No One Gets Out Alive Page 3

  Huddled into herself, with her head dipped from the rain, she made her way to the top of the road to find the bus stop and typed a quick text message to Ryan:

  I’VE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE [AGAIN!]. CAN YOU HELP ME?

  FIVE

  Stephanie arrived back at the house after seven. The rain continued to fall hard upon North Birmingham. The streetlights in Edgehill Road were spaced so far apart, and issued such thin light, they made the houses exude a vaguer, more inhospitable aspect than they had done that morning. Or perhaps they seemed menacing now that she had something to feel intimidated by. She wasn’t sure. But she wondered if there had been any daylight here at all while she’d worked indoors at the vast Bullring shopping centre in the city, a world of steel, glass, marble, white electric light, and the trappings of affluence that ejected her into the rain once her day’s servitude was complete.

  The people she had worked with, and the location, had felt impersonal and never close to familiarity, as if to communicate the message: Don’t get used to it. She couldn’t help taking that to heart.

  Usually she made friends on temp jobs, during the long hours of boredom and repetition that always felt more stressful than important work. In the past, she’d even exchanged phone numbers and email addresses with the other girls she’d worked with in warehouses, factories and while stewarding live events. But the bright lights and designer clothes shops of the Bullring had given airs to the other two girls she’d worked with, an attitude demonstrated by many of the shoppers as if they were all accustomed to, and unimpressed by, the opulence. Her two colleagues both considered themselves to be models.

  And what recession? Amongst crowds laden down with logo-emblazoned paper bags with string handles, expensive hair styles, new clothes, smart phones, the shopping centre had suggested an exclusive annexe existing beyond any world she was familiar with. While she had resorted to blacking-out the scuffs on her one pair of boots with an eyeliner pencil, others seemed to exist in effortless affluence. It mystified her like magic. Where were all the people, like her, who had no money? Were they hiding themselves away in wretched buildings like she was?

  Beside the thirty-minute break, when she’d sat on a bench in the Bullring and watched silent news reports on a huge television screen about flooding in Cornwall, Yorkshire and Wales, she had been on her feet for the best part of eight hours. She’d become so tired she’d begun to slur her ‘Hello, sir, would you like to try our new Italiano range of wrap? Only two hundred calories per…’ She’d called two women ‘sir’, and the edges of her vision had started to flicker by late afternoon. She needed eight hours’ sleep but had had less than three the night before. Her stomach burned with hunger.

  Relief that the working day was over plummeted at the sight of the house. The building appeared wetter, grubbier and even more derelict than when she’d hurried away from it that morning. The whole place seemed sullen and eager to be left alone in the cold darkness. Whatever optimism and comfort the building once possessed was long gone. The house’s character seemed so obvious now.

  Don’t think like that.

  She paused in the hallway to turn on the light and inspect the post: fliers for Asian mini-markets, fried chicken and pizza delivery services mingled with cards for local taxi companies. There was nothing addressed to the tenants, beside one final demand from British Gas for a Mr Bennet. Everything else in a white envelope was addressed to ‘Dear Homeowner’.

  Not having notified the bank or the doctor’s surgery of her change of address was a small mercy. She’d do all of that when she found a new room in another building. And if she stood any longer looking at the faded walls, the uncarpeted stairs leading to the first floor, and the solitary closed door at the end of the ground floor hall, she worried she might not get up the stairs to her room.

  Stick to the plan. She’d rehearsed it all day. Eat, then go and see the landlord and give notice on the room. Ask if you can leave your bags here until Monday morning. Get your deposit back. Find a new place this weekend. Accept that the month’s rent paid in advance might be gone, but still try to get a refund so you can stay in a cheap B&B over the weekend until you find a new room.

  If she could not get the rent back she would have to stay in the house until Monday.

  Stop! Don’t think about it … One thing at a time.

  You can do it. You can do it. You can do it.

  Reciting the silent mantra throughout the day to deter self-pity had felt absurd. But now she was back inside the building, the house suggested the implacable, with an entrapping power that would drain any resistance to itself.

  ‘It’s what you make of it,’ Knacker had said yesterday, grinning through his gappy teeth. But that was a cliché. It was incorrect. After six months away from the family home, she knew it was how these demoralizing places changed you that needed to be resisted. And she always resisted them. ‘Character building’, others might have said about her experiences. But that was also a cliché, and easy to say when it wasn’t your character being built by adversity.

  ‘You’re a smart girl. And beautiful too. You’ll make it all come right,’ her dad once said after a dispiriting weekend together in Aberystwyth, when she knew she couldn’t afford to go to university, no matter how good her A Levels had been.

  Why didn’t you come and see me the night you died, Daddy, and tell me what the fuck to do?

  She briefly wondered what the ground floor was used for. Maybe it held tenants too? She hurried past the silent first floor and ran up the carpeted stairs to the second storey, slapping the lights on as she moved, running to the next switch before the lights behind her winked out.

  She paused outside her room long enough to disappear into the abrupt darkness produced by the three-second timer on the overhead light reaching the end of its pathetic cycle. What kind of mean bastard would try and save electricity like this?

  Only the ambient glow of a distant street lamp, seeping through the window on the stairwell between the first and second floors, offered any illumination.

  Stephanie held the long room key lightly between her fingertips and listened intently.

  All was silent on the other side of the door to her room.

  She struggled to control her bottom lip’s tremble when she recalled the tug and rustle of plastic beneath the bed, the mournful voice, the bed springs depressing as a new weight added itself to the mattress. What happened in this room last night?

  Could the floorboards of an old building correct at night, as a building moved upon its foundations, to suggest a footfall? Had she heard a radio in another room, or a conversation, maybe someone talking to themselves? Were there mice under the bed? And what about the bathroom that morning? Was she losing her mind?

  Schizophrenia. Psychosis.

  Stephanie pushed the door to her room open with more force than she’d intended, and reached inside to slap the light on.

  SIX

  All was as she had left it: a chipped Formica table, the old bed concealed by her purple duvet, a red rug on floorboards painted with brown emulsion, the hideous gold and black curtains, the white bedside cabinet at odds in style and time with the imitation walnut wardrobe. The room looked like the scene of a potential suicide following an occupant’s long period of depression, isolation and poverty, cobbled together out of oddments of junkshop furniture. Plaster wainscoting, an iron fireplace and hardwood skirting boards suggested bourgeoisie grandeur so faded as to be almost undetectable behind the tat. Sparse, but somehow too lived in. Overcrowded with the past, but left barren by neglect. Despair: an installation created by stuff given away on Gumtree. It could win the Turner Prize without breaking a sweat. The smile on her lips surprised Stephanie, and she realized she was looking at the room with new eyes; with the scrutiny afforded by the death of wishful thinking.

  She dropped her handbag and supermarket bag on the bed, but kept her boots on because the floors were dusty and because they made noises, and had voices in them that she coul
d not account for.

  She killed the thought. Plugged in her phone to recharge. Slapped her iPod into another socket. Locked her room and went down to the kitchen with her Tesco Express bag. A carton of salad that had to be eaten that day and a pasty with the same imminent expiry bumped against her hip as she descended the staircase.

  The kitchen was on the first floor landing, opposite the bathroom; both communal rooms were set before the staircase. The other doors in the first floor corridor sank away from the landing towards the front of the house and into darkness.

  Beneath a bedroom door on the right hand side she could see a warm and welcome strip of electric light. No sound came from beyond the door.

  Inside the kitchen the orange and lemon coloured lino peeled up skirting boards black-rimmed with dust. A table had been shoved into one corner. A quick wipe of a finger across the vast L-shaped counter blackened the pad with dust. The plastic swing-lid bin was empty and smelled of ancient bleach. Detergent and limescale traces had evolved into white powdery rimes in the arid kitchen sink. Puzzled, she went to the ancient fridge and opened the door. Completely empty save the wire-frame shelves. Old stains darkened the bottom of a tray that promised to be a ‘Vegetable Crisper’. The fridge had been emptied at some point but not cleaned. The freezer compartment was a solid brick of ice that had broken the hinges of the ice box door.

  Black spills around the electric cooking rings were ancient too. She snapped two of them off the enamelled metal. They looked like flattened, desiccated worms.

  Like the bathroom, the kitchen had not been used in a long time, nor had it been cleaned recently. Even the mouse traps were old, the bait long gone. In the corners the petrified black rice of mouse droppings were suspended in a grey fur of dust, gathering as if the spoor had been absorbed by a monstrous fungus.

  Knacker had said there were other people living here, so what did they do to prepare food? Eat out? Takeaways went with the territory, especially if the household was male-oriented, but this one was supposedly all female. Certainly didn’t look like it. And who could afford takeaways every day? Not someone who lived here. Stephanie’s last vestige of illusion that she might have sat in here with other girls, and bitched about work over coffee, as communal stir-fries sizzled on the stove, doused like the final spark in a cold fireplace.

  Yet as she plugged the microwave in to see if it still worked, and then fiddled with the buttons to change the setting from HELLO … DEFROST … ADD WEIGHT, she heard footsteps outside: high heels on the tiles of the ground floor before they began to rise up the stairs to the first floor.

  A girl!

  With her warmest smile primed in anticipation, Stephanie headed for the kitchen doorway. ‘Hey! Hello there,’ she called out.

  The footsteps softened as they hit the carpeted landing of the first floor, before continuing on to the second floor without slowing down. Wasn’t Birmingham supposed to be friendly? The big heart of England? She would have to crawl out of its arse before she found its heart.

  ‘Hello. Hi,’ Stephanie said as she came into the corridor outside the kitchen.

  The girl turned on the first part of the staircase to the second floor. Stephanie didn’t see much beyond a slender silhouette moving across the undraped window of the stairwell.

  She lives on my floor. The idea made Stephanie so excited she desperately slapped at the light switch on the wall outside the kitchen. But the woman was already rising up the stairs to the second floor, leaving Stephanie with only the sounds of muted high heels.

  ‘Hello. Sorry. I just wanted to introduce…’

  Engulfed in the woman’s perfumed wake, Stephanie followed the footsteps. The scent was strong but pleasant. She thought she recognized it and must have once smelled a sample in Debenhams. When Stephanie turned the staircase and the second floor came into sight, the light below clicked off and left her in darkness.

  ‘Hi. Hello!’ An edge had come into her voice; she just wanted to say hello to a neighbour. The woman must have heard her. And it was odd that the girl had walked up these stairs so swiftly without turning the lights on. She must have been living here a while to cross the terrain so confidently.

  Stephanie made the second floor and reached for the nearest light switch. In the darkness ahead of her the swish of clothing and thump of high heels moved away, and quickly too, as if in flight. A key rattled inside a lock.

  ‘Hello,’ Stephanie repeated, and more loudly this time as she snapped the corridor light on, which briefly revealed a woman entering the room opposite hers in the middle of the corridor. A glimpse of long blonde hair, a pale face, tight jeans and dark high heels was all she received before the door closed and was locked. Inside the room a light clicked on.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Stephanie walked back to the kitchen, her footsteps accompanied by the angry bark of the dog outside. The draught around the stairwell window smelled of the wet yard and she shivered. The woman had been anxious not to make contact; her movement through the dark had actually sped up when Stephanie spoke. An evasion. What was that about?

  You won’t be here long so don’t sweat it. She might fancy herself as a glamour puss but she lives the fuck here.

  In the kitchen Stephanie tugged open the cabinet doors beside the stove and found two plates. She washed them in hot water as there was no washing up liquid, then slid her pasty into the microwave. She’d eat in her room. It was that kind of place.

  The rude girl in the dark revived her fighting spirit. Once she got this food down she’d go and face the landlord. No wonder he kept a low profile, renting out this hole. He’d been delighted by her interest in the room, and her pitiful enthusiasm had made her an easy mark. He had positively shivered with glee when she handed over the three twenty.

  Three hundred and twenty quid!

  SEVEN

  The door to ‘Knacker’ McGuire’s flat was ornate, like the grand entrance of a house owned by the West Midlands rich. There was a brass knocker and a spyhole and a glare of blonde wood to suggest a visitor had arrived somewhere and probably underestimated the importance of the people inside. The sight of the landlord’s door also reinforced her feelings that all of her assumptions about the building and the people inside might be entirely wrong.

  What was even stranger was the small CCTV camera attached high on the wall above the top of the door. It was not a new camera, but one of the old ones that looked like a Super-8 cine-camera fixed into a bracket.

  Nearly a minute passed after Stephanie knocked before several locks were unbolted and a chain slid through a latch on the other side. The door shifted a few inches to become ajar. One large eye presented itself, the blue iris so pale as to suggest marine life, and with it a nose reminiscent of a horse – not regally equine, but more nag-like and knuckled from hard labour and scraps. Dim light shone around a halo of curly hair. ‘Yeah?’

  Stephanie moved her eyes up to the camera. ‘It’s OK, I’m not here to rob you.’

  Knacker didn’t smile. ‘What’s the problem? It’s the evenin’. I should have said that anyfing that needs fixin’ you need to tell me before six.’

  Where do I start? Stephanie bit back on recommending demolition. ‘Oh, no, it’s not that. I just need to speak with you. Something’s come up. I, er … I need to leave.’

  ‘Eh? What you talkin’ about?’ It was more of a belligerent challenge than a question and her resolve tottered as though it had suddenly hit black ice. Just as quickly she tightened all over with irritation at his tone.

  The door opened a full foot. Knacker’s face filled the gap, followed by one bare shoulder and arm. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just silky tracksuit bottoms with the waistband of Calvin Klein underwear visible. All of his clothes looked new; they hadn’t yesterday.

  The landlord had the kind of body she’d seen on drug addicts and women with eating disorders: supple skin pulled tight on knobbly features and sinewy limbs. Old man bony in a younger body. She always wondered if people worked a
t that ‘look’ or if it was genetic. They seemed to have made a lifelong enemy of body fat and ended up striking but unattractive. The hair had not been starved of nutrition, however: it was thick and so well groomed she feared a wig. Big curly locks around an ageing face. A middle-aged man dressed like a teenager.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind. About the room. I’ve come about the deposit.’

  Knacker’s eyes narrowed and she knew in a heartbeat she’d struck a nerve. He quickly relaxed his expression, sniffed, and changed his tack. He had some persuading to do, some ducking and diving – she’d seen that look all her life. ‘That’s not something I’m prepared to discuss now. I’ll come and see you tomorrow—’

  She cut his bullshit off before it could get airborne. ‘I’m at work tomorrow. Early start. This won’t take long.’

  Yesterday, at the time of the interview, she’d disliked him immediately, but knew most landlords of sub-lets were bastards; they went with the territory. Buy-to-let summoned the spiv. But what had been immediately and abundantly clear was that he liked the sound of his own voice, liked to give flight to his opinions and ‘foughts’, without really answering questions.

  She guessed he’d also been showing off because she was young and attractive and he had wanted to appear worldly. She hadn’t planned on staying for long, no more than a few months before she landed a job in London, so she’d reasoned she could put up with him. He was small too, and hadn’t exuded lechery or hostility. And there were other girls living here, he had said so, and that fact had reassured her. But how much effort had she really put into an assessment of Knacker, when so desperate to find another room at no more than forty pounds a week? After only one night beneath the roof of 82 Edgehill Road, the awareness that she’d suppressed her suspicions and instincts gnawed at her accusingly. Her chest burned with an indigestion of frustration.