Guest

by SJ Bradley

  Kebby, uncharacteristically, made no attempt to stop her. He just watched, staring at her hips and arms as she went out of the door. ‘Let me know if either of you ever want a job,’ he said.

  Samhain was next after her, with a box of books. It weighed more than the centre of a black hole – and he marvelled, again, that people didn’t clear their things out before moving. Some families packed all sorts of rubbish up in boxes to take to their new places, things they never used or looked at. This lot seemed to be that type, the sort who lived amongst dusty things. Things that had belonged to long-dead uncles and grandparents, a collection of old-timey, useless junk, as though they wanted to live in a museum of the self.

  ‘We usually do the upstairs first,’ Samhain commented, shoving his box onto the tailgate with a grunt.

  ‘You don’t want to go up there.’ One mother carefully placed a side-lamp in between the boxes. ‘I don’t think they’ve even finished packing yet – have they?’

  ‘No, and they never will. Arthur keeps putting toys in his box, then getting distracted and taking them out again to play with them. At this rate, it could take him months.’ The other mother put witchy hands over tired eyes, and breathed deeply. ‘I do rather think finishing the children’s rooms may be a professional’s job.’

  ‘No trouble.’ Kebby pulled a stack of flat boxes from the driver’s cab. ‘Shall we get started?’

  ‘Please,’ said the younger of the two: she took them upstairs.

  In the tiny back bedroom, a boy with dark hair sat amongst a detritus of lego and foam aeroplanes, adding stickers to a book. He looked about six years old.

  ‘Arthur,’ sighed his mum. She turned to Samhain: ‘I’m sorry. He’s packed everything and then unpacked it again.’

  Her partner appeared, sliding an arm around her waist. ‘That reminds me of somebody else I know.’

  Samhain started making up a new box. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Soon have you sorted.’ Every new box they made was an extra £8 on top of the bill, and they were supposed to make a new one every time they came across a box packed by the owner whose lid wouldn’t close, or every time they had to put a pile of unpacked things into a box: Peter made a lot of money that way. ‘Here you are, Mrs Gable-Lloyd,’ he said. ‘Quicker we get it all sorted, quicker it’s done.’

  The family were moving to another part of the village, to a place less than four miles away. It was on the other edge of town, a larger place, the leafier part of the village, closer to the school.

  In the van, they listened to Kebby’s old band. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘A friend who knows something about computers put them onto CD for me. You hear that drum sound? They don’t make snare cracks like that anymore.’

  ‘Sounds like Motown,’ Samhain said.

  ‘Yes. We were trying for that – we thought we could be the West Yorkshire version of Stevie Wonder. I don’t know if we managed it.’ Kebby grinned. ‘It’s not too bad though, right? It gained a bit of noise in the transfer, but you can still hear it pretty well. Oh now shh, listen. This is where Eloise comes in.’

  Past a church. Samhain gazed out of the window at a sign drooping on the railings. There were lights on in the church hall, and a woman was working her way along the floor with a mop.

  ‘Hear that voice?’

  Melody, pleading and strident. The girl sang as though she was angry, yet there was this beautiful, blues drawl to it.

  ‘I don’t know why she never managed to do anything as a singer,’ Kebby said. ‘You hear that voice? Gorgeous. She was almost as good as Aretha, that girl. Could have been famous. I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t want to be famous.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Kebby paused for a moment, indicating at a roundabout. ‘It’s a shame about your band, Sam.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Samhain shrugged. ‘Had to end sometime.’

  ‘Let me tell you.’ Kebby pulled around the roundabout, through two lanes, and up across onto the hill. ‘With your little girl? You won’t miss it. You are in for the adventure of a lifetime.’

  ‘She’s two now. Mart showed me a picture.’

  ‘Two! So she’ll be talking now. Just you wait. My God, the questions. “Daddy, why is the sky blue?” “Daddy, what is a different kind of bird for?” “Daddy, why doesn’t my brain stop thinking in time for me to go to sleep?” “Daddy, can I have some chocolate buttons?” “Daddy, will you draw me a picture of a dog and a pig together on the same hill?”’

  They were behind a builder’s merchant van, its back loaded with timber.

  ‘When you meet her, you probably won’t believe it – the love you have for your children. It’s so fierce, like you never knew you could feel anything like it. You would kill anybody if they tried to hurt your baby – throttle them with your bare hands. When Ayesha was a baby, we used to spend hours just watching her as she slept. Her skin. Her tiny little hands. She was so beautiful, we couldn’t believe she was ours. That we had made a whole human being! Imagine!’

  Shifting down a gear, Kebby chugged the van slowly uphill. ‘The only thing was, when she got to the age of walking around and asking questions, she would sometimes ask things from the second she woke up, until the moment she went to sleep. She wanted to know everything, Samhain, and she thought I would have the answers. She asked about every single thing, questions you would never even think of asking yourself. Sometimes I wanted to say, For God’s sake, just for a minute, can’t you stop with the questions?’ He took a hand off the gearstick. ‘But that was only sometimes. Most of the time, you don’t mind. Not really. You’ll see.’

  ‘What kind of toys do you think I should get?’ Samhain asked. ‘For when she comes to stay at my place?’

  Greenery and tree-lined avenues, planes and falling sycamore seeds, detached houses with blackened fronts. ‘Oh, everything!’ Kebby said. ‘You should get her everything. If you can think of it, you should get it. All sorts. Books, bricks, dolls, toy trucks, musical instruments are good, crayons and paper and paint – my Ayesha used to love drawing. They never get tired of exploring and playing and trying new things, until they start school. That’s when they find out what they’re really interested in, what they’re really good at. They play so much, they’ll play with anything and everything.’ He said: ‘Can’t you find out from her mum what she likes already?’

  ‘I’ll get Mart to ask her.’

  ‘Do that.’ Kebby let out a low whistle. ‘Man, look at this place.’

  They pulled up a curved driveway under the gentle brushing of overhanging trees, to a stone house with bay windows either side of the front door. One was the kitchen, the other a living room. Broad stone steps led to a solid wooden door.

  ‘Looks like something out of a horror film,’ Samhain said.

  Kebby wheezed with laughter. ‘“No, that huge place isn’t for me, mister. Give me a tiny place any day. Because I’m a little mouse, and I want to live in a mouse’s house.”’

  ‘That’s not what I said.’

  ‘I heard it in your voice.’

  A large blue Volvo pulled up into the driveway behind them, with both mothers in the front seats.

  ‘Anyway,’ Kebby went on, ‘when the time comes, I’ll help you move. No–’ he said, stopping Samhain’s protests with a hand in the air: ‘It’s settled. I’ll get Peter to let us use one of the work vans.’

  He was out of the cab before Samhain could even tell him there wasn’t a van’s worth of stuff to move.

  11.

  Mama Cat had moved full time onto Samhain’s old bed, leaving a moulted circle of fur around herself in the shape of Saturn’s rings. Comfortable there, and declining to move.

  ‘You really should get her spayed,’ Mart said.

  ‘Can’t afford to.’ Frankie had been around the hotel, gathering guest soaps. They sat, egg-nestled, in folded fresh towels, in the old Estamos merchandise box. ‘And besides, she’s not my cat.’

  ‘PDSA do free spaying on a Tuesday
,’ she said. ‘You just have to go to the place and wait.’

  ‘How long?’ Frankie put the box with the rest of Samhain’s stuff, waiting by the front door.

  ‘I don’t know, however it long it takes them to see you.’

  ‘All day?’

  Mart reached down into Frazzles. He was in a box of his own, much smaller, and he moved his head, purring, under her scratching finger. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I haven’t got time for that,’ Frankie said.

  ‘You’re the one who bloody let her in,’ Samhain said.

  ‘I didn’t let her in. She just came in one day when the door was open.’

  This was the largest pile of things that Samhain had ever taken in a house move. A bed frame and mattress, a double duvet off one of the beds. Sheets and pillows. Resting on these were things from the kitchen – tin opener, wooden spoon, crock pot. Samhain wasn’t sure how Frankie was going to get along without these things, but Marta had put them in the pile with everything else, and talked him out of putting them back in the kitchen for Frankie.

  He opened the front door. The sun gleamed into his eyes in a golden splint. ‘Christ, Frankie,’ Samhain said, ‘I’ll come back and take her to the PDSA myself.’ Any minute, Kebby was going to arrive, and he wanted to be waiting when it happened. It was odd enough that he’d had to give his workmate directions to come and pick him up here, at this disinterred old guesthouse. He didn’t want him going upstairs and asking questions as well. ‘If you don’t, she’ll have another litter of kittens. Then another, then another. Who’s going to look after them – you?’ He was hauling his rucksack onto his shoulder; as he lifted it, he felt the old, reassuring scrape of the screwdriver handle against his neck.

  ‘Did it this time, didn’t I?’

  The bag felt heavier this time, less portable than it had ever been. Weighted with spoons, with forks, glasses from the bar; it bulged with toilet rolls from the linen cupboard. ‘You didn’t. I did.’ There was the chug of an engine outside. Samhain opened the doors wider, and waved at Kebby, pulling up in the van. ‘I’ll come again myself and see to it – next Tuesday, after work. Don’t let her out, right?’

  ‘I’ll miss you, boyo.’ Frankie came towards him, stretching out his arms. A manly hug constricted around Samhain’s back in a broad elastic. The hug that Samhain had felt a thousand times – darkened bars, late nights, under deep cover of Jägermeister. In the days when he had thought he and Frankie would be best friends forever. ‘Don’t be a stranger, will you?’

  Samhain picked up the duvet, and was transported back.

  Flores, her back to him, standing in one of the yurts. Small then, his head somewhere around mid-thigh height, clutching a pillow, the only thing he was big enough to carry.

  Something in his other hand, something warm and wooden. The little toy car he had loved so much.

  They weren’t supposed to keep toys for themselves, but somewhere along the way he had plucked this from one of the toy boxes in one of the camps, and kept it. A thing with red paint, and carved wheels that only turned some of the time.

  Boys and girls were meant to play with things for a while, then return them to the shared box. But Samhain had been so attached to this car, and he’d held it often. It was always in his hand, and had been at that point. Flores gathered scraps of clothing: warm jumpers for cold, cagoules for rain, singing as she worked. She always did this when they were on the move. He hadn’t asked her where they were going, not that it made any difference. Wherever they went, they were always going to the same place. Another dusty camp with tents, placards and signs and chains, to the earth and sky, the constant murmur of voices.

  He’d known what a house was, because he’d built one with Lego. A house was a place where you lived forever, a sturdy thing with a roof and four walls, a door you could close when you went home.

  ‘This all reminds me of moving when I was a kid,’ he remarked.

  Mart was holding Frazzles in the box. ‘Better get him in the van, before we do anything else,’ she said.

  ‘Right. Just ask Kebby–’

  ‘Somebody ask for me?’

  There he was in the doorway, off-duty. Old jeans and canvas shoes, a peaked cap worn and navy.

  ‘We said, better get the expert to move all this stuff,’ Samhain said.

  ‘That’s you, but what about me?’ Kebby glanced at the pile in the hall. ‘So where’s the rest of it?’

  ‘This is the lot. There isn’t anything else.’

  Kebby grabbed the kitchen box, shaking his head. ‘You’re going to sit on the floor in the evenings?’ He went out of the door, throwing over his shoulder: ‘Let’s make Peter’s warehouse our second stop of the day. You need a bit more to live on than this.’

  Roller blinds rattled, revealing a thicket of table legs. Tables, chairs, turned over on their backs on tops of one another, crammed helpless wooden insects.

  ‘Now look,’ Peter said. ‘You’ve been a good worker, Samhain. So you can take whatever you want from the front part of the warehouse, within reason, but you can’t take anything from the antiques at the back – I can’t give you those for nothing.’

  ‘Look, Sam.’ Mart had already found a child’s bed, part-concealed behind an old roll-front writing desk. It was a bunk-style thing, with a bed on top and a desk underneath. ‘Perfect for Astrid’s room – don’t you think?’

  There was an old fire surround tipped up against the ladder. ‘Looks like it’ll fit,’ he said.

  A narrow path led a crooked way past some of the tables, down into the deeper recesses of the room. Kebby was already most of the way down there; Samhain saw his baker’s boy hat bob down between two sets of mirrors. ‘Oh, I remember this,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you’ve still got it, Peter.’ He re-emerged around the side of a Welsh dresser. ‘I thought you said you were going to have this thing restored.’ He said to Sam, ‘Me and Simon brought this over here, well... must have been more than three years back.’

  ‘I keep meaning to,’ Peter said.

  Sam couldn’t see – he was climbing. Balancing with one foot on a table, and the other tentatively on a set of dining chairs. He was trying to get across to a neat sofa he’d seen, which looked purple in the darkness.

  He turned, and saw Mart on the floor on the other side, a smear of dust across her cheek. ‘Come on, jump down,’ she said. ‘I’ll catch you.’

  ‘But I haven’t the time,’ Peter went on. ‘Thing like that – it needs a specialist restorer. I can’t get anybody out to come and have a look at it.’

  Samhain heard Kebby’s voice, without actually being able to see the man himself. ‘What? I can’t believe that. If those guys could just see this place... I can’t believe some of this stuff is still here. It’s a crime, Peter. You should at least put some of it on eBay.’

  ‘What’s eBay?’

  ‘Here.’ Mart already had a stack going. She’d gone, magpie-eyed, around the wooden topography. ‘What about this?’ She led him over the dining table to an old leather sofa, then over that, further into the dark, away from the doors, to a book case and coffee table with an inlaid top. ‘And what about this – any good? Do you like it?’

  Then from there, with what touched his hand feeling like her skin or a piece of velvet fabric hanging loose, through legs and standard lamp fringing, to more dark, greater dust, to a desk lamp and floor lamp.

  ‘It’s great, Mart,’ he said. ‘How did you find all this stuff so quickly?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ Things were dim here, back here, in this forgotten place so far back amongst the furniture. He could only see her teeth as she smiled. It took his eyes a moment to adjust. ‘Years of scavenging, I guess.’

  ‘You’ve got a great eye,’ he said.

  They were standing in some part of the room where, by some accident of the way the furniture was stacked, there was only just room for two pairs of adult feet, facing one another.

  ‘So they tell me.’

  She was smiling: h
e could hear it in her voice.

  ‘Thanks for bringing me here, Mart,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t bring you anywhere. It was Kebby who drove the van.’

  ‘No, but – you know what I mean. Not just for this. For everything. The flat – Charley – the... you know, the stuff with my dad.’

  She reached away from him, towards a lamp with a mermaid swimming around its base. ‘What’s brought all this on?’

  There was a cinnamon smell about her, on her hair, her clothes. ‘I don’t know. I guess I just looked at all the things you’d picked out, and realised how lucky I am.’

  ‘Lucky?’

  She was still smiling when he leaned down towards her: holding the lamp in one hand, sweet tea on her breath.

  ‘Yes – lucky. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

  ‘You would have managed.’

  ‘Why don’t you put that lamp down?’

  She looked at it, smiled at the graceful creature with the fishtail, reaching her hands up towards the bulb. ‘This is the best thing I’ve seen so far. I think I’m going to keep it.’

  ‘Put it with the rest of the stuff.’

  ‘Sam.’ She laid the lamp down carefully, on top of a cabinet with glass windows. ‘You’re better than you think. You would have figured it all out. With or without me. You’re smart. That’s what I like about you.’ The plug swung loose, and tapped against a wooden leg. ‘Or at least it’s one of the things I like about you, anyway.’

  ‘There’s more than one?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Wondering, he looked beyond her into the jungle of furniture, at polished corners catching and reflecting the sun, at Peter’s head shining with silver by the roll-top doors.

  ‘I didn’t know there was...’ he began.

  Then he was quietened: she closed her eyes, and pulled him close.

  Kissing Mart was like eating a Danish pastry. Sticky and sweet, the kind of thing he could have kept on doing all day. Her back was a boat-sail under his arms, her hands in his hair in a light breeze.

  Up close, she was syrupy, soft. All parts of her might have been made from candyfloss. He was busy trying to get to the lollipop stick in the centre when he heard the crack of somebody knocking a piece of furniture over nearby.