I looked at her in disbelief. “I said mints, you stupid troll. Why would I want a lump of raw meat? I’m just getting over food poisoning!”
“I dunno. I thought you might want to make a burger or something.”
“I don’t even eat burgers when I’m well!” I stuffed the plastic box hastily back in the bag – the sight of the oozing, pulped flesh was too much for my delicate guts – and threw it back at Rachel.
“I’m sorry” she laughed remorselessly. “You should speak more clearly. You mumble; that’s your trouble.”
I glared at her.
“Oh, well, no point in wasting it. I’ll make spaghetti Bolognese tonight. Auntie Jackie is the worst cook.” She lowered her voice, remembering just too late our proximity to the kitchen. “I think she must live on baked potatoes.”
A baked potato sounded good to me: bland and fluffy and easily digestible, and not greasy or recently slaughtered.
Rachel stood up and began to prowl around my room in search of diversion, opening and closing the wardrobe and poking about among Auntie Jackie’s ornaments on the mantelpiece.
“What’s she keeping all this stuff for?” she asked, twanging the one remaining string of the double bass. “I mean what’s with the archery target? And this?” She picked up the papier-mâché pig, which was surprisingly light considering its vast girth, and stared into its painted eyes.
“He’s called Gunter. She made him at art college.”
“What are you going to do all day when I’m at out at work?” Rachel asked suddenly, as if I was the one who was bored and restless.
“Have you got a job then?”
“No, not yet. But I will have soon. And then what are you going to do?” Anyone would think she had done nothing but entertain me since we arrived.
“I’ll be fine. I thought I might help Auntie Jackie in the shop.”
“You could get a job of some sort. A paper round or something.”
“I don’t need a job,” I reminded her with a smug smile. “Because I’m not in debt.”
As I said this, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye; a small brown shape with a pink, thread-like tail suddenly shot out from under the double bass, crossed the carpet in a blur and vanished under the door. It was over before either of us could react with the proper squeals of horror: instead, we just blinked at each other in surprise.
“Was that what I think it was?” Rachel said after a pause.
I nodded, my heart hammering.
“Oh, gross. There’s probably a nest under all that junk.”
I approached the double bass tentatively. I wasn’t scared of mice – in their place, which was in cages or clinging to ears of corn on the front of birthday cards – but I didn’t fancy confronting a whole nestful. On the other hand, I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about sharing my sleeping quarters with one – or more. I began to tweak at the pile of “junk”, bracing myself for a stampede. As well as the double bass, that corner of the room was home to a rack of ancient LPs, relics of Auntie Jackie’s past no doubt, stacked vertically like slices of toast, an Ali Baba basket full of shoes and a box of dressmaker’s patterns in paper packets.
I picked one of these up: BUTTERICK 1949. I took this to be a reference to its year of origin. The cover showed a pen and ink drawing of a woman with bouffant hair and impossibly elongated legs wearing a tight-waisted tartan suit. She was standing with hands on hips, wrists bent back to an angle of ninety degrees and looked like no woman you would ever see. The edges of the packet had been well nibbled. On closer inspection I discovered that only the patterns closest to the top of the heap had been spared: those further down had been totally shredded.
I left Rachel sniggering over the evidence of our ancestors’ fashion crimes and went upstairs to report my findings to Auntie Jackie, making sure that there were no clients around. Even I could see that an infestation of mice wouldn’t be great for business. I found her in the back room performing repairs to some recently returned stock. She was wearing a pair of glasses and there was a row of needles, trailing different coloured cotton, pinned to her chest.
“Someone had a good time at the Young Conservatives’ Ball,” she said drily holding up a pale pink taffeta dress. There was a bald patch on the bodice where a whole section of beads had torn loose, an unidentified stain down the front of the skirt and a muddy bicycle tyre track up the back.
“It’s completely ruined,” I said indignantly
“Well, she’s blown her damage deposit,” sniffed Auntie Jackie. “And I won’t be giving them a ten per cent discount again in a hurry” She folded the dress up and dumped it in a wicker laundry basket. “That’s one for the specialist dry-cleaner’s.” She hauled the next dress on to the bench. “I’m glad to see you up and about. What can I do for you, my love?”
“I think there’s a mouse in my bedroom,” I said, and went on to break the news about her dressmaking patterns.
“Oh, I’m not bothered about those. I got them in a car boot sale about a year ago. I thought I might do something with them, but I never got round to it.” She rummaged in a drawer filled with cotton reels of every colour until she found one the right shade of blue and began to rethread her sewing machine.
“Well, I just thought I’d mention it,” I said, hoping for something more concrete in the way of mouse-catching strategies.
“Yes. Glad you did.” Auntie Jackie beamed. “Never be afraid to mention things.”
“I think you can get these humane traps,” I suggested. “I don’t really know how they work.”
“No need for anything like that,” Auntie Jackie replied breezily “The rat in the kitchen will get it.”
The next day Rachel went job-hunting, taking me with her for moral support. She had imagined that a seaside resort in high season would offer dozens of opportunities of which she, naturally, would have the pick. She hadn’t taken into account that Brighton, like Oxford, was a university town and therefore, just as at home, summer job-seekers would greatly outnumber summer jobs. As we came down the front steps, calling a goodbye to Auntie Jackie, I noticed a girl of about twelve or thirteen sitting on the wall of the house opposite. She had long, very distinctive copper-coloured hair and skin so pale that it had a bluish tinge, like skimmed milk. She was looking at us in a way that wasn’t particularly friendly. As if we had disturbed her, she slid off the wall and walked away up the road at a brisk pace, without looking back
Our first port of call was the Lanes, an area of quaint old streets which contained most of Rachel’s favourite clothes shops and where she felt confident of success. Invariably however, we found ourselves queuing to speak to the manager behind someone else on exactly the same vain errand. “Sorry, no vacancies” was the story everywhere. It was quite depressing. Expensive too, as Rachel somehow felt uncomfortable
