EIGHTEEN

The space was narrow, dim and lined with old grey pipes. In parts, a furry cladding was wrapped around the pipes and secured with electrical tape that was so old the tape had crisped and begun to peel away.

The walls Stephanie’s shoulders squeezed through were made of plasterboard. Some words had been written on them with chalk. Stephanie read ‘Misha is a slag’, and hurried past to follow her stepmother through the tunnel. Val turned her head and said, ‘Will you keep up. You’ve already made me late!’

Stephanie found herself to be a girl again, and she recognized her clothes from the faded pictures in the family photograph albums; pictures mostly taken at that unhappy time when her stepmum made a first unwelcome appearance into her young life. Back then, Val had been all smiles and permed red hair with matching red spectacle frames – which is how she looked right now. And despite her size, Val had no trouble moving through the narrow space.

Stephanie worried her stepmother was pulling too far away. Her own quilted coat kept getting stuck on things – a pipe bracket, a timber joist.

Val disappeared round a corner at the end of the narrow space.

Stephanie shuffled sideways to reach the end of the passage. At the turn the gap sloped into darkness. The space between these walls was just as narrow as before, but Stephanie could not see or hear her stepmother inside the darkness any longer.

She didn’t have much time to query Val’s disappearance because her own feet slipped down the passage and she batted her hands against the walls that were now made of galvanized metal and offered nothing to grab hold of. Her sphincter tingled as her feet slid faster and faster across the metal floor. She wondered if she should sit down before she fell.

Stephanie slipped into a room with dark brown and orange wallpaper, a big floral velour settee and two matching armchairs. The lightshades were made from pearlescent glass bowls. On the circular coffee table was a stack of magazines. The top one was called Fiesta and a woman with lots of make-up and big hair was sucking one of her fingers. Stephanie looked away.

Her stepmother stood before the window, talking to herself with her hands clasped over her face.

‘Where’s Daddy?’ Stephanie asked Val.

The door behind opened. An elderly man came into the room. He wore a black three piece suit and had a long white face and near black eyes. He carried a large wooden box and placed it upon the magazines. A purple velvet curtain hung over the front of the box as if the box was a tiny stage.

Stephanie didn’t like the box. It smelled of a museum she had once been to with her dad; inside the museum there had been a long room containing bits of people in rags, their remains squeezed inside wooden boxes that looked like canoes.

A distant doorbell chimed; it was the sound of her family home’s bell when she was a child. She hadn’t thought of it once until now.

‘They’re here,’ the man in the black suit said and left the room.

When Stephanie turned around her stepmother was no longer inside the room, which was now entirely black and lit by a line of candles on a sideboard made from dark wood. A black curtain hung over the windows. Even the furniture had changed. There was now a large dining table with carven legs and four chairs.

Stephanie could not see her feet in the darkness and ran across the room and through the door the man had left open. As she ran, the candles on the sideboard winked out, one by one, until she felt she was fleeing a nothingness that swelled like a cold wave behind her back.

She ran into another room, a pink bedroom with floral bed-linen, pink curtains and big pink roses printed on the wallpaper. The only window was fussy with net curtains. Under her feet the carpet was thick and freshly scented with a cleaning product.

On the far side of the bed she could hear rustling plastic, like someone was on their hands and knees and rummaging inside a box full of polythene.

She said, ‘I want to go now. Will you get my dad?’

From the floor beside the bed someone stood up and said, ‘What’s the time?’ They were covered by a near opaque polythene sheet. Where her naked breasts and thighs pressed against the plastic, the woman’s skin was brownish and mottled with liver spots. There was no hair on her head.

Stephanie sat up in bed and inhaled sharply, then fell to panting and realized she must have been holding her breath while asleep.

The person inside the polythene faded to an outline against the thick black curtains, like an after-image vanishing from her retina. The definition and clarity of the mirrored wardrobe, the furniture and the spotlights smarted against her startled vision.

There was nobody inside her room, which was still lit.

With an incalculable relief, she knew she had only been dreaming and was awake in the same room she had fallen asleep inside, but the nightmare had shaken her enough to make her feel like a child while she dreamed.

Stephanie looked at her alarm clock. Midnight.

No, that was too early. She couldn’t have been asleep for only an hour.

In the room next to her own someone was talking, a young woman’s voice, one too muffled for her to understand what the girl was saying. A recollection of the footsteps from an hour or so earlier brought a tremble to Stephanie’s bottom lip.

She couldn’t bear the idea of going back to sleep because it was taking most of her conscious mind to suppress what she remembered from the nightmare.

Stephanie climbed out of bed and wrapped herself in her towelling dressing gown and stood by the door. Unlocked it quietly. Feeling as uncomfortable as if she were looking at the night from inside a lit room, by moving her door wider she increased the amount of light falling into the passage outside. The corridor was empty. The room beside hers, from which she could hear the talking girl, was unlit.

Stephanie clawed her fingers down her face and left them over her mouth.

Not again. Not again. Not again.

Staring into the half-light of the corridor, she could just make out the landing at the end. Beyond this area was the stairwell, but it was too dark to see that part of the house with any clarity. And while peering down there Stephanie fought the instinctive notion of an alteration in the air temperature, a perceptible lowering from cool to cold.

Beyond the rear of the building, Knacker’s dog began to bark.

Soon the cold air pricked her face and numbed her bare feet. Gripped by an apprehension that she was about to see movement down by the unlit stairs, Stephanie pushed her door shut. The sense of a profound stillness in the corridor, and the ache of solitude that seemed to pass from it and into her stiffening body, didn’t pass with the closing of her door.

This can’t go on.

Feeling flickers of anger at the situation, at her continuing powerless within it, Stephanie yanked open her door, left her room and stood outside her neighbour’s door. She knocked. ‘Hello, Miss. Miss?’

No answer.

Stephanie stepped away from the door and looked nervously towards the unlit stairwell, unwilling to acknowledge why she kept looking down there, while her imagination persisted in its attempt to insert the idea that a figure was standing on the stairs, watching her from inside a concealing darkness.

The voice of the girl in the neighbouring room thickened with tears until she began a pitiful sobbing, as though the woman had just heard terrible news. Stephanie even hoped that her knock at the door was the cause of the surge of grief, because that would mean there was an actual living occupant inside the room.

‘If you don’t want to talk, I understand. I just want to help. That’s all.’

The girl sniffed, then whimpered. She never spoke, but her reaction felt like a response. A minimal response that would not develop.

Stephanie returned to her room, closed her door and sat on the bed. She stared at herself in the mirrored doors of the wardrobe opposite. She looked dreadful and would soon have two black eyes from lack of sleep. Her face also appeared as if it were incapable of a smile; she looked older, worn down, undernourished. She covered her face with her hands and listened to the sound of the girl next door, weeping inside what appeared to be an empty room.

Stephanie climbed back into bed and shuffled closer to the wall to listen to the girl. It didn’t matter if nothing here made sense; she was just so tired. She didn’t care any more. Just like the girl next door.

Stephanie put her hand on the wall. She wiped her eyes and said, ‘Dad. Make it stop. Help me. Dad, please.’

The girl kept crying.

Eventually, Stephanie rolled over and closed her eyes.