Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

Hampshire Place was already lined with cars, so we had to park some way down the road. As we staggered up to the house with my mattress, he groaned, and I thought he was balking at the prospect of carting the rest of my belongings all the way up to the second storey. I told him not to worry, he could dump the stuff in the hall if he liked, but it wasn't the climb that had been worrying him.

'I was just remembering the last time I was here,' he said. 'You know — that time with Sophie.'

I'd forgotten all about it until now. 'I'm only going to invite you in for coffee if you promise to molest me like you molested her,' I teased.

Graham chuckled politely. 'You don't feel threatened?'

I surveyed his scrawny frame, hung with an Aston Villa Supporters' Club T-shirt and baggy khaki shorts exposing pale kneecaps knobblier than a pair of Jerusalem artichokes. On his feet were short grey socks and grubby white plimsolls — not trainers, but plimsolls .

'I don't think so,' I said sadly.

Between us, we managed to drag the mattress up to the second floor. I hadn't finished cleaning, but the flat was starting to look habitable, and I'd managed to get rid of the musty smell by leaving the windows almost permanently open.

'It's a pretty good space,' Graham acknowledged.

I promised to invite him round for a meal in the very near future.

According to Marsha, the water supply had never been cut off in the first place. The electricity board, only too happy to have another sucker on their books, didn't ask too many questions when we put in a request for it to be reconnected. The gas was still off, but I thought I could probably make do with an electric fire and some sensible clothes. If I lasted until winter without being chucked out on my ear, that is.

To begin with, the lack of a phone made me feel isolated, but as nearly all my freelance work came from the same source, I decided I could live with it. In the end, it turned out to be something of a relief to be freed from the heartache of constantly checking the answering machine for messages which were never there.

My place was never going to look as high-tone as Sophie's, but I was determined to get it sparkling clean, or at least clean enough for people not to feel they needed to pass through a decontamination chamber after each visit. And as I vacuumed and dusted and scrubbed, I sang. I started off singing along to tapes of old favourites from the Eighties, but found myself listening more and more to the recordings I'd made at Dirk and Lemmy's — Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and the Drunken Boats. Especially the Drunken Boats.

Down there down there down there

It seemed only appropriate. Sophie had been packed off to Provence for a couple of weeks — Carolyn's parents had been talked into letting her convalesce in their holiday home — but I couldn't help thinking it was a shame she wasn't at home to hear the sound of the Drunken Boats coming through her ceiling. It would have been amusing to think of her, down below, imagining she was having a nervous breakdown all over again.

I'd almost forgotten I'd once heard the music myself. But it was easy now to dismiss that memory as the result of a drunken hallucination, or a party down the road, or some of Sophie's hysteria rubbing off on me, or a trick of the acoustics. You never could tell with these old houses.

Naturally, I enlisted the services of Lemmy and Dirk. My requirements were basic; I was quite content with the same matt white silk finish on the woodwork as on the walls. Unburdened with the intricacies of Sophie-style colour schemes, they took only a few days to slap white emulsion all over the living-room and bedroom and most of each other. I'd decided not to bother with the bathroom and kitchen until I could be sure my occupancy was more secure, but I gave both rooms a thorough hose down and scrubbed off years of accumulated grime.

Marsha was right. Who was to know I was staying there, other than a few friends? And who would give a damn anyway? I sensed she herself was grateful to have at least one other female in the building who was not a fruitcake. I imagined that she, like Miles, felt my presence would absolve her of any responsibility towards Sophie. Poor Sophie. No one wanted to feel responsible for her.

After those few words from Marsha had unravelled her tidy little world, Sophie went to bed and stayed there for days on end. I was coming and going with boxes and bags, but once or twice popped in to see how she was doing. She didn't say much, but murmured thanks when I presented her with cartons of soup or salad from the delicatessen round the corner.

I did my bit, but mostly I left it to Carolyn or Charlotte. (Isabella would no doubt have chipped in, but she was on one of her visits to Mamma and Papa back in Milano.) It was in the nature of their respective upbringings that they would rise to occasions such as this, and between them they seemed to have worked out a subliminal rota system. Sometimes I would run into one of them on the stairs and we would exchange polite greetings, but even though we had spent entire evenings together in Sophie's company, I'm not sure they were able to recall exactly who I was.

I had the sense of brushing up against an exclusive little clique, but I didn't care. I'd finally arrived. I was where I'd always wanted to be, and, now I was there, the circle would just have to open up and let me in.

It was only a matter of time.

In the beginning, I have to admit, I was nervous about spending the night on my own — about spending it there , in that flat. I almost wished Marsha had kept her mouth shut about its history. But on the other hand, its history was one of the reasons it had been empty in the first place. In many respects, I owed it all to Robert Jamieson.

But that first Saturday, I stayed out until well after midnight, knocking back tequila in the Bar King with Dirk and Lemmy. They escorted me back to Hampshire Place, and I was tempted to ask them up for a nightcap, but that would have led to us staying up, drinking and talking, until daylight, which would have been postponing what I needed to do anyway, sooner or later, which was to make it all the way through the night on my own.

It was reassuring that the house didn't look the least bit ominous. The facade resembled a welcoming face, with windows in place of eyes. There were lights on in Sophie's flat (this was just before she'd been packed off to France), and lights on in Marsha's. And, quite unexpectedly, there were lights on in the basement as well.

So the mysterious Walter Cheeseman was at long last in residence. This was an excellent omen at the start of my new life. Not only could I now look forward to meeting another creative individual, but even his unseen presence boosted my confidence. Once I took my appointed place inside, it would be a full house, and I could relax in the knowledge that if anything horrible happened — and by now I was certain it wasn't going to — there would be plenty of neighbours on hand to provide me with protection and support.

Much as Robert Jamieson had provided protection and support for Sophie.

I waved that thought away. It was a bad one, and it gave me a bad moment. But I had good, strong, positive feelings about the flat. I couldn't say I was thrilled that a previous tenant had cut his throat there, but that was ancient history, and I had washed and scoured every room so thoroughly that every inch was now as familiar to me as parts of my own body. I knew there were no monsters lurking in the shadows, because there were no longer any shadows for them to lurk in. It was my territory. I had marked it with soap and water and paint. It was already beginning to feel like home.

Now I was feeling safe, I also allowed myself the luxury of feeling just a shade disappointed that the house was an ordinary house after all, a house like any other, with its history locked away where all history ought to be — in the past. It was obvious Sophie had been having a nervous breakdown, but I couldn't help wishing I were a little less well-balanced, a little more highly-strung, so that I too could hear music and see ghosts and people would bring me soup and force-feed me with Diazepam before arranging for me to fly off to their parents' holiday homes in the South of France.