FIVE

Stephanie arrived back at the house after seven. The rain continued to fall hard upon North Birmingham. The streetlights in Edgehill Road were spaced so far apart, and issued such thin light, they made the houses exude a vaguer, more inhospitable aspect than they had done that morning. Or perhaps they seemed menacing now that she had something to feel intimidated by. She wasn’t sure. But she wondered if there had been any daylight here at all while she’d worked indoors at the vast Bullring shopping centre in the city, a world of steel, glass, marble, white electric light, and the trappings of affluence that ejected her into the rain once her day’s servitude was complete.

The people she had worked with, and the location, had felt impersonal and never close to familiarity, as if to communicate the message: Don’t get used to it. She couldn’t help taking that to heart.

Usually she made friends on temp jobs, during the long hours of boredom and repetition that always felt more stressful than important work. In the past, she’d even exchanged phone numbers and email addresses with the other girls she’d worked with in warehouses, factories and while stewarding live events. But the bright lights and designer clothes shops of the Bullring had given airs to the other two girls she’d worked with, an attitude demonstrated by many of the shoppers as if they were all accustomed to, and unimpressed by, the opulence. Her two colleagues both considered themselves to be models.

And what recession? Amongst crowds laden down with logo-emblazoned paper bags with string handles, expensive hair styles, new clothes, smart phones, the shopping centre had suggested an exclusive annexe existing beyond any world she was familiar with. While she had resorted to blacking-out the scuffs on her one pair of boots with an eyeliner pencil, others seemed to exist in effortless affluence. It mystified her like magic. Where were all the people, like her, who had no money? Were they hiding themselves away in wretched buildings like she was?

Beside the thirty-minute break, when she’d sat on a bench in the Bullring and watched silent news reports on a huge television screen about flooding in Cornwall, Yorkshire and Wales, she had been on her feet for the best part of eight hours. She’d become so tired she’d begun to slur her ‘Hello, sir, would you like to try our new Italiano range of wrap? Only two hundred calories per . . .’ She’d called two women ‘sir’, and the edges of her vision had started to flicker by late afternoon. She needed eight hours’ sleep but had had less than three the night before. Her stomach burned with hunger.

Relief that the working day was over plummeted at the sight of the house. The building appeared wetter, grubbier and even more derelict than when she’d hurried away from it that morning. The whole place seemed sullen and eager to be left alone in the cold darkness. Whatever optimism and comfort the building once possessed was long gone. The house’s character seemed so obvious now.

Don’t think like that.

She paused in the hallway to turn on the light and inspect the post: fliers for Asian mini-markets, fried chicken and pizza delivery services mingled with cards for local taxi companies. There was nothing addressed to the tenants, beside one final demand from British Gas for a Mr Bennet. Everything else in a white envelope was addressed to ‘Dear Homeowner’.

Not having notified the bank or the doctor’s surgery of her change of address was a small mercy. She’d do all of that when she found a new room in another building. And if she stood any longer looking at the faded walls, the uncarpeted stairs leading to the first floor, and the solitary closed door at the end of the ground floor hall, she worried she might not get up the stairs to her room.

Stick to the plan. She’d rehearsed it all day. Eat, then go and see the landlord and give notice on the room. Ask if you can leave your bags here until Monday morning. Get your deposit back. Find a new place this weekend. Accept that the month’s rent paid in advance might be gone, but still try to get a refund so you can stay in a cheap B&B over the weekend until you find a new room.

If she could not get the rent back she would have to stay in the house until Monday.

Stop! Don’t think about it . . . One thing at a time.

You can do it. You can do it. You can do it.

Reciting the silent mantra throughout the day to deter self-pity had felt absurd. But now she was back inside the building, the house suggested the implacable, with an entrapping power that would drain any resistance to itself.

‘It’s what you make of it,’ Knacker had said yesterday, grinning through his gappy teeth. But that was a cliché. It was incorrect. After six months away from the family home, she knew it was how these demoralizing places changed you that needed to be resisted. And she always resisted them. ‘Character building’, others might have said about her experiences. But that was also a cliché, and easy to say when it wasn’t your character being built by adversity.

‘You’re a smart girl. And beautiful too. You’ll make it all come right,’ her dad once said after a dispiriting weekend together in Aberystwyth, when she knew she couldn’t afford to go to university, no matter how good her A Levels had been.

Why didn’t you come and see me the night you died, Daddy, and tell me what the fuck to do?

She briefly wondered what the ground floor was used for. Maybe it held tenants too? She hurried past the silent first floor and ran up the carpeted stairs to the second storey, slapping the lights on as she moved, running to the next switch before the lights behind her winked out.

She paused outside her room long enough to disappear into the abrupt darkness produced by the three-second timer on the overhead light reaching the end of its pathetic cycle. What kind of mean bastard would try and save electricity like this?

Only the ambient glow of a distant street lamp, seeping through the window on the stairwell between the first and second floors, offered any illumination.

Stephanie held the long room key lightly between her fingertips and listened intently.

All was silent on the other side of the door to her room.

She struggled to control her bottom lip’s tremble when she recalled the tug and rustle of plastic beneath the bed, the mournful voice, the bed springs depressing as a new weight added itself to the mattress. What happened in this room last night?

Could the floorboards of an old building correct at night, as a building moved upon its foundations, to suggest a footfall? Had she heard a radio in another room, or a conversation, maybe someone talking to themselves? Were there mice under the bed? And what about the bathroom that morning? Was she losing her mind?

Schizophrenia. Psychosis.

Stephanie pushed the door to her room open with more force than she’d intended, and reached inside to slap the light on.