Nancy’s real feeling of dread began the next day, with a small patch of damp on the wall. The wallpaper was the coarse, cheap kind that landlords used to cover up cracks. It had little chips on it like the chickenpox pimples on skin. She raised her hand and pushed it against the patch. The paper had come away from the wall behind. She thought of the moisture oozing out of the body of the house.
She looked around the room and remembered the old saying: a place for everything and everything in its place. Just at the moment, here in this new flat, there was a place for nothing and nothing was in its place. The walls were bare, except the pale rectangles where pictures had once hung. A light socket dangled from the centre of the ceiling with no light bulb in it. The previous tenant had taken the pictures and taken the light bulbs.
Cardboard packing cases covered the floor. One of them had split, showing the paperback books inside. It was their whole life, stacked in front of her. In Stoke Newington it had looked hopeful and now here in Harlesden, ten miles to the west and a whole world away, it looked lost and defeated.
In the next couple of days the boxes would be unloaded and the contents distributed and arranged and hung and stowed, and it might almost look like a home again.
But that stain would still be there, even if they could cover it with a picture.
As she looked at it, she suddenly felt as if the building was alive and it was suffering from a wound and was exuding some blood or awful liquid. The wall had tried to contain it but it was trying to force its way through.
Nancy heard a rumble and felt it too, beneath her feet. Water was running through pipes under the floorboards. Probably the heating was switching itself on or off, or someone in the flat next door was emptying a sink. She felt the building was alive and the pipes were its veins and arteries. The house was trying to tell her something. She could hear the whispers, but she couldn’t make out the words.
She had taken her pills, but she knew the signs and knew she needed to be in the fresh air, not looking at that damp, dark stain any longer. She picked up her worn leather jacket – as comforting as an ancient teddy bear – and pulled it on. She looked instinctively at the mirror on the wall to check her appearance, to see that her long, pale brown hair wasn’t too disordered, but there wasn’t a mirror on the wall. Not yet.
Felix was out of sight in the galley kitchen. He would be installing something, doing something practical.
‘I’m going out,’ she said in a raised voice. ‘I have to…’
She couldn’t think of anything that she had to do, but she hoped it would be enough.
‘Can you get something for me?’
Nancy didn’t want to talk, and she didn’t want to have to remember anything. She felt that she was being held underwater by an irresistible force and that she was about to open her mouth and breathe in the water and drown. The muttering around her increased and she tried to ignore it. Maybe it would go away.
She heard a horrible sound and at first, she couldn’t tell what it was or where it was coming from, whether it was inside the house or outside the house. She opened the door to the flat and stepped out into the common passageway, where the sound at once became clearer and more defined. Of course, it was the crying baby in the flat opposite. She knew that the crying didn’t mean anything except that the baby was hungry or tired, but it felt like a drill, except the drill was inside her skull.
She hurried down the stairs and stepped out onto the path. A few stumbling paces later she was on the pavement. She took deep breaths in the cold air. She had made it.
It was a Sunday afternoon in mid-November, and it was as if the day was already preparing for evening. Windows glowed up and down one side of Fielding Road. Every minute a train, a caterpillar of lights, rumbled past and disappeared. She didn’t know the area and she had nowhere to get to except away from where she had been, so she just started walking.
One day the road would be familiar, the street where she lived, but now it felt as if she had been dropped there and abandoned. A young man in a heavy jacket and a woolly hat was walking towards her. She avoided meeting his gaze, but as he passed her, he said something. She couldn’t make out the words, but they sounded like a threat. You can’t get away from me. Nancy speeded up her walk. The important thing was not to respond, not to engage.
Suddenly there were people everywhere, as the houses became shops: pound stores, furniture warehouses with sofas wrapped in thick polythene piled outside on the pavement, fish shops that also sold meat, barbers and charity shops. It felt like an area for people like her, who were exiles from another part of London or another part of the world. They were there because they didn’t have the money to live anywhere else. She walked along a motley storefront of mops and bins and plastic flowers and crates of energy drinks and found herself in a market. Parsnips and carrots, flecked with the earth they’d been pulled from. Meat hanging from hooks, glistening pink and with a smell that caught in the back of her throat. There was a pyramid of over-ripe mangoes, flesh oozing out of split skin. Christmas trees standing in a row. They would be dead long before Christmas.
Something spun her round. A woman shouted. A finger jabbed her. She heard spiteful laughter. Where was it coming from? It seemed all around her, bubbles of sound.
Up close was a face, jowly, spittle on the chin. Reek of cigarettes and garlic. So many smells, so many sounds, and it was as if she could smell and hear them all.
‘Cry baby.’
‘What?’ Nancy stepped back.
‘Escape,’ said another voice, close at hand. ‘Get away.’
There were bodies closing in all around her and she was trapped by them, trapped by the voices that were asking her for something, telling her something, but she couldn’t hear what. A figure reeled towards her, face blotchy and discoloured, with staring eyes, like an upright corpse. So much fear and distress.
Nancy ran a hand over her face, she pressed her fingers to her mouth. Her skin pricked and itched, as if there was an army of stinging ants marching across her.
‘It’s okay,’ she said out loud because sometimes talking to herself in the third person helped.
Her feet slid on wet, slimy leaves. It hasn’t been a good idea to come out. She was less safe here than in the flat. She had to go home. But home is where the heart is. She put her hand flat against her chest to feel her heart hammering away. Distress signals.
She turned. Someone spat at her. No. Not spit, rain. Fat clean drops of rain on her hot cheek.
She walked back slowly, one foot in front of the other. What was that marching rhyme from her childhood, walking in the mud and chill of a winter Sunday afternoon with her father chivvying her? Left, left, you had a good home and you left; right, right, it serves you jolly well right.
The crowds abruptly fell away. A bike light wavered towards her, gleaming on the damp road, and then passed.
The house was just a few yards away. She could do this.