TWO

Stephanie sat in the pre-dawn darkness with the duvet grasped under her chin. Through the open curtains the sky turned from black-blue to mackerel-grey. The bedside light was switched on. The overhead light was switched on. In the palm of one hand her mobile phone was cloudy with the heat from her tight grip. On the bedside cabinet the small travel clock clicked towards six a.m.

When she’d turned the bedside light on, there had been no one sitting on her bed and no one in her room. When she’d summoned the courage to look under the bed, she’d seen large balls of greyish dust on painted floorboards, but no plastic bag. Her door key was still hanging from the lock of the secured door. The sash windows were closed and held tight with metal clasps. Only her clothes occupied the walnut-veneered wardrobe. She couldn’t be sure that someone had actually interfered with her bags during the night either, because she’d left them unzipped and gaping before she went to bed.

The scratching under the bed must have stopped when the light came on, though she couldn’t recall the exact moment the noise ceased. When she put an end to the darkness there had been no voice in the fireplace either.

The fireplace grate and surround were made from metal, thickly coated in black paint and dusty. The chimney flue was no more than a few inches across. She’d moved her ear close to the fireplace and heard what sounded like a distant wind, nothing more.

Stephanie looked at the walls around her more closely. They had not been decorated in years, not since the yellowing paper, carrying the impression of bamboo stalks and leaves, had been pasted upon them. The room was as depressing as the others she had lived in since leaving home; small capsules of space left stranded by the onward surge of life, untouched by modernization and a source of revulsion for those of means. These rooms were now home to those who were only one more misfortune away from homelessness, and so close to dropping out of the statistics of the unemployed and into the statistics of those with no fixed address, or those reported missing.

Stephanie squeezed the duvet until her nails pressed through the fabric and hurt the palms of her hands.

Thoughts of the MDMA she’d once taken came back to her with the full weight and pressure of an accusation, as did memories of the skunk weed she’d smoked a few times, and the magic mushroom tea she’d once drunk – all three years ago in her first year at college. She wondered if those brief and fledgling experiments with drugs had been the cause of the hallucinations; some kind of delayed reaction.

And as she sat in bed, waiting for the morning, it began to seem a long time since she had woken in a room loud with intrusive sound. Most of her mind now insisted that the experience was part of the indistinct nightmare, that had continued in the form of footsteps crossing the room, followed by the impression of someone sitting on the bed. All of it could have been imagined.

Must have been.

But what she had so recently heard in the dark didn’t feel like the lingering effects of a dream. After she had slapped the lights on and finished her inspection of her sealed room, she’d thought about ghosts for a long time. And she remembered a story her dad had told her. Long before her natural mother died, her dad told her that his own mother, Stephanie’s paternal grandmother, once appeared beside his bed and asked, ‘Are you coming?’ The following morning her dad was called on the phone by his sister to say their mother had died the night before, in her bed, in her home, on the other side of town. The story had enthralled Stephanie, but also given her a hope that death was not the end. What she’d just endured made her wish that death was, in fact, final.

Her dad also used to call her ‘my miracle girl’ because she’d come close to death as a toddler after swallowing seawater. She had no memory of the incident, but had briefly wondered, when she was small, if nearly dying had made her special. Because at the funerals of both her grandfathers, in a way she still could not explain, she remembered being engulfed by a sense of them around her, and inside her head, at the terrible moment their coffins rolled behind the red curtains in the same crematorium chapel in Stoke.

But this was the sum total of her experience with the supernatural. Stephanie hadn’t watched a horror film since she was sixteen and she wasn’t religious. She’d always assumed she needed to sort out her place in this world before she thought of the next.

Looking back on the episode that had so recently occurred in her new room, she was struck by a notion that two very different places had opened onto each other, or come together.

The sky turned from mackerel to white-grey.

Exhaustion lay heavy inside her body, but the fatigue helped the shock dwindle. Listless memories of the previous day drifted through her mind as the sun rose.

There was a blister on the little toe of her right foot and her calf muscles bulged with aches; both reminders of the three trips she had made on foot from a tiny rented room in another sub-divided house in Handsworth to this one. She’d carried her bags three miles through quiet, identical streets choked with parked cars. Her new room was the same price but much bigger than her last place – a room she had called the cell. She’d nearly gone mad inside ‘the cell’ during her first few months in Birmingham.

Weariness from the move and from the weekend’s two twelve-hour shifts, working as a steward in the reception of a caravan show, had put her to sleep before ten p.m. She’d awoken more frightened than she could remember between two and three. In one hour, un-refreshed and tense, she would need to leave for work.

How did I get here? Why is this happening to me?

She ran through the seemingly ordinary sequence of events that led to her sitting up in bed, terrified and praying for the dawn light to hurry into the sky. The day before, an overly friendly man she had found it hard to like, a Mr McGuire, or ‘Knacker’, had guided her round 82 Edgehill Road: an old, neglected, but otherwise ordinary house with rooms he let out to lodgers scratching around the bottom of the rental market.

Knacker was the landlord and lived on the top floor in a private flat. He had shown her this large room with high ceilings that she had been so excited to find at forty pounds per week. It had been advertised on a card in the window of a local grocer’s: BIG ROOM. 40 QUID FOR WEAK. GIRLS ONLY. SHARD BAFROOM, KICHEN. V CLEEN. There had been a mobile phone number too, and she had grinned at the misspellings and imagined the house was let by migrants for whom English was still a mystifying second language. Many of the big Victorian houses in the area were sub-divided into bedsits. Her ex-boyfriend, Ryan, who was working in Coventry, knew Birmingham well and had said Perry Barr was mostly an Asian area, but increasingly popular with Eastern European migrants and students from the City of Birmingham University. He’d said it was really cheap, and really cheap was all she had the budget for. But at least this place was only let to females, and in the most deprived areas of town that was an asset among such unappealing pickings.

There was nothing extraordinary about the circumstances of her being here; anyone in the same position could have ended up in the same room and, therefore, experienced the same thing. But sitting in a strange bed, in an unfathomable building, made her feel that her life resembled a landscape pitted with bad decisions and unfortunate situations created by circumstances she had no control over. And the craters of hasty choices, or impacts made by fate, were interspersed with the shadows of anxiety about her immediate future.

Did she always bring these situations upon herself? Her stepmother had always said as much. Bitch. But how is it done, how is control over your life possible when you have no money, and no prospect of getting more than a little to survive on? To exist on was closer to the truth. Because that is what you are doing: existing, not living.

A familiar suspicion revived itself: that she hadn’t even started in life and was still outside it somehow, looking in, drifting, or being blown about its fringes, while trapped in places where anything could happen to her.

Regret had become tangible overnight and was now a lump in her throat and a cold weight in her tummy; it made her face literally feel too long. Taking the room had been impulsive, as was handing over £320 in cash as a deposit and first month’s rent to a man who made her wary.

She now seriously regretted not calling Ryan and asking if he knew anything about the street, or even to come down to get his sense of the landlord. She hadn’t spoken to Ryan in a month, but didn’t know anyone else well enough to ask them to perform such a task on her behalf. Her friends were mostly at home with their parents, applying for jobs, retaking A Levels and signing on in Stoke.

Now that she wanted to leave the house and move on again after only one night, Stephanie worried she might not get her deposit back from Knacker McGuire. She would need the deposit to pay for the next room, or there would be no next room. Until she was paid for the temp work she had this week, she was down to fourteen pounds and change. Fourteen pounds and thirty-two pence to be exact, because when you are skint you do count every penny.

According to the text message she’d received from the temp agency yesterday afternoon, while she lugged her bags between the two houses, she would spend the next three days giving out food samples in a shopping centre. So when today’s eight-hour shift finished, unless she retrieved her deposit and found a new room that didn’t require a reference, she would have to return to this house. To this very room. There was nowhere else for her to go.

She didn’t know what to do. Stephanie cried as quietly as she could, her wet face pressed into the duvet. She thought of the woman she’d heard in the night.

House of tears.

The sky’s brief glow was smothered by charcoal clouds full of rain. She would have to get ready for work soon.

At ten minutes past six the world reinserted itself into her isolation and introversion. Hot water pipes and the solitary radiator beside her bed gurgled reassuringly. The air about her face warmed. In the distance of the house, downstairs she thought, a door closed. Soon after a toilet flushed. In the room behind hers, at the end of the corridor and overlooking the street, the heavy footsteps of a stranger announced themselves and remained an active presence until her alarm sounded at half past six.

In the cluttered concrete yard beneath her windows, a dog stirred and moved its short chain. Far off, a police car raced through the dawn streets. The dog barked a gruff, angry retort, then whistled through its nose and fell silent.

Stephanie got out of bed and found her robe, her towel and her washbag. The rug was crispy beneath the soles of her bare feet. She unlocked the door and felt her skin prickle and shrink in the cold air of the unlit corridor outside her room. By the light that fell from the doorway of her room, she watched the other two doors on her floor. The occupants had fallen silent. No light bled from beneath their doors. She did not know who lived in the rooms around her, and that ignorance made her feel small and vulnerable and nervous. She’d not long stopped crying, but her eyes burned again.

She looked at the fly-specked lightshade above her, noted the forlorn silence of the unlit stairwell. The place was a refuge for transients like her. The dismal corridor seemed to confirm that this was where she belonged now: a place of indifference, anonymous neighbours, coughs in the night from gruff throats, creaks of worn bedframes, and televisions murmuring behind closed doors; hidden histories, disparate accents and alien languages, the awkwardness of meeting strangers in shabby corridors with dressing gowns tucked under their chins. This was a place of stale air and overfull bins, compromised privacy, petty thefts, and new faces as worn but disingenuously watchful as the last crowd.

She’d seen it all before in the six months since she’d left home. Not yet twenty and her eyes should never have looked upon this side of life. If her dad was still alive he’d have been furious with Val, her stepmother, who’d thrown her out. ‘You don’t want to find yourself down there. Down there with the rest of them,’ he’d said while she studied for her A levels, specifically to escape a home traumatized by her stepmother’s personality disorder – an instability that had raged daily beneath the roof of Val’s house until Stephanie was gone from it. There was no going back there.

Yesterday, when she’d asked about the other tenants in the house, Knacker had sniffed and said, ‘Uvver girls. Stoodents mostly. All kinds, Powls – all kinds bin in ’ere over the years.’ Knacker had come up from Essex to take care of his family home, but claimed to be a Brummy originally, and constantly sniffed up his long, bony nose during the interview. ‘All over. Bin all over, me. Like to move around, yeah? Spain, you name it. Bin everywhere, me. Done it all.’

Though he hadn’t said much specifically about himself or the house, he had asked her a lot of questions. With hindsight, once he had the deposit, she wondered if he’d actually been evasive about the other tenants, while she’d mistaken his brief non-committal replies for disinterest. His big washed-out eyes had slid all over her but darted away when she looked directly at him.

She didn’t want to think about his face. She didn’t want to be here. Not for the first time since she left Stoke, with her stepmother ranting behind her, she asked herself, What have you done?