A Word Beginning with 'S' by Ginny Baily / Fiction / Untitled Books

"Kneeling beside her in the dark, he tells a story about a land where people don't grow up or get old. He strokes her hair back while he talks. His hand is gentle but trembly."

A Word Beginning with 'S' by Ginny Baily

1942

The chill of the lino beneath Helen's bare feet seeps up her legs and underneath her nightie. She knows it is late from the feel of the air, still and silent as deep water.

Head thumping and in need of a drink, she has crept downstairs. She has felt her way through the blackout darkness of the house, running her fingers along the panelling in the dining room, counting up to twenty and then backwards down again, which not everyone can do.

She opens the kitchen door onto a room full of ghostly white light. The window is the only one in the house without a blind. It is like an eye without an eyelid, strained but all-seeing. Outside, the moon hangs huge and low casting gleams onto the sink and the draining board. She tries not to blink in case something strange is hiding in the strange night kitchen, but her eyes ache. They are crooked with the headache. Lines don't join in the middle and there are holes in her vision.

Helen twists the tap and cold water splashes into her cup. She drinks it straight down. It sluices through her tubes and up in an icy cold wave against the backs of her eyeballs.

The line of yellow light still spilling out under the bathroom door onto the landing lights her way back upstairs. She leans against the wall on the landing, pressing her fingers to her left eyelid. Climbing has made her head bang worse as if a mallet is being struck rhythmically against the back of her left eye. She pictures a wooden xylophone mallet. Whoever is in the bathroom, Aunty Bet, Mum or one of the uncles, is taking a long time and now Helen needs to get in there because she is going to be sick.

Uncle Johnny might have left the bathroom light on because he's American. In America they have lights outside at night even so the streets shine and the puddles are like rainbows. Uncle Johnny calls her a little hell raiser. "You'd go down a storm over there you little hell raiser," he said when he sat her on his knee. "I'll take you when all this is over." Mum had frowned at him. "She's too big for that Johnny," she'd said but he wrinkled his nose at Helen and winked. His uniform is different from the real uncles' ones. It doesn't smell like blankets.

The bathroom door swings open and there is Uncle Johnny, bleary and blinking in his pyjama bottoms. "All yours," he says, waving Helen in. Then he sees that she is sick. He waits at the doorway for her, wipes her face afterwards and carries her back to bed. Kneeling beside her in the dark, he tells a story about a land where people don't grow up or get old. He strokes her hair back while he talks. His hand is gentle but trembly.

She wakes up in darkness with a heavy weight pressing on her stomach. Her body stings as if she's been scalded but her head is clear and empty, washed out from the inside and almost pain-free. Her fingers in the dark find the stubble of Johnny's shaven head. His breaths come deep and slow. She feels the tips of his ears and cups them in her hands.

It is morning when next she wakes and Johnny has gone. When she puts her sticky nightie under the pillow she finds a Hershey bar. A whole secret bar of chocolate.

"Where's Uncle Johnny?" she asks when she's clearing the breakfast dishes. Her mum doesn't reply. She's busy getting Aunt Meg ready. When she bends to tie Meg's laces, Helen sees she's wearing the nylons that were a gift from Johnny.

Her mum straightens up, pats her hair in the mirror and applies lipstick, stretching her lips into a tight oval. She catches Helen's eye and smacks her lips together. "What's the matter with you?" she says. "Gawping like a goldfish."

Helen presses her lips closed and shakes her head so hard it seems to rattle. The leftover bits of headache shoot sparks into the back of her eye.

Grandad comes back later on that day but not Johnny.

2011

Helen's first thought on waking is that she has been mugged. An intruder has come into her room and dealt her such a blow as she lay sleeping that her brain fizzes. She goes to reach her left hand up to feel for blood or a lump. She cannot even feel her hand.

She tries to shift her weight and after-shocks explode inside her skull, fusing little bits of her brain. She feels them burning up like stars in distant galaxies.

A creeping nausea follows, a rising bile burning her gut and building up in her mouth. In the changed landscape of her brain, a crevice has opened up between thought and action and the command for swallowing is marooned atop some new-formed ridge.

She senses a vast emptiness. It is different from the everyday feeling of disuse issuing forth from the corners of this house; the dust-collecting bedrooms, the old-fashioned upstairs bathroom which three generations used to jostle to occupy, the box-filled attic where the relics of her childhood are stored. This emptiness is something other. It is like one of those thoughts on the edge of consciousness that shimmy away when you try to grasp them and take with them a key that might have opened a locked door. All her life she has chased such shadows and from her rare captures have emerged her novels and poems.

She is lying on her back, propped up against the pillow. The evening carer arranges her thus before leaving. The semi-supine position is supposed to help her breathing. She blinks to make sense of what she sees. It seems the emptiness has become manifest and has swallowed up a whole section of the room. The corner cupboard containing a collection of inherited china - the only extant testimony to the room's original incarnation as a dining room - has disappeared into a fog. As has her desk, computer and her black leather swivel chair.

This room and the adjoining kitchen are the epicentre of Helen's domain. For nearly four decades it has been her office, the place where she has written her books. She has paced its length chain-smoking, tracking down elusive ideas. From here she directed the work to transform the antiquated kitchen with its musty smelling larder into a bright and airy space where French windows opened onto the courtyard and noisy convivial dinners were consumed around the bespoke white oak table. And wine was drunk. Unquantifiable gallons of wine. And even now, when the frailty caused by her lung condition has so shrunk her physical world that the office serves also as her bedroom-cum-living room and cups of tea with the hired help have replaced the wine-drenched evenings with friends and erstwhile lovers, it is still an emanation of her own self. It is the base from which her imagination sets off on its travels, crosses the seas and peers through distant windows into might-have-been lives.

All that happens within this room is at her bidding, sanctioned and chosen by her and she has not requested that part of it be sliced away. She looks harder at where the door should be and is able to make out a pink blurry shape which she recognises, finally, as the side of her own nose.

Although her head is thundering, she makes another tentative move. Her right hand is still under her control. She reaches for her left hand with her right. It is the hand of a stranger and with that touch a long buried memory unfurls. She recalls the feel of a different hand, another unsanctioned intrusion and with that, she knows the name of what has been done to her while she slept.

She lies unmoving, facing the place where the door used to be, her eyes wide open but only one of them still seeing. She is waiting for the morning carer, Jill, to arrive so that she can finally tell.

She tries to recall the poem she's been working on but the key word, the one that would set memory in motion, eludes her. Tears trickle down her cheeks and she catches them in the sheet, folds them in and tugs a fresh edge to her face. Shock. She is in shock. Yes, something beginning with an s. Struck or stricken, is it? The stone that struck the something. The emptiness within her head is spreading. It climbs the hillocks of her brain like a rampant weed, strangling syntax, obliterating joined-up thought.

Three more minuscule earthquakes take place in Helen's head while she waits.

Jill always puts the kettle on and makes a pot of tea before she comes into the bedroom. Then she carries the tray in and pours Helen the first cup, the weak one, as her 'wake up call' and Helen sips it while Jill bustles. Once Helen is up and installed in her bedside chair, they have a second cup together while Jill does Helen's hair. She talks nineteen to the dozen all the while, mostly tales of doom and gloom, of death and disability amongst her clientele but her unfaltering loquaciousness has always been a relief, a distraction from the indignity of being wiped and handled.

"Been an accident on the corner down by the lights. That's why I'm late," Jill says. Helen hears the words as if from a great distance and thinks the radio has switched itself on. Jill looms up beside her, appearing from one of the absent parts of the room, and places the tea tray on the bedside table. "I saw that chap there, you might know him, Bernard, the one who used to come round with the mobile library sometimes. He seemed upset." Jill turns away and flicks the curtains open. "Don't know if he was related in some way to the old lady that'd been hit. Police there, ambulance and everything." She clips the curtains neatly to the sides with the tie-backs. 'Now, do you want a nice cup of tea straightaway or shall we get you up and washed first?' She turns back into the room.

Helen has been clinging to her piece of news as ivy clings to a wall even after its roots are severed. She has it ready and now she casts it out into the blur. Perhaps it is the sticky sheet she is clutching to her that muffles her voice and makes the noise indecipherable. The woman stands wide-eyed and as if transfixed for a second and then she is suddenly moving at high speed. "Oh my God!" she keeps saying. "Why didn't she ring her bleeper? What's it there for if not for this? How long's she been lying there like that?"

In the ambulance the man in uniform asks Helen how many fingers he's holding up. Helen ignores him. She has more important things to think about. There had been a word beginning with something and she needs it.

"Was it a stone?" she asks.

"Pardon? I didn't quite catch that," he says.

Helen raises her voice. She is practically shouting, but the man is either deaf or daft.

"Can you count backwards from 20" he says. So he must know her. He must be that man although he doesn't look like him but people don't always.

"What's your name, dearie?"he asks her.

"Little hell-raiser," she bellows. She would like to wink, to show him she knows that he knows, but her eyelid is too heavy. He shakes his head and adjusts something on a machine. She used to know what that was called. There were words for everything.

"Do you know what's happened?" he asks.

"Is that a xylophone?" she says. She meant to say wireless.

The man peers at her and then puts his fingers around her eye and holds it open while he shines a little light in there. He speaks in a low voice into the wireless. He doesn't seem to hear Helen when she speaks. She says, "I've been stroked."

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Africa Junction by Ginny Baily is published by Harvill Secker.

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Thursday, 4 August, 2011

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"Kneeling beside her in the dark, he tells a story about a land where people don't grow up or get old. He strokes her hair back while he talks. His hand is gentle but trembly."