Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House

I turn right down Nightingale Lane and ask Chloë how she got over it, the fear of the shower. Does she remember?

‘I suppose I just realized it wasn’t very rational,’ she says, inspecting a scab on her knee.

Doreen Webley is a couple of years younger than me, gentle, quiet, neatly dressed in white shirt and long denim skirt. She comes through the hall and says she doesn’t remember it being so narrow. I apologize for all the boxes piled by the door.

‘It might be that or it might just be that I’ve got that bit wider,’ she laughs.

We sit and drink tea at the kitchen table. She talks quietly, haltingly, but she offers information without my having to ask questions. I’m impressed by her directness. In the end I put my pencil down and just listen.

‘I came in the summer of seventy-eight. I was sixteen. I didn’t know my Mum at all – she’d left me in Jamaica when I was two and I hadn’t seen her since. I’d been pushed from relation to relation over there, but the aunt I was living with got fed up with me and decided it was time my Mum had me back. So I was sent over here. I’d been in the middle of O levels in Jamaica so I had to try and find somewhere to carry on. My Mum couldn’t get me into school anywhere so I enrolled at Vauxhall College and managed to get a few passes.’

I ask her what her Mum was like to live with and she gazes down at her tea. ‘To be honest, we didn’t have a very good relationship. I think she resented me being here.’

‘And your Dad?’

‘He lived nearby. But I didn’t meet him at all till I was eighteen. He was OK, his house was a bit more relaxed. I went round there a bit but my Mum got jealous if I went too much.’

‘But she didn’t really want you here?’

Doreen shakes her head.

‘To be honest, my memories of this house weren’t all that happy. I was on my own a lot. I had a lot of chores to do. My Mum used to shout at me if I didn’t get them done quick enough. She took in sewing and she spent all her time here in this kitchen we’re sitting in now. There was a window over there and she’d sit in a chair and sew. She was really just biding her time, I suppose, waiting – to sell the house and go out there to marry Mr Reynolds.’

‘And there was no question of you going to Canada with her?’

‘No.’ Doreen glances shyly up at me. ‘I did used to think, Why are you doing this? I mean I only just got to know you and you’re going off again. But, well.’

I ask who else was in the house.

‘Just my Mum and me. And Mr Kyle upstairs.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Nice. Elderly man, white, very quiet. He was a solicitor. He helped me out once actually …’ Doreen hesitates and smiles. ‘When I got into a bit of trouble.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘I got done for shoplifting.’

When it finally happens, her belly goes hot, soft. She feels her insides are falling out of her. She can’t believe it – that she could be so stupid. She can’t believe that ever in a million years she’d be the kind of person capable of doing something like this.

But Leia isn’t either. Or you wouldn’t think so anyway. Quiet, pretty Leia, from Mauritius, her first proper friend in this country. Leia cheers her up so much that she realizes how lonely she’s been all this time. They work at the hospital on Portland Place together, wheeling the trolleys, taking the food around the wards, chatting all the time.

Right from the first day, Leia decides they’re friends and shows her stuff – the best toilet for a quick smoke where you won’t get caught, the dodgy drinks machine that sometimes gives you back extra change – jackpot! Leia makes her laugh and Doreen far prefers this to her college life. She’s out all day so her Mum can’t pick on her. She feels like she’s turned into somebody, like she knows who she is.

She has to leave at eight to get the tube to Oxford Circus, but pretty soon she starts leaving earlier and earlier, just to get out of the house. She likes walking up to Clapham Common station in the grey mist – sometimes you can hardly see across the Common and she finds that a bit magical and mysterious. She finds it a real thrill arriving on Oxford Street before the shops are open, walking up and down in the November chill and gazing into windows, listening out for the scrapy clang of someone pulling up a grille, watching the women in their posh coats walking briskly past. Everyone seems to have somewhere to go and she likes that, likes the hurry and certainty of it.

‘Hey, you know what, let’s meet up, before work,’ Leia says, ‘have a coffee, look around the shops together.’

Their shift starts at 9.45 and Debenham’s opens at 9. As soon as the security man turns the key in the big glass door, they’re in – milling swiftly through with the other shoppers. Doreen loves the big stores – the whirr as the escalator starts up, the smells you’d never get in Jamaica: powdery wafts of perfume made sweeter by the cold air, a blueish whiff of bus exhaust from the street outside, the cleanness of plastic bags.