'But it can't be Marsha. I saw her go out.'
Sophie shook her head again. 'It took me ages to work out where it was coming from.'
'And?'
'It's coming from right here,' she shouted. 'From inside the flat.'
I looked at her and without saying another word got up and made my way towards the living-room. Just outside, I paused, and sniffed.
Sophie was at my elbow. 'Smell it?'
I nodded. Sophie was the staunchest of non-smokers and had never stopped nagging Miles to give up, so I knew this had nothing to do with her. There were so many freshly painted surfaces that the smell of cigarettes should have been overwhelmed, but it wasn't; it hung in the air, like a poisonous mist. It was a smell that went well with the ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk
The music was definitely coming from the living-room. I went in, and she followed, watching intently for my reaction. The smell of smoke was stronger in here, and now there was an extra ingredient to it, something I couldn't quite identify.
I was halfway across the room when the music stopped just as suddenly as it had begun.
It was only now there was silence ringing in my ears that I started to feel a small flutter of nervousness. I could think of only one explanation; both the noise and the smell had something to do with Dirk and Lemmy. Perhaps they'd inadvertently rewired the room so it had turned into one big receiver for Capital Radio. Maybe they'd left a cigarette burning. I prowled around the room, searching for fag ends, checking behind the paint cans in the corner, lifting each can in turn. I rooted through the pockets of the paint-splattered overalls draped over the stepladder, but all I found was a steel tape-measure, a grotty paper tissue, and a small scale model of one of the Klingons from Star Trek.
Sophie tailed me down to the kitchen and bathroom. Then, as we were trotting back up to the upper level, she announced, 'There's something you have to see,' and steered me across to the living-room windows. I obediently looked out into the street, but apart from the usual parked cars, there was nothing to see.
'What?' I asked, turning back to her. 'What?
Sophie's face had fallen. Saint Joan's vision had not materialized. 'It's not happening,' she said. 'They must know you're here.'
'What isn't happening?'
'Nothing but music tonight.'
'It must be the man upstairs,' I said. 'Who else could it be?'
'I already told you,' Sophie said. 'I know it's not him.'
I was getting tired of this guessing game. 'You've got hidden speakers?'
'Better than that,' said Sophie.
I bit the bullet. 'It's nothing to do with Dirk and Lemmy, is it?'
'Better than that,' said Sophie. 'Much much better.'
Her eyes were shining again. I began to wonder if she had a fever.
'I give up,' I said. 'You win.'
Sophie smiled triumphantly.
'I've got ghosts.'
Chapter 7
Of course there had to be some other explanation. But I let her babble on, because if she was going mad, I wanted to be the first to know about it so I could pass the news on to all our friends.
'In the beginning I blamed it all on the man upstairs,' said Sophie. The music was bad enough, but you know how I feel about smoking. How dared he let his habit drift downstairs to pollute my air, my own private air, the air in my flat, in my lungs? I only hoped he wasn't smoking in bed. That would have been all I needed — the whole house going up in flames and my worldly goods burnt to a crisp before I'd even finished unpacking them.'
'How can you be sure it's not him?' I asked.
'We met,' she said.
It was the look on her face that tipped me off. It was the expression of a cat that had got not just the cream but everything else on the milk float as well.
'I see,' I said, unable to keep the note of disapproval out of my voice. This was classic on-the-rebound stuff. I felt she'd moved with unseemly haste. 'What's he like?'
Sophie went ahead and told me, and in enormous great detail. I didn't know how much of it to believe.
Night after night, the music had woken her up.
Sometimes it lasted for only a few minutes, once it had kept her awake for nearly an hour, but only when it had stopped was she able to get back to sleep. Until this one night, she said. Up until then, the noise had been a nuisance, no more, and she'd been meaning to talk to the man upstairs about it, but on this particular night, something really dreadful had happened and she didn't know how to explain it at all.
Sophie wasn't used to sleeping on her own. At school, I would often creep into her bed after lights out, and we would sit there whispering and giggling and nibbling Chocolate Olivers out of the latest parcel of treats from Hamish — or, to be more accurate, from his housekeeper.
We were both plagued by nightmares. I dreamed repeatedly about a giant one-legged koala bear that hopped through the streets, thirsting for the blood of innocent children. I would have only a few minutes in which to find a safe hiding-place under the stairs or in the wardrobe, but once I'd found it, I'd have to listen trembling as the bear howled and sniffed the air and drooled and came closer, ever closer. Hop… hop… hop… It never found me, of course, though the tension was so unbearable that I sometimes wished it had.
Sophie, whose imagination was never quite in the same league, had been having recurring nightmares about squealing piglets being chased and stung on their fat pink bottoms by bumble bees. This didn't sound terribly alarming to me, but I always shuddered dutifully whenever Sophie told me about it. It seemed only fair — my stories about the one-legged bear, which I tended to embellish with every retelling, would leave her quaking under the bedclothes with fright.
It was on one of these exchange-of-nightmare sessions that we both finally owned up to being afraid of the dark.
'I'm glad you're there when I wake up in the night,' I told her.
'Me too,' said Sophie. 'When I grow up, I'm going to get married, so there'll always be someone there when I wake from a bad dream.'
This time, there was no one there. She dreamed she was drifting through the halls of the Brera Gallery in Milan. It was one of her favourite galleries; after her last visit, she'd sent me a postcard of Mantegna's Cristo Morto — the painting famed for its dramatic foreshortening.
The gallery in the dream was like something by De Chirico, with deserted colonnades and unnaturally elongated shadows. There was something wrong about the paintings and it was making her feel uneasy. She had the uncomfortable feeling that all the virgins and bishops and saints were shifting their positions behind her back.
Past a Poussin landscape she drifted, past a Masaccio triptych, and Matisse's dancers and lots of other pictures which shouldn't really have been there, not all together in that particular gallery, until she found herself standing in front of Mantegna's Dead Christ. His crinkled soles pressed up against the foreground, as though He were actually there, lying in a glass-fronted recess. Sophie stared in horrified fascination at the jagged holes in His feet. The flesh was dead flesh, the colour and texture of old green cheese.
She became aware of a muffled rhythmic booming. It beat up through the floor and she couldn't work out why it was making her feel so panicky. Ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk It was coming closer, getting louder, echoing off the walls as it came. She knew she had to tear herself away from the painting before something dreadful happened, but she couldn't.
And now it was too late.
The booming grew louder until it filled her head. It was all around her, now inside her, and there was no escape.