TWENTY-EIGHT

Stephanie entered the house as silently as she was able, then crept up the stairs, but only managed two steps across the kitchen lino before she came to a standstill. Her fingers released the plastic supermarket bag and it hit the floor with a thump.

The girl smoking a cigarette by the kitchen sink turned around. Caution flared in the woman’s bright green eyes. Surprise was followed by relief, as if Stephanie was not who she’d expected to see.

Stephanie was unable to speak. Could this . . . Is this . . . Am I seeing a . . . a ghost?

Greedy for proof she was looking at the living, and without daring to blink in case her eyes opened to find herself alone in the kitchen again, her vision groped about the woman’s body: a collarless leather jacket with a bronze zipper, a black polo neck jumper, skinny-fit jeans tucked into the high-heeled boots, three gold rings on her manicured fingers, highlights in her shoulder-length blonde hair, a pretty face with angular bone structure, bronze eye make-up. The woman was detailed, three dimensional, coloured . . . there was perfume too. She recognized it: Miss Dior.

Stephanie snapped herself out of the fugue. To regain control of her voice she cleared her throat. ‘Are you . . . I mean . . .’

The girl eyed Stephanie from head to toe too, and took in the functional white blouse and black trousers she wore to interviews, and her expression developed a haughty disapproval. The woman’s eyes were beautiful though, like those of a husky or wolf: green flecked with black, the eyelids offering a hint of the Asiatic. Surely a spirit could not be so vivid.

‘I’m sorry,’ Stephanie said. ‘I’m not sure . . . this might sound crazy . . .’

The woman frowned.

‘I didn’t expect to see you. You made me jump.’

The woman looked past Stephanie and took in the kitchen with a sweep of her lovely eyes. ‘This was not what I expect.’ The voice was heavily accented, almost certainly Eastern European. The Russian girl? And possibly the one she had seen outside in the yard that morning, though the hair looked different.

‘Are you on the second floor?’

The question confused the woman so Stephanie pointed at the ceiling. ‘Upstairs?’

‘Upstairs, mmm, yes. You live here?’ She seemed to get three syllables into ‘here’, but Stephanie liked the way she wrestled English words out of her mouth.

‘Yes. This floor.’

The girl frowned again and Stephanie identified the first sign of fatigue from communicating with someone for whom English was a second language. Though her relief that the girl was real was far greater. ‘Were you outside this morning?’

Her question was greeted with another frown.

Stephanie walked to the sink unit and passed within a force field of hair spray and skin cream. She pointed at the garden with something approaching desperation. ‘Down there? Did I see you down there this morning, smoking?’

The girl glanced at the tumult of vegetation and building refuse below, as if she were looking at a dog’s excrement on the side of her boots. ‘There? Never. Is shit. Whole place, shit.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Never mind.’

She recalled Knacker saying something about two girls moving in, about her having company, but had assumed it was another one of his lies. ‘You moved here today?’

‘Today? Yes, yes. In the morning I come.’ The girl took a hard drag on her cigarette.

Now Stephanie stood closer she could see the woman wasn’t as young as she’d first appeared. Either the skin around her eyes was aged under so much make-up, or the expression in her eyes appeared too old for the lower part of her face.

Averse to Stephanie’s scrutiny, the girl moved away from the dregs of the sooty dusk light hanging around the sink unit. ‘You work here?’ the girl asked, squinting in the smoke enveloping her head.

‘Here? Birmingham, yes. Sometimes. One day here, one day there.’

The girl didn’t seem impressed with her answer, though Stephanie couldn’t work out why. She already made her feel frumpy, and was now adding worthless to a minor crisis of confidence.

‘But work is good here?’ the woman asked.

‘No. Not really. Same as everywhere.’

‘I have good work. Düsseldorf. Vienna. They say it very good here.’

‘Depends on what you can do. I’m just starting out.’

The girl frowned and looked slightly offended. Though again Stephanie couldn’t understand why.

‘I’m Stephanie.’ She extended her hand, to break the awkward silence.

The girl took it with her long, cold fingers. ‘Svetlana.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Lithuania.’

‘See you’s two met then,’ said Knacker McGuire.

At the appearance of the landlord in the kitchen doorway, Stephanie noticed Svetlana’s face drop at the precise moment her own spirits plummeted.

Dressed once again in his new jeans and trainers, he was grinning and jaunty on his feet, like a stupid youth who thought he’d done something clever. ‘Your room’s ready, girl,’ he said to Svetlana. ‘New bed an’ everyfing, like. Put a TV in there too. If I don’t say so myself, it’s a nice room. Fink you’ll be very comfortable in there.’

Svetlana didn’t answer. She watched Knacker, her gaze hard, and exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘My bags. He bring them?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about nuffin’. All in hand, like.’

‘There is other bathroom, yes?’

‘What baffroom?’

Stephanie didn’t like the way Knacker had started to squint and jut his chin out. His eyes took a moment to glare at her too, making her feel unwelcome in the room now that another tenant’s disappointment in the property was becoming evident. Stephanie turned away and unwrapped her boxed dinner on the counter beside the microwave and feigned disinterest in the exchange.

‘This is not what you say. You said new. New kitchen, new bathroom. But this? This one is not new. I don’t use it. You must be joking.’ Svetlana’s last line sounded Italian and might have been a figure of speech picked up from another traveller.

‘Lick a paint. All’s gonna get done up. That’s what I said.’

‘No, you say new. No one can eat here. Is filthy.’

Stephanie was delighted by the girl’s resistance, but the slither of fear that was beginning to frost her stomach overruled her shame at preparing food in the dirty kitchen.

‘Don’t you worry about nuffin’. Other people might not have the same standards as you and me,’ he said, as if fingering Stephanie as the source of the dilapidation and dirt. ‘But it’s all gonna be fixed up. Be like living in a hotel.’

‘Hotel?’ Svetlana snorted with derisive laughter. ‘What kind hotel? Mr Knacker, I tell you I have major problem with this. This is not what you say.’ She broke off and said something in her own language.

‘You gotta give it time, girl. You know, period of adjustment and all that.’

‘When Margaret see this . . . I mean, she will say same as me. You have not told truth. I will speak to Andrei.’

‘Settle down. Settle down, yeah!’ Knacker was losing his temper.

Stephanie’s own nervy bewilderment was beginning to make the two minutes she needed to wait for her bolognaise to finish its first cooking cycle feel like a decade. And the food would also needed stirring, before cooking for another two minutes. She turned to leave the kitchen, her eyes lowered.

‘And this girl.’ Svetlana nodded at Stephanie and Stephanie really wished she hadn’t. ‘This girl say the work . . .’ Svetlana waved a hand dismissively from side to side ‘. . . is bad here.’

Knacker turned his head to follow Stephanie out of the room and she caught sight of his pale, angry face haloed by recently pampered curls. He reeked of aftershave. ‘You don’t want to be listening to anyfing other people say, like. What do they know? And she knows how I feel about anyone bad moufing my house. She knows it’s being fixed up too, cus I told her the same fing as you.’

Stephanie hurried back along the corridor to her room, and caught the end of what had become a confrontation. She admired the girl’s courage in the face of Knacker’s temper; her own had wilted immediately.

‘This is not right. Not acceptable.’

‘You don’t tell me what’s acceptable. That’s not how it works. You get me? You’s lucky to have a fuckin’ roof over your head, considering where you come from. Lifuania! Now I’m a reasonable man, I don’t . . .’

Stephanie closed her door and waited in her room until the muffled exchange moved out of the kitchen, went up one floor and passed out of her hearing. Above her head two sets of feet bumped about angrily in what sounded like a wrestling manoeuvre. A door slammed. She flinched.