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balconies all the way around. The garden around it was dried up and scraggly. The paths were overgrown with weeds, and most of the yuccas looked sick. The roof over the front porch was heaped with dead, desiccated vines, and there was a strong smell of broken drains.
    He rang the doorbell. It was shrill, demanding, and distant, like a woman shrieking in the next street. Martin shuffled his Nike trainers and waited for somebody to answer. ‘
All those times you shook in your shoes
,’ he sang softly. ‘
You were – Whistlin’ Dixie!
’
    The front door opened. Out onto the porch came a small sixtyish woman with a huge white bouffant hairstyle and a yellow cotton mini-dress. She wore two sets of false eyelashes, one of them coming wildly adrift at the corner of her eye, and pale tangerine lipstick. She looked as though she hadn’t changed her clothes or her makeup since the day
Sergeant Pepper
had been released.
    Martin was so startled that he didn’t quite know what to say. The woman stared at him, her left eye wincing, and eventually said, ‘Ye-e-es? Are you selling something?’
    ‘I, uh –’
    ‘I don’t see anything,’ the woman remarked, peering around the porch. ‘No brushes, no encyclopaedias, no Bibles. Do you want to clean my car, is that it?’
    ‘Actually, I came about the furniture,’ said Martin. ‘You’re Mrs Harper, right? Ramone Perez called me from The Reel Thing. He’s kind of a friend of mine. He knows that I’m interested in Boofuls.’
    Mrs Harper stared at Martin and then sniffed, pinching in one nostril. ‘Is tha-a-at right? Well, if you’re interested in Boofuls, you seem to be just about the only person in the whole of Hollywood who
is
. I’ve taken my furniture to every auction house and movie memorabilia store that I can
find
, and the story’s always the same.’
    ‘Yes?’ said Martin, wanting to know what it was – this story that was always the same.
    ‘Well,’ pouted Mrs Harper, ‘it’s
macabre
, that’s what they say. I mean, there’s a market in motion picture properties. The very coffin that Bela Lugosi lay in when he first played Count Dracula. The very bolt that went through Boris Karloff’s neck. But nobody will
touch
poor little Boofuls’ furniture.’
    Martin waited for a moment, but Mrs Harper obviously wasn’t going to volunteer anything more. ‘I was wondering – maybe I could come in and take a look at it.’
    ‘With a view to purchase?’ Mrs Harper asked him sharply; then fluttered her left eye; then squeezed it shut and said, ‘Darn these lashes! They’re a new brand. I don’t know what you’re supposed to keep them on with. Krazy Glue, if you ask me. They will …
curl up
. I’ve seen centipedes behave themselves better, and live ones at that.’
    She led Martin into the hallway. The interior of the house was sour-smelling and gloomy, but it had once been decorated in the very latest fab 1960s style. The floor was covered with white shag carpet throughout, matted like the pelt of an aging Yeti. The drapes were patterned in psychedelic striations of orange and lime and purple, and white leather chairs with black legs and gold feet were arranged around the room at diagonal angles. There was even a white stereo autochange record player, which reminded Martin so strongly of the Beatles and the Beach Boys and his high school dances that he felt for one unnerving moment as if he were sixteen years old.
    ‘I’m a widow,’ said Mrs Harper, as if she felt a need to explain why the interior of her house was a living museum of twenty-year-old contemporary design. ‘Arnold died in 1971, and, well – it all just
reminds
me.’
    Martin nodded, to show that he understood. Mrs Harper said, ‘
He
didn’t like the Boofuls furniture, either. I mean he actually hated it. But his father had bought it, just before the war. His father was setting up house, you see, and he went to an auction and bought it – well, because it was so
cheap
. It was only