I HAD BARELY HAD TIME to get home and divest myself of my outer garments when the doorbell rang, ten minutes earlier than I’d been expecting. Probably trying to catch me out. When I opened it, slowly, keeping the chain on, it wasn’t the person I’d been expecting. Whoever it was, she wasn’t smiling.
‘Eleanor Oliphant? June Mullen, Social Work,’ she said, stepping forward, her progress blocked by the door.
‘I was expecting Heather,’ I said, peering around.
‘Heather’s off sick, I’m afraid; we’ve no idea when she’ll be back.
I’ve taken over her cases.’
I asked to see some form of official identification – I mean, you can’t be too careful. She gave a tiny sigh, and began to look in her bag. She was tall, carefully dressed in a black trouser suit and white shirt. As she bent her head, I noticed the white stripe of scalp at the parting in her shiny, dark bob. Eventually, she looked up and thrust out a security pass, with a huge council logo and a tiny photo. I scrutinized it carefully, looked from the photograph to her face and back again several times. It wasn’t a flattering shot, but I didn’t hold that against her. I’m not particularly photogenic myself. In real life, she was about my age, with smooth, unlined skin and a slash of red lipstick.
‘You don’t look like a social worker,’ I said. She stared at me but said nothing. Not again! In every walk of life, I encounter people with underdeveloped social skills with alarming frequency. Why is it that client-facing jobs hold such allure for misanthropes? It’s a conundrum. I made a mental note to return to the topic later, unhooked the chain and invited her in. I showed her into the lounge, listening to her high heels clicking across the floor. She asked if she could have a quick tour; I’d been expecting that, of course. Heather used to do that too; I assume that it’s part of the job, checking to make sure that I’m not storing my own urine in demijohns or kidnapping magpies and sewing them into
pillowcases. She complimented me unenthusiastically on the interiors as we went into the kitchen.
I tried to see my home through the eyes of a visitor. I’m aware that I am very fortunate to live here, social housing in this area being virtually non-existent these days. I couldn’t possibly afford to live in this postcode otherwise, certainly not on the pittance that Bob pays me. Social Services arranged for me to move here after I had to leave my last foster placement, the summer immediately before I started university. I’d just turned seventeen. Back then, a vulnerable young person who’d grown up in care would be allocated a council flat close to her place of study without it being too much of a problem. Imagine that.
It took me a while to get around to decorating, I remember, and I finally painted the place in the summer after I graduated. I bought emulsion and brushes after cashing a cheque I received in the post from the University Registry, along with my degree parchment; it turned out that I’d won a small prize, set up in the name of some long-dead classicist, for the best Finals performance in a paper on Virgil’s Georgics. I graduated in absentia of course; it seemed pointless to process onto the stage with no one there to applaud me. The flat hadn’t been touched since then.
I suppose, trying to be objective, that it was looking rather tired. Mummy always said that an obsession with home interiors was tediously bourgeois and, worse still, that any kind of ‘do-it-yourself’ activities were very much the preserve of the hoi polloi. It’s quite frightening to think about the ideas that I may have absorbed from Mummy.
The furniture was provided by a charity that helps vulnerable young people and ex-offenders when they move into a new home; donated, mismatched things for which I was most grateful at the time, and continue to be. It was all perfectly functional, so I’d never seen the need to replace any of it. I didn’t clean the place very often, I supposed, which might contribute to what I could see might be perceived as a general air of neglect. I didn’t see the point; I was the only person who ever ate here, washed here, went to sleep and woke up here.
This June Mullen was the first visitor I’d had since November last year. They come around every six months or so, the Social Work visits. She’s my first visitor this calendar year. The meter reader hasn’t been yet, although I must say I prefer it when they leave a card and I can phone in my reading. I do love call centres; it’s always so interesting to
hear all the different accents and try to find out a bit about the person you’re talking to. The best part is when they ask, at the end, Is there anything else I can help you with today, Eleanor? and I can then reply, No, no thank you, you’ve completely and comprehensively resolved my problems. It’s always nice to hear my first name spoken aloud by a human voice, too.
Apart from Social Work and the utility companies, sometimes a representative from one Church or another will call round to ask if I’ve welcomed Jesus into my life. They don’t tend to enjoy debating the concept of proselytizing, I’ve found, which is disappointing. Last year, a man came to deliver a Betterware catalogue, which turned out to be a most enjoyable read. I still regret not purchasing the spider-catcher, which really was a very ingenious device.
June Mullen declined my offer of a cup of tea as we returned to the living room, and after sitting down on the sofa, she pulled my file from her briefcase. It was several inches thick, held together precariously by a rubber band. Some unknown hand had written OLIPHANT, ELEANOR in marker pen on the top right-hand corner and dated it July 1987, the year of my birth. The buff folder, tattered and stained, looked like a historical artefact.
‘Heather’s handwriting is atrocious,’ she muttered, running a manicured fingernail down the page at the top of the pile of papers. She spoke quietly, to herself rather than to me. ‘Biannual visits … continuity of community integration … early identification of any additional support needs …’
She continued to read, and then I saw her face change and she glanced at me, her expression a mixture of horror, alarm and pity. She must have got to the section about Mummy. I stared her out. She took a deep breath, looked down at the papers and then exhaled slowly as she looked up at me again.
‘I had no idea,’ she said, her voice echoing her expression. ‘Do you … you must miss her terribly?’
‘Mummy?’ I said. ‘Hardly.’
‘No, I meant …’ she trailed off, looking awkward, sad, embarrassed. Ah, I knew them well – these were the holy trinity of Oliphant expressions. I shrugged, having no idea whatsoever what she was talking about.
Silence sat between us, shivering with misery. After what felt like days had passed, June Mullen closed the file on her lap and gave me an overly bright smile.
‘So, Eleanor, how have you been getting on, generally, since Heather’s last visit, I mean?’
‘Well, I haven’t become aware of any additional support needs, and I’m fully integrated into the community, June,’ I said.
She smiled weakly. ‘Work going OK? I see you’re a …’ she consulted the file again ‘… you work in an office?’
‘Work is fine,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine.’
‘What about home?’ she said, looking round the room, her eyes lingering on my big green pouffe, which is shaped like a giant frog and was part of the charity furniture donation I’d received when I first moved in. I’d grown very fond of his bulbous eyes and giant pink tongue over the years. One night, a vodka night, I’d drawn a big housefly, Musca domestica, on his tongue with a pilfered Sharpie. I’m not artistically gifted in any way, but it was, in my humble opinion, a fair rendering of the subject matter. I felt that this act had helped me to take ownership of the donated item, and created something new from something second- hand. Also, he had looked hungry. June Mullen seemed unable to take her eyes off it.
‘Everything’s fine here, June,’ I reiterated. ‘Bills all paid, cordial relations with the neighbours. I’m perfectly comfortable.’
She flicked through the file again, and then inhaled. I knew what she was about to say, recognizing full well the change in tone – fear, hesitancy – that always preceded the subject matter.
‘You’re still of the view that you don’t want to know anything else about the incident, or about your mother, I understand?’ No smiling this time.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘There’s no need – I speak to her once a week, on a Wednesday evening, regular as clockwork.’
‘Really? After all this time, that’s still happening? Interesting … Are you keen to … maintain this contact?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I said, incredulous. Where on earth does the Social Work department find these people?
She deliberately allowed the silence to linger, and, although I recognized the technique, I could not stop myself from filling it, eventually.
‘I think Mummy would like it if I tried to find out more about … the incident … but I’ve no intention of doing so.’
‘No,’ she said, nodding. ‘Well, how much you want to know about what happened is entirely up to you, isn’t it? The courts were very clear, back then, that anything like that was to be entirely at your discretion?’
‘That’s correct,’ I said, ‘that’s exactly what they said.’
She looked closely at me, as so many people had done before, scrutinizing my face for any traces of Mummy, enjoying some strange thrill at being this close to a blood relative of the woman the newspapers still occasionally referred to, all these years later, as the pretty face of evil. I watched her eyes run over my scars. Her mouth hung slightly open, and it became apparent that the suit and the bob were an inadequate disguise for this particular slack-jawed yokel.
‘I could probably dig out a photograph, if you’d like one,’ I said.
She blinked twice and blushed, then busied herself by grappling with the bulging file, trying to sort all the loose papers into a tidy pile. I noticed a single sheet flutter down and land under the coffee table. She hadn’t seen it make its escape, and I pondered whether or not to tell her. It was about me, after all, so wasn’t it technically mine? I’d return it at the next visit, of course – I’m not a thief. I imagined Mummy’s voice, whispering, telling me I was quite right, that social workers were busybodies, do-gooders, nosy parkers. June Mullen snapped the elastic band around the file, and the moment to mention the sheet of paper had passed.
‘I … is there anything else you’d like to discuss with me today?’ she asked.
‘No thank you,’ I said, smiling as broadly as I could. She looked rather disconcerted, perhaps even slightly frightened. I was disappointed. I’d been aiming for pleasant and friendly.
‘Well then, that seems to be that for the time being, Eleanor; I’ll leave you in peace,’ she said. She continued talking as she packed away the file in her briefcase, adopting a breezy, casual tone. ‘Any plans for the weekend?’
‘I’m visiting someone in hospital,’ I said.
‘Oh, that’s nice. Visits always cheer a patient up, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never visited anyone in hospital before.’
‘But you’ve spent a lot of time in hospital yourself, of course,’ she said.
I stared at her. The imbalance in the extent of our knowledge of each other was manifestly unfair. Social workers should present their new clients with a fact sheet about themselves to try to redress this, I think. After all, she’d had unrestricted access to that big brown folder, the bumper book of Eleanor, two decades’ worth of information about the intimate minutiae of my life. All I knew about her was her name and her employer.
‘If you know about that, then you’ll be aware that the circumstances were such that the police and my legal representatives were the only visitors permitted,’ I said.
She gawped at me. I was reminded of those clowns’ heads in fairgrounds, the ones where you try to throw a ping-pong ball into their gaping mouths in order to win a goldfish. I opened the door for her, watching her eyes swivel repeatedly towards the giant customized frog.
‘I’ll see you in six months then, Eleanor,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Best of luck.’
I closed the door with excessive gentleness behind her.
She hadn’t remarked upon Polly, I thought, which was odd. Ridiculously, I felt almost slighted on Polly’s behalf. She’d been sitting in the corner throughout our meeting, and was clearly the most eye-catching thing in the room. My beautiful Polly, prosaically described as a parrot plant, sometimes referred to as a Congo cockatoo plant, but always known to me, in her full Latinate glory, as Impatiens niamniamensis. I say it out loud, often: Niamniamensis. It’s like kissing, the ‘m’s forcing your lips together, rolling over the consonants, your tongue poking into ‘n’s and over the ‘s’. Polly’s ancestors came all the way from Africa, originally. Well, we all did. She’s the only constant from my childhood, the only living thing that survived. She was a birthday present, but I can’t remember who gave her to me, which is strange. I was not, after all, a girl who was overwhelmed with gifts.
She came with me from my childhood bedroom, survived the foster placements and children’s homes and, like me, she’s still here. I’ve looked after her, tended to her, picked her up and repotted her when she was dropped or thrown. She likes light, and she’s thirsty. Apart from that, she requires minimal care and attention, and largely looks after herself. I
talk to her sometimes, I’m not ashamed to admit it. When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.
A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a pot plant, is she certifiable? I’m confident that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.
I watered her, then got on with some other household chores, thinking ahead to the moment when I could open my laptop and check whether a certain handsome singer had posted any new information. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Windows into a world of marvels. While I was loading the washing machine, my telephone rang. A visitor and a phone call! A red-letter day indeed. It was Raymond.
‘I rang Bob’s mobile and explained the situation to him, and he dug out your number from the personnel files for me,’ he said.
I mean, really. Was all of me on show in buff folders, splayed wide for anyone to flick open and do with as they wished?
‘What a gross abuse of my privacy, not to mention an offence against the Data Protection Act,’ I said. ‘I’ll be speaking to Bob about that next week.’
There was silence on the other end of the line. ‘Well?’ I said.
‘Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry. It’s just, you said you would call and you didn’t, and, well, I’m at the hospital now. I wondered, you know … if you wanted to bring the old guy’s stuff in? We’re at the Western Infirmary. Oh, and his name’s Sami-Tom.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘No, that can’t be right, Raymond. He’s a small, fat elderly man from Glasgow. There is absolutely no possibility of him being christened Sami-Tom.’ I was beginning to develop some serious concerns about Raymond’s mental capacities.
‘No, no, Eleanor – it’s Sammy as in … short for Samuel. Thom as in T-H-O-M.’
‘Oh,’ I said. There was another long pause.
‘So … like I said, Sammy’s in the Western. Visiting starts at seven, if you want to come in?’
‘I said I would, and I’m a woman of my word, Raymond. It’s a bit late now; tomorrow, early evening, would suit me best, if that’s acceptable to
you?’
‘Sure,’ he said. Another pause. ‘Do you want to know how he’s doing?’
‘Yes, naturally,’ I said. The man was an extremely poor conversationalist, and was making this whole exchange terribly hard work.
‘It’s not good. He’s stable, but it’s serious. Just to prepare you. He hasn’t regained consciousness yet.’
‘In that case, I can’t imagine he’ll have much use for his Irn-Bru and lorne sausage tomorrow, will he?’ I asked. I heard Raymond take a breath.
‘Look, Eleanor, it’s entirely up to you whether you visit or not. He’s in no rush for his stuff, and I guess you should throw out anything that won’t keep. Like you say, the poor old soul isn’t going to be making a fry-up any time soon.’
‘Well, quite. In fact, I imagine that fry-ups are exactly what got him into this situation in the first place,’ I said.
‘I’ve got to go now, Eleanor,’ he said, and put the phone down rather abruptly. How rude!
I was on the horns of a dilemma; there seemed little point in travelling to the hospital to see a comatose stranger and drop off some fizzy pop at his bedside. On the other hand, it would be interesting to experience being a hospital visitor, and there was always an outside chance that he might wake up when I was there. He had rather seemed to enjoy my monologue while we were waiting for the ambulance; well, insofar as I could tell, given that he was unconscious.
As I was pondering, I picked up the fallen page from the file and turned it over. It was slightly yellowed around the edges, and smelled institutional; metallic, like filing cabinets, and grubby, touched by the unwashed skin of multiple, anonymous hands. Bank notes have a similar odour, I’ve noticed.
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL WORK NOTE OF CASE MEETING
15 March 1999, 10 a.m.
Case Meeting: OLIPHANT, ELEANOR (12/07/1987)
Present: Robert Brocklehurst (Deputy Head, Children and Families, Social Work Department); Rebecca Scatcherd (Senior Case Worker, Social Work Department); Mr and Mrs Reed (foster carers)
The meeting took place at the home of Mr and Mrs Reed, whose children, including Eleanor Oliphant, were at school at the time. Mr and Mrs Reed had requested the meeting, which was outwith the regular scheduled sessions, in order to discuss their growing concerns about Eleanor.
Mrs Reed reported that Eleanor’s behaviour had deteriorated since it was last raised at a case meeting some four months earlier. Mr Brocklehurst requested examples, and Mr and Mrs Reed cited the following:
- Eleanor’s relationship with their other children had almost completely broken down, particularly with John (14), the eldest;
- Eleanor was insolent and rude to Mrs Reed on a daily basis. When Mrs Reed attempted to discipline her, for example by sending her upstairs to the spare room to reflect on her behaviour, she had become hysterical and, on one occasion, physically violent;
- Eleanor had, on occasion, pretended to faint in an attempt to avoid being disciplined, or else in response to being disciplined;
- Eleanor was terrified of the dark and kept the family awake with hysterical crying. She had been provided with a night light and reacted with violent sobbing and tremors to any suggestion that she should give it up, being too old for it now;
- Eleanor often refused to eat the food which was provided for her; mealtimes had become a source of conflict at the family table;
- Eleanor refused point-blank to assist with simple household chores, such as lighting the fire or clearing out the ashes.
Mr and Mrs Reed reported that they were extremely concerned about the effects of Eleanor’s behaviour on their other three children (John, 14, Eliza, 9 and Georgie, 7) and, in light of these concerns and also those raised previously during scheduled case meetings, they wished to discuss the best way forward for Eleanor.
Mr and Mrs Reed again requested more information about Eleanor’s past history, and Mr Brocklehurst explained that this would not be possible, and indeed was not permitted.
Miss Scatcherd had sought a school report from Eleanor’s head teacher in advance of the meeting, and it was noted that Eleanor was performing well, achieving excellent grades in all subjects. The head teacher commented that Eleanor was an exceptionally bright and articulate child, with an impressive vocabulary. Her class teachers had reported that she was quiet and well-behaved during lessons, but did not participate in discussions, although she was an active listener. Several members of staff had noticed that Eleanor was very withdrawn and isolated during breaktimes, and did not appear to socialize with her peers.
After lengthy discussion, and in light of the concerns raised and re- emphasized by Mr and Mrs Reed about the impact of Eleanor’s behaviour on their other children, it was agreed that the most appropriate course of action would be to remove Eleanor from the family home.
Mr and Mrs Reed were content with this outcome, and Mr Brocklehurst informed them that the Department would be in touch in due course regarding next steps.
File note: on 12 November 1999 a Children’s Panel Review of Compulsory Supervision Order concerning Eleanor Oliphant took place, at which Mr Brocklehurst and Miss Scatcherd were present (minutes attached).
The Children’s Panel concluded that, on account of Eleanor’s challenging behaviour in this and previous placements, foster care in a family environment was not appropriate at the current time. It was
therefore agreed that Eleanor should be placed in a residential care home for the time being, and that the decision of the Panel would be reviewed in twelve months.
(Action: R Scatcherd to investigate availability of places in local facilities and notify Mr and Mrs Reed of expected date of removal.)
R Scatcherd, 12/11/99
Liars. Liars, liars, liars.
