TEN

After Stephanie checked inside the wardrobe, under the desk, behind the curtains and beneath the bedframe, she climbed under her duvet and lay awake with the lights on. She’d moved the bedside lamp closer to the edge of the bedside cabinet, with the metal shade angled upwards to add power to the ceiling light, and to make it more accessible for one of her arms in an emergency.

The noise of sex across the hall had been frenzied but brief. The girl had not made a sound during the encounter. Stephanie had feared that she’d heard a rape, because why would a woman so distressed consent to sex with another tenant, and one whose movements through the house implied aggression?

It could not have been Knacker in the girl’s room because he was upstairs; she’d heard him shout at the dog. She wondered if the man that had thundered up through the house was the owner of the leather-soled shoes that she had heard leaving the house that morning. Not catching up with him may have proven to be a lucky escape. The first break she had caught here.

Distaste mixed with her fear of sexual assault as she considered the nature of the relationship between the girl and the man that smelled like an animal. Had the girl offered a whimper of resistance, Stephanie would have called the police. But her neighbour hadn’t made any sound, as if she were no longer even present in the room across the hall.

The man was still with her too, perhaps lying with her as if they were lovers. Maybe they were lovers entangled insanely in one of those love-hate relationships fuelled by aggression, and the girl had grown used to his smell. Stephanie squeezed her eyes shut at all of the horror in that thought.

She opened her eyes and tried to make sense of the atmosphere that had engulfed her out in the corridor: the cold emptiness, fragranced like an uninhabited wooden space, all around her. But she never came close to an understanding of the scent, beyond entertaining a brief and unconvincing notion that she had smelled stale air rising, but rising from where?

The same bewilderment applied to her attempt to understand the bestial smell. From whom could such a powerful gust of raw and feral maleness have risen? For how long would you have to avoid soap and water to cultivate such an odour?

She wondered if her interpretation of the male presence had been affected by her confrontation with Knacker. Maybe their argument had tainted her into believing she was in danger from men in this building. She didn’t know. Didn’t really know anything about this place, or anyone inside it. All she knew was that she was tense and frightened and anxious and exhausted, with nowhere else to go. But she also realized that no matter how bad her life seemed, the life of someone nearby was probably worse. The memory of the woman’s grief still made her nerves jangle. She imagined being in another country and in the same situation as the girl; a country in which she didn’t know the language and couldn’t even understand an offer of help at her door.

How did I get here?

All she’d wanted was a room and a job. Maybe that was all her neighbour had wanted too.

She told herself that she only needed to get through this night, just one more night, and if she heard anything around her bed, she would grab her most essential bag, call a taxi and go straight to the city centre. She would walk around in the dark until the Bullring opened.

Outside her window the thick mass of foliage that engulfed the neglected garden shook, rustled and sighed in the wind. Stephanie imagined a foul sea lapping against the back of the house, an attempt to reclaim the old bricks, stained cement and creaking timbers, to cover it all with the vines and thorns and skeletal deciduous tangles she could see from her window by daylight. It was an unruly vegetation that rose as high as the top of the fence, on all sides of the garden, like a tidal surge over coastal walls.

Her eyelids gradually became heavy from fatigue, from the near sleepless night before. Eventually she relaxed over the edge of sleep.

But only for short periods, from which she would jerk awake to find herself lying in the same position in a lit room, with the garden’s noise still active beneath her window. Once, as she came round from being half asleep, she was sure the window was open because the thrash and scrape of bushes and tree branches below seemed unpleasantly loud and active around the bed.

The final time she awoke, she realized the room had somehow become dark as she’d dozed.