Thieving Fear

SIX

Ellen felt as if she were being scrutinised not just by Mrs Stevens but by the framed photograph on the desk. She was about to favour it with a remark when she heard sounds overhead: a heavy thud followed by a cry. The proprietor of the Peacebrook Home didn't react, and nobody seemed to have gone to the aid of the injured, even once the cry was repeated with additional anguish. 'Should I go and see what's happened, do you think?' Ellen was driven to ask.

'There'll be no need for that, thank you.'

Mrs Stevens sat back in her generous leather chair, and the lower reaches of her sleeveless blouse bulged as though celebrating her last meal or many of them. Her small face was set in plushy flesh that underlined her diminutive chin with a larger version, while her pale arms were so plump they hardly seemed defined. Ellen had been reflecting that at least she was slimmer by comparison, but now she was worried about whoever had fallen. The cry came again, and she was on the way to standing up despite the proprietor's reply when she heard an exaggerated voice that she guessed was a nurse's. 'Have you knocked your table over again, Thora? There it is for you. We'll have to see about getting it screwed to the floor, won't we? Why don't you come down and sit with the others now. Your quiz show that you like is on soon.'

He sounded as smug as Mrs Stevens had settled into looking. If Ellen had turned the situation into a test, she had no idea how she'd fared. As she sank back onto the chair its creak made her feel yet more examined. 'Sorry,' she said sooner than she'd planned to speak.

'Ah,' Mrs Stevens said, perhaps with satisfaction. 'What for?'

'I wasn't meaning to imply nobody was dealing with it.' When Mrs Stevens only gazed at her Ellen said 'I suppose I did, but I was wrong.'

'Nothing wrong with being conscientious.'

'I'm that, I hope. I'd look after your residents the way I'd look after any of my family.'

'Do they need it?'

'My family?' The proprietor's question seemed both irrelevant and oddly ominous. 'They're fine,' Ellen said. 'My parents are forever travelling and my cousins are all working.'

'If more people cared for their families there'd be less need for us.'

Since she was resting her fingers on top of the photograph, Ellen wondered if she had the couple – a young white man arm in arm with a young black woman – in mind. 'Yours?' she said.

'Why, do you see a problem?'

'I hope not. No, of course not. Certainly there shouldn't be.' Ellen thought she was saying too much and then not enough as the proprietor's gaze failed to change. 'They're your children, are they?' she said, which earned no response. 'Adopted?' she tried saying.

'Why are you asking that?'

'I don't mean both. It needn't be either.' Ellen felt as if she were strewing her words in her path. 'I don't even know why I said it. Forget I spoke.'

Mrs Stevens turned the photograph away from Ellen. 'They're my son and his partner.'

'Of course, I should have known.'

'Why should you?'

'Tell me if I'm trying too hard,' Ellen said and worked on a laugh. 'I just want to make sure you don't get the wrong impression.'

'You are.'

'Well then, I'll stop.'

'And I will,' Mrs Stevens said, caressing the top of the frame. 'I'm afraid you aren't suitable for the post.'

Ellen's face felt puffed up with dismay. 'Because of what I just said? I'm sorry if I was clumsy, but surely I wasn't rude.'

'How much more of my time are you proposing to waste, Miss Lomax? I'm surprised you attended the interview.'

'I don't believe in letting people down.'

Mrs Stevens shook her head as if Ellen's remark were an insect to be driven off, and her lower chin quivered while the smaller one stayed unsympathetically firm. 'Just in taking them for fools,' she said.

'I really don't think that's fair. How have I done it to you?'

The question appeared to topple the proprietor. Without taking her gaze from Ellen, she leaned sideways out of her chair. Her face seemed to swell or sag in that direction as she reached down for a newspaper, which she brandished like a warning to a dog. It was the Knowsley Globe, a local weekly. 'Seen enough?' she said.

'I haven't. If there's something I –'

Mrs Stevens leafed through the paper so vehemently that Ellen was surprised the pages didn't tear. Not much less than halfway through she turned it towards Ellen with such eagerness that it left several pages behind. 'Here you are,' she said in a kind of triumph.

Ellen saw the photograph first, such as it was. She'd hidden her face from the photographer outside the town hall because Muriel's comment had made her feel worse than plain, but she looked as if she had been trying to conceal her identity. How fat a face was her fat hand not quite able to cover up? The headline beside them snatched her gaze away. TRIBUNAL UPHOLDS DISMISSAL OF CARE HOME WORKER, it said.

The report insisted that the panel had convicted Ellen Lomax of racist attitudes and intolerance of disability and bullying a vulnerable elderly witness. Having parted her thick lips with her outsize tongue, she managed to mumble 'It isn't true.'

'We've always found it reliable.'

'How can they print this when I haven't even been told?'

Mrs Stevens tidied the newspaper and folded her arms. 'I don't think they have to ask your permission to publish the news.'

'Not the paper, the tribunal. They haven't told me anything.'

'Dear me, someone has been thoughtless.'

'Yes, the paper. How could they put in all that and not interview me?'

'Perhaps they tried.' When Ellen uttered something like a laugh Mrs Stevens said 'Our son works for them. You'll have to excuse me now. I've an applicant to see in a few minutes.'

Ellen worked her stiff lips until she was able to say 'You never were going to give me a chance, were you?'

'I wanted to see how far you'd take it so I can advise my colleagues in the business.'

Ellen rose to her feet at a speed that she tried to find more dignified than ponderous. As she plodded out of the room she felt weighed down by the proprietor's gaze, but as she closed the door she found that Mrs Stevens had crouched forwards, face drooping as she pencilled comments on an application letter. Ellen was tramping along the hall when a voice above her said 'Are you the new girl?'

A woman was clinging to the banister two-handed while she lumbered downstairs. Although she was mostly enveloped in a voluminous long-sleeved floral dress, Ellen saw that her legs were twice as wide as her feet. 'I'm sorry, I'm not,' she said. 'I won't be working here.'

'Didn't you like our home?'

As disappointment shaped her mouth it threatened to infect Ellen's. 'So long as you do,' she said and had to turn away.

'I wish you wouldn't go. You're a jolly sort, I can tell. Some of these thin ones are a bit grim.' The old lady took a step that trembled the stairs and said 'Us fatties ought to stick together.'

She only meant that Ellen was less scrawny than whoever she found lacking in humour, but Ellen felt as if a memory that she preferred not to revive were lying in wait for her. 'Sorry, I'm not welcome,' she mumbled and was on her way to the front door when she caught sight of herself in a mirror across the lounge. Several seated residents turned to watch as she leaned through the doorway. She looked smaller than a child, but her head was swelling out of proportion, pumping up her cheeks so that they dwarfed the rest of her face. The expansion had spread lower than her shoulders before she recoiled, to be addressed by Mrs Stevens along the hall. 'Wrong door, Miss Lomax. Nobody wants you in there.'

'I hope you find a suitable replacement,' Ellen said with the remains of her dignity and let herself out of the house.

Had the afternoon grown humid, or was that her body? As she crossed the car park the sunlight felt treacly on her skin. She wanted to be home, to look up the phone number of the tribunal, but she could have mistaken her urgency for fever. Her skin was crawling with moisture by the time she reached the road to Hesketh Park.

Crossing the park on her way to the interview, she'd imagined walking through all its seasons to her new job. She'd wished she had a notebook for scribbling her observations: a girl being led by the hand past the duck pond by a boy stripped to the waist for some kind of action; a Crazy Golf course so miniature that you couldn't call it crazy, just mildly deranged. This no longer seemed inspired, and as she passed the aviary beyond the vandalised greenhouses she was distracted by a rooster puffing itself up. It reminded her of her appearance in the mirror, and so did the chubby-cheeked jovial moon on the front of a small blue engine carrying toddlers along a path. Perhaps she could do without a notebook.

Three-storey blocks of apartments faced her side of the park, but hers was at the far end of a side street. The numbers of her cousins' first initials admitted her to the square white concrete lobby. Mrs Sharp from the left-hand ground-floor flat kept replenishing a vase on a table with flowers from her plot behind the block. The current bunch was as white as the solitary envelope beside the vase. Although it hadn't been there when Ellen had picked up her mail – bills and offers rendered personal by computers – it was addressed to her. Someone had ringed the address with an incontinent blue ballpoint and scrawled more than one sputtering version of a word beside it. MISDELE was succeeded by MISDILIVERED, so forcefully that several of the letters were italics.

The item had been posted first class several days ago. Ellen tore open the envelope and unfolded the single sheet, which was apparently all it took to sum her up. The Appellant's attitude to a disabled witness was judged to be unsatisfactory. Her approach to this witness went some way beyond cross-examination and, given the age and frailty of the witness, could only be described as bullying. The Appellant displayed tolerance of racism and exhibited racist tendencies of her own. By the unanimous decision of the Tribunal, the appeal of the Appellant is dismissed and the decision of the Respondent is upheld.

The sheet bore a telephone number, but what would calling it achieve? The impersonal language had left her feeling exposed, unfamiliar to herself, guilty of behaviour she hadn't been aware of. What else was she unwilling to acknowledge about herself? She was refolding the page rather than screwing it up in her fist when she saw Mrs Sharp's Punto puttering into the car park. She didn't want to talk to anyone just now. She ran upstairs, at least until she reached the last flight, and arrived panting on the top floor.

Her family were waiting in her hall, or rather Rory's portraits were. He'd made prints for his cousins and Hugh while he was at art school. Each of them was gazing past the artist as if they were seeing the future, but now their fixed stares seemed more ominous; she might almost have imagined that they'd noticed an intruder. Ellen shut the door and halted in front of her own portrait, where her faint reflection on the glass doubled the image. Whichever way she moved she was unable to fit her present face within the younger model. Why was she wasting time? She ought to be checking whether she'd heard from Charlotte.

The computer occupied much of the desk beside the bookshelf full of Cougar titles in the main room. She switched on to find there was indeed an email from her cousin, headed Take Care? It was hundreds of lines long, and she sent them racing down the screen as she tried to find their point. Cougar might want her novel, but not under that title. Charlotte's senior editor Glen had suggestions for improvements – many of them, though some were Charlotte's. Ellen felt heady with elation and yet heavy with the prospect of so much extra work on a story she'd been sure was finished. In particular she could have done without Glen's choice of words or Charlotte's decision to quote them unedited. 'Right now your work feels bloated. Try to slim it down.'