“Of course,” said Keiko. “But… no matter what?”
“Ha!” Fancy said. “I thought you understood me.”
They stood side by side in the bay window and looked down at the street.
“That’s Janice Kelly. I was at school with her. I bet she looks up. Yep, there you go. Hi, Janice.” Fancy waved to the young woman. and Keiko raised her hand shyly too. Janice Kelly gave Keiko a tight smile. In the distance a shrill bell sounded and almost immediately a faint bubbling chirp began, like far-off geese.
“She’s a friend of yours?” Keiko said.
“School’s out,” said Fancy, and pressed her cheek against the glass, craning up the street. Keiko pressed her face to the other pane. “Janice? She’s all right. They all are really, I suppose. Now, that-look quick-that’s Craig McKendrick, in the ironmongers.” A boy in a grey overall came out of the shop across the road, looked into the window for a moment, shook his head, and went back in.
“Mr. McKendrick’s grandson?” said Keiko.
“His nephew!” Fancy wagged her finger, laughing.
“Just like this morning,” Keiko said. “I thought the man called Malcolm was Mrs. Poole’s husband.”
“No!” Fancy turned towards her, eyes like eggs. “You didn’t say that, did you?” she asked, but then seeing Keiko’s brow crumple, she hurried on. “It doesn’t matter really. It’s just that Mr. Poole died not long ago.”
Keiko put her head in her hands, but Fancy spoke fiercely.
“No! It’s not your fault. Somebody should have told you.”
Down on the street, gaggles of little children were beginning to tumble past, weighed down by the enormous satchels sliding down their backs.
“Poor Malcolm, though,” said Fancy.
“He didn’t hear me,” said Keiko. “He wasn’t there.”
“Oh, so you haven’t met him? Maybe I should tell you…”
“I’ve seen him,” Keiko said. “He seems… very nice.” They glanced at one another, not smiling.
“Have you seen his brother?”
“Is he… like Malcolm?”
“God no, not hardly,” said Fancy. “Poor Malcolm.” She sighed and then pulled away from the window slightly. “Here she comes. Check the state of her hair.”
A thin girl, one of smallest ones, with hair the same bright brown as Fancy’s but springing out behind an elaborate hair band, was hopping down the street, the middle one of three, all hopping and holding hands tightly as they bunched and surged.
“They’re coming back to my place,” said Fancy. “I said they could do face-painting if they were good.” She let herself out of Keiko’s flat, bounded down the stairs to the street, and stood hopping in front of the three little girls, making them laugh.
Across the street, behind the net curtain in the flat above the hardware shop, Mr. McKendrick stood looking over towards the Pooles, watching.
five
Keiko, walking back through to the kitchen to wash the cups, threw a grape up in the air and ducked with her mouth open. It bounced off the bridge of her nose and fell back onto the table. She put it in between her lips and sucked it in, then coughed it back out of her windpipe and bit it in two before it could damage her any more.
“Chucking out time,” she said out loud. “Check the state of her hair. Since that weirdo niece stopped coming.” That was what she had been pining for: good, natural, idiomatic English that would stop her sounding like a schoolgirl.
“I wouldn’t stir my tea with your comb,” she said and shuddering again decided her: she would indeed ask guests to remove their shoes. Which meant she needed a genkan.
In her bedroom, she tipped clothes out of the big case onto the floor, pulled out the thick plastic sheet that her mother had insisted she use to line it-I’m going on a plane, Mother, not a sailing ship-and carried it back to the front door. She would go to the hardware store later, the ironmongers as Fancy had called it, and see if there was something more sturdy, but for now she shook out the plastic and laid it flat, tucking it under the edge of the doorframe, trying to thread it along under the bottom of the radiator. But no matter how she worked away at it, pulling and coaxing, something was stopping it from going all the way.
Holding her hair back, Keiko bent her face down close to the carpet and peered under the radiator. What she saw there made her smile: the Pooles, the Traders, whoever it was who had painted the flat, had done it the easy way, just reaching in around the radiator with a brush. Here, right underneath it, the top half of the base-board was a dark glossy green, and Keiko could see the faded stripes of old wallpaper too.
Now if she could just work the edge of the plastic past that little valve… But that was not what was blocking the way. Something else was in there. She stood up, but there was a shelf above the radiator and she couldn’t see down behind it. She knelt again. She didn’t want to put her hand under there without knowing what she was touching. But it couldn’t be anything too bad, surely not anything organic because, trapped behind the hot coils of the radiator like that, it would have smelled and someone would have noticed. Keiko wondered for the first time who had lived here before and how long the place had been empty.
She was beginning to get a crick in her neck from crouching. And anyway, there were no snakes in Scotland, and there surely could not be mice in a flat with a stone floor. Very tentatively, she curled her fingers up between the pipe work and the wall, then she let her breath go in a rush. It was only a piece of paper. She gripped it between two fingers and drew it out. An envelope. It must have fallen down the back of the shelf above and been forgotten there. Then she looked at the direction on the front and frowned.
for you, it said.
For me? thought Keiko.
She sat back on her heels and stared at the thing. It was yellowed and brittle, dusty from its time in there. So, not me, Keiko told herself. But who then? And what was it? Was it a love letter? for you seemed very intimate, somehow.
She knew all about invitations and thank you notes and letters of application and complaint, but her English teacher had never covered love letters.
Whatever it was, she decided, it was the business of the flat’s owner not its tenant. Slipping on her shoes, she trotted downstairs to hand it over to the Pooles.
She hesitated in the shop doorway for a moment, expecting smells to match the exuberant sights in the window, but it was mostly cold and soap with just the faintest metallic base note.
“Hello?” she said. The shop was empty-her voice rang back at her off the tiled walls and the glass counter-but there was a light on in a cubicle at the back, behind a frosted window. She craned around the counter to where a tiled passage with a red painted floor disappeared into darkness. “Mrs. Poole?” she called out. She stepped behind the counter and tapped on the door of the cubicle. There was a slow, shifting noise inside and the door opened. Malcolm Poole was standing there.
“Sorry,” said Keiko and stepped lightly back so that she was standing on the customer side of the counter again. Malcolm, turning sideways through the door, came towards her.
“I’m sorry I frightened you. Before, I mean,” he said. His voice was low and muffled, and Keiko had to lean in to catch his words.
“Not at all,” she said. “You were very kind.” And she held out her hand to shake his. Malcolm’s hand did not reach far beyond his body and he leaned forward, apparently from the ankles, his white rubber boots squeaking. His hand was hot, as if he had just washed it in scalding water.