Breaking and Mending

Helen McCleod imagined there were people who were positively delighted to find out they are sharing a hotel room with someone else, especially if it means a reduction in the bill, and others, more, for sure, who can tolerate it, especially for a night. But she also was pretty sure that most people didn’t like it one little bit, particularly when it wasn’t planned. Sharing a room with a good friend was one thing (though frankly she’d prefer her own room even then!) but sharing it with a stranger was another matter. And if that makes me anti-social, she thought, then I don’t care.

     But she thought that before, when it was just hypothetical. 

     The hotel stay hadn’t been planned and most certainly wasn’t a leisure trip. She couldn’t get home from a business meeting because a river had burst its banks, flooding the road. It could have been much worse, everyone agreed. So far as the emergency services knew, nobody had been hurt or was still missing, and given where the breech had happened, even damage to property wasn’t that bad. But until the pumps had done their work, and that wouldn’t be until mid-morning the next day, at the earliest, the road was closed. And for Helen there was no alternative route home. 

     Well, I suppose I might as well just accept it and make the best of it, she thought. Though it was hard to see what the “best” might be. She wished she had checked her insurance policy to see if it covered for hotel stays in such circumstances, but at least she had some reading matter – she’d arrived a bit early in the town where the meeting was taking place and got a couple of paperbacks from a charity shop. She consulted her phone and found out that there was a Premier Lodge just up the road. Which will cost far more than it’s worth as I’ve not booked two months in advance, she thought, with a sigh, but I’m not going to trail around looking for an alternative. There would be toiletries in her room, and she recalled from previous visits to Premier Lodges that you could buy a toothbrush at reception – over-priced again. She supposed she would have to sleep in her clothes, well, at least some of them, but it wouldn’t be the first time. 

     There was something quite comforting about knowing exactly what you would get, though she had never mastered the art of opening sachets of shower gel, nor that of filling a kettle from a basin in a hotel room. Still, it’s hardly an ordeal, she thought, lying down on one of the twin beds (which, she had to admit, was very comfortable), sipping the coffee she had finally managed to make and reading one of what she termed her new/old books with some “guilty pleasure” TV as wallpaper. 

     Her room didn’t look over the car park, but if it had, and she had chosen to enjoy that particular “fascinating” view she would have seen that the car park was filling up. She was surprised, but not unduly so, when there was a knock at the door. But her surprise grew when she saw it wasn’t someone from reception, clad in their purple uniform, but a woman she’d have guessed was about her own age, clad in a three-quarter length parka, and looking vaguely apologetic. “Hello,” she said, “You must be Helen. I’m Abigail – Abigail Ross, most folk call me Abbie. Look – I know you won’t be best pleased about this. They’re as good as full, with the road being closed, and there are no single rooms left. The lady at reception said normally they’d never dream of this, but – would you mind sharing? “

     Yes, I ruddy well would, thought Helen. I’d mind it very much. Abigail brandished her keycard as if to prove her legitimacy, saying, “I expect you’ll hear from reception soon, but they’re SO over-worked, half the evening staff haven’t been able to get in, you know, the flood …..”

     Well, you don’t say, thought Helen, here was me thinking it was because we’d been invaded by killer slugs from Neptune! 

     “Look,” (it seemed she had a habit of beginning sentences with “look”!) “I could quite understand if you didn’t want to, and I could probably find somewhere else …..”

     At times, thought Helen, it could be quite tedious to have a moral compass, even if hers could be as fluid as one of Dali’s clocks on occasion. But she wasn’t lacking in empathy, and when push came to shove, she wasn’t going to send another woman back into the night (which was already falling) not knowing if she’d find somewhere to stay or not. Though the odds against it were infinitesimal, she didn’t want to spend all of the rest of her life with the thought of Abigail falling victim to a serial killer as she slept in her car by the roadside. 

     “That’s fine,” she said, “But I claimed the bed by the window first, and I’m keeping it!” She meant it as a joke, but realised it sounded a bit mean. Abbie was gratifyingly amused, though. She had rather a nice laugh, thought Helen. Not the kind that jarred on you. It wasn’t that bad after all. And it was only for the one night! 

     She had steeled herself to tolerate it, but realised that, amazingly, she was actually enjoying it! Abbie was good company without being intrusive, and it felt as if they’d known each other for years. The thing was, she still hated the idea of room sharing on principle, but sharing it with Abbie really was, to use her own word, fine! 

     I didn’t always mind sharing a room, she thought, as they waited for the kettle to boil again. She had always shared with her older sister Vanessa, and even when the girls were teenagers they were quite happy about it and didn’t hanker for separate bedrooms. They weren’t “joined at the hip” and in fact they went to different universities, though both were fairly close to home and they often spend weekends there. 

     They had always known that at some point they would go their separate ways, and that was okay, but had a notion (or at any rate, Helen did) that they would always be close and that there would, of course, be tiffs – there always had been – but there would never be a rift. 

     There was a rift. It all started out being quite funny, or at least with people able to convince themselves it was funny. Neither of them had either been especially rebellious – or especially docile, for that matter – but several years after leaving university Vanessa developed a rebellious streak. She resented that phrase. “You don’t develop it, like you do the measles or a double chin,” she said, “And anyway, I call it my real self coming through after years – decades – of being stifled!” 

     Neither of them was living at home now, but Helen “touched base” often. Vanessa didn’t, and though their parents were plainly sad about this, they tried to be pragmatic about it and made that joke about her student rebellion coming late. “Anyway, she has a good job and there’s nothing to worry about,” their mother said.

     This was, at least for a while, true enough. At least about the job. Always good at figures, she was working for an accountant. But in one of their increasingly rare conversations she told Helen it was mind-numbingly boring and “pandering to people’s obsession with money”. She didn’t get sacked – she walked out of her own volition. She had a boyfriend now (though boyfriend, it goes without saying, was another term she objected to) with the unlikely name of Cedric, though he seemed delighted to cash in on it (perhaps he had chosen it for himself) and called himself Lord Flauntleroy. Helen, whose talents lay more with words, wondered if he had fallen into the frequent trap of confusing flaunt and flout, but come to think of it, he did both. They only met a couple of times and she intensely disliked him. It had nothing to do with his manner of dress or hairstyle or anything like that. Vanessa liked to make out it was, but it wasn’t. He had such a nasty, sneery way about him. She had no problems with cynicism, she could be cynical herself, but he seemed to think the whole world except him was beneath contempt and waiting to see the light. Or as he might well have said, embrace the darkness. 

     She tried to persuade herself that Vanessa was just having a fling with a rather unpleasant Goth (and she knew some Goths who were the most gentle and decent people you could hope to meet!). But she didn’t succeed. All the same, the first time Vanessa came home and asked their parents for money, she thought it was nothing more than the fact that she was skint, though Cedric always seemed to have enough to spend on new clothes, and nothing more sinister than that, though she hoped they weren’t being exploited. She told Vanessa as much when, perforce, they were sharing their childhood bedroom. “Oh, for God’s sake!” Vanessa exclaimed. “If I’d known you were here this weekend I wouldn’t have come. They’re cool with it, so spare me the preaching, eh?”

     If I’d known you were here this weekend I wouldn’t have come. Those words seemed to orbit round Helen’s mind and float before her eyes. If they had been said in temper it wouldn’t have been so bad. They could both be hasty. But they were said in a supercilious drawl. 

     We love each other she reminded herself, feeling betrayed and confused, we’re sisters and love each other, and I don’t want this to be happening.

     For a while things almost seemed to be set into a pattern. And they got worse. Another teacher at the school where Helen was working then had family connections in the town where Vanessa was living. Some people like being the bringer of bad news and do so with an air of smugness, but Dean was a kind man, and one of those men who seem fatherly when they’re only in their twenties. “Helen, I have to tell you this, even though I don’t want to. The man your sister is involved with – the one who calls himself Lord Flauntleroy, well, he’s a drug dealer. It’s actually a pretty open secret.”

     Helen was about to say that she wasn’t puritanical about such matters, she’d smoked an odd joint herself now and then at university (though she’d never liked it much!) and thought it should be decriminalised. But one look at Dean’s face told her he wasn’t just talking about a bit of pot for private use. 

     This led to what Helen always thought of (when she couldn’t avoid thinking of it) as The Row, and those two syllables, even capitalised, weren’t nearly enough to express all it meant. A chance phone call home led to her discovering Vanessa was also at home and she decided to confront her sister. Just what the hell did I hope for, she wondered, that she’d see the error of her ways and return to the bosom of her family? It went horribly wrong, of course. They didn’t actually come to blows, but they might as well have done – and their parents overheard. “Is it true?” their mother asked in a pained, thin, forced little voice, “About the drug-dealing? We can help you out, you know! But – as long as you’re involved in this – this kind of thing –“ she broke off and their father, who seemed to have become an old man as he walked down the corridor, said, “You’re not welcome in this house. Like your mother says – we’d help you all we could ….”

     “If I gave up Cedric” she said, “Well, no thank you. It’s a shame, but there it is!” Looking back Helen remembered how her father wasn’t the only one who had aged. Vanessa’s skin wasn’t clear any more, and her eyes had a look that wasn’t exactly glazed, but was unfocussed and lethargic and agitated at the same time. She was wearing a long-sleeved top, but she was pretty sure what she’d see if she rolled them up. 

     “I expect you’re disowning me, too,” she said, before slamming the door behind her and – a gesture that was both childish and terrible at the same time – throwing her key down a grid outside their house. 

     “We didn’t disown her,” their mother muttered, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, and she was a woman who was quite messianic about using a handkerchief. “We didn’t. Did we, Helen?”

     “No, you didn’t,” Helen said, giving her a hug, and biting her tongue to stop herself saying, but nobody would have blamed you if you did.

     They didn’t hear from Vanessa after that. They heard rumours about her, and none of them were reassuring. One thing that was, apparently, fact, was that Cedric had died – officially of pneumonia, but it was an open secret that his body was so ravaged that he had no capacity to fight anything. “I don’t know what to say,” their mother said, “I’d never wish anyone dead, and he’s some mother’s son, God help the poor woman, but – if it brings Vanessa back to us ….”

     Helen didn’t have the heart to say that wasn’t going to happen. From what she had heard, Vanessa and Cedric had broken up years ago, but she had come under influences that made him look like – well, like Little Lord Fauntleroy. And she looked dreadful. 

     Since then, since that If I’d known you were here this weekend I wouldn’t have come, Helen had loathed the idea of sharing a room with anyone. Now she found herself thinking, none of it is Abbie’s fault, and perhaps it’s no bad thing this has happened. They stayed up chatting until it was quite late, and after that, she slept surprisingly well. She awoke to see the bed next to her empty, and of course assumed that Abbie was just in the bathroom. There was nobody in the bathroom. And it was plain that Abbie’s bed had not been slept in. The duvet still had that cardboard band across it signifying that it was freshly laundered. But there was a piece of paper on the bed, and there was a mobile phone number written on it. 

     She didn’t mention her room-mate at the reception desk. She knew there would be that embarrassed pause whilst they tried to work out what she was talking about. She called the number, and heard the voice she hadn’t heard for years. 

     It was not an uncomplicated happy ending. Vanessa was very ill and years of neglect and drugs had taken their toll. But she wanted to come home. And she did, and gradually, with months of care, and sometimes seeming to go one step forward and three steps backwards, she began to regain her health, though she would never be robust, and was closer than she had ever been to her sister and her parents. 

     The sisters were visiting an exhibition when they heard a mother call out, “Abbie, don’t go too far away!” to a little girl who (perhaps understandably!) wasn’t entranced by ceramics. 

     Vanessa looked wistful, “I had a friend called that,” she said, “A sweet, lovely girl, made me realise how much I missed having a sister. It was so tragic. She wasn’t nearly as far gone as most of us were in the squat that passed for home, and was quite the little housekeeper,” she smiled amid her sadness, “But – sod’s law and all that. She was the one who got the rogue heroin and didn’t stand a chance.”

     For a split second Helen wondered about telling her sister what had happened. Then their eyes met, and they both nodded, and realised it wasn’t necessary.