patch of grass with two benches and some bushes and a bin for dog shit. It was also an openair crack house. Isabel told me, but she clearly didn’t care. She’d been there the night I had to let her in. She threw stones at my window. I thought I’d dreamed them.
“Oi!” she said in this shouting sort of whisper. “Country! Get down here and open the door.”
I had to put some clothes on. The stairs were cold and gritty under my feet and I could hardly see. I thought I might still be asleep. She stood there on the doorstep like I’d shown up three hours late to collect her.
“Doesn’t anyone brush their hair any more?” she said.
It felt strange, someone talking to me, like having a spotlight shined in my eyes.
“How long’ve you been here?” she said.
I had to clear my throat to speak, like it was rusty. “I just got up,” I said.
“No, Einstein, how long’ve you lived here?” she said.
“Oh. About ten days.”
“I haven’t seen you,” she said, like that meant I was lying. She was feeling about for her spare key above the doorframe but she wasn’t quite tall enough to reach.
“Well, I’ve been here,” I said. “I’ve been keeping to myself.” I got the key for her.
She looked me up and down and laughed once. “Pink lung disease.”
“What?”
“Pink lung disease. Don’t you young people know anything?”
She told me about this policeman at the dawn of the motor age who got sent from his village to do traffic duty in Piccadilly. He wasn’t any good at directing traffic. Nobody was because it was a new thing. The policeman got hit by a car and he died. The doctor who cut him up had never seen healthy, pink, country lungs before. He was used to city lungs, all black and gooey, so he said that was the cause of it. Pink lung disease. Not a car driving over him at all.
She looked at me the whole time she was talking. She was the very first person to see me since I’d been here. I was conscious of it.
“You’ve got lovely country skin,” she said. “Look at the glow on you.”
“Thanks,” I said, because I didn’t know how else to take it.
“You stick out like a sore thumb with that healthy skin.”
“No I don’t,” I said.
“Put that key back for me, would you?” she said, and I reached up and put it back above the doorframe. She noticed my watch. It has a thick strap. I always wear it. “What’s the time?” she said.
“Four thirty-six.”
“Well, what are you standing here for, at that hour?” she said, and she sent me back to my room and shut the door behind her, like she’d forgotten I was only standing there because of her.
I couldn’t go back to sleep. Someone was boiling a kettle in the flat upstairs. I heard the plug going into the socket, the switch click to ON, the thrum of the water bubbling on the counter top. I heard an alarm clock somewhere beep seventeen and a half times and then stop. I heard the scrape and warble of pigeons waking up on the windowsill.
I pictured the walls and ceilings and floors separating everyone in their little boxes. I thought about how thin they were, and what might be between them, like dust and mice and lost letters, like feathers and crumbling plaster and hundred-year-old wallpaper. I thought about everyone in the whole city, alone in our boxes like squares on graph paper, like scales on a fish, like ants.
Now I was an ant, maybe Max would’ve liked to study me, navigating my way round the Tube, walking down a crowded street without colliding, stacking shelves and watching them empty again, sweeping my floor, putting the rubbish out.
Do ants know that they are working for the colony? That whatever little job they get to do until they die actually forms a meaningful part of the whole? Do they know that? Because I certainly didn’t.
Have you ever done that thing where you interrupt a line of ants? They’re all moving along, no questions asked, filled with a sense of purpose, and you draw a line across their path in the mud or the sand or whatever, just a line, with a stick or your shoe or an empty vinegar bottle. The ants in front of the line carry on like nothing happened, like there’s nothing to worry about. They don’t look back. But the ones behind the line, the ones who walk into it, they lose the plot. It’s like they all go insane and run around tearing their hair out because they’ve got no idea what the hell they’re supposed to be doing. Like they’ve forgotten everything they ever knew.
Max hated it when I did that. It drove him crazy.
That’s what I was wondering, sitting in my room listening to other people who didn’t know that I existed. If Max was watching me then from above, what side of the line in the ants was I on?
A few nights later I bumped into the old lady again in the hallway. It wasn’t late. I was going out for some air because I’d been in my room all day. She came out of her flat just before I got to the front door.
“Ah, Country,” she said. “Come in, meet the neighbours.”
I didn’t want to meet anyone. I shook my head. “No thanks,” I said, and I opened the door. I could see a slice of blackish, street-lit sky. I could smell the warm metal and dust of outside.
“You’ve got to meet the neighbours,” she said.
“No, it’s all right.”
The door was properly open now. Two people walked past on the street, a man and a woman, and they glanced up at me in the light of the hall for less than a second. My shadow was long down the front steps.
She said, “What are you on about, ‘No, it’s all right’? It’s the rules. I have to introduce you.”
I said I’d rather she didn’t.
“What do you mean?”
She was standing in the doorway now and I was halfway to the pavement. I couldn’t really see her face because the light was behind her.
“I don’t want to meet the neighbours,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” she said. She pushed the door shut in front of her, its rectangle of light on the street disappearing in one quick, diminishing movement.
“I will,” I said to nobody at all.
I wasn’t out for long. I walked about. I sat on a bench at the canal. I watched people in cafes and bars to see what they were doing with their time. I got a newspaper and stared at some TV through the window at Dixons for a bit.
When I got back the lights were still on at the old lady’s house. I could see them from the street. Inside, the door to her flat was open. I heard her moving around, heard the muffled sound of her voice and the tap of the dog’s feet somewhere, like fingers on a table. I leaned my head against
