She was sitting in our kitchen drinking tea out of one of our brown mugs. I jumped slightly when I saw her there. A woman with long thin hair down to her waist, men’s trousers tied round with a belt, a striped shirt and braces, a long grey overcoat and green fingerless gloves. She looked so wrong in our house, I thought. The only people who came to our house wore hand-stitched suits and bias-cut satin; they smelled of Christian Dior aftershave and l’Air du Temps.
Birdie glanced up at me as I walked in, small blue eyes with thin pencil lines of eyebrow above, a hard mouth which didn’t close quite properly over a row of small teeth, a rather weak chin that appeared to have buckled under the joylessness of her face. I thought she might smile, but she didn’t.
‘Henry,’ said my mother, ‘this is Birdie! The lady I was telling you about, from the pop group.’
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ she replied. I couldn’t make sense of her. She sounded like my headmistress but looked like a tramp.
‘Birdie’s group want to use the house to film a pop video!’ said my mother.
I admit, at this point I did have to feign disinterest somewhat. I held my features straight and said nothing, heading silently to the biscuit barrel on the counter for my daily back-from-school snack. I selected two Malted Milks and poured myself a glass of milk. Then and only then did I say, ‘When?’
‘Next week,’ said Birdie. ‘We had a location chosen, but they had a flood or some such disaster. Bouf. Cancelled.’
‘So I said, come and look at our house, see what you think,’ my mother continued.
‘And here I am.’
‘And here she is.’
I nodded casually. I wanted to ask when they were coming and could I take the day off school and could I help but I was not then, and never have been, a person to show enthusiasm for anything. So I dipped my Malted Milk biscuit in my milk, the exact way I always did, just to the T in ‘Malted’, where the end of the standing cow meets the end of the lying down cow, and ate it silently.
‘I think it’s brilliant,’ said Birdie, gesturing around her. ‘Better than the other place in fact. Just perfect. I think there’d be things to sign.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You know, waivers, etc. In case we set fire to your house. Or one of your moose heads lands on one of us and kills us. That sort of thing.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said my mother as if she had to sign waivers for accidental moose-head fatalities all the time. ‘That makes sense. And obviously I’d need to discuss it with my husband first. But I know he’ll be happy. He loves your music.’
This I suspected was untrue. My father liked rugby songs and bawdy opera. But he did like fuss and attention and he did like his house and anyone who liked his house was always going to go down well with him.
Birdie left a few minutes later. I noticed a small pile of dry skin pickings on the table by her mug and felt a bit sick.
The shoot for the video lasted two days and was much more boring than I’d thought it would be. There was endless time spent finessing light readings and getting the scruffy band members to repeat actions over and over again. They were all dressed alike in brownish clothes that looked like they might smell, but didn’t because a lady with a clothes rail had brought them along in clear plastic bags. By the end of the day the song was embedded inside my head like a trapped fly. It was a terrible song but it went to number one and stayed there for nine long, dreadful weeks. The video was on every TV screen you passed, our house, there, on view to millions.
It was a good video. I’ll give it that. And I got a minor thrill from telling people that it was my house in the video. But the thrill faded as the weeks passed, because long after the film crew had left, long after the single had dropped out of the charts, long after their next single dropped out of the charts, Birdie Dunlop-Evers, with her bead eyes and her tiny teeth, was still in our house.
7
Libby works for an expensive kitchen design company. She’s head of sales, based in a showroom in the centre of St Albans, near to the cathedral. She has two sales managers and two assistant sales managers beneath her and an assistant sales director, a senior sales director and a managing director above her. She’s halfway up the ladder, the ladder that has been the focus of her existence for the past five years. In her head Libby has been building a bridge towards a life that will begin when she is thirty. When she is thirty she will be the director of sales and if she is not then she will go elsewhere for a promotion. Then she will marry the man whom she is currently trying to find both online and in real life, the man with the smile lines and the dog and/or cat, the man with an interesting surname that she can double-barrel with Jones, the man who earns the same as or more than her, the man who likes hugs more than sex and has nice shoes and beautiful skin and no tattoos and a lovely mum and attractive feet. The man who is at least five feet ten, but preferably five feet eleven or over. The man who has no baggage and a good car and a suggestion of abdominal definition although a flat stomach would suffice.
This man has yet to materialise and Libby is aware that she is possibly a little over proscriptive. But she has five years to find him and marry him and then another five years to have a baby, maybe two if she likes the first one. She’s not in a rush. Not yet. She’ll just keep swiping left, keep looking nice when she goes out, keep accepting invitations to social events, keep positive, keep slim, keep herself together, keep going.
It’s still hot when Libby gets up for work and there’s a kind of pearlescent shimmer in the air even at eight in the morning.
She’d slept all night with the bedroom window open even though she knew women were advised not to. She’d arranged glasses in a row along her windowsill so that if a man did break in at least she would have some warning. But still she’d tossed and turned all night, the sheets twisted and cloying beneath her body.
The sun had woken her up from a brief slumber, laser bright through a tiny gap in her curtains, heating the room up again in minutes. For a moment everything had felt normal. And then it hadn’t. Her thoughts switched violently to yesterday. To the dark house and the linen-fold panels, the secret staircase, the rabbit’s foot, the pale blue roses on the side of the crib. Had that really happened? Was that house still there or had it turned to particles in her wake?
She’s the second to arrive at work that morning. Dido, the head designer, is already behind her desk and has got the air conditioner running. The iced air feels exquisite against her clammy skin, but she knows in half an hour she’ll be freezing and wishing she’d brought a cardigan.
‘Good morning,’ says Dido, not looking up from her keyboard. ‘How did it go?’
She’d told Dido yesterday in confidence that she needed the day off to visit a solicitor about an inheritance. She didn’t tell her about being adopted or the possibility of the inheritance being a house. She’d said it was an elderly relative and suggested that she might be in line for a few hundred pounds. Dido had got very excited about the possibility of a few hundred pounds and at the time Libby wasn’t sure she’d be able to face her reaction if she told her the truth. But now that she’s here, and it’s just the two of them and it’s Tuesday morning and she won’t be seeing her best friend April until the weekend and she hasn’t really got anyone else she can tell, she decides maybe it would be good to share, that maybe Dido, who is twelve years older than her, will have something wise or useful to impart to help her make sense of the whole ridiculous thing.
‘I’ve inherited a house,’ Libby says, running water into the Nespresso machine.
‘Ha ha,’ says Dido, clearly not believing her.
‘No. I have. It’s in Chelsea, by the river.’