by Simon Lelic
‘It’s definitely stronger out here,’ Syd declared, a shard of light from the landing window cutting right across her furrowed forehead.
The smell did seem to be at its worst where we were standing. The trouble was, there didn’t appear to be anywhere it could have been coming from. There was no space on the narrow landing for anything but the pictures on the walls (black-and-white family photographs mainly, interspersed with the occasional, obligatory, bird). The nearest door was the one to our pop-up music room, the door through which we’d just come.
‘Is it the drains maybe?’ Syd asked me. ‘The soil pipe or something?’
I was only seventy-five per cent certain at that point what a soil pipe actually was, but if I was right it didn’t seem that type of smell. It was more like … rotting fruit. Or the bins at the back of a restaurant.
I looked up.
Syd joined me.
‘The attic?’
I shrugged. The hatch was directly above our heads. We hadn’t been up there yet. It would be crammed with junk, we’d supposed, and there were other parts of the house we wanted to clear first. Plus, personally? I’m not overly friendly with spiders.
‘Shall I get the stepladder?’ I asked. It wasn’t really a question. More a delaying tactic.
‘I’ll go up,’ Syd said, sensing my fear. She makes clucking sounds whenever she sees a spider, then carries them to the nearest window in her hand.
‘No,’ I countered. ‘Don’t be silly.’ My father again, channelling through me when he wasn’t even dead. Because drainage issues? Involving ladders? That was man’s work.
I was glad I said it, though. I was glad in the end that I did go up that stepladder first. Because once I figured out how to turn on the torch and I realized what it was that was up there … Well. I had a chance to warn Syd, if nothing else.
‘Don’t come up here,’ I called out. ‘Syd? I mean it. Don’t come up.’
Sydney
I’m not going to talk about the attic. I’m going to talk about Elsie Payne.
I remember thinking she would blow away. It was her hair whipping behind her like a kite string, the wind-splash ripples in her raincoat. The fine weather that was to last for most of the summer had taken a few days off and for a short time that month it felt like we’d tripped straight into autumn. Elsie was like a leaf dislodged prematurely from the tree, green in her mac and with that splayed stalk of blonde, struggling through the weather for a safe place to land.
I followed her to the shop on the corner. I liked that, that there was a shop on the corner, and that it wasn’t a Londis or a Tesco. Mr Hirani, who ran it, didn’t worry overly about the paintwork, and whatever signage had once existed was evident now only as shadow. But inside there was everything you could need. Cornflakes, cumin, cat food – even, at an extortionate mark-up admittedly, champagne. The shop it was known as in the neighbourhood. As opposed to the shops, which referenced the more uniform parade of south London outlets a fifteen-minute walk away on the local high street.
I’d never noticed Elsie before. Not that I would have expected to necessarily: we’d only been living in the house for a few weeks. But when we’d moved in I’d taken a fortnight’s holiday (as much time as I’d taken off work in the preceding two-and-a-bit years) and, either by sitting on the window seat on our new landing or by dawdling through the surrounding streets myself, I’d become familiar – at least by sight – with many of the local faces. There was Mr Hirani, of course, who was so reliably behind the counter in his shop I half suspected he must have invested in a catheter. There was Pink Woman (her clothes, not the woman herself. Her skin was actually this deep toffee brown) and Russian-Mob Man (who turned out to be Kevin from Essex, but who looked exactly like a Russian gangster right up until the moment he opened his mouth), as well as the Guitar Cowboy (guitar case, cowboy hat) and Telly Savalas (just a lookalike, more’s the pity). Oh, and the JAMIE! family, who seemed to communicate exclusively by yelling – you guessed it – JAMIE! Unloading the car, preparing for school: there wasn’t a task the family carried out in public that didn’t seem to hinge on the deployment, like cannon fire, of that single word.
There were others, too, whose habits and routines I’d come to recognize. But not Elsie, not until that morning.
I guessed from the size of her that she was ten or eleven, though it turned out she was really thirteen. And though she never tripped or even stumbled, her gaze seemed permanently angled towards the clouds, as though she were using them to navigate or were imagining herself part of their world. I spent several moments that first time I saw her searching for the thing she was staring at – an aeroplane, I thought, or a wheeling bird – until I realized there was nothing so specific up there. Nothing I could make out, anyway.
I’d almost caught up with her by the time we approached Mr Hirani’s shop. The little bell rang when she pushed open the shop door, then again as I followed her inside. A twitch in her shoulders betrayed her surprise that I’d entered so close behind her but she didn’t turn. She simply moved a little faster towards the counter.
‘Elsie,’ said Mr Hirani. He was not a man given to smiling, I’d learned, or in fact offering any expression at all – but there was a smile for Elsie in his smoker’s voice. (That was another thing about Mr Hirani. From the sound of him he smoked sixty a day but I’d never seen him outside with a cigarette. I’d never witnessed him leaving his stool. Maybe everything he needed to accomplish he accomplished after shutting up shop. Bite to eat, chain-smoke some Bensons, then a massive, long-anticipated wee.)
And talking of cigarettes, it was two packs of B&H that Mr Hirani slid unasked for by Elsie across the counter. She opened her hand above his and let fall into his palm a crumpled banknote. Before he’d even uncreased it to see what denomination it was, he was already handing over Elsie’s change. She counted it carefully – twice – in a manner that, if an adult had been doing it, any self-respecting shopkeeper would have considered insulting. Mr Hirani didn’t blink. If anything he appeared to be counting – double-checking – with her.
I caught his eye. I suppose my reservations about what I’d witnessed must have showed. I mean, I’m not exactly a stickler for regulations. The right to die, the right to get high: I’d march for both. And personally I was smoking when I was nine and my first line of coke was a present from a so-called friend on my fifteenth birthday. That doesn’t mean I’d condone it, though. When it comes to kids (who I would define, desperately optimistically I realize, as anyone under sixteen), nanny statism, I feel, does more than simply serve a purpose. It’s vital, inviolable. To the same degree that a child’s innocence is corruptible. Anything that makes kids’ lives safer: I’d do more than march for it. I’d die for it.
So, yeah – that must have showed. Mr Hirani knew me well enough by that point to know I had a serious sugar habit and that I had a weakness for sour-flavoured Skittles. Still, I was new to the neighbourhood and he didn’t know if he could trust me. Hence the look he was giving me, which initially I mistook for concern – presumably for his self-preservation. His face, though, was hard to read at the best of times and I realized that actually it was a warning. Not to say anything. Not to interfere. Perhaps in any other context I would have mounted that high horse I tend to drag around with me – if, say, we had been in a Londis or a Tesco, and on the high street and not at the core of a neighbourhood I’d only recently begun to think of as my home. But that day, for once, I was quick on the uptake. I understood that what I’d witnessed was none of my business. Also, that it was almost certainly only a very minor scene in a drama that was playing beyond my sight.
I made up for it, of course: the lack of damage I did then. I made up for it and more. But that was later. For the time being I remained an observer, obedient to Mr Hirani’s silent counsel and relieved, actually, that I’d been absolved of my duty to make a fuss.
Elsie pocketed her cigarettes and slid from the counter towards the door. As she passed me I caught m
y first proper glimpse of her face. Only in profile, and just for an instant before she sank tortoise-like beneath her coat collar, but I noticed the stormy shading of her eyes and the high-boned fragility of her cheeks. I saw her fringe cut so low it tickled her eyelids and I saw the bruise, old and fading, that was nevertheless still visible above her lip.
I’d come in for sugar. Something about what had transpired made me pretend that, instead of Skittles, I wanted milk. I paid hastily, then walked out of the shop without looking like I was rushing. This time Elsie wasn’t dawdling. She didn’t gaze up towards the sky and she barely checked before she stepped out to cross the street. I followed steadily behind her, trying not to look like I was following her, but if she’d turned she wouldn’t have been in any doubt.
We passed the church and the Evening Star (I liked that about the neighbourhood too: that the pub and the church were directly across from one another, so that if you were to walk down the middle of the road they’d be like a devil and an angel calling out to you across opposite shoulders) and then rounded into one of the residential streets. It was the turning before ours but I took it anyway. The houses were identical to those in the terrace next to us: red brick, two storeys, with crenulated stonework around the windows and the doors that roughly one in three owners had painted white.
Gradually, like a ship slowing, Elsie came to a stop. I continued as close as I dared, then paused unhidden by a lamp post. She’d got out her change again and as before appeared to be checking it. This time, rather than putting it back in her pocket, she wrapped it in a fist and approached the nearest front door. The house she was aiming for was one of those directly behind ours. I counted from the corner. Five in, which meant it would be visible from the spare-bedroom window.
There was movement in one of the windows – on the first floor, on what I presumed was either the landing or in a box room – and I looked up. All I saw, though, was a retreating shadow. Elsie’s father? The form had been too broad to belong to a woman. I stared a little longer and that’s when I saw movement again. Whoever it was hadn’t gone away. They’d merely withdrawn enough so that I could only just see them.
When I looked down again Elsie had her key in the lock. She paused and I wondered whether she’d sensed movement above her too. But then she turned, and looked directly at me, and I realized she’d known I was following her all along. She smiled. Was it a smile? Even now I’m not entirely sure. It was something anyway, an acknowledgement of one kind or another. It was shy, almost wistful. It was the same expression I saw her give me two months later, when we spotted each other on the platform of our local train station and I stood watching as she threw herself off.
Jack
‘Arsehole.’
I raised my head from my paperwork in time to see Bartol hammer down the phone. He saw me looking and broke into a grin.
‘Relax, amigo. He couldn’t have heard me. The fascist prick had already hung up.’
Bart had been in trouble before for speaking his mind. In fact it was a daily occurrence, but what I mean is he’d almost lost his job. He was a housing officer, the same as me. But whereas I was like a holding midfielder – dogged, reliable, with consistent if unspectacular performances – Bartol was our glamorous foreign signing, singularly programmed to attack. He scored plenty, turned no-hopers now and then into valuable points, but he pissed off a lot of people on the way. The opposition, yes, but also members of his own team. Even me, every so often, but never to the extent that I wanted him to get fired. At the risk of sounding like an eight-year-old, Bartol Novak was my best friend.
‘Who were you talking to?’ I asked him. ‘No, wait, let me guess. Your bank manager. Or Tony Blair.’
Bart grinned still wider. ‘That fucking landlord,’ he replied, and his expression darkened. ‘Do you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to tell him about Susmita’s situation. Maybe if he understood what she’s been through, he wouldn’t insist on being such a cold-hearted prick.’
Susmita was a rape victim. Her attacker had left her with a broken wrist, a shattered jaw and twin boys she’d refused to have terminated because abortion ran counter to her beliefs. She loved them dearly, in spite of their provenance, and after losing her job and her place at a shelter, she’d been desperately trying to rebuild her life. Bart, though, was about the only friend in London she had. He was trying to find a home for her, somewhere permanent, in the private sector because social housing was full. It was one of those cases that for Bart had become deeply personal – in part, I suspect, because Susmita was so astonishingly beautiful and my friend had fallen in love. To be fair, crush or no crush, with some cases you just can’t help yourself. You know there’s a system, that there’s a limit to what you can and cannot do, but sometimes … Well. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t stretch the rules.
‘Seriously, what an arsehole,’ said Bartol again. He shook his head, stared for a while, and I could tell he was about to mention the VSO. ‘It’s people like him I’ll be glad to see the back of when I finally join the VSO.’
Joining the Voluntary Service Overseas was Bart’s long-term escape plan, a bit like my dream of writing a bestseller. You have to have one, working in social services. On the toughest days it’s your escape plan you cling to in order to keep yourself afloat. The difference between my plan and Bart’s was that his was more or less in sight. In fact I didn’t doubt that one day he’d do it: just walk out on his life in London in exactly the way he always said he would. Bart was a romantic. He pictured himself building community halls in Eritrea, uncorking water supplies in South Sudan. His only reward would be the thanks of the locals and a cameo on Comic Relief.
‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Better a pissy landlord once in a while than a long-term relationship with dysentery.’
‘I’m sick of pissy landlords. When did you last meet a landlord who wasn’t pissy? All the property owners in this city, they act like they’re fucking anointed. Which I suppose they are, but that doesn’t give them the right to empty their bowels over the rest of us.’
‘Hey. That’s me and Syd you’re talking about, remember?’
‘Oh. Right. I’d forgotten,’ said Bart, with a grin that told me he’d done no such thing. ‘So how is it out there among the middle classes? Joined any book clubs lately? Hosted any dinner parties?’
Bart had a flat-share in Elephant & Castle. He liked to make out he was keeping it real, but the true reasons he lived where he did were, a, he couldn’t afford a place of his own and, b, it was vital to his mental well-being that he was able to walk to and from work. He didn’t like buses and he was out-and-out terrified of the Tube. The confined space, the press of people: just the thought of the Northern Line made him shudder. He claimed it was because of the war. The Croatian war of independence, that is, back in the early nineties, even though Bartol had been a toddler when his family had moved to England to escape the violence, and the only memories he could possibly have been repressing were those from a childhood spent in Royal Tunbridge Wells.
‘Loads,’ I answered. ‘We would have invited you, but you know how it is. All of our other friends know how to use a knife and fork.’
‘Show-offs,’ said Bart. ‘Hey, you were telling me about your attic. About how brave you were, overcoming your perfectly rational terror of those teeny tiny little spiders.’
I had been, until the landlord Bart had been chasing had finally deigned to return one of his calls. To be honest I’d been glad of the interruption. I’d started the story about the attic without knowing whether I really planned to finish it. Not because I didn’t trust my friend or value his opinion. I just … I guess I was still struggling to work out what exactly I’d seen up there – and how to put it into words.
‘It was just … a cat,’ I said. ‘A dead cat.’
‘That was making the smell?’
I shrugged, nodded.
When I’d swung the torch beam from my spot by the hatch, the attic had shown itself to be su
rprisingly empty. Not empty empty. There were boxes, a roll of carpet, an old water tank: all your typical loft-level artefacts. Mostly, though, it was cobwebs and dusty space. It explained why the rest of the house was so chock-full. The things most people would consign to the garret, the previous owner had been either too lazy or too infirm to carry up a ladder. I didn’t know which. At that point we still knew next to nothing about him, other than the story about him emigrating. And it was that as much as anything that had been bothering me. The cat was one thing: the smell of it, the sight of it, the difficulty I had getting it past Syd. But it wasn’t just the cat that I’d discovered.
‘It was in the corner,’ I said to Bart. ‘I couldn’t tell what killed it. Maybe, I don’t know … I figured maybe it got trapped up there.’
‘How? I mean, was there a window or something?’
‘I didn’t see one. But you know what cats are like. They can get in anywhere there’s air.’
‘Maybe it got injured in a fight or something, then crawled away somewhere to die.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I guess.’ Although the cat had looked as though it had got involved in something more serious than a fight. Two of its legs were bent at odd angles and its fur in places appeared almost to be singed. ‘But the point is there was something else as well,’ I went on. ‘The cat, it was right at the back. The attic was only boarded around the hatch, so I had to walk over the rafters to get to it.’ And through like a million of those cobwebs, I didn’t add. ‘But once I was there I could see into this little alcove. Like, this space tucked away behind the water tank? And there was a shoebox. A big one, all by itself. Sort of … hidden there.’
Bart was watching me with a curious little frown. He was dark-haired, dark-skinned and, much as I hate to admit it, hideously handsome. Even when he frowned – especially when he frowned – he could have passed for a model. One of those earnest types advertising something life-changing – like chewing gum, say, or underwear.
