Transit(9)

I told him that I had met the previous occupant of my flat when the estate agent first brought me here to look. She was there packing up the last of her things: it took her a long time to answer the door. Eventually I had noticed her peering through a gap in the net curtains that hung at the front window. The estate agent called through the window, telling her who we were, and persuaded her to let us in. She was a tiny, cowed, shrivelled woman whose voice, when she spoke, barely rose above a whisper. But after the estate agent had gone she was more forthcoming. We were upstairs in one of the bedrooms: she sat on the edge of the bed with the stained wall behind her. I asked what the people downstairs were like and she looked at me for a long time, her weary brown eyes deep and unblinking in their wrinkled sockets. The woman is worse than the man, she said finally. The people in the next-door house, she added, were kind people, good people – university professors, she said proudly. They had always helped her when trouble started with downstairs. Her eyes travelled consideringly over my face. But maybe it will be different for you, she said.

I asked her where she was moving to and she told me she was going back to Ghana: her children had all now left home and found flats of their own. She asked if I had ever been there and I said that I hadn’t. It’s beautiful, she said, her face uncrumpling and lifting. All these years she had dreamed and dreamed about it. Her youngest child, a girl called Jewel, had been the last to remain at home but recently she had finally finished her studies and moved out. She had chosen to study medicine – ‘takes a long, long time!’ the woman cried, clapping her hands to her cheeks and rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed with silent mirth – but at last it was done. You’re free, I said to her, and watched as a little smile dawned across her wrinkled face. Yes, she said, nodding slowly while the smile widened, I’m free.

‘Poor cow,’ the builder said. ‘But at least you can’t say she didn’t warn you.’

A foul, meaty smell was filling the kitchen and he sniffed the air and grimaced.

‘I’m guessing that’ll be downstairs cooking their lunch,’ he said. He folded his thick, furred arms again and drummed his fingers against his biceps. ‘You won’t improve relations,’ he said, ‘by having the builders in.’

He asked if I’d had any dealings with them since I’d arrived – ‘other than through Morse code,’ he added, tapping on the floor again with his foot. He had tapped a little more forcefully this time: there was a muffled shout from below and a kind of squawk and then, shortly after, several sharp thumping sounds in reply. I told him that when we first moved in I’d gone down and knocked on the door to introduce myself.

‘What’s it like down there?’ he said. ‘Hell on earth, I’m guessing. Judging the ceiling heights from outside, they must be living like rats in a coal-hole.’

In fact, the most noticeable thing had been the smell. I had rung the bell and stood outside waiting while inside the dog yapped repetitively, and even on the doorstep its presence was overpowering. Finally, after a long time, I had heard the sounds of movement from inside and the man I had spoken to in the street had opened the door.

‘Who is it, John?’ a woman’s voice had called from indoors. ‘John, who is it?’

They’d been civil enough, I said, until I mentioned my children. The woman in particular – her name was Paula – had not troubled to disguise her feelings. You’ve got to be bloody joking, she’d said to me, slowly, her eyes never leaving mine. We were in their sitting room; we’d passed down an oppressive corridor with a sagging, yellowed ceiling from which I’d caught a glimpse through the door to a bedroom where a mattress lay on the floor beneath a heap of filthy sheets and blankets and empty bottles. The sitting room was a cluttered, cave-like place; Paula sat on a brown velour sofa. She was a powerfully built, obese woman with coarse grey hair cut in a bob around her face. Her large, slack body had an unmistakable core of violence, which I glimpsed when she suddenly turned to take a vicious swipe at the shrivelled dog – who had been yapping ceaselessly throughout my visit – and sent him flying to the other side of the room.

‘Shut up, Lenny!’ she bellowed.

Amidst the clutter, I’d noticed a black-and-white photograph standing in a frame on top of the television. It showed a woman standing proudly on a beach in a swimming costume: she was tall and shapely and handsome, and my eye kept being drawn to the photograph not just for the relief it offered from the surrounding squalor but with an increasing sense of the woman’s familiarity, until finally I realised, from the tilted-up nose and pointed chin still visible in the bloated face in front of me, that the woman was Paula.

The man, John, had seemed slightly more propitiatory. We’ve had years of it, you see, he’d said in his hoarse voice. His skin had the blue-grey colour of breathlessness and his white hair was unkempt; white hair sprouted from his ears, and from a number of large moles on his face. The woman nodded, her pointed chin raised, her mouth in a line. That’s right, John, she said. Years and bloody years, John said. Them Africans, you wouldn’t believe the noise they made. You tell her, John, the woman said, you tell her. After that she had refused to speak further, and had sat there with her mouth clamped and her nose in the air until I left. I’d learned to tread, I told the builder, with all possible lightness in the house but it had been harder to instill this habit in my sons. They were used to living in a different way, I said.