10
Leah found it hard to believe that she’d ended up working somewhere called the Pink Hummingbird. She’d thought it was a joke at first when the woman at the agency had mentioned it to her.
‘The what?’
‘Yes,’ she’d said, ‘I know. You’ll understand when you see it.’
It was the most violently, unremittingly feminine shop in London. It had a sugar-pink façade and windows strung with feather-shaded fairy lights. It sold things that only girls would ever want to buy, such as gem-encrusted picture frames and writing paper scented with eau de toilette. The ceiling was dripping with bejewelled chandeliers and whitewashed bamboo birdcages. The walls were hung with Venetian glass mirrors and soft velvet hats in shades of plum and passion fruit. It sold underwear constructed from pure gossamer and presented in tissue-lined sateen boxes with rosebuds on the lid. And soft plush cats dressed in fur coats and heels. And birthdays cards handmade using diamanté and sequins. And cushions made from pastel-tinted Mongolian sheepskins. And pens decorated with lilac glitter and wisps of marabou.
It was sugar-coated decadence on a sickly scale.
Leah wasn’t really a pink sort of girl. Leah liked wearing chunky footwear and hard-wearing jeans. She wore the minimum of make-up and no perfume. Her only concession to femininity was her hair, which she wore long and wavy, and her fingernails which she kept manicured and shiny. She didn’t really need make-up. She had one of those scrubbed land-girl kind of faces that looked better with just a touch of eyeliner and a pinch of the cheeks. Maybe that was why Ruth had offered her the job. Maybe she hadn’t glanced down and seen the chunky-heeled boots and the hint of old mud clinging to the hem of her only smart trousers. Maybe she hadn’t noticed that Leah was wearing a T-shirt with a logo on it. Maybe she’d just taken in the cute face and the girlie hair and decided that Leah was a Pink Hummingbird in the making.
Whatever the reason, she’d offered her the job. Leah had been managing Ruth’s shop for five years now, ever since Ruth had relocated herself to LA and opened Pink Hummingbird II in Beverly Hills. Leah quite liked working here. It was a sweet-smelling antidote to the scruffiness of the rest of her life. It was nice to walk in here in the mornings, stepping from the grey of the pavement outside into this fragrant pink grotto.
But if someone had told her ten years ago that one day she’d be thirty-five years old, unmarried, non-home-owning and managing a gift shop in Muswell Hill she’d have kicked them in the shin. But here she was selling overpriced gewgaws to girls and grannies and clinging – she could feel it as keenly as an oncoming train today – to the sheer rock face of an existential crisis, by the tips of her shiny fingernails.
The doorbell of the Pink Hummingbird sounded at three o’clock, just as Leah had opened a new copy of heat and was about to tuck into a tortellini salad. She jammed the plastic tub under the cash desk and glanced at the door.
It was Toby.
He was wearing a cream cable-knit turtleneck jumper with narrow black jeans and a red scarf. On his head was a grey ribbed woollen hat. His shoes were enormous and shiny, but he somehow managed to pull the whole look off, even with his abundant and unfashionable sideburns. She smiled when she saw him; she couldn’t help herself.
‘Hello,’ he said, peering at her from beneath the Chinese-print paper parasol she’d been hiding behind.
She peered back at him. ‘Hello.’
‘It’s me,’ he said, apologetically, ‘Toby.’
She nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, I know.’
‘So,’ he said, nervous eyes taking in the shop, ‘this is where you work?’
‘Yup. Uh-huh. This is my … pink and fluffy world.’ She spread her hands outwards.
‘It’s nice,’ he said. ‘I must have walked past here a million times and never been in.’
‘Yes, well – you’re either the sort of person who is attracted by feathery fairy lights or you’re not.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said glancing around. ‘I quite like some of this stuff. These cushions are great.’ He fingered the price tag of an ivory sequinned cushion and winced slightly. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said, ‘for a cushion?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Leah nodded. ‘You don’t want to know the cost price.’
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘I don’t suppose I do.’
They both turned as the doorbell chimed and an old lady in a woollen coat walked in. Leah smiled at her.
‘I hope you don’t mind me turning up like this, unannounced. It’s just, I’m not sure, really, but I just feel a bit strange that I haven’t seen you since what happened the other day. And you mentioned that you worked in a pink gift shop and I was passing and assumed that this must be the pink gift shop you were talking about. So I thought I’d come in and say hello. And thank you. Again.’
‘What for?’
‘For being so cool, calm and collected in a crisis.’
‘Ah, well. If nothing else, I am good in a crisis.’
‘Yes, indeed you are.’
‘So. Have you had the funeral yet?’
‘Yes. On Tuesday.’
‘How was it?’
‘Oh, miserable,’ he said, smiling. ‘Horrible. It rained all day and his relatives were gruesome.’
‘Oh, dear,’ Leah replied, smiling back.
‘Yes, but lots of interesting things have happened since.’
‘They have?’
‘Yes. My life’s been sort of turned upside down, really.’
‘Well …’ Toby paused and licked his lips. Then he stroked his sideburns and squinted. Leah watched him curiously.
‘Are you OK?’ she said.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m being strange, but I recall you saying that you considered yourself to be a curious person, about human beings, that is, and unfortunately curiosity is not one of my fortes, and I’m in a very strange quandary and I really need to, God, this will sound so American and so inane, but I really need to share. And I know we’re strangers, but I don’t really have anyone else whom I feel comfortable discussing these things with …’
‘You want to talk to me?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded.
‘About your problems?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Cool,’ she smiled, sliding down from her stool, ‘let’s go for a coffee.’
They went to the Ruby in the Dust. Toby ordered a cappuccino and Leah had a peppermint tea and a slice of cheesecake. She glanced up at Toby. He had a foam moustache and some chocolate powder dusted across his stubble. She resisted the temptation to wipe him down with her paper napkin and smiled at him.
‘So,’ said Toby, ‘this is the thing. Gus has left me some money. Posthumously.’
‘Well, obviously.’
‘Yes. And now, in a weird twist of fate, my estranged father is coming back to London to see me and, frankly, I’d given up on him for dead, never thought I’d see him again, and I’m forty next year and I just feel as if this is my last chance to, you know, make a life for myself, because I’ve become stuck in a terrible, terrible rut, come to a kind of grinding halt, I suppose, and now I have both the incentive and the means to do something about it, to refurbish the house and put it up for sale. But there’s a snag.’
‘There is?’
‘Yes, my tenants. I need to get rid of them.’
‘Right …’
‘Yes. I need them all to move out. So that I can renovate the house and sell it before my father comes back.’
‘Which is when?’
‘End of March. Ten weeks.’
‘OK. So why can’t you just evict them?’
‘Because …’ Toby paused, then sighed. ‘Oh, God, I don’t know, it’s so pathetic, really, and I know that’s exactly what I should do, but for some reason I just can’t bring myself to do it. For some reason I feel personally responsible for them all.’
‘But why?’
‘Because, well, because they’re all so lost.’
‘Lost?’
‘Yes, all of them, to varying degrees. And the only reason they’re living in my house is because they have absolutely nowhere else to be. No friends, no family, no safety net. And if I evict them, then what will happen to them? What will become of them all?’
‘Well, yes, but surely that’s not your problem, is it?’
‘Well, no, not technically, but I do feel a certain level of responsibility. It was me who invited them to live with me, after all. It was me who placed classified adverts, who selected them on the grounds that they were genuinely needy. It would be like kicking people out of a halfway house. And the funny thing is, I always thought it was just Gus who was keeping me from selling the house, from moving on, but now he’s dead and I’ve realized that it wasn’t just him. It was all of them.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Well, that’s exactly it. The only way I would feel comfortable about asking them to move out is to ensure that they have somewhere else to go, someone else to be with. The only way I could ask them to leave would be if I knew that they were all …’
‘Happy?’
‘Yes. Exactly. That they were all happy. And I don’t really know anything about the people I live with, beyond what brand of breakfast cereal they eat in the mornings. I don’t like asking people questions. It makes me feel uncomfortable. But unless I can find out more about my tenants I don’t stand a chance of satisfying their needs. And in your capacity as a naturally curious person, I wondered if you might be able to help me, or at least advise me on ways to access the inner workings of their minds.’
‘You want me to teach you how to be nosy?’
‘Well, it’s easy. You just have to ask loads of questions.’
‘Oh, God. What sort of questions?’
‘I don’t know. Just ask them how they are. What they’re up to. What their plans are.’
‘Really,’ he winced. ‘But won’t they just think I’m being terribly interfering?’
‘No, of course they won’t. People love being asked about themselves.’
‘Do they? I don’t.’
‘No, well, not everyone. But most people. And I could help, too, if you like.’
‘You could?’
‘Mm-hmm. I could get talking to them. Nose around. You know?’
Toby looked at her in awe. ‘You’d do that for me?’
‘Of course I would. I told you. I’m desperately nosy.
She smiled then, as the idea caught her imagination. She’d spent three years watching these people across the road, three years wondering what they were like, who they were, what they did and why they were there, and now she was being asked to find out. Officially.
‘Well, if you were really happy to do that, then, wow, that would be amazing. And in fact, it’s my birthday next week, my thirty-ninth, and I’d been thinking I might invite a few people to the pub and, maybe, if I did that you might like to come along, too. Give you a chance to …’
‘Be nosy?’
‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘And your, er, boyfriend? Husband?’
Leah threw him a questioning look.
‘The doctor. The Asian chap?’
‘Oh. Amitabh. My ex-boyfriend. We split up.’
‘Oh. Hell. Sorry. I er …’
‘And he’s a nurse, not a doctor.’
‘Oh. Right. I was just about to say, you must ask him along, too. But, obviously, ah … I really had no idea.’
‘Really. Honestly. It’s fine. We split up last week. I suggested that we get married and he suddenly went all Indian on me. Said his parents would disown him. So, that’s that.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’
‘Yes, well,’ Leah shrugged, holding back her tears so as not to embarrass Toby. ‘Shit happens. I’m trying to be philosophical about it.’
‘Yes, yes, best way to be. Totally.’
It fell silent then for a moment. Leah glanced up at Toby. He was staring wistfully out of the window, looking pensive. ‘OK, now,’ she said, smiling, ‘that was a perfect opportunity for you to practise being nosy. A curious person would want to know more about my break-up.’
Toby stared at her, blankly.
‘So – ask me some questions.’
‘What sort of questions?’
‘Questions about the break-up.’
‘Well, yes, but you’ve just told me why you broke up. What else is there to ask?’
‘Well, for example, you could ask me how long we’d been together.’
‘Right. OK. So, how long had you been together?’
‘No! Not like that. You need to sound genuinely interested. Say: “Oh, no, that’s awful. How long had you been together?”’
Toby flushed and cleared his throat. ‘Erm, oh dear, poor you, how long had you been together?’
‘Nearly three years.’
Toby nodded.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Ask me more questions. Ask me how we met.’
‘So – how did you meet?’
‘We met at his cousin’s wedding.’
‘Right. I see.’
‘I was a colleague of the bride. I think she only invited me because someone else dropped out.’
Toby nodded awkwardly.
‘Go on,’ she said, encouragingly.
He cleared his throat. ‘And, er, was he nice?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he was. Very nice. But obviously not as nice as I thought he was.’
‘And what are your plans now?’
‘Well, Am’s moved into nurses’ accommodation and I’ll have to find somewhere else to live.’
‘And, er, how do you feel about that?’
‘I feel very annoyed, very sad and very nervous.’ She paused then as her bottom lip trembled and her smile started to crack. She blinked away some tears and laughed. And then, she couldn’t resist it, she picked up her napkin and brushed the chocolate off his chin.
‘There, you see,’ she said, forcing a brittle smile, ‘it’s easy, isn’t it? Being nosy.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘So – do you think you can do it? Do you think you can get to know your tenants?’
Toby nodded. ‘Yes. I really think I can.’