The drift of post in the hallway testified to the frequency with which people came and went here. It was eighteen inches high and stretched further and further along the wall as the weeks passed. Every time she arrived home before the people downstairs and picked the day’s mail off the doormat, Rowan found things for three or four former residents, the now-familiar names of those who’d moved on recently but often ones she’d never seen before, too. It wasn’t just flyers and catalogues but meaningful things: voter registration cards, bank letters, birthday cards. The paper-chase evidence of disorganised lives.
This evening she wasn’t first back – she’d heard the thump of bass from a hundred yards down the street – and the day’s post had already been tossed on to the pile. She wasn’t expecting anything and might not even have looked if she hadn’t seen a statement from Barclays lying on the top. She checked – yes, hers – picked it up, and stopped.
Underneath was a cream envelope the size and shape of a postcard, her name and address written on it in black ink. The handwriting – she recognised it straight away.
The shock was like a camera flash going off. The narrow hallway vanished, replaced by white light, silence, and then it rushed back in: the thumping bass behind the thin door, the hectic pattern of the cracked mosaic floor-tiles, suddenly dizzying. Like the box of sketches, the envelope pulsed with energy. Once, as a small child, she’d stood at the feet of a pylon and heard the electricity humming overhead. Alive. Deadly.
Now, a decade later, the day after Jacqueline’s phone call – it couldn’t be a coincidence.
Rowan hesitated a second longer then snatched up the envelope as if someone from the other flat might lunge out from their doorway and grab it. She held it pressed against her chest as she unlocked her door then, turning awkwardly on the bottom step, locked it again from the inside and flicked the catch on the deadbolt.
If she’d had cigarettes in the house, she would have smoked them. Instead, she poured a glass of wine and drank it like medicine as she paced the short distance between the kitchen sink and the sitting-room window. The bass coming up through the floor felt like a heartbeat now. Either Placebo or Muse: pounding, anxious music.
The envelope was on the table, a magnet whose poles reversed constantly, pulling then repelling her. She wanted to open it but the idea made her nauseous.
Marianne’s handwriting – broadly spaced letters; risers and descenders that spiked and plunged like the trace on a heart monitor. Extraordinary to see it again after so long, like getting mail from a different life. At university, they’d written; the letters had shuttled back and forth between them, Oxford to London, every few days. They’d texted and emailed, too, of course, but the letters were different, long and discursive, written late at night, as if, without ever saying so, they’d been continuing the conversations they used to have up in Marianne’s room when the lights went out and they lay in their beds in the dark. Rowan had looked for this writing for ten years, every day at first, and then, protecting herself from disappointment, less and less often until she’d let herself hope only around certain key dates: Christmas, New Year, their birthdays. The anniversary.
And that it was this address; that told her something, too. That Marianne had known to write to her here could mean only one thing, realistically: that she’d got Rowan’s Christmas card and opened it. Saved it. Despite everything, the thought made her heart swell.
The envelope was postmarked five days ago – Marianne had posted it the day before she died. Five days. Had it taken that long to make it the sixty miles from Oxford or had it been downstairs before today? She’d been back late every evening this week; she hadn’t once collected the post directly from the mat. Perhaps it had been in the pile and she just hadn’t seen it. Perhaps the people downstairs had picked it up with their mail by mistake. Marianne had died in the evening – it might have been sitting on a kitchen worktop in the flat downstairs as she fell from the roof at Fyfield Road.
Rowan took a swig of wine and picked it up. Hands trembling, she tore it open and pulled out a matching cream postcard with the same black writing.
I need to talk to you.
Nothing else, no signature, not even an M, but there didn’t need to be. Blindly, Rowan pulled out a chair and sat down. She stared and the words started to pulse on the paper, their edges blurring then straightening, blurring again.
Why? What had happened? Because something had – this eliminated any doubt.
She stood up quickly, nearly knocking over the chair, and ran the few feet to the sink where she threw up the wine and what little remained of her lunch. As she straightened up, the film of sweat on her forehead turned cold.
After all this time, she’d begun to believe that it could stay buried. With each year that went by, she’d imagined it sinking deeper and deeper, new earth settling on top, making it harder and harder to uncover. Now she could see that she had been na?ve. What Marianne had done was only buried, not gone. It had been there all the time, lying dormant, waiting for the moment when it would stir, stretch and break out into the light.
Three