Lou and I called her Ophelia and she lived in the attic of the lesbian dream house. This was before the Burglary, right above our flat. Ophelia was a ghost and therefore Victorian and played the trombone, we’d say as the pipes groaned.
The building, too, was Victorian. Our kitchen was a corridor and hadn’t always been a kitchen. It led into a box room with a sink and dishwasher and a ridiculously wide windowsill which meant we couldn’t reach the window unless we climbed over our perennially dirty dishes. Lou called that box room the ‘orphan hole’ because Lou was an orphan and the building was Victorian and Victorian times were known for their orphans and it seemed they’d have been sent to the orphan hole if they misbehaved.
To save kitchen space, we put our freezer next to the couch in the living room and stored our stockpiled pandemic vegetables in the attic; none of the neighbours ever went there anyway. One afternoon we’d started to prepare dinner, some vegan dish with a vegetable replacing cheese or eggs or maybe both at the same time, only to find our squash had disappeared. That night, we heard something shuffling around above our rooms, and then, unmistakeably, a loud burp.
When the Burglary happened, the window above our door was smashed and we found knives at the top of the attic ladder outside our front door. The Burglar had used the ladder to climb into our home; or rather, down and out. Maybe Ophelia’s talent for trombone explains the disappearance of musical instruments from our flat that May night: accordion, banjolele, ukulele. Bloodied footsteps led down the carpeted stairs of the tenement. At night in Aberdeen, they say, sometimes you can hear a lonely fanfare crossing the deserted granite roads.
– Parel JOY