The woman in the wall  Chapter 1

The woman's voice comes from inside the wall of the living room. 'Tell me about yourself,' she says.

It's an ordinary wall, papered in a faded pattern of blobs of pink dangling from green nooses. Perhaps they were once roses.

She's been chatting to me all afternoon. We could be sitting on bentwood chairs in a lounge at The Balmoral or The Carlton, catching up over an afternoon tea of crustless sandwiches, tiny cakes and tea in thin china. That's what afternoon tea would be like. I've read about it.

In fact, I'm sprawled alone on a sofa in my old flannel pjs, shivering and sweating at the same time, talking to a wall about myself. Not about the real me, of course, but the me I've been living in for the past eight years.

'I'm from just outside Glasgow,' I say. The words stick in my swollen throat.

'I've spent time in Glasgow myself,' she says.

'Not Glasgow itself so much,' I say. 'Further out, past the outskirts.'

When I bought the cottage I thought I might renovate, but I didn't. It's not like I've ever lived anywhere nice. Nobody else sees the inside and mostly all I do is look outside.

I don't care about the scratched Formica kitchenette and the avocado bathroom suite. I keep them neat and they're efficient enough. They're not what I bought the cottage for six months ago. All I care about is that when I lie on the floor on my back and look up out of the windows I can see the air, real air that's invisible all the way up to the sky. Not second-hand city breath, but air as clean as a sheet on the line and smelling as fresh.

'I ken the outskirts of Glasgow well enough,' says the woman in the wall. Her voice changes. One moment it has the rasp of thousands of cigarettes and old stories told too many times; the next the twang of Morningside, with the gentility of lambswool behind sandstone walls and a three-year old blue Nissan parked outside.

'My father was a minister,' I squeeze out of my throbbing throat. It's been a while since I've told this story, but the words slip back as if I'd told it yesterday.

'Ah, a daughter of the manse!'

'I went to boarding school down south. I was a complete bookworm – I even loved maths.'

'An accountant from an early age!' says the woman in the wall and I smile like it's the first time anyone has said that to me. 'You're showing too many teeth,' she says and I press my lips together, hiding the black scars of cheap fillings, put in too late. The price of a childhood of gobstoppers and jeely pieces.

The spring afternoon light is fading, adding blotchy shadows to the wallpaper's sickly roses. Usually I'm not home until after dark, even in summer. The woman in the wall said earlier she'd been watching me for a while and I work too much. I told her my work was my life. She said that was daft and life should include a social life. I told her she could be my social life and then she stopped talking for a few minutes, but when she did, her voice sounded like a teenager giggling down the shopping centre with her friends, so I knew she was pleased.

My breath catches in my throat, and I cough, gulping in air. I've been coughing for a few days, hacking coughs that stoke the fire burning in my chest. Stuart sent me home early from work today; said my coughing was putting him off his tuna sandwich. I drove home, but not to the doctor. I stay away from doctors, because the last thing I want to do is discuss my family history. 'And what did your mother die of?'

I just need a good sleep. I'll go to work tomorrow. At work I matter and I understand. I love the way the office looks; the reassuring sameness of the blue-walled cubicles laid out in unvarying rows with the desk and the computer in the same place in every one. I love the structure that lies behind it; the way that every client number must have five letters and five digits and never be the same as any other; the order of the computer filing system; the stationary cupboard with its ranks of pens and sharp-edged stacks of paper. I love the discipline of working my way through the tax code, balancing a company's structure, management and profits against its need to minimise its tax bill. I assess and plan and balance and judge and it always works perfectly. It's obvious if you know how.

'It's a shame bonuses are only for client management this year, Jac,' Stuart said at my appraisal last month. 'If they were for technical knowledge, you'd have got one for sure.'

I love the way Stuart leaves his office door open, because he likes to look out and see my back and the figures scrolling quietly past on the computer. He says it keeps him calm.

'That's an awful cough,' says the woman in the wall. 'Got a hanky?' I wave a tissue at the patch of wall where the paper is peeling away from the cracked plaster. Her window.

'That's no' a hanky,' she says. 'That's a wee bitty paper.'

I blow my nose on the tissue and toss it into the wastepaper bin next to the sofa. I'm not sure if she sighs, or if it's the wind breathing through the leaves outside the window.

'Jac?' she asks. 'Unusual name for a girl.'

'Short for Jacinta,' I say. Kirsty Watt, the payroll clerk knows about Jacqueline-Marie Thompson, because she pays her salary into her bank account every month, but Kirsty's down on the third floor where the elevator lets out women in chain store suits and men with soft-soled shoes. Jacinta Thompson-Evans works on the sixteenth floor, where the air conditioning works and the men wear silk ties.

'Shouldn't it be Jass or Jace?' the woman in the wall goes on, and I'm ready for this too.

'I know, I know,' I say, rolling my eyes. 'My parents wanted a boy. Continue the family name.'

The only place our family name has ever appeared is the drunk's cell at the police station. Eck McKinnon wrote Dad's name over the door in Magic Marker one night. 'It seemed right,' he said when he dropped him off the next morning. 'He's had that much use out of the place.' Eck lived around the corner and always dropped Dad off in the morning if he'd been on the night shift when Dad was brought in.

'Should have had more weans, then, if they wanted a laddie, shouldn't they?' the woman in the wall says.

I can't answer, because I'm in the grip of a fit of coughing that rips at the burning insides of my lungs.

'Honey and lemon,' says the woman in the wall. 'I told you that when you got home.'

'I just need sleep,' I gasp eventually.

'But you've no' tole me about your parents yet.'

'My parents are dead.'

'That's quite the story,' says the woman in the wall.

'It was a long time ago.' I stand; crumpled pyjamas sticking to my sweat-gluey skin. My head is spinning and heavy and I hold on to the sofa for support as I shuffle past the kitchenette.

'Small wonder you're a' wobbly. You've no' had your dinner, yet,' she mutters. 'Again,' she points out as I close the living room door. I don't say goodbye.

I lie in an oozing sweat of fever and chills and thrashing feet that doesn't feel like sleep, but still makes me late for work the next day. I'm never late, but today the bypass to Edinburgh seems miles longer than usual, spilling out in front of me like an endless grey ribbon unrolling along a never-ending corridor. All of I sudden I drive past the office, and have to loop-the-loop over the bridge at the next exit and go back. I wipe my face on a tissue before I get out of the car, but my skin is still sticky and I plaster on a breezy smile in the lift.

The breeze freezes when I see Maddy Cooper at my desk. Not just at it, but inhabiting it with her furry toys, her family photos and the lumpy china pencil holder one of her kids made. Desks like Maddy's make my skin itchy. Her computer screen is decorated with multi-coloured puppy post-it notes like a tacky Christmas tree. The back of my chair is draped with her jacket and her beige-skirted cushion bottom is oozing over the edge of the seat.

'That's my desk,' I say. My laptop bag drags on my arm like somebody has loaded it with bricks. I want to put it down and slide into my chair before my jelly legs wobble away from under me.

Maddy looks up at me, sticks out her lower lip and puffs out some air as if to say it's none of her business.  'You've to talk to Stuart,' she says and rearranges one of her teddies.

Stuart's door is shut for once, but when I knock he opens immediately, like he's been watching me through the narrow window at the side.

'Come on in,' he says, and now he leaves the door open.

'Why is Maddy at my desk?' I ask.

'Sit down, Jac,' he says. 'We need to talk.' He sits down behind his curvy desk and picks up a pencil and spins it between his fingers. Everything looks tiny beside Stuart. He's a tall, stooping man, with shaggy black hair and fidgety hands that are always in motion. There's something about that that makes my heart thrum faster. His long pale fingers, toying with little things that don't really matter.

I sit at the chair in front of his desk, with my hands folded, fingers curled under my palms, and the laptop propped against the chair leg. 'I'd like my desk, please.'

He makes a noise halfway between a groan and a laugh. 'Such a polite request,' he says. His voice is velvety and rolling and he doesn't sound his 'r's. It's the sound of money and public school and the high houses of Heriot Row. It's a voice that for years I thought only existed on television.

'Christ. I've always admired your beautiful manners. Which makes it all the stranger…' He pauses, tapping on the desk with his pencil. 'I can't give you your desk,' he says after a few minutes. 'Your technical ability can't be faulted. Nor can your manners, your appearance, even your presentations. Absolutely. And yet – the clients don't warm to you. I send Maddy or Tim along with your ideas and the clients call to thank me and ask for more. I send you, and the same ideas get rejected. I've never really understood that. Until yesterday.'

He puts the pencil down on his desk. His hands are still, for the first time I remember.

'Jac, I popped down to payroll yesterday afternoon.'

Something cold crawls through the inside of my head; icy-legged spiders that ripple freezing webs down my neck and spine.

'I'd had a word with the other partners, to see if we couldn't change your bonus situation, recognise your ability. Fine, they said. So I went to Kirsty. She'd never heard of Jacinta Thompson-Evans. But, she said, there was a Jacqueline-Marie Thompson working on the sixteenth floor. Working for me.'

The spiders are in my mouth; wrapping their silken frost around my tongue, so even though Stuart looks at me, I cannot speak. That alone tells him what he needs to know. Jacinta Thompson-Evans is Jacqueline-Marie Thompson

'Why, Jac? Why would you lie about your name?' Stuart's hands are clenched so tight that his knuckles are bleached white. 'Are you hiding something?'

I part my lips to talk, but nothing comes out. No words are ready. I shake my head and it aches as the ice spiders swarm across my temples.

Stuart looks down at his hands. 'Jac,' he murmurs. 'I wish I could…' He stops, and then lifts his head. His voice is clipped. 'I have to let you go. The name, whatever reasons you had, it won't make any difference. The partners are worried about fraud. But it's not just that, I wish it were. You're a clever girl. Absolutely. It's …the clients don't believe in you. And, with the name, I…’ The wrinkle between his eyes tells me how hard he's trying not to say that he doesn't believe in me either.

The only part of me that is warm is my chest, rising and falling through layers of fire. I breathe in and then out, long and steady, defrosting my tongue, chasing away the spiders, driving them down my body to my hands and feet where they settle with lumpen chill.

Stuart leans over his desk towards me. 'Talk to me, Jac…if you could tell me, then maybe…'

I smile with fiery lips, and then stand up. 'It's been a pleasure working with you,' I say.

'Jac…' he starts, but he doesn't know what more to say. I hold out my hand. He stands too, on the other side of his desk and looks at my hand as if it's something extraordinary, something he's never seen before, which I suppose it is. He knows I don't like to be touched. Or perhaps he's repulsed by the ugliness of my fingernails, bitten down to the quick. After a moment, he reaches out and takes my hand and shakes it gently up and down, then holds it in his for a minute. His skin burns against mine. Does touching other people always burn, or is it because I'm sick? My hands and feet don't feel like they belong to me, they are so cold.

'Your hand is freezing. Jac, look, it's not personal-' I pull my hand out of his and wipe my palms on my skirt. Then I leave.

I have no personal belongings at the office; the laptop I take home with me at night belongs to the company and I've left it on the floor of Stuart's office. I flow out of the door, into the lift and down. Another day, another drive home to Sadleir and back tomorrow. Just with no tomorrow.

The woman in the wall is waiting for me.

'Early again,' she says.

I lie down on the sofa facing her. 'Sing to me.'

She doesn't ask any questions, but starts singing softly, like my mother used to do when I was tiny. I fall asleep right there on the sofa in my suit and shoes. When I wake up, she's still singing.

The room glows orange with late evening light and every breath I take binds my lungs more tightly in white-hot metal bands. I ache inside and out. For some reason, I'm thinking about Benito, the cat I had when I was wee, and how it felt to have him curled up against me when I slept, warm and breathing. If I close my eyes and lean against the sofa cushions, it's almost as if he's there, snuggled into the curve of my back.

The woman in the wall stops singing. 'It was the name, wasn't it?'

Then I know that she knows about the real me, even though I haven't told her, and she knows I know. We sit up together through the darkness, but we don't talk. Outside, the dark night closes down the day and then the pale spring light of tomorrow fights it off again. At some point, I crawl into the bedroom and change out of my crumpled suit into pyjamas, and then I stumble to the sofa to be with the woman in the wall and Benito. At some point, I throw up into the wastepaper basket, tearing more pain into my chest, and the woman in the wall says she's amazed I've anything to throw up, because as far as she can tell I've not eaten for days. At some point, when it's day and the air is invisible again, I throw open the window and breathe in, which sets off such a coughing fit that the woman in the wall tells me to shut the window before I catch my death. At some point, I fall into a shuddering sleep and I dream about Benito, flying through the air with his legs and tail outspread, like some kind of five-limbed and wingless prehistoric bird.

At some point, I lose track of time.

By then I'm using all my strength to squeeze air in and out of my lungs, although I wonder why I bother, because the metal bands are still tightening, millimetre by burning millimetre. I can't feel the sofa under my body. I may be floating. The woman in the wall is talking again, or it might be a man. I smell cigarette smoke, but I don't smoke. Do I? Am I awake or dreaming? Alive or dead? I don't care; I close my eyes and let go. 

I wake up in the nubbly-blanketed nest of a hospital bed. My face is damp and sweaty inside an oxygen mask and a drip dangles over my head. I am still breathing and, although something heavy and warm weighs down my lungs, the fire is gone.

The room smells of stale cigarette smoke, which helps me to work out that the slumped thing in the chair in the corner must be my father.