banging of a piano downstairs, went out onto the landing and called down. ‘Adam!’ Her deep voice echoed in the stairwell. When she called again, the piano stopped and he came out on the landing below, covered in paint, a pinch-faced twitchy kind of a person with spiky hair and a crooked jaw that he held in a stiff, unnatural way. ‘What?’ he said irritably.
‘You know exactly what.’
‘Oh, Rose!’
Rose sat down on the top step, imperturbable, smoking a cigarette. ‘No skin off my nose,’ she said, ‘but he’s not going to let you live here rent-free forever.’
Adam hunched his shoulders and kicked the wall sulkily as if he was twenty years younger. ‘End of the month,’ he said. ‘You know that.’
‘End of which month, Ad?’ She smiled. ‘You know Laurie. He’s getting cranky.’
‘Ah but you, Rose, you can always get round him.’ He looked up, a sour twist to his mouth. ‘Use your influence.’
‘Ha.’ She picked a fleck of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. ‘It only goes so far, my dear.’
She’d been an artist’s model, sold pizzas, tried to get by making embroidered skirts, but now she was here, collecting rent for Laurie and passing on messages about leaky taps and blocked toilets, living a whole year now rent-free herself in return for that and her haphazard cleaning services. Fallen on my feet, she sometimes told herself, with a sense of having found a safe berth on a heaving sea.
‘Make a brew, Rosie,’ Adam said, continuing to kick the wall.
She got up, flicking ash into her hand. A shapeless garment the colour of wet sand hung loosely down past her knees, and her legs were bare and brown. ‘Come on then,’ she said.
He followed her up and stood frowning on the rug in front of the fireplace watching her make tea. A door stood open to her bedroom, through which could be seen her unmade bed trailing a thin Indian coverlet, bare boards painted blue, long shelves jumbled with beads and glass and spools of coloured threads. She made frames, ornate creations. Now and again she sold one or two through some craft shop or other.
‘What the hell is that?’
Adam was staring at Tattoo with an affronted, almost angry intensity.
‘That’s Tattoo,’ she said, pouring boiling water into the teapot and frowning at the steam billowing up in her face.
Adam picked up the doll and turned it round in his hands. His top lip rose at one side like a nervous dog’s.
‘Don’t you like him?’ she asked, stirring the pot. She put the tea cosy on it, turned and stood with folded arms looking over at Adam. God love him, she thought. Sweet. Not the type to get involved with though. Tough front, inside all mush. They smother you, those kind. Mind you, I suppose they all do in the end. Unless they’re married like Laurie, and even he—
‘That’s horrible,’ he said.
‘It’s just an old burnt doll,’ she said, pushing her hair back, pushing it about with her hands. ‘I was coming home and there he was on top of a skip. How could you resist that little face?’
‘It’s horrible,’ he said again. ‘Looks like a hoodoo doll.’
‘No no no.’ Closing her bedroom door on the mess within as she passed – too intimate a display for him – she came and plucked the doll from his hands. ‘You leave him alone,’ she said, ‘I have to find him a home’, and bore the thing, like a great treasure, to the mantelpiece above the blocked up fireplace. The mantelpiece was already crammed, but she moved things about with deft precision. Three-legged brown plastic horse with a hole in its back. Torn Chinese fan. Pink candle with teeth marks. Disgruntled Moomin, lacking an arm. ‘There!’ she said, propping Tattoo against the wall in the middle and standing back. ‘He’s happy there. Don’t you think he looks good?’
‘Good?’ Adam shoved his fists deep in his pockets and the skin between his eyebrows turned square. ‘It’s just a trunk,’ he said. ‘It’s got no arms and legs.’ But in a way, he thought, it did look good, hacked out, primal. Kind of an artwork. ‘Why d’you call it Tattoo?’ he asked.
Rose shrugged. ‘You pour the tea,’ she said, crossed the room and stretched out on the sofa, closing her eyes. She heard the rattle of cups, the clink of a spoon. She remembered the original Tattoo, could see him now with his smudgy grey eyes and thin smile of a mouth, his face young and friendly and shy, standing with his arms down by his sides on his scuffed blue shoe base, blue trousers, red coat, tall black hat. The paint was rubbing thin all over him, specially his hat. He was six inches high and lived in her pocket and she’d always had him.
Adam plonked a mug of tea down next to her head.
She opened her eyes. ‘I named him after a wooden soldier I had when I was little,’ she said, sitting up. ‘My grandmother got him from a jumble sale. He was very old. Home-made.’
‘The way you remember these things,’ said Adam, taking a seat at a respectful distance and blowing on his tea.
‘He was lovely,’ she said. ‘Had the face of a holy fool. My mother threw him out when we moved house when I was nine. I called her a murdering bastard.’
‘Did you? When you were nine?’
‘Probably not,’ said Rose, putting her mug down and lazily plaiting her hair. ‘Should have done though.’
It began to rain unexpectedly, hot rain from a heavy summer sky, wildly drumming on the windowpane.
‘Names are important,’ she said. ‘When a thing has a name, that’s when it really counts.’
Madame Soulie was in the parlour with three ugly dresses laid out on one of the divans. ‘Oh Julia,’ she said, ‘I thought some of these might suit you. Much too big, of course, but we can make adjustments.’
She was sick of cast-offs. ‘Mr Rates is taking me shopping,’ she said.
‘Julia,’ said Madame Soulie, coming briskly towards her with something lilac and old-fashioned held out in front of her as if she were dancing with it, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course he will still take you shopping. But these are gifts from me.’
‘Of course. Thank you so much, Madame Soulie.’
Always the dull ones. Old, unworn, unwanted. Never again. This time she’d get a dress better than the blue dress, just for her.
‘You’re very kind, Madame Soulie.’
‘See,’ she said, ‘it fits you very well about the shoulders. Why don’t you try it on?’
’Now?’
‘Why not? In there, see, you can put it on in there and I’ll pin it for you.’
‘Oh no, really . . .’
Madame Soulie was not the sort to argue. Julia went into a dark musky room almost filled by a vast bed. It had a vague redness about
