guttering. He might only be travelling up a ladder, but surely the principle remained the same.
Handy Simon was not a fan of heights. All of life’s bad experiences had occurred when his feet were off the ground. Even his mother died on an aeroplane. A heart attack at thirty thousand feet on the way back from Spain (‘At least it was on the way home,’ his father had said, over the ham tea). It was their first foreign holiday. Simon often wondered whether, if they’d chosen Margate over Malaga, she might still be alive now. Although she was very fond of sweet sherry and never held back at a buffet table, so quite possibly not. That was the problem when your parents were so much older than everyone else’s. You ran the risk of losing them before you’d really got to know each other.
‘Was I planned?’ he once asked his mother.
‘You were a surprise,’ she told him. ‘A miracle.’
‘Like Jesus?’
‘Not quite like Jesus,’ she said.
He tested out the first rung with the heel of his boot. Life at Cherry Tree involved a more than reasonable amount of ladder work. He’d once mentioned the words ‘health and safety’ to Miss Bissell in the staff room, but she had arched an eyebrow in silence and returned to her Sudoku. Simon found this was the main problem with people. They never listened. They were too busy enjoying the sound of their own voices to take any notice of him, and because of that, they missed out on a wealth of information. Not anecdotes or stories, but statistics and proof. Facts. Facts were the important things. Facts stood the test of time. Without facts, the world would become a giant mess of rumour and hearsay, and everything would fall apart.
He turned his collar against the wind. North-easterly. Bitter. Becoming cloudier as the day progressed. Once the wind found its way into Cherry Tree, it never seemed to be able to find its way out. It was the architecture. The wind took the path of least resistance, it rushed down from the buildings and hid around corners. People thought corners were the best places to escape the wind, but often, they were the most dangerous. Simple physics. He’d tried to explain this to Miss Ambrose one day, but her eyes had glazed over in a most unattractive fashion. He hadn’t given up, mind. It wasn’t in his nature. Instead, he’d printed out a page on the subject from the internet for her. Some people are visual learners, after all. Actually, forty-three per cent of people are visual learners.
Simon knew he’d made a mistake as soon as he got to the seventh rung. He felt the push of air against the ladder, and heard the creak of metal on the tiles. He wondered if his life might flash before him, or at least the parts with a degree of significance, but all he saw was a cracked roof tile and a pigeon, looking down on him with clockwork curiosity. Perhaps he didn’t have any significant parts. Perhaps his significant parts were yet to come, and would now never arrive, due to a north-easterly wind and his decision to have one more egg sandwich. He’d just begun to feel the inevitability of the slide, an unexpected journey back to earth, when a voice said, ‘Steady on there, young man,’ and the ladder righted itself and the world became vertical again.
When Simon looked down (which took a surprisingly large amount of courage), he saw the top of a trilby and an overcoated forearm holding up the ladder. The new chap. From the day room. Whatshisname again.
‘Price,’ said the man, and shook hands when Simon reached the protection of solid ground. He nodded at the ladder. ‘Health and safety issue, if you ask me.’
‘Exactly.’ Simon tried to swallow, but he couldn’t find anything to do it with. ‘I’ve told them as much.’
‘That’s the problem with people today. They never listen.’
‘Exactly,’ said Simon. He said it a few more times, just for good measure. ‘I need some ties for the ladder. Secure it to the wall.’
‘I’ll help, if you like.’ Mr Price straightened his trilby. ‘Give you a hand.’
Simon wasn’t entirely sure of the average age of a Cherry Tree resident, but he felt it was one more suited to holding up supermarket queues than ladders. The man in the trilby looked more than capable, mind you. As though age had tightened his springs, rather than unwound them.
‘Don’t look so worried, Simon,’ he said. ‘I’m not quite ready for the knacker’s yard just yet.’
A string of ‘no’s came out of Simon’s mouth in a little dance. ‘Oscar Swahn won an Olympic medal in his seventies,’ he said. ‘Fauja Singh ran the London Marathon at ninety-two. History is littered with people who achieved great things in old age.’
The man lifted the ladder away from the guttering. ‘Those are very interesting facts, Simon. Why don’t you tell me some more?’
And so he did.
I could tell Elsie thought it was a completely ridiculous suggestion, but she still went along with it. It’s one of the best things about her.
‘Of course I’ll come with you. That’s what friends are for,’ she said.
‘You don’t want to argue about it?’
‘Sometimes it’s easier,’ she said, ‘just to agree. Or I’ll spend the entire rest of the day listening to you talk me into it.’
The potting shed, I told her. If we sit in the potting shed, we’re bound to spot him sooner or later, and you can see for yourself. I wanted to prove I wasn’t hallucinating, that I hadn’t lost my mind.
‘Of course you haven’t lost your mind,’ she said.
I wasn’t so sure. Although it’s such a silly turn of phrase. It implies it’s somehow your fault. It suggests you were being careless, or became distracted along the way and mislaid it somewhere, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier. Or a husband, perhaps. Although I suppose losing your mind can prove quite helpful sometimes, because it does hint there is a possibility, however slim, that you may find it again.
It smelled of creosote, the potting shed. Creosote and soil. We were surprised it was unlocked, but there are times Cherry Tree seems stuck somewhere in the 1950s, when the whole world was unlocked but no one had yet thought to steal from it. It was dark too. There was a feathery light, but it didn’t quite meet up with the corners. There were shelves at the back, with all manner of bottles and jars stretched along them – many of which, I suspected, did not contain what they claimed to. Below the shelving, a row of gardening equipment rested against the wood, and made odd shadows on the walls. I didn’t know all their names, but there was a giant spade, still holding on to lumps of earth. Elsie asked me what each of the tools was called, because she said she was always looking for an opportunity to stretch my mind. I told her my mind wasn’t in the mood for being stretched. I told her, if she wanted to know the names for all the different tools, she could find them out for herself, and I pulled out some old deckchairs for us to sit on instead. As soon as I opened them up, I could tell they weren’t safe, but she said they’d be perfectly fine if we stayed put and didn’t move around too much, and so we rested on decayed canvas and peered through a window smeared with last year’s gardening.
‘We could be at home instead of sitting here,’ she said. ‘With a full pot of tea and Radio 4.’
I ignored her. She was used to it by now. Whilst I ignored her, I listened
