When you know you don't belong

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Sep 29, 2006 

It is a bright, hot, sunshiny September day, warmer than many of the August days we just had, and I am in Elsa's garden. Her two kids are bouncing on a trampoline, the church clock has just chimed four and bees are working their way over the lilies - hovering, alighting, crawling in and out of the mauve waxen bells, which strain and bounce under their weight.

I don't know Elsa well. She is a new friend. We are still at the careful, exploratory stage where half the conversation is frank and intimate and enticing, the other half simply small talk, comfortably dull. We've discussed schools and food additives and trampoline accidents and now Elsa is telling me about the house she rented after she split up from her husband.

"It was a horrible house, " she says, "really horrible. I don't know how we lived there. It was only about six months but it felt more like a million years. "

"Horrible? " I'm assuming she means it was dirty or ugly or cold or else staring out on to a loud grey main road.

"No, what I mean is we weren't wanted. There was something going on. Someone didn't want us there. "

"What kind of thing? " I ask her. "I mean who? Who didn't want you? "

Elsa shivers and pours more tea. A glass wasp-catcher hangs from the apple tree, three or four dead wasps inside it.

"Just - I don't know - bad things happened to us there, all the time. Jessie got ill, I got ill. One time I was carrying Lou - she was just a baby, nine or 10 months - down the stairs and I slipped and fell, for no reason, you know? "

I turn and watch Lou, now six and blonde as an angel, flying up and down on the trampoline.

"My God, " I say. "Were you OK? "

Elsa rubs at an insect bite on her arm. "Oh yeah. I kind of saved us with my body, you know how you do if you're carrying a baby? "

I nod but I'm thinking, "Well, anyone can fall. " Every time I carried one of our babies down our stairs I used to watch my feet and think of it. As if just the thinking of it might keep us safe.

"But after that, " Elsa says, "well, for instance, Jessie's room. One night she woke up screaming and refused to go back in there. She always came in and slept with me after that. And even in the day she never wanted to play in there and wouldn't even keep her toys there or anything and when I asked her why she said an old woman had told her to get out. "

I take a breath. "You mean she actually saw someone? "

Elsa glances towards the kids.

"She kept going on about this old woman, how the old woman had told her she wasn't allowed in the room. She was three years old at the time. Three-year-olds just don't make these things up. "

I think about this. I don't know Elsa well enough to say it but I remember being three and seeing things happen that, now I think of it, could not possibly have happened. For instance the day my little drummer dog on wheels crossed the lino nursery floor all on his own. I remember how his tin wheels just whirred into motion without anyone touching him and next thing you knew he was on the other side of the room. I think I clapped my hands in pleasure. But I knew better than to tell anyone.

"Oh I know how it sounds, " Elsa says. "I mean there I was, alone with two kids, a toddler and a baby, with Colin off with some woman on the other side of the world. It was a stressful time, I guess. "

"It's hard to know, " I agree. "How much of it comes from inside you . . . "

We both stop and look at the kids. Jessie has got down off the trampoline and is showing Lou something on the back of her hand. Lou giggles as whatever it is crawls up Jess's elbow. She glances back at us.

"A ladybird, " she mouths to her mum and Elsa nods encouragement and then she sighs.

"So when you left, " I ask her, "did you leave because of all that? "

Elsa puts her head on one side and dips her finger in her tea to remove a tiny bug that has fallen in.

"I really don't know. That's what's strangest of all in a way. I've kind of blotted out a lot of that house. Jessie's room, for instance, when I try and think of it, I can't picture it. I know it had this little window but - well I can't see myself in it or any of us in it. It's as if it never existed, as if we were never really there at all. "

We're both silent while we think of this. The sun is hot on our heads. A wasp alights on the edge of my tea cup and gropes around in the wet for a moment before changing his mind and taking jerky flight, moving off into the bright afternoon air.