TWENTY-FIVE

On the cold, wet path outside the house, upon which she stood in bare feet, Stephanie bent double and sucked hard at the night air. Her heart thumped thick inside her ears. She feared she was going to be sick.

Before throwing herself out of her room, and then the house, she’d possessed the presence of mind to pull her coat over her underwear, but had forgotten to force her feet into the unlaced trainers beside the bed.

Clutching her phone in a trembling hand, she worried she might drop the handset and quickly cupped it with both hands.

Rain vigorously speckled her face and bare legs. She stepped back to the front door hoping for cover, but a thick stream of water spattered the concrete and splashed her legs. The guttering high above was holed.

The cold was sobering.

Beyond the small metal gate between the ink-black mass of the encroaching privet hedges, she could see three houses across the road; all of the front windows were unlit. Some of the curtains hadn’t been drawn in the upper windows. The houses and those who lived in them suggested disinterest in her plight. The horrible man who lived next door would not be safe to go to.

What could she actually say to anyone about what she had just experienced?

As she’d run through the house to the front door she had told herself she would call the police. But now she was outside, the urgency of the idea shrank inside her. What would she say to them? A ghost had climbed into her bed? People she could not see were coming into her room? A girl in an empty room next door had been beaten? Her landlords intimidated her?

‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.’ Her body trembled as her breathing shuddered in and out of her still heaving chest.

She should run right now, go somewhere.

Where?

Some kind of shelter for the homeless? A police cell would be better than that room. Maybe if she told the truth to the police she would be committed and sedated in a hospital. She seriously considered it as an option until the solid tangibility of the street and the great black house behind her, and the physical discomfort of the cold and wet, blunted the spike of her shock and drained the swamping terror that had compelled her to flee the room and stand outside the house like a frightened child stands outside the closed door of its parents’ bedroom after a nightmare.

She looked at the time on her phone: two a.m. Three hours until the sky lightened. If she could stay awake that long, and then gather her bags and call one of the girls back home, and call a taxi to New Street Station, then this could all end. Three more hours.

Stephanie wiped the rain off her face, turned around and went back inside the dark house.