No One Gets Out Alive (12 page)

She could not refuse him entrance. It wasn’t really her room, but a token of his charity; she’d been in it for one night and her ownership of the space hadn’t been established.
The realization prompted a vision of his face going stiff and white with rage if she told him to piss off; followed by another of her standing outside in the rain with her bags at her feet.

‘Mind if I sit?’ Even if she had minded it wouldn’t have done any good, and when he sat heavily on her bed she shivered with revulsion. He was steadily erasing the last
vestiges of her resistance. Deliberately too, and with relish, and she hated him for it.

‘No wonder you can’t keep a fella, girl. Face like that. Who’d wanna look at that all day?’

‘You . . .’ Her voice died when Knacker raised his chin provocatively. He was wearing a new red Helly Hansen ski jacket and Diesel jeans with his pristine green trainers. A peacock
hooligan; she’d never liked them.

‘I hear you met Fergal. Me cousin. Said he seen you downstairs.’ As he spoke his eyes slid about as he scoped out the room behind her. ‘That the post?’ He rose and
snatched it off the little table. ‘What you doing wiv it?’

‘I . . . picked it up.’

Every trace of mocking humour vanished from his eyes so quickly it shocked her. ‘I can see that, but it ain’t yours.’

‘I know.’ She swallowed. ‘Your cousin, he . . .’

‘What?’

‘Startled me. And I forgot I had it in my hand.’

Knacker was delighted and sat down again. ‘Startled you! I like that, “startled”. You don’t hear that much. You’s got a nice way of putting fings, girl. You just
need to smile a bit and the world’s your oyster.’

‘What was he doing? Downstairs, by that door?’

Knacker frowned. ‘It’s his house as well as mine. He can do what he likes.’

It struck her as odd that a cousin would be a co-owner of the house. ‘Who lives down there?’

Knacker started to sniff. ‘No one. Out of bounds.’ He uncapped the wine bottle. ‘That whole part of the house is.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to do a bit of work on it. Here, you want some a this booze or not? Don’t often touch it much meself. Loopy juice. I get a couple in me and people’s holding me back,
like. Does somefing to me head. I prefer a bit a weed, bit a coke. But I don’t fink one glass will hurt.’

Knacker’s cousin, Fergal, resting his head against the door in an unlit corridor, as if meditating, had not appeared like preparation for renovations. And Knacker was trying to change the
subject.

‘Decorating?’ she said as a prompt.

‘Bigger job, love. Structural work first, like. We gonna have our hands full.’

‘A man lives down there though? I’ve heard him go out in the morning. Or was that your cousin?’

Knacker avoided her eyes, sniffed. ‘Probably.’ He passed a glass brimming with white wine at her. ‘Here you are, time to stop nosing about and start drinking.’

Stephanie took the glass and resigned herself to using the coffee table as a seat.

For the next thirty minutes, stupefied by her own awkwardness and reticence, and never offering more than monosyllabic answers if she could help it, Stephanie fielded the landlord’s
quick-fire questions about her temporary work, her stepmother, her friends, what she studied, with Knacker taking a special interest in her psychology A level: ‘Been finking about doing
somefing like that meself’.

She did her best to mentally screen the bragging monologues that formed the majority share of his discourse, and mostly looked at the floor with a dazed expression on her face, hoping her lack
of engagement would cut short the duration of his visit. He didn’t seem to notice, and his face grew redder from the wine. As well as his fondness for undermining her, he found selling an
idea of himself as a wily, tough, financially successful man even more delightful. He claimed he had been a paratrooper, that he had property ‘all over’, he was a builder, did
‘electrics’, and once had a nightclub in the rave scene. Spain was a popular topic. He’d done ‘a bit of everyfing. You name it, done it. All of it.’

He wanted to impress her. Which was futile as she hated him and considered him ridiculous. She found his expectation of approval astounding, considering how he had bullied and insulted her from
her first day at the house; a memory of his taunts made her stomach writhe at the very sight of him. But Knacker appeared unable to accept her evident dislike. Either that or he was stubbornly
resisting her signals, which made her nervous.

As his self-aggrandizing gathered momentum, she found herself acknowledging, with difficulty, that permanent roles had already been assigned: he had the upper hand and would not take kindly to
her digressing from this position. Just like the bullies she’d encountered in casual work. Just like her stepmother. In her unfortunate experience of what she understood to be a form of
narcissism – because her stepmother had been diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder while her dad was still alive – her only real defence would be a retreat and a removal of
herself from his presence. Only that wasn’t possible until she had more money. She wondered if her frustration was contributing to her perception of him and the house, and perhaps even
warping that perception.

‘. . . You see, girl. Life is what you make it. End of the day, like, what you need to remember . . .’

What to do?
She had no work lined up for the following week, and only £120 to her name. Once Knacker the arsehole left her room, she would call her friends in Stoke, like Ryan
suggested, and see if she could borrow a sofa tomorrow.
But for how long? Indefinitely?
The work situation in her home town was as impossible as anywhere she’d known, and her
stepmother was there. Going back to Stoke would not only be an admission of defeat but a dead end. She wondered if she would ever have the strength to leave it a second time, and alone, without
Ryan.

It would take six days for her new cash card to arrive. She couldn’t stay here that long. But if she went to Stoke she’d still have to come back here to collect the new card.
What to do?
She wanted to scream and keep on screaming.

‘End of the day, when all is said and done, like, I’m a fighter, me . . . You’ll never . . . a McGuire . . .’

She began to eye her uninvited visitor’s new clothes and she pondered the absence of any evidence of renovation in the property. Knacker had lied about this room being newly decorated. In
fact, he’d told so many lies she doubted even he could keep track of them, but he would become instantly hostile if she pointed out contradictions. Her thoughts were throttling her;
they’d been a noose all day and most days for months now.

‘Problem with most people—’

‘What’s her story? The girl next door.’ She asked the question to prevent Knacker from giving her any more advice about life.

‘What you talking about? Who lives here, who lives there? What’s it to ya?’

‘Perfectly natural to want to know who you’re living next to in shared accommodation. And you seem to have an interest in your tenants.’ She opened the palms of her hands to
indicate his increasingly sprawled posture, or lack of posture, on her bed.

And that was going too far, because now he’d started to go pale, and his eyes were lidding. There was also a shrug as he sat upright, and a rustle as both shoulders rotated inside the ski
jacket.

She kept her tone of voice level, struggling to suppress the sarcasm. ‘It’s just that I keep hearing them. Girls. Upset. But they won’t speak to me. In the
bathroom—’

‘I don’t get you. I don’t get you at all. You get the best room in the house for forty quid a week. Which, I might add, may come under review sooner than you fink if you keep
this up. Who lives here, who lives there? Other people’s mail in your hand. It’s none of your fuckin’ business. You is prying. What’s your game, eh?’

‘I don’t have one. I’m just—’

He wasn’t listening. He was working himself up. She remembered what he’d said about the effect alcohol had upon him. She swallowed.

‘I’ll tell you what your game is—’

The door opened so quickly they both jumped.

A ginger head thrust into the room. The neck behind the head was absurdly long and ribbed with cartilage visible through pasty skin. Without invitation, Knacker’s cousin,
Fergal, stepped inside.

‘Fuck’s sake, Fergal! You nearly give me a heart attack!’ Knacker started to grin. But Fergal didn’t acknowledge him. Instead he stared at Stephanie with what she took to
be a limitless malevolence. It was similar to his expression when she’d first seen him downstairs, only this was worse. There was so much hatred and rage in the man’s bloodless face she
couldn’t breathe, became dizzy, scratched around her mind for any reason she might have angered him.

Stephanie was sure he was going to hit her because he walked right at her. It took all of her will not to cringe or flinch. Her hands shook, so she squeezed them into fists.

Fergal halted one step away from her. He bent over so his face was no more than an inch from hers. And stared at her with such aggressive intensity, she looked away, and to Knacker for an
explanation.

Knacker appeared anxious too, which made Stephanie’s terror ratchet even higher.

‘Come on, mate. Got some plonk here. Have a glass.’ There was a conciliatory tone to Knacker’s entreaty that did nothing to restore Stephanie’s confidence.

Up close, Fergal smelled unwashed, oily, sebaceous. His jeans were greasy, stained, the hems trodden down to a black mush of fabric and filth under the heels of his dirty trainers. He looked and
smelled as if he had been sleeping in the street.

Fergal finally grinned into Stephanie’s face and revealed yellow and brown teeth. As quickly as he’d entered, he took a long stride backwards and sat heavily on the bed, then thrust
his legs apart, as if claiming territory, and knocked Knacker’s knees together. Knacker stiffened, then quickly grinned and clapped his cousin on the back.

Fergal snatched the bottle from Knacker’s hand. Inside his long spidery fingers and prominent knuckles, the bottle appeared to diminish in size, as well as being instantly stripped of any
of the civilized values that accompany the drinking of wine. The man put the bottle to his lips and gulped at it; his sharp Adam’s apple moved unpleasantly in his throat as he swallowed like
a savage.

Determined to find the man’s behaviour hilarious, Knacker started a slight bouncing of his buttocks on the bed. ‘He was doing that fing, that fing, wiv his face. Classic it is. Shits
everyone up. When we was in the Scrubs he—’

Fergal turned and thrust his face close to Knacker’s. ‘Shat it,’ he said in a slow, deep voice.

Knacker did. He must have been ten years older than the younger man, but was clearly intimidated by Fergal. And Knacker now tried to maintain his smile, as if to drag his confederate back into
the camaraderie, while proving to Stephanie that it was all harmless role play. She wasn’t fooled, and not even Knacker seemed as menacing or problematic any more compared to the younger
man.

There was something terribly wrong here, with them, with them being here. Not just inside her room, but inside the house. She sensed a disconnect between the vast inhospitable building and this
pair of unstable men sitting on her bed. They were the most unusual and absurd landlords. And they weren’t even from the Midlands.

How did I get here?

Surreal but dangerous, without a shred of humour she could glean, the situation wasn’t making sense in comparison to anything she’d ever experienced. Nothing did in the building.
Even without the voices and the crying women it was bizarre. It was a mad house and she felt as if she were the only sane thing here . . .
the only clean thing, civilized thing.

She’d already swallowed the large glass of wine and the effects expanded her imagination into an ever more sinister darkness. It rendered her mute; her confusion was becoming unbearable.
And what was Scrubs?

Her mind was made up; it would be stupid to remain in a building with Fergal, let alone Knacker. She’d seen enough, wanted to get them out of the room fast. She needed to call a cab to
take her to New Street Station, and then start putting in calls to her friends while on the move back to Stoke. She found it staggering that she was even still here,
again
, in this
building, a place that refused to settle into a recognizable condition. She worried that her despair, apathy and listlessness, that came from being exhausted and demoralized, were now her biggest
enemies.

Fergal pulled a comical facial expression and nodded in Stephanie’s direction while keeping his eyes on Knacker. ‘This the best you could do?’

Knacker suppressed a grin which suggested they privately shared a joke about her.

Seeing her reaction, Knacker struck his cousin’s thigh gently as if to kill the jest because it had gone too far. ‘Just helping a girl out, ain’t I. She’s doing her best.
Trying to get by, like. I respect that. These is tough times.’

Fergal turned his head in an exaggerated fashion, as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy operated by the older man, and stared at Stephanie with his mouth open, feigning idiocy. He crossed
his eyes. When Knacker spoke again, Fergal swivelled his head back in the older man’s direction, his big mouth still hanging open.

‘She ain’t finding much work, like,’ Knacker said. ‘Struggling. Nothing we ain’t seen before.’ When he noticed his cousin’s face mocking him with the
imbecilic expression, he shouted, ‘Cut it out!’

Stephanie stood up. She
needed
to get them out of her room. ‘I need to get ready. Early start.’

Fergal swung his face back in her direction, a hideous, mocking, wrecking ball of a head. ‘Don’t let us stop ya.’ They both found this funny and started laughing, Fergal in
that deep, forced manner, Knacker with a hissy titter through his big lips.

‘Not much of a party, is it?’ Fergal said.

‘She ain’t the partying type like we’s used to, mate,’ Knacker replied, as the horrid nature of their coercive double act tried to take shape in her room.