THIRTY-FIVE

By nine p.m. another four ‘clients’ had been entertained by the foreign girls. The volume of anonymous traffic through the house had sustained Stephanie’s anxiety and added a tinge of nausea.

Beneath the window her bags were packed, ready for evacuation, to where she did not know. She’d already made the two most desperate phone calls she’d ever made in her life: one to the YWCA and the second to a women’s refuge. The latter could only take battered women with a police referral; the former had a long waiting list.

And then she’d made her final decision. She would stay until the morning, pack what she could carry and spend the following two nights at a cheap hotel, keep the last forty quid for train fare and food, and return to Stoke on Wednesday to beg Val to take her in. She’d only ever had a desperate and unappealing selection of options since her first night at 82 Edgehill Road. A demoralized inertia, maybe even hope or delusion, had not helped her cause. But she was all out of choices now. She had to leave in the morning.

Stephanie climbed into bed fully clothed. A pair of trainers were in position on the floor beside the bed, ready. One more night. Just one more night.

She lay in bed for hours while cars slowed and pulled away outside 82 Edgehill Road. Sometimes they stopped and their doors slammed. Footsteps occasionally scraped up and down the cement paving of the front path. In the distance the front door of the house opened and closed. Stairs groaned. Girls laughed. Lights clicked on and off. Mobile phones chanted dance music through the ceiling. Knacker bounded up and down the stairs, shepherding, escorting, blagging, forcing a self-satisfied laugh as everything went his way. A preened and prancing cockerel – she imagined the big lips grinning, the heavily lidded, reptilian eyes counting cash, assessing punters. Where was his cousin? Glaring at a ground floor door?

Thoughts of them filled her with a rage so dark, crimson and hot she worried her grinding teeth might snap. When she was clear of the house she’d cancel the new cash card, then call the police and report the prostitution. It was the only thing she looked forward to: revenge.

The last ‘client’ arrived just after ten p.m. At eleven, the thing that visited the girl who didn’t exist in the room next door began to grunt, and the bed in the neighbouring room groaned against the other side of the wall, like a boat loaded with pestilence had just moored and moved on the swell against the thin hull of her privacy.

Earlier, he had been outside her door too.

She’d heard the heavy steps approach from the stairwell. The floor of the corridor directly outside her door had creaked for several minutes as if he were deliberating about which room to enter. When the neighbouring door had clicked open and then slammed shut, Stephanie had felt so grateful she’d breathed hard enough to realize she was panting. But had she opened her door at any point during his visitation, she knew that she would have looked out at an empty, unlit corridor filled with the stench of the unclean, or worse.

But that’s all it is, a smell, and footsteps. They can’t hurt you!

The temperature in her room had since stayed warm, the only blessing she could draw from the disturbance beyond the door of this first floor capsule of light and strained nerves that she occupied and could not escape.

Stephanie slipped the plugs into her ears. Lay on her side facing her lighted room. She thought she’d reached the lowest point in her life a number of times recently, and mostly inside this house. But fathoms of unpleasantness still appeared ready to embrace her. And then there was the renewed contact with Val to come too.

She swore to herself she would not sink any deeper. Dabbed her eyes with a tissue until they closed for sleep.