They rang the doorbell, just like any normal people. How was I to know? It was ten past nine in the morning, just after the postman had been. I was dressed, you understand, just about to go down to the shop for a newspaper. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and at that time in the morning you don’t expect—
You don’t expect.
A boy and a girl. She was too thin, he was liverish, not a healthy-looking couple. Down at heel, I thought, fallen on hard times. Or perhaps they had never known good times. She looked about sixteen, he was two or three years older. John and Amy, they’d come about the room. What room? I asked them. They pointed to the lounge. They’d seen it through the garden window, the room I still called the front room. Sleet was falling outside. The girl was wearing a pink cardigan two sizes too small, like a little girl. She looked so cold.
How could I refuse them?
Hard times, he said, something about hard times. Well. This whole neighbourhood has fallen on hard times. I like to think I’m a good Christian. The thing was, they had no money. Not right away, but they could get some. Just a room. What about the toilet and kitchen? I asked, you’d need to use those. You won’t know we’re here, said the girl, we’re very quiet. It won’t be for long.
I suppose I wondered then if they had done something wrong. But the girl’s eyes were so blue and wide, and the boy’s face was so pale and lean. He had a rash on his neck that needed treatment. You feel sorry for the younger ones, how can they get a start in life now?
I had the space to spare. This house has three floors. A Victorian semi-detached residence. Even when Sam was alive we hadn’t used all of the rooms, they cost too much to heat. With him gone, and hardly anyone visiting, what need had I for a front room with a piano I had to keep polished every week, and so many ornaments in the glass cabinet, and the best china and the rugs, and the air so still you could see motes of dust hovering on sunny afternoons, not even circulating through the light.
I let them move in. This was January. How was I to know?
I gave them a key, the only one I had spare, Sam’s old key. At first I hardly knew they were there, they were so quiet. One day Amy left me a cake, came upstairs and put it on my kitchen table. Shop bought, just sponge and blue icing, but a sweet gesture. Amy and I ate some together with tea, and she told me she was pregnant, and had been thrown out of her stepfather’s flat. She had no money. He had no job. How were they to live?
I moved my things to the first floor so that they could have the kitchen and bathroom to themselves. I thought it was only fair. She said they would pay me back once they got on their feet.
John often went out late. I saw him go from the upstairs window. He left Amy alone, but I didn’t go downstairs. I didn’t mean to pry. Who wants an old lady interfering and making a nuisance of herself? Young people live differently now.
It’s a quiet street, run-down and dirty, but you should have seen it after the war, smart and neat, with tidy front gardens, not like today with the kids yelling and screaming. Now they leave fridges and sofas on the pavement, and abandon their cars in the road. A woman was stabbed in the middle of the afternoon for no reason. How can you be stabbed for no reason? The council do nothing. I write and write, but all I ever get back is a form letter – thank you for bringing this matter to our attention, and so on.
It snowed in February, and John stopped going out so much. That was when the doorbell started ringing more often. At first it was just during the day. Strangers would call and ask for John. I would hear Amy answer the door, see her usher them in. They would stay for just a couple of minutes and then leave. People soon began calling at all hours of the night.
One night I remember the house was cold because someone had left the front door open. I wanted to check that everything was all right, and knocked on the front room but there was no answer. I could hear crying inside.
I still did my own hoovering then. One day I was vacuuming the hall carpet and found a hypodermic needle, a nasty-looking thing with blood on one end. I should have asked them what was going on. The lady from the social services came to call to see how I was, and I told her everything was fine. A neighbour called, the Methodist lady from across the road. I didn’t mention my lodgers, I don’t know why. I wanted to sort things out for myself. I hadn’t seen Amy for a while, and neither of them had offered me any money. I had to sort it out, just to know where I stood.
I knocked at the door, and found myself confronted by a tall black man dressed in one of my husband’s old shirts. He told me he was staying with John and Amy for a while, and who was I? Well, I hardly knew what to say. When I was growing up, no one would have ever behaved in such a way. I was trembling, but I demanded to see the room.
This man – I never found out who he was – opened the door. It was a shock to find the place in such a state, rubbish on the floor, pizza boxes and beer cans and filth, everything so dirty, and John lying on the floor half asleep, dressed only in a stained T-shirt and shorts, and terrible bruises on his arms. Amy told me he’d been in a fight, and apologised about the state of the room. She’d meant to clean it but hadn’t been well. Her stomach was no larger, and when I asked her about the baby she didn’t seem to recall our conversation. I supposed she wasn’t pregnant after all, but couldn’t think why she would have lied.
I went back to my rooms on the first floor to think things through. Obviously I had to ask them to leave, but how?
I decided to talk the matter over with my neighbour, and went over to see her, but she wasn’t in. I was worried sick. The next day John came in carrying one of those portable music players, and started playing it all the time, even after I asked him to turn it down. I must have been blind.
I saw him go out, watched through the banisters as he shut the front door, then I went downstairs. Amy was sitting against the wall with a rubber cord tied around her arm. She and the black man were boiling something in spoons over Sam’s old primus stove. Well, of course I knew it was drugs, I’d seen it on the television, so I had to put my foot down. No drugs in this house, I told her, I’m afraid I will have to ask you and your friends to leave.
The other man, his name was Lee, he told me to go away – only he was much ruder than that, he actually swore at me, told me to eff off and mind my own effing business. Told me not to come downstairs again, that it was off-limits from now on. Shook his fist in my face. I was shaking when I went back upstairs. I would not be spoken to in that way, in my own house.
I waited until the next morning and went to the police. I waited for ages to see someone, and this very abrupt lady told me I was to make a report, and she would deal with the matter, so I filled out a form, giving them my name and address, and came home.
When Sam was alive the house was filled with plants, aspidistras, ferns and palms in round white china bowls. Everything gleamed, silverware, crockery, my best tea service, the framed photographs on the walls. In the month that followed, everything disappeared, the cutlery, the pictures, the books, the silverware. They sold it all to buy their drugs, became quite brazen about it. Amy wouldn’t talk to me anymore. She seemed distant and only half-alive. John avoided me. One day, I came back from the shops to find two new men, one with a scar right across his face, and another girl, a scruffy little thing with sores on her arms. The men said they were friends of Lee’s, and had come to stay, but they would need my first floor.
I wouldn’t have let them and yet – something – all I could think was that perhaps there were redeeming circumstances, perhaps there was still a reason to be kind, but I was determined to return to the police as no one had called to talk to me.
In the meantime, I moved up to the top floor. The stairs were more steep, and although there was a toilet, the kitchen was little more than a cubbyhole. They stole everything that was left out, laughing and fighting and crashing into things, and I realised then that I was scared, really scared. I had survived a war and lived through rationing and seen my husband die, so of course I wasn’t scared for myself, but these harmful people hurt themselves and each other, they were so in the grip of their need, this thing they cooked and smoked, this thing that made them crack into pieces and behave like animals. The man called Lee, going to the toilet on the stairs in the middle of the night, the one with the scar holding his fist up to me, his fist! Just because I asked him to make less noise, I couldn’t sleep. They wouldn’t let me wash, or sleep. I became ashamed of myself.
The worst time was when I came out onto the landing (I would sneak downstairs to use the bathroom while they slept, I didn’t want to have to confront them) and saw one of them cutting Amy’s arms with a razor-blade. Blood was falling onto the threadbare Persian carpet like tiny red raindrops. I cried that night – buried my face in my pillow and pretended it was not happening. I would dream Sam was still alive, and the house was still nice, and would wake up with a terrible sinking sensation when I realised that all my fears were real.
It frightened me to leave the house, but one day I crept out, went back to the police and told them what was happening. They seemed surprised that no one had come to visit, and insisted on coming back with me, half a dozen of them. They said there had been complaints from the neighbours. I didn’t know about that. I had hardly ever talked to my neighbours, a young couple working in television on one side, hardly ever at home, some rough people on the other. The police told me they had ‘initiated eviction procedures’, but when they left, the people in my house were still there. They won’t do anything to you, love, said one of the policemen, just let us know if you have any more trouble, they’ll be gone soon.
The next day one of them called to inform me that a county court eviction order had been applied for. The police returned with a drugs search warrant and evicted everyone from my house. One man jumped over my garden fence and broke it.
I was alone for the first time in four months. I had terrible nightmares. A lady from social welfare called and told me I could apply for compensation, and that I could get someone in to help clean up the mess, but that it would take a while for the application to be processed. She didn’t think they would be able to get my belongings back. I only cared about the things that had sentimental value.
The next night, they moved back in. I heard them banging around, not even bothering to be quiet. They had nothing to be scared of. I was nearly eighty years old, and had no phone. I couldn’t believe anyone could be so brazen. You hear about such things but never think it can happen to you.
The police came back later that week, and this time they were armed. Dealers, I had dealers in, said one of the officers, and they had to get rid of them. He made it sound like I had mice or an infestation of cockroaches. But these men and their women and their drugs, they still came back. This time Lee tied my hands together and carried me to the top floor, and told me to stay there if I knew what was good for me. Every night I heard them banging through the house, looking for things to sell until there was nothing left. They cleared out my wardrobe and took my jewellery, my wedding necklace, the earrings Sam had given me on our silver anniversary. They emptied out my purse, even took all my old dresses.
I couldn’t go out, and didn’t dare to answer the door because I never knew who might be there. One afternoon at the end of May I heard the knocker – the doorbell no longer rang because they had taken out the batteries – and tiptoed out into the hall to peer through the bannisters. I recognised the shape standing behind the glass because the lady from across the road is rather large. I didn’t know what to do. Should I risk going downstairs? Finally I decided I had to be brave, and crept down as quietly as I could. The door to the lounge was shut, and the house seemed quiet because everyone had a habit of sleeping at odd hours, so I carefully opened the front door.
Dear God, said my neighbour, what’s happened to you? When did you last have something to eat? You look terrible. Her voice was so loud that I was frightened she would wake them up, so I told her I had the flu, and would call on her when I was better, and quickly shut the door.
I made my way upstairs and went to bed. There was little point in getting up, not when the rest of my house was out of bounds. The next day I received a letter from the bank warning me about running up an overdraft, especially since I had asked to close up my account. I had never had such a thing in my life. My pension was paid in by direct debit, and I always had enough to see me through the month because I suppose I spent so little on myself – you don’t, do you, when you’re eating for one. It was a shock, and when I searched for the box I keep my cheque book in, I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I had to go and see Amy. She was in her usual sleepy state, only worse this time. Her face was yellow with jaundice, and her eyes had sunk so deep that I could hardly tell if she was looking at me in the candle light.
She told me that John had drawn out my savings and paid some men the money he owed them, if he hadn’t they would have killed him, and now it was all gone, and what did I have that I could sell? I got angry and said, how can you live like this, what is wrong with you people? When I was your age nobody lived in this terrible way, lying and stealing and hurting each other, and soon she was crying and hugging me like a baby wanting to be nursed.
Then John came back with some men in hooded jackets, and I could tell they had been drinking, so I scuttled back upstairs, but I heard what they said to Amy. Do you think she’s got more money hidden away? asked John. We really need it, Amy. You could get it out of her, she likes you. And Amy said no, leave her alone, she’s so old she won’t live if you hurt her, and then it was quiet for a bit. We could tie her up and leave her without food until she tells us, that’s not like actually torturing her, is it, said another. Then I heard them coming up the stairs.
I held my breath. The footsteps stopped. Something distracted them and they started arguing. After a few minutes they went back downstairs and closed the front room door once more. That was when I decided I couldn’t stay on the top floor any longer. I would have to move.
I quickly decided that the only place left was the cupboard in the top room. I hadn’t used it for years because it was tucked in a corner and hard to get at. It went under the attic, but if I dragged my blankets in there I could make myself a bed. I could come out at night and take food from the kitchen, perhaps use the microwave because it was quiet and they hadn’t sold it yet. I worked quickly and quietly, taking only the things I needed, and made myself a new little home. I pretended it was wartime again, and that I would be hurt if anyone found me.
I did a clever thing. I crept downstairs and left the front door wide open, so they would think I had gone out, run away for good. Of course I couldn’t because I had no money and no clean clothes, and I couldn’t impose myself on people I hardly knew. In my day you wouldn’t consider doing such a thing. Then I went back up to my cupboard. I found a tin of condensed milk, and an apricot, not very fresh but better than nothing. And there I stayed.
I thought for a while I would escape, but I became too weak to get much further than the toilet and the kitchen, and certainly couldn’t manage the main staircase to the front door, it is far too long and the stairs are too deep.
They quickly overran the house, barking and chasing each other like dogs, and nobody thought of looking in the cupboard because you wouldn’t it was so insignificant, and they hardly noticed such details. At night they smashed things up and screamed at each other, screamed terrible things, and once there were gunshots, but none of the neighbours ever came round to complain.
No one comes round to complain. I think they are too frightened. The other afternoon I got as far as the kitchen (I had found some tuna left in a discarded tin) and I noticed that the house next door, the one belonging to the television people, was now empty. They had given up.
I still live here in my old house. I’ve been here for a long time now. The worst thing is when the police come and throw them all out, because I can’t tell how soon they’ll be back, and I have no food until they do. I need them to feed me. But they always return, smoking their little pipes and leaving half-eaten pizzas on the floor, which I can take and reheat when they’re asleep.
Of course I am scared. I’ve been scared before, but when you are scared all the time, the sensation fades away into a dull ache that you hardly remember anymore, like losing Sam or any other sadness that is always with you.
Sometime I remember the house the way it was. With polished lino and ticking clocks and china dogs on the mantelpiece, and the wireless playing, the smell of fresh baked jam puddings and lavender polish, washed net curtains, everything dusted and tidy and bright, but those days have gone, and I would rather be old and filled with memories and living in this little dark space than be downstairs in the bare hard light, young and raw and screaming inside, facing the daily terror of being alive in a world that no longer cares, or even notices if you are there at all.