She struck me as quite posh for round here, from the way she spoke, the out-of-proportion gratitude posh people have when they talk to the hoi polloi and her silk dressing gown – which I didn’t dream might be actual silk; she only told me that later. Shoulders hunched, she appeared fragile but glamorous. A bit Blanche DuBois, if you know what I mean. I felt sorry for her in the way normal people do for a certain kind of vulnerable but beautiful woman, do you know what I mean? Men, especially.
Blue Eyes is nodding, but I suspect she’s humouring me. ‘So, you gave her a teabag?’ Get on with it, woman.
‘I invited her in, actually. She looked like she was about to burst into tears.’
I can picture soppy Ingrid as if it were last week. The silk robe was olive green with flowers embroidered down the front, the ties knotted around an impossibly skinny waist. She was almost leaning backwards, as if waiting for a second invitation.
‘Come in then if you’re coming,’ I said. ‘It’s chilly out. Kitchen’s through the back.’
‘Thank you.’ In a whiff of perfume I didn’t recognise, she scurried through to the kitchen and stood with her fingertips pressed together at her waist, shoulders still round her ears.
‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony.’
‘Thank you. It’s kind of you to let me in.’ She sat, looked around her as if doing a recce for a film shoot or something. ‘You were filing?’
I followed her eyes to my clip file, which I quickly picked up and took over to the dresser. ‘Just bank statements. A very exciting household is this.’
She forced a brief laugh.
Before Blue Eyes asks me anything about the file, I tell her that Ingrid was a funny mix. Obviously not a hugger or a smiler. Not a great sense of humour either, apparently.
‘So how’re you settling into the street?’ I asked her once I’d got us some coffee.
‘It’s early days. I’m still unpacking.’ She gave a sad smile, a half nod. She pushed her thumb to her mouth and tore off a strip of thumbnail, picked it out of her mouth and rolled it between her thumb and forefinger. She patted at her robe.
I recognised the gesture, saw the rectangular bulge in her silk pocket.
‘I’ll fetch an ashtray,’ I said.
Neither me nor Mark smokes but Katie’s boyfriend and a few of our friends do, or did when we used to have them round, so we do keep an ashtray in the house.
I dashed into the living room. The ashtray wasn’t in the usual place on the sideboard, which wasn’t unusual, if you know what I mean. I knew where it would be, even though I’ve told Katie a thousand times that we don’t smoke in the house and that her boyfriend is not exempt. I dashed up to her room, pushed open the door, felt it snag against clothes on the floor.
‘Mum!’ One syllable, into which my daughter managed to muster a world of disdain, before she threw the duvet over her head, an action that muffled but failed to disguise the ‘What the fuck?’ that followed.
‘Good morning to you too, darling.’ I grabbed the ashtray – home to some shady-looking butts of the hand-rolled variety, if you know what I mean, and four mugs from her chest of drawers, kicking her pile of dirty clothes out of my way as I left, all the while trying not to breathe in a smell so rank I thought it might stick in scales to the back of my throat. The mugs were half full of a brownish liquid that might once have been coffee, mini flotillas of grey-green discs bobbing on the surface. I love Katie, don’t get me wrong, but she’s an absolute pig in knickers sometimes.
Ingrid seemed to be taking a tour of the kitchen when I got back. When she saw me, she returned to her chair and lit up, slid the lighter back into the packet and blew out a jet of smoke, obviously no intention of stepping into the garden like our friends do. Still, she could have been sitting on a spike for how uncomfortable she looked. She’d blagged her way into my home but it was as if she no longer wanted to be there. As if she wanted company like a vase with a hole in the bottom wants water: she seemed to want to be filled up, only to let it run out