Frankie Styne & the Silver Man by Kathy Page Page A

shops, baby clothes cost a quarter of what she and Jim had to live on for a week, but second-hand they were virtually free. The world must be littered with them, she thought; so many people had been born and temporarily inhabited a series of such garments, sloughing them off like snakeskin every month or so . . . She liked looking at the piles, stripes of different colours. Like liquorice allsorts. Already some were too small.
    Downstairs, there were two rooms, matching the bedrooms upstairs, plus an extension for the kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom contained two packs of disposable nappies, the powder, soap, toothbrushes, cotton wool and cream, one plastic bath that fitted inside the main bath, one bowl, one bucket, one thermometer, one mat, three towels on the rail . . . But these were things for Jim, so probably they didn’t count.
    In the kitchen were two pans, one non-stick; one mug, blue with white stripes; two side plates the same; one dinner plate in pale green with faint ridges around the rim; assorted cutlery—all there on her arrival. On the shelf above the counter were food supplies and the book, Infant Care, which Mrs Wingfield had given her at the clinic. She had overheard Mrs Wingfield talking to the receptionist last week, ‘It could be avoided,’ she’d said. ‘Look at the poor kid. I don’t think it’d be wrong.’ Soon, the book warned, there would have to be other kitchen things, in particular a fridge; it talked as if there were no question of someone not having a fridge, though so far Liz had managed perfectly well without, drinking the last of the carton of milk every night so as to save waste, buying small amounts. It made sense when you had to carry everything home.
    â€˜Always store in the fridge,’ Infant Care said of almost everything, and warned that there would have to be bottles, teats, brushes, a steriliser, a spouted baby mug, a bent plastic spoon, a stiff bib with a ridge and more. Perhaps, though, it could be avoided.
    The room next to the kitchen—the one with the stuck door—contained only the brackets for the shelves someone took away with them and a paper lampshade left behind. The room was just something to be walked through on the way to the stairs. Apart from this path, the dust on the floorboards had been undisturbed since that first day when, halfway between kitchen and stairs, she had paused and on impulse crossed the room to open the door of the understairs cupboard. It had been—still was—full of clean jam jars, packed in softening cardboard boxes.
    In the front room, where the television aerial socket was, were the four cushions Liz had brought with her. She had made the covers herself, when she was at the B & B, stuffed them with other women’s discarded tights. On the ledge of the ceramic tile surround of the gas fire she kept several pine cones, a white-coated flint, the skeleton of a holly leaf brought back from one of her walks—these were not real things, she felt, neither possessions nor possessors; they were more like visitors.
    â€˜I don’t think somewhere to live is a thing,’ she informed Jim. ‘Food neither.’ That just travelled through the body and came out the other end. Cotton wool, nappies . . . They cost money, but were just a means to an end—like all Jim’s things, they were safe. ‘I don’t think you’ll get too attached.’
    Things that people had given her, unasked, were also safe; she could walk away from them any time. But what about a television set? ‘The main point is the pictures,’ she explained to Jim. Pictures—as clear and large and lifelike as possible, and then the sound, second—both produced by immaterial signal—these were as un-possessable, you’d think, as water or air. ‘A television set, really, is part of somewhere to live.’ Part of home, which wasn’t a