Eleanor Oliphant is Completely 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.’