He never did visit the flat. The timing was never right, and then he was gone to Woomera. You wonder how he is. You wonder how long it will be before he can write his own letters again. It occurs to you that this whole block must be roughly the size and weight of the army’s new spaceship.
You never played the piano much while you were here, though you know enough to pick out chords and follow a melody, accompanying drinkers in the pubs you and your father frequent back home.
Fel was the pianist. Compared to hers, your efforts sounded ugly and lumpen. She said she liked listening to you, but you would not be encouraged.
The piano is electric and you are surprised to find it plugged in and the power still on. The stand holds a book of cocktail-bar arrangements. Frederic Curzon, Ronald Binge: if you substitute octaves for chords in the left hand you can just about follow the line.
The work boots you’re wearing are no use on the pedals and will scratch them, so you take them off. It’s good, shedding these great heavy boots, but at the same time you’re left feeling naked. You are making yourself at home in a place that no longer belongs to you.
There’s a three-against-two syncopation in this piece you’ve lost the knack of. A run of minor sevenths, tangling under your fingers, is so pretty you try it again and again but you don’t make much progress. Run after run, the music falls away, becomes an athletic thing, a banging about. You wish you had practised more while you were here, but at the time the piano had been of a piece with the card games you and Fel used to play together, and the dinners you used to try and cook together for your friends. Ordinary shared activities, they could not help but remind you how far you lagged behind her in understanding, accomplishment, even the plain brute capacity for living. Fel didn’t just think faster than you. She felt faster. She felt more. Until in the end you acted more like her pet than her lover. Until, in the end, you realised that was exactly what you were.
Too loud. Enough. You close the lid over the keys.
Has Fel even moved out? It doesn’t look as though she has. Heavy items like the piano: with money no longer an object, you can understand her leaving such things behind. But her sheet music is still here, and her books. All the countless ordinary little things that add up to a person. Did she even pack a bag?
You need the toilet. In the bathroom, you find that she has left her perfumes gathering dust. This is doubly strange: it’s not a collection anyone would want to just abandon. Blood, moss, wet rope, tobacco, cat urine, ash. In her whole collection there is not one floral note. The business of scent was one of those many subjects Fel had absorbed and mastered, enthused about, obsessed over, and to stand close to her in her weaponised state was to fall down a rabbit-hole of queer associations.
Your hands are shaking. Are you afraid to try these scents? They will bring you to the edge of places and times you know you will never be able to revisit. The nostalgia they wield is a threat. Let them go!
But like an agoraphobic drawn to the edge of a high place, you take down a bottle and open the cap. You spray your wrist, shake the alcohol into the air, and once your skin is dry, lean into the scent.
It is for all the world like being strangled in a damp cellar.
According to the estate agent’s letter, there are just a few weeks to go until new tenants move in to this flat. You can clear your stuff in hours, but what about the rest of it? Is she really going to abandon Chopin, Debussy, York Bowen, all these well-thumbed scores scribbled over with her own fingering? You imagine her coming here to pack, scraping through the door with a rucksack full of bags. (This is, remember, how you moved in here, carrying gear on the Underground from the shared house in Tooting.)
More likely, Fel’s belongings will be packed carefully away into boxes and crates by men hired by her father. They could turn up at any time.
In the kitchen, you dig out a blister-pack of greens and thumb two tablets onto the granite-effect counter. You run yourself a glass of water. And think about it: the power is on, the water is on… Try the hob – yes, the gas is on, too: seriously, did you forget to turn the gas off when you left?
You open the kitchen cupboards and there are some tins and dried goods but all the perishables and opened packets have been cleared out. The kitchen bin by the pantry door is empty, and there isn’t a liner in it. The fridge door is closed. A mistake: it’s been emptied and turned off and the door should have been left open; there are lines of black mould and a bad smell inside; it’ll need disinfecting.
So here’s a possibility. (You neck your greens – a silly name for little pills of radiogardase, common name ‘Prussian Blue’.) What if she’s coming back? What if she’s moving back in?
The painted chest of drawers is still in the bedroom: an heirloom from Moldova, and Fel’s favourite object. ‘It used to stand in my nursery. When my grandmother was a baby, they put her down for the night in the bottom drawer.’ The frame and the edges of the drawers are a yellowish green, the drawer panels off-white decorated with carnations. Fel’s underwear is here. Her tights. Her hairdryer.
She’s entitled to come back, obviously. To carry on living here, if that’s what she wants. Thanks to her father’s generosity with the rent, this was always more her flat than yours. You work through the drawers, pulling out your things, the few clothes you left here. Are they even worth taking back with you? If you’re not going to take them with you, you ought to throw them away. Imagine leaving them for her. Imagine her coming back in here, sorting through these drawers and finding your belongings, your socks, your T-shirts. Imagine her throwing you away.
This is no good, you’re going to drive yourself mad, you have to stop thinking, you have to find something that will stop you having to think. The power is on, the gas, the water; you go into the bathroom and run the shower over the bath. You undress, and halfway through you remember the fictional removal men you dreamt up, muscling in with their crates and their boxes. Half-naked, you cross the hall to the door and deadlock the Ingersoll.
The water is running hot when you get back. You adjust it a little, keeping the heat as high as you can bear, and step in under the flow. For a while you stand there, willing on catatonia. The shower does not numb you, but it does refresh you until, to hell with it, you might as well wash and be done. Maybe there is coffee somewhere in the cupboards; you could make yourself a cup.
You squeeze soap from a bottle: expensive stuff you remember Fel got from a parfumerie on Wigmore Street. Rosemary leaf, cedar-wood bark, juniper berry. On the side of the bottle there’s this absurd, humourless sales screed, to convince you the purchase was worth it. Why on earth should reading this again bring on tears? Maybe it’s the smell. The associations. Something, at any rate, is drawing out tears you have never been able to shed before.
Ridiculous. You turn off the shower, pull the curtain aside and step out of the bathtub. You dry off. Finding some toilet paper, you blow your nose. Then, out of habit – because you could as easily have flushed the tissue away – you pedal open the bin which stands under the sink.
This bin has a liner and it’s full – so full, the tissue you’ve dropped in there has rolled onto the floor. So you bend down and pick it up and poke it into the bin, and lying on top of the screwed-up tissues, a used-up toothpaste tube, flossing sticks and cotton wool, there is a pregnancy-testing wand.