It’s a grey light, a dead sort of light. A light that bleaches the colour from the world, makes everything dusty. Cher steps over the threshold and finds herself in an attic room, all sloping rafters and thick cross-beams, the light seeping in through a single skylight ten feet from where she stands. This is not right, she thinks, even as she steps in. It shouldn’t be here. But here it is: a jumble of beds and bassinets, all scratched and broken and covered in dust.
She jumps as she sees a figure move into view from behind a curtain; breathes again when she sees that it is just herself, blurred by a haze of crackled silvering in a console mirror half-covered by an old sheet. A miniature rocking horse, skewbald, its mane missing in hanks, sways back and forth on its rockers, as though its infant rider had leapt from its back and fled at the sound of her arrival.
It’s not right, she thinks again, and walks out to where thin air should be. But, oh, look, it’s three times the size of my room. Four times. It just goes on and on. Look at that big pile of velvet curtains. I could have those for my window, not be woken up at dawn every day, and that tapestry cover would look great on my bed. I could come back tonight, when nobody’s looking. Imagine: all this space, and nobody knows it’s here.
Except him, says a small voice by her shoulder. He knows it’s here. And he knows you’re here, too.
She starts awake, paralysed for a few seconds beneath the sheet by the force of her dream. Her limbs are pinned to the mattress, her muscles prickling as though pierced by a thousand red-hot needles. Her eyelids open before she is able to move, and she is briefly confused to see the same old dingy bedsit, the scuffed flat-pack wardrobe with the peeling laminate, the brave little splashes of colour she has tried to add by Blu-tacking photos of models and pretty rooms, carefully cut from the pages of glossy magazines, to the faded flowered wallpaper. Psycho the cat sits near her on the bed, and purrs with pleasure to see that she’s awake. He’s not been as cuddly, lately. Until the heatwave hit he would have inserted himself into her arms as she dozed, and slept along with her, but he prefers just to be nearby at the moment, to submit to the briefest of hugs and extend his chin for rubbing.
She pulls him into her arms and feels him settle against her chest. Kisses his satin forehead, speaks low, soft words of love into his twitching ear. My first love, she thinks, and it’s a cat. How sad is that? Then: where is it? Where did it go? The dream-room behind the stairs was so real – its smell, its dry air still somewhere inside her so that she can barely comprehend that she isn’t there. It was a dream, Cher, she scolds herself, but a bit of her wants to go right out on to the landing and jemmy that cupboard door open, just to check.
She stretches out and checks the time on her phone. Gone half past six. She’s slept the afternoon away again. She sits up in her frowsty bed. She’s fallen asleep with the window closed, and the room is like an oven. She is sticky with sweat, her hair glued to her scalp. No wonder I’m having mad dreams, she thinks. My brain’s boiling.
She slides out of bed and pulls her dressing-gown – satin, kimono-style, £16.99 in TK Maxx, or it would have been if she’d bought it – over her pyjamas, goes over to the window and throws it wide. Psycho drops down from the bed and pads across the floor, jumps up on the windowsill in search of coolness. The heat hasn’t even started to leave the day and, though the shadows are changing in the garden below her, there’s no sign of an evening breeze. A fan, she thinks. I’ll probably have to buy one of those: too damn bulky to slip under my coat. But it would be so good, being able to just lie in bed with the air running over me like water.
Her thirst is pressing. She wanders over to the sink and fills a pint glass – all her crockery and cutlery comes from the outside tables of pubs and cafés, slipped into her bag, ketchup remains, beer froth and all, as she passed. The water’s lukewarm from the pipes, but, this far up the house, the wait for it to run cold is worse than drinking it that way. She drains it in a single breath, refills it and takes it back to bed. Gets out her hand mirror and starts to repair her face, licking a finger and wiping her eyeliner back into place.
Now she’s awake she can’t stop thinking about the new woman downstairs. That wasn’t a good start. She looked as if she thought she was going to be stabbed in her bed when Cher came in through the door. It doesn’t do to be in bad odour with your neighbours. But aside from that, Cher is a kindly girl. The woman looked like she had lived through a train crash and it’s her first night in a new house. She deserves cheering up – even if she has taken over Nikki’s room.
I should tell her, she thinks. Let her know, before that lady throws all her stuff away. She might want it.
She grabs her phone – a Samsung because she doesn’t believe in iPhones herself – and scrolls through the contacts. It doesn’t take long. Nikki is the third of six numbers the phone contains. She hits the button to send and listens as the phone rings out. No voicemail. Nikki doesn’t do voicemail. Says if anyone really wants to get hold of her they’ll keep trying.
Okay, thinks Cher. Whatevvs. Sod her if that’s her attitude. She tucks the phone into her bra, in case, and jumps from the bed, finds her flip-flops and ties her hair up off her face with a scrunchie. She can’t shake off a feeling of melancholy about Nikki, though. I thought she was my friend, she thinks. I’d’ve at least thought she’d have said goodbye. Then she shrugs the sadness to the back of her mind and starts to clean her face. In Cher’s life, no one lasts for long. If you let it get to you, she tells herself, you’re done for, so let her go. If she doesn’t want to talk to you, then fuck her.
She wonders about putting on more make-up and dismisses the thought. ‘We’re all girls together,’ she tells the cat, who blinks his jade eyes to show that he’s listening. ‘We don’t need slap.’
She heads for the fridge. The supermarkets have become a lot more canny about tagging their branded goods, but the own-brand equivalents don’t seem to matter to them in the same way. Apart from sherry. Sherry, the old tramp’s standby, often has a big black bold alarm strip round its neck. But Cher has yet to develop a taste for the grown-up things: olives and sherry and vermouth and red wine. Her favourite drinks of all are neon blue, but they’re surprisingly hard to nick.
In the fridge, along with the cheese slices and the ketchup, she has a bottle of Sainsbury’s own-brand Irish Cream, just a couple of inches taken off the top. She snatches it up, along with a bar of chocolate and a multi-pack of meat-flavoured Golden Wonder crisps, and heads down the stairs where her knock is greeted by silence. But she feels, as much as hears, that movement has stopped behind the door. She knocks again and listens. Gerard has turned his music off, which must mean that he’s gone out. He never stops with it, from when he gets up in the morning until eleven on the dot each night. The only times there is silence is when he goes out. Weird bugger, thinks Cher. Far too much time locked up in there, if you ask me.
She hears Collette call out to ask who it is. She doesn’t sound friendly. She sounds like she might have had one visitor too many already today.
‘Only me,’ she says. Then, when the announcement is met by silence, adds: ‘Cher. From upstairs.’