As for Antonia, I think this whole experience toughened her up, and made her realize that being a little bit wild animal wasn’t a bad thing for a fairy princess. And that Anthony Kiedis really doesn’t have the singing range he thinks he has. And that when it comes to love triangles and duels to the death, you should always cheat. And that running away from your problems only works for so long. There were a few other lessons, all of which I printed out and laminated for her. She still sings in the bar, but she’s made a couple of trips back to Sylvania during the crescent moon, and they’re working on a cure for her. She could probably go back and be a princess if she wanted to, but we’ve been talking about going into business together and opening some straight-up karaoke bars in Charlotte and Winston-Salem. She’s learning to KJ. I think we could rule the world.
LOOK INSIDE
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
I’m going to tell a little fib to start off with. Don’t worry – I’ll let you know what it was, later on. I’ll leave you with the truth, I promise.
But I’ll tell you the other stuff first.
And I’m pregnant.
* * *
When it started, I’d been out for the evening. A work dinner, which meant a few hours in an Italian restaurant in Soho while my boss rambled about the challenges facing his company in these tough economic times, and was fairly good about not glancing down my blouse.
It wasn’t a long dinner, and even after taking the tube back I was home by half-past nine. I own a very small house in an area of North London called Kentish Town, not far from the station and the main road. Kentish Town is basically now an interstice between the nicer and more expensive neighbourhoods of Hampstead, Highgate and Camden, but before it was subsumed into urban sprawl it had been a place of slight note, open country enlivened by the attractive River Fleet – sourced in springs up on Hampstead Heath but long-ago so snarled and polluted that it was eventually lost, paved over for its entire length and redirected into an underground sewer.
My narrow little house stands close to where it once ran, in the middle of a short mid-Victorian terrace, and is three (and a bit) storeys high with a scrap of garden out back halved in size by a galley kitchen extension put in by the previous owner. Originally, so I was told by said owner, the houses were built to home families of men working on the railway line. It’s remarkably unremarkable except for the fact that one side of my garden is bounded by an old stone wall, inset into which is a badly weathered stone plaque mentioning St. John’s College. A little research turned up the fact that, hundreds of years before, the land that these houses was built on – and a chunk of Kentish Town itself – had belonged to the College, part of Cambridge University. Why a college would have owned a garden a hundred miles away is beyond me, but then I’ve never understood the appeal of reality television or Colin Firth, either, so it’s possible I’m just a bit dim.
Here endeth the tour.
It’s a very small house but I’m lucky to have it at all, given London’s lunatic house prices. Well – not just lucky. Oh, how my friends took the piss, when I bought my first flat and shackled myself with a mortgage straight out of university; but now I’ve been able to swap up to a place with an actual staircase, and they’re still renting crappy two-bed apartments in neighbourhoods where not even hipsters want to live, it’s not so bloody funny, it appears (except to me, of course).
Once indoors I hung up my coat, kicked off my shoes, and undid the top button of my skirt in an effort to increase my physical comfort in a post-pasta universe. Thus civilianised, I wandered through the living room (an epic journey of exactly five paces) and into the kitchen, where I zoned out while waiting for the kettle to boil. I’d drunk only two glasses of wine but I was tired, and the combination put me into a fuzzy trance.
Then, for no reason I was conscious of, I turned and looked into the living room.
The kettle had just finished boiling, sending a cloud of steam up around my face, and yet there was a cold spot on the back of my neck.
Someone’s been in my house.
* * *
I knew it without doubt. Or felt I did. I’ve always believed it a romantic notion (in the sense of “sweet, but deluded”) that you would somehow know if someone had been in your house: that the intrusion of a stranger would leave some tangible psychic trace; that your dwelling is your friend and will tattle on an interloper.
A house is nothing more than walls and a roof and a collection of furnishings and objects – most chosen on the grounds of economy, not with boundless attention or existential rigour – and the only difference between you and every other person on the planet is that you’re entitled by law to be there. And yet I knew it.
I knew someone had been in my house.
What if he’s still here?
The kitchen extension has a side door, my back door, I guess, which leads into the garden. I could open it, slip out that way. I couldn’t get far, though, as the neighbours’ gardens are the other side of high fences (in one case built upon the remains of that old wall).
I didn’t like the idea for other reasons, too.
It was my bloody house and I didn’t want to flee from it, not to mention I’d feel an utter tit if I was discovered trying to shin my way over a fence into a neighbour’s garden on the basis of a “feeling”. That’s exactly the kind of shit that gives women a bad name.
I reached out to the door, however. I turned the handle, gently, and discovered it was unlocked.
I knew the front door had been locked – I’d unlocked it on my return from dinner. All the windows in the kitchen were closed and locked, and from where I stood, still frozen in place, I could see the big window at the front of the living room was locked, too.
There was, in other words, only one possible way in which someone could have got into the house – and that was if I’d left the back door unlocked when I left the house that morning.
I didn’t know anything about the tactics of house-breaking, but suspected that you’d leave your point of entry open (or at least ajar) while you were on the premises, to make it easier to affect a rapid exit if the householder returned home. You wouldn’t close it.
My back door had been closed. Which meant hopefully he wasn’t still on the premises.
I relaxed, a little.
I tip-toed back through the living room to the bottom of the stairs, and peered up them, listening hard. I couldn’t hear anything, and I know from experience that the wooden floors up there are impossible to traverse without a cavalcade of creaks – that sometimes the damned things will creak in the night even if there’s no one treading on them, especially the ones on the very top floor.
“Hello?”
I held my breath, listening for movement from above. Nothing. Absolute silence.
I went on a cautious tour of the house: the bathroom and so-called guest room on the first floor; the bedroom and clothes-storage-pit on the next; and finally the minuscule “attic” room at the very top, situated up its own stunted little flight of five stairs. According to the previous owner, this would originally have been intended for a housemaid. She’d have needed to be a bloody tiny housemaid.
The space was so small that any normal-sized person would have to sleep curled-up in a ball. She wouldn’t have been able to stand up in the space, as I’d confirmed only the day before. I’d finally got round to hoicking out and charity-shopping a few old boxes of crap that had been languishing in there since I moved in. During the process I straightened at one point without thinking, banging my forehead on the dusty old beam hard enough to break the skin, causing a drop or two of blood to fall to the wooden floorboards.
I could still see where they’d fallen, but at least the tiny room was tidy now.
And empty, along with all the other rooms.
The whole house looked exactly as it had when I left that morning, i.e. like the lair of a twenty-eight-year-old professional woman who – while not a total slattern – isn’t obsessed with tidiness. Nothing
out of place, nothing missing, nothing moved. Nobody there.
And there never had been, of course. The sense I believed I’d had, the feeling that someone had been inside, was simply wrong.
That’s all.
* * *
By the time I reached the ground floor again I was wondering whether I was actually going to watch television after all (my intended course of action) or if I should have a bath and go to bed instead. Or maybe just go straight to bed, with a book. Or magazine. I couldn’t quite settle on a plan.
Then I thought of something else.
I shook my head, decided it was silly, but wearily tromped toward the kitchen. Might as well check.
I flicked the kettle back on to make a cuppa for bed (having decided on the way it was now late enough without spending an hour half-watching crap television, and showering tomorrow morning would do just fine, given the emptiness of my bed). Once a teabag was in the cup waiting, I turned my attention to the bread bin.
My mother gave this to me, a moving-in present when I bought the house. It’s fashioned in an overtly rustic style and would look simply fabulous if placed within easy reach of an Aga in a country kitchen (which my mother has, and would like me to have too, preferably soon and in the company of an only moderately boring young man who would commute from there to a well-paid job in the City while also helping me to start popping out children at a steady clip). In my current abode the bread bin merely looks unfeasibly large.
I don’t actually eat bread either, or not often, as it gives me the bloat something chronic. I was therefore confident that it should be empty of baked goods but for a few crumbs and maybe a rock-hard croissant.
Nonetheless this is what I had come to check.
I lifted the handle on the front, releasing a faint scent of long-ago sliced bread. Then I let out a small shriek, and jumped back.
The front of the bin dropped to the counter with a clatter that sounded very loud. I blinked at the interior, then cautiously reached out.
Inside my bread bin was a note. I took it out.
It said:
It’s very pretty. And so are you
* * *
I need to backtrack a little here.
Years ago, in the summer after I left college, I went on a trip to America. I can’t really describe it as “travelling”, as I rented a car and stayed in motels most of the time – rather than heroically hitch-hiking and bunking down in vile hostels or camping in the woods, dodging psycho killers, poison oak and ticks full to bursting with Lyme Disease – but it was me out there on my own for two months, and so it qualifies for the word “trip” in my book.
In the middle of it I lodged for five days with some old friends of my parents, a genteel couple called Brian and Randall who lived in decaying grandeur in an old house in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, the name of which escapes me. It was a pleasant interval, during which I learned that Mozart is not all bad, that my mother had once vomited for two hours after an evening sampling port wines, and that you can perk-up cottage cheese no end by stirring some fresh dill into it. Fact.
I noticed something the first night. Randall had gone upstairs to bed. Brian, by a slender margin the more butch of the two, sat up with me a while longer, conferring advice on local sights worth a visit (almost none, according to him).
As we said goodnight in the kitchen, I noticed that he checked the house’s back door was shut (without locking it, however), and hesitated for a moment in front of a small, wooden box affixed to the wall opposite it, before giving it a little tap.
The next morning I was up early, and as I made myself a cup of tea (Brian and Randall were fierce Anglophiles, having spent several years living in Oxford, and had a bewildering array of hardcore teas to choose from) I drifted over and took a look at the wooden box.
It was small, about two inches deep, nine inches wide and six inches tall. There was a hinged lid on the top and upon this had been painted the words LOOK INSIDE!
I didn’t feel that I could or should, however, and it was a couple of days later – after I’d seen Brian go through his late-night ritual twice more – that I finally asked him about it. He rolled his eyes.
“Silly idea,” he muttered. He gestured for me to come over. “See what it says?”
“‘Look Inside’,” I said.
“What does that make you want to do?”
“Well… look inside.”
He smiled. “Good. Go ahead.”
I opened the little box. Inside was an envelope. I looked at Brian. “Go on,” he said.
I pulled it out. The envelope was unsealed. I removed from it a cheerful greetings card that had the words WELCOME, FRIEND printed clearly on the front. Inside was another envelope, a little smaller than the first. I let this be for a moment, and read the message that had been inscribed on the card:
Dear Uninvited Visitor,
Welcome to this house. We have called it ours for a long time now, and we like it very much. We hope you will find good use for what is in this card, and that it will be sufficient incentive for you to go on your way, without further loss or damage to our dear home. If so, you leave with our thanks, and our very best wishes.
Regards,
Randall & Brian
I frowned, and looked up at Brian.
“Look inside the second envelope,” he said.
I put the card down and opened the envelope. Inside, held together by a large paperclip with a smiley face on it, were bills totalling two hundred and sixty dollars.
“We started with a hundred,” Brian said. “And have raised it by twenty every year. So it must be seven years, now, I suppose. No, eight. Time does trot along, doesn’t it?” He gestured vaguely to indicate the house as a whole. “Nobody’s going to break in through the front door,” he said. “It’s right on the main street, and in a town this small people keep a friendly eye on each other’s properties. Someone could come around the side, but breaking windows is such a chore and prone to be noisy. So we always leave the back door unlocked.”
“What? Why?”
“Otherwise that would be the obvious way to break in, my dear, and a broken door alone would cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars to put right, never mind the time and inconvenience – and who knows what they’d steal or damage once they’d gained entrance? The way it stands now, someone can simply open the door and come straight in, and once you’re in the kitchen the very first thing you see is that box. Hard to resist, don’t you think?”
I was smiling, charmed by the idea. “And does it work?”
“No idea,” Brian said. “I have never once risen from my slumbers – nor returned from promenading during the day – to discover the envelope gone. The whole thing was Randall’s idea, to be honest. I generally find it’s best to let the old fool have his way. Except when it comes the proper method for making a nice, silky Hollandaise, of course, with regard to which he is… so very wrong.”
A couple of days later I got back into my rental car and set off to wherever I went next (a vague trawl through the Carolinas, I believe, though as my route was completely without form, and void, it all gets a bit mixed up in my mind now). I evidently brought Randall’s idea back home with me to London, however – buried beneath the levels of conscious recall until I moved into this house.
In my previous flat it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense, what with it being on the third floor. Quite soon after I moved into my house in Kentish Town, however, I saw a little wall-box in a local knick-knack store, and the idea popped back into my head as if it had been waiting patiently for attention all along.
I bought the box and picked a spot on the wall, about six feet up the corridor from my front door. I spent a happy evening rather painstakingly painting the words LOOK INSIDE! onto the lid. You’d have to be charitable to describe the result as artistic, but it was legible. When I’d hung the result on a nail, I felt foolish.
Not because I’d done it – I was still charmed by
the notion – but at stealing the fruits of someone else’s personality. This was Randall’s idea, not mine. In the house he shared with Brian (the latter sheepishly colluding, out of love) it was a song of individuality, like the mandatory dill stirred into their cottage cheese. If I did the same thing, I was merely a copycat.
So I changed it a little. Instead of putting an envelope of cash in the box on the wall, I left a note there telling them to look...
In the bread bin, in the kitchen.
And I didn’t make an offering of cash, either. I left a piece of jewellery instead. It wasn’t a piece that meant the world to me, admittedly, but it wasn’t without some emotional value. I’d found it in Brighton years before, paid more than I could afford at the time, and had real affection for it. I chose it for the offering on the grounds that a genuine sacrifice could not be made without cost. It was probably worth about a hundred quid, or at least that’s what I imagined you could get for it, should you show it discreetly around one of the area’s less reputable pubs.
Like Brian, I’d never yet woken or returned to find evidence that the note in the box in the hallway had been found.
Never, that is, until now.
I walked quickly back to the hallway. I stopped when I was a few feet from the box, and approached cautiously.
It looked the same as always, though to be honest I’d stopped noticing it some time ago. I looked inside.
The envelope there had been opened.
Of course it had. It had to have been. Without reading the message I’d written on the card – almost verbatim the same as the one Randall had concocted – the person wouldn’t have known to look inside the bread bin, and find what was there, and leave me the note.
Suddenly all the strength seemed to go from my legs, and I tottered into the living room and sat down on the sofa just in time.
* * *
The house was still empty, of course. I’d already established that, and what I’d just discovered made no difference to that fact. There was nothing to be frightened about. Nothing in the present situation, anyway.
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