Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis
Chapter Eighteen
‘Hi, this is Noelle Butterby, I’m calling again about the––’
‘The camera?’
‘Yes. Yes, God, I bet you’re sick of hearing from me, but the guy I spoke to last week said the head of history was back from annual leave yesterday so …’
‘No, no, that’s quite all right. But I’m afraid we still haven’t come across it. I’m sorry.’
‘I just – I know it would mean a lot to a lot of people …’
‘I know, but it’s like I said to your friend last week, it probably is in the other vessel––’
‘My friend?’
‘Yes? He called asking about a disposable camera. One that might have been unclaimed, I just assumed it was something to do with you––’
‘What was his name?’
‘Um. I don’t know, he didn’t leave a name, I don’t think. It was just a casual enquiry.’
‘But it was a guy?’
‘Yes. He said he was an ex-student.’
Sam’s dad Frank won’t speak a word. I was expecting rude remarks, I was expecting grumbling and tutting and short answers, and perhaps having too much to say every time I picked up an item or opened a bin bag. But what I wasn’t expecting, was him completely blanking me as if I am an unwelcome ghost haunting his little flat who he’s been advised to ignore by a priest. ‘Ignore this strange and troubled soul and she will get bored and eventually pass on to the other side, Frank. I’m afraid it’s the only way.’
I said hello when I arrived, and I offered to make him a drink. Silence on both occasions. I was almost tempted to go up and prod his wrinkly face, check he wasn’t some sort of waxwork.
A woman called Gloria opened the door when I first got here – a carer with one of those smiley faces I would have definitely described as infectious had she actually had any sort of effect on Frank other than making him look even more like a man hopeful for death.
‘You are Noelle,’ she said in a strong Irish accent. ‘Come on into the happy house.’ And she’d laughed and whispered out of the side of her mouth, ‘I hope to get a smile from him by the time I retire. What do you think? Possible?’
She sorted Frank’s breakfast and helped him into his dining chair to eat it, then back into his armchair. I could hear him grumbling about it being ‘bloody pointless’, but Gloria explained he’d seize up if he spent all day in one armchair.
‘Nonsense,’ he’d snapped. And when I’d smiled, passing the doorway with a full box of cardboard recycling, he’d stared at me with as much contempt as you’d give a passing door-to-door salesman and/or criminal. Then I’d dropped half of it, and he’d inhaled so deeply, it’s a miracle I wasn’t sucked up his nostrils along with the sideboard.
And now, it’s just us. Me and Waxwork Frank. A match made in the fiery pits of hell.
‘Frank?’ I call from the kitchen, peering my head round the door, but he doesn’t respond because of course the fucker doesn’t.
He’s in his chair, watching a daytime TV show as if there is a gun to his temple forcing him to, and I’m hesitating in the kitchen doorway after spending fifteen minutes more than the three hours I’m being paid for in the spare bedroom filling bin bags, emptying cardboard boxes of old newspapers, and a suitcase bursting with papers I showed to Frank before he shouted, ‘No! Don’t touch that!’ and I’d dropped it like it was a bomb. I’ve over-run because it’s in disarray, this flat. In every nook and in every little crevice, is just more stuff. It’s like Mary Poppins’ magic bag, but full of crap instead of fancy lamps and funky umbrellas. But I’ve also over-run because I can’t stop thinking about what the woman at the college said on the phone. I’m totally distracted, my brain doing all sorts of laps and relays around itself, coming up with hundreds of stories that belong in library shelves and not in real life.
‘Your life is not a Nicholas Sparks novel, Noelle,’ Dilly would remind me now if he knew I’d even laid awake considering Lee being the male student asking for the camera, when in fact Lee is sadly very much dead. And yes, there’s nothing to say it’s the same camera, but I dunno – I think it is. An ‘unclaimed camera’. Of course they’d assume Daisy’s camera would be unclaimed – that’s the language they’d probably use if they were referring to an item belonging to someone who isn’t here any more, and something that, without me being there to collect it, would definitely just sit there. I’d asked Ed, who looked at me as if I’d finally crossed the border into madness.
‘Nope, wasn’t me, Nellie,’ he’d said with a shrug. I’d met him straight from the train station again with a takeaway coffee the day of the call. It’s become a bit of a routine. A coffee straight off the train after his shift, walking through town together, meandering through the market, Ed tugging at my arm to join him in his flat above a cycle shop and sometimes I do, depending on how many calls Mum has made, whether Ian’s with her. It’s a temporary let – someone his dad knows, who’s travelling, and every time I visit, I feel like I’m in someone else’s home, with someone else’s things.
‘Look, I don’t mean this coldly,’ Ed had carried on, ‘but maybe you need to let this camera go.’ I’d stiffened then, because of how dismissive, how Ed he was, but also because something passed over his face. Pity. Worry. Something. Or maybe I’m paranoid, because why would he lie? Why would he even want some old camera?
‘It’s just photos, Nell,’ he’d said.
‘Her photos,’ I’d added, and ‘one of us,’ I’d thought but didn’t say. One she took of Ed and me, Ed’s arm around me, the flood-lit college field behind me. ‘My future’s in that photo,’ I’d thought as Daisy’s thumb had wound back the film. ‘I know it. I just know it. And I’ll prove it, when we eventually come back here and take it out of the ground. Together.’
‘Frank?’ I call again from the doorway.
Frank doesn’t look up, his eyes on the TV, his lips parted, his eyes slits as if it’s an effort to keep them open. Sam must look like his mum. I see not a single likeness between Frank and Sam. Perhaps, the nose, but at a push. The straight line of the bridge of their noses are the same. But everything else – they’re chalk and cheese. Polar opposites. In looks and in nature and as far as I can see, absolutely everything. I wonder how they met, Frank and Sam’s mum. Sam’s dad is nine years older than Sam’s mum, I know that much, but I wonder if she wore lipstick, in case she bumped into him. I wonder if he made excuses to brush past her, to be close, and if she analysed it afterwards, the looks, the touches. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine him even smiling, let alone touching anything (well, besides souls with a cold stare).
‘Cup of tea before I go?’ I try again.
‘No,’ he says, in more of a grunt than a word and I nod pointlessly as the washing machine ironically sings a happy, tinkly tune behind me to signal that its wash load has finished. ‘I’ll just uh, hang this out on the balcony then, shall I?’
No response.
‘OK, brilliant,’ I say, ‘I’ll do that. It’s lovely and sunny so shouldn’t take too long. Gloria can fetch it in. Or Sam. Is Sam coming today?’ And I know I shouldn’t, but I really hope he is. Sam and I haven’t spoken since that day on the concrete, outside. Well. Besides one text. ‘I’ll be there Tuesday before nine,’ I’d sent and he’d texted back, ‘Great’ with a smiley face. Not even Charlie and I could pick apart and analyse that bland, boring exchange.
The balcony is seven floors up, and although I’m not exactly afraid of heights, my knees wobble, as if on a rickety bridge, as I start hanging laundry on a clothes airer. It’s not natural to be this high up, really, is it? I was never afraid of flying, though. I love flying. Mum loved it too. We’d go on holiday once a year up until I was about sixteen. Spain. Crete. Cyprus. Portugal. She’d save and save, her whole year revolving around that one week she could whisk Dilly and me away. I remember the little rucksacks she’d pack us for the plane – puzzle books and sweets and a packet of pencils – and how she’d lift them out of the boot in the dark, blurry-eyed but excited for our little adventure. It wasn’t always like this. Mum was sun-kissed and zesty and hungry for the world once. And then the stroke – and slow and fast, all at once, she retreated. Little sparks inside of her slowly going out. It can happen to any of us. Turn back the clock about seven years, and that person was me. The version of Noelle Butterby Doctor Henry was enquiring after. The one who lost herself, for a bit, when everyone else went off to university, started their lives.
‘Stay tuned for a fantastic competition …’ a distant TV chatters from a nearby flat. ‘… and later, we will be showing you how to cook not one, but two perfectsummer dishes …’
You can see for miles up here. Stretches of houses and buildings, but just on the horizon, hills and lush green trees and blue sky. There’s a particular specific smell up here. The smell of other people’s houses; evidence of other people’s lives. Freshly cut grass of someone’s garden, the smell of frying onions from another flat. I grip the balcony rail and close my eyes. Daisy and I used to do this on her balcony, or at night at a sleepover, the night silent through the open window except for the distant whoosh of motorway traffic far in the distance.
‘Where are you, Elle?’ she’d ask sleepily, and I’d always make her go first, because she had the best ideas – the best imagination. It’s why she took art. It’s why she wrote the best short stories and poems, in English Lit.
‘Oh, I’m in Italy with you,’ she’d say, closing her eyes. ‘We’re celebrating. I just sold this movie script and they’re saying I’m the new Nora Ephron, so I have a shitload of money to spend. We’ll pick up some hot, tortured poets at some dive bar tonight. They’ll romance us.’ She would always giggle, as if with glee at the glory of her own little stories. ‘Come on, Elle, close your eyes. Use your imagination. What do you see?’
Her happy, lively voice swirls through my mind now, girlish and giggly. I hate that Daisy is stuck in time. I hate that she will forever be eighteen. That she’ll never know twenty-two, thirty-two, seventy-two. That she’ll never fall in love, or see New York, or Amsterdam. Amsterdam. The first place we promised we’d go when we left college and saved up. ‘Jump on a cheapo flight,’ Daisy would say, and I’d feel almost sick to my stomach with longing.
‘Where are you, Elle?’ her voice asks me now.
And I think. Hands gripping the balcony, I think, and I try. Where would I go, if I could go anywhere? But nothing comes. Nothing at all. And I wonder for just a moment, if I’m stuck too.
‘Hey.’
My eyes snap open and I turn round. Sam stands at the balcony door, tall, handsome, his lips a soft smile.
‘Taking in the view?’ he says, easily.
‘A bit.’ I clear my throat, straighten. ‘My legs are having a bit of a barn-dance though.’
‘Barn-dance,’ he says. ‘Interesting.’ He comes to stand beside me, then leans, resting his tanned forearms on the bar of the balcony and looks ahead, like me. He smells amazing. Of showers and sun cream and that cedary aftershave. Something flutters in my chest, madly, like a trapped moth.
‘See, you’ve got to trick your brain,’ he says. ‘As long as you have something under your feet, you’ve just gotta convince yourself that you’re on the ground.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Sort of hard to do when you know, the cars down there look like Hot Wheels toys and you’re closer to birds than people.’
Sam laughs. ‘Takes practice,’ he says. ‘Is that why your eyes were closed?’
‘Ah. Not quite. It was something I used to do. With my friend, when we were kids. She had a balcony just like this and we’d … close our eyes, pretend we were somewhere else. Somewhere we wanted to be someday. Say what we could see. I know, it’s silly …’
‘No, it’s not,’ says Sam. Then he leans closer and says quietly, as if asking me something secret, ‘And what did you see?’ And I feel it. Despite myself, there’s an electrical churn in my stomach. Like I just started a downward plummet on a rollercoaster.
I clear my throat. ‘Um. A-a pasty,’ I lie. ‘A um, huge, golden pasty.’ Sam’s eyebrows knit together a fraction, as if shocked by the sudden change of tone, but he laughs.
‘You sure it wasn’t oysters?’ he says.