44 Scotland Street

“You must be pleased about that,” said her father. “Working in a gallery. Isn’t that what most of you people want to do?”

“Not in particular,” said Pat, somewhat irritated. Her father used the expression you people indiscriminately to encompass Pat, her age group, and her circle of friends. Some people wanted to work in a gallery, and perhaps there were a lot of those, but it was hardly a universal desire. There were presumably some people who wanted to work in bars, to work with beer, so to speak; and there were people, plenty of people, who would find themselves quite uncomfortable in a gallery. Bruce, for instance, with his rugby shirt and his en brosse haircut. He was not gallery material.

That had been another interview altogether. She had seen the discreet, hand-written notice in the window of the gallery a few streets away. A bit of help wanted. Reception. Answering the phone

– that sort of thing. The wording had been diffident, as if it was almost indecent to suggest that anybody who read it might actually be looking for something to do. But when she had gone in and found the tall, slightly lost-looking young man sitting at his desk – the wording had seemed perfect.

“It’s not much of a job,” he had said. “You won’t have to sell any paintings, I expect. You’ll just be providing cover for me.

And you’ll have to do the occasional other thing. This and that.

You know.”

She did not know, but did not ask. It looked as if he might have found it tedious to give the details of the job. And he certainly asked her nothing about herself, not even her name, before he sat back in his chair, folded his arms, and said: “The job’s yours if you want it. Want it?”

2. A Room with a Smell

Bruce had shown Pat the vacant room in the flat and this had brought home to him what a complete slut Anna had been. He had asked her to clean the room before she left – he had asked her at least twice – and she had assured him, twice, that it would be done. But he should have known that she did not mean it, and now, looking at the room with a visitor’s eyes, he saw what she had done. The middle of the carpet had been vacuumed, and looked clean enough, but everywhere else looked dirty and neglected. The bed, pulled halfway away from the wall, had large balls of dust under it, as well as a collapsed stack of magazines.

A glass of water, with lipstick stains on the rim, had been left on the bedside table. She had moved out a week ago and he should have checked, but he had always hated going into the room while she was there and her presence somehow lingered. So he had left the door closed and tried to forget that she had ever lived there.

Pat stood still for a moment. There was a musty odour to the room; a smell of unwashed sheets and clothes.

“It’s got a great view,” said Bruce, striding across to draw the curtains, which had been left half-closed. “Look,” he said. “That’s the back of that street over there and that’s the green. Look at the pigeons.”

“It’s big enough,” said Pat, uncertainly.

“It’s not just big, it’s huge,” said Bruce. “Huge.”

Pat moved over towards the wardrobe, a rickety old oak wardrobe with half-hearted art nouveau designs carved up each side. She reached out to open it. Bruce drew his breath. That slut Anna, that slut, had probably left the cupboard full of her dirty washing. That was just the sort of thing she would do; like a child, really, leaving clothes on the floor for the adults to pick up.

“That’s a wardrobe,” he said, hoping that she would not try to open it. “I’ll clean it out for you. It might have some of her stuff still in it.”

Pat hesitated. Was the smell any stronger near the wardrobe?

She was unsure.

“She didn’t keep the place very clean, did she?” she said.

A Room with a Smell

7

Bruce laughed. “You’re right. She was a real slut, that girl. We were all pleased when she decided to go over to Glasgow. I encouraged her. I said that the job she had been offered sounded just fine. A real opportunity.”

“And was it?”

Bruce shrugged. “She fancied herself getting into television journalism. She had been offered a job making tea for some producer over there. Great job. Great tea possibilities.”

Pat moved towards the desk. One of the drawers was half-open and she could see papers inside.

“It almost looks as if she’s planning to come back,” she said.

“Maybe she hasn’t moved out altogether.”

Bruce glanced at the drawer. He would throw all this out as soon as Pat went. And he would stop forwarding her mail too.

“If there’s any danger of her coming back,” he said, smiling,

“we’ll change the locks.”

Later, when Pat had left, he went back to the room and opened the window. Then he crossed the room to the wardrobe and looked inside. The right-hand side was empty, but on the left, in the hanging section, there was a large plastic bag, stuffed full of clothes. This was the source of the musty odour, and, handling it gingerly, he took it out. Underneath the bag was a pair of abandoned shoes, the soles curling off. He picked these up, looked at them with disgust, and dropped them into the open mouth of the plastic bag.

He moved over to the desk. The top drawer looked as if it had been cleared out, apart from a few paper clips and a chipped plastic ruler. The drawer beneath that, half-open, had papers in it. He picked up the paper on the top