THIRTY-THREE

Stephanie stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of exaggerated female arousal. Rising in crescendos, the cries would stop just short of a scream, while a bed rattled and groaned beneath what sounded like an eager bestial congress. Either Svetlana or Margaret was having sex, but probably Margaret as she’d seemed prepared for it.

The noise originated from above the ceiling of the room next to Stephanie’s; she could hear the coupling through the wall against which her bed rested. But was Margaret having sex with Knacker, or Fergal, or the third man who had just been on the stairs?

Punter.

Margaret having sex during her first day inside the house was more shocking than the idea of the participation of either of her landlords. And in the very room where the Russian girl had been crying before she had sex with a smelly male presence that didn’t exist.

Stephanie marvelled to the point of shock about how anyone could feel enough desire for that kind of activity inside this building. And yet here was another Eastern European girl, an obvious migrant, and one shaking a bed apart beneath an unknown male presence.

The sounds continued for fifteen minutes, unbroken, before total silence fell over the house like a black sheet dropped across an old and cruel birdcage. The interior appeared quieter than ever, as if the very bricks and mortar were muted in shock at this carnal display.

As Stephanie breathed normally again, she remained curiously exhausted from the tension the sounds had instilled inside her body. She knew all about sex – who didn’t? – and she had been active with Ryan, her third lover. But the noises had made her feel like a child who had stumbled across an explicit film and been shocked to her core by what she had seen. Her reaction to the sounds was not dissimilar to her reaction to the violence she’d overheard in the room next door.

Within five minutes of the noisy intimacy ending, there was movement on the staircase again. Stephanie moved to the door of her room and killed the overhead lights. Peered through the gap and heard Knacker’s voice on the stairwell. ‘Anytime, mate. You just call that number, yeah? Speak wiv me, like.’

When the first floor landing lights clicked on, Stephanie ducked back inside her room, though not before spying a pair of short legs dressed in khaki chinos and brown shoes that descended ahead of Knacker’s training shoes. So the man who had gone upstairs with Knacker had definitely not been Fergal. And this visitor had been with one of the girls, most probably Margaret: ‘You just call that number.’

Stephanie stood behind her door, paralyzed with bewilderment and disoriented with shock. Outside, a car alarm blipped and a vehicle pulled away from the curb, hurriedly. Upstairs, the toilet flushed. Stephanie glimpsed Margaret’s long, tanned legs, that ended in bare feet, coming down the stairs.

She pushed her door closed, locked it as quietly as she was able. When Margaret came out of the bathroom and returned to the second floor a few minutes later, the girl joined Svetlana in the Lithuanian’s room; Stephanie heard the two women talking above her head. She couldn’t make out what they were saying. A television came on. Feet bumped about. A mobile phone burst into dance music.

Knacker thumped up and down the stairs three times, and each time added his voice to the conversation in Svetlana’s room.

Stephanie sat immobile, in her own silence, looking at the black walls and the white ceiling of her room with fresh eyes, hoping hard enough for it to feel like she was praying, that her new suspicions about the nature of the house were not true.