M. Harrison - Empty Space

She tried ‘L1 Dominette’.

She looked in the mirror and said: ‘She is too pretty not to get married.’

In London, the weather had turned. Anna Waterman changed trains at Clapham Junction, and, taking the twelve-ten to Epsom, alighted at Carshalton Beeches. From there she walked east then south under a sky that looked like both sunshine and rain, through long suburban perspectives off which the dense ranks of detached and semi-detached suburban homes — each with its hundred-metre garden and mossy old wooden garage — stretched towards Banstead. Not far from HM Prison Downview she wandered into a street she thought she might remember, entering the garden of the first house she came to. It was three storeys, detached, with gable-front dormers, walls done out in whited pebbledash, and clean bay windows on the ground floor. Clean windows were a counter-indication: the house she was looking for, Anna felt certain, would have dirty, unused-looking windows, as if the person who lived there did not place a great premium on seeing out. It would be a house turned in on itself.

Neverthless she took the pocket drive from her bag just in case, and held it in one hand. If she was stopped, she planned to offer it as proof of her good intentions. She could say, ‘I came to return this,’ and it would be the truth. She was used to trespassing in people’s gardens by now. She had never been caught anyway.

A short, weedy drive gave on to the garage, and a front garden where ilex and old roses greened in a fitful light. Standing up at the bay window, squinting between her cupped hands to eliminate reflections, she found herself looking into a room full of partly-unpacked boxes and crusty dustcovers, as if someone had started to move in years ago and never finished. Items of furniture, including mismatched dining chairs and a hospital bed, were shoved up against the walls, off which hung narrow triangular strips of wallpaper stiff with old paint. Unplugged electrical leads curled and trailed about the floor. The upper surfaces of everything, from the treads of the stepladders to the shoulders of the unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling rose, were laminated with the gritty dust that collects in unused London houses, baking on year by year like a specialised industrial coating. The effect was of a room abandoned but not yet used. At the rear, a door lay open — wide enough to admit some light, not wide enough to see if a similar dereliction prevailed the other side of it.

Anna was shrugging and moving away when she heard footsteps on concrete, and a boy of about sixteen came round the corner of the house, glancing back over his shoulder as if he had been up to something inside. He was dressed in tight jeans rolled at the ankle, a T-shirt too small for him, lace-up boots covered in drips of black and pink enamel paint. Such disorder had been gelled into his short yellow hair that it resembled an old scrubbing brush. When he saw Anna, he jumped in surprise and said hastily:

‘I don’t know what you think, but I’ve come to read to a woman who lives here. Sometimes I bring her a film, but mostly I read.’

Anna, not knowing how to answer this, said nothing. The boy stared expectantly. He was shorter than Anna, and his face had a raw appearance, as if he lived in a blustery wind no one else could feel. Perhaps in an attempt to convince her, he held up a paperback book, thick, warped, browned at the edges of the pages. ‘She’s an old woman,’ he said. ‘She’s lived here years. Some people like her, some don’t. She does her shopping down in Carshalton. She enjoys a film but it’s always something old-fashioned, that old-fashioned kind of film she likes.’ He shrugged. ‘You want something more modern than that, don’t you. My eyes get tired though, with all this reading. It’s the dust. It makes your face feel tight.’

‘I came to return something,’ Anna offered.

The boy didn’t seem to hear. He wiped his left forearm across his face and said, ‘I could read to you, too, if you like. That’s an idea! I could come to your house and read this book.’ He held the book up again, and Anna, filled with fear and disgust, saw that it was a very old copy of Lost Horizon . Its pages were bunched and rippled where it had been dropped long ago into someone’s bathwater; the back cover was missing. It might easily have come from the room she had been looking into.

‘I don’t think I want that,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

‘I never use the toilet here,’ the boy called after her, ‘even if I need to go. She’s too dirty, the old woman.’ Anna lurched into a flowerbed, then away across the lawn. He thumped along behind her, without, she thought, making any real effort to catch up; then, as soon as they reached the road, jogged away towards the Royal Marsden hospital. ‘It’s a good book,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve read it more than once.’

She hurried in the opposite direction until, out of breath, she reached Carshalton Ponds. The ponds lay under a leaden sky, two strange, shallow, purposeless, industrial-looking sheets of water separated from the road only by a railing, home to fractious ducks and gulls. Anna walked around them twice. I’m calming down now, she thought, surprised by her own resilience. He was only a boy. He was as guilty as me. To demonstrate calm to herself — to act it out — she bought a tuna wrap and an apple from the supermarket on the High Street. These she ate sitting on a bench by the water, while the young mothers more or less patiently urged their toddlers to and fro in front of her to feed the ducks. Sunshine came and went, but then it began to rain. To Anna, something smelled stale, perhaps the water itself, which had a light, cobwebby film, a skin of dust supported by surface tension; perhaps the birds pottering about in front of her. She hoped it wasn’t the children.

Carshalton is served by two stations; to reduce her chances of meeting the boy again, she decided against Carshalton Beeches and made her way up North Street to the other one. It was closer anyway.

Arriving home an hour or two later, she discovered Marnie in the garden, frowning puzzledly over the contents of the flower-border at the base of the summerhouse.

‘I don’t know where all these have come from. Did you plant them?’

Anna, who had anticipated having her house to herself and felt put out, first claimed to have no idea; then, feeling that she ought to show some kind of authority, though she hadn’t gardened for years, amended: ‘They’re exotics, darling. I think they’re doing rather well. Don’t you?’

They were. Though none of them were tall, they occupied the little border with a kind of dense self-confidence. Slack, poppyish blooms predominated, but there was a form of lunaria too, and something that promised to uncurl into an oversized altar lily. The poppies had a curious brown metallic colour to their petals, which drooped from pale green fleshy stems, curved towards the top like the stems of anemones, as if they weren’t made to support weight. Between them, lower down, as thick as a lawn, you could see the pubic tangle of a single dark feathery growth — similar to yarrow leaves but finer in construction — which seemed to repeat itself at every scale; you soon lost your place in it. There was no point in admitting that the border had fostered no poppies before today. ‘They look as if they’re made of paper,’ Marnie said, separating the flowerheads with her fingers, bending the stems this way and that so that she could peer down between them — as if she had been thinking of buying them but was changing her mind. ‘Do you think they smell of anything? They’re very artificial colours.’ She stood back, stared up at the summerhouse, and seemed about to speak further.