I couldn't believe that I'd heard her right. I didn't dare say anything in case it broke the spell and she changed her mind.
'Why not?' Marsha went on. 'You want to live here, don't you? Who's going to know? Who's going to care? I'm surprised no one's dossed down already, though I suppose you'd never guess from the street that the place is empty. I mean, what's the worst that can happen? The landlord can have you thrown out?'
I could think of worse things. I forced myself to address them now. 'Those friends of yours,' I said, straining to sound nonchalant, 'the ones who slept here. Did they ever, you know, complain… about anything?'
'What do you mean?' Marsha asked briskly.
I struggled to find the best way of expressing it. 'Did they ever… hear anything?'
She looked vacant for a moment before cottoning on. Then, very slowly and deliberately, shook her head.
I wasn't entirely convinced. 'How about you? Did you ever hear it?'
She folded her arms. 'Hear what exactly?'
'Music,' I said. 'Sophie kept hearing music which shouldn't have been there.'
'Clare,' said Marsha, 'I have lived here for almost sixteen years and never heard anything out of the ordinary. There is no music. The only time there has been any music is during August Bank Holiday and the Notting Hill Carnival, which I grant you is a bloody great pain in the arse.' Her tone became gentler. 'Your friend is suffering from some sort of nervous collapse. She just split up with her boyfriend, right?' She tapped the side of her head. 'Poor girl needs a shrink, not an exorcist.'
Marsha went downstairs to check on Sophie, leaving me to wander around the empty flat and daydream. The idea of moving in there was seeming less preposterous and more of a practical proposition by the second. I was already imagining the walls painted white. I could already see shelves bowing gently beneath the weight of my books, which I would have arranged in alphabetical order by author, or title, or perhaps by subject, colour, or size — I hadn't yet decided. I could see Miles, with a Martini glass in his hand, and Larry and Berenice and all the other people to whom I owed dinners but had never had the nerve to invite to Hackney, because I knew they would have turned the invitation down. In my mind's eye, the rooms were already thronged with ghosts, but they were my ghosts, and it was I who had invited them there.
And so I achieved my heart's desire. I held on to the flat in Hackney, in case the new arrangement fell apart, but the rent was negligible, and I found a surprising number of short-term visitors to London who were only too willing to pay it for me, and not one of them complained about being stuck on the wrong side of town.
But at long last I was moving west. West to the land of silk and money, to the world of plenty, to the streets of gold where the cognoscenti roamed. West to the kind of life that, up until now, I'd only been able to dream about.
I began by tackling the queues and transfers of public transport, but after only a couple of trips I'd had enough of lugging bags and cases on to trains crammed with people who scowled at me as though I were some hapless German backpacker. I rang Graham, and with a combination of cajolery and threat, talked him into spending his Saturday afternoon driving the rest of my essentials across town in his Fiesta.
Hampshire Place was already lined with cars, so we had to park some way down the road. As we staggered up to the house with my mattress, he groaned, and I thought he was balking at the prospect of carting the rest of my belongings all the way up to the second storey. I told him not to worry, he could dump the stuff in the hall if he liked, but it wasn't the climb that had been worrying him.
'I was just remembering the last time I was here,' he said. 'You know — that time with Sophie.'
I'd forgotten all about it until now. 'I'm only going to invite you in for coffee if you promise to molest me like you molested her,' I teased.
Graham chuckled politely. 'You don't feel threatened?'
I surveyed his scrawny frame, hung with an Aston Villa Supporters' Club T-shirt and baggy khaki shorts exposing pale kneecaps knobblier than a pair of Jerusalem artichokes. On his feet were short grey socks and grubby white plimsolls — not trainers, but plimsolls.
'I don't think so,' I said sadly.
Between us, we managed to drag the mattress up to the second floor. I hadn't finished cleaning, but the flat was starting to look habitable, and I'd managed to get rid of the musty smell by leaving the windows almost permanently open.
'It's a pretty good space,' Graham acknowledged.
I promised to invite him round for a meal in the very near future.
According to Marsha, the water supply had never been cut off in the first place. The electricity board, only too happy to have another sucker on their books, didn't ask too many questions when we put in a request for it to be reconnected. The gas was still off, but I thought I could probably make do with an electric fire and some sensible clothes. If I lasted until winter without being chucked out on my ear, that is.
To begin with, the lack of a phone made me feel isolated, but as nearly all my freelance work came from the same source, I decided I could live with it. In the end, it turned out to be something of a relief to be freed from the heartache of constantly checking the answering machine for messages which were never there.
My place was never going to look as high-tone as Sophie's, but I was determined to get it sparkling clean, or at least clean enough for people not to feel they needed to pass through a decontamination chamber after each visit. And as I vacuumed and dusted and scrubbed, I sang. I started off singing along to tapes of old favourites from the Eighties, but found myself listening more and more to the recordings I'd made at Dirk and Lemmy's — Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and the Drunken Boats. Especially the Drunken Boats.
Down there down there down there
It seemed only appropriate. Sophie had been packed off to Provence for a couple of weeks — Carolyn's parents had been talked into letting her convalesce in their holiday home — but I couldn't help thinking it was a shame she wasn't at home to hear the sound of the Drunken Boats coming through her ceiling. It would have been amusing to think of her, down below, imagining she was having a nervous breakdown all over again.
I'd almost forgotten I'd once heard the music myself. But it was easy now to dismiss that memory as the result of a drunken hallucination, or a party down the road, or some of Sophie's hysteria rubbing off on me, or a trick of the acoustics. You never could tell with these old houses.
Naturally, I enlisted the services of Lemmy and Dirk. My requirements were basic; I was quite content with the same matt white silk finish on the woodwork as on the walls. Unburdened with the intricacies of Sophie-style colour schemes, they took only a few days to slap white emulsion all over the living-room and bedroom and most of each other. I'd decided not to bother with the bathroom and kitchen until I could be sure my occupancy was more secure, but I gave both rooms a thorough hose down and scrubbed off years of accumulated grime.
Marsha was right. Who was to know I was staying there, other than a few friends? And who would give a damn anyway? I sensed she herself was grateful to have at least one other female in the building who was not a fruitcake. I imagined that she, like Miles, felt my presence would absolve her of any responsibility towards Sophie. Poor Sophie. No one wanted to feel responsible for her.
After those few words from Marsha had unravelled her tidy little world, Sophie went to bed and stayed there for days on end. I was coming and going with boxes and bags, but once or twice popped in to see how she was doing. She didn't say much, but murmured thanks when I presented her with cartons of soup or salad from the delicatessen round the corner.