Shallow Be Thy Grave (5 page)

The flat on the third floor had iron railings over the doorframe. Lily exhaled and carried on climbing the steps, half expecting someone to throw open a door and ask them what they were doing. But no one came. They reached the fourth floor and Flat D and stared at each other for a moment. Another small piece of white card with the word ‘Chance’ was blu-tacked to the door. Lily wondered whether it was a name or a promise. She rested her fingertips on the smooth, unpainted wood.

Jo nodded her head, like what was she waiting for, so Lily knocked. The door was thick and hard on her knuckles. Next to the door were two glass panels - it hardly seemed right to call them windows, as they didn’t look out on the external world. The panel on the left hand side of the door had curtains badly drawn across it, leaving gaps at either side. Lily tried to peer in. She couldn’t see any lights on.  Jo tried the door handle but the door was locked. The sense of unease in Lily’s stomach increased.

Jo joined Lily by the glass panel on the left hand side of the door and pulled along the bottom of the frame. It stayed firmly shut. Jo turned and moved a few paces to the window on the right as Lily lit her lighter, held it up against the glass. It was useless.

“This one’s moving,” said Jo.

Lily moved up to the panel on the right hand side of the door, where Jo was tugging at the bottom of the frame. There were no curtains, but a blind was pulled halfway down the window. As Jo stepped back to look in her bag, Lily peered in. She could just make out a kitchen in the gloom, the cooker reflecting the gleam of the moonlight that came in through the skylight. Jo pushed the lid of her Golden Virginia tin up between the gap between the window frame and the window. The window moved open a centimetre. “Give us a hand,” said Jo.

Lily squeezed her fingertips into the gap and between them they managed to prise it open, the small metal clasp on the inside of the window just eating through the rotten frame.

They stared at each for a moment. Complete silence made Lily’s eardrums hum, and she jumped about five inches into the air as a sudden click sounded, its noise amplified in the quiet. “Relax, it’s just the timer,” said Jo, nodding towards another plastic light switch.

“What are we going to do?” whispered Lily.

 Jo leaned over the railings and looked up and down the stairwell. “There’s only one thing we can do.”

She stooped in front of Lily and clasped her hands together to give Lily a leg up. Lily’s heartbeat doubled. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

Lily’s scrawny frame was built for breaking and entering. Less than twenty seconds later, Jo had practically catapulted her through the window and she was inside the flat, crouching on a sink unit. The only light came from the gloom of the stairwell, which shone through the small window behind her. She knew instinctively that there was no one home, yet she called out Fiona’s name a couple of times, just to be sure.

 As her eyes grew used to the dark she jumped down off the draining board. She could make out the door at the other side of the kitchen. Lily crossed the room and slipped through the doorway, tiptoeing for some reason she wasn’t fully aware of, into the hallway, which was in pitch darkness. She felt a shiver of fear run down the back of her neck as she stepped on blindly, in the direction she thought the front door would be. Each step a leap of faith. A step into complete blackness, her hands held out in front of her, walking like a zombie. Her imagination started to play tricks. What if on one step forward she brushed her fingertips against a dead body? Or worse, a live one? She had to fight the urge to turn and run back the way she’d come. Only the thought of Jo laughing at her kept her going.

Altogether it took six steps until her fingertips touched solid wood in front of her. She used the palms of her hand to pat down the door, located a small, metal, thumb turn lock, and fumbled around with it until it finally gave.  At the sound of the lock opening, Jo pushed down the handle from the outside of the door. It burst open and Lily found herself face to face with her friend.

Jo stepped over the threshold and Lily quickly shut the door behind her, which plunged them both back into darkness.

Lily turned the metal lock.

“Hang on,” said Jo. “We need a light.”

Lily ignored her. She wasn’t going to open the door again. She didn’t know why but she felt much safer, even in the pitch black, with it closed. Like breaking and entering wasn’t so bad with the door closed. Jo was feeling the walls in huge sweeping movements and must have eventually found a light switch because Lily heard the click.

“Bollocks,” muttered Jo, as the hallway remained resolutely black.

Lily stumbled her way back into the kitchen, where the light coming in from outside made it possible, just about, to see what was around. In a cupboard under the sink, she found two wine bottles, candle wax dripping down their necks with a half burned candle in each. She lit them both and took one through to Jo, who was bumping around the rear of the flat.

“There’s no one here,” said Jo, needlessly.

“It doesn’t smell so bad,” said Lily, remembering the last time she’d gone into an unoccupied house. Her mother’s house had stunk like rotten meat.

“We’d better have a look around,” said Jo.

“There’s a kitchen,” said Lily.

“See if you can get a bit more light. Light the stove if you have to.”

Lily felt weird, going through someone else’s flat. What was she looking for? The kitchen was large, with a round table and chairs in the centre of the room. She carried the candle over to what looked like a pinboard on the wall by the door.

“Have you got a Franc?” Jo shouted through from the hall, making Lily jump.  “There’s a meter out here.”

Jo appeared in the doorway, looking like a ghost, lit up by candlelight. Lily felt in her pockets for the rest of her change, and handed her last Franc across the room. A minute later the lights flickered on and the sound of the fridge revving itself into action filled the small flat. Lily screwed up her eyes at the brightness. There was no lampshade, just a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling but she knew immediately that Fiona had been here. She wasn’t sure why, but she could sense her.

The wooden table dominated the room and Lily imagined Fiona sitting at it, drinking tea and writing letters. She crossed the room to the table, but there was nothing on it, except for a dark brown pottery ashtray. Worktops went half the way round the edges of the room, and the cooker looked newer now the lights were on.  The other half of the room held a small settee and a bookcase. On top of the bookcase sat a telephone, but there was no dialling tone when Lily picked up the receiver. No sound at all. She replaced the receiver and noticed a thin blue book on the bookcase. The bookcase had a wooden lip all the way round the edges, and the book was right to one side, like it had gone unnoticed when whoever had packed the rest of the books away. And someone had packed the books away, because she could see their outline in the thin layer of dust on the shelves. Lily picked it up. It was a German to English dictionary. She opened the front pages, but there was no handwritten note inside.

She sat down on the settee and immediately felt something jar against her lower back. She shifted her position and noticed the spine of another book sticking up from the back of the cushions. She plucked it out.
Hitler’s Children: Story of the Baader Meinhof Terrorist Gang
, was written in white capital letters against the black background. She put it on the bookshelf next to the German dictionary and sat back into the settee, trying to imagine Fiona sitting in this same place. As she stared in front of her, her attention caught on something so familiar, the sight of it made her almost gag. Hanging on the back of the kitchen door was the olive green leather jacket Fiona always wore. She crossed the room and tugged on the coat sleeve. It had deteriorated since Lily had last seen it, had bite marks around the cuffs, like someone had chewed the edges, but it was definitely Fiona’s.

She felt herself relax a little. At least they now had good reason to be here. She held it to her nostrils and smelled it and felt a wave of sadness hit her as she was reminded of her younger sister.  Why hadn’t they kept in touch better? They’d let a whole year pass without once seeing each other.

She let the sleeve of the jacket fall and continued her search of the kitchen, buoyed up by the fact that she felt closer to Fiona than she had done since her sister had left England. She was comforted too by the sounds of Jo banging around in the rest of the flat. Lily reached up and opened one of the wall cupboards. It was almost empty, save for a box of tea bags and another sure sign of her sister - a jar of Marmite.  It had a rubber band around its neck and a small label hanging from it. “Couldn’t bear the thought of you going hungry. Love, Dad.” 

 Lily closed the door quickly, like she was fearful the Marmite might escape. She went to look for Jo and found in her in a bedroom at the other end of the hall. There was a double bed, which was pushed into the corner of the room to make space for a single mattress on the floor. The double bed had only a sheet on it and a sleeping bag. The mattress on the floor was made up, with a single quilt and pillows. “Is there only one bedroom?” asked Lily.

Jo nodded.

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Lily. “Why would she leave the Beaumonts to move here? She had her own room and en-suite shower there.” Fiona’s first letters had contained more information about the en-suite shower room than the rest of her experiences in Paris put together.

“The company’s probably better,” said Jo. “I’m amazed she lasted a year with Madame Bitchmont.”

“I hope Brigitte’s nice,” said Lily. “Do you think she is?”

“She can’t be worse than the Ice Queen.”

“Something doesn’t feel right,” said Lily. “She hasn’t even taken her coat.” She held up the jacket in front of her.

“She might have two coats,” said Jo. “And you wouldn’t take a leather jacket inter-railing would you? A, it would probably get nicked, and b, it’s not the sort of thing that packs away easily. When I went inter-railing I didn’t-”

“You went inter-railing?” Lily’s voice was full of surprise, even though Lily herself wasn’t sure why. It was just that Jo had never mentioned it before.

“Yeah, when I was, like, seventeen.”

“Where did you go?”

“All over the place, France, Italy, Yugoslavia. You don’t need a coat in any of those places. Just a bikini and a bottle of Ambre Solaire.”

When they’d been to Spain together last year, Jo had talked about being abroad before. She’d talked about family holidays in the South of France, before her dad left, and Lily knew she’d been to Spain. But she’d never mentioned inter-railing and Lily was curious as to why. “You never said.”

“You never asked.”

Why would she ask about something she didn’t know anything about? thought Lily. She was about to ask Jo the same question - but something in Jo’s demeanour made her change her mind. “How long do you think they’ve gone for?”

“A month, probably.”

“Is that how long you went for?” A month’s holiday seemed excessive to Lily’s brain.

“Yeah.” Jo opened one of the drawers in the chest by the bed.

“Weird that they didn’t think to lock the kitchen window then. They could have been burgled.”

“There’s not much to nick.”

It was true. There wasn’t even a telly. “Even so,” said Lily.

“You know what we need,” said Jo, stepping over the mattress and coming out of the bedroom, her presence forcing Lily back into the small corridor. “A cup of tea and a spliff.”

“Funny,” said Lily, in a voice that suggested it was anything but. Her heartbeat increased slightly at the mention of the word spliff. It wasn’t that she was addicted. Just that life was infinitely nicer through the slowed down haze of spliff, and she couldn’t allow herself to think what she was going to do without it. She felt her palms grow sweaty. “I need the toilet.”

 The world’s smallest bathroom contained a shower, a sink and a toilet. The room was completely tiled, and there was a plughole in the centre of the room. Lily had never seen a bathroom that didn’t have a bath.

She stared at herself in the mirror in the bathroom. Her dreads were looking a bit unruly, she tried to pull them so they all headed in one direction. She saw her sister in her own eyes. She washed her hands and went back to find Jo, who was in the kitchen pulling things out of her small rucksack.

“So, shall I skin up?” asked Jo.

“Will you quit keep doing that?” said Lily, her temper fraying. She’d never wanted a spliff more. “It’s hard enough as it is.”

“Doesn’t have to be hard, Lil.” Jo held up a bar of Imperial Leather.

Lily had the feeling Jo was waiting for her to say something. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s a trick my brother told me.”

“What is?”

Jo took off the cardboard and pulled the bar of soap out of its packaging as the light started to dawn for Lily. “You didn’t?”

“I fucking did.”

“You didn’t.” Lily clapped her hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Coz I know what you’re like, Lil. You’d have probably been confessing by the time the customs guy had asked to look in your bag.”

“But he did look in our bags.” A sudden dread swept into her system as she remembered her cockiness. “Shit, what would you have done if he’d found it?”

Jo shrugged as she pulled the cellophane wrapper off the bar of soap. It had been opened before so the cellophane wasn’t stuck together, but the only way of finding that out would have been to remove the soap from its cardboard box and luckily for them the customs official hadn’t thought to do that. “She didn’t even open my wash bag.”

Jo removed the brick of soap from the cellophane and tugged gently at it. It came away in two pieces, cut through the middle. In the centre of each half was a carved-out middle, and sticking out of the carved-out middle of one half was a small lump of cellophane filled with grass.

Lily’s first feeling, once she’d got over the fact they weren’t now languishing in a Parisian prison, was one of elation. No need for sobriety. Hurrah. She needed to clear her mind, calm her thoughts. Maybe then she’d know what to do.