‘Good.’
‘Dario, your face is hidden by Pippa’s shoulder. Mick, you look a bit weird with that smile. Scary, actually. OK, ten seconds. Are you ready?’
‘What about you?’ said Pippa.
‘Just wait.’
Davy pressed a button and ran round to join us. His foot hit the table leg so he stumbled and half fell on to the tightly massed, scowling, smiling group as the light flashed. That was how the camera caught us, a blur of flailing arms and legs, and me in the centre, mouth open in surprise in my grazed and swollen face, like the victim of a drunken attack.
‘Look at us!’ screamed Pippa in delight: she came out the best of us all, of course – dainty and gorgeous in the scrum.
‘My eyes are shut,’ groaned Dario. ‘Why does that always happen?’
‘Right,’ said Miles, once we’d sat down again. He pushed away his plate of congealing orange curry. ‘I want to say something.’
‘Yes?’
‘This isn’t easy, but I’m giving you plenty of warning.’
‘It’s about the state of the bathroom, I know it.’
‘Leah and I have decided to live together.’
Pippa gave a little whoop.
I frowned. ‘So why the solemn face?’ I asked.
‘She’s moving in here.’
‘We can cope,’ said Dario. ‘Can she, though? That’s the real question.’
‘I mean,’ said Miles, ‘it will be just Leah and me.’
For a moment, nobody spoke: we stared at him while his sentence hung in the air.
‘Oh,’ said Mick at last.
‘Fuck,’ said Pippa.
‘You’re chucking us out?’
‘Not like that,’ said Miles. ‘Not at once.’
‘How long?’ I asked. My face was starting to throb.
‘A few months. Three. That’s all right, isn’t it? It’ll give you time to settle in somewhere else.’
‘I was just settling in here,’ said Davy, ruefully. ‘Oh, well.’
‘You couldn’t all stay here for ever,’ said Miles.
‘Why not?’ Dario looked stricken. His freckles stood out in blotches.
‘Because things change,’ said Miles. ‘Time passes.’
‘Are you all right, Astrid?’ Davy asked. ‘You’ve gone a bit pale.’
‘I need to go to bed,’ I said. ‘Or at least lie down for a bit. I feel odd.’
Pippa and Davy levered me to my feet, hands under my elbows, making tutting noises.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Miles, wretchedly. ‘Maybe it was the wrong time.’
‘There’s never a right time for things like this,’ said Pippa. ‘Come on, Astrid, come into mine for a while. It’s one less flight of stairs to manage. I can rub Deep Heat into you, if you want.’
I shuffled up the stairs, taking them one at a time, and edged my way into Pippa’s room, which was thick with the smell of perfume. It was a large room at the front of the house. When we had first moved in, it was the designated sitting room, and didn’t seem to have been decorated since the fifties. Pippa had done nothing to change that, just filled the space with the frippery and clutter of her life. The effect was peculiarly jarring. Two walls were a grubby mustardy yellow, and another was covered with flowery wallpaper busy enough to make your head ache and peeling at the joins. The lightbulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling had a brown paper shade, split along one side. A large bay window gave out on to the street, but Pippa kept the shutters half closed so the room was in permanent shadow.
In my woozy state, the mess she had created took on an unsettling, almost hallucinatory aspect. There was a metal bed – a large single, which was particularly inappropriate to her lifestyle – with a lusciously crimson velvet bedspread; a small divan that her grandfather had left her, which was heaped with clothes, both clean and dirty; a chest with every drawer open and underwear and shirts spilling out on to the floor; a wardrobe, similarly open, in which hung her gorgeous dresses, suits, skirts and jackets; a flimsy desk buckling under the weight of papers and files. A full-length gilt mirror was propped against one wall, and at its base were piles of makeup, bottles of body lotion and tubs of face cream, ropes of necklaces, scattered earrings, a couple of belts. Yet out of this room Pippa emerged every morning fresh and immaculate, not a hair out of place, smelling of soap and Chanel No. 5.
I pushed aside a pair of knickers and lowered myself cautiously on to the bed.
‘Paracetamol?’ She reached under the bed and plucked out a box of pills. ‘With whisky?’ Like a magician, she produced a bottle from beneath the pile of clothes on the divan and brandished it.
‘Maybe not the whisky tonight.’
‘Go on.’
She shook two white tablets into my hand, then poured a couple of fingers into a tumbler and handed it across. I swallowed the paracetamol and took a sip of whisky to chase them down.
‘Shall I rub your shoulders?’ she asked.
‘I think that might hurt too much.’
‘You’re not making nearly enough fuss.’
‘Strange day,’ I said.
I could hear voices from downstairs, then the unmistakable heavy trudge of Mick making his way to his room.
‘For you, mainly,’ Pippa said. She took the tumbler from me, poured herself a generous slug of whisky and tossed it expertly down her throat. ‘Bastard,’ she added loudly.
‘Miles?’
‘Who else?’
‘I don’t know, Pippa. It had to happen some time.’
‘Bah!’
‘And if he and Leah want to live on their own together…’
‘She’s the one behind it.’
‘You make it sound like a conspiracy.’
‘Of course it’s a conspiracy. So we’re going to have to be the counter-conspiracy.’
She went on talking, saying something about the bump on my head making me too reasonable. But I didn’t really hear the words, or make out their sense. I was feeling crashingly tired. The room swam in and out of focus. I lay back against the pillows and closed my leaden lids. ‘Perhaps I’ll go to sleep here tonight,’ I said thickly.
Pippa grabbed my arm and pulled me into a sitting position. ‘Oh, no, you don’t. Not tonight, darling.’
I went crabwise up the second set of stairs, into my own room, which was white and empty after the garish mess of Pippa’s: just a small double bed, a narrow wardrobe, a chest on whose surface stood all the objects I’d dug from the garden, and a big wooden rocking-chair Dario had picked out of a skip for me and I’d covered with cushions I’d bought at Camden Market. I tugged off my tracksuit trousers, then wriggled under the duvet. But I stung and throbbed, and although I was so tired, it took me a long time to sleep. I heard sounds: the front door opening and closing; voices; someone laughing; water in the tank; footsteps on the stairs; an old house breathing.
Chapter Three
I twisted and turned and slept and fretted and twisted and turned some more, and slept and woke and saw the bright sunlight shining through the curtains and gave up the fight. Besides, my body and my bike both needed checking.
In the shower – hot, this time – I examined myself. I flexed my knees and elbows. They ached but there were no cracking or scraping sounds. I needed to get moving. I also suspected this would be a fine day to be absent from the house.
Meanwhile it was good to be on my own in the kitchen. I made myself coffee and cut a grapefruit into segments. While my porridge was cooking, I went into the garden and looked at my vegetable patch. I’d never grown anything before, except maybe mustard and cress on blotting-paper when I was small, but this year I’d suddenly decided we should grow our own food. I’d gone to a car-boot sale and bought a spade, a trowel and a watering-can so nice and bright, almost new, and cheap they had clearly been stolen from someone who had forgotten to lock their garden shed. What else are car-boot sales for in Hackney? But I’d made good use of the stolen goods, measuring out a long rectangle of overgrown land, and digging it into a well-tilled plot, whose earth was loamy and rich, and studded with old coins and bits of pottery, which I collected and put on the chest in my bedroom. It was surprisingly satisfying. I relished the ache in my back, the blisters on my palms and the dirt under my fingernails. Davy offered to help with the heavy digging but I wanted it to be all my own work. I’d planted courgettes, broad beans, lettuces, beetroot and rocket – even potatoes in their own raised bed. Everyone else in the house teased me about it, but already sturdy shoots were appearing. Almost every morning and evening, I went to look at them. This morning, I had been thinking that next year I should plant sweetcorn as well, and maybe some butternut squash for soups – until I remembered that next year I wouldn’t be here. It was only then I realized that I wouldn’t be here this year, either, to harvest the vegetables I had tended so carefully. Miles and Leah would be picking them instead, enjoying the fruits of my labour.