into the kitchen where she boiled the kettle and filled two hot-water bottles. These she carried upstairs. Then she fetched a can of paraffin and filled the two heaters that stood in the hallway upstairs, heaving one into her room and the other into the bathroom. After trimming and adjusting their wicks, she persuaded both to stay alight. Downstairs again, she coaxed the boiler into action, filled her cup with more whisky, and then went up and ran a bath.
She undressed in a cloud and lay back in water as hot as she could stand, knowing that it would soon cool and that the steam would condense and drip down the walls to feed the mildew, which she would then be able to see, like her poor pink body, far too clearly. The bitter paraffin fumes stung her eyes and mouth, but the smell was a sign that something beyond this bath was giving off heat.
Wrapped in a towel which would never quite dry, Juliet scuttled to her room and turned on a tiny fan heater. She had the largest bedroom, the one with two windows, at the front. It was painted matt duck-egg blue and she kept the navy slatted blinds down, preferring striated light to a view of towerblocks and corrugated iron. Her clothes were arranged on a rail and folded on shelves and in boxes. Her desk, chair and lamp were army surplus, metal-framed and painted grey. She allowed herself one postcard at a time. Her floor was painted dark green and covered in a rug that had belonged to her grandmother. Since childhood, she had loved its lack of traceable pattern.
She surrounded the rug with dullness in order to see it more clearly. She thought about things like this a lot and had impressed Tania at her interview with her ideas about framing space and the importance of absence in display. The truth had been that she liked the empty gallery so much that she knew she would never like anything brought into it. Her PhD, which she planned to finish the following year, was titled ‘Framed Departure: the Empty Metaphor in Post-Iconoclastic Netherlandish Art’.
She got dressed in vest, socks, pyjamas and jersey, and was in bed reading when Fred knocked on her door. Pleased to see him, she moved over and he climbed under the covers, claimed one of the hot-water bottles and lit a joint. Allie had grown cannabis in his attic room, punching holes in the roof above each plant to let in light. His crop had been so successful that the cupboard under the stairs was crammed with large plants hung upside-down to dry. No one had been sure when they would be ready but over the winter they had turned into something like dried seaweed and had a striking effect.
‘How was it?’ she asked.
Fred was too full of delight at his evening with Caroline to want to talk. He shrugged and shook his head, giggled and sighed and smiled so hard that Juliet laughed for the pleasure of something as absolute as his happiness. She was still laughing as she tried to get up, so at first Fred didn’t notice that she couldn’t straighten and when he did, he waited.
When she could speak again, Juliet said, ‘I keep meaning to see someone about this, but then it goes away. It’s as if someone’s turning a switch off and on. And it’s not just my back any more. There’s so much blood and it’s full of –’
‘No!’ Fred covered his ears.
Fred’s room was at the back of the house where he slept in the brass bed he had had since growing out of his cot. He had painted his walls red, thinking this would make the room warmer. His shirts, pounded in a bathful of suds and inadequately rinsed and ironed, were arranged on hangers suspended from picture hooks hammered badly into the wall. His two suits were squashed up on the back of the door while his shoes and ties, underwear and waistcoats were scattered about.
Juliet came to wake Fred at six-thirty. He had to be at his desk within the hour. She stroked his cheek. ‘Every time I come in here,’ she said, ‘I think you’ve just exploded.’
Juliet continued to listen through the office wall. Jacob Dart might have been sitting beside her, including her; she had no choice.
‘Hullo, Sally.’
Juliet had guessed by now that Sally was Jacob Dart’s sister. He talked to her in the kind of shorthand that siblings use, swore a lot and laughed more from his belly. She imagined him sliding down in his chair as if he were at home and it was just after dinner, and he and this sister (they also talked about a Monica – ‘Bloody Monica’, ‘You know what Monica’s like’) were drunk and up for a late night of banter.
‘Hullo, Sally.’
He said ‘Hullo’ in the old-fashioned way, with an audible ‘u’ rather than an ‘e’. Juliet tried it out when answering her own telephone: ‘Hullo. The opening? Yes, she’ll be delighted. You’re not sure? Fine. I don’t suppose she’ll notice whether you’re there or not. Yes, I can spell it.’
‘Right … right … right …’ with each repetition, the word grew smaller. ‘Which hospital? Are you there now? I’ll be, it’s alright, I’ll be right there. It’s OK Sally, I’m on my on my my way.’
Juliet realised that he was crying. He cried for a long time, as if letting go of something that once it began to unravel would go on and on. What came to mind was a story Fred had written as a child about a magician who was cursed and went to hell, where, ‘leaking small tears and tidy sobs’, he had to spend eternity pulling a scarf from his sleeve.
She couldn’t go and knock on his door. They had not yet met and what would she say? Then his door opened and shut. Juliet looked at her watch and saying loudly, ‘Time to go home!’, put on her coat and stepped outside.
As she cycled into the alley, she glimpsed a figure in a pale coat and a dark hat passing under a lamp, and hurried to catch up. She turned into the street so fast that she found herself overtaking him and had to keep going so that he wouldn’t suspect. Guessing that he was heading for the main road, Juliet sped on and hid round a corner. How could he not spot her immediately? He continued past with a loose stride that made him seem more like a farmer walking his fields than someone hurrying across a city to a hospital. She liked this walk; it made her think of him as a generous man.
The road was a one-way system which gathered up everything heading west and forced it east for a while, around the bend where Jacob vaulted over the railing and danced across four lanes. He hopped over a crash barrier and crossed through the traffic on the other side, where drivers accelerated, relieved to be once more heading the right way. Juliet cycled round and was just in time to see Jacob slip back onto the pavement through a gap where the railings had been wrenched out of place. He continued, half running now, lightly, lightly, disappearing as the road squeezed under the first of the railway bridges which fused here so thickly that they created long tunnels of blackened brickwork and squalid tiles, under-powered striplights and dummy speed cameras, encrusted girders, pallid chickweed, lush moss, pigeons and power cables, all faltering on and on.
‘Can I help you?’ The man patrolling the hospital forecourt was wearing a vaguely military uniform and carrying a walkie-talkie.
‘I’m visiting,’ Jacob whispered.
‘What’s that?’
Jacob shrugged and the man decided that the best way out of this was to pretend that he had heard.
‘Know the way?’
‘No,’ Jacob admitted, then turned and walked off.
‘Which ward then?’
