by Simon Lelic
Syd was pulling out all the show tunes. My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, Grease, The Sound of bloody Music. We were taking turns to educate each other. Neither one of us prepared to learn a thing, but each of us having a grand old time nonetheless.
Until Syd started sniffing at one of the record sleeves.
“Syd?”
She was looking at the soundtrack of To Kill a Mockingbird as though it were something distasteful.
“Do you smell that?” She sniffed the cover again, then the air.
I did. I’d smelled it for a while. It was just damp or something. A moldy pair of trainers we’d yet to discover at the bottom of one of the wardrobes.
“It’s not the record sleeve, Syd. Gregory Peck’s far too much of a gentleman to make that kind of smell in front of a lady.”
Syd smiled and rolled her eyes, bumping my shoulder with the record sleeve.
“It’s like . . .” She sniffed again. “What is it? Is it coming from in here?” She uncrossed her ankles and got to her feet. Syd never wears skirts, only trouser suits or jeans. She doesn’t like showing her skin, particularly her arms. The way she feels obliged to dress makes her feel self-conscious—“mannish” in her words—but the truth is, she’s got no reason to worry. Whatever she’s wearing, whatever the situation, she moves with the grace of Audrey Hepburn.
I joined her in chasing the smell around the bedroom, only slightly annoyed because it was my record we were being distracted from on the turntable.
We ended up on the landing, inhaling and exhaling like a pair of overexcited police dogs. All I can think, looking back, is that the smell had worsened that day because of the weather. It had been cool and wet for most of the month—for most of the year—and finally, on that bright day in May, we were getting a taste for the first time of the impending summer.
“It’s definitely stronger out here,” Syd declared, a shard of light from the landing window cutting right across her furrowed forehead.
The smell did seem to be at its worst where we were standing. The trouble was, there didn’t appear to be anywhere it could have been coming from. There was no space on the narrow landing for anything but the pictures on the walls (black-and-white family photographs mainly, interspersed with the occasional, obligatory, bird). The nearest door was the one to our pop-up music room, the door through which we’d just come.
“Is it the drains maybe?” Syd asked me. “The soil pipe or something?”
I was only 75 percent certain at that point what a soil pipe actually was, but if I was right, it didn’t seem that type of smell. It was more like . . . rotting fruit. Or the bins at the back of a restaurant.
I looked up.
Syd joined me.
“The attic?”
I shrugged. The hatch was directly above our heads. We hadn’t been up there yet. It would be crammed with junk, we’d supposed, and there were other parts of the house we wanted to clear first. Plus, personally? I’m not overly friendly with spiders.
“Shall I get the stepladder?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question. More a delaying tactic.
“I’ll go up,” Syd said, sensing my fear. She makes clucking sounds whenever she sees a spider, then carries them to the nearest window in her hand.
“No,” I countered. “Don’t be silly.” My father again, channeling through me when he wasn’t even dead. Because drainage issues? Involving ladders? That was man’s work.
I was glad I said it, though. I was glad in the end that I did go up that stepladder first. Because once I figured out how to turn on the torch and I realized what it was that was up there . . . Well. I had a chance to warn Syd, if nothing else.
“Don’t come up here,” I called out. “Syd? I mean it. Don’t come up.”
CHAPTER SIX
SYDNEY
I’M NOT GOING to talk about the attic. I’m going to talk about Elsie Payne.
I remember thinking she would blow away. It was her hair whipping behind her like a kite string, the wind-splash ripples in her raincoat. The fine weather that was to last for most of the summer had taken a few days off and for a short time that month it felt like we’d tripped straight into autumn. Elsie was like a leaf dislodged prematurely from the tree, green in her mac and with that splayed stalk of blond, struggling through the weather for a safe place to land.
I followed her to the shop on the corner. I liked that, that there was a shop on the corner, and that it wasn’t a Londis or a Tesco. Mr. Hirani, who ran it, didn’t worry overly about the paintwork, and whatever signage had once existed was evident now only as shadow. But inside there was everything you could need. Cornflakes, cumin, cat food—even, at an extortionate markup admittedly, champagne. The shop it was known as in the neighborhood. As opposed to the shops, which referenced the more uniform parade of south London outlets a fifteen-minute walk away on the local high street.
I’d never noticed Elsie before. Not that I would have expected to necessarily; we’d only been living in the house for a few weeks. But when we’d moved in I’d taken a fortnight’s holiday (as much time as I’d taken off work in the preceding two and a bit years) and, either by sitting on the window seat on our new landing or by dawdling through the surrounding streets myself, I’d become familiar—at least by sight—with many of the local faces. There was Mr. Hirani, of course, who was so reliably behind the counter in his shop I half suspected he must have invested in a catheter. There was Pink Woman (her clothes, not the woman herself; her skin was actually this deep toffee brown) and Russian Mob Man (who turned out to be Kevin from Essex, but who looked exactly like a Russian gangster right up until the moment he opened his mouth), as well as the Guitar Cowboy (guitar case, cowboy hat) and Telly Savalas (just a look-alike, more’s the pity). Oh, and the JAMIE! family, who seemed to communicate exclusively by yelling—you guessed it—JAMIE! Unloading the car, preparing for school: there wasn’t a task the family carried out in public that didn’t seem to hinge on the deployment, like cannon fire, of that single word.
There were others, too, whose habits and routines I’d come to recognize. But not Elsie, not until that morning.
I guessed from the size of her that she was ten or eleven, though it turned out she was really thirteen. And though she never tripped or even stumbled, her gaze seemed permanently angled toward the clouds, as though she were using them to navigate or were imagining herself part of their world. I spent several moments that first time I saw her searching for the thing she was staring at—an airplane, I thought, or a wheeling bird—until I realized there was nothing so specific up there. Nothing I could make out, anyway.
I’d almost caught up with her by the time we approached Mr. Hirani’s shop. The little bell rang when she pushed open the shop door, then again as I followed her inside. A twitch in her shoulders betrayed her surprise that I’d entered so close behind her but she didn’t turn. She simply moved a little faster toward the counter.
“Elsie,” said Mr. Hirani. He was not a man given to smiling, I’d learned, or to offering any expression at all—but there was a smile for Elsie in his smoker’s voice. (That was another thing about Mr. Hirani. From the sound of him, he smoked sixty a day but I’d never seen him outside with a cigarette. I’d never witnessed him leaving his stool. Maybe everything he needed to accomplish he accomplished after shutting up shop. Bite to eat, chain-smoke some Bensons, then a massive, long-anticipated wee.)
And talking of cigarettes, it was two packs of B&H that Mr. Hirani slid unasked for by Elsie across the counter. She opened her hand above his and let fall into his palm a crumpled banknote. Before he’d even uncreased it to see what denomination it was, he was already handing over Elsie’s change. She counted it carefully—twice—in a manner that, if an adult had been doing it, any self-respecting shopkeeper would have considered insulting. Mr. Hirani didn’t blink. If anything he appeared to be counting—double-checking—with her.
&nb
sp; I caught his eye. I suppose my reservations about what I’d witnessed must have showed. I mean, I’m not exactly a stickler for regulations. The right to die, the right to get high—I’d march for both. And personally I was smoking when I was nine and my first line of coke was a present from a so-called friend on my fifteenth birthday. That doesn’t mean I’d condone it, though. When it comes to kids (who I would define, desperately optimistically I realize, as anyone under sixteen), nanny statism, I feel, does more than simply serve a purpose. It’s vital, inviolable. To the same degree that a child’s innocence is corruptible. Anything that makes kids’ lives safer: I’d do more than march for it. I’d die for it.
So, yeah, that must have showed. Mr. Hirani knew me well enough then to know I had a serious sugar habit and that I had a weakness for sour-flavored Skittles. Still, I was new to the neighborhood and he didn’t know if he could trust me. Hence the look he was giving me, which initially I mistook for concern—presumably for his self-preservation. His face, though, was hard to read at the best of times, and I realized that actually it was a warning. Not to say anything. Not to interfere. Perhaps in any other context I would have mounted that high horse I tend to drag around with me—if, say, we had been in a Londis or a Tesco, and on the high street and not at the core of a neighborhood I’d only recently begun to think of as my home. But that day, for once, I was quick on the uptake. I understood that what I’d witnessed was none of my business. Also, that it was almost certainly only a very minor scene in a drama that was playing beyond my sight.
I made up for it, of course, the lack of damage I did then. I made up for it and more. But that was later. For the time being I remained an observer, obedient to Mr. Hirani’s silent counsel and relieved that I’d been absolved of my duty to make a fuss.
Elsie pocketed her cigarettes and slid from the counter toward the door. As she passed me I caught my first proper glimpse of her face. Only in profile, and just for an instant before she sank tortoiselike beneath her coat collar, but I noticed the stormy shading of her eyes and the high-boned fragility of her cheeks. I saw her fringe cut so low it tickled her eyelids and I saw the bruise, old and fading, that was nevertheless still visible above her lip.
I’d come in for sugar. Something about what had transpired made me pretend that instead of Skittles I wanted milk. I paid hastily, then walked out of the shop without looking like I was rushing. This time Elsie wasn’t dawdling. She didn’t gaze up toward the sky and she barely checked before she stepped out to cross the street. I followed steadily behind her, trying not to look like I was following her, but if she’d turned she wouldn’t have been in any doubt.
We passed the church and the Evening Star (I liked that about the neighborhood too—that the pub and the church were directly across from one another, so that if you were to walk down the middle of the road, they’d be like a devil and an angel calling out to you across opposite shoulders) and then rounded into one of the residential streets. It was the turn before ours but I took it anyway. The houses were identical to those in the terrace next to us: red brick, two stories, with crenulated stonework around the windows and the doors that roughly one in three owners had painted white.
Gradually, like a ship slowing, Elsie came to a stop. I continued as closely as I dared, then paused unhidden by a lamp post. She’d got out her change again and, as before, appeared to be checking it. This time, rather than putting it back in her pocket, she wrapped it in a fist and approached the nearest front door. The house she was aiming for was one of those directly behind ours. I counted from the corner. Five in, which meant it would be visible from the spare-bedroom window.
There was movement in one of the windows—on the first floor, on what I presumed was either the landing or in a box room—and I looked up. All I saw, though, was a retreating shadow. Elsie’s father? The form had been too broad to belong to a woman. I stared a little longer, and that’s when I saw movement again. Whoever it was hadn’t gone away. They’d merely withdrawn enough so that I could only just see them.
When I looked down again Elsie had her key in the lock. She paused and I wondered whether she’d sensed movement above her too. But then she turned and looked directly at me, and I realized she’d known I was following her all along. She smiled. Was it a smile? Even now I’m not entirely sure. It was something anyway, an acknowledgment of one kind or another. It was shy, almost wistful. It was the same expression I saw her give me two months later, when we spotted each other on the platform of our local train station and I stood watching as she threw herself off.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JACK
“ARSEHOLE.”
I raised my head from my paperwork in time to see Bartol hammer down the phone. He saw me looking and broke into a grin.
“Relax, amigo. He couldn’t have heard me. The fascist prick had already hung up.”
Bart had been in trouble before for speaking his mind. In fact it was a daily occurrence, but what I mean is he’d almost lost his job. He was a housing officer, the same as me. But whereas I was like a holding midfielder—dogged, reliable, with consistent if unspectacular performances—Bartol was our glamorous foreign signing, singularly programmed to attack. He scored plenty, turned no-hopers now and then into valuable points, but he pissed off a lot of people on the way. The opposition, yes, but also members of his own team. Even me, every so often, but never to the extent that I wanted him to get fired. At the risk of sounding like an eight-year-old, Bartol Novak was my best friend.
“Who were you talking to?” I asked him. “No, wait, let me guess. Your bank manager. Or Tony Blair.”
Bart grinned still wider. “That fucking landlord,” he replied, and his expression darkened. “Do you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to tell him about Susmita’s situation. Maybe if he understood what she’s been through, he wouldn’t insist on being such a coldhearted prick.”
Susmita was a rape victim. Her attacker had left her with a broken wrist, a shattered jaw and twin boys she’d refused to have terminated because abortion ran counter to her beliefs. She loved them dearly, in spite of their provenance, and after losing her job and her place at a shelter, she’d been desperately trying to rebuild her life. Bart, though, was about the only friend in London she had. He was trying to find a home for her, somewhere permanent, in the private sector because social housing was full. It was one of those cases that for Bart had become deeply personal—in part, I suspect, because Susmita was so astonishingly beautiful and my friend had fallen in love. To be fair, crush or no crush, with some cases you just can’t help yourself. You know there’s a system, that there’s a limit to what you can and cannot do, but sometimes . . . Well. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t stretch the rules.
“Seriously, what an arsehole,” said Bartol again. He shook his head, stared for a while, and I could tell he was about to mention the VSO. “It’s people like him I’ll be glad to see the back of when I finally join the VSO.”
Joining the Voluntary Service Overseas was Bart’s long-term escape plan, a bit like my dream of writing a bestseller. You have to have one, working in social services. On the toughest days it’s your escape plan you cling to in order to keep yourself afloat. The difference between my plan and Bart’s was that his was more or less in sight. In fact I didn’t doubt that one day he’d do it: just walk out on his life in London in exactly the way he always said he would. Bart was a romantic. He pictured himself building community halls in Eritrea, uncorking water supplies in South Sudan. His only reward would be the thanks of the locals and a cameo on Comic Relief.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “Better a pissy landlord once in a while than a long-term relationship with dysentery.”
“I’m sick of pissy landlords. When did you last meet a landlord who wasn’t pissy? All the property owners in this city, they act like they’re fucking anointed. Which I suppose they are, but that doesn’t give them the right to empty their bowels ove
r the rest of us.”
“Hey. That’s me and Syd you’re talking about, remember?”
“Oh. Right. I’d forgotten,” said Bart, with a grin that told me he’d done no such thing. “So how is it out there among the middle classes? Joined any book clubs lately? Hosted any dinner parties?”
Bart had a flat-share in Elephant and Castle. He liked to make out he was keeping it real, but the true reasons he lived where he did were, a, he couldn’t afford a place of his own, and, b, it was vital to his mental well-being that he was able to walk to and from work. He didn’t like buses, and he was out-and-out terrified of the Tube. The confined space, the press of people—just the thought of the Northern Line made him shudder. He claimed it was because of the war. The Croatian War of Independence, that is, back in the early nineties, even though Bartol had been a toddler when his family had moved to England to escape the violence, and the only memories he could possibly have been repressing were those from a childhood spent in Royal Tunbridge Wells.
“Loads,” I answered. “We would have invited you, but you know how it is. All of our other friends know how to use a knife and fork.”
“Show-offs,” said Bart. “Hey, you were telling me about your attic. About how brave you were, overcoming your perfectly rational terror of those teeny tiny little spiders.”