Age So Crammed With Madness

Chapter II: The Artist

I remember one that perish'd; sweetly did she speak and move;
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall

Who is Susan McQuillan, you ask? Good question. Are you sure you want to hear the answer?

To understand the chaos that followed, you must first understand that I lived in a boarding house at this time. My rooms were on the second storey. On the floor below me lived the landlady and her husband. On the floor above lived a law student. And on the final floor, in an attic that had been converted into rooms, lived an artist named Susan McQuillan.

I knew nothing about her except her name. I didn't even know what she looked like, until the morning I opened my kitchen window to find her outside it.

It was perhaps a week after the events I have described in the first chapter. My life was a mundane, repetitive business of waking up, going to work, coming home, and writing or trying to write a few hundred words before going to bed.

My kitchen was a small room with an oven, a sink, a few cupboards, and a coffee table that served me perfectly well as a dinner table. The window provided a view of the office block across the road. That is, it usually provided a view of the office block across the road.

The day Susan McQuillan barged into my life started like any other day. I woke up at seven o'clock, went into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and opened the curtains...

To reveal a woman standing on my windowsill.

I did not scream. I merely squeaked. And I'd like to know who wouldn't squeak, upon seeing such an unexpected sight. She squeaked too, and started back. This was a terrible thing to do, because she came dangerously close to the edge of the windowsill.

I decided that questions and recriminations could wait until she was no longer in immediate danger of breaking her neck. I pulled open the window -- luckily it opened inwards, not outwards -- as far as it would go.

"Here! In here!" I called to the woman.

She nodded silently. Her face was the unnatural shade of white that people went when they were badly frightened. Her hands shook as she knelt down and pulled herself in the window.

The minute she was safely standing on the kitchen floor, I exploded.

"Who the hell are you? What were you doing on my window?"

The woman clung to the worktop and took several deep, gasping breaths. She didn't seem to hear me shouting at her. The kettle chose this time to boil. Its piercing whistle chased all thoughts of further questions out of my mind. I raced over to the cooker to turn it off and stop that racket right now.

When the kettle was silent again, I turned back to the woman. She had moved away from the worktop and was examining a picture hanging above the fridge. I felt a stab of annoyance. Who did this woman think she was, standing on my window, invading my home, and now studying a picture of my parents as if she was in an art gallery?

I cleared my throat. The woman started, as if she'd forgotten I was there at all. She turned to face me. For the first time I saw her clearly, without being distracted by whistling kettles or danger to life and limb.

She was tall, taller than me, with brown hair and blue eyes. There were coloured stains on her hands that looked like paint or ink. She wore an old, patched dress with a fraying hem, decorated with paint stains. She blinked at me owlishly, her head tilted to the side.

"Who are you?" I said again, "and why were you on my window?"

"My name is Susan McQuillan," she said. "I'm afraid it's a long story. You see, I was trying to climb down the drainpipe."