NINE

As Stephanie undressed for bed, the tenant in the room across the hallway began to cry.

It had to be the same girl Stephanie had glimpsed earlier. The tall woman with the lovely perfume was now producing a shuddery weeping sound that travelled through two walls to Stephanie, the kind of despair that came from the bottom of the lungs, when a throat burned with the taste of a swim in the sea. A sound that felt complementary to her own situation and the very house, as if this building was a place where misery flourished.

All of Stephanie’s resentment at the girl’s refusal to acknowledge her vanished. The grief she could hear heaved with everything that made life temporarily unbearable.

No good. She wouldn’t be able to just lie in bed, swimming in her own self-pity, while listening to that. The girl across the hall was really hurting. Her distress might also explain why she hadn’t spoken to Stephanie earlier, or even paused in her headlong charge back to her room; maybe the woman had simply been unable to face anyone.

But was this also the same woman she had heard behind the fireplace last night?

It couldn’t have been, because the voice in the fireplace had come from a different direction, seemingly from the other side of the house. So there could be two deeply unhappy women here. Three if she counted herself.

Another idea struck Stephanie. The other tenant might be in the same situation as her: broke, a victim of coercion, under the threat of violence for defiance, stuck, trapped . . . Was she being dramatic or had that been the subtext of her most recent exchange with the landlord?

BIG ROOM. 40 QUID FOR WEAK. GIRLS ONLY. Why?

Stephanie opened the door to her room and stepped into the hallway.

And came to a standstill before reaching for the light switch.

The sensation was akin to stepping outside the building without a coat. There was a plummet in the air temperature – a terrible cold that registered the moment she was engulfed by the thick darkness. And a smell that brought her to a halt – an odour akin to being inside a wooden space, fragranced by emptiness, dust and old timber, like a wooden shed. She was overwhelmed by the notion that she had just stepped into a different building. Or the same place altered so profoundly that it may as well have been somewhere else.

A solitary streetlight beyond the garden offered a meagre glow to silhouette the wooden handrail and a pallid patch of staircase wall. A strip of light fell out of Stephanie’s room and suggested a dark carpet, some scuffed skirting board. The red door opposite her own was barely visible.

But these vague suggestions of the building’s scruffy interior were oddly welcome, because they were real, while she felt . . . Yes, she could better identify it now . . . she felt an acute anguish. Abandonment. Like the first morning after her dad passed away. A hopelessness fully realized and suffocating and exhausting at the same time: something that would drive you insane if it didn’t pass within minutes; if it wasn’t relieved. But the feeling tonight, outside her room, was worse, because the overwhelming solitude wouldn’t end for whoever was truly experiencing it. And that was the strangest thing of all.

This atmosphere, or sensation, that occupied the physical space of the passageway was not recognizable as being of her own making, as being generated by her own emotions. And this notion that she had been engulfed by someone else’s distress, in effect stepped into its orbit, as irrational as it was, did not feel imagined either.

Or was it?

Now she was beyond the reach of a balanced state of mind herself, and what felt like actual physical safety after no more than a single step outside of her room, she heard herself whimper. And the shock of hearing her own small cry, in the cold and half blindness that was so vast it gave her vertigo, made her strike out at the light switch on the wall.

But the horrid feelings persisted through the sudden coming of light to the corridor, which also did nothing to stem the cries of the grief-stricken girl.

No light escaped from the room opposite her own. The occupant was weeping in the dark.

Stephanie forced herself to cross the corridor to go to the crying woman. She knocked on the door. ‘Hello. Please. Miss. Miss, please. Can I help?’ She knocked again, twice, and stepped back.

But the girl was inconsolable, undeterred and undisturbed by the sound of a neighbour.

Stephanie tried again and spoke at the door. ‘I just want you to know that you can talk to me. If you want to. I’m just across the hall. In the room opposite.’

The girl began to talk, but not to her and not in English. It sounded like Russian. A language as hard and fast as the Russian she’d heard spoken before, the words struggling through sobs.

‘English? Do you speak English?’ Just open the door, she wanted to shout. We can communicate with our eyes, our faces. I’ll even hold you. But please stop. It’s too much . . . too much for me . . .

Outside the house, Knacker’s dog barked and leaped against the full extent of its chain.

Inside the building, from two floors down, footsteps erupted and skittered in haste against the tiled floor.

The footsteps bumped up the stairs to the first floor. Then began a scrabbling, urgent ascent to the second storey.

Stephanie didn’t move, was not sure what to do. Though she was curious as to the appearance of another tenant, she was intimidated by the swift and loud nature of the movement up through the house, that also suggested the motion had been evoked by the woman’s distress.

The light on the second floor landing clicked out. Stephanie turned for the light switch but only succeeded in covering her mouth because of . . . what? The gust. The sudden pall of . . . what was it? Sweat? Old male or animal sweat.

She gasped to keep the stench out of her lungs. Remembered the fungal scent when she’d sat on a bus behind a man with no grasp of personal hygiene. The smell in this house suggested a lather had been worked up by anger and alcohol. It was accompanied by a sudden, unpleasant sensation of herself twisting within thickly haired arms while she struggled to breathe. She didn’t know why she had imagined this, and was too panicked to understand, but a determined muscular violence seemed to be driving the odour through the house.

The hot animal smell, now spiced with what she recognized as gum disease, replaced the scent of aged and unfinished wood, and so entirely that she doubted the underfloor cavity scent had ever existed.

Instinct informed her that if she didn’t get inside her room and lock the door swiftly, something terrible, and perhaps final, would happen to her this very night. Irrational to think this, like she was a child running up the stairs to her bedroom all over again, so convinced something was following her that she’d often heard footsteps behind. But she did move, and fast, through the doorway of her room, to fall against the inside of the door. She turned the key the moment the door banged shut.

Upstairs a window opened and she heard Knacker roar, ‘Shat up!’ at the dog, which fell to whining and then silence.

Outside her room the footsteps reached the second floor and stopped, as if the owner had paused to catch his breath, before the bangs of his angry feet commenced down the hallway, to her room . . .

Stephanie stepped away from the door, on the verge of a scream.

The footsteps stopped outside.

A fist banged on the door of the room opposite her own.

Thank God it’s her he wants and not me.

The door across the hall opened.

‘No,’ she whispered. Don’t let him in! she screamed inside her head.

Silence.

Not moving, she stood in her room, a few feet behind the locked door, her hands over her mouth, her eyes watering from the strain of not blinking, her head aching from the strain of incomprehension.

At the end of her hearing a bed began to creak vigorously, back and forth. The noise failed to conceal the accompanying sound of rhythmic grunts.