Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

Ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk

It was much too loud, even louder than usual, and now it wasn't just the bass beat and an occasional hint of vocals — it was overlaid with screeching and twanging and droning, like a rock concert from hell, and she couldn't fool herself any longer into thinking it was coming from one of the other flats.

Going down down down

Down there down there

Perhaps she had been wrong not to resist the noise all those other times. Perhaps it had been taking advantage of her compliance to feed and grow stronger. She wanted it to stop, wanted desperately to switch it off, but how could she switch off something that hadn't been switched on in the first place?

Only now did she notice there was something different about the living-room. The walls were no longer freshly painted pistachio, but mottled with black and purple shadows, and sprinkled with gold and silver stars that glinted in the half-light. She moved in a dream towards the windows, which were draped with polyester velvet which was bulging like a schooner's sails in the draught.

Sophie stared at the windows. She knew she hadn't left them open. But they were open now.

Then she made the mistake of looking out.

The world outside was greenish, the colour of green cheese, the same colour as Mantegna's Christ, and to begin with, Sophie didn't notice the girl who was lying almost directly beneath her, two floors down. Her hair might have been red, but it was difficult to tell in the greenish light. At first Sophie thought she was just leaning awkwardly against the railings. Then she saw the girl's head was bent back in a position that was wholly unnatural — the neck had to be broken — and that protruding from the socket of her left eye was the tip of an iron spear. The other eye was wide open, and so was her mouth, though she made no sound. Only her fingers moved; they were flexing, opening and closing on empty air.

She was gazing up at the window through that wide-open eye, though Sophie wasn't sure if she could actually see anything.

Inside the room, the music pounded.

Ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk

Something dark and wet was pooling on the pavement.

Sophie could only stand and stare. At that stage, what she was seeing didn't frighten her, because she knew it couldn't possibly be real. She was embroiled in another nightmare — an incredibly intricate one in which she had dreamt about waking but hadn't woken at all.

She wasn't really and truly afraid until she realized she wasn't alone. She had only to turn her head a fraction, and she would see someone standing just behind her shoulder. It was a he, of that she was sure. Already she could smell his familiar stale cigarette smell, mixed with alcohol, mixed with something else — something even more pungent and repulsive.

And, with a sensation not unlike that of stepping out of an aeroplane at forty thousand feet, she suddenly understood that it worked both ways. Whoever was standing there could see her too.

She turned, slowly.

The shadows shifted. And shifted once again.

She wasn't sure what she was seeing. There was more than one of them: a man, maybe two men, or perhaps a man and a woman, perhaps a whole crowd of people, and she thought she heard someone giggle and say, 'Oops'. She stood there for perhaps thirty seconds before her legs responded to the frantic signals from her brain. As soon as she could make them move, they carried her towards the door, and she didn't look back, because she was afraid of what she might see if she did.

She made it down to the landing outside her flat, only to realize that the idea of going anywhere near the railings outside made her feel faint with terror. So instead she headed up the next flight of stairs and hammered with her fists on Robert Jamieson's door.

And that was how Sophie finally met her upstairs neighbour.

It wasn't the way she would have planned it. She didn't get time to comb her hair or put on make-up or anything. She was wearing a nightshirt — her nipples and the shadow of her pubic hair were visible through the thin white cotton, and the neckline had slipped, exposing one of her shoulders in a saucy Nell Gwynn sort of way.

It was one hell of an entrance. She couldn't have staged it better if she'd tried.

There was the sound of the door being unlocked, and then she was looking up into the face of a tall, thin man with an open mouth. Sophie caught a whiff of dragon's breath before realizing she'd caught him in mid-yawn. He was in pressing need of a shave, but she didn't think she'd got him out of bed, because he was wearing jeans and a loose T-shirt which might have once been black but which was now a dusty grey.

He rubbed his eyes and muttered three words.

'Where's the fire?'

Sophie opened her mouth too, but the only sound that emerged was a pathetic little bleat, as if someone had pressed a button in her midriff but her batteries needed replacing.

The man stood and drank her in with his eyes, looking her up and down with a peculiar, rather self-satisfied little smile, and after a while he said, 'You'll do.'

She got mad at him then, and the anger helped snap her out of her shock. 'For Heaven's sake,' she snarled. 'Are you going to let me freeze to death?'

'Sorry,' he murmured, showing her in with an expression so tragic it was almost comical. 'And there I was, thinking I'd died and gone to heaven.'

He led her up to his living-room, and it was only when Sophie was shivering in the middle of it that she realized what a compromising situation she'd walked into. It wasn't so long since the unpleasantness with Graham, and now here she was, barely dressed, alone and defenceless in the company of a complete stranger. What if he turned out to be another creep?

But he was behaving like a gentleman, even if he didn't look like one. He found a musty army surplus overcoat and draped it around her shoulders before making her sit in an old brown armchair. He bent to light the rickety gas fire, mumbled something about a stiff drink and headed back down to the kitchen.

Sophie peered warily at his living-room. It was roughly the size of her own, but seemed smaller and darker, because the walls were lined floor-to-ceiling with books. All sorts of books: big ones, little ones, fat ones, thin ones, hardbacks, paperbacks, and ones without any backs at all. The only sort of books he didn't have were new ones; they all looked second-hand and well-thumbed, but at least that meant they weren't there just for show. And they looked dusty. Sophie stroked the mantelpiece with her finger and found it was also covered in dust. The whole place smelled of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes — this was evidently not someone who took his housework seriously.

The thought gave Sophie a warm glow of optimism in the middle of her anxiety. He couldn't possibly have a girlfriend, because a woman would never endure such squalor. It wasn't so much that Sophie felt like doing his washing-up for him, but perhaps he could be persuaded to hire her own Filipino cleaning-woman for a couple of hours each week.

Comforting sounds drifted up from the kitchen — the clink of glass, the gush of water from the tap. Sophie began to relax for the first time since she'd woken from the dream. She huddled beneath the greatcoat, staring half-mesmerized at the flicker of artificial gas flame.

It was only when her neighbour reappeared, carrying a couple of glasses of whisky, that she remembered with an unpleasant start that she ought to have been calling the emergency services. That poor girl. She shrugged the greatcoat aside and started to get up. 'I have to use the phone.'

He stepped so close that she was forced to sit down again. 'You look like you need a drink,' he said, towering over her as he handed her one of the glasses.