“Oh yeah?” she said and she came in the flat and almost trod on the dog. “Oh shit!” she said “Sorry, dog,” as she walked in the kitchen.
“It’s funny cos his name is Doormat,” I said to her, but it was only me who was laughing.
“Hello, Isabel,” she said and she sounded really loud in the tiny kitchen. “I’m Cherry, Bo’s mum. Is she bothering you at all? You all right with her in here?”
“I invited her in,” Isabel said. She wasn’t really smiling.
“Well, that’s nice,” Mum said. “I’m off now. Job interview. I’ll be back in a bit. Wish me luck.”
I put my arms round her waist and she smelled all lovely, and she kissed me in that way she does when she’s thinking about her lipstick, all gentle and hardly there, like an eyelash or a butterfly.
Mum was almost out the door when Isabel called after her, asking should she give me my lunch as well as my breakfast. There was a bit of an edge in the way she said it that made me feel bad for eating so much toast.
“No need,” Mum said, clicking back in and looking hard at me. “I’ll be back by then. And Bo has lunch money, don’t you, darling?”
I shook my head. It was quiet and nobody moved. I counted to three. Then Mum opened her purse and shoved a crumpled fiver in my hand. It was soft and old like tissue. I opened it out to have a proper look. I didn’t know what to think. I never normally got that much just for lunch.
Mum told me not to spend it all at once and then she said, “Come and kiss me goodbye then.”
I followed her to the door. She took the fiver off me and put it back in her purse. “Sorry, Bo,” she said. “It’s all we’ve got. I won’t be long. I’ll bring you back a sandwich or something.”
And then she was gone.
I pretended to be putting the money in my pocket when I walked back in. I didn’t want Isabel thinking anything about anything.
The old lady on the ground floor was nocturnal and so was her dog, probably through habit rather than choice, because she walked it in the middle of the night. I know because that’s how we met, on my eighth day. She got locked out at half past four in the morning. I believed her at the time anyway. She was the first person to speak to me in my new life.
There was a park just round the corner. I learned to call it a park, but actually it was a patch of grass with two benches and some bushes and a bin for dog shit. It was also an openair crack house. Isabel told me, but she clearly didn’t care. She’d been there the night I had to let her in. She threw stones at my window. I thought I’d dreamed them.
“Oi!” she said in this shouting sort of whisper. “Country! Get down here and open the door.”
I had to put some clothes on. The stairs were cold and gritty under my feet and I could hardly see. I thought I might still be asleep. She stood there on the doorstep like I’d shown up three hours late to collect her.
“Doesn’t anyone brush their hair any more?” she said.
It felt strange, someone talking to me, like having a spotlight shined in my eyes.
“How long’ve you been here?” she said.
I had to clear my throat to speak, like it was rusty. “I just got up,” I said.
“No, Einstein, how long’ve you lived here?” she said.
“Oh. About ten days.”
“I haven’t seen you,” she said, like that meant I was lying. She was feeling about for her spare key above the doorframe but she wasn’t quite tall enough to reach.
“Well, I’ve been here,” I said. “I’ve been keeping to myself.” I got the key for her.
She looked me up and down and laughed once. “Pink lung disease.”
“What?”
“Pink lung disease. Don’t you young people know anything?”
She told me about this policeman at the dawn of the motor age who got sent from his village to do traffic duty in Piccadilly. He wasn’t any good at directing traffic. Nobody was because it was a new thing. The policeman got hit by a car and he died. The doctor who cut him up had never seen healthy, pink, country lungs before. He was used to city lungs, all black and gooey, so he said that was the cause of it. Pink lung disease. Not a car driving over him at all.
She looked at me the whole time she was talking. She was the very first person to see me since I’d been here. I was conscious of it.
“You’ve got lovely country skin,” she said. “Look at the glow on you.”
“Thanks,” I said, because I didn’t know how else to take it.
“You stick out like a sore thumb with that healthy skin.”
“No I don’t,” I said.
“Put that key back for me, would you?” she said, and I reached up and put it back above the doorframe. She noticed my watch. It has a thick strap. I always wear it. “What’s the time?” she said.
“Four thirty-six.”
“Well, what are you standing here for, at that hour?” she said, and she sent me back to my room and shut the door behind her, like she’d forgotten I was only standing there because of her.
I couldn’t go back to sleep. Someone was boiling a kettle in the flat upstairs. I heard the plug going into the socket, the switch click to ON, the thrum of the water bubbling on the counter top. I heard an alarm clock somewhere beep seventeen and a half times and then stop. I heard the scrape and warble of pigeons waking up on the windowsill.
I pictured the walls and ceilings and floors separating everyone in their little boxes. I thought about how thin they were, and what might be between them, like dust and mice and lost letters, like feathers and crumbling plaster and hundred-year-old wallpaper. I thought about everyone in the whole city, alone in our boxes like squares on graph paper, like scales on a fish, like ants.
Now I was an ant, maybe Max would’ve liked to study me, navigating my way round the Tube, walking down a crowded street without colliding, stacking shelves and watching them empty again, sweeping my floor, putting the rubbish out.
Do ants know that they are working for the colony? That whatever little job they get to do until they die actually forms a meaningful part of the whole? Do they know that? Because I certainly didn’t.
Have you ever done that thing where you interrupt a line of ants? They’re all moving along, no questions asked, filled with a sense of purpose, and you draw a line across their path in the mud or the sand or whatever, just a line, with a stick or your shoe or an empty vinegar bottle. The ants in front of the line carry on like nothing happened, like there’s nothing to worry about. They don’t look back. But the ones behind the line, the ones who walk into it, they lose the plot. It’s like they all go insane and run around tearing their hair out because they’ve got no idea what the hell they’re supposed to be doing. Like they’ve forgotten everything they ever knew.
Max hated it when I did that. It drove him crazy.
That’s what I was wondering, sitting in my room listening to other people who didn’t know that I existed. If Max was watching me then from above, what side of the line in the ants was I on?
A few nights later I bumped into the old lady again in the hallway. It wasn’t late. I was going out for some air because I’d been in my room all day. She came out of her flat just before I got to the front door.
“Ah,