Гейл Ханимен - Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

‘You mentioned Marianne a lot there,’ she said gently, ‘when you were talking about your day-to-day life.’

I was ready to say it out loud. ‘She’s my sister,’ I said.

We sat for a moment and I let the words crystallize. There she was: Marianne. My little sister. My missing piece, my absent friend. The tears were coursing down my cheeks now, and Maria let me sob until I was ready to speak.

‘I don’t want to talk about what happened to her,’ I said. ‘I’m not ready to do that!’

Maria Temple was very calm. ‘Don’t worry, Eleanor. We’ll take this one step at a time. Acknowledging that Marianne is your sister is a huge thing. We’ll get to the rest, in time.’

‘I wish I could talk about it now,’ I said, furious with myself. ‘But I can’t.’

‘Of course, Eleanor,’ she said, calmly. She paused. ‘Do you think that’s because you can’t remember what happened to Marianne? Or is it because you don’t want to?’ Her voice was very gentle.

‘I don’t want to,’ I said slowly, quietly. I rested my elbows on my knees and put my head in my hands.

‘Be gentle with yourself, Eleanor,’ Maria said. ‘You’re doing incredibly well.’

I almost laughed. It certainly didn’t feel like I was doing well.

Before and after the fire. Something fundamental had gone missing in the flames: Marianne.

‘What do I do?’ I said, desperate, suddenly, to move forward, to get better, to live . ‘How do I fix this? How do I fix me ?’

Dr Temple put down her pen and spoke firmly but gently.

‘You’re doing it already, Eleanor. You’re braver and stronger than you give yourself credit for. Keep going.’

When she smiled at me then, her whole face crinkled into warm lines. I dropped my head again, desperate to hide the emotion that flamed there. The lump in my throat. The pricking of more tears, the swell of warmth. I was safe here, I’d talk more about my sister soon, however hard it was going to be.

‘See you next week, then?’ I said. When I looked up, she was still smiling.

Later that day, Glen and I were watching a televisual game in which people with a fatally flawed understanding of statistics (specifically, of probability theory) selected numbered boxes, each containing a cheque, to be opened in turn, in the hope of unearthing a six-figure sum. They based their selections on wildly unhelpful factors such as their birth date or that of a person they cared about, their house number or, worst of all, ‘ a good feeling ’ about a particular integer.

‘Humans are idiots, Glen,’ I said, kissing the top of her head and then burying my face into her fur, which had grown back with such resplendence that she could now afford to shed it all over my clothes and furniture with gay abandon. She purred her assent.

The doorbell rang. Glen yawned extravagantly then jumped down from my lap. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I stood before the door, thinking that I ought to get one of those spyholes installed, so that I would know who was there before I unlocked it. I found the trite theatricality of it rather dull. Who’s behind the door? Boring. I don’t like pantomimes or whodunnits — I like to have all the relevant information at my disposal at the earliest opportunity, so that I can start to formulate my response. I opened the door to find Keith, Sammy’s son, standing on the doorstep, looking nervous. Mildly surprising. I invited him in.

By the time Keith was sitting on my sofa with a cup of tea, Glen had disappeared. She only really enjoyed her own company. She tolerated mine, but fundamentally she was a recluse at heart, like J. D. Salinger or the Unabomber.

‘Thanks for the tea, Eleanor. I can’t stay long, though,’ Keith said, after we’d finishing exchanging the usual pleasantries. ‘My wife’s got Zumba tonight, and so I need to get back for the kids.’ I nodded, wondering who Zumba was. He reached into the backpack he’d brought with him, pushed a laptop to one side and took out a parcel, something wrapped in a carrier bag — a Tesco one, I noted with approval.

‘We’ve been clearing out Dad’s stuff,’ he said, looking directly at me and keeping his voice even, as though he was telling himself to be brave. ‘This isn’t much, but we wondered if you might want it, as a keepsake? I remember Raymond saying how much you’d admired it, after that time you helped Dad …’ The words snagged in his throat and he trailed off.

I unwrapped the parcel carefully. It was the beautiful red sweater, the one Sammy had been wearing on the day Raymond and I found him in the street. I could smell it, still faintly scented by its wearer with apples and whisky and love, and I squeezed it tight, feeling the softness and the warmth against my palms, the gentle, exuberant Sammyness of it.

Keith had gone to the window and was staring out at the street, an action I completely understood. When you’re struggling hard to manage your own emotions, it becomes unbearable to have to witness other people’s, to have to try and manage theirs too. He couldn’t deal with my tears. I remember, I remember.

‘Thank you,’ I said. He nodded, his back still turned. Everything was there, obvious to us both, but it all remained unsaid. Sometimes that was best.

After he’d gone, I put the sweater on. It was far too big, of course, but that made it even better, with more of it to go around me, any time I needed it. Sammy’s parting gift.

GETTING TO DR TEMPLE’S office involved a bus journey into town and then a short walk. My travel pass had expired, and it was symptomatic of my general feeling of Weltschmerz , of anomie, that I hadn’t even bothered to renew it last week. Marianne. Everything else was just trivia. I dropped two pounds into the driver’s slot, caring not one whit that it bore an ugly sticker saying no change given , and that I had therefore needlessly sacrificed twenty pence. Who gave a fig about twenty pence, when it came down to it?

All of the seats already had an occupant, which meant I was going to have to position myself next to a stranger. In a different mood, I enjoyed this game: one had ten seconds to scan the occupants and select the slimmest, sanest, cleanest-looking person to sit next to. Choose wrongly, and the fifteen-minute journey into town would be a much less pleasant experience — either squashed beside a sprawling fatty, or mouth-breathing to minimize the penetration of the reek emanating from an unwashed body. Such was the excitement of travelling on public transport.

I took no pleasure in the game today, however, and merely seated myself as close to the front as possible, taking no interest in the merits or demerits of my companion. As luck would have it, she was an elderly woman, slightly on the plump side but not inconveniently so, who smelled of hairspray and kept herself to herself. Good.

She got off at the next stop and then I had the seat to myself. More people got on, and I watched a handsome young man — tall, slim, with disproportionately large brown eyes — play the scanning game in order to select a seat. I looked forward to sitting next to him, being sure that he was neither mad nor malodorous.

However, he walked straight past me and sat on the other side of the bus, next to a short, rough-looking man in a sports jacket. I couldn’t believe it! Two people got on at the next stop — one went upstairs, the other, once again, eschewed the spare seat next to me and walked towards the back of the bus, where, I noticed when I turned around to look, she seated herself next to a man with no socks on. His bare ankles looked distressingly white above his oxblood leather brogues, which he had teamed with green jogging bottoms. A madman.