5

AT SIX O’CLOCK that evening Kirsty Rivers came out of a small shop tucked away behind Oxford Street on the north side. She set the burglar alarm, turned off the lights and pulled down the security shutter. There were no late nights at the shop – apart from the stocktake once a month – and no earlies either, whatever the weather. The business acted as an address, or an office, for people who didn’t have one. Kirsty spent the day sending, receiving and forwarding mail. She wrapped up fragile and oddly shaped parcels. Gloria, her mother, couldn’t understand why Kirsty was doing anything so lowly when she had a 2:1 in media and music. She said that if Kirsty was interested in post she should go and run the Post Office. It needed someone with a brain. Kirsty said that people of her age didn’t run anything.

She was hungry so she crossed the road to the Lebanese grocer’s opposite. A clear plastic sheet was draped over the display at the front and snow was collecting in the dips between the piles of fruit. Kirsty went inside and walked up one aisle and down the other, picking up a packet of halva, another of almonds and a bag of pleated cotton wool. The man behind the counter raised an eyebrow but Kirsty ignored it. She had decided, over time, that the eyebrow was not connected with the contents of the basket. The mind was elsewhere.

Leaving the smell of cold oranges, she walked along the backstreets towards Marble Arch. There was an enigmatic life behind Oxford Street that had nothing to do with department stores or tourist touts. Tall terraced houses were divided into offices. Drab lighting and the occasional chandelier shone behind full-length net curtains. There were black cars parked on yellow lines and occupied by sleek, sleeping drivers, newsagents selling foreign newspapers, tiny barbers’ shops with only two chairs. Even in the snow, smartly dressed old women walked their dogs and waiters wrapped in tight white aprons sat on the back steps of hotels, sheltered by canopies. Kirsty liked the calm and the strangeness – the chink of unexplained money. She felt that however long she spent there she would lack information. She made her way to the Marble Arch end of Edgware Road and caught a bus. The lower deck was already crammed with people but the stream of incoming passengers continued boarding, squeezing into gaps fit only for flexible pipes. Kirsty forced her way up the stairs and stood on the upper deck, dipping into the nuts with her gloves on, munching them, lurching whenever the bus started and stopped. The windows were closed, steamy and running with water inside and out. Kirsty could feel the heat from the cough of the woman standing next to her. She tried to breathe shallowly. Her phone rang; it was Marlene.

‘How was your New Year?’ Marlene said.

‘Don’t ask,’ Kirsty said.

‘Tell me,’ Marlene insisted in her compelling voice.

‘Luka was working. He did an all-night stint at a bar, earning double time,’ Kirsty said. ‘He invited me along.’

‘But you didn’t go.’

‘No.’ Kirsty’s conversations with Marlene generally reached a quick anticlimax. On the last stroke of midnight, Luka had rung to say the happy stuff. Kirsty had heard mayhem in the background – cheering and stamping and whooping singing. Abe had rung too at a quarter past twelve and shouted, ‘Kirstabel, I love you. Why haven’t you called to wish me Happy New Year?’

Something happened,’ Marlene said. ‘I can hear you remembering.’

‘Two people said they loved me.’ Kirsty glanced sideways at the woman with the cough.

‘What were their names?’ Marlene asked.

Kirsty paused. ‘Luka and Abe.’

Marlene sighed.

‘I made a cup of tea and took it to bed but I fell asleep before I’d drunk it,’ Kirsty said.

‘It can only get better, Kirst. I hate that new beginning propaganda. It’s not real. Since when was January a new beginning? I read your stars for the year and it said, “You already have wings. Soon you will fly.”’ Then Marlene said that she had a call waiting and rang off.

Kirsty put the phone in her pocket and took out the almonds again.

‘You’ll never get fat,’ the woman with the cough said. ‘However many nuts you eat.’

After almost an hour, the bus reached Kensal Rise. Kirsty began to ease her way down, edging past the people who were standing on the stairs. By the time she was at the bottom, the bus was at the Iverdale Road stop. Kirsty stepped off and skidded across the pavement in her shoes with wafer-thin soles. She never planned ahead with shoes, perhaps because the house was only twenty metres from the stop – a mixed-brick terraced house with a scruffy hedge at the front. Some terraces have a look of uprightness but this one needed shared walls to prop itself up. The roof sprouted buddleia – charred-looking spikes that resisted the snow. Kirsty’s footsteps were the first since the snowfall, though the slush thrown up by the traffic spattered the front path. No one had walked up to deliver pizza flyers and Abe wasn’t yet back. He hadn’t come home the previous night. Sometimes he stopped out for days at a time. Kirsty placed her feet gingerly on the ice-covered steps and opened the door. The house, punctured by gaps in the woodwork, felt as cold as a shed. Apart from the rumble of buses outside, the place was quiet. No sound of Abe’s builders from the upper floors, though they often worked in the evenings.

Kirsty went down to the basement, still with her coat on, holding the roll of cotton wool. She pulled pieces off and stuffed them into the joins of the warped window frames where shafts of air were coming in. She felt as if she were tending wounds, patching up lesions, but then, when she finished, the windows looked like a home for cocooned butterflies. The draught was tamed. On a whim, Kirsty switched off the lights. She skirted round her bed in the dark and went back to the window to look at the garden refashioned by snow. She tried to guess what lay beneath; the bumps and stumps that had once been a bucket, a deckchair frame, a wheel from a motorbike. It felt odd to be staring from the unlit house – a quirky thing that she would never have done in ordinary weather. The buildings in the next street seemed suddenly much closer and more companionable, as if they were part of a village – not a picturesque village, but a place where, once upon a time, you might have spoken to your neighbours. She stayed for about ten minutes, just staring out.

When Abe returned at eight o’clock, Kirsty was preparing her supper – chopping up garlic and onions to cook with some rice and chickpeas.

‘Nothing fucking works in this country,’ he said, as he walked into her kitchen. Abe generally came in to see her, if he had nothing better to do. He sounded cheerful. He waved the evening paper and slapped it down next to her on the speckled Formica worktop, like a husband in a fifties film. Kirsty glanced at the fuzzy picture of lines of cars, stranded in white drifts on a motorway. She moved the newspaper to one side because it was half over the chopping board, on top of the bits of garlic.

‘Let’s have a party at the weekend,’ Abe said, putting an arm round her and picking a chickpea out of the open tin with his free hand. ‘A house-warming.’

‘You’ve had one already,’ Kirsty said, extricating herself from the cold sleeve.

‘Oh, that wasn’t a proper party,’ Abe said. ‘That was just having a few friends round. We’ll have a proper one and you come to it this time. We’ll use the whole house.’

Abe had celebrated every major purchase he had made: the American-style fridge, the high-speed shower, the wide-screen television. On these occasions he drank a lot of Prosecco and took various drugs.

‘I won’t know anyone,’ Kirsty said.

‘Of course you will. Ask people.’

‘Will Declan be coming?’

‘No idea,’ Abe said.

Declan was a musician who played recorder and flute. Kirsty had known him at university. He alternated between animation and Zen-like calm, and had furrows running from his nose to his chin that made him look older than he was. He and Abe had got it on – at least Kirsty assumed so because at one time she kept bumping into him around the house. She hadn’t seen him since before Christmas but he had left his bicycle, a black waterproof and a stack of CDs in the hall. It was funny thinking of the people – men – who started out as her friends and then fancied her brother. They tended to drift away after an involvement with Abe. She had lost a few friends that way. Kirsty ran a knife down the papery casing of an onion and began peeling it, section by section. From the corner of her eye, she saw Abe pull off his hat and stuff it into his coat pocket. Then he took off the coat and draped it over a chair.

‘Do you want to know what happened to me yesterday?’ he said.

‘Go on.’

‘First, I had to fight my way off the train.’ Abe paused. He roamed around the room. He opened one of the kitchen cupboards and shut it again. He opened another and started moving things about.

‘What are you doing, Abe?’

‘I thought you might have some raisins.’

‘I haven’t.’

He carried on poking around inside.

‘What are you looking for now?’

‘Nothing.’ He pulled out a small packet. ‘Why have you got an elastic band round these walnuts?’

‘To stop them falling out.’

‘Neat.’ He was already chewing. ‘They’re a bit stale.’ Abe dipped into the packet again. ‘Anyway, like I said, eventually, I got through to the taxi queue outside Paddington Station. What?’ he asked, interrupting himself, catching some expression on Kirsty’s face.

‘I didn’t say anything. Carry on.’ Kirsty blinked as the vapour came off the onion and a dribble of juice ran out.

‘You never take black cabs. I know.’ Abe leant his head back and tipped the remaining particles of walnuts into his mouth. Then he continued. He didn’t name the man he had shared the taxi with, or say anything about him, other than that he lived in Sudbury Hill. He described the journey in detail, making it sound like the snow scene in Narnia. Kirsty carried on chopping the onion, rhythmically slicing it into smaller and smaller pieces. Abe reached the point where the man offered to put him up for the night. He stopped. Kirsty put down the knife and looked up at him. The story had come to an end. She hadn’t said anything; she had just let him tell it. Abe was smiling. It was his silly lips-together smile that went on for hours. Kirsty couldn’t see what he was so pleased about.

‘You told this man you lived in Harrow?’ Kirsty said. ‘You’ve never even been there, have you?’

‘No,’ Abe agreed. ‘Why would I want to go to Harrow?’

‘What did this man look like, then?’ Kirsty asked.

‘Gorgeous,’ Abe said.

‘Gorgeous?’

‘Yeah. Why not?’ Abe started to laugh.

‘What’s he called?’

‘Richard.’

‘He doesn’t have another name?’

‘Could be Epworth.’

‘Are you seeing him again?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Is there a bottle open?’

‘No.’

Abe opened the fridge and closed it again. ‘Have you got anything to drink?’

‘Just water.’

Abe looked sceptical but he picked up his coat. ‘See you.’