‘How are Mr and Mrs Tilson?’
‘Tom seems fine. I haven’t seen Ailsa for a while.’
‘You’ve become friendly, I hear.’
‘Yes, I think so. I hope so.’
‘She’s an odd one. Rather elusive.’ She seemed pleased with her choice of words. She rested her hand against her forehead. Her fingernails were rimmed with dirt. ‘Is she happy? I don’t know. She doesn’t seem it. And Tom . . . Poor Tom.’
‘Are you talking about Ailsa?’ Trish interrupted. ‘She only came to book club twice, and yet she made such a fuss about joining.’
‘Plus she didn’t even read the book,’ Delilah said. ‘It was obvious her heart wasn’t in it.’
The table had gone quiet. ‘She’s a bit flighty,’ another woman said, her open mouth revealing a plastic covering to her teeth – of course: dear Soph’s mother. ‘When she first moved here, she begged to join our Pilates class. Sonia went out of her way to make space for her, even though the studio only really fits five, but she hardly ever comes.’
‘So selfish,’ Trish agreed. And they began to talk among themselves, not directly criticising Ailsa but talking in general about behaviour they deemed unacceptable in a friend.
The quiz started up almost immediately but for the whole of the first round, I was aware of the conversation on the next table starting and flaring and being suppressed, like random flare-ups after a forest fire.
In the half-time break, I stood on the pavement outside with Maeve and Sue while they smoked their roll-ups, picking tobacco now and then from the tips of their tongues. The conversation – they were bickering about their van, whether to get it serviced before their next trip to France – didn’t need my input. I was thinking how Ailsa hadn’t lived in the area long, her roots here were shallow, these friends of hers didn’t know her well. I could see Delilah and Trish and dear Soph’s mother and all the others through the window – passing round the wine, screwing up their noses at the mushroom pâté. I’d imagined Ailsa the centre of all this, the queen of her little world. I’d been wrong.
When I walked behind Delilah heading back to my table, she put her hand out to stop me. ‘Don’t tell Ailsa you saw us,’ she said. ‘Be a love.’
I was home that night at about 11 p.m., and the shouting started soon after. Or maybe it had been going on the whole time; the walls had absorbed it, but now they had got close to the back door. ‘I’m not going to ask you again. Just tell the truth.’ Tom’s voice, bullying and boorish, repeating the same phrases over and over again. I thought about the children upstairs, pressing their faces into their pillows. How Ailsa had grown up with arguing parents, how patterns repeated. When I was a child, I used to line my stuffed toys along the bottom of the door, block out the noise that way. Should I go next door and knock? Take the children from their beds? My heart rate, already raised, raced at the thought; my hands trembled. What would I do? Where would I take them? I couldn’t bring them here. I was a coward, and I did nothing.
I fell asleep, hours after it had gone quiet, and dreamt vein-like cracks appeared across the ceiling, that it began to creak and then bow, and that as I watched, small droplets began to swell on the base of it, turning gradually to thick yellow globules and I felt a drip and I knew that any minute, with a crash of plaster, and a flood of water, the ceiling would fall. The fear, the dreadful anticipation, woke me and I touched the wall above the bed and for a second the coldness of it felt like damp, and I felt quite sick at the thought of telling Mother, until I remembered she was dead. I remembered she was dead before I remembered it was a dream, and the relief of the first outweighed the relief of the second.
The next day, I watched Bea and Max leave for school. I knocked on her door, but no one answered. I texted ‘Hello? Fancy a walk?’ No reply. I tried to distract myself with work, but I stared at the screen, reading without reading, searching without digesting any of the answers. The area where I keep my computer needs a clear-out, but I collected a pile from one place and put it down in another. I stared out of the window.
I went for another walk, down to Lidl, where I bought some of the hazelnut chocolate she’d told me she liked, and up and down the long wide streets on the far side of the high road in the area estate agents call the Heaver Estate. When I was growing up, the wide red-brick terraces were divided into bedsits but now they’re in the second or even third wave of re-gentrification, and I wasn’t surprised, halfway up Louisville, to come across a small yellow skip, insecurely covered with tarpaulin. A basement was being dug out and the homeowners had used the building work as a spur for a clear-out.
Normally, a discovery like that has a positive effect on my mood; the satisfaction sits in my chest, settles there and expands, rolling around the nerve endings, cauterising any pain. Not that day. When I got home, I stood in the doorway to Mother’s room and imagined myself collecting clothes, finding bags and boxes, without moving. I looked down at my top and noticed I’d picked up a mark from the rung of a garden chair I’d carried back: the scythe-shaped streak of rust looked like blood.
When the doorbell rang, I assumed it was my Amazon delivery. I was expecting Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, a tome too hefty for the letter box. The chain was on, and with the new stiffness in my forefinger and thumb it takes me a minute, reaching up, to unhitch the knobbly end from its slotted corral. Then I turned the latch and opened the door.
It was Ailsa.
She looked at me without smiling. ‘Can I come in?’
Chapter Ten
Folding wooden dish drainer from Habitat, hinge broken
Tsundoku, noun. The act or habit of piling up newly
acquired books. From the Japanese ‘tsumu’, to
pile up, and ‘doku’, to read.
‘It’s not a good time.’ I stepped out into the porch, closing the door behind me. On the other side, the dog had started barking, jumping up, her nails scratching at the wood. The air was warm out, warmer than in the house; the light seemed suddenly different, bright and clear, like when you arrive at the beach. Ailsa had been fixed in my mind as I’d last seen her: pale, blotchy around the eyes. It was a shock to see she looked well. She’d had her hair cut and it bounced just above her jawline. She was wearing cowboy boots, and a cream dress with broderie anglaise and other fussiness across the chest.
‘Are you working?’ she said.
‘No. No I’m not. But I . . . it’s not a good time,’ I said again.
‘It’s just I’ve been so busy. Just one thing after another this week. I’ve been meaning to come round for a chat. I feel terrible that I haven’t come sooner so I thought I’d just invite myself in for a cup of tea. We’re having a party and I wanted to talk it through with you.’
There was a drop in the traffic. On the other side of the road, the street cleaner rolled noisily past.
‘Or do you have people?’ she said. Her eyes landed on the stain on my top, and then rested on one corner of my mouth. I raised my thumb before I could stop myself and felt stickiness there, a tiny bit of toast in the crease.
‘Do I have people?’ I tried to make sense of her words. Did I have people? She knew my people were dead, or gone.
She was waiting, fiddling with the ribbons that dangled from the neck of her dress.
‘I don’t,’ I said, understanding at last. ‘I . . .’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t have people here at the moment.’
‘Verity,’ she said. She was looking into my eyes, my small hard eyes, her foot resting on one of my crates of magazines. ‘Verity. Please let me come in.’
It started in the depths of my chest, and it rose, until it was between the back of my throat and my nose and it felt unmanageable, gloriously monumental and yet dreadful.
‘Just let me come in,’ she said. ‘Verity. It’s time. It’ll be OK.’ She took the key out of my hand then and inserted it in the lock and turned it. I felt powerless suddenly, drained. All the force and energy seemed to come from her as she unlo
cked the door, pushed it back as far as it would go, which was only a crack really, and slipped through.
I didn’t have a choice but to follow.
I bent down first of all to talk to Maudie, who was leaping up, tugging with her paws at my legs. I occupied myself with calming her, which was obviously a displacement activity for calming myself.
Sometimes, when the door is closed on the street, the house seems in contrast very quiet. It wasn’t quiet now. It twitched and rustled. There was a roaring in the walls, a creaking in the beams, a groaning. Ailsa hadn’t spoken.
‘When I said it wasn’t a good time,’ I managed to say, ‘it’s just that I’m having a bit of a clear-out.’
‘Oh, Verity.’
She still hadn’t moved; her eyes were travelling to the floor and up to the ceiling, from place to place, alighting for a moment on one spot and then shifting and alighting on another. I found myself itemising the immediate points of reference: a pile of papers to the side of the mat, comprised of flyers and the free magazines and handwritten notes for missing cats, and a pile of jiffy envelopes and loose packaging and Amazon cardboard sleeves that were waiting to be recycled, and a pile of post I hadn’t yet opened, and a pile of post that I had and which was now waiting to move to the front room to be dealt with or filed. And the piles of miscellaneous kitchen equipment that I hadn’t yet found a place for, and a haphazard heap of boxes that other stuff had come in that were too useful to be thrown away. And plastic bags containing I didn’t remember what, some of them piled up almost to the ceiling, and at the back there, at the bottom of the stairs, some new additions, including two large white picture frames from Ikea, and a Henry vacuum with a broken nozzle, and yesterday’s haul: a fold-up garden chair, an iron, five melamine plates with a sunflower pattern and an old-fashioned child’s tin globe.
Her neck tipped and I saw she was craning to look between the bannisters to the stairs. ‘Books,’ I said. ‘I’ve run out of space in the shelves. Those treads are a useful place for books. It’s not like they’re used for anything else.’
She had brought her hand to her mouth.
‘It’s all got a bit out of hand,’ I said. ‘It’s run away with me rather.’
‘Oh, Verity,’ she said.
The heat in my neck rose. I had an impulse to sink to the floor, to bury my face between the two closest plastic bags and to stay there until I heard her leave. But I could only stand, next to her, alongside everything. ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I just need a chunk of time, and as you know I’ve been very busy recently. It’s hard enough staying on top of my work for the OED.’ I laughed, or it was supposed to be a laugh. Ailsa was very still.
‘How has it got like this?’ she said finally.
Again I tried to laugh. If we could make light of it, it wouldn’t be so bad. ‘It’s just crept up,’ I said.
‘What is all this stuff? Where is it all from?’
I swallowed. ‘Life.’
She bent down and poked into the top of one of the kitchen boxes. Her expression was appalled. ‘I mean – these . . . why?’
‘Takeaway cups,’ I said. ‘They’re always useful.’
She pushed them to the side, picking up something else and dangling it from one finger as if she didn’t want to get too close.
‘That’s a good colander.’ I took it out of her hand and clasped it to my chest. ‘It’s a proper one. Lots of them are plastic these days, and the handle bows when if you pour boiling water into them. This one’ – I tapped it, holding it more tightly – ‘it’s enamel. Solid. Someone had thrown it away and I hate waste.’
‘It’s old,’ she said. ‘Dirty.’
‘It just needs a bit of wire wool.’
‘Why is it out here in the hall? If you wanted it, you could keep it in the kitchen.’ She stirred the surface of that particular box. ‘This stuff – Verity. This old tap . . . this hose thing . . . what is it?’
‘It’s for attaching to the bath so you can wash your hair.’
‘These?’
‘Radiator caps.’
‘It’s all just rubbish.’
‘It’s not just rubbish. Most of it has a place – and will be useful. I just need to have a clear-out elsewhere so I can create cupboard space.’
I threw the colander onto the top of the box with some force. I wanted her gone now. Two steps and a 180-degree turn and she could be out of the front door. If I put my hands on her shoulders, I could steer her in that direction, push her.
And she did take two steps, but not towards the front door. She side-stepped – which wasn’t necessary, she was making a point – along the path between piles towards the sitting room, and then she swivelled and put her hand on the door, and I couldn’t stop her, I realised, even if I got there in time. She pushed and it opened a small way and she put her head round the frame.
Sometimes I imagine I can see the room as it was before, the bones beneath the swelling flesh: the two floral velour-covered armchairs, and the matching sofa with its patterned scatter cushions; the fireplace with the tiles down both sides and the mirror above it; two side tables, one round, the fringed table lamps, and the desk and chair in the window. Watching her peer in, I could pretend to myself that that was the room she was observing, but I knew when she withdrew her head and I saw the distaste on her face that she hadn’t seen that room. She had been too distracted by other things: the bags of clothes and the piles of books, the towering heaps of pens and correspondence mingled with half-drunk mugs of coffee; the uneasy darkness – the lamps were long buried – and the dust. I knew plates and cutlery sat in teetering piles and collapsed mounds on the table and floor, and that that some of the shoes and clothes I had come across recently were stacked on the chairs.
‘Verity,’ she said again, and for the first time since she had been in my house I heard reproach. ‘This is where you work?’
‘Yup. On the desk there. At the computer.’
She put her head back in as if she wanted to confirm, and when she brought it back, she said, ‘How can you even reach it? All that crap.’
‘Everything in here is important, Ailsa,’ I said. ‘I receive a great deal of correspondence. Back and forth. The slips. Obviously, there is some filing to do. But it’s all vital to the process. I do need to keep the documentation.’
‘All of it.’
‘Yes.’
‘But the books. The plastic bags. The clothes. There’re so many of them.’ She raised her voice. ‘It’s a fire risk. You’re lucky you haven’t . . .’ She stared at me, and then something came over her features, and she softened. ‘It’s a health risk.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘What else?’ she said. ‘What else?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘That room’s the worst.’
But she didn’t take my word for it, and took several stumbling steps, kicking a plastic bag out of her way, and followed a path to the back room. ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘There’s no point. That room isn’t used.’
She was picking things up and moving them to make her journey easier. ‘What’s this?’ she said, handling a long stainless-steel rod. It was from the Herberts’ shower – the one she had ripped out and replaced. I shook my head slightly and made a face as if it was too complicated to explain, and she flung it carelessly down to the side. It landed on a collection of plastic crates, and slid sideways with a clatter. When she reached the door, she turned the handle and the door gave maybe a couple of inches. ‘I wouldn’t,’ I said, seeing she was about to give it a shove with her shoulder.
‘You can’t even get in this room?’ she said.
‘It’s never used.’
She took to the stairs then, before I could do anything. Reaching her hand over to the bannister, she placed her feet gingerly, one after another, on the few inches of bare carpet – as far as the half-landing. I needed to stop her. Faith’s room is there. I let out a shriek. She put her hand on the handle.
‘Don’t,’ I said. I began to come up the stairs after her. I’d
raised my voice. ‘Can you come down now, please.’
As she descended, taking care not to trip, I could see her struggling to find the words to express whatever she was feeling: how about repulsion and disgust and disappointment? I knew things could never be the same between us again. I had lost any credibility, all equality as a person, as a friend. All gone. I could do nothing now to redeem myself except claw back a small amount of dignity.
‘Ailsa, you’re quite right,’ I said, when she was standing next to me. ‘I need to have a jolly good sort-out, and seeing things through your eyes has clarified that. I’ve got this latest batch of words to finish and then I’ll start. It’s just a matter of finding the time and getting down to it.’
She rubbed her hand across her forehead. It left a smear of dust like a bruise. ‘Where do you cook?’
It crossed my mind to lie, to make some arch comment about not knowing one end of a saucepan from another. She knew how it was: I ate out or ‘ordered in’. I could even hear myself say it, repeating something she’d told me about her twenties in Fulham. ‘All that was in my fridge was a bottle of tequila and six vials of teeth-whitening serum.’ But her head had made short shifting movements, like a small bird, and she had seen the kitchen door, which was propped open with the fold-up aluminium chair under the handle, and she picked her way back towards me, on the path she had created, and then out again at ninety degrees towards it. She paused to pick up a wooden drying rack. ‘This is ours, isn’t it?’ she said.
I looked at my feet. ‘You were throwing it away.’
‘But Verity, it’s broken. The hinge doesn’t work. It doesn’t stay upright.’
‘It just needs a screw,’ I said quietly. ‘Or a piece of string.’
She put it down, but carefully this time, as if I had begun to get through to her. I could talk about our throw-away culture, my abhorrence of consumerism and its attendant wastefulness, the importance of recycling, the protection of the environment, but even as I began to shape the requisite sentences in my head, I knew they didn’t sound right.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 11