No One Gets Out Alive (19 page)

‘All right, be like that. But somefing’s come up that you might want to get in on, like. Personal matter. We need some privacy to discuss it.’

‘There’s nothing I want to discuss with you. I won’t be here much longer. Especially now.’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘I mean, you are fucking joking,
right?’

Knacker feigned confusion. ‘Not sure what you mean.’

‘Yes you bloody do.’

He stiffened at her tone, his big eyes lidded, the top lip pursed.

‘Did you think I’d stay here? With that going on?’ She couldn’t bring herself to say
it
, to describe
it
.

‘That’s got nuffin’ to do wiv you. What other people do here, yeah, is up to them. Nuffin’ wrong wiv people making a livin’, like, in the privacy of their own
home.’

She took a deep breath and tried to rally her reason through her rage. ‘Oh, that’s all it is, people making a living? Do you think I’m stupid? That bloody gullible?
You’re running a criminal enterprise here.’

In response to the word ‘criminal’ Knacker straightened up like she’d called him something else that began with the letter ‘c’, and she dearly wished that she
could. His face had gone so pale she thought she better shut the door.
But what then?
The windows were barred. And in that moment she worried they were barred to keep people inside rather
than out. Fear made a swift return and panic capered behind it like a troupe of clowns. Her fear was stronger than her anger; it had been her natural state of being from the day she’d moved
into 82 Edgehill Road.

‘You best watch what you say. You don’t know nuffin’. Using words like that in my house. My mother’s house. Who you fink you are? What’s them girls to you? Yeah?
What they does is up to them. And they make a better living than you do, girl, if the truth be told. They’s not even from this country and they’s making hundred quid in five minutes.
Tax free. Few months’ work and they is on holiday, like, for the rest of the year. South of France. Spain. They have the nice clothes and fings they want. While you’re working in some
call centre, dressed like a pauper. You’s biting your nose to spite your face, woman. Pretty girl like you should be in Dolce and Gabbana—’

‘Stop! Fuck’s sake. Stop . . . you think I would do
that
?’ That’s why he had come down with the cheap wine on Friday, to sweeten his offer of her becoming a
whore in his stinking, half-derelict house. She was being groomed.
Groomed!
How had that word entered her life?

All I wanted was a fucking room and a fucking job!

Life had become so surreal and grim it was comical. But if she released the mad laugh stuck at the base of her throat, there wouldn’t be a trace of levity in the sound that she’d
bark into the dismal air. ‘Get away from my door or I will scream until the neighbours come running.’

‘Who’s gonna hear? That old perv next door? He’s already tried to book a dirty ride, like. Said he was impressed wiv what he saw.’

She closed her eyes, swallowed. ‘You’re making me sick.’

Knacker struggled to restrain a laugh. His eyes swilled with mirth. ‘No one expects you to go wiv some old bastard like that, girl. We’s talkin’ high-class gentlemen here.
We’s got plans, like. Fings are moving very well. And as you got nuffin’, out the goodness of my heart, I’m just trying to give you a helping hand, like. All’s you got to do
is give them a bit a company, yeah? These are solicitors and all that type of fing. Clients of ours.’

‘Clients?’ She wanted to shriek again with dead laughter. ‘Is that who I’ve been hearing, walking up and down those shitty stairs, clients? Fucking those illegal
immigrants in your stinking rooms. Judges, no doubt. Bank managers and barristers. Shall we speak to the police and see if they agree with your pitch?’

Knacker cocked his head at an angle. He rotated his neck. His fists clenched.

Anger and strength drained out of her like cold water and she filled to capacity with indecision and dread once again. She shut the door and locked it. But she didn’t move away because
Knacker had not moved away from the other side.

‘I don’t wanna hear nuffin’ about what we’ve discussed getting back to me, yeah? If I hear from the council, or the filth, yeah, anyfing gets back to me about you talking
shit about this house, I will be very displeased. You don’t know nuffin’ about my background, or Fergal’s. And we got keys to this door.’

His feet bumped away into the darkness.

When she could no longer hear the footsteps she called Ryan.

He didn’t pick up.

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.

In the garden the four women with long skirts sat on the corners of a large patchwork blanket. Their heads were bowed so she couldn’t see their faces. On top of their
heads their dirty hair was piled into coils. She wondered if they were reading. A small wooden box, with a purple velvet curtain draped over the front, was placed in the middle of the blanket.

Someone had put a wooden ladder against an oak tree and arranged four identical wooden chairs beneath the lowest limb.

Only when she sat on the blanket did Stephanie realize the women were all crying into their thin white hands. How had she not noticed before?

Placed on the blanket in front of each of the women was an old creased chapbook with something written on the cover she couldn’t make out.

When one of the women became aware of Stephanie, she removed her hands from her face and revealed what looked like a skull in a wig. The sharp features were tightly papered with a mottled
parchment of skin, and the woman’s eye sockets were empty. Stephanie tried to scream but had no breath. The woman said, ‘What’s the matter with my face . . . ?’

Stephanie wasn’t in the garden for long before she found herself inside a dark place with wet brick walls, through which the women in the long skirts bustled. When the tunnel became too
tight for them to go any further, the women slipped to their hands and knees and rolled sideways into blackened stone cavities near the floor. The holes looked like drains without grates.

‘This one is yours,’ said a voice behind her.

She looked down at the black space, no more than a little stone alcove at the foot of the wall. ‘In there? I can’t. I can’t. I don’t like closed spaces.’

Stephanie looked over her shoulder. There was no one behind her. And even though she was only a little girl, when she tried to squeeze back through the narrow passage, and towards what looked
like a door sunken into one side of the shaft, she became wedged.

What she had thought was a doorway was only a cleft in the brick wall. Inside of the cavity something wrapped in polythene was standing upright. ‘What is the time?’ it asked her.

Stephanie awoke into silence and a cold so fierce it burned her forehead, the only part of her face exposed above the bedcovers. She tugged the plugs out of her ears. There was
a delectable moment of cool air filling the ear canals.

A smear of half-remembered images sank into oblivion, until she could not pin down much about the nightmare at all. There had been wet brick walls . . . long skirts . . . a face, a horrid
face.

She looked about the walls and ceiling of her room, took in the mirrored wardrobe doors, the little glass table, her bags, the window. She saw nothing move. Sniffed at the chilled air. Detected
no trace of the male animal odours.

Thank God.

Silence next door too, and in the rooms of those living above her. But she knew she was not alone on account of the plummet in air temperature.

Pulling the duvet with her she sat up in bed and glanced at her travel clock: three a.m. Her mind scrabbled for ideas of what to do, and for clues about what might be happening, or about to
occur.

They can’t hurt you
was the only reassuring notion that came to her, though she found that very hard to believe.

A girl
: it must be one of the female presences inside her room.
Can she see me?

Stephanie swallowed hard. ‘Hello.’ Her voice was no more than a whisper. She raised it. ‘Hello. I know you’re there. I . . . I can feel you.’

Silence.

‘It’s all right. I promise.
He’s
not here. And I won’t scream. Are you . . . are you Russian?’

Silence.

Her sense of being watched was acute. And there was a peculiar tension growing inside her eyes and ears, like anticipation. Something was trying to get her attention; not by movement or sound,
but through other means.

Another part of her, like some unused sense, seemed to quiver in response to what felt like a change in the air pressure. She might have been close to the edge of an awful drop, or about to
cross a road ploughed by fast traffic in the rain. An unpleasant tightness around her belly grew into her chest and made her breathless. As before, her spirits quickly darkened and she felt as sad
and lost as a child separated from its parent in a crowd of indifferent adults.

She was stuck in this house and would never be released or found. No one cared enough to come looking for her. This was her end and also her future, because the house was not a true conclusion
to existence, only of life.

She had no role to offer the world and had been shuffled into a forgotten and dreary corner to wait quietly until expiration. She belonged amongst dust and dreary colours, age, stone, the
plaster that sealed it, the paper that covered it. She amounted to nothing. She had kidded herself that she could function in the world.

A sob broke from her. Stephanie covered her face.

Fingers pressed her forearm.

Stephanie thrust her body back against the wall.

The touch had been freezing. She could still feel the chill indenting her flesh.

‘Please . . . don’t. Please,’ she whimpered.

She clutched her hands over her ears because she was sure a mouth had opened, close by, to speak. She didn’t know how she knew this. Maybe she didn’t know and this was nothing but
her senses spiking with panic, but she could not bear to hear a voice.

The touch of a cold hand became a gentle squeeze around her wrist. And this time she did not cry out, or even breathe. With the exception of the shivers that erupted over her entire covering of
skin, Stephanie remained absolutely still.

The lights are on. There is no one there. Can’t hurt you, hurt you, hurt you . . .