‘Kitty, could I come in your room for a moment?’
I kept the door as tightly closed as I could, without cutting my head off.
‘What for?’
He swung the hammer and the wrench.
‘I’m searching for an airlock in the pipes. I think it’s probably in there with you.’
He nodded towards my door. And since he had his shirt sleeves rolled right up, and oily stains on his fingers, I had to believe him.
‘I suppose so.’
I pulled the door back as far as it would go.
He stood and waited.
‘Well?’ he repeated. ‘Can you open the door?’
‘I have,’ I told him. ‘This is as far as it opens.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ (Oh, you could see it in his eyes: Goody! Another little job to help me suck up to my lovely Rosalind.)
‘Nothing is wrong with it,’ I snapped. ‘It’s just that there’s one or two books lying behind it on the floor.’
‘One or two books.’ He whistled. ‘You must have the whole National Scottish Collection behind there, to jam it that much.’
I said nothing. I think he knew perfectly well what I meant by my silence. But I did pull the door back a little, till all my English Literature books splayed up on top of one another with their spines cracking.
He slotted himself in sideways, and peered through the gloom.
‘Why is it so dark in here?’ he asked. ‘Why haven’t you opened your curtains?’
I stepped back, tripping on wires from my computer and my hair crimpers tangled all over the floor.
‘I haven’t had time yet.’
‘Time? It’s practically evening. If you don’t open them soon, it will be time to close them again.’
I ignored him. He lifted a foot and slid it gingerly between my plastic bags full of spare wools and some dirty old tea cups. You could tell he was trying really hard not to tread on the clothes that I hadn’t had time to hang up yet. But there was not much actual carpet showing, and he tipped a cereal bowl with his heel. Luckily Floss had drunk most of the milk, and the cornflakes had dried up.
He flung the curtains open. Light flooded the room.
There was stunned silence, then:
‘Dear gods!’ he whispered softly in some awe. ‘Designer compost!’
He gazed about him in amazement. And it did look a bit slummy, I admit. Blackened banana skins don’t look too nasty dropped in a waste-paper basket, but when you see them spread on your crumpled bedclothes, coated with cat hairs, they can be a bit off-putting. And the tops were off most of the make-up and hair stuff. And the playing cards would have looked neater in a pile. And if my dresser drawers had been pushed in, none of my underwear would have been spilling on the floor.
He stopped to pick up a mug with two inches of stone cold coffee inside it, and a layer of thick green scum over the top.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Bit of a rarity, this particular mould.’
‘I think you mentioned an airlock in our pipes,’ I said coldly.
Notice that? Not the pipes. Our pipes. I always hoped that if I managed to make him sound enough like a trespasser in our house, he might go away. It never worked.
‘Oh, yes.’
He made a space for the coffee cup on my desk, between my furry slippers and a large tin of cat food I must have brought up from downstairs one night when Floss seemed hungry. There was a metallic clink as he put down the cup. We both heard it. He brushed a couple of letters from my dad aside, and picked up something lying underneath.
Scissors.
‘Kitty,’ he said. ‘Are these the scissors your mother spent three days searching for last week?’
I flushed. I knew that he’d been at her side each time she pleaded with me to scour my room one more time, because her precious sharp hair-cutting scissors couldn’t have been anywhere else but there. He’d heard me insisting I had looked under absolutely everything, thoroughly, twice, and they were most definitely not there.
He laid the scissors down beside the wrench with a sigh, and turned away. Brushing aside a tell-tale nest of crinkly wrappers from the last box of chocolates he’d brought to the house, he knelt down on the floor.
‘Do you mind if I prise a few of these odd socks out from behind your radiator?’ he asked politely. ‘Principles of convection, you understand.’
‘I’ll get them out.’
I wouldn’t have seemed so keen to cooperate, but you know how it is when someone starts rooting around the more impenetrable areas of your bedroom. You never know if they’re going to turn up something so embarrassing you’ll die of shame.
As I reached in the top of the radiator, he tapped the bottom sharply. Two shrivelled apple cores shot out.
He frowned.
‘That pinging noise,’ he said. ‘It’s making me just a wee bit suspicious.’
I thought he meant my radiator must have sprung a leak. But when he’d fished behind the metal casing with a stick he found in my Stop Trident collection, he managed to bring up four house keys tangled together with string.
Dangling them from his fingers, Exhibit A, he looked at me gravely.
‘Now these will set your mother’s mind at rest,’ he remarked. ‘She’s been wondering what on earth happened to all the door keys.’
He tapped the radiator again, a little harder. Another apple core shot out, stuck to a chocolate that I didn’t like much, and there was a rich-sounding gurgle as water welled freely along the pipes for the first time in days.
‘There.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘I think that might well be the problem solved.’
Brushing green eye-glitter from the knees of his trousers, he stood and took one more slow, marvelling look around my room. His eyes, I noticed, came to rest on my pot plant.
‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Look at it. No water. No fresh air. No sunlight. And still it lives.’
‘Is that it?’ I asked coldly. ‘Are you finished?’
He turned and pulled the door back as far as it would go against my heap of English books.
‘Miss Kitty Killin,’ he said admiringly, edging as best he could through the narrow gap. ‘The only girl in the whole world who can make litter out of literature!’
Before I could stick out my tongue at him, he had gone.
4
Helen hugged her knees to her chest, and stared at me. The tears on her cheeks had dried, unnoticeably, to pale little stains, and her eyes were nowhere near as pink and swollen as before. In fact, she was looking a whole lot better.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Don’t stop. Go on. Tell me what happened.’
That’s how I like my listeners – craving for more. Mrs Lupey isn’t Head of English in our school for nothing. She can’t have forgotten that the tears rolled down her cheeks when she read my collection of sixteenth-century limericks entitled Go Home, Old Man, from Whence Thou Camest. She must remember that she chewed her nails down to the quick reading my essay Will She, Won’t She Marry Him? She begged for the last instalment of my serial Tales from a Once Happy Home. Oh, yes. Mrs Lupey knew one thing when she passed over Liz for Mission Helen, and sent me out instead.
When it comes to a story, I just tell ’em better.
I didn’t stay there sticking my tongue out at thin air for long. I followed him downstairs. Of course I did. I needed to know what he was going to say about finding the scissors. I thought I’d end up in a cosmic great row.