“This…” she said. “Where…”
“Welcome to Painchton!” Mrs. Sangster said.
“This is Painchton?” She hadn’t Googled it a single time, not wanting to spoil the surprise, to fritter away the newness on a screen instead of hearing the buses and taxis, smelling the food stands and coffee stalls, feeling the jostle of the city all around. She looked across the street at the opposite row of shut shops and above them at the single storey of windows, all in darkness.
Then, seeing movement, she brought her gaze down again. People were gathering, hordes of them, coming down the street towards her and crossing the road from the other side.
“I don’t und-”
“Here she is, here she is,” said a loud voice. Keiko swung towards it. A short man in a dark suit was striding up to her with his arms stretched wide. He engulfed her before she could stop him and then, grasping her by her upper arms, he stood back and beamed, looking proud enough to polish her. Keiko smiled at him and bobbed her head, taking in the grey hair, glittering with brilliantine, the dazzling white shirt collar and striped tie, the black shoes as hard and bright as beetles, then she looked up into his face again.
“Jimmy McKendrick,” he said.
“Oh!” said Keiko. “Mr. McKendrick.” It was the head of the Traders, the organiser, who’d sent the forms and signed the letters.
“Away!” he shouted, shaking her a little. “Jimmy, James, Hamish! Take your pick. We’re all friends here. Welcome to Painchton. Here you are! Now,” he went on, taking charge. All the others stood in a ring, silent and watching. “You’ve your own key and your entry”-he gestured to a black-painted door beside the shaded shop windows-“but you’re right above the Pooles if you need anything. They must be away home, now, mind you.” He peered at the edge of the paper blind, as though trying to see around it.
“You think she might have-” said one of the onlookers.
Mr. McKendrick turned sharply and the voice stopped.
He and the Sangsters between them bore Keiko and her luggage through the black door into a passageway. It reached clear through to the back of the building, deeper than she had imagined, but she was ushered up the stairs. Stairs that rose, solid stone with iron railings, turned on a landing and rose again, and at the top just one apartment door. Behind it, once they had left her, she crept around these four rooms, sniffing the fresh paint and the pine and lemon, bleach and wax, until she came to a standstill in the bathroom and gave way to weeping.
Briefly. Soon, she sniffed hard and smiled at herself in the mirror. In some countries, she told herself, they wash themselves with ash and clean their teeth with dried dung. I’m going to be fine.
She ignored the voice, her mother’s voice, saying, This isn’t right, Keko-chan, this isn’t what they said. She didn’t even hear the other voice, whoever it was, saying, This is a bad place, you don’t belong here.
She dabbed out her lenses, went into the big front bedroom, slipped out of her clothes, and inserted herself between the covers, falling asleep before the sheets had even warmed against her skin.
two
Tuesday, 8 October
Keiko flinched and her eyes snapped open onto brightness. Had there been a sound? She turned her head towards the window, where daylight was pouring in, and felt the air move against dampness on her neck. Why was it so hot in there? Then the radiator, a monstrous thing five feet long and made of thick iron loops, newly painted in the same cream as the window frame, clanked again-the sound that had woken her-and Keiko laughed as she swung herself out of bed and went over to it. It was pulsing with heat, making the air above it shimmer.
“Good morning to you too,” she said. “I’ll ask the people downstairs how to tame you.” Then she stepped to the window to take a look out at this most auspicious day.
Directly under her, a striped cotton awning hid the street from view, but across the road, below the grey slate roofs and grey stone chimneys, below the apartment windows, also grey from the net curtains that covered them, the shops had come alive.
There was an official-looking place on the corner that might be a bank or post office. Next door, a banner between the shop windows and the apartment above said, Scotsman D.W. Glendinning, Newsagents and Tobacconists Evening News-Keiko rolled the words around, savouring them. And then was a shop whose sign was written in such looped and elaborate gold script that she couldn’t read it at all beyond a name that started with Mc.
“Newsagents and Tobacconists,” she said to herself as she padded through to the kitchen. It was even hotter, with its own hulking radiator clanking away under the window and the fridge humming desperately back at it.
Looking inside the fridge, Keiko could not help her mouth dropping open. It was packed, every shelf stacked high, dark from the way the food was piled up in front of the little light in there. There were boxes of juice and smoothies, cartons of milk, trays of eggs, blocks of butter and cheese, packets of cured meats whose names Keiko had never heard, mounds of grapes and paper bags of mushrooms (four kinds), little plastic baskets of tomatoes and plums, tubes of meat spread and tubs of cottage cheese, pots of yoghurt and pudding and cream, and balanced on top of it all, two stuffed-crust, deep-pan, four-cheese pizzas.
She closed the fridge again, feeling a shudder pass through her, and opened a cabinet door. Cans of soup, bags of pasta, glass jars of jam and jelly and Frank Cooper’s Vintage Oxford Marmalade. Plastic jars of salted almonds and cellophane packets of flavoured corn snacks, spicy salsa no artificial colourings or preservatives, boxes of double chocolate dipped choc chip chocolate shorties may contain nuts.
Jet lag, Keiko told herself, swallowing hard. And it was so hot. And the smell of all the new paint and something else, very faint, coming from the sink drain. She poured herself a glass of water and went over to the back window, determined to undo the unfamiliar catches and get some air in there.
Outside was a concrete yard, with green plastic dumpsters and grey metal garbage cans ranged up and down it on both sides, a small brick building at the far end. Someone had just been cleaning down there-there were still wet brush marks on the concrete and traces of soap suds around the wheels of the dumpsters.
Keiko jumped and almost dropped down out of sight when a door in the outbuilding opened and a woman appeared. She was carrying two metal pails with a mop handle sticking up out of each but she managed to keep the door half-closed as she came around it and nudged it shut again, manoeuvring herself with the ease of long habit. Her head was down, showing pale, pearly-grey hair that would have looked white except that she was dressed in such stark white clothes: an overall and apron and short rubber boots. Keiko, determined to be as outgoing as all the books had advised, knocked on the glass and waved.
The woman looked up so quickly, at just the right window in the row, that she must surely have known Keiko was standing there. She gave a single nod, then put her head down again and started walking, disappearing out of view under the windowsill, leaving Keiko with her hand raised and the smile fading on her face.
What a peculiar person, she thought, putting her chin in the air. She wouldn’t mention this woman when she wrote to her mother and described the friendliness of everyone she was meeting, but even as she thought that, she could hear her mother’s voice: First impressions are thinner than new frost on a lake. Do not step there. Her mother, who had never stepped on a frozen lake in her life. But she was right. Perhaps that woman-she must be the cleaner-was having a bad day.