The First Chapter of The Couple Upstairs by Holly Wainwright.

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 over- wrought 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 beside the bed, under the fairy lights she’d strung up to sprinkle a little magic.

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.

This is an extract from The Couple Upstairs by Holly Wainwright, published by Pan Macmillan, RRP $34.99, available in all good bookstores and online now.

Feature image: Supplied.