A white towel lay crumpled in the centre of the bathroom floor. It had definitely been folded on the rack beside the bath, she was sure of it. Paul was away in Manchester again. He’d told her he was going to argue his case for compensation, but had already started spending his redundancy. She wanted to talk, but his mobile had been switched off for hours. Why, what was he doing? Whenever they spent more than three days in close company they quarrelled, but she missed his absurdly inappropriate enthusiasms, his innocent longing for the freedom of youth. The house was less forgiving without him, as if it would only seek to press its peculiar aura when his insouciance was not there to temper it.
The bathroom tap shuddered and clanked when she twisted it. She was about to start washing her hair when the front-door knocker boomed through the house.
Jake Avery was immediately apologetic when he saw her dressing-gown. ‘I’m always getting people out of the bath,’ he told her. ‘I should have called first, but I don’t have your phone number.’
‘Then I’ll give it to you,’ she promised, ushering him in. ‘I was only going to wash my hair because there’s nothing on TV. I’ll make us some tea.’
He seated himself awkwardly on one of the mismatched kitchen stools and looked around. ‘It’s coming along nicely in here.’
‘Thanks. I’m doing it by myself—Paul’s hopeless with DIY.’
‘You should get Elliot in from number 3. He’s good as long as you keep him off the booze. He painted and rewired our place, and now he’s laying the front yard for the builders’ merchant at the end of the street. You know, the piece of waste ground old Garrett was trying to get his hands on? It’s going to be a car park.’
‘I don’t think Mr Copeland is interested in the job. I’d like to take a couple of walls out and stop the rooms looking quite so Victorian.’
‘Yeah, Paul told me your plans.’
‘Did he?’ I wish he’d tell me, she thought. ‘You two had a bit of a boozing session the other night.’
‘Yeah, we got a bit pissed. Sorry about that.’ He didn’t sound contrite. ‘I realize now that I don’t talk often enough to my neighbours. We all work so hard that we’ve no time left for social niceties when we get home. I mean, I give money in the street to professional charities I’ve never even heard of, and yet I’m too tired to bother with the people who live next door. That’s not right, is it? Paul told me how you two met. It sounded kind of romantic.’
‘Paul has a way of sexing up every story. You have to take him with a pinch of salt.’
They had spent twenty minutes together inside a ghost-train car that had broken down in Blackheath funfair. She had been sitting with her girlfriend Daniella, debating whether to leave the car and risk walking through the cuprous gloom, when Paul had loomed out from a graveyard tableau and made them both scream. The happiness of that memory had been undermined by the fact that Daniella had died a month later, hit by a delivery van while riding her bike home late one night. No one had ever traced the driver. You could fill every square of the city’s map grid with the stains of hidden tragedies.
‘What did you guys find to talk about for so long?’
‘Oh, you know, men in pubs can stretch any subject until closing time.’ Jake accepted the tea. Unusual to meet a gay man who’s overweight, she thought idly. Pleasant face, obviously comfortable dealing with people in his job.
‘It’s just that Paul mentioned something about hang-gliding.’
‘Oh, that. It was nothing. I told him that Aaron and I had been hang-gliding in France, and he suggested coming along with us some time.’
‘How long have you two been together?’
‘Eleven years, believe it or not.’
‘That’s longer than most of my friends.’
‘We have a deal. I told him if he ever leaves me I’ll kill him, which pretty much sorted the whole thing out.’
‘So,’ she tried to sound casual, ‘what was the part about making some money?’
‘Oh, nothing really, not even first-hand information, just something I’d been told.’ He suddenly looked like a small boy who had been caught stealing sweets. ‘I wouldn’t demean either of us by recounting another half-drunk conversation. But I did offer to lend him some money. He told me you were a bit strapped for cash right now.’
She bridled at the idea that her finances had been discussed with a virtual stranger. ‘We’ll be fine. It’s just that there’s a lot to do here. The electrics, the plumbing, the basement needs to be damp-proofed and replastered, the roof needs repairing. And I don’t know how long I can live with this seventies wallpaper.’ She indicated the mauve paisley print behind them.