The 200-year-old house on the London street in Chelsea had become a house of women. That was not to say there were no men in the house. The stairs often creaked with heavy footprints as someone left stealthily in the early hours.
On the top floor was a young secretary who stole stationery from her work, bringing home carrier bags of it. ‘Nobody notices,’ she said offering an expensive folder for storing certificates to the woman on the third floor. It was a nice book with a leather cover and so the other took it. The secretary also had new thick piled carpet installed in her flat. By the time the bill arrived, she had moved on, to no known address.
Two sisters replaced her on the fourth floor, tall girls with long carefully straightened hair. One had a boyfriend in a well-known band but was never seen. The sisters always went out together and their stiletto shoes clattered on the stairs. A floral perfume mixed with something muskier permeated after they had left the house.
The old woman in the basement flat kept an eye on the comings and goings in the house. Her flat had the only access to the sunny garden at the rear of the house but she never invited any one to use it. The third-floor woman resented this.
The old woman told the third-floor woman the tenant on the ground floor was a prostitute. A small furtive looking man was sometimes seen going in and out of the flat. A drug dealer from Turkey, she said.
The Turkish man once brought two big dogs the size of small horses and left them in a car outside. He loitered in the hallway, scaring the third-floor woman as she came into the house. An acrid smell of smoke and men’s heavy cologne wafted from him. He wore a number of gold rings on his fingers. He watched her as she headed up the stairs.
The third-floor woman had an envelope with a cheque book stolen from the mail table in the shared entrance. The thief wrote cheques to a total of 115 pounds before the woman realised it was gone. After she informed the other residents, the ground-floor tenant invited her for a visit and gave her a gold signet ring which she said was too small for her fingers. It was a ridiculously small ring.
The second-floor woman was an air hostess in her forties who worked in the Business Class lounge of one of the airlines. She confided to the third-floor woman that she’d met the husband of one of her old school friends when he began to use the lounge. He would change his flights so he could stay over with her in the house, leaving early in the morning to fly back to Paris. Now she was pregnant. She had asked another regular lounge user, a bishop, if he could baptise the baby for her at the cathedral.
After she had the baby, the local priest visited. He was a nice-looking man, the third-floor woman thought and she pointed him out to the old woman. The old woman informed the air hostess the other woman had said the priest only visited because he felt sorry for her. He’d know she wasn’t a regular church goer. The air hostess and the third-floor woman fell out over this. It became quiet in the house, except for the nightly cries of the baby.
Months later, the old woman died. The church-going neighbours came in to clean. Nine feral cats in the flat had to be put down and hearing this the third-floor woman no longer wanted the basement flat. She now coveted the second-floor one which had a tiny balcony that looked onto the street and a leafy tree. She wished the air hostess would leave, taking her noisy child with her.
One night the ground-floor woman was attacked in the street outside the house and found motionless by the two sisters on their way home from a club. The third-floor woman had her suspicions about the Turkish man, she told the police, but as she didn’t know his name or address, it wasn’t much help. She didn’t know what kind of car he drove. She thought the dogs the size of little horses might be a clue, but London was a huge city, its inhabitants spread far and wide. The attacked woman was in a coma for weeks and didn’t recall anything. After that, whenever the stairs creaked, the third-floor woman worried it was him. She moved out without leaving her new address.
The tenants left and new ones moved in. The years went by. The house felt a great shuddering of its bones. Regentrification had come to the street. Husky builders from Poland stripped walls and removed doors and gutted all the tiny kitchens and bathrooms in the house, throwing everything into a succession of at least 13 rubbish skips. A For Sale sign went up in the street and then a Sold sign.
On a trip to London from a remote farm in the Scottish highlands, the third-floor woman paid a visit to her old street. All the different buttons for the bells for each floor had gone. The house had been re-painted white, the door a shiny black. She crossed the street and turned to see a man come out, open the boot of a big black car, and remove a package. She stood on the opposite footpath. He caught her watching and frowned.
‘I used to live here once,’ she called out in explanation.
She thought about telling him about the old woman with the nine urine-smelling cats living freely in what would now be the stainless-steel family kitchen. She wondered what the back garden looked like. She would have liked to have finally walked in it. The man shrugged and walked back up the steps of the house. He shut the door. It remained closed.
Kate Mahony’s short fiction has been published in among others, Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand, Mayhem, Flash Frontier, The Blue Nib, Blink Ink, Blackmail Press, Meniscus, Peacock Journal, and The Cabinet of Heed. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University, Wellington.
999 words.