What Goes Around (IP)

It was Sunday afternoon, and Annabelle Jones was preparing her Sunday afternoon soak. She popped a Lush bath bomb underneath the stream from the bath’s mixer tap, and contemplated a weekend well spent.

On Friday night, after work, there had a been a pleasant few hours in a pub with friends. On Saturday she had visited Sainsbury’s for her weekly shop, cleaned her flat, done what she called her personal washing and ironing, and caught up with recorded TV viewing.  On Sunday morning, after a bit of a lie in, she had changed her sheets and towels, and washed and tumble-dried them.  The Sunday soak was to ensure she had clean skin and hair to go with the clean, fresh smelling sheets. 

    Keeping everything clean and fresh and ordered had not always been so easy.  The furnished flat she’d had in the eighties hadn’t included a proper cooker, never mind a washing machine, and everything had to be carted to the laundrette and back.  In the fifties she’d lived in a cramped bedsit with a gas ring and a shared bathroom, and she’d paid an extra half-crown a week for her landlady to provide clean, shabby sheets and towels.  Her own clothes she’d washed in the bathroom sink, and not, she shuddered to think now, nearly as often as modern-day standards would require.  A lot more had to be dry cleaned then, thought Annabelle, as she watched the bath bomb fizz.

    In the twenties, there had been no question of her leaving home until she was married.  As she declined any offers of marriage made to her, she had lived, from her birth, in the respectable red brick villa with the slightly irritated parents she had at the time, until it was time to move on.  Annabelle never had to think about laundry then.  Those parents had a couple of maids, and a cook.

    Her previous parents had been grander still, living in a house large enough to be called a Hall, with a number of servants, and a carriage.  Annabelle didn’t remember much about it because those parents put her in an institution when she was nine years old. 

    The parents before them had been impoverished by comparison, but Annabelle remembered a happy childhood.  Her father was a farmer, and she recalled sitting on warm, sweet-smelling haystacks, and chasing the chickens and the two collie dogs with her brothers and sisters, two of each, all older than she was.  It was the only time she ever married, to a good-natured young man called Samuel, and the only time she had children, but Annabelle preferred not to think about the sturdy little boy with the fair hair and freckles, and the laughing little girl with the chubby arms and the slight, adorable lisp. 

    She turned off the water, ruffled the surface with her hand, then slipped off her dressing gown and climbed in.

    She wondered what her rosy cheeked first mother would make of life now.  A plumbed in bath.  Bath bombs.  A microwave.  A computer.  A job.  A flat of her own.  A tumble-dryer.  A weekend. 

    At least, Annabelle assumed that Sarah Deacon had been her first mother.  She couldn’t remember any further back.

    She played idly with the pink, scented water, sending small waves over her stomach and abdomen.

    The private institution the next parents had put her in was run by a money-grabbing couple called Mr and Mrs Buckley. It was hideous in every conceivable way, but at times like this Annabelle quite liked remembering it.  In her warm, enveloping bath, with a glass of something bubbly on the windowsill behind her, her radio burbling gently, a choice of tasty, nutritious food waiting in her fridge or freezer, she smiled, and sighed, and stretched out her arms and legs like a satisfied cat. 

    She had eventually found out what happened to the Buckleys, but in 1898, when the thirty year old Annabelle moved on, they seemed all powerful pillars of society.  They and everyone around them were impervious to the needs or reproaches of a thin, gaunt, lank-haired, distracted woman, whose sores and bruises were no doubt the result of her own disturbed activities, and whose family paid the bills on the strict understanding that they need have nothing to do with her.  No-one would listen to her screeching accusations of visits in the night from both Mr and Mrs Buckley.  Such vile slurs, such evil thoughts, were only more evidence of depravity and madness. 

    But someone had taken an interest in this particular lost and unpleasant cause.  When she was ten years old, Mrs Larrimer had come to see her.

    Mrs Larrimer’s social standing in her community was similar to that of Annabelle's then parents in theirs, at the other end of the country.  Unlike them, Mrs Larrimer interested herself in good works, and particularly in visiting the poor unfortunates in Mr and Mrs Buckley’s institution.

    Annabelle could still remember her hands and face being sponged, and her dirty hair being roughly combed, and a slightly less grimy pinafore being dragged over her head, before she was taken into a large room with heavy, dark furniture, to see Mrs Larrimer for the first time. 

    Mrs Larrimer was seated on a slightly frayed chaise longue.  She looked at the girl in front of her in silence for several moments, before turning to Mrs Buckley.  ‘So.  This is Alice.’  Annabelle was called Alice then.  ‘You say she has delusions? She thinks she’s somebody else?’

    Mrs Buckley’s oval face, framed by her lustrous dark hair, was impassive.  Even at the age of ten, Alice knew that beauty was no indicator of character. Mrs Buckley, some years younger than her husband, was beautiful. 

    ‘The girl is one of our most intractable cases, Mrs Larrimer.  So sad, in one so young.  I would not get too close to her.  She can be violent.’

    Annabelle remembered Mrs Larrimer’s dry smile, in a face that was creased rather than wrinkled.  At the time, she had assumed Mrs Larrimer was old.  Now, she knew, the lady had been in her mid-forties.

    ‘Oh, I’m sure we shall be perfectly all right, Mrs Buckley. Please, feel free to leave.  I know your time is valuable.’        

    Alice was surprised when Mrs Buckley withdrew, after a moment’s hesitation, leaving her alone with Mrs Larrimer.  

    ‘You see, my dear,’ said the lady, as though their conversation had already started, ‘I have money.  Remember that for the future, Alice.   If you have money, or even if people just think you have money, they are more inclined to do what you tell them, and any ills that might befall you can be cushioned.  Of course,’ she added, ‘one way to stop ills befalling you is to keep your mouth shut.’

    Alice stared at her.

    ‘You are not the only one,’ Mrs Larrimer said calmly.  ‘Your recall is better than most, though.  That is your problem.  Few children recollect their previous lives in such detail, certainly not first time around.  This is your first time around, I believe?’

    Alice kept staring.

    ‘I can recall four lives,’ said Mrs Larrimer conversationally, ‘but not in quite the detail you can.  Fortunately, my first time around, a gentleman who was a friend of my father’s recognised the signs and told me that I should on no account say anything to anybody.  He explained that there was nothing wrong with me, but that everyone would think there was, and would say I was mad.’  She shook her head.  ‘Of course, as I grew up he extracted a payment for his silence on the matter.  But he gave good advice.  My dear, there is no point in insisting your name is Martha and you live on a farm when the world can see that your name is Alice and you live in a rather lovely country house.’

    ‘But – ‘ began Alice.

    ‘You’ll get used to it.  The names.  The difference in social status.’  Mrs Larrimer sighed.  ‘That can be hard, if it goes the wrong way.  At least those who do not recall their past lives can never experience the desolation of finding oneself a maidservant when one was the mistress.’    

    ‘You believe me,’ said Alice.

    Mrs Larrimer smiled more warmly.  ‘Yes, dear girl, I believe you.  But if you are ever to leave this horrid place you must never breathe another word of what you remember, and what you know.  By the way, at what age did you die, in your last life?’

    Alice stared again. 

    ‘You don’t remember that?’

    After a moment Alice said, ‘I was thirty years old.  I had two children.  I was giving birth to my third child…’ She stopped.

    ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Larrimer.  ‘Well.  That’s another thing you will learn.  At least the memories mean you can make some choices about your lives.  What might be best, under the circumstances.’

    ‘What circumstances?’ Alice asked.

    ‘It’s all fixed,’ said Mrs Larrimer.  She took Alice’s hand.  ‘You see, my dear, we get the same number of years, every time around.  But it doesn’t matter, because with practice you learn how to live a lifetime in a decade, or a year, or a month, I suppose.’

    Alice looked at Mrs Larrimer’s wrinkled but plump hand, caressing her own thin, still faintly grubby one.  ‘How old were you?  When you died?’

    ‘Seventy-two,’ said Mrs Larrimer.  ‘I’ve brought up so many children I’ve forgotten who half of them were.  Not to mention the grandchildren.’

    ‘Will I always die having a baby?’

    ‘Oh no.  That’s always different.  It’s just the time that’s the same.’  She stood up.  ‘I’ll come again, my dear.  For as long as you need me.’

    In her clean white bathroom, Annabelle smiled and reached for the body wash.

    Mrs Larrimer kept her word, and came three times a year until Alice moved on, twelve days after her thirtieth birthday.  Not that Alice had known it was her birthday.  Birthdays were not observed in Mr and Mrs Buckley’s establishment.  But she guessed, when Mrs Larrimer appeared barely four weeks after a previous visit.

    Mrs Larrimer sighed when she looked at Alice’s thin face and overbright eyes.  The left eye was ringed by a purple bruise.  A black dress hung from the bony shoulders, as though unaccustomed to being there.  Which indeed it was, being one of two dresses being made available to female patients only when they had visitors.  Washing their filthy shifts for an hour’s visit was hardly an efficient use of anyone’s time.

    ‘Oh, my dear, even now, you will not heed good advice.  You will not submit.  Things are as they are, Alice.  You cannot change them.’

    Alice’s fists were clenched into a ball.  ‘You know.  You know what they do here.  What he and she do to me.  To us.’

    ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Larrimer.  ‘You know, in my third life I was transported to the colonies for theft.  I was beaten and violated, worked like a dog, and in the end it was only by more criminal activity that I was eventually able to buy my passage back to England.  I died in misery and penury.  There was nothing to be done about it.  But the memories of that time have stood me in good stead.  Even if I had been born into the same mean circumstances for my next life, I would not have made the same mistakes.  That, Alice, is the advantage we have over all those who cannot remember.’

    ‘Unspeakable things,’ whispered Alice.  ‘They do…’

    ‘You are powerless in this life, my dear.  Make sure the same doesn’t happen in your next one.’

    Annabelle rubbed creamy lather into her arms.  She had made sure indeed.  But she had never forgotten the feeling of despair that the well meaning but ineffectual Mrs Larrimer evoked.  Annabelle had thenceforth made it her business not only to learn lessons, but to help those with no access to the same foreknowledge of life.  She wondered if Mrs Larrimer, wherever she was, had ever learned that particular lesson. 

    It was only in her present life that she had managed to trace what happened to the Buckleys.  She saw with satisfaction that Mr Buckley had died at the age of fifty-four, not long after Alice, when a patient called Betty Lewis, whom Annabelle vaguely remembered, gutted him with a knife stolen from the kitchen.  Betty was confined to an asylum for the rest of her forty-two years (Annabelle wondered what she was doing now) but the circumstances of the murder leaked out, and Mrs Buckley was forced to sell the institution’s buildings and decamp to London, where the trail of census returns went cold.  Sometimes, when Annabelle saw things about cruel and dreadful crimes, where the perpetrators were a couple, she wondered.  Perhaps some people were locked together throughout all their existences, always drawn together and unable to remember why, or what the terrible consequences would be.  Or perhaps there were just more Buckleys around than one would hope. 

    The light outside the bathroom window was starting to fade as Annabelle finished rinsing her hair and stood up, enjoying the feel of water sliding down her body.

    Perhaps only those who could remember a time without access to warm scented water, or good food, or some control over their lives, could understand the sheer sensuous pleasure she felt, standing in her bathroom, in possession of all three.

    She turbaned her hair in a small towel, took the large bath sheet from the rack over the radiator, and began methodically drying herself. 

    She heard, softly from the radio, the name of the man with the brilliant mind and the broken body, whom the world mourned when he moved on earlier that week.  She thought what a pity it would be  if he had not remembered his previous lives.  He would, she thought, have been fascinated by a history of time even he had not been able to imagine. 

    Unless, of course, he had reason to imagine it.

    Her phone buzzed while she was preparing her meal.  She looked at the name on the screen and grinned.

    ‘Hello.’

    ‘Hello you.’

    ‘Good job you didn’t ring earlier.  I was in the bath.’

    A deep sigh wafted down the phone.  ‘Oh, the thought of it.  Are you drying yourself, by any remote and glorious chance?’

    She laughed.  ‘No.  I’m fully dressed and chopping carrots.’

    ‘Bugger.  Still, I can dream.  Now then, this birthday.’

    ‘What birthday would that be?’

    ‘Har har.  You’re not showing nearly enough interest in these celebrations.  Where do you want to go and who do you want to invite?’

    ‘Surprise me.’

    ‘Well, I could do that.  If you’re sure.  You only get one thirtieth, you know.’

    ‘I’m happy to leave it up to you.’

    ‘Sometimes I think I’m more excited about this birthday than you are.’

    She smiled.  ‘I love you.’

    ‘Of course you do.  I’m irresistible.  I’ll see you tomorrow.  Love you too.’

    Standing in her own kitchen, another glass of bubbly within reach, the smell of shepherd’s pie coming from her oven, a clean bed and clean clothes upstairs, and the scent of her bath still on her, Annabelle thought contentedly of how much she had enjoyed this life.  She hoped the next one would be just as rewarding, but she knew that, like Mrs Larrimer, she had learned enough now to make the best of whatever hand she was dealt.

    That was how she knew the man with the brilliant mind and the broken body had been a wise soul with many lives behind him.  Because whether or not he knew why, it was a lesson he had obviously and wonderfully learned.