Sipsworth

by Simon Van Booy

Helen Cartwright was old with her life broken in ways she could not have foreseen. Walking helped, and she tried to go out every day, even when it poured. But life for her was finished. She knew that and had accepted it. Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle⁠—as though even for death there is a queue.

The front garden had been paved over, but cracks in the cement sometimes bled flowers she could name, as though just below the surface of this world are the ones we remember, still going on.

Helen turns the item over. A plastic deep sea diver. Touches the air tank and flippers. Behind the diving mask two painted eyes seem to recognize her. She had bought the very same thing for her son’s thirteenth birthday. Then it had been part of a set.

Perhaps this one is part of a set, too, and the pieces will appear, one by one, as if gathered in by the long whiskers of grief.

Without thinking, she bends, heaves up the fish tank with its toy diver and dirty cardboard boxes. It’s heavier than Helen has imagined, and though it isn’t far to t...

Memory has never come to her like this in the physical world. It has always been something weightless⁠—strong enough to blow the day off course, but not something she can reach for and hold on to.

Everyone she has ever loved or wanted to love is gone, and behind a veil of fear she wishes to be where they are.

There is nothing in the house even to look at. No birthday cards, no letters. Even photo albums were discarded for her big move three years before. She burned them, actually. In the driveway under the terrace. She had to. Even the one of a trip to New Zealand when David was nine and they’d sat as a family with ice creams on a low wall watching small boats make for the open sea, like children leaving home.

she listens to the house. There is nothing to hear, of course, but the emptiness reassures her; thoughts can wander, unfurl without touching.

She stares at the fish tank before her. Below the plastic deep sea diver and under the cardboard boxes are coloured plastic objects in shapes she doesn’t understand. Helen tries to imagine the last person to have touched these things. Where are those hands now and what are they doing?

Their son is about to open a present. He knows what it is because they had all tramped down to the pet shop a week before to help him pick everything out and to pay for it. But they’d wrapped it anyway because that’s what you do with children.

There was a time, she remembers, when broadcasting ceased at a certain hour. People in the studio went home to crisp envelopes of bed. Now the television went all night. An endless loop of voices. Even if there was no one in the studio or watching at home, it kept on, seeking to fill the emptiness but only intensifying it.

This isn’t a loud noise, but an insistent one. Something is happening downstairs in her house on Westminster Crescent that hasn’t happened before. A person breaking in? She knows there are burglaries in the town because it’s in the local paper. But what does she have to steal? This is a place where everything of value has already been taken.

Helen’s first task is to submerge the deep sea diver in suds and begin washing. Her gloves squeak over the plastic, and soap bubbles make everything glisten. It really is the same toy that brought so much happiness to David when tropical fish were his chief preoccupation.

And herein lies the cruel paradox of human existence⁠—not that you die, but that all happiness eventually turns against you.

A moment before she drops them back into the tank, a pair of tiny eyes and a pink nose appear from a hole in the box that is smeared with muck. Calmly, Helen sets everything down on the carpet. She has never been the screaming kind, and it’s not an angry face, just a small, grey cone with crooked whiskers, like every mouse in every book she ever read to David when he was little. When she leans forward, the head drops back into the darkness of the box, which hadn’t been empty after all.

Helen goes cautiously toward the fish tank. Leaning in, she looks into what she realises now is a bona fide mouse hole. Although the animal doesn’t appear, she can hear it faffing around, drumming the cardboard with its paws, chewing on something that makes a flicking sound. The lonely creature is likely frightened, stranded there in a sitting room on Westminster Crescent, unaware there is someone listening, someone watching beyond the small, dark place it has come to live out the last of its days.

Without knowing why, Helen fumbles for her keys and strides back into the house. From a drawer between the cooker and fridge, she takes a small cutting knife. Still buttoned into her coat, Helen carries the knife into the sitting room, where she pokes six quick holes in the plastic stretched tightly over the top of the fish tank. She expects to hear or see something, but the miniature world below is perfectly silent, as though the creature knows its life is finished and has accepted it.

Then in the distance she notices something new, the yellow sign for an American fast-food restaurant. It was a place David had loved growing up in that other country where Helen lived for sixty years. It was the only home her husband and child had ever known. Most things here would be completely foreign to them. And yet it was where she had been born and the place she had returned to now that the business of life had been settled.

The next shop has a window of toys glowing under electric light. Helen stands there taking it in. There are teddy bears, dollhouses, spinning tops, jigsaw puzzles, fire trucks, Lego sets, dinosaurs, and battery-operated cars with rubber wheels. David would have loved this place. Heavens above, it would have been an argument for sure. As she lingers, it isn’t any particular memory that comes, just random things, like the way he pulled her hand, even when she said no

A moment later the radio is on. Words enter the kitchen as she fills the electric kettle. A group of people have blown up another group of people; an iceberg is melting faster than experts had hoped it would; somebody who tells fortunes on the television is dead after an unexpected accident; an argument between countries about who can fish where has escalated to a standoff hundreds of miles out to sea.

None of this has any effect on her. It is no longer Helen’s world to worry about. And in her mind it is the same news over and over again, with the only difference being that people think they’re hearing it for the first time.

Then Helen has a thought. Why not put on shoes and just move the box to the hedge? That’s what David would have told her to do. She imagines him there, leaning on the counter in a T-shirt and long shorts. He pushes up his glasses and looks around. Studies the things that fill his mother’s life in his absence. Helen stops what she is doing. Lets memory shuffle the deck. They are now in the kitchen of their old house in Australia. It’s the last week of school.

He pushes his glasses up and Helen says that on Saturday after work, she’s driving him to the optician in Westfield to have the frames tightened. He doesn’t want to go. Tells her it’s his only form of exercise. They laugh at that. He chooses an apple from the bowl and rubs it on his shorts. In a few months he’ll be at the university and moments like this will keep her going.

Helen lays both palms on the counter. Smiles at the kettle. Oh, the irony of it all. You can burn all the photos and scrapbooks and report cards and certificates, but in the end they find their way back.

ITV is broadcasting interviews with people from different faiths about prayers they know by heart and rely on during hard times. Helen has not set foot in a house of worship for decades. The last time was David’s service, attended by almost the entire school where he was head teacher. A few of the children couldn’t keep still. They fiddled with toys or just played with their fingers.

When it is time to pray, Helen closes her eyes with the others. Lets her head drop. She does not wish for anything, but hopes her presence might be felt in whichever corner of the universe belongs to her.

Once both boxes are positioned, Helen pushes the new one a few inches under the hedge in case there is more rain overnight. “It doesn’t get much better than this,” she says. But stepping into the house she realises it could be better. The creature had opened and closed its mouth when she saw it through the French door. A mother is fluent in signs like that.

Regardless of the creature’s whereabouts, Helen sprinkles the hard tongues of oat, making sure some drop through the crudely fashioned hole in the pie box. If the mouse has gone away, she thinks, leaving food might bring it back. She remembers the words of the man in the hardware store, warning her about making the thing “feel at home.”

It is just one meal. And somewhere dry to sleep. As a child her father always told her, Do your best. Helen can hear him now, as if he were just behind a door, about to come in for his tea.

The only real proof of her advanced age are a chronic, persistent feeling of defeat, aching limbs, and the power of invisibility to anyone between the ages of ten and fifty.

She would like to buy more vegetables in tins, save herself the hassle of washing and cutting, but they simply can’t be carried with her legs the way they are. And taking a taxi would mean talking. Being asked questions that rattle the doors she keeps locked.

She goes further, turns right at the library and then left into an alley at the Butcher’s Arms. At the end of Magdalen Road, Helen stops at the crossing. Stares into the knuckled arms of an oak as wind gallops through branches. Some leaves fall while others cling to the memory of a summer past.

Often in moments of indecision, Helen will hear the voices of Len or David or Mum or Dad, just beyond the reach of her eyes. But this time Helen feels quite alone, as though anything new in life comes at the expense of something past.

Impulsively, she parks her trolley and returns to where there are small packets of unsalted party nuts on hooks at the end of the aisle. She has her tart and her biscuits⁠—why shouldn’t the mouse get something, too? Its life is most likely nearing the end⁠—as only an elderly mouse with nothing to lose could be so trusting and grateful.

When it’s her turn at the till, she puts the things from her trolley onto the moving belt. Follows each item with a sense she has done her best. After all, it might not be around to see another summer, so why not give it one final taste of what it meant to live?

She is quite sure now it is a boy mouse. Not only by the way he’s chewing noisily, but from the small packet between his back legs where the fur is a darker shade and there are two distinct lumps. She opens the refrigerator and makes space for the new items, somewhat amazed at how calm she feels with a wild animal in her kitchen sink.

Only eighteen minutes before the afternoon film on BBC Two. She picks a juicy bell from the container of strawberries, rinses it in the downstairs loo, and cuts a tiny wedge on the chopping board. When Helen drops it a few centimetres from the creature’s tail, the mouse turns and grabs the morsel. Standing up on his back legs, he turns the piece around and around in both paws as though choosing where to bite first.

Before returning to the couch, she glances into the pie box, where a grey head with long whiskers is peering out through the hole. Its eyes are like two currants, but bright with something she has seen before, in the faces of those who now haunt her.

Reality is all corners and sharp edges. Then a more unsettling truth drops: Helen is no longer able to die. What she has both wanted and feared for so long is now impossible. Squeezing both fists, she turns sharply to the bedside table. “It’s like having a baby! At eighty-three!”

Helen wonders what else she can’t remember, and why memory holds things back. The bigger question is why all this is happening now. Could what we call coincidence be something intended, with a meaning purposely hidden? That would imply design. A God. But what sort of God would strike down a boy’s father at dinnertime? Then allow the boy to grow into a beautiful, gentle man, only to snatch him, too?

When she lies back down, it occurs to Helen that her son had initially wanted a mouse. Of course! That’s why they were in the small pet section looking at toys. His dream had been to look after a mouse.

It was a mouse David really wanted, and in his mind had already begun to love. Where was that love now?

Helen tries to understand what’s happening to her, but each thought leads her back to the kitchen sink, where a lost wish has been granted.

Helen is certain now that the creature in her sink must surely have been a child’s pet that outlived his use as a companion and was left to die. Except he is downstairs in a pie box. Not dying. And for the first time in many years, against her better judgement, neither is she.

“The only consolation of being the last to go,” she admits, “is knowing the people you loved the most won’t suffer the way you do in their absence.”

“I’ll never know your name. But suppose I could give you one for the time we have left.” The mouse plops down to the sink and rushes to the lemonade cap. Dips his head for a sip’s worth. Helen watches. “That’s it. I’ll call you Sipsworth. It’s old-fashioned like me.”

soon the Australian soaps will start, then the news, then evening dramas, talk shows, or perhaps a film, “though please god not something from America,” Helen grumbles, “all sex, guns, money, and drug taking.” Not like the crackling pictures before the war, she recalls, with gentle men in tails and women in silver gowns with high, soft shoes.

Helen impulsively holds out a fragment of cashew, Sipsworth grabs onto her finger and pulls himself into her palm. Helen doesn’t know what to do, but is afraid to move in case her sudden action hurts him. The house is now creaking like old timber, and outside in the street, she can hear glass breaking. Helen notices her hand trembling⁠—not because she’s holding a live mouse, but because it’s the first time she’s been touched by another living thing for over twenty years.

Blinking her eyes, Helen goes over the things that have happened that day. Replays conversations in the library with Dominic and his mother. Wonders where they are . . . and if they are awake, what thoughts and memories are rowing them out to the deep waters of sleep.