Woken by the violent squeal of tyres in the street below, Joanna tries to go back to sleep. She thought she had slept for hours, but her head had barely hit the pillow. Too full of the unresolved questions about Caroline she had hoped she was free of when she climbed into bed. Unblinking, she watches moonlight nudge between the folds in the bedroom curtains. It curdles with the glow of city streets and moulds itself to the withers of Dora’s old furniture.
Accepting she isn’t going to be able to drift off now, she rolls over. Groping the graveyard of earrings her sister occasionally wore, the framed black and white photographs – of their father, another of Joanna and Mike on their wedding day – standing proudly amid empty bottles of temazepam and zolpidem. She switches on the bedside lamp, swaps the sickly pre-dawn light for the artificial and swings her legs off the bed. Pulling on one of Caroline’s cardigans, she slots her feet into her sister’s old slippers. Finding the hollows Caroline’s toes had made brings a memory of her father’s shoes, and not of Caroline at all. Shoes Joanna would push her hands inside to feel where his toes had been, before her mother bagged them up for Oxfam to take away.
Padding to the bathroom, she tugs on the light and is greeted by more of her sister’s medication lined up in the cabinet above the basin. The sight of it pushes her back to that damp, cramp Camden flat of her childhood: the stuffiness, the mustiness, the rows of brown pill bottles, their necks plugged with pink cotton wool – pills that if her mother didn’t take spelt trouble. Shaking them and finding each of them empty, she drops them into the bin. She snaps shut the mirror-fronted cabinet and catches a glimpse of Dora over her shoulder. The draught of ghostly breath on the nape of her neck. She jumps, ice cold beneath her night-clothes. Joanna experienced something similar to this when Dora first died, but nothing since. Why is she seeing her again after all these years – is her aunt trying to communicate something? An unsettling thought as the real world recedes then shifts forward into the startling sound of the telephone.
‘Who the hell rings people at this hour?’ she grumbles, listening to it summon her. ‘It could be urgent,’ she says to no one, in no hurry to answer it.
Joanna sweeps Caroline’s thick woollen cardigan around her, finds a hole worn away on the sleeve. Coddling herself, she aims for the hall, letting the swell of a rare gibbous moon lead the way. Slithering free from a fold of cloud, its supine stare is enough to override the stain of streetlamps and allows her to circumvent the sharp-edged furniture, picture frames and vases. Checking what can be seen of the clock above her head to confirm the absurdity of the time, she picks the telephone up on the sixth ring.
‘Hello?’ she interrogates the handset, pinching sleepy dust from her eyes.
Nothing.
‘Who’s there, please ?’ Her voice shaking. ‘Mike , is that you, love?’
When no one answers, her mind spins to what the neighbour said about Caroline being beleaguered by silent calls. Could this nuisance be the same person who’d been pestering her sister? Could it be connected to why Caroline was too frightened to leave the flat, so she missed her appointments at the hospital, didn’t collect her prescriptions? And – worse – why she armed herself with Dora’s knife that night?
‘Who’s there, please?’ she asks the caller, a shiver of fear running the length of her. ‘Answer me. Who are you, what do you want?’
Again nothing. But there’s definitely someone, she hears them breathing. The sound fights for room alongside her in the dark.