Three Things About Elsie

by Joanna Cannon

But it was as though life had an undercurrent, and no matter how hard she tried to swim in the other direction, it was determined to pull her away. It would be so much easier, she thought, if you knew what the world’s intentions were in the first place. It would save such a lot of energy. Instead of paddling around aimlessly, you could swim with confidence towards your target, ignoring the temptation and the distraction, and all the other swimmers, who battled and argued with the tide.

There are times when sharing a problem only seems to make it grow. Hearing the words out loud gives them a strength they never seem to have inside your own head, and it’s easier sometimes to let them stay there, unnoticed. If you lock something away for long enough, if you can manage to keep it from escaping, eventually it feels as though it never really happened in the first place. But I knew as soon as I told Elsie, as soon as I allowed the problem to leave, I’d lose ownership of my worrying and I’d never be able to silence it again. “Someone I’ve seen,” I said.

There was a feathery light, but it didn’t quite meet up with the corners.

A patchwork of perennials and ceramic planters, and gravel paths with no real purpose, like an elaborate board game. We watched old people shuffle from bench to bench, passing parcels of conversation between themselves and trimming their afternoons.

Sometimes, you feel a memory, before you see it. Even though your eyes can’t quite find it, you can smell it and taste it, and hear it shouting to you from the back of your mind.

I never thought it would come to this. You always think a secret will only be a secret for so long, that one day, you will turn to someone else and say, “I’ve never told anyone this . . . ,” and the secret will vanish and become something else. It’s only when you get to the end of your life, when you’re lying on a wipe-clean carpet with only yourself for company, you realize that you never did manage to find the right someone to tell.

Elsie stared at the trees, where autumn rested on the branches, waiting for its turn. “No,” she said. “I don’t suppose you do.”

After Elsie’s father was killed, her mother became strangely fixated with death. The more violent the end of someone’s life, the better. She once walked three miles in the pouring rain, to stare at a tree where a motorcyclist had been decapitated. “It’s important,” she said. “To look.” At first, I couldn’t understand why she would want to do something so intensely morbid, but then I realized it was a comfort to her. She liked to remind herself that God hadn’t just singled her out for tragedy alone. It happened to other people too. It somehow helped her to think we were all hurtling towards our destiny without having any choice in the matter. When I tried to explain it, Beryl said, “She needs her head read, if you ask me,” without even looking up from her magazine. Elsie’s mother probably did need her head read, but no one ever managed it. There were so many stories in there, I doubt even she could find all the words.

I’m not sure if it was because the sun disappeared behind a cloud, but Cyril looked older in those few moments. More fragile. You can see the fracture lines in people sometimes, if you search hard enough. You can see where they’ve broken and tried to mend themselves.

When that didn’t work, Miss Ambrose had joined a gym. She had run away from herself on a treadmill and sweated out the very essence of herself on a cross trainer, and then she had walked through department store beauty halls, past the rows of painted faces, trying to pick which one she might like to become. At one counter, she had been persuaded into an expensive lipstick, in the hope that it might transform her into someone else, but when she put it on, she discovered that she was still only Miss Ambrose, but wearing an expensive lipstick and thirty pounds out of pocket. She had even decided to call herself Ms. Ambrose. The only problem was, most of the residents couldn’t understand what they were supposed to be saying, and the few who did made her sound like an angry wasp. The only thing left, was her job. She turned her head, in the hope that