The sobbing continues, low, miserable and despairing. The occasional ‘ow’ breaking in to the rhythm. They sound like they’re in trouble, she thinks. It sounds like somebody’s hurt.
Am I still dreaming? Am I having one of those dreams where you think you’re awake? Am I hearing myself cry in my sleep, and thinking it’s coming from outside me? I am so tired. Maybe I’ve never woken up at all.
She drifts across the room and slips through the door. In the corridor, the faint sound of Gerard Bright’s music lulls her, makes her feel safe. If I were awake it would be a hundred decibels louder, she thinks. I’m hearing it through the fog of sleep, registering it because it’s there. She stands at the foot of the stairs, looking up, for a long time. All is silent up on the landing: just the ticketty-ticketty-tick of rain on glass. Something’s changed about the light up there. Despite the overcast skies, the landing looks brighter that she’s ever seen it. She’s halfway up the stairs before she sees that it’s because Thomas’s door stands wide open.
The sound of sobbing has disappeared. She pauses on the landing and listens at Cher’s door, but hears no sound within. She taps, calls her name, but hears no response.
Something draws her to Thomas’s door. It’s so odd to see it open. She’s never seen it so before, never even glimpsed in to the stairwell. A terrible smell rolls down the stairs, a smell of rot and chemicals that fills her with dread. And yet she finds herself walking up. This must still be a dream, she thinks, as she runs her hand up the plasterboard wall of the stairwell. In real life this smell would be enough to send me back down the stairs to look for one of the others. So I might as well go with it. At least I know it’s not real, not like when I was on the banks of the Ganges. That felt so real I thought I was going to die.
She reaches the door at the top of the stairs and finds that it, too, is open. She calls, tentatively, into the room: ‘Hello? Thomas? Hello?’ And steps inside. Sloped ceilings, a generalised grime, and an extraordinary and pungent collection of cardboard air fresheners drawing-pinned to the sloping ceiling as though they are a decorative flourish, a television on a stand and a record player on which the arm goes back and forth, back and forth, in the centre of an old LP. She goes over and takes it off. Can’t bear to watch old things damage themselves.
Cher’s black cat shoots out from under the stained and sagging sofa, trots towards her then moves to a gallop as he gets near. ‘Hey, Psycho,’ she says, and stretches out a hand. He ducks, slips past her legs and hurtles off into the house. She shakes her head. He’s never been a friendly cat, though he’s devoted to Cher and follows her wherever she goes.
And now she can hear the sobbing again. It’s muffled, as if the voice’s owner is shut behind a door. She calls out, once more, more loudly this time. Wherever Thomas is, he’s not here in among his stinking artefacts. ‘Hello?’
The sobbing stops. A shout in response. ‘Hello? Hello? Oh my God! Is someone there?’
It’s Cher. Somewhere in this flat, sounding weak and scared and desperate. ‘Cher?’ she calls.
A noise on the sloped ceiling; someone shifting, up on the roof, the sound of a tile loosening itself, sliding over her head and smashing on the flags below. ‘Oh, God! Collette! Oh, God, I’m here!’
‘Where?’
‘On the roof!’
She almost asks what she’s doing there, but thinks better of it. ‘Where?’
‘On the roof! I can’t get down. Please. Help!’
She’s beginning to realise that she’s awake; fully awake and in a place that makes her very uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to wait for Thomas to come back – he’s not the sort who would take kindly to uninvited guests.
‘How did you get up there?’
‘Bedroom window. Oh, no, Collette, don’t…’
‘Hold on,’ she calls, and goes to the bedroom.
No, I am dreaming. I must be. That looks like…
She stops in the doorway and gapes. Her scalp crawls. Oh, my God, those are women. One on a chair, an Egyptian queen made of leather, one on the floor behind the door, one arm contorted beneath her and the other thrown full-length over her head, flaking into the carpet like a resident of Pompeii. Bags of salts, bottles of oil, a rail of dresses. What is this? What is this?
Cher’s voice brings her back to herself. ‘Collette? Collette!’
She does as she always does, as she’d trained herself. Thinks: I won’t think about this now, I’ll think about it later. Action always trumps thinking in an emergency. She steps gingerly over the wizened brown legs of the woman on the floor and climbs on to the bed. Leans her arms along the windowsill and puts her face out into the rain.