I’m luckier than some people, she thinks. A secure tenancy is a secure tenancy. At least I won’t end my life out on the street. But oh, what happened to my life?
She doesn’t know what, if anything, her invader was looking for. The tea caddy where she keeps the scratched savings of a life lived frugally on the old-age pension hasn’t been raided, and her mother’s engagement and wedding rings, the eternity ring with which her father marked her own belated birth, still nestle in their felt-lined boxes on the bedroom mantelpiece. Her electrical equipment is outdated and chunky, but a junkie would probably have got a tenner for the telly. It’s spite, she thinks. Pure spite. He just broke in to spoil my home. Why else would you upturn a funeral urn and tread the ashes into the carpet?
Holding on to the table, Vesta lowers herself to the ground and starts to sweep together the contents of her memory box, tipped out randomly among her parents’ cremains. She hates herself for having fallen prey to such indecisiveness about what to do with them. They only hold a space for so long at the crematorium and after that, you’re on your own. For forty years, she’s meant to take them to some beauty spot, some place with a view, and scatter them there, but every time she’s tried to remember a place they might have loved, her mind has gone blank. They didn’t do much. Her mother’s whole world encompassed errands on the High Street and the occasional walk on the common, a trip to the shops in Kingston a major undertaking. They never even went into town, as far as she remembers. For all the use they made of London – big, scary, exciting London – they might as well have lived in Cardiff. No wonder I’ve never done anything myself, she thinks. It’s over a decade since I last went in to Oxford Street, even.
Such a paltry little box of keepsakes; nothing of value, nothing that will mean anything to anyone else. When I die all alone in a hospice, she thinks, they’ll send in the house clearers, and the whole lot will go in a skip. Oh, stop it, Vesta, she scolds herself. Pull yourself together. The world is full of nice people. You can’t let one spite-filled random act of vandalism ruin it for you. Such kindness I’ve seen over the past couple of days. I have to remember that, hold on to that. There’s more kindness than nastiness in the world.
From above, she can hear Gerard Bright’s music thunder through the floorboards. Normally she tunes it out, adopts a live-and-let-live approach, but he seems to have been playing The Ride of the Valkyries since breakfast time, and the sound of the new girl in the back room, walking up and down, up and down, has driven her out of the bedroom. She goes over to the window, where there is light, and leafs through her handful of photos – relatives long since dead, friends and neighbours moved on, moved up, returned to their countries of origin – and feels a surge of loneliness. I was always good at making friends, she thinks. But I haven’t the first idea where they all are, now. That’s London, for you. There’s more of a sense of community than outsiders give us credit for, but the communities don’t last.
She hears footsteps rattle up the pavement, and glances up at the window. The little girl from the first floor, Cher, walks past, all legs and backpack from this angle. She’s wearing that wig again, hiding her lovely hair as if she’s ashamed of it, and is dressed as if she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. She goes out a couple of times a week like that, and the sight makes Vesta melancholy. Enjoy it, my love, she wills the girl. You have no idea how much you’ll miss those looks when they’re gone.
Cher peers down and sees her, and waves airily down from on high. Such a pretty face. Vesta feels herself touched by sunshine, smiles broadly, and waves back. Lovely girl. A bit lost, she senses, a bit aimless, as if she’s waiting for someone to point her where to go. And so young. She barely looks old enough to have left school. Mind you, I long since lost my knack for telling how old people are, she thinks. Policemen have been looking young to me for decades. Maybe it’s just one of those things about being nearly seventy that everyone under thirty looks as if they’re barely out of nappies.
She slides the window open. ‘Hello, love.’
‘Hiya,’ says Cher. ‘How’s the clearing up going?’
‘Oh, you know,’ says Vesta. ‘Where are you coming back from?’
‘College,’ says Cher. They both know it isn’t true, but it’s their unspoken agreement that Vesta won’t say anything if Cher at least looks as if she’s trying to improve herself.
‘You’re back early,’ says Vesta. From the state of her reading Vesta guesses that Cher’s still not enrolled anywhere as she’d suggested. I must do something about that, she thinks. Maybe I could teach her myself? Because it’s not stupidity that’s stopping her.
‘Short day,’ says Cher. ‘It’s so bloody hot it’s hard to concentrate.’
‘I bet. You got time for a cuppa?’
Cher mimes checking the watch she doesn’t wear. ‘Sure.’
‘Back door’s open. Come on down.’
She potters through to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Pulls a face at the smell coming in through the open door. She’s got to catch the Landlord about those drains, again. Her kitchen sink is taking the best part of an hour to empty, cooling greasily an inch below the overflow. Five pounds a week she’s been spending on chemicals to keep the outlet moving, but the drains barely seem to work at all, now. That bottle of something he poured down the outside drain before she left has done no good at all. Probably just a gallon of bleach from Poundstretcher, anyway. He’ll never spend money if he has a choice about it.
The gate in the side-return creaks, and Cher appears at the top of the steps, picking her way delicately between the plant pots. Psycho the cat trots complaisantly in her wake. He must have been waiting somewhere in the shade for her to come home. He’s really attached himself to her, thinks Vesta. That’s nice. It’s nice to think he’s found himself a good friend. She would love to have him herself, but the Landlord would use it as an excuse to break her lease before he’d got through his first tin of Whiskas. Cher has shed her wig, and dangles it from one hand like a Regency lady holding a fan. Her hair is tied up on the back of her head, her neck exposed to let out the sweat.
‘It’s a stinker out there,’ she says, and starts down the chipped brick steps. Catches the whiff of the drains and pulls a face. ‘Feee-you,’ she says, and waves the wig in front of her face as though that will make the smell go away. She’s such a kid, thinks Vesta, again. It’s so bizarre, the way teenagers are: twenty-five one second and seven the next. ‘That’s a bit rank, isn’t it?’
‘It’s the drains,’ says Vesta. ‘They’re blocked again.’
‘He needs to call Dyno-Rod, that mean old bastard.’
‘I keep telling him. It’s all those kitchenettes. Emptying their bacon fat down their plugholes.’
Cher shakes her head. ‘Not me.’
‘Yes, well, that’s because you live on pizza and chocolate. These drains were built for a family house, not a block of flats, and he needs to deal with it. Someone’s going to go down with food poisoning, and it’ll probably be me. Milk and two, is it, love?’
Cher bounces down the last two steps, tittups over to her door. ‘Ta.’
‘Let’s have it in the garden,’ says Vesta. ‘Get away from the smell.’
She hands Cher her cup and follows her up into the sunshine, passing through her potted herb garden. Sweet aromas of sage and rosemary, basil and mint rise off the heated bushes as they brush past. Now, this is what a garden should smell like, she thinks. Feels a little swell of pleasure at the patch of civilisation she’s carved out of the dilapidation beyond.