Adam Nevill: Apartment 16

Under the soles of her boots the carpet was crispy. With the dim hall lights on, a host of dead moths visible through their glass shades, she could see how the carpet was worn down to the weave. What had once been a complicated pattern of red and green was now mostly the colour of compressed straw along the middle. Worn down by her great-aunt’s feet.

The furniture in the long hallway was definitely antique. Dark and shiny wooden legs appeared between bales of yellowing newspaper. Embroidered cushions on the chairs were partially hidden by blanched telephone directories. Elsewhere, carved wood, mother-of-pearl inlays, and frosted glass with intricate decorations peeked out from among the garbage sacks, as if humiliated by their surroundings. Apryl was no historian, but even she knew they’d stopped making cabinets, clocks and chairs like this in the forties. And if it wasn’t for the piles of trash and stained walls the apartment might have looked elegant. Or maybe not.

The wallpaper had once been a cream silk, with silver stripes running vertically through it, but was now mostly yellow and discoloured by brown clouds where moisture had dried near the dirty wainscoting and above the skirting boards. Beneath her fingertips, the walls felt fuzzy like the worn fur on a stuffed animal.

In the kitchen there was cracked yellow lino and a perimeter of ancient enamel appliances. Dark wooden cabinets were fixed to walls once painted buttercup but now blemished like ivory. The gas rings on the stove were dry and dusty, the deep sink bone dry. Only the surface of the kitchen table showed signs of use. There were lines made by a knife on the chopping board and crumbs in the bread bin. A solitary chair, with a tartan pattern on its cushion, was tucked beneath the kitchen table.

The scant evidence of her great-aunt’s domesticity suddenly made her sad, right down to her toes. But it was the sight of the silver teapot on the tray decorated with birds of the British Isles, next to the stub of a packet of lemon cookies on the table, that thickened her throat with emotion. She thought she might cry.

There was a single china cup beside the teapot, a strainer, a sugar bowl and a tea caddy. The gold rim of the cup was chipped, probably the last of a set. Maybe a wedding gift when she and Reginald were married. Apryl touched the handle, but couldn’t bring herself to raise the fragile vessel. This was Lillian’s cup; she drank tea out of it. Up here on her own in the kitchen, at this little table by the plastic bin with the swing lid, surrounded by the relics of nearly a century on this planet. Apryl sniffed a tear back. She could see why rich people sealed themselves off inside retirement villages in Florida and rode around in golf carts wearing polo shirts. What was the point of being different if you ended up like this?

She wiped at her eyes. ‘You could have come and lived with us.’

Inside the cupboards on the walls she found a motley assortment of crockery — three china dinner sets, incomplete and now combined in an incongruous medley of patterns. There were some old pots and pans in the cupboards. She doubted the pots had been used in years, except for the one with a rind of dry milk inside. And besides the three tins of soup and some packets of sweet cookies, there was nothing to eat. Inside the fridge she saw a plastic bottle of lumpy milk. Her great-aunt lived on tea, cookies and soup and made it to eighty-four.

Stephen said nothing had been touched since Lillian died. And how did she die? Was it in here?

Apryl dropped her backpack from her shoulder and leant it against the kitchen table. She couldn’t shake the sense of being an intruder in a stranger’s home. Already she was dreading the thought of spending a night here. Would there be clean sheets? Had her aunt died in bed? She suddenly wanted to call Stephen and get him up here and not let him leave until she knew everything.

With an effort of will she calmed herself. She was tired, excited, her nerves were strung out; she couldn’t possibly have anticipated any of this. She just had to remember this was a great opportunity. Something totally radical and beyond her experience.

But when she opened the living-room door, her resolve vanished again. She didn’t manage more than two steps inside. Why hadn’t Stephen told her about the flowers? All of the dead flowers. The sloping pile of brown stalks and shrivelled petals that rose from the carpet to the sill of the big window overlooking Lowndes Square. They reminded her of flowers on old graves, left to wither and collapse and to bleach of colour. Seeing so many emaciated stems and dead leaves in the thin, brownish light made a shiver pinprick up her spine and then fizzle at the base of her skull. This must have been going on for years. This pile built one bunch at a time. And all roses, by the look of the few petals on the top that remained as dark as wine. Behind them, the grey drapes with the plaited golden trim were drawn closed.

She turned the main light on to better investigate the flowers and see the pictures on the walls, but the room was still so shadowy and dim she realized she’d be better off with the drapes open. But when she leant over the flowers and tried to pull them apart she discovered they had been stitched shut. She stepped back quickly from the window and stared at the neat bindings of red thread that joined the drapes in the middle, permanently.

‘What the fuck?’

Alone and crazy, Great-aunt Lillian had sewn her drapes shut with thread, and then mounted before them floral tributes that covered half the room. She turned around to look about her. The room was empty of furniture, the floor still thick with dust, but the corners where the walls met the ceiling were free of cobwebs, so you still could see the photographs. On all of the walls, black-and-white photographs in antique frames reached from the height of her waist to the ceiling. And the pictures all featured the same couple. Every single one of them.

Handsome with a pencil moustache, like Douglas Fairbanks Junior, his hair slick either side of a parting, she saw her great-uncle Reginald for the first time in her life.

His eyes were dark and intelligent. And smiling. Just looking at him made her grin. Reginald always dressed in a suit and tie or wore silver slacks with a white shirt open at the neck. In one photo a little terrier lay at his feet as he sat in a cane chair. A pipe often featured in his strong left hand. Lillian’s husband: a man she always stood proudly beside, close, either holding his elbow or standing behind him with a hand placed upon his shoulder. Like she couldn’t let him go. Like she loved the man so much being without him would drive her crazy.

And Lillian had been a beautiful woman. Like a movie star from the forties with big brown eyes and the sharp bone structure you rarely saw these days. Always dressed elegantly in tea frocks, or cocktail dresses to the knee, or ball gowns sweeping around the white toes of her glossy shoes. But it was the way they looked at each other that affected her most. You couldn’t fake that. This sad, brown and mildewed space which Lillian roamed and dreamed in and haunted for sixty years suddenly made more sense. Two people once lived here who should never have parted. And the place was in mourning because the widow was heartbroken. Maybe mad with a grief that never eased. Did hearts still get broken like that?

Apryl knew Reginald died in the late forties. After serving in the RAF in the war and surviving dangers she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, this happy, handsome man with a beautiful young bride had died suddenly. She didn’t know the details, but her gran had told her mom that he died after the war. That’s all they had to go on. A sketchy oral history passed down from one solitary old woman to another, and so on to her. But glimpses into Lillian’s life hung all around her on the walls, and were packed into those boxes in the hallway, and into whatever else Apryl might find in the three bedrooms and dining room. And hadn’t Stephen said something about a storage cage under the building?