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."

I waited for a further explanation. Susan McQuillan did not seem inclined to give one; she was now curiously examining the flowerpot sitting on my windowsill. It contained a rather wilted, drooping collection of chrysanthemums and yellow carnations. My mother used to grow them, and I kept some in her memory. I was much worse at taking care of them than she had been.

"You should water these more," Susan McQuillan said.

I stared. Surely she hadn't just-- No one could have the audacity to barge into my home and lecture me on how to take care of flowers! The fact she was right was entirely beside the point.

"I don't recall asking for your opinion," I said frostily.

She shrugged and twirled a strand of her hair around her finger. "No offense."

"Why were you climbing down the drainpipe?" I asked, returning to the most important matter at hand.

"It's all Julie McRoddon's fault." I had no idea who Julie McRoddon was, so I said nothing and waited for Miss McQuillan to clarify. "I told her that she was disturbing my sleep by playing loud music late at night. She told me that if I didn't like it I could wear earplugs. So I burnt her records, and she called the police! Can you believe it?"

I could believe it. What was more, I felt that Julie McRoddon was perfectly justified in calling the police. No one had the right to burn someone else's property, no matter how annoying they were. I opened my mouth to say as much. Miss McQuillan interrupted me before I could speak.

"I explained everything to them, but they still said I was in the wrong and made me pay a fine! And that McRoddon girl -- who does she think she is? She's no one but a shop clerk -- went and barricaded me into my rooms! So I can't do it again, she says. Well, I'm not going to stand for that, so I climbed out my window and down the drainpipe. And that's how I ended up here."

This narrative of selfishness and pettiness took my breath away. All this mayhem, over music? How could anyone be so stupid?

"So," Miss McQuillan continued, "thank you for saving my life, and I'll be on my way now."

"Goodbye," I said mechanically, still trying to wrap my mind around everything I had just heard. "Please don't appear on my windowsill again. I don't know if my heart could stand the shock."

She grinned as if we were old friends. "I'll try not to."

~~~~

I didn't expect I'd ever see Susan McQuillan again.

I've never been so wrong in my life.

~~~~

The next morning I awoke to someone knocking on my door. Now, as many of my readers doubtless know, there are few things more annoying than being awoken prematurely from a sound sleep. I was not in a friendly mood, therefore, when I crawled out of bed, pulled on a dressing gown, and stalked out to answer the door.

Susan McQuillan stood on the other side. Her hair was swept back in a ribbon. Her white blouse and black trousers were freshly pressed. Under her arm she held some mysterious rectangular object covered with a white sheet. And she was smiling as if she was meeting an old friend.

"Good morning!" she chirped.

I resisted the urge to slam the door in her face.

"Good morning," I said with no great enthusiasm. "Why are you here?"

She beamed at me. Obviously, she was one of those obnoxious morning people.

"I came to apologise for yesterday," she said cheerily. "I quite forgot to, at the time. And when I came back later you were gone. So here I am now. I brought you-- By the way, what's your name?" She giggled as if someone had told her a funny joke. "I never thought to ask before."

All through this extraordinary stream of chatter, I stood in the doorway as if stupefied. My mind was still foggy with sleep, and I understood at most half of what Miss McQuillan said. Somehow her question registered in my brain.

"My name?" I said dazedly. "Oh, yes. My name. Clarence Linnane." I almost added "pleased to meet you", but that would be a lie.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Linnane!" She held out her hand. I took it absent-mindedly. "So, as I was saying, I brought you this."

She took the mysterious rectangular object out from under her arm. I looked at it with the vacant non-comprehension of someone awakened before they were ready.

"What...?" I asked.

"It's a picture I drew," she explained as she pulled the sheet off it. "I thought you might like it."

It was, indeed, a picture. A picture of a stick figure wearing a dunce cap and balancing on a windowsill, while another stick figure tried to pull the first one in through the window. And on the windowsill, depicted in all their wilted glory, were my flowers. They were the only part of the whole thing that was drawn with an attempt at realism.

Despite myself, I laughed. It was so ridiculous I couldn't help but laugh.

"You drew this?"

She nodded proudly. "I'm an artist. It's not one of my best works, but I thought it was funny."

I looked at the drawing again. No one could call it a best work, but it was certainly funny.

"Thank you," I said.

~~~~

The next morning, as I left my rooms on my way to work, I found a book sitting outside my door. A glance at its title revealed that it was "Care of Houseplants: A Step-by-Step Guide".

It took very little deductive reasoning to guess who was responsible for this.

~~~~

When I returned from work that evening, I went to see my landlady. It was only polite to thank Miss McQuillan for her gift, after all, but I didn't know then which floor she lived on.

Thelma Credge was a stout elderly woman who was chairwoman of a knitting group and liked collecting old guns and other historical weapons. Her husband was a deacon in an Independent Methodist church, and their only son had been a policeman. He had been murdered by the Caths, leaving a wife and young son. That was as much as I knew about my landlady and her husband.

I don't know what I expected to see when she answered the door. But I certainly did not expect Mrs. Credge to be wearing what looked like one of her husband's old suits, covered with splatters of about twenty different paint colours, and with a can of paint in her hand.

"Oh," I said, startled. "Have I disturbed you?"

She shook her head rapidly, her white hair almost spilling out of its ponytail. "No, no, not at all. We're just repainting the kitchen, Mr.... Linnane, isn't it? Was there something you wanted?"

"Yes," I said, remembering why I had come. "I was wondering, can you tell me where Miss McQuillan's rooms are? She gave me a book, and I want to thank her for it."

"Up on the top floor, in what used to be the attic," Mrs. Credge said. "And you can tell her that her rent for this month is overdue, too!"

~~~~

Those two days were the start of a very strange friendship. To this day I still don't know quite how it happened, but Susan seemed convinced we were the best of friends. I went along with it. And then somehow, at some point, we became the best of friends.

Naturally, that was about the same time when everything went horribly wrong.