The potting shed does have a useful view. Cherry Tree consists of four blocks of flats, called (rather unimaginatively) A, B, C and D. Miss Ambrose once spearheaded a campaign to have them renamed a little more romantically, but, like many of Miss Ambrose’s ideas, it never really took off. The main buildings crouch in the middle, and on either side are two courtyards. From where we sat, we could see both of them: 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. We saw Miss Ambrose, dawdling back to her flat as usual, with the world pressing down on her shoulders, and Gloria, from the kitchens, having a smoke in the back yard of the canteen. But no sign of Ronnie Butler.
‘Or whoever it was you think you saw,’ said Elsie.
‘He’ll be along in a minute,’ I told her, ‘and then we’ll be well away.’
‘We should have brought some sandwiches,’ she said.
I started to stretch my legs out, but then I remembered the deckchair and put a stop to myself.
‘And a flask,’ she said. ‘We always did that when we went anywhere, do you remember?’
I said yes, but I had half a mind on the window and I wasn’t really concentrating. I could feel a seed of worry begin fidgeting inside my head.
‘What if one of the gardeners finds us first?’ I said. ‘Or that handyman. I can’t remember his name.’
‘Simon,’ she said. ‘You know full well he’s called Simon. You would have remembered if you’d thought about it for long enough. You need to think about things for longer before you give up, Florence.’
I didn’t answer, and we were stuck in a wordless argument for a while.
‘Do you remember taking sandwiches on holiday, when we were children?’ she said eventually. ‘Do you remember going to Whitby?’
I said I remembered, but I wasn’t sure. She could tell straight away, because nothing much gets past Elsie.
‘Think, Florence,’ she said. ‘Think.’
I tried. 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.
‘Ham and tomato,’ I said. ‘With boiled eggs!’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes! We ate them on the beach at Saltwick Bay, when we went looking for fossils.’
I thought for a moment. ‘We never found any fossils, though, did we?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. We didn’t find any fossils.’
There was a silence again, before I spoke.
‘Why is it,’ I said, ‘I can remember what was in my sandwiches at Saltwick Bay, but I can’t remember the name of the handyman?’
There was a tremor in her voice, and she had to speak a bit louder to make a way through it. ‘If we knew that, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it now, would we?’ she said.
‘I don’t suppose we would,’ I said back.
‘Now tell me his name again, Florence. The handyman. Don’t give up so easily. What is he called?’
I didn’t answer.
It was another ten minutes before we saw him. I spotted the handyman first, marching through the grass, holding on to a ladder, but I couldn’t tell who was at the other end with all the darkness and the dirt.
I started tapping on Elsie’s arm. ‘Look. Do you see him? Do you see him?’
She said, ‘Give me a chance,’ and she got her glasses out and peered through the window. ‘I can’t make anyone out from here except Simon; they need to be a bit closer.’
‘They will be in a minute,’ I said.
And they were.
Very close.
So close, they couldn’t have been heading anywhere else.
She still didn’t see him. I know she didn’t. Not until the door was pulled open, and the shed was flooded with light. She saw him perfectly then, even though he was standing behind Simon. He seemed to fill the entire doorway, and he showed not even the smallest indication of surprise, but looked as though he fully expected us both to be there. Simon didn’t say anything at all. I knew he was still looking at us when he reached for a piece of rope on one of the shelves, but I was more concerned about the man in the doorway.
When Simon left, the inside of the shed was a box of ink again and I could hear my own breath, needling the air. ‘Well?’ I said.
We stared at the space where they had stood. We stared for a very long time, and eventually Elsie said, ‘But it makes no sense.’
I stopped staring and turned to her. ‘It’s him, though, isn’t it? It’s Ronnie?’
She told me she wasn’t sure. She said it looked like him, but how could it be? I’m not certain what I said next, but I know I ended up shouting, because sometimes you have so much fear, you don’t know where to put it and shouting is the only way for it all to escape from you. Elsie waited patiently for everything to come out, and when it had, she reached for my hand in the darkness.
‘Yours was the first hand I ever held,’ she said.
I was still angry, and my words came out in a snap. ‘Not your mother’s?’
‘My mother’s hands were always far too busy waiting for my father to come back. I suppose I must have held my sisters’ hands at some point,’ she said. ‘But yours are the first I remember.’
She was right. We held hands as we climbed hills, as we waited on pavements, and as we ran through fields, and we held hands as we faced all the things in life we didn’t think we could manage alone.
‘Are you there, Elsie?’ I said.
Her hand was older now. The skin was livered and loosened, and the bones pressed into my flesh, but it still fitted into mine, just like it always had. I needed to feel its strength, and she squeezed my hand, so I could be sure it was there.
‘I’m here,’ she said.
Neither of us spoke for a long time.
‘What do you think he wants?’ I said, eventually.
‘We don’t know that it’s him.’
‘But if it is?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you think we should do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘But I don’t think we should do anything at all right at this moment.’
‘Whyever not?’ I could just make out the shift of her silhouette in the darkness. ‘We’ve got to tell someone.’
‘But what?’ she said. ‘What are we going to tell them? That Ronnie has come back from the dead? No, there isn’t any proof, you’ll just have to take our word for it. You’re on probation, Florence. You’ve got to be careful.’
There was a silence again.
‘They’ll send me to Greenbank,’ I said.
I heard her whisper back to me in the dark. ‘Perhaps that’s just what he wants.’
HANDY SIMON
‘The potting shed?’
Anthea Ambrose put down her calculator and folded her arms so tightly they disappeared into her jacket. ‘What on earth would anybody be doing sitting in the potting shed?’
Handy Simon tried to find something in the room to stare at, other than Miss Ambrose’s eyes, even though they seemed to take up most of the space.
‘I couldn’t really say,’ he said.
‘And what were you doing in the potting shed?’
‘We were getting some rope for the ladder.’
‘We?’
‘Mr Price was with me.’ Simon’s shoes began to shuffle. Whenever he was worried, his anxiety always seemed to make a beeline for his feet.
‘You were having quite the party in there, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, Miss Ambrose.’
He’d known this was a mistake as soon as he’d seen Miss Ambrose was doing the accounts. The monthly accounts always made Miss Bissell irritable, and any emotion experienced by Miss Bissell was eventually passed around amongst everyone else. It was in his contract to report these events: a duty of care, it said. He was told at his annual appraisal that everyone’s opinion mattered. Just because he was a handyman, didn’t mean what he had to say wasn’t valuable. Everyone was valuable at Cherry Tree. No one was defined by their job.
‘What a load of bollocks,’ his dad had said.
‘Is it?’ They had been sitting on the patio, just over five years ago, when Simon first started working at Cherry Tree. The breeze caught the edges of the fly screen, and a row of multi-coloured ribbons applauded against the door frame. ‘Do you think our jobs make us who we are?’
‘Of course they bloody do,’ said his father, who had been known as Fireman John for his entire adult life. ‘Jobs are our identity, aren’t they? Where do you think surnames come from?’
Simon didn’t answer.
‘Wheeler.’ His dad squinted into the sunshine. ‘Mason, Potter, Taylor?’
‘Right,’ said Simon. ‘But that won’t happen to me. I’ll never be defined by my job. Cherry Tree isn’t like that.’