"—and I told her it's just a stain, Denise, everyone's got a stain like that on a rented carpet, it doesn't mean anything."
Marion says this over the rim of her mug, not looking at me. We're at her kitchen table on the Tuesday I bring her shopping up, same as every Tuesday, and I stopped trying to steer these stories anywhere years ago. You let Marion get to the end in her own time or you don't get the end at all.
"This was the flat on Aldermoor Road," she says. "Above the tanning place. Denise took it in the spring, box room and a bit of a lounge, carpet left by whoever was there before. Sort of a swirl pattern, browns and an orange, the kind they don't make anymore because nobody in their right mind would buy it new."
I say I remember the tanning place. It closed. Sun Kissed, it was called, and there was a woman who worked there with a dog she used to tie up outside on a lead too short for it, but that's another thing.
"She used the box room for her sewing," Marion goes on. "Machine in the corner, ironing board, that sort of thing. And she says to me on the phone, maybe June — no, it would've been May, because her birthday's the fourth and she hadn't had it yet — she says, Mum, there's a bit of the carpet that looks like someone's sat there. Like the pile's gone flat in a shape. I says it's where the wardrobe was, love, before you moved it. She says no, Mum, the wardrobe was never there, it was against the other wall."
Marion turns her mug a quarter turn on the table and doesn't drink from it.
"By July she's ringing me every few days." She says it flat, like she's reading it off something. "Says the shape's got a bit more to it. Says if you stand at the door with the big light off and the little lamp on, you can see there's like a line where a back would be, and above that a sort of dip, like a head bent down. Says it's always the same corner, by the machine, and it's always facing away from her."
"Facing away," I say, because I don't know what else to say.
"She stopped sewing in there." Marion's hands have gone still on the mug. "Did it on the kitchen table instead. Said she didn't like having it behind her. And then — this is the bit I never got straight in my own head — she says one night she comes home late from her sister's, and she doesn't put the big light on, just goes straight past the box room to get a glass of water. And out the corner of her eye the shape's not facing away anymore."
She stops there and drinks properly this time, both hands round the mug, and I notice her knuckles have gone white where they weren't a minute ago.
"She rang the agency the next morning. Some lad called Pryce come round, very offhand, said it was probably damp bloom under the pile, said they'd get someone to look at it before the next tenant. She moved out three weeks after that. Forfeited the deposit rather than wait for them to check. Wouldn't go back in for the machine. I had to fetch it myself."
"Did you look?" I ask. "At the carpet."
"I looked," Marion says. "Shape was there right enough. Head bent down, like she said." She sets the mug down and looks past me, toward my hallway, where the carpet runs from the front door to the kitchen in a swirl of brown and faded orange that came with the flat, that I have never once thought to ask about.
"Facing the door," she says.