I Found You Read Free Page B

called Alice, leaning across a small table to open a pair of navy-blue curtains. ‘It’s a bit musty. It’s been weeks since I had anyone in here.’
    He looks around. He’s in a small timber room with a Velux window in the roof and a glazed door which opens into Alice’s back garden. It’s furnished spartanly. There’s a camp bed on one side, a sink, a fridge, a Baby Belling, a plug-in heater, the table, two plastic chairs, grimy rush matting on the floor. But the timber walls are painted an elegant shade of green and hung with an assortment of very attractive artworks: flowers and faces and buildings seemingly made from tonal slivers of old maps, skilfully collaged together. And by the camp bed is a pretty beaded lamp. Theoverall effect is quite pleasant. But she’s right, it does smell: an unhappy blend of must and damp.
    ‘There’s an outdoor toilet next door. No one else uses it. And you can use our downstairs bathroom during the day; it’s just off the back porch. Come on. I’ll show you.’ Her tone is clipped and slightly scary.
    As he follows her across the gravelled back yard, he takes in the form of her. A tall woman, slim enough, if a bit heavy around the middle. She’s dressed in narrow-fitting black jeans and an oversized sweater, presumably to camouflage the heavy middle and accentuate the long legs. She’s wearing black boots, slightly in the style of DMs, but not quite. Her hair is a springy mass of caramel and honey and treacle and mud. Bad highlights, he thinks, and then wonders how he has an opinion on such things. Is he a hairdresser?
    The tiny door at the back of the house sticks as she attempts to open it and she gives it a well-practised kick at the base. Ahead and down three steps is a galley kitchen, to the left is a cheap plywood door leading into a rather sad bathroom.
    ‘We all use the one upstairs so you’ll pretty much have this one to yourself. Shall I put a bath on for you? Warm you up?’
    She turns screeching taps before he has answered either way. She pulls up the sleeves of her oversized jumper to stir the water and he notes her elbows. The wrinkled misshapen pockets of them. Forty,forty-five, he thinks to himself. She turns and smiles. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Let’s get you something to eat while that’s running. And get these things on the radiator.’ She takes the damp bits and pieces she found in his pockets from him and he follows her again, into the galley kitchen: walls painted magenta, pots hanging from racks overhead, handmade units in soft oak, a sink full of washing up and a corkboard pinned with children’s scribbles. There’s a teenage girl sitting at the tiny table wedged into the corner. She glances up at him and then looks questioningly at the woman.
    ‘This is Jasmine. My eldest. This’ – she gestures at him – ‘is a strange man I just picked up on the beach. He’s going to sleep in the studio tonight.’
    The girl called Jasmine raises a pierced eyebrow at her mother and throws him a withering look. ‘Excellent.’
    She looks nothing like her mother. She has dark hair hacked – deliberately, he assumes – into a brutal bob, the fringe too high up her forehead, but somehow framing well her square face, her full vermilion lips and heavy eyes. She looks exotic, like a Mexican actress whose name he cannot possibly recall.
    Alice throws open a red fridge and says things to him. ‘Ham sandwich? Bread and pâté? I could heat up some cauliflower cheese? Or there’s an old curry. From Saturday. Where are we now? Wednesday. I’m sure it’ll be OK. It’ll be OK, won’t it? That’s what curry was invented for, wasn’t it? To preserve meat?’
    He’s finding it hard to assimilate information. To make decisions. This, he suspects, is why he ended up sitting on the beach for more than twelve hours. He was aware that there were options. He just couldn’t put the options into any kind of order. Instead he’d sat stultified, inert. Until this