No One Gets Out Alive Page 2

  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?

  THREE

  The bathroom was cold enough to make her think twice about a shower. The air bit her face, her ankles and feet. Even with the water splashing hot inside the tub and creating steam, the mere thought of removing her gown was an anticipation of pain.

  Grit and fluff had stuck to the soles of her feet when she’d flitted down one flight of stairs to the communal bathroom on the first floor. She wished she’d worn her trainers, or ended her resistance to slippers; they had their uses.

  She checked the radiator. It burned red hot but failed to transfer any heat into the cramped space.

  The room was bone dry and dusty. A red carpet, as stiff and desiccated as the rug in her room, crackled under her feet. Plain paper painted a watery yellow covered the walls. In the corners above the toilet and sink, a rash of black spores erupted from damp plaster. Around the sink, old black whiskers had fossilized under the overflow hole. She wondered if she would have become a resident if she’d properly inspected the bathroom during her tour yesterday. Though to be honest, she’d used worse.

  Sitting on the toilet to pee, she sensed being on the edge of a bad smell that wouldn’t fully reveal its source. There was a strong odour of damp and old carpet in the air of the bathroom, but the ripe sweetness of meat in deep bins suggested itself too.

  Wiping the grimy and discoloured enamel of the bath with sodden toilet paper was a delaying tactic for actually stepping into the shower. When was the last time the bath had been cleaned?

  Up on the second floor there was only a toilet on the landing, without a sink, so there was no alternative to this bathroom in such a large building. But the sink and the toilet seat had been dusty before she used them, which was odd because she had heard this toilet flush a little whil
e ago, so someone must have been in here.

  As far as she could tell there was a self-contained flat on the ground floor, another on the third floor, and six bedrooms in the communal section of the building: three bedrooms on the first floor, three on the second floor, but only one complete bathroom. Grim. The idea of someone not washing their hands after using the toilet this morning made her wince. What sort of people lived here?

  She checked the time on her phone. Better get a move on.

  She laid her shampoo and conditioner bottles behind the blotchy taps at the top of the bath. When the room was sufficiently cloudy with steam to give an impression of heat, she braved the cold and removed her robe, her t-shirt and underwear. She didn’t shiver as much as shake. By the time she stepped into the cascade of water, her feet and fingers were numb.

  The window was closed, the heating was on. How could it be so cold?

  As dawn struggled through a cleaner portion of the window, daylight revealed an aperture blocked with painted iron bars, fixed to the exterior wall.

  What would you do in a fire?

  The windows in her room were not barred, so maybe this was a security feature of the lower floors – something else she hadn’t noticed yesterday in her determination to get out of the cell. But it was yet another reason to get out of here. The very idea of moving again was exhausting, but she couldn’t remain here. She wanted to run someplace familiar.

  Ryan.

  Whenever fear and anxiety had overrun her since she’d arrived in Birmingham, her first thought was always to call her ex, Ryan, and ask him if she could return to his room – at least until she found work in Coventry, or somewhere nearby. But that wouldn’t be possible until the weekend, because she needed the next three days’ work giving out the samples. She’d make £120. And a return to Coventry would also be an act of outright desperation; the very idea made her feelings crawl around on all fours in the form of guilt and grief.

  She didn’t want to go through all that again. She didn’t want to be with Ryan. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind about that. Her being at his place would be inappropriate and near unbearable. And a sorry-faced return to Ryan’s life would involve her sleeping on Ryan’s bed again, while he fidgeted on the floor in a sleeping bag.

  Going back to his room, but not back to him, would mean tears, mostly his, and a revival of the discomfort and awkwardness that would overwhelm a few nights in his room. His desperate need for them to get back together would take him over. It was one of the main reasons she’d shifted down to Birmingham to find work: to cut them off from each other.

  Stephanie thought herself into brief surges of hope, which sank into a familiar cycle of stifling frustrations and ended in dread. Nothing new there. She always seemed to be inside houses owned by other people, restless with anxiety or paralyzed by regret. How could she have been so foolish as to believe she could make it on her own in a strange city?

  Conscious of the time, she washed her hair quickly, constantly rotating her body under the water that struggled to escape the limescale-encrusted shower head. After a few uncomfortable minutes, she climbed out of the bathtub and wrapped herself in the towel while her teeth chattered.

  Not having to use the bathroom for much longer was the only relief she could draw from the experience. She could pick up a scourer and cleaning spray on her way home from work, from a pound shop, and just use the sink until she moved out. No one need know. As she thought about how bearable she could make her time at 82 Edgehill Road, she heard a voice.

  The cold forgotten for a moment, Stephanie stepped away from the bath, because she was sure the voice had come from the tub.

  Steam clouded to the ceiling. She swiped her hands before her face to clear her vision.

  Silence.

  And then she heard it again: a faint voice down by the floor. But not one directed at her; the speaker seemed to be talking into a corner, or even at the floor. Maybe from under the floor?

  She followed the direction of the voice and wondered if there were tenants on the ground floor and some weird acoustic or cavity in the building was throwing voices into the nearby rooms.

  She lowered herself to her hands and knees. But the carpet was filthy enough to make her rear back to her heels and bat the gathered hairs and grit from her damp hands.

  ‘What is my name?’

  Stephanie stood up and backed against the nearest wall. Opened the bathroom door to let the steam escape so she could see the woman who had spoken, and only a few feet from her face at that.

  What is my name? The question had risen as if someone lying inside the tub had spoken out loud.

  And whoever was speaking now continued to mumble as if they were drifting away. Stephanie could almost catch the words that appeared to originate, impossibly, from beneath the bathtub. She moved closer, swallowed the constriction in her throat, and knocked on the bath, hoping that would make it stop. ‘Hello? Can you—’

  The speaker either didn’t hear her or ignored her and continued to talk in a quick stream of words, to herself, or to someone else she could not see. It was a woman urgently communicating something to someone that wasn’t Stephanie.

  On all fours, Stephanie moved her hands around the carpet at the base of the bath, though she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A waft of wet rags and a hint of sewage buffeted her face. The room below must have a hole in the ceiling and she was overhearing a one-sided conversation or a television.

  Stephanie’s ear touched the side panel of the bath’s surround.

  ‘… before here … that time. Nowhere … to where the other … the cold … is my name?’

  A television, it must be, or a radio play, overheard from a room beneath the bathroom. The voice had to be coming from below. She didn’t want to believe it could be coming from anywhere else.

  Stephanie gathered up her things and hurried into the warmer corridor of the first floor. She came to a standstill on the landing, sluggish with shock and bewilderment, and wondered what on God’s earth she had moved into.

  FOUR

  When she left her room, dressed for work in boots, her last pair of smart black trousers and a white shirt under her coat, the interior of the house was still dark enough to require lights in the communal landings and on the staircase.

  The ceiling lights were on timers and didn’t remain switched on for long. They came on for a few seconds to reveal dated green wallpaper, torn down to plaster in places, or interspersed with long panels of newer paper, painted white. There were scuffed skirting boards and ancient wainscoting so thickly covered in paint it was impossible to determine the original decorative features. And if she was quick enough, she could reach the next circular light switch before the darkness fell with a horrible suddenness behind her. Not a building she would want to move through at night. She suppressed the thought.

  Uncomfortably eager to leave the building, Stephanie jogged down the stairs. She wondered if she would ever have the courage to cross the threshold later when she finished work, even if it was just to collect her stuff and … go where?

  As she turned into the last flight of uncarpeted stairs leading to the hall, she heard the scuffle of leather-soled feet on the floor tiles: footsteps preceding the unlatching and the creak of the front door. It gave her a start until she realized it could be one of the other tenants leaving the building ahead of her. She sensed a man. But this place was for girls only, so maybe this was the landlord.

  If she could share her experiences, she might receive an explanation about the noises in the house. Stephanie hurried down.

  The front door closed before she made the bottom step. She raced along the ground floor passageway, the heels of her boots scraping and clattering across the tiles, to struggle with the front door.

  Outside, the world was reluctant to reach whatever served for light in this grey time of year, but there was no one on the path and the gate was closed. She could not be that far behind whoever had just left the building.

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sp; On the short front path six wet rubbish bins stood sentinel on either side of the little rusty gate that rose as high as her hips. The rest of the front yard was a combination of broken paving slabs, litter and long weeds. Clumps of wet leaves, drooping from unkempt trees, flopped against the ground floor windows and concealed the lower storey of the house, which was why she hadn’t noticed the security bars yesterday. Behind the ancient white cages of iron bars, all she could see behind the windows were black curtains. Rain rustled the pennants of crisp packets and plastic bags caught up in the unruly privet hedge that screened the front of the house from the street.

  Gripped with a need for human contact, Stephanie unlatched the gate and stepped into Edgehill Road. Traffic from the T-junction at the end of the road became loud around her head. She looked left and right. The streetlights glowed yellow and lit up the vertical descent of the rain that had fallen for hours. The road surface appeared oily, the cars heavy with a second skin of water, the trees tense with cold. The dim and miserable world was soaked but empty. So where had the man gone?

  Stephanie looked at the house. Sooty red bricks running with dirty water. Black drainpipes. Old wooden sash window frames on the second floor, visible above the trees. Faded curtains. Only the top floor windows boasted venetian blinds. Not a flicker of light escaped the interior. The building appeared deserted. She could not recall it looking this way yesterday. Must be the light and weather, or her lack of sleep. Had the sun not briefly appeared for yesterday’s viewing she doubted she would have even set foot inside.