Early the next morning, Felix left to pick up the van he had rented. It was a Saturday in mid-November, cold and grey and threatening rain. Nancy, alone in the flat full of boxes and bulging cases, walked from room to room. She was saying goodbye and readying herself for the next stage.
She checked her shoulder bag. Her passport was in there, her make-up bag, the drugs prescribed by Dr Lowe that she needed to take at regular times through the day but which dried out her mouth. She sometimes felt that her edges were being rubbed away, all the sharp and unexpected bits of her. But she would go on taking them, and go on checking in with Helena, her therapist.
‘Never again,’ she said aloud to the room.
‘What’s that?’ a voice called.
‘That was quick.’
Felix came into the room, jangling a key in his hand.
‘I’ll take the heavy stuff,’ he said.
As the van filled up, Nancy thought how much and yet how little they had. There were all the flimsy bits and pieces of a life – the plates and glasses and cutlery; the bed linen and towels; the laptops and chargers; the cases of clothes and splitting bin bags of shoes; the things they didn’t really want but couldn’t bring themselves to throw away – and yet they possessed barely any furniture and certainly no possibility of a place of their own.
She put a large pot plant near the back of the van and shut the door.
‘Ready?’ Felix asked.
She nodded.
‘You don’t want to check one last time?’
‘You do it,’ she said.
Her keys were on the table. She needed to be gone.
London rolled by, first familiar and then strange. The sky was tea-bag brown and it was starting to rain. The windscreen wipers swept back and forth, trailing shreds of loose rubber which made a squeaking sound. It was a long, slow journey. Nancy’s head buzzed.
‘Okay?’ Felix asked.
‘Fine.’
‘You’re sure? You seem a bit quiet.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Just say if you aren’t.’
‘I will. Tell me about the other people in the house. Do you know all of them?’
‘I only really know the guys in the basement flat. Barney and Seamus.’
‘What are they like?’
‘Good guys,’ Felix said.
‘What do they do?’
‘Seamus is some kind of fitness instructor. I’m not sure about Barney.’
‘Old? Young?’
‘Maybe our age or a bit younger. Early thirties, anyway.’
‘Friendly? Shy?’
‘Barney’s a bit shy.’
Nancy gave up.
‘You don’t know the other people?’
‘I’ve no idea who lives opposite. I’ve met the woman on the ground floor in passing.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘She seems nice.’ Felix turned left. They were driving alongside a road, one side of which was residential, and on the other was a whole system of railway tracks. Beyond those, there were cranes, industrial buildings, storage tanks. A freight train rattled past in the opposite direction. ‘You mustn’t worry,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t worrying. I was wondering. What about the flat?’
‘It’s quite small,’ he said cautiously. ‘But you’re about to see it.’
The house in Fielding Road was from the late nineteenth century. A few feet of gravel pathway led to the communal front door with four buzzers in a vertical row to its left. A metal staircase led down to the basement flat.
Felix fumbled in his pocket for keys and opened the door. Nancy stepped into a dark hall, cracked tiles on the floor and a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a door to the right and on the other side a staircase carpeted with a fraying runner.
‘First floor,’ said Felix, and they mounted the stairs in silence.
There was a high wailing noise that grew louder as they approached the first floor. At first Nancy thought it was an alarm, but then she realised it came from a crying baby.
Felix opened the door to their flat and then shut it behind them, but even with the door closed the noise was piercing.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Nancy, seeing his anxious expression. ‘It’s bound to stop soon.’
She looked around the flat. Felix had been right to call it small. The door led directly into a square living room, furnished with basic pine furniture, leading into a tiny, doorless galley kitchen with a door that led down a flight of rickety steps into the far end of the narrow, untended garden. To the right of the living room was a bedroom with just enough room for a double bed, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. To the left was a bathroom.
‘What do you think?’
The walls were stained and peeling. The room smelt of damp, the windows weren’t big enough to let in much light – although perhaps it would be better when it wasn’t grey and wet outside. She thought of the bright, airy flat they had just left. She thought of her modest, satisfying little restaurant with its whitewashed walls and sturdy wooden tables. She made herself smile.
‘We can make it feel homely,’ she said. ‘Once our things are in here, pictures on the walls, throws.’
Felix nodded gratefully.
‘I’ll start unloading,’ he said. ‘Then I need to get the van back.’
Kira heard people going up and down the stairs, carrying things. She thought of offering to help, but she was still in her pyjamas even though it was early afternoon. She wasn’t working today, and she had spent the morning lying in bed with a mug of coffee and toast and honey, looking at her phone, half dozing and then waking up in a state of voluptuous drowsiness. She felt like a cat curled up in its own warmth.
Eventually she made herself get up. There was the party this evening, and she’d seen a dress in town that she wanted to buy. A beautiful green sequined sheath. She imagined herself wearing it.
As she left, she met Olga from upstairs in the hall. Olga was small and thin, and she was holding her baby, who was enormous and red-faced, with a huge open mouth from which came frightful howls.
‘Sorry for the noise.’
‘You look exhausted.’
‘I am. How do other mothers do it? Perhaps,’ she added, ‘their husbands help more.’
Kira thought of her own mother, who’d done it all alone. She would rush in from work and start cooking their tea before she’d even taken her coat off. Kira’s father had left just after her younger sister was born. Her mouth tightened: she didn’t like thinking of him. He was a thin, querulous, complaining man who had abandoned his family and then felt sorry for himself. Sometimes he called her in the middle of the night, when he’d drunk too much, to tell her how nobody understood him and how life had let him down.
‘Let me babysit one night,’ she said impulsively to Olga. ‘You and Harry can go out together.’
‘You would do that?’
‘Of course. I’d like to.’
Felix left and Nancy sat on a packing box and stared around. The baby was still screaming. If anything, it was louder than ever. She wanted tea, but which box contained the tea bags, which the mugs? She pulled a strip of masking tape off the nearest box and levered it open. Pots and pans. She lifted one out, a heavy cast-iron saucepan that she hadn’t been able to resist. She held it on her lap for a few moments and then began to weep. Everything was wrong.
The dress was still there. Kira took it into the changing room, stripped off her jeans and sweatshirt, and inched herself into it, the silky, chinking material cool against her flesh. She looked at herself in the mirror, turning this way and that, glancing back at herself over her shoulder. She took off her socks with their balding heels and stood on tiptoe. It made her look both slim and voluptuous, she thought: the stretch of it over her hips and her breasts, and she imagined herself wearing it when Ollie came back. She smiled at her reflection. I’m pretty, she thought; I’m sexy. Only five days, she told herself.
Kira bought her dress, though she couldn’t really afford it. Almost all of her money went on paying the rent for the nasty little flat which smelt of damp and had silverfish in the bathroom. She should move, find a flat share so when she got up in the morning there would be someone to chat to over a mug of tea, and when she came home at night, it wouldn’t be to an empty room, the freight trains rumbling by and making the windows rattle.
She walked back in the strengthening rain. On the street, she ran into Michelle Strauss, the woman who lived next door. Michelle was middle-aged and plump, with round glasses that made her look like an owl and a smile that always seemed ironic. She usually wore baggy linen clothes. She had always been very friendly to Kira, and once invited her for supper, but the way she would look at Kira with speculative curiosity made her uneasy, and the way her husband, Dylan, looked at her made her flinch.
‘Hello, Kira,’ said Michelle. She looked at the bag Kira was clutching. ‘Been shopping?’
‘I bought a dress. I shouldn’t have. It was stupidly expensive. But I couldn’t resist.’
‘Show me.’
Kira brought the garment out of the bag and for a moment, in spite of the rain, held it against herself.
‘Wow!’ Michelle said.
‘I’m going to wear it to Seamus and Barney’s party tonight.’
‘Have fun.’
‘Seamus invited me to their party tonight,’ said Felix as he came back into the flat, having delivered the van.
‘Party?’
‘In the downstairs flat. He said it was a last-minute thing. Shall we go?’
Nancy’s heart was jumping in her chest and her pulse was fluttering in her temple. She didn’t feel quite right.
‘You go,’ she said.
‘Don’t you want to come? Just for a bit?’
‘I’m a bit tired.’
‘I’ll stay here too. It’s our first evening.’
‘Don’t. It would be good to go. After all, they’re our new neighbours.’
‘I’ll just pop in for a few minutes after supper. I thought I’d get us a takeaway.’
‘Stay as long as you like.’
Kira ate a bag of crisps slowly, licking the salt off her fingers. She dried her hair and tied it loosely back at the nape of her neck. She painted her nails, put on a necklace, some dangling earrings, several thin silver bangles. She applied make-up carefully: dramatic eyes and red lips. Then she stepped into her new green dress. It was like a second skin. She smiled and her looking-glass self smiled back. Her eyes shone.
Nancy lay in bed and listened to the sounds of the party. It was two floors down, but the floors were thin, and the whole house seemed to reverberate with the noise. Good music, she thought. She loved dancing, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had danced.
She was glad Felix had gone to the party. Since coming out of hospital, she had rarely been alone. It was as if he didn’t quite trust her yet; as if he thought she might unravel again if he didn’t keep an eye on her. It was good to lie in bed, music pounding below her and trains rattling by outside the window, and let thoughts drift through her. Everything was strange to her: the breakdown, the move, this flat, her future. She felt small and naked in the world.
She woke briefly when Felix climbed into bed beside her.
‘Good party?’ she mumbled.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’
His breath smelt of beer.
‘What time is it?’
‘Go to sleep now.’