She didn’t say anything. She just carried on staring.
There were twenty-three. She counted them. I wanted her to take them away, but she said she wasn’t allowed to, that she’d have to tell Miss Bissell and someone would come over.
No one did.
I waited.
In the end, I had to go outside, because I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was the smell. The marzipan. It’s funny, because I used to love the smell of marzipan. It reminded me of Christmas and mixing bowls, and my mother, dusted in flour and smiling. Now the smell filled the whole flat, and it made me feel sick. I even sat in the bathroom with the door shut to get away from it, but it crept in somehow. I could taste it. Jack had gone off with Chris somewhere and I couldn’t find Elsie, so I decided to sit on a bench until someone came to take them away.
‘Are you all right, Florence?’
It was the handyman. Big talker, little doer. Always appears slightly confused. Wears training shoes, although he doesn’t look the type who sees the inside of a gymnasium very often.
‘It’s Simon,’ he said.
Simon. That’s it. I would have got there if he’d given me a bit more time.
‘It’s a bit cold,’ he said, ‘to be sitting out here on your own.’
‘Does it make it any warmer if you sit out here with someone else?’ I said.
He didn’t answer, although I thought it was a perfectly reasonable question.
‘It does old people good to get fresh air,’ I said. ‘I read about it. In a magazine.’
‘I was just worried you were getting a bit too much of it,’ he said.
I studied his face. I’ve never been very good at guessing ages, but I thought he might be about forty. Elsie says I guess the same for everybody, but I’ve found it suits most people. His face wasn’t wrinkled, but his thinking had begun to make lines around his eyes. I sometimes wondered if you were supposed to think more as you got older, and so the lines were there just to make it easier for your face to fall into a thought.
‘You need a shave, Simon,’ I said.
I didn’t know it had come out. Sometimes I think the words stay in my head, but then I look at people’s faces and realise my mouth has opened and set them all free. Simon just laughed.
‘I think you’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I walk you back to your flat, and we can have a cup of tea? Warm ourselves up a bit?’
I sat up a little straighter. ‘Not with all that cake,’ I said.
‘Cake?’
‘I didn’t buy it. Everyone will think it was me, and it wasn’t. Even I’m not that mad on marzipan.’
He frowned at me, and so I explained it to him.
‘They were supposed to take it away, but no one came. That’s why I’m sitting here. To get away from it.’
Simon put his hand on mine, and I let him.
‘Why don’t I move it for you, Florence? We’ll go back together, eh?’
I found him an old carrier bag in the back of a drawer.
‘There are twenty-three of them,’ I said. ‘Only one of them is mine. I don’t know who the rest belong to.’
He gathered them up and put them in the bag, and tied a little knot in the top. ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he said. ‘We’ll let Miss Bissell sort it out.’
‘You’ll tell her, won’t you? You’ll tell her they’re not mine, or she’ll use it against me.’
He nodded and smiled at me, and all the thinking on his face disappeared.
‘It looks like they broke your mug when they fell,’ he said.
The Princess Diana cup. It lay on the floor in a lake of tea.
‘It was my favourite,’ I said. ‘I’m worried I’ll forget about her now.’ My voice shook, although I wasn’t really sure where the shaking came from. It never used to be there.
‘I tell you what,’ Simon said. ‘I’ll soon fix that for you. It’s only the handle, you leave it with me, Florence.’
He wrapped the cup in a sheet of newspaper and put it in his coat pocket.
I looked up at him.
‘You can call me Flo,’ I said. ‘If you want to.’
I managed to wait until he’d left before I started crying.
I hadn’t cried in years. There have been times in my life when I’ve cried for so long, I completely ran out of tears, but not so much recently, because there hasn’t seemed to be much point in it. I thought I’d forgotten how, but as soon as Simon left, I realised it was like riding a bicycle.
It’s strange, because you can put up with all manner of nonsense in your life, all sorts of sadness, and you manage to keep everything on board and march through it, then someone is kind to you and it’s the kindness that makes you cry. It’s the tiny act of goodness that opens a door somewhere and lets all the misery escape.
‘We’ll have to monitor your purchases from now on,’ Miss Ambrose said. ‘We’ll have to be sure you’re making sensible choices.’
She said did I want to see a nutritionist? Or the dietician?
I asked her what the difference was, and she just coughed and looked for something in a drawer. I don’t know when jobs became so complicated, where all these names come from. I wonder if the names make people feel better about themselves, or perhaps it just makes other people more likely to listen to them. I told her I didn’t want to see anybody. I told her the only person I wanted to see was someone who believed me. She didn’t even bother to reply.
I’m not even sure Jack and Elsie believed me, although Jack bought me an air freshener. To get rid of the smell of marzipan, he said. Forest Walk, it’s called. Sits in a little plastic cube on the draining board. It smells a bit like Jeyes Fluid, but I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. The shop sells them. There’s Lavender Meadow and Winter Wonderland as well. They all smell like Jeyes Fluid to me. The only difference I can see is the picture on the front. I didn’t buy one. The man with the earphones watches me now. He writes down everything I buy in a book under the counter.
I said to him, ‘It’s like rationing, only it’s just me this time,’ and I tried to laugh a little bit.
He didn’t join in.
When Jack brought the air freshener around, he asked about Beryl again. He tried to hide it in another conversation, but I spotted it straight away because men aren’t very good at that kind of thing. He wanted to know what happened to her. How she died. He said we might be able to use it. He said we could play Ronnie at his own game.
It’s funny, because I can’t tell the difference between those daft air fresheners, but whenever anyone mentions Beryl, all I can smell is the wooden polish of the dance floor and the spilled beer. I can hear the music as well. All those notes, playing in my head. The slide of the trombone and the brush of the piano keys. The tangos and the waltzes and the foxtrots, all spinning around and covering up everything else. I tell him I can’t remember. I tell him I walk down all these different paths in my mind, but the only thing I can find are dead ends. Miss Ambrose says everything is up there, I just have to find a way of getting it out.
‘It’s your retrieval system, Florence,’ she says, whenever I forget something. ‘You have all these memories stored in drawers in your head, and we just need to find the key to open them up again.’ She taps the side of her skull when she says it. Like I don’t know where my head is.
If you sit in the day room for long enough, someone comes along with photographs of film stars and prime ministers, and pop singers.
‘Come on, Florence,’ they say. ‘Let’s open those little drawers.’
I don’t recognise my own face sometimes, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to recognise theirs. I just say Winston Churchill to everything, and they go away after a while and pick on someone else.
I tried to explain it to Jack. I tried to explain that sometimes memories don’t want to be remembered, that they crouch behind all the other memories in the corner of your mind, trying to be unfound.
‘Perhaps there was someone else there, apart from Clara,’ he said, ‘who might be able to remember?’