Elizabeth Day - Scissors, Paper, Stone

There were two of them – a white man and a pretty Asian woman, standing shoulder to shoulder underneath the porch awning as though their primary purpose was to advertise the police force’s ethnically diverse recruiting practice. Anne braced herself to receive a fistful of glossy leaflets and a promotional plastic keyring, but then she noticed that neither of them was smiling.

‘Mrs Redfern?’ the man said, and the silver numbers on his epaulettes glinted in the mid-morning light.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s about your husband.’ He had flabby pink cheeks and small, round eyes and a kindness that hung loosely around his lips. He looked as though he should be outdoors, building dry-stone walls and eating thick ham sandwiches. Anne felt a twinge of sympathy for him, for how difficult he was finding it to enunciate the words. There was a short pause that Anne realised she was expected to fill.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident.’

She felt a coolness seep into her bones but she stood straight-backed in the doorway and did not move. The policeman looked relieved that she was not breaking down. The pretty Asian woman reached out to touch her arm. Anne became aware of the pressure of her hand and although she usually disliked the tactile presumption of strangers, she found it oddly comforting.

The man was talking, telling her something about Charles being knocked off his bicycle and being taken to hospital and the fact that he was unconscious: still alive, but only just.

Only just. She found herself thinking how strange it was that two small words could encapsulate so much.

Then the woman was talking about cups of tea and lifts to the hospital and is-there-anyone-you-could-call and Anne found that she was not thinking of Charles, of what state he might be in or of how worried she should be, but that instead her mind was filled with the perfectly clear image of four unpeeled carrots that she had left draining in a colander in the sink.

She told the police officers that she would drive herself to hospital.

‘Are you sure?’ the man asked, eyebrows pushed together in furrowed concern.

She nodded and added a smile for good measure.

‘Perhaps you’d like us to come inside and sit with you for a bit?’ said the woman, her eyes darting beyond Anne’s shoulder into the hallway.

‘No, honestly, I’ll be fine,’ Anne said firmly. ‘Thank you,’ and she started to close the door before they could say anything else. The casserole. She had to finish the casserole.

As she walked back through to the kitchen, she passed the ugly dark wooden hat-stand at the foot of the staircase. Charles had brought it home with him one evening several years ago, with no explanation. When she asked where it was from, he replied coldly that a colleague had wanted to get rid of it. She had known, by the tone of his voice, not to push the point any further.

The hat-stand struck Anne as a particularly useless piece of clutter, but it had taken up permanent residence in the hallway, casting grotesque shadows over the tiles like a stunted tree, its branches gnarled and misshapen into arthritic wooden fingers.

She had grown used to it and normally never gave it a second glance. But this time she noticed that Charles’s cycling helmet was still hanging on one of the lower hooks. She winced. A sudden vision of his bloodied skull, squashed and bruised like overripe red fruit, rose unbidden in her mind. She pushed the thought back under and returned to the chopping board.

For twenty minutes, Anne peeled carrots and diced potatoes and roughly sliced the marbled red beef that was springy and cool to the touch. When she lifted away the polythene bag in which the butcher had wrapped the meat, it left a trickle of bloodied water on the metallic indentations of the sink. Anne shuddered when she noticed, wiping it away briskly with a cloth.

She slid all the ingredients into a big saucepan, angling the chopping board at its lip and pushing the vegetables into the simmering stock with the back of the knife. She left it to boil and then she took off her apron and went upstairs and brushed her hair, tucking it neatly behind her ears. She unbuttoned the floral blouse and changed into a loose-fitting V-neck scented with the ferric freshness of fabric conditioner.

She was conscious of the fact that she was behaving oddly and she wondered for a moment whether she might be suffering from shock. But Anne did not feel shocked. She felt – what exactly? She felt cocooned, un-tethered from actuality. She felt vaguely anxious, but there was an underlying sense that nothing was quite happening as it should. It was not so much unreal as hyper-real, as if she had just been made aware of each tiny dot of colour that made up every solid object she looked at. It felt like the pins and needles sensation she got in the tips of her fingers after she warmed her cold hands against a hot radiator, only then becoming aware of the completeness of her physical presence.

The smell of the casserole wafted up from the kitchen, steamed and earthy. Anne walked downstairs, taking her time, placing each foot carefully in front of the other. She was conscious of the need for extreme caution because, whatever happened when she got to the hospital, she would need somehow to deal with it and she wanted to stretch out this small scrap of leftover time as long as she could. This, now, here: this was still the time before, the space that existed prior to knowledge. She had no idea yet what would be required of her or how badly Charles was hurt.

She could not work out how much she cared. She found that, given everything that had happened during their years together, she was not unduly upset by the thought of his death but then, almost simultaneously, she felt a bottomless nausea when she allowed herself the rapid shiver of contemplation of her life without him.

But she did not have to face him until she got there.

So she would finish making the casserole and then she would get into her car and drive to the hospital and from then on, her life would be different in some way that she could not yet fathom.

But not just yet.

The saucepan bubbled, the lid clattering gently against its sides.

Her mother’s name flashes up on her mobile.

‘Mum?’

‘Can you talk?’

‘Yes.’

She knows immediately that something is wrong.

‘It’s Charles . . . I mean, it’s Dad. Daddy.’

All at once, she is sick with anticipation. A desperate calm settles itself around her heart. For a second, she thinks her father is dead. The certainty of it filters through her skin, leaving a trail of goosebumps along one arm. A coolness tightens around her shoulders.

‘Oh God, no. No.’

She hears her voice begin to shudder. A gasping, dry sob rises in the back of her throat.

‘It’s all right,’ her mother is saying on the other end of the line. ‘Listen to me. He’s OK. He’s alive.’

She hears the words but does not, at first, understand them. She lets them slot into place, slowly reforming the sentence in her mind.

Not dead.

Alive.

Still living; still part of her.

And then, she no longer knows what to feel.

PART I

Anne

When Anne was a child and her parents returned late at night from a party, she liked to pretend to be asleep. It was partly because she knew the babysitter had let her stay up longer than she should but it was also because she enjoyed the feeling of play-acting, of feigning something, of playing a trick on adults.

She would hear their footsteps on the stairs, the heavy and deliberate murmur of drunken whispers and half-giggles, and she would flick the switch of her bedside lamp and shut her eyes tightly, drawing the blankets up around her. Her parents would approach her bedroom and halt for a moment outside, shushing each other with exaggerated seriousness, before pushing open the door and poking their heads round. Her mother’s voice would say her name softly, each movement punctuated by the tinny jangle of earrings and bracelets.