The Last Girl

by Penelope Evans

  I'm looking for clues, that's all.

  The problem is now, when it's time to turn the knob and walk in. You may laugh, but it's not as easy as it sounds. All this time I've been making her welcome as can be in my own place, yet she hasn't once returned the compliment. I haven't seen downstairs since she moved in. And now here I was, all set to enter uninvited.

  Daft, I know. Like a second home these rooms should be, seeing as I must have been in and out of them hundreds of times over the years. No-one has ever thought twice about calling old Larry down when there was a hairdrier that needed fixing or plug that wanted changing. Then there have been all the times Ethel has sent me in with an errand of her own. So what was the difference now?

  Hardly any. That's what I said to myself. Hardly any, and with a good firm grip on the handle I opened the door.

  Even so, it comes as a shock.

  These rooms have always been dingy, and the lounge the worst of the lot. Decrepit, damp, neglected are words that spring to mind. Old rooms in an old house. It would take an awful lot of good money to turn them around, but you can't expect that of Ethel not when it's someone else who'd get the benefit.

  So why the shock?

  Because looking around me now was like seeing the place for the first time. I've never had to think very hard about what it would be like to live here. After all, if it's Indian girls you're talking about, these rooms might not exactly be your ideal home, but they're still a darn sight better than what they must be used to on the Subcontinent. I've yet to hear whether they have wallpaper over there. But now, looking at it, as it were, all through Mandy's eyes, you start seeing things afresh.

  It's a case of copping the wallpaper, trying to remember when it first went up, and failing, it was that long ago. Yet it was me that put it there. One thing I was fairly sure of, it wasn't brown in those days, and nor is it because of me that it's coming away from the ceilings. Those great spreading dark patches are responsible for that.

  The plasterwork is just as bad. I reckon you could hoover up twice a day here, and you'll still find it scattered like dandruff over the floor. It's a shame that, because it was on the plaster that I remember Ethel gave me free rein. 'Do what you want, Mr Mann,' she said. So I went ahead and painted the rosettes and garlands in colours I reckoned would brighten up the place. They're still there, the lime greens and the oranges, but they don't do me credit, not with all the cracks and gaps everywhere.

  Mind you, I don't suppose Mandy gives two hoots about the plasterwork. I reckon she'd be happy if there was just some way of stopping the wind howling through the gaps in the window frames. It doesn't matter where you stand, you can feel the hairs on the back of your neck lifted by something stronger than just a draught. What I want to know, though, is why Mandy has tied back the net curtains. They're not going to keep out the wind like that, and don't try telling me that Ethel approves.

  Then there's the furniture. The wonder is that any of it is still standing. You won't believe it, but most of it used to be mine - till I got shot of it along with Doreen. Gave the whole lot to Ethel, I did, job lot for ten shillings. Couldn't wait to get rid of it. The settee was a disgrace even then, which was hardly surprising seeing as we'd had it for over twenty years, and it had been Doreen's Aunty Freda's before that. Looking at it now, you'd never think we'd been grateful to have it at the time. The main thing about it was, it had a little lever you could pull down to make the whole thing into a double bed. I never quite got the hang of it somehow, but Doreen knew how to use it all right. Anyway, it's on its last legs now. The leather's showing its real age and there's horsehair falling out of places where it's worn away.

  It's a miracle Mandy spends any time down here at all, when you think about what she's welcome to upstairs.

  Nothing new then - in all senses of the word. Except that there was something different about the place, it's just that it took those first few seconds to see what it was. She'd gone and moved it around - settee, table, everything. Everything was in its natural place before, now it's all out of kilter. She's pulled the two armchairs and the settee right up to the fire so she's made almost a little room within a room there. Which is all very well, only what about the rest of it? Now there's a great open space in the middle of the floor, and nothing to fill it with. You wouldn't believe how bare it is. And that's not all. Look a bit closer and you start noticing that the walls seem awfully blank as well. She's taken down every one of the pictures - even the nice ones like the one of the skinny kid with eyes nearly bigger than his face.

  Still, I wasn't here to check out the furniture. I was meant to be looking for clues. With that in mind, I headed over to the big table. She'd moved it from the side over to the window and covered it with books and bits of paper, and more books - in short made an awful mess. Lord only knows what Ethel thinks. All the same, there was enough there to make you think there must be something useful amongst it all - if you could ignore the straightened-out paper clips and elastic bands and empty biros with the ends chewed off.. And I'll say this, when I picked up the first bit of paper that came to hand, and started to read, I actually thought I'd hit the jackpot. There it was, a whole page of little tiny writing (not that different from mine!) where certain words just seemed to jump out and hit you in the eye - words like Love and Desire -even the little word that begins with S and ends in X. Honestly, I didn't know where to look. Then gradually, it dawned on me. She wasn't writing about herself at all, but about the people in some book she was reading. Well that was a relief, but it took a minute or two to get over the shock.

  I was still a bit shaky when I moved over to the mantelpiece. But it was no better here. Ethel's knickknacks had all completely disappeared. Instead there were postcards, tens of them, arranged higgledy-piggledy along the shelf. Well, you can guess what I thought. Whatever else she was short of, it wasn't friends willing to remember her when they were off on their hols - or maybe it was just one special pal suffering from a travel bug. In other words - precious information. But when I looked at the back of one, and then another, and yet another, they were all blank. She must have bought them herself and stuck them up for show. In fact, looking at the pictures on the front, there wasn't a beach or palm tree in sight. They were all what some people like to call 'art', meaning they were mostly blurs and blobs and sawn-off guitars.

  I can tell you, it almost made me cross, having my hopes raised like that. I thought I was going to learn something at last, and all I'd found out was that Mandy was odder in some ways than I like to admit.

  In a nutshell then, I didn't find a single thing in that sitting room that was of the slightest help. So there was nothing for it but to proceed to the kitchen. Even here, though, I had a shock. It's only been four days since I was last in. Surely not long enough for all this. I'm talking about those blooming postcards. They were here as well, only worse, stuck to the wall wherever you looked like some creeping plague. You couldn't even open the fridge door without some nasty little figment of an artist's imagination practically biting off your hand.

  Was this what one lone phone call could drive a girl to do? Namely turn her kitchen into a chamber of horrors overnight. Those pictures were the sign of an unhealthy mind. And when a girl starts posting this sort of stuff up beside her sink, it's a sign that she needs help, fast.

  Unfortunately, that's just about all I did find there. If I told you her cupboards were bare as Old Mother Hubbard's it would be no more than the truth. All she had were these little bags of beans, all dried-up and nasty, and no difference between them and the gallstones Harry had taken out and would insist on showing folk for ever after. Apart from that, not so much as a tin of sardines. I mean, even sardines might have been a clue to something - if you thought about it hard enough.

  So there you are. I was afraid it would come to this. All the time I had been looking through her sitting room and .kitchen there was always the hope that I would find something, anything, which would mean that I could leave it there and not l
ook any further. But what was the use? Neither room had come up with a sausage. There was nothing for it now, I would have to carry on, open up the last door.

  I suppose I must have known I would end up here, outside Mandy's bedroom. Remember June? If there was the least little thing she wanted to keep hidden, it was off to the bedroom every time. You always knew where to look. And if I was ever going to find anything to help me now, there really had only been one place all the time.

  The trouble is, if I had any hesitation about walking into her lounge those few minutes ago, it was ten times worse now. I mean to say, bedrooms are private places. Call me over-sensitive, but nothing could have made me barge in without a second's thought. In the end I had to get a grip, even if it meant speaking sternly to myself. I actually said it aloud: 'All right, so it goes against the grain, but just you remember - this is for Mandy, no other reason. So get on with it, Larry my boy. Open up the door.'

  And that does it. Next thing is I'm doing what I should have done straightaway. I'm opening the door.

  Only very nearly to close it again.

  Did I say Mandy was odd? That was putting it mildly. And if ever proof was needed, go and stand in Mandy's bedroom. See what she's done to it. The ironical thing is, this was the one room you could almost describe as nice. The wallpaper here was roses, faded of course, but pretty enough. The curtains had roses on them too so you could nearly say that they matched. There was a frill round the bottom of the bed and another around the dressing table. In fact, it was a proper girl's room, the one you'd least expect anyone to want to change.

  As I said, you should see it now. Remember the pictures on the walls, the one of the cats and the other with the horses on a ploughed field at sunset? Gone. And not just them either. You can't see the roses any more. She's gone and pinned up these great squares of material that take up nearly the whole wall - all zig zags and stripes, in browns and blacks. Like the colour of the people who wear them. Because I'll tell you what they were. They were exactly the same things you see native women wrapping themselves up in because the missionaries never taught them how to wear decent clothes. That's what she has chosen to cover up her walls, and if that wasn't bad enough, she's got them on her bed as well. Which, by the way, used to be June's right from the time she was a child. Look at it now, though, and you might not even be able to recognize it. But it was her bed all right. You only have to touch it the once, and the whole frame begins to shiver like one great big creaking rusty spring. And what with my bedroom being right above hers (in fact we're practically room-mates when you think about it!) that's the very noise I have to listen to if Mandy so much as breathes heavily. Lord knows how she ever gets to sleep.

  You can understand my state of mind though. It's not every day you become fond of someone only to discover that they seem to be a completely different person in private. I could quite easily have walked away from it with just one question left in my mind: how Ethel could be such a snob as to allow all this.

  This is what stops me: the second thing that hits you when you walk in, only it takes a moment to sink in. It's the smell.

  It's lovely. That's what's so surprising. No, really. It's a smell of scent and soap and talc, mixed up, dare I say it, with all the soot and traffic fumes from outside. Because believe it or not, as if the place wasn't chilly enough, the silly kid has actually gone out and left the window open. But it's still lovely. Grown-up, yet at the same time youthful as bubble bath. You wouldn't believe the effect a smell like that can have - coming at you when you're least expecting it. And it's familiar. I must have been catching whiffs of it every day since she arrived, only so faintly I never realized it was there. But now, with it coming at you in waves, you couldn't mistake it. It was Mandy all over. Shut your eyes and you could almost imagine she was there, looking over your shoulder, close enough to touch.

  Of course that was being a little fanciful - talking as though she was a bar of soap or something. More accurate would be to say it was due to what she had scattered all. over her dressing table, to the jumble of bottles and jars taking up just about every square inch. Another small wonder when you think of Ethel, letting her get away with it. A real girl's mess, but there it all was - the reason my Mandy smells like she does. Clean and fresh and smoky as a rooftop garden.

  Get on with it, Larry.

  I didn't close my eyes - even if I was tempted. I came into this room with a purpose and I never once forgot that. I just wanted to say that it's true, about smells being the most powerful influences of all. After a few seconds, however, I was back on form and ready for a proper look round. For want of a better place, I started with under the bed, got down on my hands and knees and everything, and found - nothing, just a couple of pairs of shoes with no heels to speak of and looking as if they could have belonged to a kid. Having had no luck there, I inspected her bedside table and it was the same story, only a pile of books so high it would probably have wobbled if you so much as looked at it. There she was again, then, my Mandy acting just like June, piling up all her books because she never knew which one she wanted to read before dropping off. We used to tell her, June, that she would ruin her eyes but she never listened. Now here was Mandy, just as bad. So that really only left the dressing table.

  I can tell you now what I was looking for. I didn't know before, but now I did, seeing I was standing there with the influence of Mandy all around me, inspiring me as it were. I was looking for a photograph, that's what. A snapshot, no matter how blurry or old, of her parents maybe, a little souvenir of hearth and home. It would mean that even if I never found anything else, I'd come away having learned something just from looking at their faces and the way they smiled for the camera. And so it hit me - absolutely the queerest thing of all - in amongst those bits and pieces, the bottles and the boxes and the scarves and the beads, there wasn't a single photograph.

  That threw me, I don't mind saying it. I even set off around the room again in case I'd missed something. I know they had quarrelled and all that, but you always have something up, even if it's just for show. And then suddenly, I had another thought. If this was June we were talking about, where would be the first place you'd look? In the drawer beside her bed. She could keep any number of photos there. Handy for those occasions when she's feeling just that bit sentimental. All she'd need to do was accidentally-on-purpose open the drawer, and there they would be, her mum and her dad, smiling at her as if nothing had happened.

  Well, you know how it is when you get a good idea I mean when· one moment you're at a loss, and the next, a light goes on in your head - you don't think about anything else. The second this one hits me, I'm over by that table, pulling open the bedside drawer, just to see if I was right. The only thing on my mind was the snapshots, how the moment I opened the drawer there they would be, staring up at me, the way they would at Mandy. It was only when the drawer was open and I found myself, instead, gazing down at a letter, lying there without an envelope or anything, that I realized what I was doing, i.e. taking a peek inside somebody else's drawer. Something I never meant to do, not in a hundred years. Cupboards maybe, but not bedside drawers ... On top of which, there was the disappointment. See, there wasn't a snapshot in sight. Only this one letter.

  Hence the little voice, the one that never would have been there otherwise, whispering in my ear, 'Oh well, Larry boy. You're here now. You might as well.'

  But here's the difficult bit. I'd no sooner than picked it up when something else happened. The door behind me opened and someone walked into the room. I thought of Mandy, and straightaway I panicked.

  The silly thing, the absolutely ridiculous thing about it was, I didn't need to panic. I had a perfectly good reason for being there, one I could have explained to anyone who knows me for the man I am.

  But what if Mandy hadn't known me long enough? What if she got completely the wrong idea?

  I say this in retrospect, to explain why I did what I did. It wasn't even a case of me stopping to think. All I knew
was I had to get the letter back inside and the drawer shut, and me away from the drawer, as fast as was humanly possible. The mistake, though, was in trying to do everything at once. I threw the letter into the drawer, shut it, and jumped back from the bed, all in one smooth movement. Yet what happens next is horrible. Instead of ending up innocently on the other side of the room, I find I'm down on my knees again, below the level of the bed, choking and making a horrible noise. Because along with everything else, I'd slammed my tie inside the drawer, gone pretty near to strangling myself to death. I had to start all over again - open the drawer, retrieve my tie, and close the drawer - just to be able to turn around.

  And all this, just to find Ethel Duck scowling across the bed at me.

  But it could have been worse. That's what I told myself as I went about straightening my tie and getting the air back into my passageways. Of course I'd have rather she hadn't seen me picking my hairpiece off the floor and putting it back in place, but it could have been so much worse. If it had been Mandy there, for instance ... You don't need me to tell you what the young are like. They would rather believe in Santa Claus than the truth when it comes from those who are old enough to know. So it could have been so very much worse.

  Then again, looking at Ethel now, perhaps not. Not with the face she was wearing, and a mouth set like concrete; all ready to ask the very same question Mandy would have asked if she were here.

  Well go ahead, Larry, I can hear you say. Tell her the truth. At least she knows you. But you should know it's not as simple as that, not with Ethel. She has a way of twisting the plain honest truth into something far nastier than lies could ever be. Some of her comments about me and Doreen for instance ...

  But it was no good thinking about the past, not when we were in the here and now, and Ethel was standing there, about to put me through the mill. What was needed right this minute was an answer to that still unspoken question - to explain what I was doing there, rifling through Mandy's private drawers. Only there wasn't one, at least not one that would satisfy. The fact is then, Ethel hasn't even opened her mouth, and yet here I am, scrabbling about inside my head for the word, any word, that will take the look off her face, knowing all the while that nothing I say will make a blind bit of difference.