A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [17]
There was no sign of a bell so she slapped her palm against the metal several times. Noise came from the interior, a scrambling, followed by silence. The sun unexpectedly plunged into the alley and struck a mound of ice that had been made by leaking drains directly in front of the threshold. Dangerous, she thought, be careful. She was fingering the salt shaker in her pocket nervously.
“Just a minute,” a male voice called from the interior. “Hold on.”
She held on.
This was a door that, as far as Sylvia could tell, could not be opened from the outside. As she was thinking this, the door swung wide to reveal a pale young man of perhaps twenty-five or thirty years who was standing in the shaft of sun. He was wearing an old flannel shirt and baggy pants covered with a number of loops and straps. His dark hair stood straight up at the back, as if he had just been roused from sleep, but his brown eyes were intelligent and alert, and his white skin was smooth. He looked at her face with a hint of suspicion, and then with curiosity at the suitcase she was carrying.
She had her opening speech prepared. “My name is Sylvia Bradley. I’m sorry to disturb you,” she began, “but I am a friend … I was a friend … of Andrew Woodman and I was hoping …”
“The man who died,” said the young man.
“Yes,” she said, knowing she was beginning to tremble, “and I was a friend of his and I wanted to talk to someone, to Jerome …” She paused, unable suddenly to come up with the last name.
“Jerome McNaughton,” the young man prompted. “I am Jerome McNaughton. Are you from his family?”
Then this was the person she had been looking for, Sylvia thought. “No, not from his family,” she said. For a few moments Sylvia looked at the wet ground where a rainbow of oil was moving across a small puddle. Then, without lifting her gaze, she added quietly, “I’ve come all this way to talk to you. Will you let me come in?”
Jerome was silent, his hand still on the door, and, during this pause, Sylvia began to believe that her request would be denied. Then a slim, dark-skinned girl, dressed entirely in black, slipped up behind the young man. She had been standing, a dim silhouette, in his shadow, and her presence had barely registered in Sylvia’s brain.
“Let her in, Jerome,” this phantom said.
At first Sylvia wondered whether she would be able to cope with the cavernous space she’d been led into by these young people. There was an odd kind of music playing and, worse, competing with this were several rows of fluorescent lights. She had always believed she could hear the sound of artificial light and, as a result, had only once ventured into a department store, where the dissonant, rasping sound of the light had proved to be too much for her. Here, however, there was only a dull hum, a kind of undertone to the music. There were stacking chairs placed randomly, it seemed, around the room, a long chipped counter with a sink in it and a toaster on it, a low table on which rested a few stained cups, an ancient refrigerator growling in the corner, and one old sofa covered by a blanket as well as by a considerable amount of orange cat hair. In a further room, created by a partition, she could see part of a mattress on the floor, and the dim flicker of a computer sitting against the opposite wall. At the end of the room in which she stood there was a red door in the centre of a wall made of cement blocks. On this door were the words Conceptual Fragments.
The girl had followed her gaze. “The studio’s in there,” she said. “Where Jerome works.” She reached forward, gently took the suitcase from Sylvia’s hand, then placed it on the floor beside the sofa. “I’m Mira, by the way. Would you like to sit down?”
Thinking of her coat, of the cat hair, Sylvia chose a chair. The young man and the girl sat on the sofa. For the first time Sylvia noticed the jewelled stud at the side of the young woman’s perfectly shaped nose. She could have lost herself in the glint of that, and in the features of the girl’s lovely face, but remembered her purpose