Three Things About Elsie: A Richard and Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Joanna Cannon

path you only intended to glance down on your way to somewhere else, and when you look back, you realise the past wasn’t the straight line you thought it might be. If you’re lucky, you eventually move forward, but most of us cross from side to side, tripping up over our second thoughts as we walk through life. I never used to be like that. I always knew exactly what I wanted to be, even when I was a child.

      ‘Did Beryl work at the factory?’ Jack said.

      I shook my head. ‘Apparently we mustn’t talk about Beryl.’

      Jack frowned. ‘What about the factory, then? If you didn’t want to work there, what did you want to do?’

      ‘I wanted to be a scientist,’ I told him. ‘I wanted to make a difference with my life.’

      I did. The first time I announced it to the world, we were sitting at my kitchen table. The house smelled of warmth and pastry, and my dog, Seth, lay at our feet, his tail beating a tune into the carpet. Elsie said she sometimes borrowed my family, just to taste what it was like for a while. She said it was the only time she ever saw cutlery arranged around a placemat.

      ‘I’m going to invent something.’ I moved my schoolbooks from the path of a dessert spoon. ‘Something that will change the world.’

      ‘And what about you, Elsie?’ my mother said.

      Elsie reached down and stroked Seth’s head. ‘Beryl says we’ll both end up working at the factory, and I’m not sure you can really change the world from there.’

      ‘Beryl doesn’t know anything,’ I said. ‘Beryl talks too much.’

      It was true. Beryl did talk too much, and talking too much would eventually be her downfall, but of course none of us knew that then.

      ‘You can change the world from this kitchen table if you want to.’ My mother reached down into the dresser and lifted out an armful of dinner plates. ‘All you have to do is make wise decisions.’

      Jack is listening to the story. ‘She was right,’ he said. ‘Your mother was right.’

      My mother was always right. My mother looked like the kind of woman who had made wise decisions her entire life. Her hair was always pinned, her clothes always ironed. Whenever I walked through the front door, she would appear from a corner of the house, wiping her hands or carrying something interesting. It was as though she was a template for motherhood, cut from one of the dressmaking patterns Elsie’s sister always left on their dining-room table. I think a mother was all she’d ever wanted to be. Florence’s mother. It was how she always introduced herself to people, and it made me feel as though by being born, I’d accidentally swallowed up everything else she used to be.

      I turned to Jack. ‘I wanted us to go to university,’ I said. ‘I had it all planned, but Elsie wouldn’t come with me.’

      There was a softness at the edges of Jack’s voice. ‘She wouldn’t?’

      ‘It’s not that I didn’t want to,’ Elsie said. ‘You know how things were. You knew exactly why I couldn’t go.’

      We had sat on the lawn later that evening, watching Seth chase moths. He could never quite manage to catch one, and so he barked at them in a temper fit instead. A lopsided bark. A sound filled with a strange sense of urgency that dogs always feel when no one else is able to. Not ready to give up on the summer, Elsie and I had wrapped ourselves up into cardigans and curled into abandoned deckchairs. The evenings had grown cold and inevitable, and I could feel the seasons turn in the air.

      I sat up straight in my deckchair. ‘How do you know you’re not the university type?’ I said. ‘We’re only fourteen. We don’t even know who we are yet.’

      In the far corners of the garden, an autumn evening had stolen away the light. We might only have been fourteen, but I knew Elsie had more than managed to discover herself already. In her mother. The violent rages. The way she refused to eat for days at a time. The way she had to be coaxed from her bed like a child. Elsie had discovered herself when she found her mother cleaning the house in the early hours of the morning, and when her mother gave away her father’s clothes, only to stand on doorsteps and beg them back a few hours later. In the way Elsie’s sisters, one by one, seemed to be escaping. Gwen was training to be a teacher. Beryl had started looking at wedding dresses without even the slightest hint of a man in her life, and Dot had moved to the Midlands and married an obnoxious little fool called Harold, who put all his energy into telling other people what they should be thinking. Elsie’s mother said she did it to spite them all.

      ‘There’s always a choice, isn’t there?’ I said. ‘Every situation has an alternative waiting for you by the side of it.’

      She didn’t reply.

      ‘Don’t you think,’ I said, ‘we can change everything, just with the small decisions we make?’

      She still didn’t reply. I knew for Elsie, looking into the future must have felt like re-reading a book she’d never very much enjoyed in the first place.

      ‘You never know what life has in store, do you?’ I said. Seth settled down between the deckchairs and looked up at us both.

      Elsie stared at the trees, where autumn rested on the branches, waiting for its turn. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you do.’

      My mother died the following January.

      ‘Lungs,’ Elsie’s mother said. ‘They run in your family.’

      I wanted to say that lungs ran in everyone’s families, along with kidneys and livers, and hearts, but after Elsie’s father was killed, her mother became strangely fixated with death. The more violent the end of someone’s life, the better. She once walked three miles in the pouring rain to stare at a tree where a motorcyclist had been decapitated. ‘It’s important,’ she said. ‘To look.’ At first, I couldn’t understand why she would want to do something so intensely morbid, but then I realised it was a comfort to her. She liked to remind herself that God hadn’t just singled her out for tragedy alone. It happened to other people, too. It somehow helped her to think we were all hurtling towards our destiny without having any choice in the matter. When I tried to explain it, Beryl said, ‘She needs her head read, if you ask me,’ without even looking up from her magazine. Elsie’s mother probably did need her head read, but no one ever managed it. There were so many stories in there, I doubt even she could find all the words.

      We started at the factory that summer.

      ‘It’s just temporary,’ I said, as I slid on to the chair next to Elsie’s. ‘Until my father gets back on his feet.’

      It was a chair I would sit on for the next forty years.

      ‘So neither of you went to university?’ said Jack.

      I shook my head. ‘We worked at the factory instead, for that horrible little man. The one who marched up and down, and shouted at everybody.’

      ‘Mr Beckett,’ Elsie said. ‘The supervisor.’

      ‘Mr Beckett. You don’t give me enough time to think. You rush me too much. I would have got there myself if I’d had a minute.’

      Elsie arched her eyebrow, but I chose to ignore it.

      Jack reached over for his tea. ‘What did you make at the factory?’

      I laughed. ‘Corsets.’ He laughed along with me. ‘They were all bones and panels,’ I said. ‘When you tried to sew one, it was like holding on to a hostage.’

      ‘You were very good,’ Elsie said. ‘Mr Beckett’s star pupil.’

      I looked across the lounge, and into the past. It was more useful than the present. There were times when the present felt so unimportant, so unnecessary. Just somewhere I had to dip into from time to time, out of politeness. When I came back, Jack was waiting for me. ‘There was a girl,’ I said. ‘Sat next to me and Elsie. She couldn’t get the hang of it at all. Shook every time she tried