Chapter 13
When I open my eyes the next morning, I expect everything to be back to normal.
Of course I do—the sun is streaming in the hastily drawn curtains and I can hear birds chirping through the old single glazing.
No one would expect midnight wobbles to withstand all that.
But instead of feeling sheepish, I find my mouth dry and my heart high in my chest before I’ve moved a muscle.
“I’ve got to stop looking at listings,” I say out loud to the high ceiling above me. “This isn’t a scary place. This is my house.” But then I turn my head and see, on my bedside table, that wrapped book I thought I’d lost that I definitely didn’t put there last night. My pulse picks up even more.
I must have, that’s all. I was too tired to notice what I was unpacking. I know for a fact I was tired enough to sleepwalk round my bedroom and imagine the noise of a door opening.
But do you remember sleepwalking?
And do you suddenly start sleepwalking in your mid-thirties?
Grief can give you arthritis and ulcers, I remember Chloe telling me. Of course it can make you sleepwalk.
“I love my new house,” I say out loud. “I’m safe here.”
Immediately, a door bangs somewhere downstairs and I sit up as if someone has kicked my pedal.
I feel my back twang and try to relax it: I’ve got a lot of lifting to do.
But I’m sure that, over the sound of a bin lorry in the street and those birds who must be nesting in the creeper right outside the bedroom window by the racket they’re making, there’s another sound. Shuffling feet, I would have said.
“Oh Peggy,” I say. I’m performing this—this light-hearted exasperation—although God knows who for.
It can’t be me, because I don’t believe in ghosts, and Peggy March wouldn’t mind me living in her house, and she didn’t shuffle.
I remember trotting along beside her that day we met at the postbox, her metalled heels clip-clopping.
I decide the noise is a draught excluder shushing over a bare floor, or maybe dry leaves blowing around in the back garden, and I spring out of bed, making as much noise as I can with my bare feet, march out to the top of the stairs, and head down them.
“Ocht, I didn’t mean to wake you!” Bunny Boyle is standing in the front hall, wearing rubber gloves and with a black bin bag in his hand. He blinks up at me, half blinded by the light pouring in the glass cupola.
“I heard the door,” I say, although that was last night and surely he hasn’t been in here since then.
“Bin day,” he tells me, brandishing the bag. “I didn’t think you’d have it all worked out yet, so I thought I’d help you. I mean, I say ‘bin day,’ but it’s all so complicated now. Landfill this week. Green wheelies that. I can write it down for you.”
“So . . . you’ve got a key?” I say, coming down the rest of the stairs. It sounds worse than I meant it to, so I add, “That’s handy. Thank you.”
“Only to the very back door into the wee lobby there,” he says. “Which room have you picked for yourself, if you heard me easing that one open?”
“Thing is though,” I say, “I think the bins have been past.”
He lays a finger along the side of his nose and taps it. “I tip like a lord at Christmastime,” he tells me. “They’ll stop for me on their way back down.” He rustles the bag again and shuffles off towards the back door.
I know how offensive it is to lump old people in together as if they’re not as varied and unique to themselves as everyone else, but I decide right here and now that I’ll make up for missing Peggy by being Bunny’s dream neighbour, and if that means he lets himself in and out of my house, so be it.
I’ve just filled the kettle when he’s back.
“What did I tell you?” he says, stripping off his gloves and tucking them into his belt. He goes to the sink and starts to wash his hands. “They stopped and picked up your bin without blinking. Fifty quid a year well spent.”
“I’m so sorry about Peggy,” I tell him. “She didn’t last long in the home.”
“It’s the way of it,” Bunny says, pushing his lips out and pursing them. “That’s why I’m determined to stay put. Use it or lose it.”
Exactly what Peggy said to me.
“You must miss her.”
“It was a terrible shock,” he says, nodding as he sits.
“I had no idea she was leaving. We didn’t get to say goodbye.
In a funny sort of way, I hope her health did collapse completely overnight.
She’d have been awfully upset otherwise.
And she’d never have left without taking her leave of me, if she could. ”
“I still want to find out where she was,” I say. “I’d like to make a donation of some kind. In her name. Only I don’t know where to start.”
“The son would know,” Bunny says. “I take it you haven’t met him in the course of buying the house?”
“My solicitor handled everything,” I say, squirming a bit, since the truth is my boyfriend handled everything.
“I actually thought it was a daughter.” Although maybe I only decided it was a daughter when I was pretending to be a family friend, for the nursing homes.
“Is he a . . . is he likely to be helpful?”
“I don’t know him well,” Bunny says. “A terrible stealer of pea pods when he was a little boy, but he must be well past forty now. Once I get these rusty old cogs turning, I’m sure to come up with a name for you.
” He sighs. “Robert? William? John, even? It’s one of those Tom, Dick and Harry names.
But it’s not Mr. March, that I can tell you.
The chap’s a doctor. Nothing as handy as a GP in the local clinic, though.
Some big hospital in Glasgow, and I couldn’t tell you which bit of the body he paws around in.
Sorry.” He stares down into the dregs of his coffee.
He’s got the same asbestos throat as Peggy.
“It hurt my feelings dreadfully not to be told where she went after all the time I knew her,” he says.
“How long were you neighbours?”
“Three years.” It surprises me until he adds, “And forty-seven more years being dear friends.”
Then he claps both his big papery hands onto his knees and hauls himself to his feet with a grunt. “Welcome to Dunblane, Lindsay,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say, absolutely sincerely. “Having you next door makes me feel even happier to be here.”
He leaves by the back door and I wave him off. See? I tell myself. All’s well. You had a bad dream. You forgot you unpacked a book. You’ve got a lovely helpful neighbour. There’s no such thing as gho—
And that’s when I hear smart, tip-tappy footsteps behind me and feel a cold hand on the back of my neck. I jump what feels like a foot in the air, rewrenching my back, and coming down in a crouch with hands up, crooked into claws, ready to fight.
“Jesus Christ!” Chloe says, stepping back. “Didn’t you hear me? Have you got earbuds in?”
“What are you doing here?” I say. “How did you get in? How long have you—?”
“What am I doing here?” she says. “I’m your oldest friend. I’m amazed I managed to give you a bit of space yesterday, Lindsay. It was torture.”
“But how did you get in?”
“You shouldn’t leave your door open overnight, though. Even in Dunblane. I locked it after myself, by the way.”
“I didn’t leave my door open,” I tell her.
Chloe has started making more coffee, sniffing inside the kettle and running a finger along the rim of two cups. She doesn’t mean to be offensive—it’s second nature now, from checking the work of her staff before she signs off on her customers’ houses.
“First night in a new place,” she says. “Don’t beat yourself up.”
I don’t want to tell her why I’m so sure I didn’t leave any of the doors open last night. I don’t want to admit that I checked and rechecked multiple times before I went up. I certainly don’t want to tell her that I thought someone was here in the night. “Have you been upstairs?” I say.
“Today?”
“Did you put a book by my bed?”
“What? When? Lindsay, you’ve got a real thing about that book by your bed, you know. Read something else!”
“It wasn’t just the book. I had a weird . . . I don’t even know what to call it. But it’s probably the house, right? It’s an old house. It’s bound to have quirks. Right?”
“Even a new house this size would have quirks if you got it for sev—”
“Don’t!” I say. She starts and lets some coffee granules scatter off the spoon, so she has to shake out the front of her shirt. She’s not wearing her uniform today. “Sorry,” I tell her. “Just, you know how you hate the phrase dead room?”
“I don’t. What do you mean?”
“Oh come off it, Chlo! Anyway, I don’t care for seven dead.”
“Seven dead what?”
“Jesus, I’m losing my mind. You probably weren’t even going to say it.”
“Seven dead? Of course I wasn’t going to say it. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not the only one with memory glitches, then?”
She looks at me for a long moment then sniffs and finally turns to tip the spoonful of granules into a cup. “How about some coffee and some good news?” she says. “I got onto the movers. Your stuff’s coming today.”
“What?” I say. “How? You got . . . ?”
Chloe laughs, delighted at the effect she’s having.
“Didn’t you hear John yesterday morning, swearing down the phone?
That was me on the other end. Asking him for a direct line to the Scottish branch of the firm that moved you.
He deals with them all the time—course he does—and no way was he going to call in favours.
He made me promise not to mention his name. ”
“But . . . today? How did you get my delivery bumped up . . . what is it? Nearly three weeks?”
“I can be very persuasive,” Chloe says, waggling her eyebrows. “I refused to take no for an answer. And who really needs two kidneys?”
Right on cue, a rumble comes from outside the front of the house. Chloe beams. The lorry’s here. I’m just about to see all my belongings again, Kai’s and mine.