The Upstairs Room by Kate Murray-Browne

Author:Kate Murray-Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

8

Usually, Zoe tried not to think about it. It was three years ago now, that night, and she could almost forget about it, until something sharp and wretched stirred in her stomach and she’d know it was still there. Now, cycling home from seeing Adam, thinking about what he’d asked her, she could feel it becoming dislodged again.

She had been afraid. That was really the only reason. It was her last night in London Fields with Laura; she was moving in with Rob the next day. She sat on her bed surrounded by boxes, the cardboard pale and soft with age. Two scratchy check laundry bags from the pound shop were bulging with clothes. She was holding a collection of things she’d found under the bed – socks, books, underwear – covered in a pale grey fur so thick that it had developed a structure of its own. She pulled it off.

The bedroom was pretty much done. She had to do the living room and kitchen next, but Laura was there. She’d never said she didn’t want Zoe to move out, but she’d become quiet and distant when Zoe started talking about it. She was hostile to Rob when he came round. It broke Zoe’s heart but also irritated her, which stopped her running into the living room and telling Laura that she didn’t want to go. It was too late now, anyway.

She was afraid of moving and moving because she was afraid. She’d loved their flat more than she thought possible. She could see its flaws – the dingy carpet, the soft plastic leather sofa, the scratched perspex-topped kitchen table, the intolerably ugly kitchen chairs. You could see into the flat below through the floorboards in the bathroom, and in the living room there was a hole in the ceiling that workmen had knocked in the week they moved, exposing the innards of the partition. Presumably whatever they’d found was bad news, too bad to deal with, because it was just abandoned, and the landlord never answered their calls.

But she was proud of the flat and every small thing they’d done to improve it – Laura had made curtains and put them up, Zoe had bought an off-cut from a haberdashery shop that they used as a tablecloth. They ignored the hole in the ceiling and put a throw over the leather sofa; it kept sliding off and they kept pulling it back into place. They’d moved in in summer when London Fields was dense with people every day, the air filled with barbecue smoke and chatter. They went to Shoreditch together to get fringes cut, and bought vintage dresses from Broadway Market that never quite fitted properly. They bought oven cleaner from the pound shop and cheese from the farmers’ market. They drank pints in the Dove and sat at the side of the lido in bikinis.

But it was temporary; they knew this from the beginning. The corner shop started selling expensive chocolate and taxis began to appear, sleek and incongruous, on Kingsland Road.

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