No One Gets Out Alive (6 page)

‘You’ve had a hard time. You don’t even need to tell me, yeah? It’s written all over ya. Your mum don’t want you round no more. Ain’t really a surprise
considering the mouth on ya, if I’m totally frank. Your poor old dad’s dead. I can understand that. And you’re skint. I didn’t even want anyone living in my house. I forgot
that ad was in the window of that raghead shop. But when you called I could tell – here is a young girl in a spot of bother. Even her boyfriend’s fucked her off. She’s short of a
bit a luck, like. So I fought I’d help her out. Not the first time my family have taken in strays either. And then you goes and takes me for a mug. Just as well my cousin ain’t
’ere. He’s not as reasonable as me in these situations. He’s a hard man.’

He watched the fear return to her eyes; the fear she couldn’t keep out of them.

Knacker smiled. ‘Don’t worry, he ain’t around. He’s takin’ care of some business down south while I sort this place out. Ain’t no one lived in it since me mum
and dad passed.’ At the thought of them his eyes misted. ‘This is my family home. You gotta understand it’s a place I don’t want disrespected. Means a lot to me. You
disrespect this house you disrespect me mum and me dad, and you disrespect me. I don’t want dossers in here. I was brought up here. I don’t let just anyone froo that door. Me mum and
dad had lodgers and I fought one little girl on the run won’t hurt.’

Stephanie cut short her outrage. The sense of futility that seemed to paralyze her larynx, and everything else that wound about her head and heart on a spin cycle, transformed into suspicion.
She frowned. ‘But you said there were other girls living here. How many?’

He seemed embarrassed by his own garrulousness now that he was at full steam and had a captive audience. ‘Like I said, people come and go. I help people out. Don’t need to.
Don’t need the money when you make what I do. But it’s in my nature to be helpful. A family trait. Always has been. But you rub us up the wrong way and you’ll know about it, let
me tell you that for nothing. We got big hearts in this family. My mum . . .’

She couldn’t stand to hear another word. They seemed to grind inside her and make her gape in stupefied silence as she listened to his self-aggrandizing lies. She knew more than she needed
to know about him. They’d only spoken three times, and now the trilogy of face-to-face meetings was complete, he made her feel sick with anger. Sick to her stomach. She hated herself for
crying, for letting him make her cry so easily, for being stupid enough to be here, and for telling him so much about herself.

Had she? What had she been thinking?

‘Please leave.’

Knacker looked at the door, then moved a few feet to the side to block it. ‘Hang on, hang on. No need for the drama. You only just got here. You need to give the old place a bit a time,
like. Settle in. Tell you what I’ll do—’

‘No. I’m going.’

‘One fing I can’t stand, girl, is people interrupting when I’m talking. You follow? I fought I made my point that I have limits on rudeness, yeah?’

Stephanie glared at him but kept quiet. She could be out of here in ten minutes. She’d call a cab. Eleven pounds would get her to the city centre.

But what then?
If she spent her money on a cab she would be penniless until she was paid on Friday.

‘Now I know it could do wiv a lick a paint and some smartnin’ up. Whole house. Which is why the price is commensurate wiv its current condition, yeah? Which is why I am up here, back
in the old home town. And when I’m done wiv this place it will be restored, yeah? To its former glory. You won’t recognize this place no more. Me and me cousin ain’t just pretty
faces. But in the meantime, yeah, I’ll make this a bit more comfortable for you. How’s that? Can’t say fairer. Maybe a TV. We got some spare. A comfy chair. Something nice to sit
in, something to look at, yeah?’

‘No thanks. I need to go. The job . . .’

‘Ain’t no job. We already established that. You got nuffin’ but the clothes you is standing up in. And they ain’t much to look at, darlin’, if the truth be told.
And you won’t find a job lookin’ like a pauper wiv no address. That’s a non-starter right off. But you got yourself a decent place now. The job comes next. There’s no more
jobs in Coventry than there is here. Same all over. Country’s fucked. Least for them that don’t know how to go about fings. To help themselves, like. Cus no one is gonna help you in
this life. My mother made sure I learned that. Your own probably tried to tell you the same fing, but you’re all mouf. Time to start finkin’ like an adult, like. Time to start
listenin’. And where you gonna go runnin’ to at this time a night, eh? Boyfriend? Some bloke that chucked you out? Smart move.’

‘Stop! You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.’

‘You’d be surprised what I know about all kinds of fings. Only a fool would fink otherwise about a McGuire, girl. And who’s the one sitting pretty in a six-bedroom house wiv a
loft conversion, eh? Wiv his own business? Me. Not you. You got nuffin’. But I’m reaching out. Offerin’ a helpin’ hand. First rung on the ladder. Last fing you want to do is
take me finger off, sister.’

‘Monday. That’s my last day.’

‘My you are a stubborn one. Don’t know what’s good for ya. But go on then, Monday it is. Suit yourself. You paid for a mumf, you can stay a mumf, or fuck off tonight. I can do
without the grief, quite frankly. But you ain’t having the deposit back. That’s non-negotiable. You’s broken the contract. I mean, what am I, a charity?’

Knacker grinned at her. She endured a long silence while he stood there with his eyebrows raised, waiting for her to argue. ‘You’ve gone all quiet on me again. Cus you know you
ain’t got a leg to stand on, sister.’ He sidled through the door, bouncing on his heels, the curly-haired head cocked with satisfaction.

Stephanie scrambled up from the bed and slammed the door.

Outside, she heard Knacker’s footsteps pause as if he was thinking of coming back to address the slamming door, like she was a teenager having a tantrum. She thought again of Val, her
stepmother, and wanted to scream.

Stephanie turned the key in the lock so quickly she twisted her wrist and then waited, pressed against the door, until she heard his feet creak up the stairs to his flat. In the distance a door
closed.

She lay on the bed and clasped her hands over her face.

As Stephanie undressed for bed, the tenant in the room across the hallway began to cry.

It had to be the same girl Stephanie had glimpsed earlier. The tall woman with the lovely perfume was now producing a shuddery weeping sound that travelled through two walls to Stephanie, the
kind of despair that came from the bottom of the lungs, when a throat burned with the taste of a swim in the sea. A sound that felt complementary to her own situation and the very house, as if this
building was a place where misery flourished.

All of Stephanie’s resentment at the girl’s refusal to acknowledge her vanished. The grief she could hear heaved with everything that made life temporarily unbearable.

No good.
She wouldn’t be able to just lie in bed, swimming in her own self-pity, while listening to that. The girl across the hall was really hurting. Her distress might also
explain why she hadn’t spoken to Stephanie earlier, or even paused in her headlong charge back to her room; maybe the woman had simply been unable to face anyone.

But was this also the same woman she had heard behind the fireplace last night?

It couldn’t have been, because the voice in the fireplace had come from a different direction, seemingly from the other side of the house. So there could be two deeply unhappy women here.
Three if she counted herself.

Another idea struck Stephanie. The other tenant might be in the same situation as her: broke, a victim of coercion, under the threat of violence for defiance, stuck, trapped . . . Was she being
dramatic or had that been the subtext of her most recent exchange with the landlord?

BIG ROOM. 40 QUID FOR WEAK. GIRLS ONLY.
Why?

Stephanie opened the door to her room and stepped into the hallway.

And came to a standstill before reaching for the light switch.

The sensation was akin to stepping outside the building without a coat. There was a plummet in the air temperature – a terrible cold that registered the moment she was engulfed by the
thick darkness. And a smell that brought her to a halt – an odour akin to being inside a wooden space, fragranced by emptiness, dust and old timber, like a wooden shed. She was overwhelmed by
the notion that she had just stepped into a different building. Or the same place altered so profoundly that it may as well have been somewhere else.

A solitary streetlight beyond the garden offered a meagre glow to silhouette the wooden handrail and a pallid patch of staircase wall. A strip of light fell out of Stephanie’s room and
suggested a dark carpet, some scuffed skirting board. The red door opposite her own was barely visible.

But these vague suggestions of the building’s scruffy interior were oddly welcome, because they were real, while she felt . . . Yes, she could better identify it now . . . she felt an
acute
anguish.
Abandonment. Like the first morning after her dad passed away. A hopelessness fully realized and suffocating and exhausting at the same time: something that would drive you
insane if it didn’t pass within minutes; if it wasn’t relieved. But the feeling tonight, outside her room, was worse, because the overwhelming solitude wouldn’t end for whoever
was truly experiencing it. And that was the strangest thing of all.

This atmosphere, or sensation, that occupied the physical space of the passageway was not recognizable as being of her own making, as being generated by her own emotions. And this notion that
she had been engulfed by someone else’s distress, in effect stepped into its orbit, as irrational as it was, did not feel imagined either.

Or was it?

Now she was beyond the reach of a balanced state of mind herself, and what felt like actual physical safety after no more than a single step outside of her room, she heard herself whimper. And
the shock of hearing her own small cry, in the cold and half blindness that was so vast it gave her vertigo, made her strike out at the light switch on the wall.

But the horrid feelings persisted through the sudden coming of light to the corridor, which also did nothing to stem the cries of the grief-stricken girl.

No light escaped from the room opposite her own. The occupant was weeping in the dark.

Stephanie forced herself to cross the corridor to go to the crying woman. She knocked on the door. ‘Hello. Please. Miss. Miss, please. Can I help?’ She knocked again, twice, and
stepped back.

But the girl was inconsolable, undeterred and undisturbed by the sound of a neighbour.

Stephanie tried again and spoke at the door. ‘I just want you to know that you can talk to me. If you want to. I’m just across the hall. In the room opposite.’

The girl began to talk, but not to her and not in English. It sounded like Russian. A language as hard and fast as the Russian she’d heard spoken before, the words struggling through
sobs.

‘English? Do you speak English?’
Just open the door
, she wanted to shout.
We can communicate with our eyes, our faces. I’ll even hold you. But please stop.
It’s too much . . . too much for me . . .

Outside the house, Knacker’s dog barked and leaped against the full extent of its chain.

Inside the building, from two floors down, footsteps erupted and skittered in haste against the tiled floor.

The footsteps bumped up the stairs to the first floor. Then began a scrabbling, urgent ascent to the second storey.

Stephanie didn’t move, was not sure what to do. Though she was curious as to the appearance of another tenant, she was intimidated by the swift and loud nature of the movement up through
the house, that also suggested the motion had been evoked by the woman’s distress.

The light on the second floor landing clicked out. Stephanie turned for the light switch but only succeeded in covering her mouth because of . . . what? The gust. The sudden pall of . . . what
was it? Sweat? Old male or animal sweat.

She gasped to keep the stench out of her lungs. Remembered the fungal scent when she’d sat on a bus behind a man with no grasp of personal hygiene. The smell in this house suggested a
lather had been worked up by anger and alcohol. It was accompanied by a sudden, unpleasant sensation of herself twisting within thickly haired arms while she struggled to breathe. She didn’t
know why she had imagined this, and was too panicked to understand, but a determined muscular violence seemed to be driving the odour through the house.

The hot animal smell, now spiced with what she recognized as gum disease, replaced the scent of aged and unfinished wood, and so entirely that she doubted the underfloor cavity scent had ever
existed.

Instinct informed her that if she didn’t get inside her room and lock the door swiftly, something terrible, and perhaps final, would happen to her this very night. Irrational to think
this, like she was a child running up the stairs to her bedroom all over again, so convinced something was following her that she’d often heard footsteps behind. But she did move, and fast,
through the doorway of her room, to fall against the inside of the door. She turned the key the moment the door banged shut.

Upstairs a window opened and she heard Knacker roar, ‘Shat up!’ at the dog, which fell to whining and then silence.

Outside her room the footsteps reached the second floor and stopped, as if the owner had paused to catch his breath, before the bangs of his angry feet commenced down the hallway,
to her
room
. . .

Stephanie stepped away from the door, on the verge of a scream.

The footsteps stopped outside.

A fist banged on the door of the room opposite her own.

Thank God it’s her he wants and not me.

The door across the hall opened.

‘No,’ she whispered.
Don’t let him in!
she screamed inside her head.