Turning Cartwheels

“Sorry, did I do something wrong?”

The woman, Helen, did not look as if she was sorry. She did not look as if she thought she had done something wrong. Elena looked at her, hips jutting, shoulders wide, toilet brush held like a baton at the ready, and measured her answer carefully.

“No, no, not at all, this is great, it was just that…”

“Good. I’ll finish up here then. Once you’re dressed we can have some breakfast.”

Elena found herself turning back up the stairs, and was half way to the top before she found the thought she was looking for. She called over the banister to where she could see Helena’s back bent over the downstairs toilet, elbow pumping as she scrubbed the bowl with a vigour Elena remembered feeling herself once, many years ago.

“Helen, I usually have breakfast in my….” Helen twisted her body without removing the brush from the toilet, and there was something in the movement that reminded Elena that there really was no reason not to dress before breakfast. “It’s ok. Never mind.”

In her bedroom, Elena drew the soft fleece of her dressing gown close about her, feeling the warmth at her neck and across her collar bone. She stood a moment, staring at the loose jogging bottoms she had draped across the foot of her bed the previous afternoon, ready for another day. She could put them on easily enough, she knew, but first she would have to fetch clean underwear, and shed her nightclothes, and after, she would be committed to a bra and a t-shirt, and to the brushing of teeth and the whole upness of the day, and for a second the weight of it all seemed to crush her where she stood. And so she crumpled. “Dressing gown off is the first step” she told herself, letting the robe fall to the floor as she lifted the edge of the duvet and inserted herself, “just for one minute, just to warm up”, between the softened rucks and sags of the sheets.

“Elena?” Helen was coming up the stairs and some protective instinct propelled Elena back to her feet, so that when the newcomer entered, she was stood awkwardly beside her bed. “You’re not dressed?” She watched Helen look her up and down, and then pull open the wardrobe, reach in, rummage a moment, then pull out a pair of jeans, holding them out for Elena to take.

“Oh, oh thankyou but I’ve got….”

“Okay.” Helen refolded the jeans and put them back on the shelf. “You have underwear?” And before Elena could work out how to answer, underwear was laying on top of the jogging bottoms, Helen moving about the room like she had lived in it for years.

Elena waited for Helen to leave, but she had pulled a rag from nowhere and had stared to wipe dust from the window ledges.

“Could I…. I mean, while I just get dressed, would you mind…”

That gaze! Every time Helen turned it upon her, Elena had the distinct sense of being seen all the way through, and disapproved of, too.

“Are you going to get dressed if I go? Or are you going to get back into your bed?”

Elena waited for an answer to come, one that would be both honest and right, but there was nothing. She shuffled out of her pyjamas and started to dress.

Helen returned to her dusting, addressing the street beyond the window. “Maybe tomorrow you can take a shower first.”

+

Downstairs, Elena reached for the cornflakes packet. She HAD asked for this, hadn’t she? Said it out loud? Expressed her intention to recruit a bit of help? Helen had been her idea, no? The 8am start had been committed to, had it not? Elena opened the fridge, and an arm shot in from somewhere behind and took the milk out of her hand.

“Put that back. Get those berries. You have yoghurt?”

“I have a bowl of cornflakes,” Elena stuttered. “I always have a bowl of cornflakes.”

“Do you want a bowl of cornflakes?” Helen looked at Elena, then glanced at the fruit, plump and red in plastic punnets.

“I… I always have cornflakes.”

“Have cornflakes if you want cornflakes. Or you could have yoghurt and fruit. Do you have oats? You could make a porridge?”

As Elena ate, Helen washed the pan and the wooden spoon and wiped down the hob. She was quick, efficient, silently shaming to be around. Elena kept her phone on the table, face down, allowing her fingers to caress the smooth casing, but forbidding herself to turn it over. There will be time, she told herself, after breakfast. Time for a little look at Instagram. Time to just check Facebook quickly. Time to have a little rest. But after breakfast, with Elena’s bowl and spoon already in the dishwasher, Helen slapped a small whiteboard on the table between them, and sat down.

“Right. What are we doing today?”

Elena stared at the blank board. “I don’t know.” The thing was, she DID know. She knew what to write. She always knew what to write. But that wasn’t what she was actually going to DO, and saying it out loud, to someone else, seemed suddenly impossible.

“Okay, what do you usually do on a Monday?” Helen uncapped the marker pen and held it poised over the top left corner of the board.

“I, er,” Elena’s speech was halting and uncertain. “I might do a bit of cleaning maybe. Or I get a few errands done.”

“Errands? What kind of errands?”

“Like, if I need to pick anything up at the shop, you know. Or make a dentist appointment or something like that.” Elena tried to think of the last errand she had run. “Or go to the post office to return something.”

“Okay, what else.” Helen had written nothing, and Elena cast about for a worthy activity to list.

“Maybe I will write my novel.” Something inside her noted the tone of triumph in her own voice and was moved to continue. “And also, exercise.”

Helen waited, and when Elena offered nothing further, she started to write.

• Cleaning

• Errands

• Novel

• Exercise

She drew in a breath and let it out, loudly. “Okay. Let’s get started then. I will follow your lead.”

Elena looked at the list, and with it laid out so neatly, found herself sufficiently inspired to get up from the table and walk into the living room, where she stood in the doorway, appraising the space. On the sofa, blankets were draped where they had been left, half on the sofa and half on the floor, which would have been easy to pick up and fold if it wasn’t for the crumbs littered over the upholstery, and the unopened mail on the sofa arm. Besides, the bedroom was more urgent, wasn’t it?

Upstairs, Elena tugged at the corner of the duvet, until it lay broadly straight across the bed. At the foot of the bed, a stack of clean laundry had toppled where she had kicked it in the night, and now needed refolding to be put away, which would have been simple had she sorted out her wardrobe to make space. But sorting the wardrobe did not feel like a job for Helen’s first day, not when they had errands, and the novel, and exercise to do before 4pm.

“You know what?” Elena addressed Helen, reminding herself who was in charge. “I think let’s do some errands.”

Helen sighed but said nothing, and Elena hastened down the stairs to where she had left her phone on the table.

“I’m going to make a doctor’s appointment.” Elena announced it as if it were a decision long in the making, which it was, given the mole had been growing for at least two months now. She sat down in the arm chair with relief, and pressed her index finger to the phone’s scanner. The screen sprang into life, and Elena clicked with automatic immediacy into Facebook, feeling the comforting glaze pass over the cells and synapses of her brain.

“I’ll do it.” Helen snatched the phone from Elena’s hand, navigated to the contact list, found the number for Elena’s doctor and pressed dial before Elena could refocus her thoughts.

“Helen, I can’t just…”

“It’s ringing.” Helen handed the phone back. Elena made a brief, futile attempt at rejection, but then the receptionist picked up, and Helen was still wiggling the handset in the space between us, and Elena had no choice but to take it from her and tell the voice what it was that she wanted, and check her calendar and agree a time and then it was done and Helen was watching her with her arms folded and a small smile on her face and Elena really wanted her to go away, but also, had to acknowledge that she was glad to have got that appointment booked, even if she did now wonder whether a cup of tea might now be needed to soothe her nerves. She did usually have a cup of tea about this time, after all.

“What’s next?” Helen said, and Elena got the sense that a cup of tea was not a possible answer. “What jobs do you have to do today?”

“Um,” Elena cast about the room, trying to remind herself what had felt so very pressing, “actually I think I should do a bit of my novel now. Don’t you think? 1000 words before lunch type of thing?” At least writing was done in private, she thought.

“Okay, good. Where do we write?”

“On, um, on my laptop?”

“No, where. At the table?”

“Oh.” Elena felt oddly small in the softness of the sofa cushions, while Helen stood over her, waiting. “Um. Here?”

“Here? In the sofa? Not at the table?” Elena wondered how a person could sound so outraged about something really so very trivial. Except it wasn’t trivial. This was where she wanted to be. This is where she sat. Her seat, in her living room, in her morning.

“Yes. Here. I like to be comfortable.”

Helen started to move about the room, picking up blankets and folding them with aggressive flicks of the fabric.

“I can see that” she said. “Too comfortable. How much have you written already? Eh? How is it working, this writing from the sofa? Is it good? And the exercise, too? You do not look like you exercise. You look like you sit down on your behind all day. And this house? This house is so dirty. Stuff everywhere. If you kept it tidy, you could clean better, but you don’t, and now it’s like a pigsty.”

Elena could feel the gathering wetness of her armpits, a creeping, tingling retreat of the skin around her cheekbones. Helen brushed a small pile of crumbs into her hand and turned her eyes to Elena. And then she stopped.

“I’m sorry.” Helen’s voice was different now. Softer perhaps. Or simply more tired. “I’m sorry, this isn’t what I am here to do.”

“No, it’s all true.” Elena stared at Helen, her eyes glazed, her body still. “It’s true. I’m so lazy. I sit here every Monday morning and I pretend I'm writing a novel but I've written six thousand words in ten months. And I haven’t cleaned in weeks. I haven’t done anything. I just wait for something to happen, and I never make anything happen, so nothing ever happens. It’s all true, I’m just rubbish.”

Helen deposited her small pile of crumbs on the arm of the sofa and stood up, holding out a hand to Elena.

“Not rubbish Elena. Come on, this stuff is hard to get started with. I tell you what. Let’s vacuum up these crumbs, and then let’s have a cup of tea and talk about what Monday is going to look like.”

Elena looked up at the outstretched hand. She didn’t want to vacuum the crumbs. She didn’t want to put the kettle on, or talk to this woman, or do anything at all. She just wanted a normal Monday. She wanted to sit here, and wait until it was nearly lunch time and too late to do anything except sit here until lunch, and by the time she had eaten something - toast or cereal or a muesli bar because that’s almost food isn’t it - then the day would be wasted and she would simply have to sit here until the others came home, write it off, start afresh tomorrow, maybe give herself a kick up the bum, get up and get going, be better, do better, do SOMETHING. The hand was looking pale now. Ethereal, flimsy, floating in the middle of the room with the memory of another woman hazing the air beyond. She could call out to her, now, and she’d come back, Helen. She would gather herself together from the hollow of the guitar in the corner, and the wallpaper they had hung when they first moved in, and the photo albums on the shelves. If Elena just reached out, took that hand, then Helen would coalesce again, and lead her to the kitchen, and put on the kettle, and forgo the biscuits for a banana, and take the tea to the table instead of leaving it on the side, and figure this thing out.

“Helen?” Elena tried to summon the energy to reach for the hand but she felt so weak, as if she was ether herself, stilled, subdued, numbed, nothing.

“Elena?” Was that a mouth, still here? A throat? Lungs? A chest? A beating heart?

“Helen, please help. I want your help.” Helen looked back at Elena from a face reforming, and this time Elena saw that her eyes were kind. “I’ve just been so tired. But I want it to be better. Like it used to be. I want to be like you. Please.”

When Helen spoke, it was as if to herself, low and steady and without any of the strident drive that had thrust every other utterance from her throat. “I did things differently. Back then. I would not have wanted to live like this. I would not have accepted it. This passivity. The dithering, the procrastination, the shutting off. I would have been so bored. What happened?”

“Life.” Elena shrugged. “I don’t know. I just ran out of steam. And then I just… I suppose I just wore a groove for my wheels and it was too hard to get out of it.” Elena looked at Helen, at the slump of her shoulders and the gleam of her welling eyes. “But it’s not all bad. A lot of it works really well. We wore these grooves for a reason. Some of them.”

“But you want it to be different?”

Elena took a deep breath, expanding her lungs and holding the air inside her for a moment. “Yes. I want it to be different. But I don’t think it can be the same as it was.”

Helen nodded. “No. Not the same as it is, and not the same as it was. So what do you want?”

“I want to be able to choose.” Elena looked away from Helen, at the tree outside the window, dancing in the wind.

“Choose?”

“Just choose. Just choose whether to ride in the groove or out of it. Just remember that there is a choice, and that I can make it, and act on it and change it if I want.”

Helena stood. She looked around the room, at the blankets and the crumbs and the laptop awaiting her hour of failure. Then she picked up the phone, opening her contact list and choosing a name. The phone rang twice before it was answered.

“Hi, Cath. I know, it’s been forever! Do you fancy a coffee? I’m just heading out.”