The Weekend Tenantnorthedge
The first week, it’s her towel that moves. She’s left-handed, so she always hangs it on the side of the chrome rail nearest the shower. Yet when she returns from a weekend back in Canterbury, her real home, it is hanging on the other side. She doesn’t notice until she steps, dripping, over the side of the bath and reaches for the towel she left hanging there. But it has moved. And something inside her recoils. A stranger has touched one of her most intimate belongings. The fabric she rubs against her skin each day, that has followed her from bedsit to house share to flat since she left home nearly a decade ago.
“Come on, Rach.” Joe rolls his eyes when she relays this turn of events the following weekend back in their modern, spotlit kitchen. “As if your mystery flatmate’s going to be using your towel. You probably put it there yourself. Or it fell on the floor and she picked it up for you.”
“You say she, but how do we know? What if my mystery flatmate is a man?” Rachel studies her fiancé’s features for signs of jealousy
– a wrinkling of his thick brow perhaps, or a tensing around his narrow-set eyes. He smiles, untroubled by this suggestion.
“So what if it’s a man? It’s not like you’re there at the same time, anyway. It could be anyone for all you know.”
“Exactly.” Rachel sighs and pushes away the plate of carbonara she’s been picking at. It had been Joe’s idea, this weekday let. She’d live in the Manchester flat Monday to Friday, and someone else would pay to stay there at the weekend.
It was cheaper than getting somewhere full-time and more practical than getting the train every day. Never mind that she and Joe wouldn’t see each other five days a week. It was only short term. And she could hardly turn the promotion down, could she? Even if it meant moving to run the accounts team in the Manchester office instead of in London.
Joe couldn’t leave his school, not when he was so close to getting head of Year Three. Although Rachel wondered why he couldn’t, given that she was the main earner. If their roles were reversed, wouldn’t she be expected to follow him around the country? They do have schools in Manchester, she heard herself
saying. But she swallowed the words.
The next week it’s her hairbrush. She’d left it on the dressing table in the corner of her Manchester bedroom. And she’d locked the door before leaving for the weekend. But when she returns it’s lying by the bathroom sink, short dark hairs entangled with her own blonde frizz. The sight of it makes her heart race. She pictures a strange woman standing at the mottled mirror, running the brush through dark curls. They could be Joe’s hairs, she rationalises. But why would the brush have moved? The weekend tenant must have a key for her room. She tries her own key in the bedroom opposite, but it doesn’t yield. She listens for a moment, pressing her ear against the warped door, but all she hears are the creaks and groans of the old building; distant neighbours on the floors below.
She’s alone, but for the phantom flatmate. The slightly older woman, as she now imagines her, whose presence seems to linger throughout the week, a faintly floral scent in the air. Two anonymous women living a mirror existence. Two halves of a full life.
The third week, it’s Rachel’s bed that looks different.
A slight indent in the pillow, a ruching of the sheets she smoothed out. She’d made a point of straightening up the room before she’d left, aware that the weekend tenant might let herself in to rifle through her things. She found she hadn’t minded the prospect of that as much as she should. It gave her a small thrill to imagine this stranger tiptoeing through her bedroom. But the bed is a shock. Running her fingers over the sheets, she sees they’re shaking, her shoulders tensed, the hairs raised on the back of her neck. The thought of this faceless woman lying on her sheets makes her skin crawl.
When she’d first viewed the rundown mansion flat in Didsbury, she’d been whisked through so quickly she’d barely had a chance to ask about the other tenant. “Often in these kind of lets it’s the landlord who lives there at the weekends,” the estate agent had said as he marched her past the high-ceilinged bedroom and into the ‘living area’ – a kitchen, small dining table and tatty
The thought of a stranger lying in her sheets makes her skin crawl
two-seater sofa. “But not in this case.” Rachel hadn’t even thought to ask who it was. She’d been too busy readjusting her expectations of what her budget could stretch to.
“It’ll do for now,” Joe had reassured her on the drive back to Canterbury, the first and only time he’d made the journey. “There aren’t many of these weekday lets at the moment, but they’re really going to take off, you’ll see.”
Rachel nodded and looked grimly through the rain-splattered windscreen, wondering when Joe had become the expert on the property market. They could afford for her to spend more. It was her earnings that made up the bulk of their joint account, after all. But Joe was adamant that every spare penny should be put aside for the three-bed home they would progress to from the modern flat they’d begun saving for as soon as they left college, never making it beyond Canterbury, despite Rachel’s dreams of Spain, Mexico, Thailand.
The fourth week she makes her excuses to Joe. A big meeting to plan for. Easier to do it in Manchester in the Sunday quiet of the office.
Except that when she arrives, she goes to the apartment. Approaching in daylight, she sees a battered Mini parked outside, a tall, sandy-haired man loading his arms with bags and boxes, one slipping as he tries to slam the car door. “Do you need help?” Rachel offers.
“Are you sure? You wouldn’t believe how many people have walked past.” His accent is local. His hand brushes hers as he hands her one of the bags. “I’m moving in.”
“You don’t say.” They smile. She follows him up the stairs, surprised as he leads her past the second floor and up to the third. “You must be my neighbour,” she says. “I’m number 12.”
“So am I.” He looks at her sharply and then breaks into a broad smile. “Of course, you’re the weekday tenant. I heard you’d already moved in. I’ll be here at weekends, when I’m performing.” He’s opened the door with his key and he nods towards a guitar case on the floor. “I’m a musician. My band’s got a residence in town. It’s a bit weird, really. I’ve always travelled around so much, but I need a base, for now anyway.”
But Rachel has stopped in the doorway, staring at all the bags and belongings piled up in the hall. “Sorry, I’ll get it out of the way. I wasn’t expecting you to be here, actually. I thought you didn’t arrive until after seven on a Sunday.”
“I don’t,” Rachel says slowly. “Not usually. I came a bit early today. But… what about the other tenant who was here before? Has she moved out?”
“There wasn’t one,” he says over his shoulder, carrying two bags into his bedroom and coming back for more. “It’s been empty at the weekends. But it’s nice that we could meet on my first day. You’re Rachel, aren’t you? That’s what the estate agent said.”
He looks at her expectantly, but Rachel can only nod, reeling. The towel, the hairbrush, the bed. She can’t have been imagining it all… Only now, faced with the solid reality of the weekend tenant, this tall, floppy-haired musician, she finds she can hardly picture the small, dark woman she’d visualised. The phantom tenant who has haunted her these past few weeks. Nor does she want to think about Joe, their bright white flat, their evenings in front of Grand Designs.
“I’m Tom,” he says, and they smile shyly at each other across the hallway that divides their rooms, their halves of the week, their mirror lives.
Charlotte Northedge’s new novel,
Before (Harpercollins £14.99), is out now