No One Gets Out Alive (16 page)

She noted the ‘radical drops in temperature’ which had accompanied each and every experience. Again, such changes to the physical world could not have been imagined.
Could
they?

What would experts and officials make of the notebook if she went missing? The morbidity of the idea made her shudder.

A member of the counter staff came and collected her coffee mug, which she intuited as an inducement to leave the café. Stephanie retouched her make-up, packed away her things and
left.

A break from the house made her feel like she’d been airlifted from a disaster. The opportunity to organize the debris of her thoughts and recent memories had been vital; she’d even
partly regrouped the scattered refugees of her wits and remembered who she had been before she’d moved into Edgehill Road. Time spent in a safe environment to consider her situation also left
her with the suspicion that she was not in any physical danger – at least not from what had amassed around her in the house while remaining unseen.

With the exception of the male presence, she couldn’t be certain that what she had felt around her in that building amounted to more than fear, loneliness, despair and anger. Or cries for
help. And those couldn’t harm you.

Could they?

Who were they? What were they? The idea that the suffering had continued for some time, and would always continue in the wretched building, was unbearable for her to ponder. She dared to wonder
what she might be able to do for them – the trapped and the crying, the tormented.

Stephanie entered the house as silently as she was able, then crept up the stairs, but only managed two steps across the kitchen lino before she came to a standstill. Her
fingers released the plastic supermarket bag and it hit the floor with a thump.

The girl smoking a cigarette by the kitchen sink turned around. Caution flared in the woman’s bright green eyes. Surprise was followed by relief, as if Stephanie was not who she’d
expected to see.

Stephanie was unable to speak.
Could this . . . Is this . . . Am I seeing a . . . a ghost?

Greedy for proof she was looking at the living, and without daring to blink in case her eyes opened to find herself alone in the kitchen again, her vision groped about the woman’s body: a
collarless leather jacket with a bronze zipper, a black polo neck jumper, skinny-fit jeans tucked into the high-heeled boots, three gold rings on her manicured fingers, highlights in her
shoulder-length blonde hair, a pretty face with angular bone structure, bronze eye make-up. The woman was detailed, three dimensional, coloured . . . there was perfume too. She recognized it: Miss
Dior.

Stephanie snapped herself out of the fugue. To regain control of her voice she cleared her throat. ‘Are you . . . I mean . . .’

The girl eyed Stephanie from head to toe too, and took in the functional white blouse and black trousers she wore to interviews, and her expression developed a haughty disapproval. The
woman’s eyes were beautiful though, like those of a husky or wolf: green flecked with black, the eyelids offering a hint of the Asiatic. Surely a spirit could not be so vivid.

‘I’m sorry,’ Stephanie said. ‘I’m not sure . . . this might sound crazy . . .’

The woman frowned.

‘I didn’t expect to see you. You made me jump.’

The woman looked past Stephanie and took in the kitchen with a sweep of her lovely eyes. ‘This was not what I expect.’ The voice was heavily accented, almost certainly Eastern
European. The Russian girl? And possibly the one she had seen outside in the yard that morning, though the hair looked different.

‘Are you on the second floor?’

The question confused the woman so Stephanie pointed at the ceiling. ‘Upstairs?’

‘Upstairs, mmm, yes. You live here?’ She seemed to get three syllables into ‘here’, but Stephanie liked the way she wrestled English words out of her mouth.

‘Yes. This floor.’

The girl frowned again and Stephanie identified the first sign of fatigue from communicating with someone for whom English was a second language. Though her relief that the girl was real was far
greater. ‘Were you outside this morning?’

Her question was greeted with another frown.

Stephanie walked to the sink unit and passed within a force field of hair spray and skin cream. She pointed at the garden with something approaching desperation. ‘Down there? Did I see you
down there this morning, smoking?’

The girl glanced at the tumult of vegetation and building refuse below, as if she were looking at a dog’s excrement on the side of her boots. ‘There? Never. Is shit. Whole place,
shit.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Never mind.’

She recalled Knacker saying something about two girls moving in, about her having company, but had assumed it was another one of his lies. ‘You moved here today?’

‘Today? Yes, yes. In the morning I come.’ The girl took a hard drag on her cigarette.

Now Stephanie stood closer she could see the woman wasn’t as young as she’d first appeared. Either the skin around her eyes was aged under so much make-up, or the expression in her
eyes appeared too old for the lower part of her face.

Averse to Stephanie’s scrutiny, the girl moved away from the dregs of the sooty dusk light hanging around the sink unit. ‘You work here?’ the girl asked, squinting in the smoke
enveloping her head.

‘Here? Birmingham, yes. Sometimes. One day here, one day there.’

The girl didn’t seem impressed with her answer, though Stephanie couldn’t work out why. She already made her feel frumpy, and was now adding worthless to a minor crisis of
confidence.

‘But work is good here?’ the woman asked.

‘No. Not really. Same as everywhere.’

‘I have good work. Düsseldorf. Vienna. They say it very good here.’

‘Depends on what you can do. I’m just starting out.’

The girl frowned and looked slightly offended. Though again Stephanie couldn’t understand why.

‘I’m Stephanie.’ She extended her hand, to break the awkward silence.

The girl took it with her long, cold fingers. ‘Svetlana.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Lithuania.’

‘See you’s two met then,’ said Knacker McGuire.

At the appearance of the landlord in the kitchen doorway, Stephanie noticed Svetlana’s face drop at the precise moment her own spirits plummeted.

Dressed once again in his new jeans and trainers, he was grinning and jaunty on his feet, like a stupid youth who thought he’d done something clever. ‘Your room’s ready,
girl,’ he said to Svetlana. ‘New bed an’ everyfing, like. Put a TV in there too. If I don’t say so myself, it’s a nice room. Fink you’ll be very comfortable in
there.’

Svetlana didn’t answer. She watched Knacker, her gaze hard, and exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘My bags. He bring them?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about nuffin’. All in hand, like.’

‘There is other bathroom, yes?’

‘What baffroom?’

Stephanie didn’t like the way Knacker had started to squint and jut his chin out. His eyes took a moment to glare at her too, making her feel unwelcome in the room now that another
tenant’s disappointment in the property was becoming evident. Stephanie turned away and unwrapped her boxed dinner on the counter beside the microwave and feigned disinterest in the
exchange.

‘This is not what you say. You said
new.
New kitchen, new bathroom. But this? This one is not new. I don’t use it. You must be joking.’ Svetlana’s last line
sounded Italian and might have been a figure of speech picked up from another traveller.

‘Lick a paint. All’s gonna get done up. That’s what I said.’

‘No, you say
new.
No one can eat here. Is filthy.’

Stephanie was delighted by the girl’s resistance, but the slither of fear that was beginning to frost her stomach overruled her shame at preparing food in the dirty kitchen.

‘Don’t you worry about nuffin’. Other people might not have the same standards as you and me,’ he said, as if fingering Stephanie as the source of the dilapidation and
dirt. ‘But it’s all gonna be fixed up. Be like living in a hotel.’

‘Hotel?’ Svetlana snorted with derisive laughter. ‘What kind hotel? Mr Knacker, I tell you I have major problem with this. This is not what you say.’ She broke off and
said something in her own language.

‘You gotta give it time, girl. You know, period of adjustment and all that.’

‘When Margaret see this . . . I mean, she will say same as me. You have not told truth. I will speak to Andrei.’

‘Settle down. Settle down, yeah!’ Knacker was losing his temper.

Stephanie’s own nervy bewilderment was beginning to make the two minutes she needed to wait for her bolognaise to finish its first cooking cycle feel like a decade. And the food would also
needed stirring, before cooking for another two minutes. She turned to leave the kitchen, her eyes lowered.

‘And this girl.’ Svetlana nodded at Stephanie and Stephanie really wished she hadn’t. ‘This girl say the work . . .’ Svetlana waved a hand dismissively from side to
side ‘. . . is bad here.’

Knacker turned his head to follow Stephanie out of the room and she caught sight of his pale, angry face haloed by recently pampered curls. He reeked of aftershave. ‘You don’t want
to be listening to anyfing other people say, like. What do they know? And
she
knows how I feel about anyone bad moufing my house.
She
knows it’s being fixed up too, cus I
told her the same fing as you.’

Stephanie hurried back along the corridor to her room, and caught the end of what had become a confrontation. She admired the girl’s courage in the face of Knacker’s temper; her own
had wilted immediately.

‘This is not right. Not acceptable.’

‘You don’t tell me what’s acceptable. That’s not how it works. You get me? You’s lucky to have a fuckin’ roof over your head, considering where you come from.
Lifuania! Now I’m a reasonable man, I don’t . . .’

Stephanie closed her door and waited in her room until the muffled exchange moved out of the kitchen, went up one floor and passed out of her hearing. Above her head two sets of feet bumped
about angrily in what sounded like a wrestling manoeuvre. A door slammed. She flinched.

Dusk was swallowed by nightfall. The time crept towards ten p.m.

Stephanie remained upon her bed, lying in the same position she had flopped into after Bekka’s text message had come in at eight. She’d already packed her bags ready for evacuation,
checked her train timetable, and then paced for hours waiting for Bekka to call. But the communication was better disclosed by text than phone call; an easier medium when the news is bad.
Bekka’s boyfriend ‘didn’t think it was a good idea for you to crash’ and they ‘didn’t have room anyway’.

The rejection made Stephanie feel ashamed, as if a ridiculous, embarrassing request had been rebuffed. Within her disappointment was also dread, like a doctor had just imparted terrible news.
For a while an overwhelming sense of abandonment had made her feel so cold her jaw had trembled.

Straight after her request for charity had been rejected by the last friend she had appealed to, Stephanie briefly considered putting a call in to her stepmother. An idea swiftly killed in
infancy when she realized the ashes of a bridge that badly burned might never be reassembled, even on a temporary basis. And it was already late enough for Val to be drunk, maybe with her
boyfriend, Tony, if he had come back since Stephanie had left home. Val would now be half-conscious as white wine swam around antidepressants in an otherwise empty stomach. There was no point
trying to communicate with the woman any day after four in the afternoon.

Her demoralized thoughts continued to trickle down, until they became sluggish and vague, at around the same time the girl in the empty room next door began to cry, at eleven p.m.

Stephanie retrieved her carrier bag from the floor beside her bed and removed the packet of earplugs: USED BY FORMULA ONE RACING DRIVERS, or so the packaging claimed. This had been an idea
she’d had in town, to cope with the disturbances if she was forced to spend another night here.

She thought about going up one floor and knocking on the door of the room directly above her own, which must now be Svetlana’s room, to ask the girl to come down and see if she could hear
the crying in the room too. A witness to the disturbance would be the final assurance that she was not suffering from an onset of schizophrenia.

But she decided against paying a visit to the new tenant because the second floor was her least favourite part of the building, was too close to the landlord’s flat, and she had a strong
suspicion that Knacker would disapprove of any contact between them. Two dissatisfied minds could easily form a conspiracy, or a resistance. And she could not bear the thought of inciting further
contact with either of her landlords for the limited time she remained in the building.

At least Svetlana had remained in residence despite the confrontation with Knacker. She and the new girl were strangers, both disgruntled and wary, but there was safety in numbers. They were
witnesses to each other’s presence, and the idea of Svetlana upstairs was profoundly reassuring.

Intermittently, through the evening, Stephanie had heard the girl’s feet bump through the ceiling while the Lithuanian barked into her phone in her first language. But as with
Stephanie’s observation of many Europeans, it was hard to tell, by the tone and volume of a voice alone, whether an argument was in progress or if a grievance was being expressed; on a school
trip to Rome she had seen people order coffee in a way that made her recoil.

Svetlana’s television still murmured, and whoever spoke onscreen sounded as if they were underwater with their mouth full of food. The idea that she may no longer be the primary recipient
of Knacker’s bullying, or the focus of his shakedown operation, also provided a guilty relief. Svetlana had suggested that another girl’s arrival was imminent too – a Margaret, or
Margereet
– who might provide an additional buffer between her and the two cousins.