I was thinking about nothing, my habit during such hours, when I was startled by somebody throwing themselves into the pew next to me with such force that the wood creaked and I nearly leapt straight up in the air.
It was my neighbour from the upper bunk, grinning at me, her dark eyes gleaming in the dusty candlelit space. One of the teeth next to her right canine was missing, a spot of blackness in her face.
‘Well, hello there!’ she said, her voice and laughter shattering the calm, clearly very amused by my shock and surprise.
‘Are you mental?’ I snarled, still light-headed and shaking. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack!’
‘Sorry. Sorry. But it was funny. You should have seen your face.’ She offered me a pleased smile, as though contemplating a job well done. She had a strangely refined accent, at complete odds with her appearance. I wondered if it was real, or if she was making fun of me.
I crossed my arms over my chest again. ‘What are you doing in here?’
‘Avoiding people.’ She gave me a cool look. ‘Like you, probably. Are you going to steal that?’
‘What? What are you on about?’
She nodded over to a battered collection box, attached to the centre of a wrought-iron stand containing rows of shelves filled with sand and tea lights.
‘Am I what?’ I asked in horror. ‘God no. I was just looking at the stained glass…’
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you were.’ She got up, those long legs unwinding endlessly as she did so, and strolled over to the candles. She did not even look round to see if the coast was clear. She tugged at the battered iron corner of the box, which rattled but didn’t move. ‘Bugger.’
‘Stop that!’ I hissed at her, appalled, but also secretly thrilled at her heretical daring. ‘There’s somebody up there!’
‘Who’s that, God?’
‘No, whoever’s playing the organ, you muppet!’
‘That’s a tape recording…’ She flapped a dismissive hand at me, inspecting the fixture holding the box.
‘It bloody isn’t! They’ve stopped in the middle and restarted at least two times.’
She shrugged and retreated back to the pew after a few seconds. ‘It’s bolted on anyway,’ she said, as though to make it absolutely clear that she had not desisted because I had commanded her to, and that she feared neither God nor the organist.
She was silent for a few seconds, giving me the opportunity to study her out of the corner of my eye while the music continued above.
In profile she had fine features, big black eyes, a petite nose dusted with freckles, and plump, sensuous lips. She could have been beautiful, in fact, but the most obvious thing about her was her state of deep disrepair. Her peroxide-blonde hair was dyed to the point of colourlessness. Angry red spots dotted her brow and cold sores bracketed her mouth. Her lips were slightly feathery with peeling skin, and she was pale, too pale, almost a sallow green.
Her arms, bare from the elbows, were dusted with little blue fingertip bruises, and in the crook of the right nestled an ugly mass of red and purple, pocked with little black marks.
‘If you’re cold you should go to the Southbank Centre,’ she said suddenly.
I threw her a surprised glance.
‘They keep it heated all day. And they can’t throw you out unless they catch you up to no good, like begging.’ She gestured expansively, not looking at me, as though demonstrating that it cost her absolutely nothing to tell me this. ‘It’s, like, one of those public space things.’
I considered this for a long moment. ‘Thanks,’ I said.
She was still looking away, but she nodded, once.
‘What happened to your face?’ she asked.
I froze.
I was aware of the effect I had on people at present, and suspected it was why I had been moved on from the library and the department store. My face, and the reason I was homeless, had a very close correlation.
‘I tripped,’ I replied stonily.
She glanced back at me then, no doubt taking in my two black eyes and swollen, broken nose.
‘Yeah. You “tripped”.’ She snickered. ‘Of course you did.’
‘It’s true.’
She seemed to be thinking, her finger now at the corner of her mouth as she worried at the nail and its cracked casing of peach-coloured varnish.
Or perhaps, looking back on it, she was merely nervous.
‘Do you want to come to a party?’
‘A party? What, now?’
‘Well it will have to be now because we have to be back at Flicks for nine or we’ll lose our beds.’ She didn’t wait for my answer, rolling once more to her feet, her sleeve falling to hide her wounded arm. Her back was straight, tense, and I realized that despite her affected accent, dramatic mannerisms and recklessness, that this was because she feared my refusal, my rejection. ‘Come on, if you’re coming.’
I couldn’t tell you how my relationship with her developed, how I got her name out of her, even whether we were friends or merely acquaintances forming our own pack for survival. I knew her name at this point – Angelique, which she pronounced carefully, lingering over each syllable as though it were music, which made me think it was not her real name at all – and before long we were staying out later and later each night before returning to the hostel. She was universally admired and introduced me to her friends – a grimy circle of skinny people I did not particularly like and who didn’t like me, though that might have been to do with the taciturn way I refused to answer any of their questions. They offered me draws on spliffs while Angelique vanished into the back rooms of their filthy squats with them before returning, her eyes dull, her limbs languorous. Before long she stopped hiding what she was doing and started shooting up in front of me.
I can’t remember when I started to join her in this. I just know that I did.
15
It was Tuesday night, and the reconstruction – ten minutes’ worth of vague acting and the appeal from me – had aired. I could barely watch it, caught between the twin poles of dread and exposure. Lily had wanted me to come round, for us to watch it with her mother; I had gently declined.
There had been no further communications from Bethan Avery in the meantime. Or Messrs Calwhit, Blank, Mettle. Or Eddy. Or Martin.
This last, funnily enough, seemed to rankle most of all. I fought the absurd feeling that I was being discarded for being insufficiently attractive to traumatized kidnap victims.
Yeah, that’s right, Margot – it’s all about you, I thought ruefully. Pull yourself together. It’s only been a day or two.
I sat down on the couch, in front of the grey and silent television, and looked at the clock on the cable box. It was six, and it was dark outside, dark early today in these days of early darkness, because of the fog. I don’t like fog. Apart from being inconvenient and dangerous, I dislike it on principle. Walking through it, there is the sensation of veils lifting and falling behind you, white gauzy veils, but there is no final one that is lifted, leaving what you are really looking for completely exposed.
Perhaps this is why I objected to the fog more today than I would on other days.
I stared at the blank television and kidded myself that I was thinking.
I kicked my shoes off and pulled my legs up under me on the sofa. I had a bag full of essays and a couple of letters for the column to answer, so I thought about them for a few minutes, without getting up. I couldn’t just sit here and helplessly watch the work pile up.
After all, I’m not helpless.
‘I’m not helpless,’ I said aloud.
The silence in the house mocked me.
I had never felt so worthless.