TWENTY-NINE

Dusk was swallowed by nightfall. The time crept towards ten p.m.

Stephanie remained upon her bed, lying in the same position she had flopped into after Bekka’s text message had come in at eight. She’d already packed her bags ready for evacuation, checked her train timetable, and then paced for hours waiting for Bekka to call. But the communication was better disclosed by text than phone call; an easier medium when the news is bad. Bekka’s boyfriend ‘didn’t think it was a good idea for you to crash’ and they ‘didn’t have room anyway’.

The rejection made Stephanie feel ashamed, as if a ridiculous, embarrassing request had been rebuffed. Within her disappointment was also dread, like a doctor had just imparted terrible news. For a while an overwhelming sense of abandonment had made her feel so cold her jaw had trembled.

Straight after her request for charity had been rejected by the last friend she had appealed to, Stephanie briefly considered putting a call in to her stepmother. An idea swiftly killed in infancy when she realized the ashes of a bridge that badly burned might never be reassembled, even on a temporary basis. And it was already late enough for Val to be drunk, maybe with her boyfriend, Tony, if he had come back since Stephanie had left home. Val would now be half-conscious as white wine swam around antidepressants in an otherwise empty stomach. There was no point trying to communicate with the woman any day after four in the afternoon.

Her demoralized thoughts continued to trickle down, until they became sluggish and vague, at around the same time the girl in the empty room next door began to cry, at eleven p.m.

Stephanie retrieved her carrier bag from the floor beside her bed and removed the packet of earplugs: USED BY FORMULA ONE RACING DRIVERS, or so the packaging claimed. This had been an idea she’d had in town, to cope with the disturbances if she was forced to spend another night here.

She thought about going up one floor and knocking on the door of the room directly above her own, which must now be Svetlana’s room, to ask the girl to come down and see if she could hear the crying in the room too. A witness to the disturbance would be the final assurance that she was not suffering from an onset of schizophrenia.

But she decided against paying a visit to the new tenant because the second floor was her least favourite part of the building, was too close to the landlord’s flat, and she had a strong suspicion that Knacker would disapprove of any contact between them. Two dissatisfied minds could easily form a conspiracy, or a resistance. And she could not bear the thought of inciting further contact with either of her landlords for the limited time she remained in the building.

At least Svetlana had remained in residence despite the confrontation with Knacker. She and the new girl were strangers, both disgruntled and wary, but there was safety in numbers. They were witnesses to each other’s presence, and the idea of Svetlana upstairs was profoundly reassuring.

Intermittently, through the evening, Stephanie had heard the girl’s feet bump through the ceiling while the Lithuanian barked into her phone in her first language. But as with Stephanie’s observation of many Europeans, it was hard to tell, by the tone and volume of a voice alone, whether an argument was in progress or if a grievance was being expressed; on a school trip to Rome she had seen people order coffee in a way that made her recoil.

Svetlana’s television still murmured, and whoever spoke onscreen sounded as if they were underwater with their mouth full of food. The idea that she may no longer be the primary recipient of Knacker’s bullying, or the focus of his shakedown operation, also provided a guilty relief. Svetlana had suggested that another girl’s arrival was imminent too – a Margaret, or Margereet – who might provide an additional buffer between her and the two cousins.

If she could cope with the other things, she promised herself she could get through until Monday. If she was offered work Tuesday to Friday, and if the new female tenants remained, she wondered if staying put for a week, while saving her wages for a new room, was feasible. By next Friday she might even have enough money to legitimately move to a new room. Her bank card would be here too.

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday . . . through ’til Friday meant six more nights in this building. But the anticipation of just one felt like a penal sentence involving mental torture that was administered arbitrarily.

Eyeing the empty side of her bed nervously, Stephanie slipped the plugs into her ears and let the spongy devices expand until her hearing was engulfed by the thump of her own blood. She placed her phone handset on the mattress between the two pillows. Finally, she slipped the duvet up to her chin and tried to preoccupy her mind with thoughts of what she could do on Sunday, in the city centre, to fill the day away from the building.