Eliza
I rose from the Underground, emerging into the twilight of the high street. It was Friday night and I had been to the ballet with Beatrice and our friend Katherine. My mind was still on poor doomed Giselle, who loved not wisely but too well and ended up a woodland spirit for her troubles. I had wept, as I always did, right through the bit where, turned mad by her lover’s betrayal, she danced herself to death in front of him and I had wept anew when that feckless lover pirouetted before the avenging Queen of the Willies, begging forgiveness, clutching his own breaking heart. As I rode home on the Tube, the music filling my head, I rewrote the ending, changing it to one where Giselle is released from the spell and lives happily ever after with her remorseful prince. It didn’t matter how many times I saw Giselle; I still always hoped that was how it would turn out. It was the same with Romeo and Juliet. Each and every time I sat there hoping, praying that the Friar’s messenger would reach Romeo in time. I never could figure out how that worked: what spell a story cast to make us think that each time it played out was the first, and that there might, after all, be a different, happier ending.
I stepped out on to the corner of the high street and turned left without looking, so I didn’t notice the long jeans-clad legs stretched out on the pavement until I stumbled over them. I steadied myself and looked down. The legs belonged to a teenage girl slumped across the doorway of an art gallery, a grubby rucksack and a can of Red Bull next to her. I muttered an apology, stepping round. She didn’t reply and I was about to walk on when it struck me she might not be stoned or drunk, but unwell, in need of medical attention. I might walk on by only to wake in the morning to the news, no doubt delivered by Archie, that a young woman had been found dead in the comfortable heart of the Village. There would be the comments by the police, made more in sorrow than in anger, that it appeared that the poor young girl had been lying there dead, or at the very least dying, and no one did anything to help. In fact one person, a woman, early middle age, grey dress, brownish reddish hair, actually stepped right over her yet did not bother to check if the girl needed assistance . . .
So what could I do but kneel down by the slumped figure and put my hand, lightly, on the sleeve of her arm. The girl gave me a hazy look under half-closed eyelids. I asked her if she was all right. Which was a pretty stupid question when directed to someone slumped in a doorway in the middle of the night. ‘I mean, do you need help? Are you sick?’
The girl didn’t reply.
‘Are you hurt? Shall I call an ambulance?’
The girl’s eyes snapped wide open. ‘No. I’m fine.’
I wanted to walk away. But she didn’t look fine. She didn’t smell fine either.
‘I’ll call an ambulance,’ I said. I was about to get back on to my feet when my wrist was grabbed by a grubby hand. ‘I said no. If you do I’ll only walk away.’ All at once she was crying. ‘I’m all right,’ she said again, in between sobs.
‘I can help you to get home?’
‘No. I had a fight with my boyfriend. He threw me out.’
‘Have you nowhere else to go? What about your parents? How old are you?’
The expression in her eyes as she looked back at me said I was just as clueless as she had expected me to be. ‘Seventeen. And that was my home.’
‘Oh.’ I shifted my weight from one knee to the other. ‘What about your parents?’ I asked again. ‘Are they not around?’
‘Ha,’ she said. ‘Ha’, and nothing more.
‘How about a hostel? We can call the police and ask them where the nearest hostel is?’
‘Just go away, will you. Leave me alone. Go home.’ The word ‘home’ sounded like a reproach. As well it might. I had a home. She didn’t. I didn’t deserve mine. I expect she didn’t deserve not to have one. I got to my feet and then I reached down and took her by the wrist. ‘Come on. You can stay the night with me and then we’ll see what to do in the morning.’
I regretted it the moment I had said it. But it was too late to take it back. The girl was looking at me now, and she was actually smiling. The smile made her look about twelve. ‘You mean that?’
I nodded. ‘Absolutely. I live just around the corner.’ I had to force the words from my mouth because by now all I wanted to do was run off. I mean, what was I thinking of, asking a stranger into my home at night?
‘Nice place,’ the girl said. She had dropped the rucksack on the hall floor and was looking around her.
‘I’m very lucky. It’s a bit of a mess still, though. The builders have only just finished.’ I switched the light on and smiled at her. ‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘Chloe,’ the girl said.
‘I’m Eliza. Would you like something to eat?’
I scrambled some eggs as Chloe slumped on the kitchen chair. It felt quite normal; the kind of thing people did, scrambling eggs for a monosyllabic teenager in the middle of the night. In fact it felt great. I thought of the J.B. Priestley play, An Inspector Calls. I thought about no man being an island. I thought of the Big Society. The more I thought, as I scrambled the eggs, the more pleased I felt.
‘What do you do?’ Chloe asked me as I put the eggs and toast in front of her.
I joined her at the table. ‘I’m a ceramic restorer.’
‘Right. What about your husband?’
‘I’m not married.’
Chloe looked around her, chewing on her food. ‘Right,’ she said again. ‘Boyfriend?’
I knew the answer should be ‘that’s personal’ but it would sound rude. I just shook my head.
‘So you live here alone.’
What was I doing telling her these things? I shouldn’t have said anything. I most certainly shouldn’t have told her I lived alone. I wondered if it were too late to invent a housemate. A man. A man who played rugby. Or practised karate. I could slip it in. I could look at my watch and say, ‘Steve should be home from karate any minute now. I’m so proud of him now he’s a black belt.’ Chloe interrupted my thoughts. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’
I got to my feet. ‘Of course. Sorry. What would you like?’
‘Orange juice or milk or something like that?’
I hurried across to the fridge, feeling shabby and cross with myself. I was being prejudiced, judgemental, instantly assuming that this poor girl was up to no good just because she was on the streets. I was being the kind of person who was lampooned in television satire and possibly even beheaded come the revolution. ‘Here you are.’ I smiled as I handed her a large glass of orange juice.
‘Thanks,’ she smiled back and her pale drawn features lifted, making her almost pretty. Her gaze was clearer too. If she had been stoned, she was coming down. ‘You’re pretty amazing, asking me in like this?’
I felt ridiculously pleased. ‘Oh, I’m only doing what anyone would have done.’
‘I’ve been on the streets before. This is the first time anyone’s bothered.’
‘Really. That’s too bad.’ I was beginning to warm to this helping business. ‘Well, if one’s lucky enough to have a lovely home,’ I gesticulated round the kitchen. I was pleased with how it had turned out. The walls were the colour of crème anglaise (not custard, as I had explained to Uncle Ian, custard being too yellow, but the soft sunshine-on-cream colour of its French cousin) and the wooden kitchen units painted in two shades of fresh green that might have clashed as one contained yellow pigment and the other blue, but somehow didn’t.
‘It’s really pretty. Colourful,’ Chloe said.
This was cosy, the two of us at the kitchen table talking interior decor.
I lent Chloe a pair of pyjamas and made sure she had a glass of water by her bedside. Once I was in bed myself I lay staring at the birds flying free across the tattered yellow wallpaper of my room and I felt happy. Who knows what might have happened to that girl out there on the streets, if it hadn’t been for me.
A little later I got out of bed and walked up to the door, turning the key in the lock. Just in case. After a few minutes I got up once more and unlocked it.