Free Empty Space by M. John Harrison

including mismatched dining chairs and a hospital bed, were shoved up against the walls, off which hung narrow triangular strips of wallpaper stiff with old paint. Unplugged electrical
    leads curled and trailed about the floor. The upper surfaces of everything, from the treads of the stepladders to the shoulders of the unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling rose, were
    laminated with the gritty dust that collects in unused London houses, baking on year by year like a specialised industrial coating. The effect was of a room abandoned but not yet used. At the
    rear, a door lay open – wide enough to admit some light, not wide enough to see if a similar dereliction prevailed the other side of it.
    Anna was shrugging and moving away when she heard footsteps on concrete, and a boy of about sixteen came round the corner of the house, glancing back over his shoulder as if he had been up to
    something inside. He was dressed in tight jeans rolled at the ankle, a T-shirt too small for him, lace-up boots covered in drips of black and pink enamel paint. Such disorder had been
    gelled into his short yellow hair that it resembled an old scrubbing brush. When he saw Anna, he jumped in surprise and said hastily:
    ‘I don’t know what you think, but I’ve come to read to a woman who lives here. Sometimes I bring her a film, but mostly I read.’
    Anna, not knowing how to answer this, said nothing. The boy stared expectantly. He was shorter than Anna, and his face had a raw appearance, as if he lived in a blustery wind no one else could
    feel. Perhaps in an attempt to convince her, he held up a paperback book, thick, warped, browned at the edges of the pages. ‘She’s an old woman,’ he said. ‘She’s
    lived here years. Some people like her, some don’t. She does her shopping down in Carshalton. She enjoys a film but it’s always something old-fashioned, that old-fashioned
    kind of film she likes.’ He shrugged. ‘You want something more modern than that, don’t you. My eyes get tired though, with all this reading. It’s the dust. It makes your
    face feel tight.’
    ‘I came to return something,’ Anna offered.
    The boy didn’t seem to hear. He wiped his left forearm across his face and said, ‘I could read to you, too, if you like. That’s an idea! I could come to your house and read
    this book.’ He held the book up again, and Anna, filled with fear and disgust, saw that it was a very old copy of Lost Horizon . Its pages were bunched and rippled where it had been
    dropped long ago into someone’s bathwater; the back cover was missing. It might easily have come from the room she had been looking into.
    ‘I don’t think I want that,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’
    ‘I never use the toilet here,’ the boy called after her, ‘even if I need to go. She’s too dirty, the old woman.’ Anna lurched into a flowerbed, then away across
    the lawn. He thumped along behind her, without, she thought, making any real effort to catch up; then, as soon as they reached the road, jogged away towards the Royal Marsden hospital.
    ‘It’s a good book,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve read it more than once.’
    She hurried in the opposite direction until, out of breath, she reached Carshalton Ponds. The ponds lay under a leaden sky, two strange, shallow, purposeless, industrial-looking sheets of
    water separated from the road only by a railing, home to fractious ducks and gulls. Anna walked around them twice. I’m calming down now, she thought, surprised by her own resilience. He was
    only a boy. He was as guilty as me. To demonstrate calm to herself – to act it out – she bought a tuna wrap and an apple from the supermarket on the High Street. These she ate sitting
    on a bench by the water, while the young mothers more or less patiently urged their toddlers to and fro in front of her to feed the ducks. Sunshine came and went, but then it began to rain. To
    Anna, something smelled stale, perhaps the water itself, which had a