by Meg Carter
‘My mother’s ex,’ he sighs. ‘It’s a long story. Enough to say we don’t exactly see eye to eye.’
‘Yet you get on well enough to be his tenant.’
The man laughs. ‘Well yes, you’ve got me there. There is indeed a certain irony to that. But needs must. One day, soon, when I can support myself through my photography, I’ll be able to afford to have principles. Until then…’ He shrugs. ‘So tell me, what brings you this way?’
Alma shrugs. ‘I’m a music student. I’m here tonight with my roommate and her friend.’ She casts a quick glance around the bar which is slowly beginning to empty. ‘They won’t be long.’
The stranger pulls a packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket then holds it out, watches as Alma takes one, carefully lights a match then offers it cupped in his hands. ‘So where are you from then, with a voice like that?’
‘Hampshire.’
His eyes widen in mock surprise. ‘Never been. Should I?’
‘Well that depends.’ She laughs, tentatively.
‘On what?’
‘Whether you like cricket, ponies, homemade cream teas, Jane Austen.’
A sudden image of the handsome stranger before her dressed in casual slacks and a tweed jacket, walking along the local high street on a Saturday afternoon, makes laughter bubble in her throat. She wonders what he’d look like in smarter clothes; how his hair looked fresh from the shower.
Alma uncrosses then recrosses her legs.
‘And do you?’
‘No, not really,’ she stammers. ‘Well, not enough to stay.’
The rectory. Burford Girls School. Holidays in Dawlish. Dreams of the big city. Escape. She can’t stop herself, the words come so fast. And although she realises she is tipsy, she can sense his interest. The encouraging roll of his eyes. The flirtatious twitch of his lips. The brush of skin on skin as just for a moment, as he reaches for his glass, his fingers flicker across her hand.
‘So you ran away to an exclusive music academy in Kensington,’ the man murmurs, shifting position on his stool. Though his leg doesn’t quite touch hers, Alma can feel the warmth radiating from his thigh. The pure physicality of it is thrilling.
She pulls back. ‘Now you’re making fun—’
‘No, it was just an observation. What do you play?’
She takes another sip of her drink. ‘Piano.’ For the first time Alma notices an upright piano pushed against the back wall.
Her companion nods. ‘Of course. You must be good – to get into music school, I mean,’ he smiles. ‘It must be fun to be able to devote yourself to something like that. Something you really want to do.’
‘I suppose so. I mean, I thought it would be but I’m not sure I’d call it fun now.’
He puts down his glass. ‘Why, what changed?’
‘I guess I did. I don’t know—’ she replies, caught off guard. ‘—thought it would be different, but The Con—… music college feels like being back at school.’
‘You want more.’ Dropping his voice, he leans forward in his seat.
‘Yes, I suppose I do.’
‘Action. Adventure. Romance?’
She looks up sharply. Is he teasing? ‘No,’ she retorts, shifting position in her seat. ‘Just a bit of reality will do.’
His face darkens. ‘It’s over-rated.’
‘So how long has your sort-of-stepdad owned this place?’
‘A year or two – he won it in a game of poker. His day job is running a property company – buying and renting out flats, that kind of thing.’ He hands her the book of matches he used to light her cigarettes. On one side is the name of a pub in east London, The Bricklayers Arms, on Rivington Street. ‘He owns this one, too – my flat’s on the floor above.’
‘And what about your real dad?’
‘He’s dead.’
Alma bites her lip. ‘Sorry.’
He shrugs. ’Don’t be. It happened a long time ago. I barely remember him.’
‘That’s tough.’
‘It was for a while, but we got through it.’
‘We?’
‘Mum and me.’ He nods towards the distant barman. ‘And Brian over there – my sort-of-stepbrother’
‘Your sort-of-stepdad’s son?’
‘That’s the one. He might not look like much but he’s heir to the empire.’ He shakes his head. ‘Not that I’m bitter, or anything. I wouldn’t want it, anyway. It’s just… well, his old man’s a bully. The only reason Brian works here is that he’s got nowhere else to go. His dad traded in my mum for a younger model, did I mention that? And now she’s pregnant.’ He finishes his drink. ‘Sorry. I mean, Christ. Why the hell did I tell you all that?’
Alma grins. ‘Maybe I’ve got a sympathetic face?’
‘Hey,’ a low voice hisses.
The barman, who has appeared once more at their end of the bar, is repeatedly nodding his head towards the main exit beyond which a wide staircase leads down one floor to street level. A squat figure in a dark suit is talking animatedly with one of the two West Indians – a man in a brown two-piece suit – who, having left his companion seated at their table, is now standing with arms crossed in the open doorway.
Brian narrows his eyes, conspiratorially. ‘Your cue to leave, I think.’
‘Sorry, sorry!’ Viola declares, reappearing at the same moment arm in arm with Geoff by her side. ‘I bet you were about to give up on us, weren’t you? Only, really, there was such a queue! And now I’ve lost my lighter.’ Waving the unlit cigarette she is holding in one hand, she reaches with the other for the book of matches still sitting on the bar and hands it to her escort. ’Any chance you could oblige?’
‘Actually, we’ve just been talking,’ Alma starts to explain as Geoff lights a match and leans forward. But when she turns around to introduce her friends the stranger has gone.
7
Camden, February 2016
Closing her eyes, Zeb fights a pulsing wave of nausea that’s over almost as soon as it’s begun. She is standing on the kerb just outside Maresfield House in Camden Town while the cab driver extracts her bag from the back seat. Her head is spinning.
Perhaps Dr Prentiss was right. Maybe she should have stayed in hospital a few days longer. But she’d been so keen to get back to London. So sure, too, that being back home would fill in the remaining blanks in her memory. Because she’d decided she would be fine, for Matty’s sake. That was how she’d found the strength to not let them see how she was really feeling. Vulnerable. Exposed.
As the moment passes, leaving her abruptly aware of a brisk wind that nips to the bone, Zeb shudders.
Staring up at the cracked stone steps leading to the front door, Zeb sees the white plastic numbers – a four and a three, the bottom half of which has long been missing. The ground floor flat in this three-storey townhouse with its mismatched bricks is owned by the assistant manager of the NatWest on the High Street. The top floor, with its windows shrouded by net curtains, belongs to an itinerant IT consultant called Neil. But she is drawn to the slatted blinds of the two-bedroom flat on the floor in between. The place she calls home.
‘Don’t forget this, luv.’
The taxi driver, a man of rugby dimensions with a grey crew cut, holds out her bag. A sudden smile reveals a cracked front tooth hanging at an odd angle from his upper gum like a stalactite.
Zeb rethreads her woollen scarf beneath her upturned collar. Pulling two twenties from her bag to cover the fare from the airport, she tells him to keep the change. Stepping towards the front door, she scans the three buzzers on the entry system fixed to the wall on her right. The middle one boasts a neatly typed label detailing only her initial and surname.
Best not to advertise you’re a single girl living alone, Dad had said; a warning issued the day she moved in on a lead-skied afternoon not unlike this one. He’d driven up specially despite the fact she’d been living in London almost three years by then, working her way through an array of pointless jobs. Phone canvasser for a market
research business. Office manager for an independent travel firm. PA to the director of a graphic design company – until it went bust.
Zeb shakes her head. All those months struggling to find a niche, having dropped out of art school. Because she’d never been good enough – not to make a career out of it. Then, finally – thankfully – Dad stepped in.
He got back in touch with an old contact who’d told him about a position that might suit, as an education assistant at a central London photographers’ gallery. The job involved helping to organise public talks, workshops and kids’ courses. Then, worried by the number of house shares she’d tried that had never quite worked out, he set about finding her somewhere stable to live. He remortgaged his own place then spruced up a small flat he’d rented out for years.
It was Dad who helped her settle down. And she had, for a while, until at a sponsors’ event at DeHaans she met Richard and everything changed. Thank God Dad had kept the place on after the two of them moved in together and then had Matty. With a turn of the key the front door swings open.
The communal hallway is exactly as she remembers. The post stacked in neat piles on the tatty dresser to her right. The cracked, black and white tiled floor in need of a proper clean, as ever. The stairs ahead dimly illuminated by what daylight makes it through the whorled glass of the first floor landing window. Tightening her grip on her bag, Zeb climbs the stairs slowly, savouring the familiarity. Catching her breath on the landing on the first floor.
The final approach to her flat is reassuring.
To her left is Mrs Allitt’s front door, its windowless façade punctuated by the tiny peephole’s all-seeing eye. To her right is her own, which she now turns towards with keys out-held, unsure for a moment which of the three locks to try first. She takes her time, trying each key methodically before the catches are finally released. As she steps inside her flat she registers the sound of movement just behind her neighbour’s front door.
Inside her flat, as the door clicks to behind her, Zeb lets her bag drop to the floor.
She is home.
Oblivious to disarray within – airing cupboard doors that hang open, towels spilled across the floor – she hurries past the bathroom with its free-standing bath and sunflower head shower. Ignoring her bedroom – where, opposite the wrought iron bedstead draped in its Indian throws, the drawers in the junk shop dresser gape open-mouthed – and Matty’s too, she bursts into the sitting room where boxes of half-sorted papers sit spread across the floor.
Am I always this messy? she wonders.
In the kitchenette at the flat’s rear she fills a kettle then leans against the kitchen counter as she waits for the water to boil. The window looks down onto the communal yard at the building’s rear where the flats’ residents keep their bins. Aside from a pile of refuse sacks filled with rubble, the space is empty. Like the flat. And as hope turns to lead her mood darkens. Zeb rubs her eyes.
A calendar hangs on the wall before her and as she stares at it she slowly counts off the days in her head. It was Monday the 7th she was found, which makes today Thursday the 10th. The corresponding square is empty. But two squares along, she has written: MATTY BACK FROM PORTUGAL. Next Tuesday she has a meeting with a solicitor but apart from that entry, there is nothing else. Switching her attention back to Sunday, where the ‘a’ of Matty is a tiny heart, Zeb recalls how at first she’d objected to Richard’s determination to take their son on a half-term break overseas but then reluctantly agreed.
Of course. That’s why her ex had not answered his phone earlier. Her heart sinks.
Zeb reaches for the large conch sitting on the windowsill and weighs it in her hand. The solid coolness of the shell against her palm is reassuring; the contrast between the coarse grain of its outer shell and the slick pinkness within; exquisite. A memento from the Andaman Sea, she knows, savouring the memory; the fact that this she can recall.
She bought it on holiday one year from a small boy on the beach in Khao Lak, an hour’s drive north of Phuket. The trip was a long-haul adventure in between jobs, one she’d paid for with the money one of Dad’s distant relations had left her in a trust for her twenty-first. He’d expected her to use it as a down payment on her first flat but she’d more than blown it travelling. Worse: the trip had left her badly in debt. The reason she’d worked so hard during the following months was to clear her credit card.
Dad must have guessed the truth, of course. But instead of having a go at her he’d turned a blind eye – reasoning, perhaps, her guilt was punishment enough.
My little nomad, he sometimes calls her.
In the fridge Zeb finds an unopened carton of milk. Poking her nose inside, she recoils. Straightening up, she fills the kettle, deciding she’ll drink it black.
As the water boils, Zeb stares at the cork board on the wall beside her, hung with photos, doodles by Matty, postcards, Post-its and – jutting out from behind – a black-rimmed card. As she waits for the tea, she sees a photo of a pretty dark-haired woman with her hand on her hip. It’s Sam Gardner, her best friend and Matty’s godmother, she knows as, without trying, the woman’s mobile phone number plays out inside her skull. Spotting a familiar figure to Sam’s left, Zeb tugs the picture free and stares at herself, closely.
She is a slim woman in her late thirties. Medium-built with dark-blonde hair cut into a shoulder-length bob. Cinnamon eyes, full lips and a determined chin. But it isn’t Zeb’s own face that draws her attention; it’s how she’s dressed. A man’s jacket thrown over an antique lace shirt, a denim skirt with a frayed hem and tan suede boots.
Glancing down at the shapeless slacks and nylon blouse she is wearing – the things her neighbourly Samaritan brought her to wear home – Zeb frowns. Shapeless, baggy and smelling of moth balls, she notes, wondering for the first time if the clothes she is now wearing are really hers.
Elsewhere among the rag-tag mosaic of her life is a faded Polaroid of a child standing barefoot on the steel-capped toes of a large pair of Wellington boots. Dressed in a pale cotton sundress, her head is thrown back in laughter at some long-forgotten joke as she clings to a man’s waist looking up towards a beloved face unseen. Zeb’s eyes burn. But before she can process further she is distracted by the sound of voices from the landing.
Slipping off her boots, Zeb pads into the hallway then edges towards the front door peephole to squint through the monocle of glass. On the other side of the landing stands Mrs Allitt, dressed in a calf-length tartan skirt and matching cape. Her cheeks are pale and powdery, like before. Though now, a pair of thick-rimmed bifocals accentuates the intensity of her watery eyes as she puts out three supermarket bags of glass, cardboard and plastic intended for recycling.
A man Zeb does not recognise arrives on the landing from the floor above and the two exchange polite nods. Thick-set beneath his overcoat, he is of medium height with a heavily lined face and chestnut hair so dense in colour it must be dyed. As she straightens up as he passes, Mrs Allitt’s eyes dart beadily towards her neighbour’s door.
Self-consciously, Zeb stumbles a step back.
Can she hear me, she wonders, willing her heart to slow and the pounding of blood in her ears to cease.
The landing is silent.
Zeb creeps back towards the peephole and leans towards it, focusing one eye. As her neighbour’s face suddenly looms towards hers, she bites her hand to smother her cry. With only a few inches of wood between them, Zeb’s breath comes in low, shallow rasps as her neighbour taps a silvered knuckle on the door.
‘Anyone at home. Elizabeth? I know you’re back – I wondered if there was anything you needed? If I could be of any help? Whether you’d like to pop over now – for a cup of tea?’
Zeb hesitates. If she answers too soon, her neighbour will know she’s been hovering by the door, spying. Not replying at all will seem odd. But her indecision is soon outweighed by curiosity, piqued by this woman’s peculiar interest in her welfare, and a sudden and desperate loathing for her empty flat
.
She thinks of the milk gone sour in her fridge. Of the craving she now has for company. The unease she has felt these past few days from being able to see only the dark shapes that loom around the edges of her consciousness, and no more.
‘That would be lovely,’ Zeb calls out brightly. ‘Thanks.’
* * *
’How do you like your tea?’
Zeb’s body tenses. Because the woman’s words, called from the kitchen separated by a beaded curtain from the room in which she now sits, are like an echo. She’s done this before – and recently, too – though not in this house but another, somewhere else. And that time the person doing the calling was a man.
Her jaw clenches at the sudden image in her mind’s eye of a man-child, overweight in his stained sweatpant bottoms as he hurried down the stairs and past the open doorway opposite where she was sitting. Beneath the dark sweatshirt he was wearing, the bulbous bulge of his belly. Hanging idle, his spade-like hands. The intimidating bulk of him. All this confounded by a bud-smooth face.
How do you like you tea, he’d asked her. Loose or bagged?
It was in Scotland.
At that house with the peculiar, round window.
Miss Duffy had let her in but then asked her to wait while she popped out for more fresh milk from the Co-op.
Zeb sat in the sitting room, perched on the tatty sofa as the man, Mrs Duffy’s son, matched chipped saucers to glue-veined cups in the kitchen. Outside it was getting dark. Staring down at the carpet, she shivered – not from cold but the unmistakeable traces of another resident. Dog hair crests the tatty shag pile in surf-like peaks. From somewhere close-by comes a scuffling sound. Ever since she was a child she’d been scared of dogs. And this one was huge. A mastiff.
Thank God that Mrs Duffy had chained the creature up in the back yard before she’d come in. Even so, its close proximity weakened her resolve.
Actually, it’s getting late, she’d called out, stumbling to her feet. She would return in the morning, in daylight. When the woman would be there and, ideally, alone. Really, she’d added. I should be getting back.