The Couple Upstairs, page 1
About The Couple Upstairs
Five months after Mel told her husband to leave, a ghost moved in upstairs.
A young man who reminds her, with eerie intensity, of a past lover, someone who changed Mel’s life and then vanished.
When the man’s travelling girlfriend joins him, Mel’s obsession with the couple upstairs builds and the boundaries between the two homes begin to blur, with devastating consequences.
The Couple Upstairs is about one strange summer of dazzling, curdling infatuation. Writing with both a light touch and vivid intensity, Holly Wainwright explores love, regret, whether you can stop history repeating, and whether or not you should.
Also by Holly Wainwright
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Contents
Cover
About The Couple Upstairs
Also by Holly Wainwright
Title page
Contents
Dedication
Prologue January: Mel
Part One
1 October: Mel
2 October: Mel
3 October: Mel
4 October: Lori
5 October: Lori
6 October: Lori
7 October: Lori
8 October: Mel
9 October: Mel
10 October: Mel
11 October: Mel
12 October: Mel
13 November: Lori
14 November: Lori
15 November: Lori
16 November: Lori
Part Two
17 January: Flynn
18 January: Flynn
19 January: Flynn
20 January: Mel
21 January: Mel
22 January: Mel
23 January: Flynn
24 January: Flynn
25 January: Flynn
26 January: Mel
27 January: Mel
Part Three
28 November: Lori
29 November: Lori
30 November: Lori
31 November: Mel
32 November: Mel
33 November: Mel
34 November: Lori
35 November: Lori
36 December: Lori
37 December: Mel
38 December: Mel
39 December: Mel
40 December: Mel
Part Four
41 January: Lori
42 January: Flynn
43 January: Mel
44 January: Lori
45 January: Flynn
46 January: Mel
47 January: Lori
48 January: Flynn
49 January: Mel
Epilogue
Lori
Flynn
Mel
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright page
Pan Macmillan Newsletter
For Brent McKean.
Not my type.
Prologue
January: Mel
Mel didn’t believe in ghosts, but there was one living upstairs.
Tonight she heard his bare feet stepping across her ceiling. Heard his distinctive ghost voice falling through his open window into hers. Heard him ghost singing. Heard him having ghost sex.
In the evenings while she was likely sitting on her couch, a squirming child between her knees, a nit comb in hand, an overwrought talent show blaring on the television, she could sense ghost man upstairs. He was strumming the guitar. He was playing chess with his girlfriend. They were talking, always.
When Mel was in her kitchen, making Eddie’s bland, brown pasta sauce, the ghost was upstairs frying aromatic chillies and garlic, flicking off bottle tops, pulling corks, clinking glasses.
On summer nights like tonight, the windows were always open. It made the barriers between the six different households in Mel’s sturdy art-deco block particularly porous. They were all floating in and out of each other’s orbits.
‘Are they dancing again, Mum?’ asked Ava, lying in Mel’s big bed, sheets kicked away, sweating in the heat, both of them tormented by the infuriating whine of a lazy mozzie and the rhythmic gasps drifting down from the upstairs window.
‘Go back to your own bed, darling,’ Mel whispered to her girl.
‘I won’t be able to sleep there either,’ moaned Ava. ‘It’s hot and noisy in with Eddie, too.’
‘I’ll turn the fan up.’ Mel swung her legs out of the bed. ‘Come on.’
Ava looked like she was heading for the door, but then abruptly turned and fell, face first, onto Mel’s bed. A dead weight.
Mel’s exhausted irritation surged. ‘Ava, bed, or you won’t be seeing a screen tomorrow.’
It was the kind of negotiation Mel knew the ghost wasn’t having. The ghost and Lori, the young woman who shared his home, didn’t have to do anything they didn’t want to do. Fan on, fan off. Sleep, don’t sleep. Work, don’t work. Stay home, go out. They didn’t even seem to think the ever-shifting rules that told everyone else where to stand and who to touch had anything to do with them. They certainly weren’t having their nights co-opted by a sensitive tween whose primary motivation was wheedling permission for more YouTube time.
Mel knew this because the woman upstairs had, earlier, been downstairs, in Mel’s apartment. Lori had become her regular babysitter this summer, as Mel had navigated school holidays and work and single parenthood, all in one big, fresh mess.
That morning, Lori had walked into a low-level war sparked by denied requests for ice cream.
‘You know the wonderful thing about being a grown-up?’ she’d said to Ava and Eddie, squatting to their level in her terry-towelling playsuit and her bare, tanned feet. It was exactly what Mel might have worn when she was her children’s age, rather than the mini-adult ensembles Ava and Eddie wore – skinny jeans and camo shorts and tiny T-shirts bearing ’90s band logos.
‘When you’re a grown-up, you can eat ice cream whenever you want,’ Lori said. ‘As much as you want. For as long as you want.’
Can you? Mel thought but didn’t say. That’s not the information I’ve been given.
‘Being an adult is so boring, so dull,’ Lori went on, ‘there have to be perks. Your lives are still brilliant and interesting enough not to need sweetening with chocolate ice cream.’
Eddie and Ava were too old to fall for such rubbish, but there was something about Lori that made their eyes and smiles widen.
Lori always spoke to the kids like this, as if she was dropping them exciting little secrets and revelations. To the children, she was lightness and sparkle, a regular Mary Poppins – if Mary Poppins was a twenty-one-year-old backpacker from southern England which, let’s face it, was a much more likely scenario these days.
Lori had straightened up, pushed her heavy fringe out of her face and looked at Mel. ‘So where you off to, Mum?’
Mel tried not to flinch. Despite their talks over hot and cold drinks, despite the porous walls, despite everything Lori had shared with Mel about the ghost, Mel was still a mum, before anything else.
‘Work,’ she’d said. ‘I’m going into the office to finish something.’
‘Kids! Mum’s going to the office.’ Lori pulled at handfuls of her hair theatrically. ‘There are so many more exciting places to go, right?’
Mel’s children shrugged. They didn’t much care where ‘Mum’ was if she wasn’t with them. Even this past year, when their worlds had changed beyond recognition – between their dad moving out and the virus moving in – they were mostly focused on their immediate needs. Mel suspected that when she set foot outside the house, she ceased to exist for them.
But Mel had pushed the ball of irritation back down into her chest and picked up her laptop bag. ‘Feed them whatever you can find in the fridge, we’re low on supplies,’ she’d said.
At the front door, Mel had stopped and turned quickly. ‘Oh, and don’t take them upstairs, okay?’
Lori had looked up from the kids, who were already pulling her down the hallway towards the lounge room and their Nintendo. Her eyes met Mel’s for a moment and Mel thought she looked irritated, like the request was petty.
‘Sure,’ said Lori, with an almost imperceptible nod. Then she followed the kids, singing out to them as if they were all toddlers, ‘Waaaaaait for me . . .’
Now, fourteen hours later, Mel was in her bed, and the babysitter’s breathless gasps were keeping her awake in the sticky night.
For a moment Mel imagined herself on that tousled futon upstairs. Saw herself under the ghost’s blunt fingers, felt the weight of his body, his hot breath on her neck. She knew how it would feel. How consuming it would be.
Sleep, she told herself. No need to wake any ghosts tonight.
It was the last night Lori’s sighs would keep her from sleeping. The next morning, with its usual rushed routine of packing lunches, gulping coffee and scanning work calls, would mark the end of this strange summer tangle her household had found itself in with the stranded young people upstairs.
Lori wouldn’t be babysitting anymore. Wouldn’t be ‘popping in’ to share a cup of Mel’s Yorkshire tea, a salve for homesickness and ghost trouble. Wouldn’t be unsettling Mel with that casual familiarity she always fell into.
Because by tomorrow, the ghost would be saying that Lori had gone. Vanished. Her backpack pushed into the IKEA wardrobe, her clothes draped over chairs salvaged from roadsides. Her phone lying on the scuffed floorboards bes
Five days from now, Mel would have done things she didn’t ordinarily do. Things she had only ever seen on screens.
She would have been interviewed by a policewoman who seemed no older than Lori herself. She’d have printed out pictures of her babysitter from Lori’s crowded social media accounts and pasted them to lampposts. Pinned posters on cafe noticeboards next to the urgings to socially distance and wash your hands.
And lied.
Mel would have lied quite a lot.
Part One
1
October: Mel
Mel first saw the ghost six months after she’d told her husband to leave.
It was an unseasonably hot Friday afternoon and she’d spent thirty minutes trying to find a parking spot near home. The ghost was standing at the door to her building with his back to the street and a box in his arms. A backpack had been thrown on the tiled steps, alongside a scuffed guitar case and some bulging black bin bags. He was looking through the smudgy glass door, craning a little, waiting for someone who wasn’t yet there.
Mel was reaching about in her sack of a bag, the one that suddenly seemed ridiculously large. It was the bag of a woman who always had to have everything to hand – water bottles and face masks and wet wipes and rice-cracker snacks and sunscreen. Except today she didn’t, because it was the first time she’d dropped the kids with Simon for more than one night and now the weekend stretched ahead like a big empty space and she needed a smaller bag.
Everything was wrong today. She’d driven Eddie and Ava to Simon’s, whose new place was nicer than it should be. His face on seeing them was a giant split of a smile and the kids had run to him, throwing a wave in Mel’s direction as she’d called after them, ‘I’ll miss you two! Be good!’
It was exactly as it should be and it was absolutely devastating.
‘Tell your mum you don’t have to be good at Daddy’s,’ Simon had said, to the kids, not to her, and Mel had laughed too loudly and walked back to her car, arms empty of small, bright backpacks, her nausea rising.
As she looked up from her too-empty bag and walked towards the stranger’s square-shouldered back, Mel was thinking it wasn’t a day for chit-chat. It was a day to get inside her flat and feel its emptiness, hear the silence. To decide what to do with space.
She went to step around the stranger, silently cursing Simon’s new place with its off-street parking, cursing the heat and the absence of the high-pitched soundtrack of nonsense kid-chatter.
The man at the door turned around and smiled. ‘Can you get the door, please?’ he asked, nodding at the box in his arms. ‘Bit caught up here.’
Mel knew instantly he was a ghost, because she knew his face, which was absolutely impossible because that face was long, long gone.
She was so thrown that she literally fell – like some poorly sketched woman in a romantic comedy – tripping over her running shoes and stumbling backwards, down the second and first steps. Except Mel wasn’t a character in a charming comedy, she was a forty-year-old woman, sweaty and agitated from a difficult day, with activewear that was straining across her thighs and a halo of frizz around her pulled-back hair.
She tried to self-correct by twisting one leg behind the other, pretzel-like, leaving her clinging to the peeling wrought-iron fence at the bottom of the steps, her giant bag swinging.
‘You okay?’ said the ghost, but he didn’t put his box down. When Mel looked up, his eyes were creased in concern, but also, ever so slightly, in irritation. The box was heavy, it was hot, he didn’t have his keys yet. Mel knew all these things, instantly.
‘Are you . . .’ She straightened up, one hand still on the rail, smoothing her damp hair with the other. ‘Upstairs?’ was all she could manage.
He nodded. ‘Emily’s stuck down south, she’s left the keys upstairs for me,’ he said, in his deep ghost voice. ‘I’m subletting, but maybe I shouldn’t say that.’ He scrunched his face in a mini-frown, pressed his mouth into a line.
Mel obviously looked like the kind of neighbour who would call Emily’s landlord, or who was Emily’s landlord.
He quickly stopped talking and looked down at his feet. Or maybe he just decided that she didn’t need to know his business. They were different, after all. Decades apart.
Mel was probably staring. Staring at the green-brown eyes and the cropped dark hair and the full lips. Staring at how his mouth twitched up at one corner and how his brows jutted like a shelf as he lowered them to squint at her. And she was likely staring at the hands that held the box with their long, strong fingers, wide palms, bare forearms with prominent veins. How was this person here?
Lowering her eyes, Mel stared at the spot where his baggy board shorts were riding low on his hips. The strip between his faded T-shirt and the frayed, elasticated waistband. She looked up again.
Mel couldn’t help but say it out loud, just once. ‘Dom?’
The ghost looked confused, shook his head. ‘Flynn.’ He looked from her to his box, again. ‘Can you . . .’
Mel stepped up with her key in hand and edged past this Flynn. ‘I should be wearing a mask,’ she found herself saying, conscious of the momentary narrowing of distance between them.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘It’s fine with me.’
Finally, the door was open. He smelled of fresh sweat and musky soap as he passed her.
‘Is guessing names your thing?’ he asked, as he started up the stairs. His face was in full smirk. She had seen it before.
Her mouth was dry. ‘You just remind me of someone,’ she said. ‘Sorry, long day.’
‘Cool. Well, hello neighbour.’ He smiled, and then started walking again.
‘We won’t be too loud!’ he called down as he turned the corner to the next flight. ‘Maybe a little moving-in party.’
No-one anywhere had had a party in six months.
Prickles of anxiety chased up her neck and into her scalp as she pushed open the heavy door to her unit. Goosebumps. The neighbour’s given me goosebumps.
Inside, Mel leaned against the door, a light sweat sticking her back to the cool wood. She exhaled, and reached into her bag to fish out her phone.
‘I’ve just seen Dom,’ she said, the second her sister answered. ‘He’s moving in upstairs.’
‘Darling, Dom’s dead.’
‘I know. But I just stood next to him, in broad daylight.’
‘Dom looked like a lot of handsome young men, Mel. He was beautiful.’
‘I fell over.’ Mel straightened her legs, pushing her back harder into the door, letting her bag drop to the floor. ‘It was mortifying.’
‘You’re an idiot.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘The kids are at Simon’s, right? Are you okay?’
Mel thought about it. The empty weekend, the ghost.
‘Clearly not.’
There was a pause. On the other end, beyond Izzy’s breathing, Mel could hear the whirr of a coffee machine, the muttering of TV news, a video game blaring.
‘What time is it there? Can you have a wine?’ Izzy sounded hopeful.
‘I’d better not. I’m already seeing ghosts.’
‘I wish I was there, duck.’
‘Me too.’
‘No, I really, really wish I was there. Everything here is awful. At least there you can stand next to a strange ghost in the daylight.’
‘Yeah. We’re very grateful.’
In two decades, Mel had never considered the time difference when she picked up the phone to call Izzy. Whether it was nine hours or twelve, neither sister had ever let it inhibit communication. There was never any consideration of children’s bedtimes, dinner plans, sobriety status, sleep, sex. It had driven Simon mad, the conversations at all hours, some only a few seconds long, some devouring precious chunks of Mel’s time.
‘Maybe I should go up there, go ghost-hunting.’
‘Terrible idea.’
‘I know. Maybe I won’t.’
‘He’s not Dom, Mel. He’s just a guy. And you’re just his old, downstairs neighbour.’
‘Ouch. Thanks.’
‘Tough love. You came to the right place.’
‘Thanks a lot, Oprah. Talk later.’
‘I’ll be here,’ Izzy said.
Mel had opened the window of the front room and leaned out, gulping in the early spring evening air and craning her neck to look back to the front door. The ghost’s bags had gone.
