The Lonely Fajita Read online

  With wide eyes and a deep frown, Maggie yanks my arm to pull the phone away from my ear. I twist out of her grasp and hush her quiet, scooting to the other side of the bed where she can’t reach me.

  ‘No, I mean, I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been,’ I reply. I’m very sceptical about ‘great parts of London’.

  ‘Okay, so I know this might seem quick, but if you’re happy to go forward, you can meet Annie this afternoon. I’ve already spoken with her and she’s had a read of your application, so what we need to do now is put a face to the name and after that comes all the boring logistical stuff: DBS, references. How does that sound?’

  ‘This afternoon?’ I grab Maggie’s arm and ignore her melodramatic reaction as I twist her wrist towards me. It’s 11.08. So, practically the afternoon. My head throbs and it feels like my skull is cracking from the inside. I really hadn’t thought anything would come from this, not this quickly anyway. I’ve barely had time to look into places for me and Tom, which would obviously be preferable to becoming a pensioner’s skivvy, even if it was only for a few months. Alina charges on, oblivious to my pain.

  ‘Annie has suggested 3 p.m. Craig from the ElderCare team will be there as well, you know, just in case he needs to pull your leg out of the dog’s mouth!’ She booms with laughter again. ‘Joking, ain’t I? I’ll email you over the address now. Call if you need to, love! Bye, bye!’ I look down at my phone and over to Maggie.

  ‘What was all that about? You hardly said anything but you seemed to be agreeing to a lot.’

  ‘Hmm. Yeah. I think I might have signed up to something really stupid.’

  Maggie sits up and takes both my hands in hers. She’s using her teacher voice, which is equal parts sympathetic and stern, but also a little bit patronising. ‘I don’t want to be nosy, and I’m saying this because I care …’

  Oh, my head. I want a little break from adulting now. I’ve done far too much of it over the past few days. I wonder how much it would cost to go in one of those sensory deprivation tanks. And then just stay there. For ever.

  ‘If you’re struggling for money, Els, I can lend you some. You don’t need to do this,’ says Maggie. I take a huge gulp of water and wipe my mouth with my forearm.

  ‘I’m just going to go and see what it’s like, Mags. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Well – and you know I’m just as much a feminist as you – I just don’t think this should be your last resort.’

  ‘Maggie.’ I move my hands and wrap hers instead. ‘It kind of is. Mum and Dad are on another cruise and stopped giving me handouts when I got my first student loan. The money Nan left me has mostly gone on my Oyster card, and my boss hasn’t given me a single sign that I’m going on the payroll any time soon. Tom is … Tom’s got this issue with the lease. I haven’t got a choice.’

  ‘You always have choice. Women should always have a choice. I can’t let you do this.’

  Why is she being so self-righteous? It’s all right for her! Maggie’s parents won’t hear of her leaving their river-fronted townhouse on the banks of the fucking Thames and they bloody well don’t charge her rent either!

  ‘Well, I am, and you know what? For the first time in … ages, I feel like I’m doing this because I want to. And they might be really nice!’ I climb over her knees and pull my stretched grey pyjama top over my head.

  ‘When have you ever heard of them being nice, Elissa? They might treat you well at first, but I’m telling you now: intelligent, vulnerable people still get exploited.’ Maggie takes a deep breath and sits up straight. ‘This choice might seem right now, but it’ll follow you everywhere. It’ll ruin sex for you. I know they say you can detach from it, but I know you; you’re too sensitive.’ Maggie looks like she’s about to cry. ‘I mean, it’s your choice and your body, and of course, I’ll still be here whatever happens, but I can’t help thinking that you’ll come to regret this.’

  ‘Maggie,’ I say slowly. ‘What do you think I’m actually doing this afternoon?’ Maggie’s brow furrows.

  ‘Well, you know …’ She looks hesitant now. ‘I don’t want to say it.’

  ‘Did you think I was going to let someone shag me so I can pay the rent?’ Maggie’s expression smooths and she stifles a little sob.

  ‘No. No … that’s not what I thought at all.’

  ‘You did!’ I jump up. Maggie shrieks and I jab her ribs with my knuckles, laughing at how ticklish she still is. ‘I’m bloody well not becoming a sex worker!’

  ‘In my defence, you were in a very … distressed state last night!’ she says, between gasps. I stand up and shake the mass of curls out of my face. There’s no time to style it. A topknot and a comb-through will have to do. I pick up my knickers and ping them towards her. She screams and pulls the cover up as a shield.

  ‘I’m having a shower.’

  ‘Hang on, what are you actually doing this afternoon?!’ Maggie shouts at me down the corridor.

  ‘I’ll fill you in over porridge and coffee!’

  ***

  I tell Maggie about ElderCare and the plan to go to Snatch that evening, but Suki has already messaged her (somehow) so she’s coming along. A tiny part of me hoped that Suki had forgotten, or had double-booked herself, but she’d sent me a clip this morning: her head on a pillow with another girl’s hand lazily draped across her collarbone. In it, she whispered, ‘Snatch night, Snatch night, Snatch night’ over and over again into the microphone, so I guess it’s still going ahead.

  Maggie has gone off to meet her boyfriend Martin, whom she met last July on a charity gig overseas. From what I gather, it’s a scheme for overachieving teachers who don’t feel exhausted enough by the end of the year, so spend their summer holidays training educators in India. I’ve met Martin once but haven’t really formed an opinion of him yet. He laughs at Maggie’s jokes and doesn’t mock her for being perpetually upbeat, which is more than I can say for her previous boyfriend.

  I’m due to meet Annie in a place called Evergreen Village at 3 p.m., which is around twelve minutes from Hampstead station and on the same tube line as me. Questions are swirling around my head about Annie and how this ElderCare thing might work, if I have to go through with it. I click through the website, which has the same garish branding as the flyer, and look at images of happy companions doing implausible activities: decorating a cake that I’m 99 per cent sure has been shop-bought for the picture; completing a puzzle and laughing as if it’s the most fun thing in the world; and walking down a garden to point at a slightly dog-eared rose.

  I smile at this last one. When I’d go back to Hereford between terms at university, my nanny would always say, ‘Come and take a turn around the estate,’ which was entirely ironic because she had a tiny back-to-back garden. She’d point out all the flowers that had bloomed since my last visit, or tut in frustration at the molehills that had appeared overnight. Her little two-up-two-down terraced house had once housed seven children and she barely spent a day alone, right up until she went into hospital for the last time. Loneliness hadn’t been an issue for her. She’d had the same neighbours for decades and they swapped gossip over the garden fence about the new postman or ‘her who’s moved into Reggie’s old place’.

  A single bed and handrails in the bath, though? I mean, it’s hardly the young professional life I’d imagined when I moved to London and got a job that didn’t exist when I was at school. But it can’t be worse than washing Yaz’s pubes down the plughole before taking a shower. I wonder if old people are more gross to live with than guys in their twenties who ingest all their protein in liquid form?

  I think of Annie and wonder at the kind of old person she might be. Uppity and posh? Making the kinds of jokes you have to apologise for afterwards?

  I wonder if last resorts really are last resorts if you’ve said that about every living situation open to you? I click through to a rental website and move the sliders down to the cheapest bracket possible, a perpetually depressing experience. The map of London, initiall
y obscured by little purple flags indicating available property, reveals itself at such speed it’s like watching the opening titles for EastEnders. If I have to find a place by myself (and somehow manage to get upgraded from ‘expenses only’ to minimum wage) there are three. Three rooms that I could afford in Europe’s biggest capital city. I skim-read the entries and am left feeling a bit sick and slightly creeped out. Of the options available, one was masquerading as London, but was really in Southend-on-Sea with a two-hour commute; one wasn’t a spare room, rather a space in a ‘platonic double bed’; and the last was a shed. A shed. It was described as ‘spacious for a single tenant, with privacy shield’, but in reality it was a fucking shed shoved into a living room with a sofa propped up against it.

  Chapter 8

  I get off the tube at Hampstead and follow the map on my phone down a street with rows of tall Victorian red-brick houses dotted with sash windows and dainty shop fronts. I weave between demure middle-aged women who march along the pavement with arms looped through boutique bags. Others walk and sip coffee, pausing occasionally to look in the window of an estate agent, all whilst a well-behaved dog sits elegantly at their side. The bakery near my flat in Stockwell, which struggles to charge more than 50p for a croissant, would look entirely out of place here. Instead, pastries glazed with crackled syrup and delicate pastel macarons line patisserie windows. As I head up the hill, the shops make way for houses pushed back behind iron railings and heavily pruned box hedges. I veer left where the road splits into a single lane that tucks between holly bushes and a patchwork brick wall that ripples with ivy. We’re not in Stockwell any more.

  On a final cobbled lane, blossom drifts against heritage-green garage doors and Victorian lampposts flank the entrance to austere-looking townhouses. This can’t be right, surely? Where’s the Sixties prefab with pebbledash walls and mossy rooftiles? The net curtains? The geraniums? This turreted stone gatehouse must be a portal to some sort of elfin village; it surely isn’t a home for the elderly. The entrance, a pointed archway, is framed with a Latin motif that sits below two Grecian statues; one holds a scroll and the other a set of scales.

  Partially hidden behind the waxy leaves of a budding rhododendron, a carved wooden sign states ‘Evergreen Village’. I’d once flicked through a book called Secrets of the Capital and managed to skim-read a chapter on ‘London’s Villages’ before the sales assistant sarcastically asked me whether I was going to buy it. I was pretty convinced that places like this had been swallowed up by modern developments, or were empty through foreign investment, but here, barely five miles out of London, was a Dickensian remnant of the past. And it was glorious.

  I check the email Alina has sent me. Along with the postcode, she’s written an instruction. ‘Tell the porter at the gate you’re there to see Annie and he’ll walk you round to her cottage.’ Tell the porter? I would if I knew what a ‘porter’ was …

  I push on the iron gate and it swings open with well-oiled ease. ‘Um, hello?’ I say, stepping quietly under the archway. My footsteps echo down the length of sand-coloured stone. I pass beyond the threshold and hear a frantic scuffle, quickly followed by the appearance of a uniformed man who pops up behind a half-open stable door, his arms by his sides.

  ‘Welcome to Evergreen Village. You are Elissa, yes? Mrs De Loutherberg expected you five minutes ago. I’ll walk you over. Come this way, please.’ He unlatches the stable door, nods his cap as he walks briskly past me, and marches around the perimeter of an oval-shaped green that has been given a horticultural crew-cut, with ruler-straight lawn lines and metal edging. The man stops at an entrance between two hawthorn bushes and motions ahead with an upturned hand.

  ‘Please, this way,’ he says, before turning towards the gatehouse, leaving me alone in front of a lacquered front door. Annie. You can’t be horrible and be called Annie, right? De Loutherberg, though. No one at my semi-rural comprehensive school in Hereford would have got away with a name like that without getting thumped in the arm. I’m imagining Dame Maggie Smith, an uppity dowager, all wide eyes and quivering jowls.

  I look around for a non-existent doorbell and as I duck down to see if it’s hidden between the vines of a creeping wisteria, a dangling rope knocks against the back of my head. I pull it hard and the shrill sound of a bell peals from a tiny tower above the porch. I jump back and look as it violently swings back and forth, then glance over my shoulder. An elderly man stares at me with his hedge trimmers poised over a juniper bush. In the cottage next to him a curtain twitches and a chunky woman steps quickly behind it, nearly out of sight but for a protruding stomach.

  ‘Hello, Elissa. How are you?’ A moon-faced man answers the door and stands with his hands on his knees, like I’m a new puppy he’s taken a liking to.

  ‘Fine, thanks. Sorry about the bell,’ I stammer, but he ignores it and beckons me inside onto a woven grass mat.

  ‘Shoes off!’ He points to each of my feet, like I didn’t realise I had two of them, and stands next to me with his hands clasped behind his back in the manner of a slightly creepy priest.

  ‘I’m Craig. Alina must have told you about me on the phone?’

  ‘Yep, she did. You work for ElderCare too?’

  ‘I do indeed!’ Craig replies, rocking on the balls of his feet. I’m aware of his body in proximity to mine and subconsciously lean away from him. ‘Twelve years as a warden for our ladies and gents in Hampstead. I also cover Kentish Town and round by Camden. Some would say that’s a big area to look after, but I’m sure our residents are lucky to have me!’ He spits out a laugh. Poor sods. ‘I visit them once a fortnight, or more if they haven’t got an ElderCare companion, which is what we’re hoping you’ll become.’ He smiles at me without showing his teeth and juts his chin forward. ‘This is a quick visit really – completely standard procedure – to make sure you two click and the like.’

  ‘Yeah, of course. I mean, I could be an axe murderer or some sort of scam artist trying to steal the weekly pension!’ I laugh and pull at the ends of my scarf. Craig doesn’t seem to get the joke. ‘I’m not, obviously. I’d be a terrible axe murderer. I’m quite clumsy with sharp objects.’ Stop talking about axes, you total moron!

  ‘Right you are. Shall we go and meet Annie now?’ Craig smooths his oily fringe over his forehead and I’m quite frankly insulted that he’s the one who looks more uncomfortable.

  Craig leads me through an archway into a light, airy living room that opens into a small kitchen at the back of the house. A pair of French doors are pulled wide open and the tinkling of a wind chime drifts in from outside. Sitting in a wooden chair, her legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, is Annie.

  ‘Ladies! Annie, Eloise—’

  ‘Um, it’s Elissa?’

  ‘Right. There! Now we’re all introduced!’ Craig claps his hands in front of him and his blue polo-shirt rides up a couple of inches to rest on his hairy belly. I catch myself staring, so smile and turn to face Annie instead, but she’s looking out of the window bobbing her velvet moccasins up and down. Oh no. I’ve been lumped with a senile. I do not have the benevolence for this.

  ‘I’ll let you ladies chat whilst I do the rounds. I’ll be fifteen minutes or so, all right? Don’t be naughty!’ He speaks with palpable sarcasm, not that Annie has noticed. She’s quietly humming to herself. I hear Craig close the front door. The noise of Annie’s carriage clock thrums loudly from the living room and the sound of secateurs cuts the silence into awkward chunks of time.

  Annie turns to me after a minute and lets out a sharp laugh. ‘Thank Christ. I thought he’d never leave.’

  Chapter 9

  ‘Now we can have a proper cup of tea. I don’t waste the good tea bags on him,’ says Annie. ‘Come on, sit down, you don’t have to look so worried.’

  ‘Are you sure? I can make tea if you like,’ I say, at once impressed and unsettled by Annie’s sharp clarity that Craig is a total creep. Annie leans heavily on the arms of her chair as she pushes herself up, her for
earms shaking a little. I’m about to help her, but she flashes me a look that makes me sit down again.

  ‘You don’t mind a bit of swearing, do you?’ says Annie, her face entirely neutral.

  ‘Um …’ Is there a right or wrong answer to this question? If I say I like swearing she might turf me out, but if I say I don’t like it, she might think I’m some straitlaced loser who’s trying to suck up so I can sleep somewhere other than the pavement. The corner of Annie’s mouth twitches and there’s definitely a glint in her eye. Here goes. ‘Fuck no!’

  Annie recoils and turns the tap off, clearly affronted.

  ‘Chuffing hell, is that how you youngsters talk to each other nowadays?’ My cheeks flush with embarrassment. Of course she didn’t mean ‘fuck’, you total idiot, she’s eighty-three! She probably meant ‘flipping’, or ‘bastard’ at the worst. Well done, Elissa, you’ve just verbally abused an elderly woman.

  Annie rolls her sleeves up to the elbow and I notice that she has a chunky ring on every one of her fingers. She’s frowning at me the way Nanny used to when I refused to eat my mashed potato as a kid.

  ‘I’m really sorry. I don’t know why I said that.’ I try and laugh it off. ‘I don’t even talk like that normally! Swearing is terrible. Really bad. I tell my brother that every time I see him. The youth of today! What are they like?’

  She flicks the kettle on and giggles in a way that makes her torso shimmy. ‘Christ alive, Elissa, your face! You look terrified! Oh, I’m sorry, I’m only mucking about. I’m a naughty old girl, much like the lovely Craig has suggested.’ She walks over with two cups of tea that tinkle on their saucers. Her hands quake slightly as she sets them on the table next to a sugar bowl, plate of biscuits, and a small jug of milk. ‘Here we go. I haven’t used the proper crockery in a while, but you seem worth it. I have it up there on the dresser. Should have given it a wipe, really. ’Scuse the dust.’ Annie sits down heavily and frowns at me. I try and gauge what she’s thinking, but so far she’s impossible to read.