the Citroen down the road where the Greyfriars Bobby statue is, don’t back it so far, just go careful on the clutch, don’t panic, because what happens when you panic is you totally collapse the back mudguard against the wall of the pub there and anyway there’s no point in you even going for a job like that, I mean you get into the room and they’re all wearing their power-suits and you’re wearing your jeans, so just, you know, know yourself a bit better, that’s all I’m saying.
But I look at her sitting there, thin and insolent and complete, and I can’t say any of it. It’d be terrible to proffer a friend she hasn’t met yet who then turns out not to be a friend, or a left wing government that turns out not to be. Terrible to tell her, now, about a crushed mudguard one afternoon in 1984. It’s somehow terrible even to suggest she’ll go to university.
You need to eat more, I say instead.
She puts the end of her hair in her mouth. She takes it out and holds it up and fans it out, examines the wet hair for split ends.
Aw, don’t do that, I say, it’s disgusting.
She rolls her eyes.
She is spotty round the mouth and in the crevices down the side of her nose, of course she is, with a skin that I now know to call combination dry and greasy. I could tell her how to deal with it. Her middle parting makes her hair look flat and makes her look more cowed than she is. There’s a constellation of acne on her forehead beneath it. I could tell her how to deal with that too.
I go and stand at the window and look out. That kiss up against the building site fills the inside of my head again as if someone had opened a lid at the top of my skull, poured in a jug of warm water mixed with flower food, then arranged a bunch of spring flowers – cheerfulness, daffodils – using me as the vase. But the light is coming down, February, early dusk, and the common is still patchy with snow. I know, now, though I didn’t know it when I bought this house, that the common is actually a common burial ground; it’s where they buried most of this city’s thousands of plague-dead centuries ago. Beneath the feet of the dogwalkers and the people coming back from the supermarket, under the grass and the going snow, under the mound where the paths all come together, are all the final shapes their lives took, all the bare bones. Above them the black of the common, and above it the sky the deep blue it goes just before dark. It’s a clear night. The stars’ll be out later. It’ll be beautiful, all the stars and planets spread in their winter-spring alignments above the common. Are the stars out tonight? I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright. Cause I only have eyes. Art Garfunkel, it was. The song coming into my head gives me an idea.
What’s number one right now? I say. In the top twenty?
Figaro by Brotherhood of Man she says. It’s appalling.
They’re appalling, I say.
It’s music for, like, infants, she says.
And that song Angelo, I say.
I hate that song, she says. It’s crap.
It’s such a steal from the Abba song Fernando, I say. You just have to think about it and it’s so obvious.
Yeah, she says. It is. It’s like really a steal. They just took the idea Abba had and they wrote it into a so much less good song.
Her voice, for the first time since she’s been here, sounds almost enthusiastic. I don’t turn round. I rack my brains to remember something she’ll like.
I sing: Hey you with the pretty face. Welcome to the human race.
I really really like the way the piano they use in Mr Blue Sky has an electronic voice and you think it might even be the voice the sky has, if the sky had a voice, she says. I actually really really like that whole idea of an electric light orchestra because of the idea of, like, light-orchestral kind of thing, and then on top of that the idea that it’s electric and that it’s nothing but an electric light, like one you switch on and off.
It is the most she’s said so far, the whole time she’s been in the house.
Like a whole orchestra at the flick of