Publshed 'Footsteps' 1995

Simonetta had been away too long.  She had decided to have the first ever holiday on her own: and to go the whole hog with two months, this time outside her English homeland.  To call it a Grand Tour would have been stretching it too far, but many high spots of Old Europe had been on her itinerary, those resplendent representatives of history's old disguise where Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires were living memories.  Not that she gave herself any time for meticulously planning her sudden return to England: resulting in suitcases full of dirty underwear, unmemorable keepsake knickknacks and diverse books, all being hastily thrust into a taxicab at Heathrow airport.  She actually relished returning to her house in Hampstead, despite the eventual necessity of getting some teeth back into earning a living. 

                It looked at first as if things hadn't changed, upon the taxi arriving outside the familiar railings.  In fact, the doorknocker seemed just as sparkling as she'd left it: which was perhaps more surprising than she realised.  The road appeared narrower, but she assumed that was as a result of her recent charcoal-sketching of wide avenues and esplanades amid the artistic environs now another wider European world away.  The people in the street with whom, only two months ago, she may well have been on at least nodding terms, were strangely scruffy, their faces swarthy and hair showing signs of being greased down, eyes piercing as they witnessed Simonetta's undignified scramble from the black cab.

                "Oi, Miss, don't furgit yer luggidge!" called the peak-capped driver as Simonetta hustled up her front steps to unlock what she hoped was the front entrance.  She had expected the driver to get out and carry the luggage up to the door.  If he expects a tip, he'd better shake a leg, Simonetta vowed to himself.  The lock was well oiled and easily stirred, but the door was unseasonably stiff, the wood swollen in the frame, or the frame shrunk, or a combination of the two.  She put a shoulder to it, causing her to unbalance into the hall, dropping the large painting she'd purchased in Florence.

                "Oi, Miss, don't trip over yer own foot!" 

                The weaselly driver laughed, if sneering could be called laughter, as he arrived at the top of the steps, lugging baggage in one hand and holding out the other like a plate of meat.

                Simonetta hastily regained her composure and sunk a foreign coin of high denomination into the pit of the driver's grimy palm, who put his nose to it, as if he eschewed testing it with his gappy teeth. 

                "Oi, Miss, I can't spend this 'ere funny munny in the Dog 'n' Drake."

                "I'm afraid that's all I've got till I change it in the morning."

                "And I'm afraid, too, Miss.  I'm afraid I'll 'ave ter take yer all the way back to Heathrow airport where yer started off with me, unless yer give me proper goose for the gander."

                Simonetta cringed.  The gratuity had suddenly assumed a necessary purpose: an importance that her latterly foreign-steeped mind couldn't conceptualise.  She wondered about going next door, where old Mr Phipps lived.  He'd lend Simonetta a few shillings, no doubt.  Not that she owed the taxi-man anything beyond his fare which she had settled with her remaining pukka English currency.  It was simply that Simonetta felt more vulnerable in England than she did abroad, for some unaccountable reason. 

                "Hold on, while I arrange something," she said, finger in the air, thinking she conducted somebody else's argument.

                Mr Phipps must have changed his curtains - and repainted his door.  Two months was an unconscionably long period to have been away.  Even the echoing sound of the knocker upon the heel was more reverberant, as if the house was a louder sound-box or as if fabrics and furniture were depleted or perhaps both.  Probably neither.  Not shrunk nor swollen.

                "Mr Phipps! Mr Phipps! Are you there?"

                Simonetta called through the letter-box, using it like an extension of her mouth.  She expected to hear the soft pad of Mr Phipps' shambling slippers as they took their customary shine along the parquet in the hall.  But no such welcome sounds.  She shrugged and returned to the taxi-man, who was stepping from foot to foot on the spot in an attempt to give the appearance of wasting time.

                "I'm afraid you will have to take that coin today and come back tomorrow if you need it changed.  I can assure you it's probably worth far more than what I would've have given you, given half the chance, and, after all, there is no law to say I need to give you anything more..."

                The man looked askance, as if to say even the long tradition of English law had been altered by an Act of Parliament, since Simonetta went away.  Real politicians were on Summer recess, so anything could've been passed.

                "I hope you don't consider me mercenary," said the man in a suddenly posher accent, "but I can see you are a generous lady who would sooner treat than trick me..."

                "Well, whatever, please be reasonable."

                "Me, young lady?  I'm the most reasonable man you're ever likely to meet.  Reasonability, that's my watchword."

                "In that case, can we call it a day?"

                The driver looked up at the darkening sky:  "More like the night, much more like the night, I should say."

                Simonetta did not appreciate the humour, but decided not to antagonise him further.  She pulled the luggage into the hall and slammed the door behind him.  She stood for a few minutes in the dimness at the foot of the steep stairs.  Leaning steeper than ever.  Eventually, she heard the door of the black cab slam and drive off.  Hopefully with the driver in it, she mused to herself.

                The stairs certainly seemed steeper than she remembered them, with tall treads.  She managed to drag the first item of soft baggage towards  her bedroom at the back of the house.  Uncharacteristically, she had forgotten to switch on the light at the bottom of the stairs before grappling with the ascent.  Come on, Simonetta, get a grip!  She gritted her teeth and, after much fuss and bother, she arrived on the landing.  She'd have a quick bath and change into...  Into what?  Damn! All her clothes were almost stiff with European dirt - except, of course, for the oddments left behind in her bedroom tallboy.  She couldn't think properly.  The taxi-man upset her in retrospect more than he had at the time.

                The landing was even darker than the hallway.  She had always considered it preferable to keep all connecting doors firmly shut, whilst on holiday, in case of a fire.  That would account for the darkness.  Still, she had very thick navy-blue velvet curtains up in the bedroom (owing to the light early mornings before her departure to Europe), and she could not recall whether these had been left undrawn.  She emptied her luggage - tangled windings of dirty underwear and other unrecognisable smalls.  She stood for a few seconds, regaining her breath (or what she hoped was her breath) and, as she did so, she heard a vehicle drawing up outside.  Surely, it wasn't that stuffy taxi-driver returned for his damned money.  But, no, it soon drove off again, without any sound of car doors.  Leaving the scattered clothes where they were.  Not bothering with the top light-switch, Simonetta felt her way to the bedroom door...

                ...which was no longer made of the erstwhile wood, but curtain-strings of black beads that gave an inaudible, if rattly, hiss as she passed through.  In the room itself, the air bore more of a yellowy tinge than the usual black or cloying grey of London darkness.  A group of hooded figures squatted where her bed used to be, sucking on long pipes that seemed to be giving off most of the darkness.  They exchanged pipes.  One crooked a finger, as if beckoning Simonetta to join them.  She simply stood and stared open-mouthed, no longer surprised at the huge amount of her surprise - not even daring to breathe, beyond a fitful respiration that her lungs forced on themselves.  She closed her eyes, momentarily, and, on opening them...

                ...she was relieved to see that the bedroom of her dark flat, as she recalled it, had returned, the print curtains hanging at the open window, in that red lacy material she'd always liked as a free filter of the sun.  Indeed, a low sun across Hampstead Heath threatened to dip below the horizon, leaving the sky streaked with a display more fitting for some of the gorgeous places she'd just visited abroad.

                She smiled.  Must have been the strain.  Travel was an hallucinant.  Made young women like Simonetta see some things more clearly, others less so.  Plumping down on the bed, she stared up at the ceiling, one which she stippled upon originally moveing in.  It was covered in cracks and an archipelago of foxing - more such blots and blemishes than she could recall.  But, two months was a long time.

                Still feeling caked in foreign filth, she gradually dozed off, in an attempt to catch up on what she considered to be her beauty sleep or, rather, English sleep.  She thought she heard undergrunting from next door.  Mr Phipps must have company.  Strange, Mr Phipps never had people in before.  She yawned.  They may not be people.  She laughed at the illogicality of her dozing mind and snored in unison with the laughter. 

                She stirred fitfully when a vehicle drew up outside, as if it were trying to keep its engine quiet, its wheels on tip-toes.  But then a door slammed.