The Killer Next Door(110)

She carts him over to the door, opens it and hurls him on to the landing. Later, she will at least be able to comfort herself that she wasn’t so out of control that she threw him out of the window. Psycho somersaults through the air and lands on the carpet on all fours. His eyes are huge with hurt. People who don’t live with cats don’t know this: that if you know them well, their emotions are written large across their faces, if you only care to look. He hangs his head like a beaten dog, and bobs from foot to foot.

‘Yeah, fuck off!’ she bellows. ‘I don’t want to bloody see you, you bastard!’

She slams the door, shaking, and goes to examine her nose in the mirror. The cut is only a few millimetres long – nothing on the injuries from which she’s still recovering, but the fact that he’s missed her eye by a whisker makes her blood run cold. Imagination overtakes her, makes her jump outside her body and see herself, cat attached to her eyeball, membrane breaking and juicy jelly cascading over her cheek. She shudders and presses her hand to her eyes. Wets a bit of bog paper from the roll she half-inched from a pub a few weeks back, dabs at the cut.

The cat scratches at her door. He doesn’t like being excluded, is trying to apologise. ‘Piss off,’ she calls. God, it’s lucky they’re all still out at the hospital, she thinks. I’d have scared them half to death with my shouting.

Psycho yowls, and a piteous paw appears in the gap at the bottom of the door. She’s already over the anger, but she can’t resist punishing him a little more. He can stay out there till I’m ready. Little sod. She screws her eye shut and sprays a little perfume on the cut. A cut nose is one thing: a septic nose a whole other ballgame.

A few seconds of frantic scrabbling, then it stops. Cher can feel the rejection beaming through the wood. Oh, poor old sod, she thinks. He’s my best friend and he didn’t mean to do it. She chooses a little round plaster from the box Collette brought up when she was sick, and fixes it over the cut. It’s only oozing, now. It felt like it had gone all the way through to the bone at the time, but it’s clearly not that serious. She goes and opens the door.

Psycho is sulking. He has retreated to the corner by the Landlord’s cupboard, and has hunched himself into a tea cosy, his chin tucked in to his chest and his eyes wet with reproach. ‘Oh, sorry, lover,’ she says. ‘It’s all right. I’m not cross any more.’

She goes over to pick him up. He clocks her approach, and shoots off up the landing, towards the bathroom. Christ, cats. You can never snub them without getting snubbed right back. ‘Oh, come on, Psycho,’ she says, trying her reasonable tone, and follows. ‘You hurt me too, you know.’

He stops by the bathroom door and stares balefully at her. ‘Honestly,’ she says. ‘If you had the right sort of mouth, you’d be pouting. Come on. Let me make it up to you.’

She tries blinking at him, but he just lashes his tail in return. Now all she wants is to scoop his hard little body up into her arms and kiss the top of his head until he forgives her. She loves that cat. Loves him stupidly. He’s the first creature she’s ever been able to love without worrying, and she’s distressed to think that she might have spoiled it all. ‘Oh, Psycho,’ she says, and goes to grab him. He slinks backwards, ducks down and slides through her fingers, bolts back up to the other end of the landing. Stops and stares at her by Thomas’s door, then pops out a paw and pulls it open. Vanishes up the attic stairs.

Cher hesitates. Thomas is not a hospitable sort of soul, though she feels she knows him better than she did. He has the largest flat of all of them, apart from Vesta, but no one has ever seen inside. There’s music coming down the stairs, a sound that surprises her, as she’s never heard anything through her ceiling. She can’t imagine Roy Preece going to the expense of soundproofing when it got converted, but there you go. Every now and then she’s heard some heavy noise, like something being dropped or dragged, but she’s never heard music. She’d always assumed he was just a quiet neighbour.

Would he be pissed off? If I just went up? Maybe if I call up the stairs? I can’t help it if he’s left the door off the latch, can I?

She cracks the door open and pops her head inside. Pale beige carpeting. Very nice. And though the stairs are narrow, it’s lovely and bright in here, lit by the stained-glass window that used to illuminate the whole landing. ‘Hello?’ she calls.

There’s another door at the top, just slightly ajar. The Bee Gees. ‘Staying Alive’, out of Saturday Night Fever. Maybe that’s why I don’t hear it. There’s barely a bass line in there, by today’s standards. Most of the time it must be drowned out by that classical crap from downstairs, anyway, coming up through my floorboards. Totally not the sort of music I’d expect to be coming out of Thomas’s flat. If I’d expected anything, it would be screechy women and violins. I don’t suppose he can hear me over it.