Yours faithfully,

  Melinda McNulty

  1

  Early mornings were the only time that Toby felt that his house belonged to him. Everyone was still sleeping. There was no imminent possibility of a key in the door, of footsteps down the stairs, of voices carrying through walls. It was just him, in his pyjamas, sieving flour into a bowl, tap, tap, tap, against the palm of his hand.

  Toby made bread every morning. It was a ritual, something that Karen had done every day when they were together. The first morning after she left he’d come downstairs and immediately started pounding dough, desperate to re-create the scent of his failed marriage. He didn’t even eat it any more, just left it on a cooling tray every day for his tenants to enjoy.

  Toby had slept badly and his usual sense of melancholy was now overlaid by a thick blanket of tiredness. It was three days into the New Year and life had already fallen flaccidly back into place. He was still trapped in this mausoleum of a house, still surrounded by people he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. He was still married to a woman whom he hadn’t seen since he was twenty-five. He was still an unpublished poet and he was still penniless.

  A pile of bills sat on his desk upstairs, unopened and unpaid. Next to the pile of bills was a pile of rejection letters from publishers and literary agents. And next to that was a letter from a local estate agent informing him that there were people queuing down the street, apparently, to buy a house like his and enclosing examples of houses the agent had sold recently for unseemly amounts of money. While Toby was grateful to them for alerting him to this fact, it was really of no possible use to him. Toby’s house was full of people who had no intention of leaving and he had no intention of making them.

  Toby finished making his dough and pressed it into a loaf tin, which he then slid into the Aga. He could hear the tinny drone of someone’s radio alarm switching itself on upstairs and he headed quickly back towards his room, before he inadvertently crossed paths with anyone. He glanced at things as he passed through the house. A pair of Con’s trainers sat under the coffee table in the TV room, with his socks curled up inside them like sleeping dogs. There was a copy of Now magazine on the arm of the sofa and a mug half full of blotchy tea on the floor. Ruby’s black lacy cardigan was hanging from the back of the armchair and Joanne’s Clarins face powder sat in a little plastic pot on the coffee table next to Ruby’s cereal bowl. A small plastic Christmas tree with multicoloured fibre-optic tips twinkled forlornly in the early morning gloom. A pair of Ruby’s pointy boots lay by the door, one upright, the other on its side, as if it had fallen over drunk. Toby picked up one of the boots and stared at it longingly.

  This was his world, had been for years. A world of other people’s possessions, rhythms, dramas, smells and habits. His presence left no imprint on the dynamics of his home. It was as if he didn’t exist. What would it be like to live alone, he wondered, to come home and find everything as he’d left it? To never have to take someone else’s unwashed saucepan out of the kitchen sink to pour himself a glass of water, never to be woken up by the sound of someone else’s snoring or someone else’s lovemaking? To know people only as they presented themselves to the world, not to see the ragged, domestic underbelly of strangers any more. Would he feel more substantial? Would he feel more alive?

  He climbed the two flights of stairs to his room, three at a time, and closed the door silently behind him.

  2

  Ruby watched Con leaving for work from her bedroom window. He moved with the slightly lolloping gait of a teenage boy in trainers. His dark hair was slick with product and his jeans hung somewhere short of his waist but not quite below his buttocks. He was a lovely-looking boy, clear-skinned, well proportioned with startling indigo eyes. But Ruby didn’t find him attractive. She didn’t appreciate younger men. She liked older men. Not old men, just men who were slightly used, a little creased, like second-hand books. In the same way that you might look at a small child and try to envisage their adult face, she liked to look at a mature man and imagine the young man who’d once inhabited his features.

  ‘What are you staring at out there?’

  Ruby turned and smiled at the man in her bed. Paul Fox. Her slightly creased forty-five-year-old lover.

  ‘Nothing,’ she teased.

  She sat on the edge of her bed. One of Paul’s feet was poking from the bottom of the duvet. She picked up his big toe between her thumb and forefinger, put it between her front teeth and bit down on it, hard.

  ‘Ow.’ He pulled his leg back under the duvet. ‘What was that for?’

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘was for ignoring me last night.’

  ‘What?’ His brow furrowed.

  ‘You know what. Eliza walked in and suddenly it was as if you didn’t know me any more.’

  ‘Oh, Christ. Ruby – she’s my girlfriend.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But it’s still not very nice, is it?’ Ruby and Paul’s relationship had always been an informal mix of occasional business and no-strings pleasure. He got her the odd support slot for one of his acts, they got together once or twice a week for sex or drinking or both, and he paid her what he jokingly referred to as a ‘salary’, a small monthly cheque, just to keep her ticking over, just to keep her in tampons and vodka, because he could afford to and because he wanted to. It was easy-come, easy-go, a bit of reciprocal fun that had worked for both of them for the past five years. Ruby didn’t expect anything more from Paul. But at the same time she couldn’t help feeling a bit gutted that Paul had failed to fall in love with her throughout their five-year relationship. And she couldn’t help feeling a bit cheated that six months ago Paul had fallen in love with a forty-two-year-old earth mother from Ladbroke Grove with two kids, her own business and a vineyard in Tuscany.

  ‘Look,’ sighed Paul, sitting up in bed, ‘I had no idea she was going to show up last night. She said she couldn’t get a babysitter –’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘She’d originally said she was coming to see the band and then her babysitter let her down and –’

  ‘And you invited me instead.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Fucking charming.’

  ‘Jesus, Ruby –’

  ‘Jesus-Ruby-what? I’m sick of this. This whole thing is fucked.’

  ‘Ruby. Come on.’

  ‘No. I will not come on. You and I. We used to be equals. We used to be the same. But ever since you met Eliza it’s like I’m just some bit of crap who follows you around plugging the gaps in your life.’

  ‘That is so not true.’

  ‘And don’t talk like that. Like some American teenager. You’re forty-five years old. You sound ridiculous.’ Ruby winced inwardly as the words left her mouth. She was being a bitch, but she couldn’t help it.

  She glanced at herself in the mirror. Ruby had an image of herself that she carried around in her head. It was an image of a smoky brunette with black eyes and creamy skin and a look about her as if she’d just had sex or was thinking about having sex. Generally speaking the mirror reflected back exactly what she expected to see. Every now and then it didn’t. This was one of those moments. Her make-up was smudged under her eyes. Sometimes when her make-up was smudged under her eyes it made her look sexy and dangerous. Right now it made her look tired and vaguely deranged. Her hair was dull and dirty – she should have washed it yesterday, but just couldn’t be bothered – and she had a big spot on her chin. She wondered what Eliza looked like first thing in the morning and then realized that it didn’t matter what Eliza looked like first thing in the morning because Paul was in love with her and to him she would look beautiful no matter what.

  There was a knock at the door. Ruby breathed a sigh of relief and pulled her dressing gown together.

  ‘Ruby. It’s me, Toby.’

  She sighed and opened the door.

  ‘Hi. Sorry, I was just, er – oh, hi, Paul.’ He peered over her shoulder and threw Paul a stiff smile.

  Paul put up a hand and cracked an equally stiff smile. He looked silly, arranged between Ruby’s marabou-trimmed cushions and fake leopard-skin throws with his big hairy chest and his mop of greying hair. Silly and like he didn’t belong here. He looked, Ruby suddenly and overwhelmingly realized, like a silly handsome man having a silly adulterous affair. She gulped silently.

  ‘Yes, I was just wondering about the rent. Just wondering if maybe you could give me a cheque today. It’s just, there are some bills, and if I don’t send a cheque by the end of the week, then, er, well, there’ll be no hot water. Or heating. That’s all.’

  ‘Fine,’ sighed Ruby, ‘fine. I’ll give you a cheque tonight.’

  ‘Yes, well, you did say that last week, and you didn’t. I haven’t had any rent off you since the end of November, and even then it wasn’t the full amount and –’

  ‘Toby. I’ll give you a cheque. Tonight. OK?’

  ‘Right. OK. Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Good. Right, then. See you. See you, Paul.’

  ‘See you, Toby.’

  Ruby closed the door, and turned and smiled at Paul. He peeled back the cover and smiled at her invitingly.

  ‘Sorry, mate.’ She flipped the duvet back over his naked body and picked up an elastic band from her dressing table. She pulled her hair back into a topknot with it. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  Paul threw her an injured look. ‘Not even a quickie?’ he said.

  ‘No. Not even a quickie.’ She winked at him, softening the bluntness of her rejection. She wasn’t in the mood for another scene. She knew there was a Big Conversation waiting to happen, but she didn’t want to have it now. Right now she just wanted to have a shower. Right now she just wanted to feel clean.

  3

  Con pulled the glossy brochure out of the envelope and flicked through it impatiently, his eyes taking in the images a second at a time. Blue skies, palm trees, creamy beaches. But this wasn’t a travel brochure. This was a brochure for the Right Path Flight School in Durban, South Africa. Con gazed at crop-haired men in icy white shirts and epaulettes, sitting in tiny cockpits lined with a thousand buttons and lights, knobs and levers, and felt a thrill of excitement. Then, before anyone could ask him what he was looking at, he slid the brochure back into the envelope and headed for the eighth floor.

  The Vogue fashion department looked like a normal office. It had desks and computers and printers and wastepaper bins. It had a suspended ceiling and fluorescent lighting and phones ringing and fax machines chirruping. It looked like a normal office, but it absolutely wasn’t.

  Con partly relished the point in the day when he was called upon to push his trolley through the Vogue fashion department and partly dreaded it. He liked looking at the girls, rail-thin, delicate as wisps of smoke with their serious clothes and their perfect skin. He liked the way they sat behind their desks, slender legs knitted together like vines, tap-tapping at their keyboards with lean fingers. He liked their flat, pointy shoes and their strange accessories, the scarves and rings and tiny cardigans, so different to the girls he knew from home. And he liked the way they talked, their husky Marlboro Light voices and the peculiar shapes they made out of ordinary words. They appeared to him like people from dreams – half-formed, semi-opaque, not quite human. They fascinated him. And they repulsed him. It annoyed him that they existed so separately to him. It wound him up that he could move through them with his trolley, invisible, even to the ugly ones. They passed him their packages and parcels; they asked him stupid questions about costs and timings; they addressed him only via pieces of paper.

  In his world, outside the gilded gates of the Condé Nast building, Con was a player. He met his friends in the pub on a Friday night and girls, good-looking girls, shimmied around him, glanced against him, willed him to pay them attention. Here he was just the post boy.

  One of these wraith-like girls approached him now, her hand clutching a large white Jiffy bag. She had fine blonde hair, the colour of rice paper, and pale waxy skin. She was wearing a biscuit-coloured suede waistcoat with a shaggy trim over a grey lace top. Her eyes were icy blue. Con had never seen her before.

  ‘Erm,’ she started, handing him the envelope, ‘this has to go recorded. Will it get there by Friday?’

  Con took the package from her hand and examined it. It was addressed to someone in South London. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘should be OK.’

  ‘Excellent,’ she said. And then, miraculously, she smiled. Not one of the smiles that these well-brought-up girls usually served him with, not the practised coordination of facial muscles to force the mouth into an upturned crescent, but a proper burst of sunshine. ‘Thank you,’ she said, still smiling. ‘Sorry… what’s your name?’

  Con felt a flush of surprise rise from his midriff towards his temples. He hesitated for a second, not entirely sure of the answer to that question. ‘Connor,’ he said eventually. ‘Con.’

  ‘Con,’ she repeated, cocking her head slightly to one side. ‘I’m Daisy.’

  Daisy, he thought. Perfect. That’s what she looked like. A colourless, uncomplicated flower, tiny and well formed. ‘That’s nice,’ he said, feeling the heat of his embarrassment starting to fade.

  ‘Thank you,’ she smiled again. Her teeth were slightly crooked, but very white. ‘My sisters are called Mimosa and Camellia. I must have been a very plain baby.’

  Con laughed. He noticed a girl sitting at the desk nearest to him look up at the sound of his laughter. Her face registered a situation she didn’t quite comprehend. She looked away again.

  Daisy said, ‘It’s my first day today. I’m in charge of letters and things so you’ll probably find me bugging you about stuff.’

  Con shook his head. ‘That’s OK,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ she said. And then she went back to her desk.

  Con dropped the white Jiffy bag onto his trolley and pushed it towards the doors at the far end. As he passed Daisy’s desk she looked up at him and grinned. She mouthed the word ‘Bye’ and waved at him. He waved back, his heart leaping around in his chest like a wild salmon.

  As the door closed behind him and he found himself in the corridor outside, he breathed out and leaned against the wall. He tried to decipher what had just happened from the mixed messages his head and his heart were sending each other, but none of it made any sense. He had a curious feeling that something significant had just happened, that his life had reached a mini-roundabout, that suddenly he had options. And all because a beautiful girl called Daisy had smiled at him.

  He pulled himself upright at the sound of the lift pinging and wheeled his trolley quickly towards the features department.

  4

  It had snowed the night before, and Silversmith Road was gleaming with ice, so when Leah left her house on Thursday morning and saw Old Skinny Guy lying face-down on the pavement, his arms and legs spread out as if he were making angels in the snow, her immediate assumption was that he’d slipped and fallen.

  Leah saw Old Skinny Guy leave his house most mornings. He had a very set routine. At eight o’clock he started to leave the house. It took him approximately three minutes to make his way down the front steps, leaning heavily on a gnarled mahogany cane as he went. At the bottom of the steps he would stop for a while, his hand resting on the head of a plaster lion. He would then remove from the pocket of his grey tweed overcoat (worn through all four seasons) a voluminous white handkerchief and rub it vigorously back and forth across the end of his nose. No matter the weather or the time of year, the old man always had a streaming nose. He would then fold the enormous handkerchief back into a triangle, tuck it into his overcoat pocket and begin his ritual inspection of the pavement outside his house. Any stray sheets of newspaper or cigarette butts were dispatched into the gutter with a firm thwack of his walking stick, then he would be on his way.

  ‘Hello,’ she made her way tentatively across the slushy road. ‘Hello. Are you OK?’

  Old Skinny Guy failed to respond in any way. Leah leaned down and shouted into his ear. ‘Are you OK? Do you need any help?’ The man lay motionless and Leah began to suspect that there might be something seriously wrong. She picked up his hand and felt around the ribs and nodules of his wrist for a pulse. Something juddered beneath the tips of her fingers like a truck going over a speed bump. Leah couldn’t tell if it was the clunk of the old man’s blood or some kind of subcutaneous carbuncle. She let his hand drop and glanced at the front door of the old man’s house.

  She clambered up from her knees. ‘I’m going to get someone,’ she shouted. ‘I won’t be long.’

  She hurried towards the Peacock House and banged loudly against the front door. A figure appeared through the mottled stained glass of the front door and then he was there, in front of her, Young Skinny Guy, all sideburns and hair and enquiring, slightly panicky facial expressions.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Er, the old man,’ she began, ‘he’s there,’ she pointed behind her. ‘I think he might be dead.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He peered over his shoulder at the prone figure on the pavement. ‘Oh, shit. Let me… God. I need shoes.’ He glanced down at a pair of unfeasibly long and bony feet. ‘Hang on. Just a sec. Hold on.’ He turned to go, but then spun round again. ‘Have you called an ambulance?’

  ‘No.’ Leah shook her head.

  ‘Right. Maybe that’s the thing to do. I reckon. Right. Shoes. Back in a tick.’

  She was in the middle of trying to explain exactly what was wrong with the old man to a woman with a northern accent who’d answered the phone quickly enough to restore Leah’s faith in the emergency services, when Young Skinny Guy lolloped back down the hallway wearing a pair of gumboots. He followed her down the front steps and out onto the pavement. ‘He’s just sort of flat on his face,’ Leah said to the operator. ‘I’m not sure if he’s breathing or not.’ She glanced at the skinny guy who was crouched over the old man with his ear to his mouth. He shrugged.