No One Gets Out Alive (10 page)

She went back inside her room and retrieved her phone from the floor beside the bed. The time was twenty to eleven. So she hadn’t even been asleep for thirty minutes and immediately felt
cheated by time; she dearly wished that dawn was only minutes away.

Stephanie returned to the door of her room and narrowed the gap, but left it ajar in the doorframe so she could better hear the neighbour come out of the bathroom. She was sure it was a young
woman because of the lightness of the step.

She sat on the end of her bed to wait for the bathroom door to reopen; waited long enough to become uncomfortable with her own door remaining ajar for so long. While she waited, Stephanie
pondered what the woman could be doing in the bathroom.
Shower? Bath? Constipation?
She waited another twenty minutes before becoming impatient, and then she marched through the passageway
to the bathroom. She would not sleep tonight until she knew who was living in the room next door.

Outside of the bathroom, Stephanie cleared her throat. ‘Excuse me? Miss? I wonder how long you will be. I need to use the bathroom.’

There was no answer.

Stephanie knocked on the door.

No response.

Stephanie turned the plastic door handle. It was unlocked and opened onto an unlit room. Behind her, the landing light clicked out.

She turned in panic. Rushed across the landing in near darkness to flail at the wall with her hands, but could not find the switch that was somewhere beside the open kitchen door. She shuffled
back to the outline of the bathroom doorframe, yanked at the light cord and lit up the empty, silent room.

Where are you?

This wasn’t possible. She’d heard her neighbour’s feet and the bathroom door close.

The other bedrooms were further up the corridor towards the front of the house. So had the girl crept back to her room and re-entered it without Stephanie hearing?

Not possible.

Stephanie hurriedly returned to her own room. Closed the door and locked it. She climbed back into bed and stared at the television without noticing what was on the screen.

Within minutes footsteps padded down the corridor, from the direction of the bathroom. Stephanie did not move. She held her breath so as to not make any sound at all.

The door of the room next door opened and closed.

The space was narrow, dim and lined with old grey pipes. In parts, a furry cladding was wrapped around the pipes and secured with electrical tape that was so old the tape had
crisped and begun to peel away.

The walls Stephanie’s shoulders squeezed through were made of plasterboard. Some words had been written on them with chalk. Stephanie read ‘Misha is a slag’, and hurried past
to follow her stepmother through the tunnel. Val turned her head and said, ‘Will you keep up. You’ve already made me late!’

Stephanie found herself to be a girl again, and she recognized her clothes from the faded pictures in the family photograph albums; pictures mostly taken at that unhappy time when her stepmum
made a first unwelcome appearance into her young life. Back then, Val had been all smiles and permed red hair with matching red spectacle frames – which is how she looked right now. And
despite her size, Val had no trouble moving through the narrow space.

Stephanie worried her stepmother was pulling too far away. Her own quilted coat kept getting stuck on things – a pipe bracket, a timber joist.

Val disappeared round a corner at the end of the narrow space.

Stephanie shuffled sideways to reach the end of the passage. At the turn the gap sloped into darkness. The space between these walls was just as narrow as before, but Stephanie could not see or
hear her stepmother inside the darkness any longer.

She didn’t have much time to query Val’s disappearance because her own feet slipped down the passage and she batted her hands against the walls that were now made of galvanized metal
and offered nothing to grab hold of. Her sphincter tingled as her feet slid faster and faster across the metal floor. She wondered if she should sit down before she fell.

Stephanie slipped into a room with dark brown and orange wallpaper, a big floral velour settee and two matching armchairs. The lightshades were made from pearlescent glass bowls. On the circular
coffee table was a stack of magazines. The top one was called
Fiesta
and a woman with lots of make-up and big hair was sucking one of her fingers. Stephanie looked away.

Her stepmother stood before the window, talking to herself with her hands clasped over her face.

‘Where’s Daddy?’ Stephanie asked Val.

The door behind opened. An elderly man came into the room. He wore a black three piece suit and had a long white face and near black eyes. He carried a large wooden box and placed it upon the
magazines. A purple velvet curtain hung over the front of the box as if the box was a tiny stage.

Stephanie didn’t like the box. It smelled of a museum she had once been to with her dad; inside the museum there had been a long room containing bits of people in rags, their remains
squeezed inside wooden boxes that looked like canoes.

A distant doorbell chimed; it was the sound of her family home’s bell when she was a child. She hadn’t thought of it once until now.

‘They’re here,’ the man in the black suit said and left the room.

When Stephanie turned around her stepmother was no longer inside the room, which was now entirely black and lit by a line of candles on a sideboard made from dark wood. A black curtain hung over
the windows. Even the furniture had changed. There was now a large dining table with carven legs and four chairs.

Stephanie could not see her feet in the darkness and ran across the room and through the door the man had left open. As she ran, the candles on the sideboard winked out, one by one, until she
felt she was fleeing a nothingness that swelled like a cold wave behind her back.

She ran into another room, a pink bedroom with floral bed-linen, pink curtains and big pink roses printed on the wallpaper. The only window was fussy with net curtains. Under her feet the carpet
was thick and freshly scented with a cleaning product.

On the far side of the bed she could hear rustling plastic, like someone was on their hands and knees and rummaging inside a box full of polythene.

She said, ‘I want to go now. Will you get my dad?’

From the floor beside the bed someone stood up and said, ‘What’s the time?’ They were covered by a near opaque polythene sheet. Where her naked breasts and thighs pressed
against the plastic, the woman’s skin was brownish and mottled with liver spots. There was no hair on her head.

Stephanie sat up in bed and inhaled sharply, then fell to panting and realized she must have been holding her breath while asleep.

The person inside the polythene faded to an outline against the thick black curtains, like an after-image vanishing from her retina. The definition and clarity of the mirrored wardrobe, the
furniture and the spotlights smarted against her startled vision.

There was nobody inside her room, which was still lit.

With an incalculable relief, she knew she had only been dreaming and was awake in the same room she had fallen asleep inside, but the nightmare had shaken her enough to make her feel like a
child while she dreamed.

Stephanie looked at her alarm clock. Midnight.

No, that was too early.
She couldn’t have been asleep for only an hour.

In the room next to her own someone was talking, a young woman’s voice, one too muffled for her to understand what the girl was saying. A recollection of the footsteps from an hour or so
earlier brought a tremble to Stephanie’s bottom lip.

She couldn’t bear the idea of going back to sleep because it was taking most of her conscious mind to suppress what she remembered from the nightmare.

Stephanie climbed out of bed and wrapped herself in her towelling dressing gown and stood by the door. Unlocked it quietly. Feeling as uncomfortable as if she were looking at the night from
inside a lit room, by moving her door wider she increased the amount of light falling into the passage outside. The corridor was empty. The room beside hers, from which she could hear the talking
girl, was unlit.

Stephanie clawed her fingers down her face and left them over her mouth.

Not again. Not again. Not again.

Staring into the half-light of the corridor, she could just make out the landing at the end. Beyond this area was the stairwell, but it was too dark to see that part of the house with any
clarity. And while peering down there Stephanie fought the instinctive notion of an alteration in the air temperature, a perceptible lowering from cool to cold.

Beyond the rear of the building, Knacker’s dog began to bark.

Soon the cold air pricked her face and numbed her bare feet. Gripped by an apprehension that she was about to see movement down by the unlit stairs, Stephanie pushed her door shut. The sense of
a profound stillness in the corridor, and the ache of solitude that seemed to pass from it and into her stiffening body, didn’t pass with the closing of her door.

This can’t go on.

Feeling flickers of anger at the situation, at her continuing powerless within it, Stephanie yanked open her door, left her room and stood outside her neighbour’s door. She knocked.
‘Hello, Miss. Miss?’

No answer.

Stephanie stepped away from the door and looked nervously towards the unlit stairwell, unwilling to acknowledge why she kept looking down there, while her imagination persisted in its attempt to
insert the idea that a figure was standing on the stairs, watching her from inside a concealing darkness.

The voice of the girl in the neighbouring room thickened with tears until she began a pitiful sobbing, as though the woman had just heard terrible news. Stephanie even hoped that her knock at
the door was the cause of the surge of grief, because that would mean there was an actual living occupant inside the room.

‘If you don’t want to talk, I understand. I just want to help. That’s all.’

The girl sniffed, then whimpered. She never spoke, but her reaction felt like a response. A minimal response that would not develop.

Stephanie returned to her room, closed her door and sat on the bed. She stared at herself in the mirrored doors of the wardrobe opposite. She looked dreadful and would soon have two black eyes
from lack of sleep. Her face also appeared as if it were incapable of a smile; she looked older, worn down, undernourished. She covered her face with her hands and listened to the sound of the girl
next door, weeping inside what appeared to be an empty room.

Stephanie climbed back into bed and shuffled closer to the wall to listen to the girl. It didn’t matter if nothing here made sense; she was just so tired. She didn’t care any more.
Just like the girl next door.

Stephanie put her hand on the wall. She wiped her eyes and said, ‘Dad. Make it stop. Help me. Dad, please.’

The girl kept crying.

Eventually, Stephanie rolled over and closed her eyes.

As the duration of her journey from the bus stop to 82 Edgehill Road dwindled to a matter of minutes, Stephanie felt the growth of an anxiety that made her near nauseous. After
her first night in the house, each time she’d returned to the anonymous street she’d felt increasingly vulnerable. Mostly unlit, the buildings and their watching windows struck her this
evening as being strongly averse to her presence in the street.

Her phone trilled. Frantic to speak with Ryan, Stephanie yanked the handset out of her pocket. He’d sent a text that afternoon:

@ WORK. WILL CALL LATER.

There had been no characteristic X to end the message, and she believed it was the most unfeeling and abrupt message he’d ever sent her in the two years she’d known him.
Her disappointment at the brevity of the text message had made her sullen for most of her last afternoon of work at the Bullring, where she’d been giving out bite-size portions of large
cookies to shoppers for eight hours. Her sulk was soon overwhelmed by the next crisis, when she discovered that her debit card was missing from her purse.

She’d upended her bag on the staff room floor and scattered her fingers through the contents, on the verge of tears throughout a frantic search that failed to recover her bank card. There
was nothing in her account to withdraw and she had no arranged overdraft, so couldn’t recall the last time she’d noticed her card in her purse. After she’d calmed down, she
realized the last time she’d used it was four days previously, when she’d withdrawn her last thirty pounds to feed herself and cover bus fare until she was paid at the end of this
week.

She’d called the bank and cancelled the card; another would be on its way, but in six working days. Ryan might now have to provide her with more than temporary accommodation, if he was
willing. But who had taken the card? She wanted to accuse everyone: the two stupid girls she’d worked with, the indifferent supervisor, the customers, that guy who had come back three times
for samples, until she’d told him it was one per customer, and he’d responded by asking her out on a date.

She’d then thought of the house, of the landlord, the other tenants she’d failed to properly meet; someone could have entered her room while she was in the bathroom. Stuff was always
going missing in shared accommodation.

It wouldn’t stop, it just would not stop: the bad luck, the horrible slide that just kept sending her further down, faster and faster, while she gathered a momentum of misfortune.

This caller’s number on her phone screen was unfamiliar. Not Ryan, but the last of five landlords she’d called that lunchtime to arrange viewings of rooms in shared houses. This
would be the call back from the message she’d left.

She stopped walking to take the call, and then finished it with a tremor in her voice. All of the respective rooms on offer at the address were immediately available, but all required one
month’s rent in advance and a deposit, with no exceptions. Three days in the Bullring had put £120 in her bank account, but that didn’t even cover half of what she needed to move.
The word
hostel
had made an unwelcome appearance in her thoughts throughout the day. She’d have to find out where the nearest hostels were. At least she could withdraw cash across
the bank counter tomorrow to provide enough money if she had to evacuate Edgehill Road in a hurry.