Elizabeth Day - Scissors, Paper, Stone

Charles was sitting on the end of Frieda’s bed, fully clothed and cradling a green mug of coffee. There was a deep-blue Indian throw slung artfully over the sheets, with intricate patterns sewn on it in thick red thread. ‘Hello there,’ he said, a familiar sheepish grin on his face. The sun lit up the back of his head so that he appeared silhouetted against the window. ‘Frieda offered me some of her Turkish coffee and I couldn’t resist.’

‘Do you want some?’ Frieda asked, eyebrows raised.

‘Um, no thanks,’ said Anne, sitting down beside Charles on a small corner of the bed. He did not move to make room for her, she noticed, nor did he touch her as he usually did. ‘I might try and get back to sleep, actually.’

Frieda laughed. ‘It’s amazing to me how you manage to sleep for so long, Anne. I love this part of the day: the freshness of the air. It feels more, more . . . alive, somehow.’ She swept up her long hair and pinned it back in front of the small mirror on the back of the door. ‘I can’t imagine dying in the mornings.’

Anne rolled her eyes imperceptibly. Frieda was always so unnecessarily dramatic, so unrelentingly dark and solemn. She thought it was something to do with her exotic upbringing – her father was a diplomat and Frieda had grown up in various far-flung countries, never settling in one place for long. She had once, in a rare moment of confession, admitted to Anne that this made it difficult for her to keep friends.

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Charles. Anne looked at him with undisguised surprise. He hated mornings, she thought. He could quite happily spend the whole day in bed, reading newspapers and eating toast. But she didn’t say anything.

There was a strange little silence. The room felt shrunken and airless, infiltrated with a creeping sense of awkwardness. Anne looked at Charles sideways. He was staring straight ahead, his eyes resting on the nape of Frieda’s exposed neck, sipping his coffee quite calmly.

‘Well, then. I might go back to bed,’ she said in a final desperate attempt to stem the flow of silence that oozed between them. She got up and reached an arm down towards him.

‘Charles?’

He looked up at her. ‘Yes?’

‘Are you coming?’

He smiled at her, a touch of condescension in his eyes. ‘Actually, I might stay here and finish this,’ he said, lifting up his mug. ‘If that’s all right with you,’ he added, and she felt he was making fun of her.

‘Of course.’ She tied the flannel belt tight around her waist and walked out, closing the door behind her to the soft murmur of their voices.

A bit later, when she was fitfully dozing back in her own bed, Charles came in and snuggled up beside her. He put his arm along her waist, his fingers gently stroking her hipbone. ‘Hello,’ he whispered, holding her tighter, and Anne smiled to herself and thought she’d been overly sensitive about the whole thing. She’d probably still been half-asleep. She took a deep breath. Nothing to worry about, after all.

‘Hello.’

So then everything was all right again, at least for a while.

Charlotte

Charlotte was at the office when her mother rang.

‘Charlotte?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, trying to keep her voice low so that none of her colleagues would hear it was a personal call. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing important, just thought I’d catch you if you weren’t too busy.’

Charlotte clenched her jaw. Unthinkingly, she started scratching the tender patch of flesh just behind her earlobes. Her mother’s insistence on calling her at work was a source of constant irritation. She had told her several times not to do it because it was an open-plan building and she was conscious that everyone could hear her murmured replies to Anne’s familiar litany of daily complaints – workmen who hadn’t turned up, weeding that had yet to be tackled, a brand of washing powder that the supermarket had discontinued for no reason, and so on. At least when Anne called on the mobile, Charlotte could recognise the number and choose to ignore it. At work, there was no escape.

‘I am in the middle of something, actually,’ said Charlotte, almost whispering. From across the room, Sasha, the perpetually nosy office secretary, strained to look over the felt-board partition like a meerkat scanning the landscape for food. Charlotte turned the swivel chair away from her.

‘Oh. Well, I don’t want to bother you.’ But the way that Anne said it managed to convey exactly the opposite – she employed a wheedling, semi-offended tone that always made Charlotte feel terribly guilty. It was at times like these that Charlotte wished she had a brother or a sister to share the exhausting obligations of being Anne’s child.

She blew her cheeks out silently so that her mother would not hear the resigned exhalation of her breath. She checked herself. Why was she being so unsupportive? Clearly, Anne needed someone to talk to, Charlotte told herself. Charles’s accident had taken them all unawares but Anne had seemed especially dazed by it. She found herself thinking of that strange morning, some months ago, when Anne had presented Charlotte with her engagement ring. She had never worn it. The mere thought of that unblinking ruby made her shudder. But clearly there had been something going on with Charles; something not altogether pleasant. She sat up briskly and resolved to be kinder, more patient, more willing to listen.

Charlotte clicked on her mouse and minimised the typed document she had been working on so that it shrank to a thin sliver of grey at the bottom of the screen. Sasha had dropped back behind the partition, her eavesdropping attempts clearly frustrated. Charlotte felt a small pang of triumph.

‘No, no, it’s fine, Mum,’ she said, deciding that the least she could do was to give Anne five minutes of her time. ‘It’s not too urgent.’

‘Are you all right?’

Charlotte tried to keep her exasperation in check. This was a familiar tactic of her mother’s, and the more she denied that anything was wrong, the more Anne became convinced she had uncovered some dark awfulness that Charlotte was not admitting to anyone else.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘You’re sounding very flat.’

‘I’m at work, Mum.’

‘Are you sure that’s all it is?’

‘Yep.’

There was a pause.

‘You know, if you don’t want to talk to me you only need to say so . . .’ Anne let the sentence trail off.

Charlotte held her breath.

‘It’s absolutely not that,’ she said, with as much cheerfulness as she could manage. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh, I’m all right. Bearing up. The hospital visits are rather wearing, I must say. I think it’s the driving there and back that takes it out of me and, of course, Janet and I had to cancel our Paris trip so that’s something else to deal with on top of everything.’

Charlotte twisted the phone cord in one hand, mentally zoning out. Her stomach rumbled and she began thinking about what to have for lunch – there was a café she had recently noticed nearby and she wanted to try it out. It was a traditional London greasy spoon, of the sort that she thought had ceased to exist with the advent of coffee-shop chains and oversized bookstores with ‘break-out’ armchair areas. She started imagining a jacket potato with melted cheese and cheap mugs of strong tea and then she realised her mother was still talking.

‘. . . no idea about the prognosis. I always told him to wear that blasted cycling helmet. Always. But he was so stubborn. He’d never listen to me. Or to anyone, for that matter. Not an easy person, your father.’ She let the comment filter though and then added: ‘But then you know that already.’

They lapsed into a short silence. Anne’s conversations normally led this way – no matter what she began talking about, the subject matter would slide inexorably towards Charles. Charlotte was fed-up of hearing about her father’s shortcomings, partly because she was only too aware of them herself, but also because she thought that if her mother genuinely felt this strongly then she should have walked out years ago. It was as if the constant examination of Charles’s faults fed into Anne’s sense of self, enabling her to ignore her own. The familiar nit-picking seemed to have become integral to Anne’s own identity, as though she would cease to exist without being able to define herself in opposition to something. And while she clearly sought Charlotte’s sympathy for all that she had to put up with, the truth was that Anne was fuelled by her own unhappiness. She relied on it. Charlotte was pretty sure her mother wasn’t the easiest person to live with either.