'Oh that's just '

'There.' Now she was indicating the blank stretch of wall beneath the window.

Spencer scanned the area and then looked at her, puzzled. 'I don't '

Her finger was lifting again, pointing over his shoulder. 'There!!'

He spun round and this time he saw it a flash of green, whipping past the corner of the doorframe.

He swallowed a proscribed word and hurried into the living room. The lizard had already disappeared again. The lid which had fallen and been hastily replaced by Nick seemed to cover the top of the tank completely, but when Spencer looked closely he saw a minute slit at one end, through which the narrow body must have eased itself. He took the lid off altogether and laid it on the floor, just in case the lizard possessed some kind of homing instinct.

'What you doing?' Nina was hovering by the open door of the kitchen.

'I'm looking for the lizard. The greeny thing. Can you see it anywhere?'

'No.'

'Keep looking.'

The room might have been designed for hiding lizards, the tall shelves of books with as many crevices as a dry-stone wall, the litter of papers and cushions providing enticing ground cover. Perhaps if he could approach it on a blank stretch of wall... he removed a couple of withered apples from the fruit bowl and picked it up in readiness. As he did so, a pale brown speck whizzed across his field of vision and then another, and he realized that a ma.s.s cricket escape was taking place from the open tank.

'There!' said Nina, pointing at the window. The lizard was hiding behind the pelmet, visible only as a vivid sliver.

'Well spotted, Hawkeye.'

'I'm Nina.'

As he approached the curtain it moved again, streaking up and across the ceiling and pausing by the light fitting, a good eighteen inches out of Spencer's reach.

'What's it called?' asked Nina.

'Lizzy,' said Spencer, off the top of his head. The escaped crickets had already started singing, now in quadrophenia.

'I want some juice,' said Nina.

'In a minute. I won't be a moment.' Slowly, carefully, he picked up one of the dining chairs and placed it under the light fitting. Fruit bowl in hand, he climbed onto it.

'What you doing?'

'I'm just...' Seen from so close the lizard was a piece of perfection, an emerald mosaic that breathed. It seemed completely unmoved by his giant proximity and he inched the bowl towards it.

'What you doing?'

'I'm trying to...' It suddenly occurred to him that trapping a lizard on the ceiling would be completely pointless unless he could seal off the mouth of the bowl. He paused to think and in that instant it was off again.

'What you doing?'

'I'm trying to catch Lizzy.'

It arrowed across the ceiling and changed direction at the wall, heading once again towards the kitchen.

'Nina...'

'What?'

The lizard flickered through the impossibly small gap between the door and the frame and into the uncluttered, manageable s.p.a.ce of the kitchen.

'Shut the door. Really shove it.'

She used the bear, holding it in front of her like a battering ram and applying all her three-year-old weight to the head end. The door started to swing shut, and as it did so the lizard appeared again. It had doubled back on itself, re-emerging through the same tiny gap that suddenly wasn't a gap at all but a slit too small for even the thinnest lizard to negotiate.

Half of Lizzy managed the journey; the other half stayed in the kitchen. Both fell to the ground with a tiny slither.

'Done it!' shouted Nina, triumphantly.

10.

Fran had never seen professional piano movers in action before. There were none of the heaving crashes of the average removal team, the random shouts, the furrows of paint gouged from doorways, the pock-marked walls left in their wake. Instead, all was order and calm. With the aid of one little trolley, the occasional 'left a bit' and a few gently articulated 'hups', the piano was down the stairs and into the lorry with not a sign of its pa.s.sage remaining. Slamming the tailgate shut, the two movers looked as unruffled as if they'd just lifted a cheese straw from one plate to another.

In contrast, Sylvie was sitting on the front steps of the house, one hand pressed to her chest, the other clutching a gla.s.s of water.

'You all right, love?' asked the older and more avuncular of the two movers, approaching her with a clipboard.

She nodded and gave him a tremulous smile. 'I love that piano so much. I know that you're experts but I could hardly bear to watch.' Her voice was breathy with anxiety.

'Don't you worry, little lady, we'll treat it like the Crown Jewels. Now I just need your signature.' He knelt solicitously beside her. Fran, returning from the hired van on her twelfth trip upstairs, had to turn sideways to squeeze by. The man glanced at her in pa.s.sing. 'Any chance of a cuppa?'

'Kettle's packed,' she snapped, disappearing into the gloom of the hall.

In the empty flat, Peter was taking down the lampshades.

'Is that it?' she asked.

'Just these and the cat.'

Mr Tibbs was asleep behind the mesh door of a wicker travelling basket, his orange bulk almost filling the interior. 'G.o.d, he's fat, isn't he?' said Fran, peering in.

'The vet thinks he may have a hormonal imbalance,' said Sylvie, apologetically, from the doorway.

'Oh right, sorry.' Fran straightened up, embarra.s.sed.

'You see, he was starving when I found him, and that might have affected his ability to break down fats. Also, he's half blind which means he can't run around much.'

'Oh.'

Sylvie came over and crouched by the cage. 'And I think he's a bit deaf. He's a sad old thing really, I know, but I do love him.' She extended a finger through the mesh and gently stroked one of his paws. 'He sort of chose me. He arrived on my doorstep in the middle of a rainstorm and never left.'

'Like the princess and the pea,' said Fran fatuously.

Sylvie's face lit up. 'Oh I loved that story. Did you ever try it?'

'Try what?'

'Putting a pea under your mattress to see if you were a real princess?'

'I don't think so,' said Fran.

'Fran spent most of her childhood up a tree,' said Peter, carefully sealing the top of a cardboard box with sellotape.

'Really?' Sylvie stayed kneeling, gazing up at him like a supplicant.

'Yes, a two-hundred-foot horse chestnut at the end of our road.'

'It was a sweet chestnut,' said Fran.

'So what did you do up there?' asked Sylvie.

'Just hung around, really.' She had loved the whoosh of the wind through the leaves and the heaving green canopy that had concealed her from view, but the best bit had been the climb up, and the knowledge that only the fearless and the brave were capable of joining her. 'Ate sweets.'

'Shouted rude things at people pa.s.sing underneath,' added Peter.

'Did I?'

'Well you shouted rude things at me.'

'What did she shout?' asked Sylvie.

'Yes, what did I shout?'

Peter hesitated for a moment. 'You used to say I was boring.'

'You're not boring,' said Sylvie. Peter had flushed slightly.

'That's not what I call rude,' said Fran.

'Hurtful, then,' he amended. 'It was hurtful.'

She looked at him in bafflement. 'I must have been about nine. I'm not going to take responsibility for something I shouted fifteen years ago.'

'All right.' He hefted the box of lampshades and carried it out into the pa.s.sage.

'I mean, if I had to apologize for all the things I did when I was nine...'

She could hear his feet starting down the stairs. 'I think we're ready to go, Mr Tibbs,' said Sylvie, whispering into the basket.

Fran raised her voice. 'Calling you boring would pale into insignificance beside breaking the wing mirror off the neighbour's car.'

'Oh that was you, was it?' His voice boomed in the empty stairwell.

'It was a dare.'

'Uh huh.'

Sylvie got to her feet. 'Fran, could I ask you to carry Mr Tibbs? He's a little bit heavy for me.'

'Sure,' said Fran. It was like lifting a bowling ball. She was halfway down the stairs before she realized there was no one following her.

'Sylvie?' There was no reply, but she could just distinguish a soft murmur floating down the stairwell, like one side of a conversation. She retraced her steps and cautiously re-entered the flat. The living room was empty.

'Sylvie?'

'Just a minute.' Her voice came from the bedroom. After a pause during which the cat sneezed, apparently in its sleep, Sylvie reappeared with a beatific expression. 'I only have one more room to do,' she said, and disappeared into the tiny kitchen, leaving the door open. Fran crept nearer, straining her ears to filter the flow of soft speech that ensued. Sylvie seemed to be thanking someone.

'...the day I looked out and saw a rainbow over the roofs. And for the smell of fresh basil.' There was a pause, and then she emerged, smiling. 'All done.'

'What's all done?'

'Oh...' she shrugged. 'It's just something I do when I move house.'

'What's that then?'

Sylvie looked at her, bashfully. 'I'm sure you'll think it's silly, Fran.'

'No, go on, I won't.' She had to know now.

'Well...' Sylvie hesitated, and then explained in a rush. 'I thank every room in the house for a happy memory. I read about it once and it seemed such a lovely idea. Sometimes it's for something that actually happened in the room, and sometimes it's just because you had a wonderful thought when you were standing in there. I thanked the living room because it was on the living-room extension that Peter first phoned me.' She looked at Fran as if to gauge her expression. 'Do you think that's silly?'

'No,' said Fran, sounding unconvincing even to her own ears.

'It's like a blessing. I wonder if it will feel different now, for the next person?'

'Dunno,' said Fran, wondering with a sort of reflex flippancy what Sylvie had thanked the bog for. She roused herself. 'I think we'd better get going, you know, otherwise the piano's going to get there first.'

Sylvie laughed a breathy, tinkling sound. 'Oh Fran. You're so practical and I'm so ' she fluttered her hands in ill.u.s.tration. 'I'm glad, though. I'm glad there are people like you to keep my feet on the ground.'

Lugging Mr Tibbs down the stairs, Fran brooded over this last remark. What she found tiresome was the a.s.sumption that flights of fancy, however nauseating, were automatically more commendable than simply getting on with things than shouldering the workload that enabled the Sylvies of the world to have something to get fanciful about; it was the resentment of the serf through the ages, ordered to prune the fairy bower at the dead of night so that no human agency would seem responsible.

It took them over an hour to drive the two miles to the new flat. A car-boot sale just off Green Lanes had jammed the flow of traffic completely, and for nearly twenty minutes they sat unmoving beside a fruit stall, listening to 'pahnd a pahnd, pahnd a pahnd, ripe and lovely, pahnd a pahnd' until the chant merged into the background noise and became indistinguishable. Fran sat with the A to Z open on her knee and listened to Sylvie telling Peter about the imaginary big brother of her childhood. He listened with apparent concentration, watching her face throughout, but it seemed to Fran that Sylvie could have been reciting the fatstock prices and still have received the same degree of attention. She had never seen him so intent, so absorbed in one person, but then she had never really had the chance to observe him during one of his relationships. She had still been at university when he became engaged to the Welsh lesbian, and had only caught up with him during the aftermath, when his sad, moon face had reflected only the misery of rejection. She didn't know what this raptness signified: pa.s.sing l.u.s.t or a more permanent and serious condition.

'What I most liked to pretend,' said Sylvie, 'was that he was my twin and he looked just like me.'