FIFTEEN

Stephanie rushed a shower and moved her head out of the cascade of water every few seconds to look over the side of the bath tub. Just in case.

But no one muttered beneath her feet.

It felt better, felt safer, to shower and wash her hair before she went to bed, rather than in the morning before work. She had no idea how she would feel by the time the sun rose and whether she would have the courage to wash herself. She refused to go another day without a shower and the water’s heat was a small comfort she was greedy for.

She’d not been able to look up the stairwell as she’d walked down the first floor passage to the bathroom, but repeatedly reminded herself that she now had a different room on a different floor of the house, desperately wringing as much reassurance as possible from the thin new truth.

She felt lightheaded and still hadn’t eaten. Back in her room she had crisps, a Double Decker chocolate bar, some supermarket sandwiches in a plastic carton – half price because they expired today. Something she’d snatched up before catching the bus home, unable to face the dirty kitchen and microwave preparation.

Home? Don’t call it that. It is not home.

When one of her colleagues at the shopping centre had said, ‘Thank God it’s nearly Friday’, and then recited her plans for the weekend that seemed to be entirely constructed out of home, boyfriend, friends, home, boyfriend, friends, each word had struck Stephanie with pangs of envy that wilted to a sadness as thick as the mumps inside her throat. She’d needed to busy herself inside her rucksack, looking for a bottle of water that she didn’t need, so the other two girls didn’t see the tears welling in her eyes.

Home. She had nothing that resembled a home, which in turn reminded her of her stepmother on that final day: the bleached and lined face, the lips sucked into the mouth, the jaw trembling and eyelids flickering, the complexion turning red, but then so bloodless at the point of no self-restraint, while her eyes purpled with rage before the screaming and shaking and slapping. It was something she’d seen too many times since her father died: the ranting that could continue all night.

She recalled Christmas. Val had screamed at her, through a door, for three hours without cease, until her voice gave out. Stephanie had pushed her bed against the door to keep the maniac outside. But Val had run downstairs and used a paring knife to cut Stephanie’s clothes that were drying on a rack, before snapping her CDs in half. Val had then smashed every plate and glass in the kitchen until her fury puttered into sobs.

Against her will she revisited the most enduring memory of her youth, when her dad had held her stepmother by the shoulders and demanded to know what she’d done with Stephanie’s guinea pig. The next day he’d taken his thirteen-year-old daughter to Dawlish for a week, where they’d felt like crying all of the time, and sometimes did, with their heads together.

Home.

Her plans for the weekend revolved around adding Pay-as-you-go credit to her phone, and doing sums to work out how little she would need to spend on food and bus fare to scrape another month’s rent together.

The other two girls she’d worked with already had jobs lined up for the following week: modelling, or standing by a sports car in another shopping centre, wearing red satin shorts and trying to sell raffle tickets. But Stephanie still hadn’t heard from the agency, and all the girls used the same firm.

Shivering, she switched off the shower, climbed out of the bath and yanked her towel from the radiator. The radiator was hot and her towel was warm. She clutched it around her shoulders and nearly wept from the pleasure it gave her.

The room was cold again. She looked to the window and wouldn’t have been surprised to see the glass encased in ice.

‘What is my name?’

‘Oh God, no. No. No. No,’ she whispered into the steam that hung like a mist about her face.

‘What is my name?’ There it was again, a voice rising from where she had just been standing in the bath. And the notion that she had just woken someone was hard to shift.

Stephanie opened the bathroom door and darted outside. Steam from her shower drifted out behind her and into the unlit corridor. The darkness of the house seemed vast.

The bathroom gradually took shape through the thinning steam: speckled mirror, grubby sink unit, grimy windows, red carpet flecked with bits, bath tub. And out of this dismal space came the voice again.

‘. . . before here . . . that time. Nowhere . . . to where the other . . . the cold . . . is my name? . . . I can’t . . .’

Stephanie’s thoughts scrabbled through a nonsense of panic; chaos filled with a child-like begging for all to be as it was and not like this.

A recording?

This was the same thing she’d heard yesterday morning. Only it was louder now. So it could indeed be a recording. A trick. A joke. Something – some device – was under the bath and playing the same recording. Maybe this was just someone’s attempt to freak the new girl out.

‘What is my name?’

Stephanie strode inside the bathroom and stamped a foot on the floor. ‘Stop it! Stop it now!’ Stamped her foot again and didn’t care who heard her. ‘Enough!’

‘I . . . don’t . . . can you find . . . where . . . where . . . this . . . am I?’

The speaker, a girl, a teenager maybe, began to cry. And so did Stephanie as a terrible feeling of fear and misery enshrouded and then seeped through her until she was saturated with anguish.

But not her own anguish.

The grim sensations that occupied the physical space of the bathroom did not belong to her. With what presence of mind she retained, Stephanie was certain of this: the tangible misery of the room was contagious, unnatural and fast acting.

Stephanie lowered herself to her hands and knees and crawled across the hard, dry carpet towards the side of the bath. ‘Who are you? Can you hear me? Please, tell me?’