Andrew O'Hagan: The Illuminations

Snow was falling past the window and in her sleep she pictured a small girl and her father in a railway carriage. The train passed into Ayrshire and the girl looked at nothing over the fields, losing herself in a sense of winter and the smell of soap on her father’s hands.

It’s cold, Mog

He carried a light for her all his life and proved she was easy to love. Maureen opened her eyes and found that sixty years had gone by in an instant. Snowflakes poured from the street lamp like sparks from a bonfire. The night was empty and there wasn’t a sound in the flat except for the echo of yesterday’s talk shows.

This weather would put years on you

The sentence ran through her mind and then she wiped her eyes. Things are slow at that hour and you can easily miss a knock at the door or someone calling your name. Her memory had taken her to another place, where snow blew around a vanished train, and now she was home in her own warm bed and already tense for the day’s share of things sent to try her. Her thoughts came out at night like mice and the old scratching woke her up.

How hard can it be to stop what you’re doing for five minutes and dial your mother’s number? I could be lying dead, thought Maureen. You give them the best years of your life and then you get the sob stories, the hard-done-to stuff, as if you hadn’t given them everything under the sun.

She moved the pillows up. They have short memories. No she didn’t take them to art galleries and no she didn’t sit down with the homework. She was too busy putting a meal on the table. Short memories, she thought again, looking to the window. Some day she would write something down on paper from her heart, just to tell the truth. Her father often said it was good to write a letter because it’s something people can keep. They can look at it again and think about what they did. And they can write back and say sorry because they think the world of you.

It wasn’t even five in the morning. She reached for the clock and knocked over a pile of audio books. ‘Some people have too many friends to be a good friend to anyone,’ she said. Then the sound registered, a knock at the door. She swung her legs and waited to hear it again, then she was up, putting on a cardigan and turning on the lamps. Maureen told herself the roads would be bad unless the lorries were out with the salt. She couldn’t find her carpet slippers and she kept the door-chain on.

‘It’s you, Anne.’

Anne was her neighbour, eighty-two, and a bad sleeper. She had taken to wandering the corridors at night. Her neighbours often saw her shadow passing their glass doors, but they were used to upsets. It was a sheltered housing complex and none of the residents was young. The flats had front doors onto the street but the other doors, glass ones, led to a common area made up of a breakfast room, a reception, a launderette.

‘It’s me, Maureen. I’m so sorry.’

Maureen undid the chain. Anne was fully dressed, biting her lip. The ferns behind her made it look as if she had just walked in from the woods. But Anne always looked like she’d seen the world. She had beautiful skin. And her skirts were always made of the best.

‘Good God,’ Maureen said. ‘You’re like somebody dressed for a summer dance. Come away in.’

‘I won’t come in.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Can I borrow your tin opener?’

Anne was holding a tin of Heinz tomato soup. It didn’t do to argue with her at a time like this, so Maureen went off to find her slippers. When she came back Anne was in the middle of saying something about how she loved Blackpool and how the Illuminations were the best thing about it, the night when they turned on all the lights. She wanted to see it again. She put her arms across her chest and tapped rapidly at her own shoulder. Maureen had seen that before.

‘Come on, then,’ she said.

Anne’s flat was like a palace. Maureen loved the story it told, not that she knew it, but a person with taste always has a story. Once they were inside, Anne walked to the microwave and turned round. ‘The rabbit wants his dinner,’ she said. ‘He’s not had a thing all day.’

‘Who?’

‘The rabbit.’

Anne nodded towards the breakfast bar. The rabbit was ceramic, about six inches tall with green eyes and crumbs of bread at its feet. Maureen noticed the snow falling past the window in the living room. The rabbit looked creepy. ‘Now, Anne,’ she said, ‘we need to make sure we’re not telling stories.’

‘I know it’s daft,’ Anne said. ‘But it’s okay. He’s only sitting and it’s cold outside.’

‘But, Anne …’

‘He’s awful hungry.’

Anne’s mind opened onto itself. She thought of water for a second and the warm baths she used to draw.

Children don’t like it too warm. The same as a photographic solution in fact, one hundred and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. That’s what you want. Let the chemicals dissolve in the listed order and make sure it’s not too hot or the solution can’t take it and the image will be blurred.

Maureen looked into the rabbit’s eyes.

‘This is his favourite,’ Anne said. ‘Soup is all he ever wants for his dinner.’ Then she wiped the tin with a damp cloth and handed it to Maureen. ‘Some of these things have a ring you can pull, but this one doesn’t for some reason.’

BLACKPOOL

In a photograph pinned above the kettle, the face of George Formby was peeking round a door. ‘Turned out nice again!’ it said in ink under his name, a curly signature. He was smiling for the whole of Britain. The electricity sockets were covered over with Elastoplast, and the rings on the cooker were out of bounds, too, taped over with a saltire of white plastic tape. Maureen thought it was like the stuff the police put up around the murder scene in those crime dramas. No hot kettles or rings. It was Jackie the warden’s decision, and it was made, Maureen knew, in consultation with Social Services. They were sorry but Anne just couldn’t operate these electrical goods because she might burn herself. Maureen warmed the soup and Anne stood back ready to say something. ‘I’d like to take him to Blackpool, by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea,’ she said, half-singing. ‘I always thought I would end up there.’

Anne was fine most days, but she was changing. The rules at Lochranza Court stated clearly that any resident incapable of working a kettle would have to be moved to a nursing home. Nobody wanted that. Every few months it happened to one of the residents, but Anne needed her friends. ‘That’s right, Maureen,’ said Jackie. Anne added somehow to the dignity of the place, with her past and her pictures and all her nice cushions. So the warden was in cahoots with Maureen, at sixty-eight the youngest resident in the complex. They pretended it was still fine for Anne to be in the flat by herself, but she wasn’t able to use the kitchen. The microwave was okay.

Maureen was looking at the rabbit again.

‘Once upon a time, I used to go to restaurants,’ Anne said. ‘Fancy ones. In New York. Now it’s “ping” this and “ping” that. The cooker doesn’t work. And the rabbit doesn’t like his soup cold.’

‘How do you know that, Anne?’

‘Well, it’s me that lives with him.’

Anne used to read lots of books. Somebody said she was a well-known photographer years ago and Maureen could believe it. You knew by the way Anne arranged her lamps — and by the lamps themselves, the beautiful shades — that she had travelled. She had the kind of rugs you can’t buy in Saltcoats. You just don’t see rugs like that. And what a lovely radio she had by the sofa next to all those paperweights showing Blackpool in the old days. When Maureen visited the flat next door she always went round looking at the faces of the people in the framed photographs. She loved seeing them caught in the middle of their interesting lives. That was a thing. People who didn’t know Maureen immediately had her respect, as if not knowing her was part of their achievement.