‘Hello?’
I throw my voice deep into the hallway. If it catches a person, if there’s someone there, I can explain I found the door open and was just passing. That I’m just warning them against criminals, warning them against myself in different circumstances. There’s no answer so I call out again, but only the silence comes ringing back.
Hopefully, I feather the wall with wet fingers until they find a switch. The hall fills with light and Victorian tiles appear at my feet arranged symmetrically, intricately, black on white. A huge gilded mirror glares at me from the left with Tiffany wall lamps on either side. The house of an old dame.
A pause. My heart quickens with the waiting. If there’s anybody beyond this hall, these lights will alert them, so for seconds or minutes I am frozen. Waiting. Until … nothing.
Finally, I sink to the floor, my back against the heavy wooden door, and breathe. The pain kicks up again as the adrenaline dissipates. And then I begin to shiver. My heart drops in my chest. It is beginning. If I don’t get dry soon and warm, I am going to get very ill. I rub life into my cold fingers and then when the dexterity returns to them, I unpick the laces of my leather boots and tug them off. Rainwater has pooled inside them so I upturn them against the door to drain them. I stare at my feet, which are covered in plastic bags for warmth. I pull them away and then peel off the damp socks beneath them. The skin of my feet is pale, deathly. I look away from the blisters and the blackness that rims the nails. It always shocks me that my own body sickens me like this. On the cold tiles I stand and take off my coat, shaking it out before wrapping it around my boots and socks. Newspaper I had missed earlier falls now to the floor in sodden balls and the cold begins to climb from there into my bones. I shiver. I watch the other black door at the far end of the corridor, waiting for it to spring open and for anger to appear in its light. I strain my ears for sound but all they pick up is the rain outside. I rub my temples again but the pain refuses to be eased by touch.
If only it will stop for a moment, so I can think.
I gather my coat-boot bundle and walk towards the other door, catching my face in the mirror. It startles me, this face that I know but don’t recognise. My cheeks are burned from weather. The beard is the most striking thing – it’s the thing about me that I forget most often. But the real surprise is in the eyes. And not just that the left has swollen almost shut, but the impression they give: they seem lost, somehow innocent. And then as I am puzzling this, my expression catches me in a flash of anger that I didn’t know I was carrying.
Before I turn the handle on the door, I call out again.
When I step in the smell from the room hits me in a wave so I am reminded of Proust and his madeleines. It’s the wax, the scent of it transports me, capturing memories and then scattering them. Is it Mum waxing banisters that I remember now, or is this just the smell of art galleries? I can’t remember precisely but Mum is definitely there, hovering, remote, aloof. I think she’s warning me.
It takes a minute to adjust to the gloom but slowly the room crystallises. There’s a large square bay window and then I see leather chesterfields along two walls. I look to the right and start at the sight of a tall, square-shouldered man in the corner. But it coalesces, into a grandfather clock. At the far end of the double room, there is a dining table and chairs, neatly tucked in. I stand still, listening, with the thumping, rhythmic beat of my heart playing in my ears.
Books and records are stacked on shelves either side of the fireplace, in neat rows safely behind glass. I crouch down, spreading my hands on the floor. This carpet is unfamiliar. It is silk. Otherworldly under my skin.
My head drops against it as I lie down, and I breathe. After a few breaths I double over as tears spill from my eyes. Soon, though, I sleep.
When my eyes snap open, I don’t know how long I’ve slept. Something I cannot now process, something in the past, has jolted me awake. I sit up. There must have been a sound. As soon as I scramble to my feet, I clamp a hand over my mouth to give my ears space to hear.
Voices in the hall.
I freeze.
The front door slams and I hear the click of heels against the tile. Two voices blow in, a man and a woman, and suddenly it’s clear that I have to move. I don’t know what’s upstairs, or even how to get there. Maybe the way up is there to the right of the dining table and chairs. Could there be a nook there where perhaps stairs are nestling? I can’t be sure, I know only these connected living rooms down here. I should have gathered myself earlier and explored my surroundings. That’s what I do when I find somewhere new. I look around to make sure that the place hasn’t already been cuckooed. I make certain of my exits and of all the weak spots so that if I have to I can make a run for it. Why didn’t I do that? How badly did he hurt me?
The voices are near now. In a second that door will open and they’ll burst in. After that, the lights will blaze on. A nano-second later, I will be trapped in that light, frozen in view. Caught with no way out.
Across the darkness I leap on to the sofa before I see my boots, bundled in my coat, there in the middle of the floor. Somehow, I spin around and scoop them up, just as the door opens. I leap and in a blink I am behind the sofa. The voices – louder, still jolly – trail in. My eyes, adjusting to the darkness, are helped then by the light falling in from the opened door, but there’s nothing to see here, trapped behind leather.
‘Ha,’ I hear the woman say. ‘Like you would!’
The light clicks on. And everything is bright.
4
Tuesday
I left my life to be alone. When I think of it, phrased in that way, I feel like an idiot. To be alone. The idea that I once thought I could find solitude on the streets! When the drunks don’t piss on you and the police don’t move you on and the people don’t look through you in that way, there’s still the sky. For you the sky is freedom. It’s your endless, unconfined self. But for me the sky is a shroud. It wraps me. It binds my eyes and mouth so that I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe. My eyes are wide now as I force myself to connect my body to my surroundings. From behind the chesterfield I can see nothing but parts of myself. The dirt under my fingernails, the grime burned into the skin of my hands, the sleeves of my jumper, baggy and bobbled with pilling. I’ve made the mistake of holding on to my breath for fear of being noticed. And now that I am safe and hidden and I can breathe again, I have held on for too long. I lower my head so the coat-shoe bundle is tight to my face and breathe out into it.
‘There’s a bottle under that cupboard,’ the woman says. ‘You open that up and I’ll put on a record.’
I track the sound of their bodies as they separate and bustle in different ends of the room. My heart is still beating too quickly and I worry that I am going to hyperventilate.