On the ground floor were the double sitting room, the kitchen, the toilet and Rafe’s room. Rafe’s room was a mess-clothes piled in cardboard boxes, sticky glasses and snowdrifts of paper everywhere-but in an assured way; you could tell he usually knew where everything was, even if no one else could work it out. He had been goofing off on one wall with charcoal, dashing off quick, fairly impressive sketches for some kind of mural involving a beech tree, a red setter and a guy in a top hat. On the mantelpiece was-eureka-the Head: a porcelain phrenology bust, staring loftily out over Lexie’s red bandanna. I was starting to like Rafe.
The first floor had Abby’s room and the bathroom at the front, Justin’s and a spare room to the back-either it had been too complicated to clear out, or Rafe liked being on his own downstairs. I started with the spare. The thought of going into either of the others put a small, ridiculous nasty taste in my mouth.
Great-uncle Simon had obviously never, ever thrown anything away. The room had a schizophrenic, dreamlike look, some lost store-cupboard of the mind: three copper kettles with holes in them, a moldy top hat, a broken stick-horse giving me a Godfather leer, what appeared to be half of an accordion. I know nothing about antiques, but none of it looked valuable, definitely not valuable enough to kill for. It looked more like stuff you would leave outside the gate in the hope that drunk students on a kitsch kick would take it home.
Abby and Justin were both neat, in very different ways. Abby went in for knickknacks-a tiny alabaster vase holding a handful of violets, a lead-crystal candlestick, an old sweet tin with a picture of a red-lipped girl in improbable Egyptian getup on the lid, all shiny clean and lined up carefully on just about every flat surface-and color; the curtains were made of strips of old fabric sewn together, red damask, bluebell-sprigged cotton, frail lace, and she had glued patches of fabric over the bald spots in the faded wallpaper. The room felt cozy and quirky and a little unreal, like the den of some kids’-book wood-land creature that would wear a frilly bonnet and make jam tarts.
Justin, sort of unexpectedly, turned out to have minimalist tastes. There was a small nest of books and photocopies and scribbled pages beside his bedside table, and he had covered the back of his door with photos of the gang-arranged symmetrically, in what looked like chronological order, and covered with some kind of clear sealant-but everything else was spare and clean and functional: white bedclothes, white curtains blowing, dark wood furniture polished to a shine, neat rows of balled-up socks in the drawers and glossy shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe. The room smelled, very faintly, of something cypressy and masculine.
There was nothing dodgy in any of the bedrooms, as far as I could see, but something about all three of them kept catching at me. It took me a while to put my finger on it. I was kneeling on Justin’s floor, checking under his bed like a burglar (nothing, not even dust bunnies), when it hit me: they felt permanent. I had never lived in a place where I could mess with the wallpaper or glue things down-my aunt and uncle wouldn’t have objected, exactly, but their house had a tiptoe atmosphere that prevented anything along those lines from even occurring to me, and all my landlords apparently had this idea that they were renting me Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest; it had taken me months to convince my current guy that property values would not plummet if I painted the walls white instead of banana-barf yellow and stuck the LSD-based carpet in the garden shed. None of this had bothered me at the time, but all of a sudden, surrounded by this houseful of happy, cavalier possessiveness-I would have loved a mural; Sam can draw-it seemed like a very strange way to live, on some stranger’s sufferance, asking permission like a little kid before I left any mark.
