The Girl at the Window

On Tuesday, Esme brought the green nail varnish up before she brought up anything important.

“You said you had it.”

“I do.”

“Physically with you, or in the philosophical sense?”

“In my bag.”

Leila found it beneath a bus ticket, two loose pencils and a spoon she had forgotten to return to the hotel breakfast room. She closed her fingers around the spoon before Esme could see it.

“Here.”

Esme examined the bottle.

“It looks darker than I remember.”

“It's been through a lot.”

“So have we all.”

They sat on the wall behind the science block, where the brick stayed warm after the sun moved. Esme painted one thumbnail and held it up against her folder. Her nails were always different lengths because she bit them during tests and denied it afterwards.

“We didn't do Saturday,” she said.

“I know.”

“You cancelled with a message about boxes. Very mysterious. Try again this Saturday?”

Leila looked at the little brush.

“Maybe.”

“That means you're finding a reason not to.”

“It means maybe.”

“Come over after lunch. Stay. Mum's doing something with rice that she's very excited about. We can pretend to be impressed.”

The thought of a bed to herself, a bathroom she could occupy without negotiating and a room where she could speak freely on the phone was so attractive that it felt disloyal.

“I'll ask Mum.”

“Good.”

Esme blew on the thumbnail, then touched it too soon and left a print in the varnish.

“There. Ruined.”

“Now it has texture.”

“Don't do art language at me. I have enough problems.”

Leila smiled. For a few seconds they were only themselves, sitting in a place they had used for two years and complaining about something that could be removed with cotton wool.

Then Esme said, “You didn't call.”

Leila's smile went away.

“It was late when things got quiet.”

“Where are you actually staying?”

She looked across the grass at two students trying to photograph a tennis ball in mid-air.

“Mum's sorted somewhere near the retail park. It's temporary.”

“Is it a friend's place?”

Leila could have said no. The word was available. It required less breath than the answer she gave.

“Basically.”

Esme frowned.

“How is it basically a friend's place?”

“It isn't our place. That's what I mean.”

“All right.”

But Esme did not look as though it was all right. She looked as though she had been asked to accept a door being closed gently in her face.

Leila hated that she could see the hurt and still preferred it to being asked more questions.

The bell rang. Esme put the varnish away without offering to do Leila's nails.

In art, the tables were covered with maps Ms Armitage had brought from old exhibitions and tourist information stands. Some were accurate enough to find a road. Others showed smells, sounds, memories, the route a person took to avoid someone they did not want to meet.

“You can make a map of anything,” Armitage said. “But you need to decide what you're measuring.”

Leila picked up a folded leaflet showing walking routes through Fenwick Vale. Her old street was a thin grey line. The Junction Lodge was not marked at all. The retail park appeared as a large pale block with a shopping-bag symbol, as though nobody could sleep or be sad inside it.

She turned the leaflet over. On the back, a family smiled in front of a building she passed every week. Their coats were open despite the visible wind.

“What are you thinking?” Armitage asked.

“Front doors.”

“Tell me more.”

“Different ones. How you can know a house from the door. The colour, the letterbox, whether people have plants outside.”

“Whose doors?”

Leila hesitated.

“People I know.”

“That could work. What connects them beyond your knowing the people?”

She looked at the folded map.

“I don't know yet.”

“Good place to begin.”

Armitage left her with a large sheet of paper and no instruction to make the idea more personal. Leila was grateful, then immediately worried that the teacher thought it was weak.

She drew the red door again. Beside it she drew Esme's front door, pale blue with a brass knocker no one used because the bell was easier. Then she drew the door at her father's old flat, which was no longer his. Three doors she could remember clearly. None opening onto a room where she would sleep that night.

At the other end of the table, a girl was making a map of every place in town where she had cried. People kept coming over to look. The girl answered their questions cheerfully, as though the crying had become safely historical.

Leila could not imagine wanting that kind of attention. She also envied the confidence with which the girl had decided what was hers to show.

During the last half hour, Mr Olson put a notice beside the sink. The Mercer Gallery was looking for a young summer assistant to help with workshops, visitor activities and basic display preparation. It was paid. Applicants needed to be sixteen or over, available for agreed summer hours and willing to learn.

Leila read the notice while pretending to wash a brush.

The gallery occupied two floors of an old building near the station. She had been there on school visits and once by herself, when she wanted to look at a set of illustrated book covers without anyone asking how long she intended to stand in front of them. The idea of being paid to spend time there was almost embarrassing in its appeal.

“Take a photograph,” Mr Olson said.

She turned.

“Of the notice. That's why I put it up.”

“I was just looking.”

“Looking's free. Applying is also free, which is a useful coincidence.”

She took the photograph.

On the bus home, she opened the application page. There were ordinary boxes: name, age, contact details, experience. A question about why she wanted to work with the gallery. A space for examples of creative work, if relevant.

She could fill those in. She could make sentences that sounded like a person worth meeting.

The address box came earlier than she expected.

She typed 18 Hawthorn Road, then stopped with the cursor after the last letter.

The bus slowed at a crossing. Through the window she saw a woman carrying a plant too large for its bag, one leaf pressed against her cheek. Leila watched until the woman passed out of view.

Then she selected the address and deleted it.

She saved the application unfinished.

At the hotel, Mum was on the phone by the window and Toby was building a small house out of cereal-box cardboard. He had drawn curtains at every window, even the one he called the garage.

“Why does a garage need curtains?” Leila asked.

“So people can't see the car sleeping.”

She sat beside him and held a wall while he taped it. The cardboard bowed inwards. He pressed it straight with both hands and waited until the tape agreed.

Mum finished the call.

“Sonia's asked for the school details,” she said. “I've sent them. I haven't told the whole of Fenwick Vale.”

Leila nodded.

“Esme's asked me to stay Saturday.”

“That would be nice.”

“Is it okay?”

“Of course.”

“What about Toby?”

Mum looked at her.

“Toby will be with me.”

The answer was so simple that Leila did not know why she had expected it to be more complicated.

She opened her phone and told Esme she would come.

Then she opened the gallery application again. She left the address blank for now and began with a question she knew how to answer: what she liked to make.