Her illness may have got worse after my father walked out. I’m not sure. I have few memories of life before he went. Or of him. A certain aftershave pulls me up short, and fabric in a particular black and white dog-tooth check speaks to me in a peculiarly painful way. He worked for the gas board and I’m told he was from a lower social class to my mother, but family life, it turned out, wasn’t his bag. Or that’s the conclusion events have led me to extrapolate. One Saturday morning, when my sister and I were still pre-school, he went out to get a paper. The woman who ran the greengrocer – now a branch of Pizza Express – said she saw him getting on the 319. He was never seen again. That, at least, is the story my mother always clung to. I think she found the dramatic nature of it reassuring. I have a few memories that don’t fit: the sound of them arguing long before he left, empty hangers clanging in the cupboard, and then, after his ‘disappearance’, a trip with him to the fairground, when I was tall enough to go on the waltzer. If such visits did exist, they eventually stopped. Maybe he moved away, or got bored. Sometimes I wonder if he is out there still, but he was older than Mother, and she was in her eighties when she died, so it is unlikely.
My mother never worked, because of her condition, and I have no memory of her drawing any benefits. Instead, after he left, we scrimped and saved, made do, waste not, want not, etc. We grew veg, and collected coupons; we took in ironing, we constantly recycled, ‘upcycled’ to use modern parlance, our own clothes. We didn’t have a mortgage – my father had inherited the house, located on a main road, from an aunt. In those days, Tooting was nothing to write home about. Things have changed dramatically around me – ‘Trinity Fields’, I believe the estate agents are calling this patch now – though it’s still extraordinary to me that anyone would spend as much as the Tilsons on a house here, let alone bother to dig out the basement.
It has taken me a while to adjust to the notion of ‘neighbours’. We had no visitors from outside, when I was growing up, though our world was populated nonetheless. My mother’s parents were killed in the Blitz, and she moved in with her grandmother, a strict Victorian, in Eastbourne. As a child she escaped her surroundings (sadness, fear, relentless boredom) by colouring them in with her imagination, and it was a habit she never lost. All her significant relationships were with creatures, both real and imaginary. She had a vast collection of woodland-related ornaments – rabbits a particular favourite – and she talked about hedgehogs and birds and foxes as if she knew them individually. ‘Mr Hedgehog’s been sent out on his ear to find some worms.’ ‘Oh look, cheeky Rufus Robin’s come to see what’s what.’ If anything went missing in the house it was blamed on the Borrowers, the family of miniature humans who lived behind the skirting boards. She talked about them so often that when, visiting a school friend, I happened upon Mary Norton’s novel, I embarrassed myself, and was subsequently the object of much scorn in the playground, by insisting the book was written about our house. You could pull a room to pieces in search of the lost item – a sock or a protractor, say – but if you found it, it wasn’t down to your efforts but those of an invisible lodger called St Christopher. For anything more serious we called on our guardian angels – we had one each. It was mine, incidentally, not my mother, who sat by my hospital bedside after the removal of my tonsils.
Does it sound charming? It wasn’t actually. It was more of a tyranny. Every item in the house had an animus. She would never leave an egg alone in the box ‘in case it was lonely’, and we used loose tea to prevent the upsetting tearing of conjoined teabags. The cushions on our sofa sat in preordained family groups; soft toys and old clothes were never thrown out. In my treasured box of Caran d’Ache, each pencil was worn down to the same level, even the white; she made me use each implement equally so as not to hurt any feelings.
Someone – a young doctor who visited her at home once and noticed her distress at taking a single tablet – told me it was a psychological disorder. Acute empathy of that kind, he said, wasn’t easy; it was linked to over-sensitivity to slights. We agreed it was a reaction to her illness, the isolation of it. But I’ve thought hard about this recently. Ailsa says it explains a lot about me. It’s probably generic, a family trait.
At first it seemed as if I would escape. ‘The clever one’ in relation to my sister – ‘the pretty one’ – I left school for university, King’s College London, the lucky generation that got it all free. I lived in halls, and then in student digs near Elephant and Castle, and had finished my degree and begun a doctorate when two things happened: my mother’s ill health flared, and my sister decided she had had enough of being the main carer. As a result of both, I moved back home.
I was in trouble anyway. Like all family myths, my reputation as ‘the clever one’ had turned out to be an exaggeration. ‘The slightly cleverer one’ would have been more accurate. My thesis, hubristically entitled ‘Culture and Cognition in Language Evolution’, was proving beyond me. Deadlines were already being missed, emergency meetings made and ducked. I slunk home, resentfully watched Faith pack her bags for a new life in Brighton, while secretly nursing relief. If my mother was insufficiently grateful for my sacrifice, it suited me to resent that, too. I continued to resent it for twenty years, to blame her for the jobs I took, initially at the library, which didn’t go well (the chief librarian hated me, and there were too many children) and then in the Leisure and Culture department at the council – where I was just as miserable. I harboured this resentment, like a trusted old rotting skiff, throughout the last decade, when I have been happily employed as freelance assistant editor to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I have Fred Pullen, an old university friend, to thank for recommending me for this post, and it suits me down to the ground. It’s a big old project we have embarked upon, the updating of the dictionary. It started in 1999 and goodness knows when it will be finished. Never, probably, which as far as I’m concerned would be convenient. Basically I re-write the existing entries; other teams are in charge of the neologisms. I help revise the old definitions and, with the help of newly available sources online, update the quotation paragraphs (the ‘QPs’, as we call them) where necessary. It’s ponderous work, sometimes thrilling, often dull. I find it satisfying.
She’s out of the bath now. I can hear the thunder of water overhead, the clanking of the old iron pipes. That was a short dip even for her. It’s the metallic rusty streak on the enamel she hates. She says it looks like blood. Nothing about my house pleases her. She can’t help comparing it to the light, empty, knocked-through open spaces of next door: the reclaimed wooden floors, the steel framed industrial-style doors, the curated combination of old and new. My rooms are a hodgepodge in comparison. She used to care about sorting it out. She’s given up on that now. My house is no longer a project, and nor am I. She has more serious things to worry about.
Tonight, I must keep her off her phone. She has a compulsion to look at Instagram, but it’s her own feed she constantly scrolls through, revisiting happier days – her cakes, her house, her children, Tom. It’s very sad. Other people’s pictures are supposed to make you feel inadequate, not your own. I might try to get her to read one of the books I got for her out of the library: the thrillers she likes. There was a whole row of them on the ‘just published’ shelf. They seemed all to be about women who discover their husbands are psychopaths, but what can you do? Just reading this stuff doesn’t turn you into a killer.
At the pub quiz last night, Maeve asked if I wasn’t scared having Ailsa here. ‘You don’t know what she might do. What if she loses her temper? What if she turns on you?’
I smiled. ‘We’re friends.’
‘How do you know? You’re too . . .’
She didn’t finish what she was going to say but I knew what she was thinking. I looked around the table, at the motley crew who come together at the Dog and Fox once a week, and saw it in all their eyes: that I was too trusting, too lonely, that I would take in anyone to keep the darkness from pressing in.
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nbsp; The bathroom door just rattled; I can hear the creak of floorboards. She has crossed the landing and is standing at the top of the stairs. If I listen carefully I’ll know if she goes into Mother’s bedroom. She started in there a few days ago, systematically working her way through the tallboy. I don’t know what she was looking for. She got angry when I asked. No, she hasn’t gone in there. Her steps are coming down; I can tell from the tentative rhythm of her tread. She says my stairs are dangerous.
I must make sure she eats.
I’ll put this away now. I don’t want her to know what I’ve been doing. And anyway, I’ve written enough about myself. I can see, reading back, that I quite ‘got into it’. That’s the problem with human nature. We all think our own stories are fascinating, that we are the heroes of our own little worlds. We all like the sound of our own voice.
Chapter Three
Numatic Vacuum Cleaner Henry NRV 620 W, red
Sialoquent, adjective. Tending to spray saliva when
speaking.
I find it strange to look back at the person I was before they moved in. I feel almost sorry for myself, for my innocence. It was as if for my whole previous life I’d been holding my breath.
The first time I saw her she was standing in the middle of the pavement, arguing with a traffic warden. ‘Oh my God, come on,’ she was saying, both hands clasped together against one cheek, in a sort of winsomely pleading form of prayer. ‘Come on, I was only, like, two minutes. You can’t do this to me. My husband will kill me. Please. I’ll move it now. Don’t give me that ticket.’ Her arms crossed her chest. ‘Come on, tear it up. Please. For me.’
Next to her, half on the road, half on the pavement, was a lopsided navy Fiat 500. She’d clearly parked up to unload her shopping (their off-street already taken by their main car, a huge silver beast I believe one calls a ‘Chelsea tractor’). Rookie mistake. We live on a red route and to slow the traffic down here is pretty much a crime against humanity.
‘Oh, thank you,’ she said, ‘thank you very much.’ He had slapped the ticket under her windscreen wiper and got back on his moped. ‘Have a fucking nice day,’ she called after him, raising her palm in a salute.
I pushed through my gate and onto the path. ‘Bastards,’ she said, noticing me for the first time. ‘They’re all bastards.’ I only half smiled, and let the lock click shut behind me. I had no intention of agreeing. I’m not big on generalisations. I was already wary maybe; something about her coiled energy reminded me of Faith. Plus Nathan’s worked round here for years. He’s a bit of a sweetie.
She took a step towards me then and introduced herself. ‘We moved in next door,’ she said. ‘Yesterday.’ She pointed over her shoulder at number 422, as if I needed geographic guidance, and I said, ‘Oh really?’, summoning the requisite note of surprised interest. It’s not unique to her, this tendency of people who have ‘done up’ a house to ignore their impact in absentia. Of course I knew they’d moved in the day before. The whole neighbourhood knew they’d moved in the day before. Most of us had anticipated little else for the last thirteen months but their moving in the day before; thirteen months of drills and bulldozers, the clatter of scaffolding, the whining of saws, the bangs and shouts and music and oaths of the increasingly frantic builders. I knew their taste – from the original iron claw-foot bath that arrived, the plastic shower unit that departed. I knew, for example, that their sofa and their washing machine came from John Lewis, and the coffee table and a weird headboard thing from Oka. I even, to be honest, knew her name, that she was Ailsa Tilson, in HR, married to Tom Tilson, a record company executive; that they had three children, including twins (possible IVF?), and that they were moving to London after a failed stint in Kent. Please don’t think I had sought out this information. It’s just what comes your way if you live next door to a building site for a year and you’re not so inhuman you can’t make the occasional cup of tea.
About me, of course, she knew nothing.
‘I’m Verity,’ I said.
Ignoring the 319 bus, still idling behind her car, she stretched her arm over the gate to shake my hand, and then left her elbow there, propped, like she was leaning on a desk. On first inspection, she had rather pointy features, with large nostrils in a sharply upturned nose, and skin tightly drawn across the cheekbones. I noticed her mouth had a prominent philtrum and a mole sat just below her lower lip. She was wearing a bulky khaki jacket with a fur-trimmed hood, a common garment among ‘yummy mummies’ round here, which is how I can date this encounter to mid-February, during the return of what people persisted on calling another Beast from the East. We’d had a couple of mild weeks, but a cold front had swept in more biting winds and freezing rain. It’s hard to imagine it, after the summer we’ve just had, but I do remember I’d taken off my gloves to fiddle with my key, and my fingers were numb with cold. I was curious to meet her, but I was keener to get into my house.
She didn’t ask me any questions, whether I lived alone or in a harem. Equally, she showed no interest in my property, which she might have done, as it is the mirror image of hers, or at least it was, before their ‘improvements’. She didn’t even glance up at it. At the time I interpreted this as self-absorption, but I know now it was simply that she accepts ‘difference’ without judgement. Instead she told me they’d decided belatedly to sand the living-room floor, and the constant noise was driving her ‘literally insane’.
‘Tell me about it,’ is what I didn’t say.
And then she hoisted her arm off my gate and said something about having to move the car before that cunt came back.
‘Mind my French,’ she said.
When her solicitor asked us the other day when we had first met it became apparent Ailsa had completely forgotten this encounter. She planted the beginning of our friendship a few days later – at the meeting about the trees when I was more obviously of use to her. So when I look back on this, I try to imagine it’s as if I am watching her without her knowing, an objective witness, a jury member say, who doesn’t know her history. I suppose it is obvious to say that if you can judge a person by the way they talk to waiters, a person can be measured even more accurately by their behaviour towards a traffic warden. I don’t drive but I’ve noticed how parking tickets tend to provoke disproportionate anger, a strong feeling of abused entitlement, in their recipients. I think of Ailsa as empathetic, as one of the least judgemental people I’ve ever met; and yet her reaction to Nathan was complicated. I think it wasn’t just the fine that got to her, but his resistance to her charms. Later I would learn how, as an only child, she felt responsible for maintaining the equilibrium at home; it was her own cheerfulness, her ‘upness’ that kept her parents together. On this occasion, her seductive powers failed. And yet how hard she tried to repress her panic – the almost perfect fusion of sweetness and sarcasm in her ‘have a fucking nice day’. And then her decision to sweep across and talk to me; her pointless lingering despite the cold, the havoc in the road, the furiously beeping bus. Was it kindness? I like to think it was. Or was it perhaps my cool that pulled her in? She had sensed my disapproval and wanted to win me over. Why? A frantic desire to be liked, or a woman in desperate need of allies?
As for her use of ‘cunt’ (from the Middle English: of German origin, related to Norwegian and Swedish dialect kunta and Middle Low German, Middle Dutch and Danish dialect kunte)? Not a word one should usually deploy without being sure of one’s audience. You could think of it as a hand-grenade or the kind of smoke-releasing canisters police hurl into a building before entering. Do your worst and see who’s left. But equally it could have been a distress flare, fired from a lifeboat; a scream, if you like, for help.
I was to have no contact with my new neighbours for a week or so. Over that period, they had a wood-burning stove installed, submitted a planning application for a ‘driveway turntable’, which would allow them ‘to enter and leave their property in a forward gear’, and signed up to Mindful Chef, a weekly healthy food delivery
service. They also spent a Saturday night away, during which their fourteen-year-old, Melissa – or ‘Lissa’, as she was shriekingly referred to – entertained a few friends, a couple of whom left empty beer cans and a discarded box of fried chicken in my front garden. Over that time, someone inside their property also disposed of two damaged picture frames from Ikea and a large red Henry vacuum with a broken nozzle.
It was Tuesday late afternoon when I came up against them again. I was working at my desk in the front room. The traffic is heavy at that time of day, and I was listening to Classic FM through my noise-cancelling headphones. I had just received a new batch of words – anger and angst and anguish; I remember this clearly – and was, with that nice thrill of fresh absorption, having an initial spin through the database. I didn’t hear him at the gate, but I felt him at the front door. He used the knocker, despite the fact I have a working bell. Bang, bang: it was an alert that brooked no disagreement. The windows rattled in their frames; the very papers on my desk vibrated.
A fairy-tale couple, the Sun called them, and he was a handsome man, Tom Tilson, with foppish dark-brown hair, a broad jaw and blue eyes. I read recently that symmetrical features are an important factor in a person’s attractiveness, and he scored highly there. He was dressed, as I was to later discover he usually was, in the kind of casual but fearfully expensive garb made corporately acceptable by tech billionaires: dark-blue jeans, white T-shirt, hefty trainers, though I always thought – poor lamb – he’d be more comfortable in a suit. He was rather thickset for my taste, with a softness around his neck and the open-pored complexion of a person who has lived to the full, those wide-set blue eyes of his chillingly pale. His looks were not going to age well, though it feels mean to say that now.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 2
