, as if despairing of the world, and says, “Of course it did. What was he thinking?”
I don’t know, I want to say. I wish I knew. And a part of me wants to pour everything out to her, tell her I think he’s making a mistake, tell her I feel like he’s rushing this, that it’ll be just like backpacking, like so many things and relationships before, and that I have never felt so close to telling him how I feel. But the built-in, fourteen-year-long best-friend loyalty stops me. Because how dare I make this about me, when this should only be about him. About Marie. So I don’t. As much as Louise watches me now, wise, her eyes serious; eyes that have seen so many things in her seventy years that nothing much would faze her, I say nothing, and instead look around at the room—the vase with its flowers sitting neatly on the radiator cover, the carpet’s water stain now barely visible. “Well, the good news is your vase appears completely unscathed.”
Louise gives a weak nod. “Suppose that’s something.”
I look down at her on the step. “Do you need a hand?”
“No. I’ll be fine.”
I want to ask her if she’s sure, but I don’t press. I just tell her if she needs me, I’m home until eleven, then leaving for work. She gives a nod, and I go into the kitchen, make a cup of tea and two slices of toast. I think about the double shift ahead of me tonight as I set a tray—the lunch shift, followed by dinner—and plan a treat for tonight, for when I get back. It’s the only thing that gets me through some days, when the balls of my feet are burning, my back throbbing, and I know there is nobody to return home to. Small things. Ever-attainable things. They help. A bowl of soup in bed with a comfort-watch on the TV. The Leading Man, perhaps. A movie nobody has ever heard of, of course, starring Jon Bon Jovi, but a DVD I got for 99p when I was sixteen, from the Blockbuster bargain bin. It’s the only way I could afford to buy DVDs back then. It’s why most of my favorite films are those nobody has ever heard of.
“The Leading Shat,” Lucas calls it, and of course I’ve told him that doesn’t even make any sense. It doesn’t even rhyme. “I tell you what else doesn’t make any sense,” he’d say.
“That it didn’t win several Academy Awards?”
“No, Em. The fact you voluntarily watch it over and over again.”
I wash up the knife now, wipe down the counter, and tray in hands, on my way into the hallway, I find Louise still there. Not on the bottom step, but on the floor now, sitting with her back against the stairs. She looks up at me, then her papery eyelids close.
“Would you like a hand up?”
Louise pauses, then sighs raspily. “Please.”
I place the tray behind me on the floor. “How is best for me to—”
“Emmie, just give me your hands, please.”
I widen my feet on the carpet and hold out my hands as I’m told. She takes them. Her hands are warm and dry, and she squeezes them so tightly as I pull, that her rings pinch my skin. Twice, Louise almost gets to standing, before she sits back down again, her poor face contorted, a dapple of sweat above her lip. On the third try she stands properly, letting go of one of my hands the second she’s up, and steadies herself holding on to the banister.
“Do you need help getting to a seat or to the kitchen?”
“I’m fine from here, thank you.”
“Are you sure?”