DAY FIVE

THIRTY-ONE

‘No! Not up there! Never!’

Panting like she’d just broken across the finish line of a sprint, Stephanie came awake sitting up, her head thrown back between her shoulders. She stayed that way, staring at the blank ceiling, until her heartbeat slowed.

An avalanche of horrible clips from the nightmare – another one – sluiced with jumbled recollections about the house and what had climbed into her bed two nights ago. She rocked forward to clutch her face. Checked the time by peering between two fingers. Midday.

What?

Not possible. The curtains were too thick to provide any sense of the world outside. She scrambled across to the window and tore the drapes apart. Dull light shone through the metal bars and grimy panes of glass.

She’d been asleep for twelve hours. Had not set her alarm because she expected to wake, or be awoken, much earlier. Above her head a distant mobile phone ringtone chanted dance music before being cut short by Svetlana’s muffled voice.

What had she been dreaming of? Hanged women . . . that face she could still see, so pale, the lips blue, the eyes alight with life, pleading. She doubted she would ever forget it, ever recover from seeing it so vividly.

A boy in a hat. A woman by a tunnel, or a metal shed; she wasn’t sure what it had been. A siren. A dark room. People sat around a table . . . an old hat, braces, grey hair . . . something moving under the table? She’d been choking on something stuffed inside her mouth. Candle light. A box that looked familiar. Was it? Her body floating and unable to get back down to the floor, going up and up . . .

Jumbled dark nonsense of dreamtime. The house was driving her crazy.

Stephanie collapsed into the pillows. Thoughts of going out into the wet, inhospitable street, and waiting for a bus in an uncovered shelter with litter about her feet, of tramping around vaguely familiar streets and closed doors, trying not to spend money, filled her with fatigue in advance of even climbing out of bed.

‘I can’t. I just can’t.’

When the panic of the nightmare subsided, the small space created inside her mind buzzed with a new anxiety about money, CVs, application forms, that drove her into a weariness so profound she wondered if she would ever be able to move again.

She took a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed it against her eyes. Then crawled back under her duvet and lay still, in silence, and stared at the watery grey light about the window and allowed it to drift inside her.

She remained immobile for over an hour, until her need for a cup of strong coffee and to pee compelled her to move her legs and swing them over the side of the bed. She would have to go out to buy milk. Perhaps reaching the shop at the end of the road would be manageable.