Loser
The Last Errand
Philadelphia. 3rd October 1996.
The building was wearing a hat.
That was the first thing she noticed, standing across Spruce Street at a quarter to eleven with the envelopes inside her coat. Thirty-odd storeys of pale brick going up and up, and then at the very top somebody had stacked a crown of terracotta, step on step, with arches and urns and carved things she couldn't make out from the pavement, all of it so high that nobody would ever get a proper look at it except the pigeons. Somebody had spent months on that. For pigeons.
She liked it straight away, and didn't trust that she liked it.
She checked the address on the outer envelope against the brass numbers over the door. She had checked it four times on the walk over and it hadn't changed, but she checked it again. Heavy cream paper, a big sure hand. One word for the name, Sapphire, and the address under it. The second envelope was tucked behind the first and she didn't look at that one. She knew what was in it. Nobody had bothered to hide it from her. No use for her directly at the moment. A brand new person. He had a way of putting things.
There was a trick to doors like this one. You didn't look at the man behind the desk. You looked at the elevators, as if you were late and they were the reason. She went through the revolving door and across the lobby with the envelope held where it could be seen, and the man at the desk lifted his eyes, saw the paper, decided she was a courier, and looked down again.
She had his face anyway. Heavy lids. A shaving cut under the left ear, a day old. A wedding ring he was turning round and round with his thumb, the way people did when they'd had a phone call they didn't like.
The elevator was old and brass and slow. She pressed the top button and watched the numbers climb and thought about getting out on the fourteenth floor and going back down and walking away up Spruce Street and never coming back. She thought about it on every floor. Then the doors opened on a short hallway with a dark red carpet and a single door at the end, and a little panel beside it with a grille and a button.
She stood in front of it for a while.
He'd have laughed at her, standing here. Not out loud. He did it with one side of his mouth. She hated that she could see it so clearly and she hated more that some part of her wanted to see it, wanted him to be here doing it, because at least then he'd be here.
She pressed the button.
Nothing. Then a crackle, and a woman's voice, flat, with an accent she couldn't place, hard at the corners.
"Yes?"
"I've got letters." Her own voice came out too high. She brought it down. "For the lady who lives here."
A pause.
"From whom?"
She didn't say names. She'd stopped saying names a long time ago, and she wasn't going to start in a hallway with a carpet like that. "It's her writing on it," she said. "The other lady. You'll know it."
The grille went quiet. She heard a chain, then a bolt, then another bolt. The door opened about a foot.
The woman behind it had her sleeves pushed up and her hands were still damp, as if she'd been interrupted at the sink. Her hair was pinned back hard. She didn't take the envelope. She looked at it in Loser's hand for a long moment, and then she looked at Loser: the face, the hands, the coat, the boots, and the face again. She took her time over it.
Loser knew that look. She'd been looked at like that by store detectives and caseworkers and the men who came round the concourse at night with flashlights. She knew what it was to be read, and she read back, the way she always did, and waited for something to come up in the woman's face. Contempt, or pity, or that tiredness people got.
Nothing came up. The woman's face was just a face, looking.
Then she put out her hand and took the envelope, turned it over, and studied the writing. Her eyes went once, very quickly, back over her own shoulder, down the length of a corridor behind her to a closed door at the far end. Then they came back.
Loser filed that away. That's where.
The woman stepped aside.
"Come in."
She shut the door behind them, and did the chain, and the two bolts, and then touched each of them again with her fingers, one after the other, as if counting.
"Have you eaten?"
"I'm fine."
"That is not what I asked."
The room they walked through was the size of a church, and nobody had told it.
Two storeys of old brick, and a ceiling so far off she had to tip her head back, crossed with black pipes, and from the pipes hung dozens and dozens of bare bulbs on long cords, all at different heights, so that the light didn't come down so much as hang about in the air. There was a staircase going up in an iron spiral to a sort of balcony. There was a bar, a real one, with bottles, and leather sofas the colour of brandy. There was half an aeroplane on the wall. The propeller and the engine, bolted to a pillar, as if somebody had flown in through the brick and stopped.
She didn't say anything about any of it. She kept her hands in her pockets so she wouldn't touch.
The woman took her down a corridor and through a door into another room entirely. It was small and warm and lived in. Brown kitchen cabinets, a green sofa and two chairs, a rug in red and cream, plants in pots, a few photographs in frames on shelves along the wall. It smelled of coffee and soap. It was the first room in the place that looked as if a person stayed in it.
"Sit."
Loser sat at the little table by the window. The woman went to the stove.
She didn't ask anything. She took a pot of boiled potatoes out of the fridge, cold ones, already cooked, and sliced them into a pan with butter and an onion and some bacon, and stood over them pushing them about with a spatula, and when they'd gone brown at the edges she broke three eggs over the top and put a lid on it. Then she cut two thick slices off a dark loaf and buttered them right to the edges.
She put the plate down in front of Loser with a fork, and sat on the other side of the table with her coffee.
Loser meant to eat slowly. She'd decided to on the walk over, that if anyone fed her she'd eat like a person. But the smell of it got there first, and by the time she noticed what she was doing she had her left arm round the plate and her head down and half of it was gone, and she was breathing through her nose like a dog.
She stopped. Put the fork down.
"Sorry."
The woman looked at her over the coffee cup.
"For what?"
Loser opened her mouth and found she didn't have an answer. The woman waited a moment, as if she was really expecting one, and then, when none came, she seemed to put the question down somewhere and leave it.
"Eat," she said. "It goes cold."
So Loser ate the rest of it, slower, and the bread, and wiped the plate with the last of the bread, and the woman watched her do it and drank her coffee and asked nothing.
That was the worst of it. Loser had the answers ready. Where she was from, how old she was, how long on the street, how she'd met him, what she could do. She'd had them ready since the elevator. Lies for some of them and nothing for the rest, but ready. And nobody asked. The woman just sat there being exactly what she looked like, and Loser sat across from her trying to find the bit underneath, and there wasn't one.
She'd never met anyone without an underneath. Everybody had one. The man at the lobby desk had one; it was in his thumb, going round and round on the ring. Her mother's was in the way she said fine. His was in that one side of the mouth. You found the underneath and then you knew where you were.
This woman, when she cut the bread, was cutting bread. When she looked at Loser, she was looking at Loser. That was all. It was like trying to get a grip on a wall.
Loser looked away from her, out of the window, and the window looked straight onto the side of the next building. Brick, close enough to hit with a shoe. A few dark windows in it. A pipe.
"Nice view," she said.
It was out before she could stop it. She felt her face go hot.
"Sorry. I didn't mean."
The woman turned her head and looked at the window, as if checking.
"It is a wall," she agreed. Then, after a moment: "The view is in the other rooms."
She said it the way you'd say the bathroom was on the left. There wasn't anything in it at all. And Loser sat there with the plate in front of her and heard it anyway, all of it, the whole arrangement, as clear as if it had been written on the brick. Everything you could want in here. The pans, the plants, the good bread. And the city belongs to somebody else.
She waited to see if the woman minded. She couldn't tell. She couldn't tell if it was peace or practice, and not being able to tell bothered her more than the window.
"I am Ellen," the woman said.
Loser nodded.
She didn't give hers back. She waited for the woman to ask, and the woman didn't, and then got up and took the plate to the sink.
There was a pack of cigarettes in the inside pocket of the coat, crushed flat, with one left in it, bent in the middle. Loser could feel it against her ribs. She didn't take it out. She was saving it, and she didn't know for what.
It started at about two.
It wasn't bad. It was like the first hour of a toothache, when you can still tell yourself it's something you ate. A dull, low pull, somewhere under the breastbone, as if a thread had been tied there and someone a long way off was taking up the slack.
She'd had it before, the last time he'd gone weeks. She knew where it went.
Ellen had shown her into the big room and said, "You can sit in there," and gone off somewhere down the corridor about her own business, and Loser had sat. On the very edge of one of the brandy sofas, in her coat, with her boots together on the floor, the way you sit in an office waiting to be called.
The pull didn't care where she sat. She found that after a while she had turned on the sofa without meaning to, turned her whole body a few degrees toward the corridor, toward the closed door at the far end of it, the way you turn towards a radiator in a cold room. She made herself turn back. Ten minutes later she'd done it again.
She looked at the room instead.
She looked at the bulbs and counted them and lost count at forty. She looked at the propeller and decided it was real, not a prop, because there was oil on the engine still, black in the grooves. She looked at the bottles behind the bar, the ones with prices and the ones without. There was one on the back shelf, by itself, with a quarter gone, next to a lump of concrete painted blue and red, and they were both put there carefully, the way you put down things you don't use.
And she looked at the painting.
It was hanging on the brick near the sofas, and it was big, taller than she was, and nearly all black. It took her a minute to see what it was. A girl on some steps, steps going down into the ground, like a subway. Sitting with her arms round her knees and her face turned up towards whoever was coming down.
She looked at it for a long time.
The black wasn't one black. That was the first thing. There were a hundred blacks in it, maybe more, warm ones and cold ones and ones that went green when the bulbs moved. Somebody had put every one of them down on purpose. The only light in the whole thing was the girl's face, and it wasn't white, it was just less black than the rest, and somehow that made it brighter. Whoever had painted that had looked at that girl, or at a girl like her, for a very long time. Long enough to get bored, and then past bored, and out the other side into something else.
She wondered who it was. She wondered whether the girl had ever seen it. She wondered whether the person who'd painted it was alive.
She didn't ask. There was nobody to ask, and she wouldn't have anyway.
At some point, without quite deciding to, she got the sketchbook out of the torn lining of the coat, and the pen, and opened it on her knee to a clean page. A painting wasn't a person. It couldn't watch you.
But she didn't draw the painting. She drew the man at the lobby desk. The heavy lids, the cut under the ear, the thumb on the ring. She got the slump of his shoulders, which she hadn't known she'd noticed, and the way his collar didn't sit right because his neck had got thicker since he'd bought the shirt. She worked on it until it was him, and then a bit past that until it was him on the phone, the bad call, and then she stopped, because you could go too far, and she sat looking at it.
She heard Ellen's step in the corridor and shut the book and put it away before she came in.
Ellen came through, and went to the bar, and did something with the glasses, and went out again. She didn't look at the coat or the place the book had gone. Loser couldn't tell whether she'd seen.
The pull went on. Under the breastbone. Patient.
She must have slept, sitting up, because the next thing she knew the light had changed. The bulbs were on, all of them, every one, and the room had come up warm and gold out of the afternoon grey, and Ellen was standing by the switch at the end of the bar with her hand still on it.
"She will be up soon," Ellen said.
It was the first time anyone had said she in that house. Loser felt it drop through her like a stone through water, all the way down.
She heard the door first. Far off, at the end of the corridor. Then nothing for a while. Then footsteps, unhurried, coming closer, and they didn't slow down when they reached the room, and then the woman was in the room and already looking at her.
Loser had decided on the sofa, hours ago, what she was going to do, which was to look. Look the way she always did, and find the underneath, and then she'd know where she was.
She looked.
The woman crossed the room the way water crosses a floor, without seeming to put anything into it. She was dressed for an evening out, though it was six o'clock and she'd just got up, and every part of it was where it should be. She was beautiful. Not pretty, the way girls at school were pretty. Beautiful in the way that made Loser look at the floor before she'd decided to, and then make herself look up again.
And there was nothing to find.
It wasn't the same nothing as Ellen. Ellen had no underneath; you put your hand out and there was just Ellen, all the way down. This woman had one. You could feel it was there, the way you can feel a building has a cellar. A great deal of something, under the face. And every door into it was shut, and every shutter was down, and the face over it was arranged so well that you couldn't even see where the doors were.
Loser had read a lot of people. She'd never read anyone like that. It was like trying to read a closed shop.
"Ellen," the woman said.
Just the name. Not a question.
"She came at eleven," Ellen said. "With these."
She held out the two envelopes. The woman took them without looking at them. She looked at Ellen instead, for about a second.
Something happened in the room. Loser felt it on her skin like weather, the way the air goes before a storm, though nothing in either of their faces moved at all. And she thought, that's me. That's about me. That's because I'm here. She would have bet her last cigarette on it.
She'd have lost.
The woman opened the outer envelope first and read it standing up. It was short. Then she opened the second one, and read that, and that took longer. Loser watched her face the whole time. She knew where the line was, about halfway down. A brand new person. She waited for the woman's face to get to it.
Nothing happened to the face. Nothing at all. But when the woman had finished she folded the letter in half, exactly, and then in half again, and ran her thumbnail along the fold, slowly, all the way to the end, as if there was something in the crease she wanted flattened out. Then she put it in her pocket.
She sat down on the other sofa, close, across the corner from Loser, and crossed her legs.
"What do you call yourself?" she said.
Her voice was English. Not the kind on the television. Something older, and quieter, and every word put down separately like a cup on a saucer.
"Loser."
Loser waited for it. She always waited for it. A laugh, or a twitch, or the pause where they decided whether to make a joke or be kind. She'd had every version. She'd stopped minding any of them years ago, nearly.
"Loser," the woman said.
She said it as if it were Margaret, or Anne. As if it were a perfectly ordinary name that a perfectly ordinary person might have, and she was only making sure she had it right.
"Good evening, Loser."
Loser's mouth was dry.
"...Evening."
"Do you know what's in this letter?"
"Yeah."
"All of it?"
"The gist."
The woman nodded slowly. "Then I won't read it to you."
She was quiet for a moment, looking at Loser. Not the way Ellen had looked at her at the door, adding things up. More the way you'd look at a room you were thinking of renting.
"How many times did he give you his blood?"
Loser felt her face go hot again. "Twice."
"In how long?"
"Five months. About." And then, before she could stop it: "He was busy."
The woman didn't say anything to that. She didn't need to. Loser heard it herself, out loud in that big gold room, and wished she could reach out and take it back out of the air.
"I'm not going to give you mine," the woman said.
There it was.
Loser had known. She'd known on the walk over and in the elevator and on the sofa all afternoon. She'd been passed on twice in a week, and nobody passes you on because they want you. She'd known. It shouldn't have gone into her the way it did, like a knife into something soft.
"You should understand why," the woman said. "I'll tell you once."
She leaned forward a little.
"There's a little of him in you. Not much. Enough that you miss him. Enough that you make excuses for him, and think about him more than you'd like, and wish you didn't." Her voice didn't change at all. "If I give you mine on top of that, there will be a little of me in you as well. And then you'll spend the rest of your life never knowing which of us you're listening to. Him, or me, or you." She sat back. "So you'll go without. Until he's gone out of you."
"How long?"
"Months."
Loser looked at her hands. The ink on the side of the right one. "And what happens? Before."
"It will be bad," the woman said. "I won't lie to you about that. It will be very bad for a while. Then it will be less bad. And then one night you'll notice you haven't thought about it since the night before."
The thread under Loser's breastbone pulled, once, as if whoever was holding it had heard.
"You can stay here," the woman said. "Not as what he made you. As yourself. A room. Your meals. Wages, when you're well enough to do something that earns them. Nothing in a cup."
Loser looked up.
"So you don't want me."
"That isn't what I said."
"It's what it means."
The woman looked at her for a long moment. Loser waited for her to argue, the way people did. To lean in and say no, no, listen, and put a hand on her arm, and explain it again more slowly, and get that tone. Loser had her answer ready for that too.
The woman didn't argue.
"Then you'll have to wait," she said, "and see whether you're right."
She showed Loser the room herself.
Down a different corridor, a short one. A plain door. Inside, a bed made up so tightly you could have bounced a coin off it, which was Ellen; a chair; a lamp; a small bathroom through a second door, with towels folded on the edge of the bath. One window, tall and narrow, with the city in it. The real city, this time. Lights all the way down.
The woman went to the door and showed her the lock. It was an old lock, brass, with a key in it. On the inside.
She turned the key once, so Loser could hear it go. Then she turned it back, and took it out, and held it out.
"It locks from this side," she said.
Loser took it. It was heavy and warm from the woman's hand. Or it should have been; it wasn't. It was the temperature of the room.
"Why?"
"Because it's your room."
The last key Loser had owned, she'd left on her mother's kitchen table under the sugar bowl, the day she went. She hadn't held one since. She held this one now and didn't know what to do with her face.
"Goodnight, Loser," the woman said, and went out, and shut the door behind her.
Loser stood in the middle of the room for a while.
Then she went to the door and turned the key. It went round with a good, solid sound. She tried the handle to be sure. She tried it again.
The window only opened a hand's width; there was a catch on it, a metal arm that stopped it. She opened it as far as it would go and put her face to the gap, and the October air came in cold off the city, and she got out the crushed pack and the bent cigarette and straightened it as well as she could between her fingers and lit it.
She smoked it all the way down, slowly, with her cheek against the cold edge of the frame and the lights spread out below her like something spilled. Thirty-odd floors. A long way down to anything.
When it was gone she stubbed it out on the sill and kept the end, and lay down on the tight bed in her coat and her boots, on top of the covers, with the key in her fist.
The house was completely silent. The walls must have been a foot thick. She couldn't hear Ellen, or the woman, or anything.
She lay there and thought about him. Whether he knew she'd arrived. Whether he'd wonder. He wouldn't. He had a brand new person to think about.
She was angry that she wanted him to, and she lay there being angry about it, with the thread pulling under her breastbone, patient as a tide, until the anger and the pull got mixed up together and she couldn't tell which was which.
Ellen was at the bar when Sapphire came back. She was drying a glass. It had been dry when she picked it up.
Sapphire didn't sit. She stood at the end of the bar with one hand flat on the wood.
"Eleven," she said.
"Yes."
"I was asleep at eleven."
"Yes."
Ellen put the glass down and picked up another one.
Sapphire looked at the back of her hands on the bar. At eleven o'clock this morning she had been lying in the dark behind the curtains at the other end of this house, no more able to lift those hands than the dead are. If anyone had come down that corridor, she would not have known. If anyone had opened that door, she would not have known. If they had stood over her, and taken their time, and done whatever they had come to do, she would have lain there and let them, with her eyes shut, the way she had lain still once before, a long time ago, while other people decided things in the room.
She had built every part of her life so that would never happen again. Every lock and every hour. And this morning the woman who held all of it had opened the door.
"Tell me," Sapphire said.
Ellen put down the second glass. When she spoke it was in the voice she had used thirty years ago to read reports aloud in a cold office on the Davidwache, flat and in order.
"Sophie's hand on the envelope. I know it; I have seen it four times. The girl stood back from the door, a long way back, so that I could see all of her. She knew to do that. Her hands were shaking, but not from nerves. From want. She has not been fed in weeks. Her boots are split across both toes and she has slept outside in them. Her coat hangs straight; there is nothing heavy in it. Paper and a pen. A packet of cigarettes, nearly empty." She paused. "She could not have hurt you. She could barely hold the fork."
Sapphire listened to all of it.
All of it was right. All of it was exactly what she would have seen herself, in the same order, and she would have come to the same conclusion, and opened the same door. There was nothing in it she could fault.
"And if you had been wrong?" she said.
Ellen opened her mouth.
Then she closed it.
She stood behind the bar with her hands on the wood and looked at Sapphire, and for the first time Sapphire could remember in a very long while, Ellen had no answer at all. Not a wrong one. Not a hard one. None.
Sapphire could see what Ellen was waiting for. It was in the set of her shoulders, the way it always was. Something done to her. Something to pay, so the thing could be paid for and put away. She would have taken it without a word. She would almost have been glad of it.
So Sapphire gave her nothing.
She left the question where it was, on the bar between them, and didn't pick it up again. She took the folded letter out of her pocket and put it in the drawer under the till, where she kept the few papers she kept. She had kept papers like it before.
Then she went down the short corridor to the plain door, and stood outside it.
It was locked. From the inside. She could hear the girl breathing behind it, quick and shallow, not asleep, and under the door, very faint, the last of the smoke.
Ellen had said the packet was nearly empty.
The lock was the right way round. For now. Sapphire stood there until the smell of smoke had gone, and then for some time after.
The Wrong Way Round
Philadelphia. 4th to 5th October 1996.
She learned the house the way you learn a squat: by lying still and listening.
On the second day she came out of the room at nine in the morning, when the light under the door had been grey for three hours and she was sure. She'd worked it out in the night, lying on top of the covers. The woman slept in the day. Everybody knew that much. So by day there was only Ellen, and Ellen she could stand.
Ellen was in the big room, wiping down the bar. She looked up when Loser came in and said "Good morning" and went back to the bar. There were two boiled eggs and bread and a cup of coffee on the end of it, and Loser understood after a moment that they were hers.
She ate standing up. Ellen didn't tell her to sit.
The pull was worse than yesterday. Not a toothache now. More like hunger with nowhere to put it, a hollow under the ribs that food went straight past. Her hands were damp. She kept wiping them on her jeans, and they kept being damp, and the coffee cup rattled once in the saucer when she put it down, and she put her other hand flat on top of it until it stopped.
Ellen didn't look.
So Loser watched Ellen instead. It gave her something to do.
Ellen finished the bar and did the glasses, every one, holding them up to the bulbs. Then she went round the room and straightened things that were already straight. At half past ten she went to the front door and checked the bolts with her fingers, top, bottom, chain, the way she'd done it the day before, in the same order. The top bolt was stiff; she had to lean on it. The bottom one went across without a sound. The chain had a loose link that chinked.
At eleven she went down the corridor to her own rooms, and a moment later there was a radio, low, a man talking, and under that the sound of paper. Pages turning. A pencil.
Loser stood in the big room and listened to it for a long time.
Then, without meaning to, she found she was standing in the other corridor. The long one. Halfway down it, on the dark red carpet, with the closed door at the end of it about twenty feet away.
She didn't remember walking there.
It was a plain door. Wood, painted. No lock that she could see. Behind it, somewhere, in the dark, was the woman, lying the way they lay in the day, and the pull under Loser's ribs went towards that door like water going down a drain.
She thought about the handle. Just about the handle. What it would feel like, turning.
She went back to her room and locked herself in and sat on the floor with her back against the bed until her heart slowed down.
She didn't come out on the second night.
She heard the house wake up around six: a door far off, then footsteps, the woman's, light and unhurried, going into the big room and stopping there. Later, footsteps in her own corridor. They came right up to the door and stopped.
Loser sat on the bed with the key in her fist and didn't breathe.
Nobody knocked. After a while the footsteps went away again.
At about nine there was a knock, a hard short one, and Ellen's voice through the wood: "Food." Then Ellen's footsteps going. Loser waited until they were quite gone before she unlocked the door and pulled the tray in. Soup, bread, an apple. She ate the bread and half the soup and couldn't do the rest.
She didn't sleep. She lay and sweated and was cold, both at once, and the room was too hot and then it was freezing, and the pull had stopped being a thread and become a hand, closing and opening, closing and opening, somewhere behind her breastbone. Around two she got up and got the sketchbook out of the coat because she needed her hands to be doing something that wasn't shaking.
She meant to draw Ellen. Ellen at the bar, holding a glass up to the light. She had it all, the angle of the wrist, the hair pinned so hard it pulled at the temples.
When she next noticed anything, the lamp was still on and the window had gone grey, and there was a pain in her right hand like she'd been gripping something for hours.
The sketchbook was open on her knees. The page with Ellen on it was gone. Not gone, she found it, it was under the next one, but she'd gone over it. Over and over it, crosshatching, layer on layer, until there was no Ellen at all, just black, so dense it shone under the lamp like the back of a beetle. And the next page was the same. And the one after that. Three pages, solid black, the third one torn right through in two places where the pen had gone through the paper.
She didn't remember any of it.
She sat looking at it for a while. Then she shut the book and put it back in the lining of the coat, deep, where she couldn't see it.
She had no cigarettes. That was the thing. That was the thing she kept coming back to, lying there with the grey light coming up. If she had a cigarette this would be all right. If she could just get one cigarette, she could get through it. There was a place on the corner of Fifteenth. She'd seen it when she came. Ten minutes. Five, there and back.
She told herself that for an hour, and by the end of the hour she believed it.
At eleven the radio came on in Ellen's rooms.
Loser was already in the big room, in her coat, by the front door, with her boots on. She'd been standing there since a quarter to.
She did the chain first, because the chain was the loud one. She took the loose link between two fingers so it couldn't swing and lifted it out of the slot and laid it down against the door. It chinked once, very small. She stood still with her heart going and listened, and the man on the radio went on talking.
The bottom bolt went across without a sound, the way it had for Ellen.
The top bolt was stiff. She put the heel of her hand under the knob and leaned, and it didn't move, and leaned harder, and it came across all at once with a crack like a knuckle.
She didn't wait to hear if anyone had heard. She opened the door and went out into the red hallway and pressed the button for the elevator.
It was on the ground floor. She watched the numbers above the doors climb, one at a time, slow as anything. Three. Four. Five. She stood with her fists in her coat pockets and watched every one of them and the hand behind her breastbone opened and closed. Cigarettes, she told it. We're only getting cigarettes.
It didn't believe her. It wanted to go west, somewhere west, towards wherever he was. She didn't know where he was. It didn't matter. The pull knew.
Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-four. Thirty.
The doors opened. She got in and pressed the button for the lobby and stood in the middle of the brass box and shook all the way down.
When the doors opened at the bottom, the man from the desk was standing in front of them.
Not right in front. A few feet off, to one side, as if he'd just happened to be passing. But he'd come round from behind the desk, and the phone on the desk was off its cradle, lying on its side on the blotter, and he had both hands out a little from his body, the palms turned towards her.
"Miss? Hey. Miss, hold on a second."
She read him.
It took about two seconds. It was all there and it was easy. The shaving cut had scabbed over. The ring was still going round under his thumb; it was going round now, even with his hands out. He didn't want to be doing this. He'd been asked to and he didn't want to and he didn't know why he was doing it, only that the voice on the phone had been the kind you did what it said. He wasn't going to grab her. He was a man who'd never grabbed anybody in his life and was frightened of what would happen if he did. Of the shouting. Of somebody looking.
There were two people at the mailboxes. A woman with shopping bags by the revolving door.
Loser stopped and looked straight at him and said, loud and clear and high, so that it went all the way across the marble:
"Don't touch me."
Everybody turned.
He went red from the collar up. His hands came up higher, open, as if she'd pointed something at him. "I'm not, I'm not, ma'am, I'm only—"
She was already past him. The revolving door went round, and she was out in the cold and the daylight on Spruce Street, and walking. Not running. You never ran. Running was how they knew.
She went east. It wasn't the way the pull wanted, but the cigarette place was east, and she was still telling herself that, even then.
Ellen had not been listening to the radio. She had turned it on at eleven because she always turned it on at eleven, and she had sat down at her table with the accounts because she always did the accounts at eleven, and she had not heard a single word of either.
She had been hearing something else since dusk the night before. Five words, on the bar, between her hands.
And if you had been wrong?
She had lain awake with them. That was new. She did not lie awake. She had not lain awake since 1965.
So when the chain chinked, very small, at the far end of the house, under the radio, she heard it.
She was on her feet before the pencil had stopped rolling on the table.
The front door was standing open. The chain was laid neatly against it. The top bolt was across. In the hallway, above the elevator doors, the little brass numbers were going down. Twenty-six. Twenty-five.
Ellen went back into the big room and picked up the house phone on the end of the bar and dialled the desk, and when the man answered she said, in the voice she had not used in many years but had not forgotten:
"A girl is coming down in the lift. Black coat, black hair. She is not well. Keep her in the lobby for one minute. Do not hurt her."
She put the phone down before he could ask anything and went out into the hall and pressed the button and stood there, in her cardigan and her house shoes, watching the numbers go all the way to the bottom and then, after a long time, start back up.
She knew where the girl was going. Not the street. The street didn't matter. She knew the walk.
She had seen it a hundred times on the Große Freiheit, in the winter of 1964, from the window of the patrol car. Girls of nineteen, twenty, walking out of the shelters, out of the hostels, out of the hospital with their wrists still bandaged, walking back down the Reeperbahn in the rain towards the men who had put them there. Not because they were stupid. Because something had been put in them that pulled, and walking towards it hurt less than standing still.
She had picked some of them up and driven them back. Most of them walked again the next week.
The lift came. She took it down.
The desk man was standing in the middle of the lobby with a face the colour of a radish. "She just, I didn't, she said—"
"Yes," said Ellen, and walked past him.
Spruce Street was bright and cold and full of nothing much. A delivery van. A man with a dog. And half a block east, walking fast with her head down and her hands in her pockets and that big black coat flapping round her shins, the girl.
Ellen didn't run either. She lengthened her stride, that was all. She had been a police officer for nine years and a great many other things since, and she knew the difference between someone who was getting away and someone who only thought they were.
She came up on the girl's left side, on the street side, and put her hand round the girl's upper arm.
It was like taking hold of a broom handle through a blanket. There was nothing there.
The girl stopped.
She didn't pull. She didn't turn round, or shout, or do any of the things the girls on the Reeperbahn used to do, the twisting and the swearing and the going limp so you had to carry them. She just stopped, all at once, as if a plug had been pulled out of her, and stood there on the pavement in the sun with Ellen's hand on her arm, and shook.
"I was getting cigarettes," she said, to the pavement.
"No," said Ellen.
The girl didn't argue. After a moment she nodded. Just once.
Ellen turned her round, gently, and they walked back up Spruce Street together, side by side, the girl on the inside, Ellen on the street side with her hand still on the girl's arm. They went past the man with the dog, who looked, and past the delivery van, and in through the revolving door, and across the lobby. The desk man was back behind his desk. He didn't look up.
In the lift, going up, neither of them said anything at all.
At the top, Ellen put her into the flat and shut the door and did the chain, and the bottom bolt, and the top bolt, leaning on it. Then she touched each one with her fingers. Top. Bottom. Chain.
The girl went down the short corridor to her room without a word and went in, and Ellen heard the key turn on the inside.
Ellen fetched a chair from her own kitchen. A plain one, wooden. She put it in the short corridor, against the wall, opposite the girl's door.
She sat down on it, and folded her hands, and waited for dusk.
The first thing Sapphire saw when she came into the short corridor at six was Ellen, on a kitchen chair, with her hands in her lap. She had the look she got when she had been sitting in one place for seven hours and had not let herself mind.
Ellen stood up.
"She went out at eleven," she said. "I brought her back from Spruce Street."
That was all. Sapphire waited, in case there was more. There wasn't. Ellen had said what had happened, and she would not say what it meant, because she knew Sapphire already knew, and because the rest of it was the question from the night before, and neither of them was going to pick that up in a corridor.
"Thank you," Sapphire said.
Ellen inclined her head. She took her chair and went.
Sapphire stood in front of the plain door.
She had stood in front of it the night before, too, at a little after midnight. She had heard the girl breathing behind it, fast and shallow, and had stood there with her knuckles an inch from the wood for longer than she would ever admit to anyone, and then had not knocked, and had gone away.
On the way back to her own rooms she had stopped at the bar and taken a packet of cigarettes from the drawer where she kept them for guests, and had put it in her pocket. It was still there.
She knocked.
"Open the door."
A long silence. Then the key turned, on the inside, and the door opened about a foot.
The girl looked dreadful. There was no other word. Grey under the black hair, shining with sweat at the temples, her lips cracked, the black round her eyes smeared halfway to her cheekbones. She was still in the coat. She held on to the edge of the door as if it were holding her up.
Sapphire held out her hand, palm up.
She didn't explain. She had explained once. She had said she would.
The girl looked at the hand for a long moment. Then she looked at Sapphire's face, and Sapphire watched her try to read it, try very hard, the way she had tried on the first night. Watched her find nothing she could use, and stop trying.
She put the key in Sapphire's hand.
It was warm. She'd been holding it all day.
Sapphire closed her fingers over it. And for a moment, standing in the corridor with the key in her fist, she was not in Philadelphia at all. She was flat on her back in a bed that wasn't hers, and she couldn't move her wrists, and she was looking up at the ceiling while other people stood at the edge of the room and talked about her in low voices and decided what would happen next.
She had sworn, a long time ago, that she would never again be the one lying there.
She had not thought, until now, about what it would be like to be the one standing at the door.
She let it go. She put it down where she put such things, and it went, more or less.
"Come to the window," she said.
The girl came. The window opened its hand's width and no further. Sapphire took the packet from her pocket and opened it and held it out, and after a second the girl took one, with fingers that shook so badly she nearly dropped it. Sapphire lit it for her. Then she took one for herself, and lit that too, and stood beside the girl at the gap with the cold coming in off the city.
They smoked.
Neither of them said anything. There was nothing that could be said that wouldn't be a lie, or wouldn't be cruel, or both. The girl smoked as if it were the only air in the world, with her eyes shut and her forehead against the glass, and the shaking went on, but it got a little slower. The lights went on below them, street by street, all the way to the river.
When the girl's cigarette was down to the filter, Sapphire took one more out of the packet and laid it on the little shelf beside the window, where the girl could reach it later. She put the packet back in her pocket.
Then she went to the door.
The girl didn't look round. She stood at the window with her back to the room and her arms wrapped round herself inside the big coat, looking down at the city she couldn't get to.
Sapphire stepped out into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind her. She put the key into the lock. It was a good old lock, brass, and the key fitted it perfectly from this side, too.
She stood for a moment with her hand on it.
Then she turned the key, and heard it catch, and locked the door.
One for Later
Philadelphia. October to November 1996.
6th October
The door opened at a quarter past six. She knew that before it happened, because by the third night she had learned to hear the house wake: the far door, the light step on the carpet in the big room, a pause there, then two sets of footsteps coming down the short corridor together, one light and one heavy. Then the key.
Ellen came in first with a tray. Soup in a thermos, bread, cheese, apples, a bottle of water, a plate of something under a cloth. She put it on the chair, took yesterday's tray off the floor, looked once round the room at the bed and the bathroom door and the window, the way she'd look round a car she was about to drive, and went out again without a word.
Then the woman, with the cigarettes.
That was the whole of it. That was the shape of every night now. The woman came to the window, and Loser came to the window because the woman was there with the packet and there was nowhere else in the room to be. One each. Lit with a little silver lighter that the woman held out without looking. Smoked at the hand's-width gap with the cold coming in, mostly without speaking. Then one more out of the packet and on to the little shelf beside the window. Then the door, and the key the wrong way round, and the footsteps going.
Twelve minutes, maybe fifteen. She timed it once by counting.
The rest of it was the day. The day was very long.
She lay on the bed with the curtains open and watched the light come up over the roofs, grey and then white and then grey again, and the hand behind her breastbone opened and closed, opened and closed, and she sweated through the sheet and was cold. She went into the bathroom and ran the hot tap until the mirror steamed over so she wouldn't have to see herself, and sat on the edge of the bath in the steam. She ate some of the bread. She counted the floors of the building opposite, and then the windows, and then the windows with plants in them.
She found that she was waiting for six o'clock from about noon onwards.
She hated that. She hated it in the exact way she'd hated, the summer before, waiting for him to come back to the warehouse on the river and say what she was supposed to do next. She lay on the bed hating it and waited anyway.
The cigarette on the shelf she smoked at four in the morning, the worst hour, with her forehead against the glass. It lasted eleven minutes if she was careful.
8th October
She didn't eat.
She didn't decide not to. She just lay on the bed when Ellen came in with the tray and looked at the ceiling and didn't get up, and when the door shut she didn't go to it, and in the morning the tray was still on the chair with a skin on the soup.
Ellen came in at a quarter past six and looked at the tray and picked it up and put the new one down in the same place and went out again.
Loser didn't eat that one either.
On the second night Ellen came in, and looked at the tray, which was full, and picked it up and put the new one down. Exactly the same food. The same soup, the same bread, the same apples, a different cheese. She went out.
Loser lay there waiting for something. You have to eat. Or Suit yourself. Or a look, at least, the tired one, the one her mother used to have at the sink. She'd have known where she was with any of them.
Nothing. Ellen took the tray away and brought a tray, as if it were the weather.
On the third night, after the door had shut and the footsteps had gone, Loser got off the bed and went to the chair and ate everything on the tray, all of it, sitting on the floor with the plate on her knees, and the apples, and the cores of the apples, and then sat there feeling sick and stupid and full.
In the morning Ellen took the empty tray away and put a full one down.
She didn't say good. She didn't say anything. Loser had been braced for good for ten hours and when it didn't come she felt as if she'd put her foot down on a stair that wasn't there.
10th October
The woman sat down.
There was the chair, which Ellen had moved back to its place by the door after taking the tray, and the woman sat down on it, with her cigarette, instead of standing at the window. Loser stayed at the window. There was the whole room between them.
"You don't know what I am," the woman said. "Do you."
It wasn't a question. Loser answered it anyway.
"You don't go out in the day."
"No."
"And you." Loser stopped. Her mouth didn't want to say it. "You drink it."
"Yes."
"That's it. That's what I know." She dragged on the cigarette. "He never said. I asked once. He laughed."
The woman nodded slowly, as if that were exactly what she'd expected and she found it very boring.
"Then I'll start at the beginning," she said.
And she did. She told it the way you'd tell a story to someone who'd come in late, plainly, in order, without making it sound like anything. That they had been people, all of them, once. Born, and grown up, and died. That they had died and not stopped. That something had come in at the moment of dying and taken up the room the person had left, and that it was hungry, always, and that the only thing it would eat was what was in people. That the sun would burn them to nothing, the way paper burns, and not quickly. That some of them were very old. That there were more of them in this city than Loser would believe, and that most of the people who passed them in the street every night never knew it, and that this was not an accident.
"What's the thing," Loser said. "The thing that came in."
The woman tapped her ash out of the gap.
"We all have different names for it," she said. "Most of us don't say them often."
Loser looked at her. At the face, which was doing nothing. She thought of the closed shop, the shutters down.
"How old are you?"
The woman finished her cigarette. She put it out on the outside of the window frame, carefully, and dropped the end into her own pocket instead of out into the night. Then she took one more out of the packet and stood up and laid it on the shelf.
"Goodnight, Loser."
The door. The key.
Loser stood at the window a long time afterwards. She'd asked one thing that mattered, and it hadn't been answered, and that told her more than the rest of it put together.
She got out the sketchbook and wrote, at the top of a clean page, very small, doesn't say how old, and underneath it, after a while, doesn't throw ash out the window, and underneath that, why.
13th October
It was a bad day and by the evening she wanted to hurt something.
The woman came in with the packet, the way she always did, and stood at the window, the way she always did, and held out the lighter without looking, and Loser lit hers off it and stood there smoking and watching the woman's hand put the lighter away. The hand did it perfectly. Into the pocket, flat, no fumble. Every night exactly the same.
"You do everything like somebody's watching," Loser said.
The woman didn't move.
"Even in here. Even with me. You light it like it's on a stage. You put it away like you've practised." She heard her voice going higher and couldn't stop it. "Nobody's watching. It's me. It's a locked room. Who are you doing it for?"
She waited. This was the part where they hit back. She'd said a hundred things like it, to caseworkers and to girls in the shelter and, once, early, to him, and she knew the next part. The cold voice. The door slammed. Or the hurt face, which was worse.
The woman turned her head and looked at her.
For a moment, just a moment, something happened in the face. Loser couldn't have said what. Not the shutters going up. More as if somebody, deep in the building, had turned on one light in one room, to see who was knocking.
"Go on," the woman said.
Loser opened her mouth.
There wasn't any more. She'd had it, and it was gone. She stood there with the cigarette burning down between her fingers and the woman looking at her, interested, interested, as if Loser had said something about the weather that she'd never thought of before and would like to hear the rest of.
"Forget it," Loser said.
The woman looked at her a moment longer. Then she nodded, and turned back to the window, and finished her cigarette.
She put one on the shelf and went. The key turned.
Loser sat down on the floor under the window and put her face in her hands. She didn't know why. She hadn't been hit. She'd been listened to, and it was so much worse.
15th October
She didn't remember throwing it.
She remembered the day, which was the worst yet, the hand behind her ribs closing and not opening again for an hour at a time, so that she lay curled round it on the bathroom floor where the tiles were cold. She remembered getting up at some point and standing in the middle of the room. She remembered thinking very clearly, he would come if I called. Not believing it. Thinking it.
Then there was a noise like a car crash and the room went dark.
When she found the light switch for the bathroom and opened the door so the light fell out across the floor, the lamp was in pieces against the wall by the door. The shade crumpled. The base cracked in half. A dent in the plaster, about head height, with a long white scar going down from it. Glass from the bulb all across the carpet like salt.
She sat on the bed in the bathroom light and looked at it until six.
Ellen came in at a quarter past with the tray and stopped in the doorway and looked at the floor. Then she put the tray down on the chair and went out again, and came back with a dustpan and a brush and a paper sack, and knelt down and swept up the glass, all of it, working outward from the wall in straight lines the way you'd mow a lawn. She put the pieces of the lamp in the sack. She ran her hand flat over the carpet afterwards, slowly, feeling for anything she'd missed.
She didn't look at Loser once.
The woman stood at the window with the cigarettes, the same as always, and they smoked in the light from the bathroom door, and the woman didn't look at the dent in the wall either.
The next night, when the door opened, there was a new lamp on the table by the bed.
The same lamp. Not like it. The same. The same base, the same shade, the same pale wood. As if the other one had never happened, as if the night before had been taken out of the week and the two ends sewn together. Only the dent in the plaster was still there, with its white scar.
Nobody said anything about it. Nobody ever said anything about it.
Loser lay awake most of that day looking at the new lamp. She'd wanted them to be angry. She'd known, the second she found herself standing there with the pieces, that she'd wanted them to be angry, because if they were angry they'd send her away, and then at least it would be over, and she'd be right.
They'd bought a lamp.
It didn't help. It didn't help at all. It just meant that the thing she was waiting for hadn't happened yet.
19th October
It came on in the late afternoon like weather coming in off the sea.
By five she couldn't lie down and she couldn't stand up. She went round and round the room touching the walls. By six she was on the floor by the door with her back against it, so that when the key went in she felt it through her spine, and she was up and on her feet before it had finished turning.
Ellen came in with the tray. Loser didn't see her. She saw past her, to the woman in the corridor, and when the woman came in with the packet in her hand Loser was in front of her before she'd reached the window.
"Please."
The woman stopped.
"Please. Just a little. Just once. I won't, I won't ask again, I swear, I just need, please."
Somewhere behind her she heard the door close. Ellen had gone. She didn't care. She didn't care about anything in the world.
The woman went round her to the window. Not fast. As if Loser were a chair. She opened the packet and took one out and held out the lighter.
Loser knocked it out of her hand.
It went across the carpet and under the bed. The woman watched it go. Then she took out a book of matches from the same pocket and lit her own cigarette with one, and shook it out, and put it in her pocket with the others.
Loser was on her knees. She didn't remember getting there. She had two fistfuls of the woman's skirt, the dark heavy cloth of it bunched in her hands, and her forehead was against the woman's hip, and she was saying things. She could hear herself saying them as if from the next room.
"I can be good. I can be useful. I'll do anything, I'll do whatever you want, anything, you just have to say, I'll be so good, I'll be so useful, I won't be any trouble, I'll do anything, anything you want, you don't even have to, I'll, anything, please, I'll be useful, please—"
Useful. She heard it come out of her mouth and knew whose word it was and couldn't stop.
The woman stood at the window and smoked.
Loser held on. She was crying, the ugly kind, snot and all, into a skirt that probably cost more than her father made in a month, and she didn't care. She pulled at it. She pulled, as if she could pull the woman down to the floor with her, as if, if she could only get her low enough, close enough, it would just happen.
"Please. Please. Please."
The woman put her free hand on top of Loser's head. Very lightly. Not stroking. Just resting there, the way you'd rest your hand on a dog to keep it still.
"No," she said.
That was all. Quietly. As though it were the answer to whether she'd like some tea.
Loser howled. She'd never heard herself make a noise like it. It came up from somewhere she didn't know she had, and the woman's hand stayed where it was on top of her head, and the woman went on smoking.
She finished the cigarette. All of it, at her own speed, down to the filter. She put it out on the outside of the frame, carefully, and dropped the end into her pocket.
Then she took the hand off Loser's head. She took hold of Loser's wrists, one and then the other, and unhooked the fingers from her skirt, and they came open one at a time as easily as if they'd been a child's, though Loser was pulling with everything she had.
She took one more cigarette out of the packet and laid it on the shelf.
She went to the door. Loser stayed on her knees on the carpet with her hands open in front of her, empty.
The door shut. The key turned.
The studio was dark when Sapphire came into it. She didn't turn on the lamps. She went to the panel by the door and put up only the one spotlight, the one over the microphone, and walked out into it and sat down on the floor at the foot of the stand, in the middle of the circle of light, with her back to the room.
She didn't sing. She didn't touch anything.
She sat there and let it come.
She had not looked away from what she wanted since the summer of 1939. She had made that rule on an iron gallery above a gear pit, and she had kept it through everything that had come after, and she was not going to break it tonight for a girl on her knees in a guest room.
So she looked at it.
She had wanted to say yes. Not out of pity. Not because the girl was suffering, though the girl was suffering, and Sapphire had felt every second of it through the cloth of her skirt. She had wanted to say yes the way she wanted it on the nights when Ellen's face came apart. When the woman who had thrown a pimp over her hip on the Große Freiheit, and stood up to a district inspector, and lied to customs officers in three countries without a flicker, put both hands on Sapphire's knees and couldn't get the words out. The heat of that. The sweetness, low in the throat, like the first mouthful after a long fast.
And she had wanted more than to say yes. That was the part to look at.
She had wanted the girl to keep asking.
She had stood at that window with the girl's fists in her skirt and her forehead on her hip and useful, useful, I'll be so useful, the man's own word coming out of her like something she'd swallowed, and Sapphire had smoked her cigarette slowly. She could have smoked it quickly. She had smoked it slowly. She had told herself it was to keep the ritual whole, to show the girl that nothing she did would break it.
That was true.
It was not the only thing that was true.
She sat in the circle of light at the foot of the microphone and held the two things in her hands together and turned them over, and didn't put either of them down. The refusal had been right. The refusal would go on being right every night for as long as it took. And the thing under the refusal was exactly what she had always said it was, every time anyone had tried to tell her otherwise.
She found she didn't mind. Not tonight. There was a kind of rest in it. Like setting down a suitcase you've been told for fifty years is lighter than it is.
After a long time she got up and turned off the spotlight and went out.
20th October
She thought the woman wouldn't come.
She lay on the bed all day with her face to the wall and knew, absolutely, the way you know you've left the gas on, that it was over. You couldn't do that in front of someone and have them come back. She had pulled at her clothes. She had cried on her. She had said anything, and meant it, and the woman knew she'd meant it.
At a quarter past six the key turned.
Ellen with the tray. The woman with the packet.
To the window. The lighter held out, the silver one, which someone had fished out from under the bed. One each. The gap, the cold. Smoked in silence.
The woman didn't look at her any differently. She didn't look at her any more or any less. She didn't say anything about the night before, or about anything. She stood at the window exactly the way she'd stood every night for two weeks, and finished her cigarette, and put it out on the outside of the frame, and put the end in her pocket.
One on the shelf. The door. The key.
Loser stood at the window afterwards for a long time, not smoking the one on the shelf yet, just looking at it.
She'd thought it was over. It wasn't. It was the same.
She couldn't tell, for the life of her, whether that was a mercy or the most frightening thing anybody had ever done to her.
24th October
"Why didn't he tell me?"
It came out in the middle of the lessons, which were most nights now. The woman on the chair by the door, Loser at the window. About the city. About the ones who were in charge of it, and how you didn't say their names in the street. About why they hid, and what happened to people who made it harder for them to hide. Loser had been listening to that one carefully, because it seemed to be about her.
The woman looked at her.
"Any of it," Loser said. "Any of this. Five months. I carried his letters. I stood outside places all night. He never said one thing. Not one."
The woman considered it.
"Because he didn't think of you as someone things are explained to," she said.
It went in like a splinter. Small and clean and right down to the bone.
Loser turned back to the window. She looked out at the lights. She waited for the hand behind her ribs to close round it, the way it closed round everything about him, the way it made excuses before she could even think the thought. He was busy. He had a lot on.
It closed. But not all the way. Not as hard as it would have, a week ago.
She noticed that. She didn't know what to do with noticing it, so she didn't do anything. She finished her cigarette.
31st October
The house was empty.
She knew it at six. There was no far door, no light step in the big room. Nothing. Then, at a quarter past, only one set of footsteps in the short corridor, the heavy one, and a lot of rattling, as if somebody were pushing a shopping cart.
The key turned. It was Ellen. Ellen had the key.
Loser stood up off the bed. She looked at Ellen's hand on the key, and Ellen's other hand on the handle of a wheeled metal trolley with a television on top of it, a big grey one, and a video player under that, and a carrier bag hanging off the side.
"She is out," Ellen said. "All night. She gave me the key."
She said it the way she said everything. But she held the key up a moment, before she put it in her pocket, and looked at it, and Loser saw that too and put it away to think about later.
Ellen wheeled the trolley in and parked it at the foot of the bed and plugged things in behind it, and fiddled with a cable, and the screen went blue. Then she unpacked the bag onto the end of the bed: a bag of pretzels, a bag of gummy bears, the German kind with the gold packet, a bag of candy corn that she held up and looked at with deep suspicion before putting down, and a video cassette in a hire-shop box.
Then she went out and came back with two tall glasses on a tray. They were full of something thick and red.
Loser looked at the red.
Her whole body looked at it. The hand behind her ribs, which had been quiet for a few days, came awake all at once and closed like a fist.
Then the smell reached her. Tomato. Pepper. Celery salt. Something sharp underneath.
"Bloody Mary," said Ellen. "Not much vodka. One."
She handed her a glass. Loser held it and her hand shook so the ice rattled, and she stood there holding it until the fist let go a bit. Then she drank some. It was cold and salty and burned a little going down. It was nothing like blood. It was nothing like it at all.
Ellen sat down on the chair, square, with her own glass, and picked up the remote control and pressed play.
It was Interview with the Vampire.
Loser stared at the screen. At the title coming up out of the dark, red letters, and the music. She looked at Ellen. Ellen was watching the screen with her glass on her knee and an expression of complete, serious attention, the same face she had when she was cutting bread.
"Why this one?"
Ellen glanced at her. "It is Halloween," she said. "It is a film about vampires."
She went back to the screen.
And Loser laughed.
She didn't mean to. It just came up out of her, all at once, the way the howl had come up on the nineteenth, from the same place maybe. She laughed until she had to put the Bloody Mary down on the floor. She laughed until she was bent over on the end of the bed with her arms round her stomach and her eyes running, and every time she looked up and saw Ellen sitting there, perfectly upright, watching two beautiful men in frock coats be sad at each other with the face of a woman checking a tax return, it started again.
Ellen let her laugh. She didn't ask what was funny. After a while, when Loser was down to hiccups, Ellen held out the bag of gummy bears without looking away from the screen.
Loser took a handful.
They watched the whole thing. Loser ate most of the pretzels and all the gummy bears except the green ones, which Ellen ate. Neither of them touched the candy corn. Twice, at the bits where the vampires were drinking, Ellen made a small sound through her nose. Loser couldn't tell what it meant. She thought, possibly, it was contempt for the special effects.
Down in the street, a very long way below, people in costumes were shouting and someone was letting off firecrackers, and all over the city there were girls in black lipstick and long black coats walking about in the open, in a crowd, and fitting in, the one night of the year when nobody looked twice. She'd been one of them last year. On South Street, with a bottle of something, with people she couldn't now remember the names of.
She didn't think about it much. She was watching the film.
At the end, Ellen unplugged everything and wheeled the trolley out. She came back for the glasses. In the doorway she stopped with them in her hand.
"There is one more," she said, and nodded at the shelf.
There was. A cigarette, lying on the little shelf by the window, where it always was. Loser hadn't seen anyone put it there. The woman must have done it before she went out. Before six, then. Before she'd even been up properly.
Ellen went out. The key turned. Ellen's key.
Loser smoked the cigarette at the window, slowly, with the last of the firecrackers going off down in the dark like something very small being born, a long way off.
4th November
She woke up and it was light.
Not grey. Light. Proper daylight, white and flat, lying all across the floor from the window. She lay there not understanding it.
Then she understood it.
She'd gone to sleep. Last night. Sometime in the afternoon, the afternoon before, she'd lain down on top of the covers because her legs hurt, and closed her eyes for a minute. And now it was morning. And she hadn't heard the far door, or the footsteps, or the key, or anything.
She sat up so fast her head swam.
There was a tray on the chair. Last night's tray, full: soup, bread, apples. Ellen had been in. Ellen had been in and put it down and gone out and she hadn't heard a thing.
And on the little shelf beside the window there were two cigarettes.
She got up and went over and looked at them. Laid side by side, straight, the way the one was always laid. Two.
She stood there and worked it out, the way she worked out anybody. The woman had come in. Had seen her asleep. Had stood there, maybe, a minute, or longer. Had not woken her.
Had put down the one on the shelf, the one for later.
And then the one they'd have smoked together.
Loser stood at the window in the daylight with her hands at her sides. She looked at the two cigarettes on the shelf for a long time.
The hand behind her ribs was there. It was always there. But it was open. She noticed that she'd had to go looking for it, to check, and that it had taken her a moment to find it.
She'd slept the whole night through.
She picked up one of the cigarettes and lit it from the matchbook someone had left on the shelf at some point, she couldn't remember when, and opened the window its hand's width, and smoked it in the cold white daylight with her eyes open, looking at the roofs.
The other one she left where it was.
For later.
In the Glass
Philadelphia. November to December 1996.
Don't let them see.
On the seventh night the door opened at a quarter past six and the woman came in alone, without Ellen and without the tray. She went to the window and they smoked, the way they always did, in silence, and when the cigarette was finished she didn't take one out for the shelf.
She took the key out of her pocket instead.
She went to the door and took it out of the outside of the lock, where it had lived for five weeks, and put it into the inside, and turned it once so Loser could hear it, and turned it back. Then she left it there, sticking out of the lock on Loser's side. She didn't say anything about it.
"Goodnight, Loser."
She went out and pulled the door shut behind her, and it stayed shut, and nothing turned.
Loser didn't touch it. She sat on the bed and looked at the key in the lock for most of the night. In the morning she got up and went and stood beside it and put one finger on the end of it, the way you'd touch a dog you weren't sure about. It was cold. She took her finger away.
She didn't go out until the next night.
When she did, she went the way you go into cold water, a bit at a time. The short corridor. The corner. The big room, with every bulb lit and the brick gone gold. The woman was behind the bar. She looked up when Loser came round the corner, and then looked down again at whatever she was doing, which was writing something in a book with a fountain pen, as if Loser came out every night.
Loser sat at the end of the bar, on the stool furthest away.
After a while the woman put the cap on the pen.
"You'll want to know why you can't simply go," she said.
Loser hadn't asked. She'd been going to. She'd been thinking about how to put it for a week.
"You know a secret," the woman said. "Not a small one. Not a thing about a neighbour. You know that there are people in this city who are not people, and what they eat, and that some of them live in buildings like this one, and sleep in the day behind curtains. And that is the one thing nobody here is ever allowed to know."
"I wasn't going to tell anybody."
"No. Most people aren't." She put the book under the bar. "But you will be tired one night, or drunk, or frightened, or in love, or in a room with a man who is kind to you. And something will come out sideways. A look, a word, a joke. And the person who hears it will tell someone, as a joke. And someone else will hear the joke and not laugh."
Loser looked at her.
"So I'm a secret," she said.
"You're a person who knows one." The woman looked at her very steadily. "There's a difference. You'll learn it. It'll be in everything, after a while. Where you stand in a room. What you don't say. Who you don't look at. It'll be in your face when you're asleep."
"What happens to people who know one, and don't learn it?"
The woman considered the question as if it were a perfectly reasonable one about the weather.
"Mostly," she said, "they're careful."
She took the cigarettes out of her pocket and put the packet on the bar, halfway between them, and the lighter on top of it.
Loser looked at it for a long moment. Then she got off the furthest stool and came and sat on the one next to it, and took one.
Tell the boss when you come to town.
"When one of us comes to a new city," the woman said, some nights later, "she goes to whoever holds it, and says her name, and says what she wants. Before she does anything else. Before she eats."
"And if she doesn't?"
"Then she isn't a guest. She's a trespasser." The woman tapped her ash into a little glass dish. "Guests are looked after. Trespassers are looked for."
Loser thought about it.
"I came to the door with a letter," she said slowly. "I said who I was. Sort of."
"You did."
"Is that why Ellen let me in?"
The woman didn't answer. She smoked. But Loser was watching the closed shop of her face, the way she watched it every night now, and on Ellen's name one shutter, very far back, moved, as though somebody behind it had leaned on it for a moment and then thought better of it.
By day there was Ellen.
That started in the second week of November. Loser came out into the big room at ten in the morning, because she'd started waking at ten, and Ellen was standing by the front door in her coat with a string bag over her arm.
"I am going to the market," Ellen said. "Put on your boots."
That was all the invitation there was.
They took the elevator down. The man at the desk looked up, and saw Loser, and went the colour of a radish, and looked very hard at his blotter. Ellen said "Good morning, Mr Kowalczyk," pleasantly, and he said "Morning, ma'am," to the blotter, and Loser filed away that his name was Kowalczyk and that he was frightened of Ellen, which was sensible of him.
They walked. Ellen walked the way she did everything, straight ahead at an even pace, as if the pavement had been laid down for the purpose. Loser walked half a step behind her, and then Ellen slowed down without seeming to until Loser was next to her, and stayed there.
The market was on Twelfth Street, under an old railway shed, and Loser stopped on the pavement outside it and looked up at the sign over the door for a long time.
Reading Terminal Market.
Ellen waited. She didn't ask.
Loser went in.
The girl had stopped and looked at the sign the way people look at the name of a street where something happened to them. Ellen saw that. She saw a great many things about the girl that she had no intention of saying.
She saw that the girl could not walk past a mirror or a shop window without looking away from it, and could not walk past a stranger without looking at them. That she counted the exits in every room. That she stood with her back to pillars. That the colour had started to come back into her face in the last week, and that she ate everything now, and quickly, and still put her arm round the plate.
She saw also, at the Pennsylvania Dutch stall at the back of the market, that the girl looked at the soft pretzels and the shoofly pie and the women in their white caps behind the counter with an expression Ellen had not seen on her before. It was not hunger. Ellen bought two pretzels and handed her one without a word, and the girl ate it slowly, for once, standing up by the counter, and looked at nothing while she did it.
Ellen did not ask about that either.
They sat at the lunch counter with coffee afterwards, on two stools at the end where you could see the whole aisle. Ellen did it from habit. After a few minutes she realised the girl had done it from habit too, and had chosen the same two stools before Ellen had reached them.
A man went by with a briefcase and a carrier bag from the cheese stall.
"He is an accountant," said Ellen, mostly to herself. "Or a cashier. He has been taking money. Small amounts, over a long time. He will be found out before Christmas."
She heard herself say it and was a little surprised. She had not done that out loud since Hamburg.
The girl turned her head and watched the man until he was gone round the corner by the flower stall.
"He's scared his wife knows something," she said. "Not the money. Something else."
Ellen looked at her.
"How?"
The girl shrugged. "He bought her cheese. The expensive one. He kept checking it was still in the bag." She drank her coffee. "You don't do that for the money."
Ellen thought about it. Then she nodded, slowly, once.
After that they did it every time. They did not call it anything. One of them would look at someone at the counter or in the aisle, a woman with a pushchair, an old man with a racing paper, two boys in school blazers who should not have been there on a Tuesday, and say what she saw. And the other would say what she saw. And they were very seldom the same thing. Ellen saw what people had done and what they were going to do. The girl saw what they were afraid of.
Ellen began to suspect, by the end of November, that between them they could have found anyone in Philadelphia in an afternoon. She did not say that either.
She noticed it on a Thursday, at the market, at the cheese stall, waiting for Ellen to choose.
She'd been in the market for two hours. She'd done the game with Ellen at the counter, and the walk there, and the bus. And she hadn't thought about him. Not once. Not since breakfast, and breakfast had been at ten, and it was after one.
She stood in the queue with the smell of cheese all round her and felt it go through her like a cold draught. Three hours. She'd never gone three hours. Not since the night he'd first put his wrist to her mouth in the back of the warehouse by the river.
She felt sick. She felt as if she'd left something on a bus.
That night, in her room, with the door locked from the inside by her own hand, she got out the sketchbook and a pen and opened it to a clean page and drew him.
She could draw anyone. That was the one thing. Faces stayed in her the way songs stayed in other people. She'd drawn the man at the desk from four seconds. She'd drawn a girl from the concourse, two years after she'd last seen her, down to the chip in her front tooth.
She drew him, and it was wrong.
She drew him again. The eyes were all right. The set of the head. But the mouth wasn't. The mouth, the one side of it going up, the thing she'd seen a hundred times, the thing she'd been able to see so clearly that night in the hallway outside this flat that she could have reached out and touched it. She drew it and it was a mouth. Anybody's mouth.
She tried four times. She couldn't get it back.
She sat on the bed with the sketchbook open on her knees and the four wrong mouths looking up at her, and the first thing she felt, before she could stop it, was relief. Clean and sudden, like putting down a bag.
The second thing she felt was that she was a traitor.
She didn't know who to. She sat there for a long time trying to work it out. Then she tore the page out, very carefully, along the perforation, and folded it in four, and put it in the pocket of the coat, and didn't look at it again.
You answer for what you make.
"If one of us makes another," the woman said, "she answers for it. For everything it does. Its mistakes are hers. Its debts are hers."
It was late in November. The woman was on the brandy sofa with her feet tucked under her, and Loser was on the other one, across the corner, and the cigarettes were on the low table between them.
"And not only the ones we make," the woman said. "Anyone we keep. Anyone who's ours."
Loser looked at the cigarette in her hand.
"So if I do something stupid."
"Then I answer for it."
"To who?"
"To whoever asks." The woman smiled very slightly. "Somebody always does."
Loser thought about that. About being something somebody else would have to pay for.
"Did you make Ellen?"
The woman looked at her for a long moment.
"Nobody made Ellen," she said. "Ellen chose."
Loser didn't understand that, and knew she didn't, and knew also from the face that she wasn't going to be told any more. She put it away to think about.
She was awake at three because the night had been bad.
Not like October. Nothing was like October now. But some nights the hand behind her ribs woke up and closed and stayed closed, and she couldn't sleep through it, and she'd learned the only thing for it was to get up and walk. So she got up and put the coat on over the T-shirt she slept in and went out into the big room in her socks.
She was going to the bar. The cigarettes were in the drawer under the till; she'd seen the woman take them out. She'd only take one. She'd tell her tomorrow.
She was halfway across the big room when she heard Ellen's voice.
It came from the other corridor. The long one. Low, and in German, so she couldn't understand a word of it. But it wasn't Ellen's voice. That was the thing that stopped her. It had Ellen's shape and Ellen's accent and it wasn't Ellen at all. It was higher. It broke in the middle.
She should have gone back to bed.
She went down the long corridor in her socks on the red carpet, slowly, close to the wall where the boards didn't creak, and at the end of it the door she had stood in front of on her second day, with her hand halfway to the handle, was standing open. About a hand's width.
She didn't go near the gap. She couldn't. She stood back against the wall of the corridor in the dark, and through the gap, across the room beyond, there was a wall of glass. Sliding doors, onto the roof. Black outside, black as anything, with only the city very far down at the bottom of it. And all the room's light falling on the inside of that glass, so that it was a mirror. Dark, and gold, and perfect.
The whole room was in it. Small and clear and upside-down in the way of mirrors. The tea lights burning along the rim of the big bath. The red patterned rug. The edge of the bed.
The woman, sitting on the edge of the bed.
And Ellen, on her knees on the rug in front of her.
Loser stopped breathing.
Ellen was in a nightdress, a plain white one. Her hair was down. Loser had never seen it down. It went most of the way down her back, and it made her look like someone else, someone younger. She was kneeling with her hands on the woman's knees and her face turned up, and she was talking, quickly, in German, and Loser couldn't understand any of it and didn't need to. She knew the tune. She'd sung it herself on the nineteenth of October with her fists in a skirt.
Bitte. That one she knew. Bitte. Bitte.
And Ellen's face.
Loser had looked at that face for six weeks across tables and bars and lunch counters and never found anything under it. There'd been nothing under it. You put your hand out and there was just Ellen, flat and square, all the way to the floor.
Here it was. All of it. It had been under there the whole time. It had just been somewhere Loser couldn't get to, because only one person was allowed to get to it, and that person was sitting on the edge of the bed looking down at it.
Ellen's face had come apart. There was no other way to say it. The jaw that was always set was loose. The mouth that was always a line was open and shaking. The eyes, which had looked at Loser over a hundred cups of coffee like the eyes of a woman reading a timetable, were wet and wide and fixed on the woman's face as if it were the only lit window in a city that had gone dark. Everything in it was want. Want, and shame, and the shame making the want worse, and the want eating the shame.
Loser had never seen anything so naked in her life.
And the woman was enjoying it.
That was the worst of it. Not that she was refusing. She was refusing; Loser could see that, she was shaking her head slowly, very slightly, and saying something, a word or two, and Ellen's face went further to pieces each time. But she wasn't refusing the way she'd refused Loser, like a door. She was refusing the way you hold a sweet just out of reach of a child. Slowly. Taking her time over it.
And her face. Her face in the glass.
The shop was open.
Every shutter was up and every light was on in every room, and what was in there, what had been behind the closed doors all along, was this. A warmth. A kind of slow, deep, private pleasure, like someone sinking into a hot bath. She was looking down at Ellen on her knees the way you'd look at the most beautiful thing you owned. Her lips were parted. She put one finger under Ellen's chin and tipped her face up a little higher, as if to see it better in the candlelight. Ellen made a sound Loser felt in her own teeth.
The woman said something else. Ellen said it again, the same thing, whatever it was, the same words, slower, as if she'd been told to say them properly.
Then the woman lifted her own wrist to her mouth and bit it.
Loser saw it in the glass. Saw the dark line come up on the white skin, very bright in the tea lights. Smelled it, she would swear later, from forty feet down a corridor, through a gap a hand wide. Smelled it the way you smell bread from the end of a street.
The hand behind her ribs closed so hard she bent over.
The woman held out the wrist and Ellen took it in both hands, like something holy, and put her mouth to it.
And Ellen's whole body changed.
Loser watched it happen. Watched every muscle in that square, solid body let go at once. Ellen's shoulders dropped. Her back curved. Her eyes rolled up and shut. A sound came out of her, low, into the woman's wrist, a sound with no words in it at all, like something in a deep sleep, like the noise a cat makes, like a woman in a bath after a long day in the cold, all of those and more. Her fingers dug into the woman's arm. Her throat moved, and moved, and moved.
Loser knew what it felt like. She had had it twice. She knew exactly, to the last drop, how good it was. That it was everything at once. Warm and full and safe and right, all the way down to the ends of your fingers and the roots of your hair, the way you'd always hoped being loved might feel and it never had. That the whole world went soft and gold and there was nothing wrong in it anywhere.
Her mouth was full of water. She had bitten the inside of her cheek, and she could taste her own blood, thin and wrong and nothing like it at all.
She had both hands flat against the wall of the corridor behind her because if she took them off it she would go through that door. She knew it. She would go through the door and across the rug on her knees and put her mouth to that wrist next to Ellen's and she wouldn't care, she wouldn't care about anything, about Ellen or the woman or the four wrong mouths in her coat pocket or the five weeks behind the locked door or anything at all.
She held onto the wall.
In the glass, the woman was watching Ellen drink. That same face. Possession. Pleasure. Love, maybe, if that was what love was in a thing like her. Her other hand was in Ellen's hair. Stroking it. Slowly, from the crown down the long fall of it to the middle of Ellen's back, and up again, and down.
Stroking.
When Loser had been on her knees, the woman had put her hand on her head and left it there. Like a weight. Like you'd hold down a dog.
For Ellen she stroked.
After a long time, the woman said one word, quietly. Genug. And took the wrist away. Ellen followed it with her mouth, blindly, a few inches, the way a baby does, and then stopped, and sagged forward, and put her cheek down on the woman's knee, and lay there.
The woman went on stroking her hair.
Loser took her hands off the wall one at a time. She went back down the long corridor in her socks the way she'd come, close to the wall, and across the big room, and into the short corridor, and into her room. She locked the door from the inside. She checked it. She checked it again.
Then she sat on the floor with her back against it and her knees up, and her arms round her knees, the way the girl on the steps sat in the painting, and stayed like that until the window went grey.
She knew now what she'd been begging for. She'd seen it from the outside.
That was the future. That was what the woman had locked her up for five weeks to save her from. And she'd have gone through that door. Even now, tonight, after everything, she would have gone through it on her knees if she'd taken her hands off the wall.
And the woman would have looked down at her with that face.
Ellen was in the kitchen at ten, in her grey cardigan with her sleeves pushed up and her hair pinned back so hard it pulled at her temples. She was cutting bread.
She said "Good morning." She put two eggs on to boil.
Loser looked at her and couldn't. She sat down at the table and looked at the window instead, at the brick wall, and ate what she was given, and didn't say a word.
It was all still under there. She knew that now. Under the bread knife, under the cardigan, under the good morning. All of it.
And it belonged to somebody else.
Their city, their rules.
She stopped speaking to the woman.
She hadn't decided to. It was like the food, in October. She just found, when the woman came round the corner into the big room at a quarter past six with the packet in her hand, that she had nothing she could say, and that she had got up off the sofa and was walking away down the short corridor to her own room.
The next night it was the same. The woman came to her door and knocked. Loser didn't open it. After a while the footsteps went away. In the morning there was a packet of cigarettes on the floor outside the door, with the lighter on top of it.
She picked it up. She hated herself for picking it up. She smoked them alone at the window, all of them, over three days, and every one of them tasted of the woman's hand putting the lighter away in her pocket like something she'd practised.
The lessons went on anyway. That was the strange part.
On the fourth night the woman knocked on the door and Loser didn't open it, and the woman spoke through the wood instead. Quietly, in the same voice she always used, as if they were sitting across the corner of the brandy sofas with the cigarettes between them.
"This city belongs to people," she said. "All of it. Every street. Not to us. To some of us. There's one at the top, and a handful under her, and everyone else is a guest or a servant or a trespasser. And within that, every one of us has a place, and the place is what we're allowed. Where we can go. Who we can feed on. Whose door we can knock at, and whose we never touch."
Loser sat on the bed with her back to the door and listened.
"In this house," the woman said, "you have a place too. When I have guests, you aren't here. You are in your room with the door locked, and you are asleep, and you have never heard of any of them. That isn't a punishment. It's the safest place in the house."
A pause.
"Goodnight, Loser."
On the sixth night she said it.
She hadn't planned it. The woman came to the door and knocked, and Loser, for no reason she could later name, got up and opened it.
The woman stood in the corridor with the packet in her hand. She held it out. Loser looked at it and didn't take it.
"You don't want anybody," Loser said.
The woman's hand stayed where it was.
"Ellen. Me. Anyone." Her voice was quite steady. She'd had six days with it. "You don't want us. You want us to want you so much we can't stand up. That's what you like. Not the person. The bit where they can't stand up anymore." She swallowed. "The bit where they're on the floor."
She waited. She'd had six days to think about what the woman would do, and she'd thought about all of it. She'd been wrong once before, on the thirteenth of October, when she'd said the thing about the lighter. She'd thought she'd be hit, and instead she'd been listened to. So she was ready for being listened to, this time. She'd made herself ready.
She wasn't ready for this.
The woman smiled.
Not the polite one. Not the one at the corner of her mouth. It went all the way up into her eyes, and it was warm, and delighted, and real. It was the face from the glass. It was the shop with all its lights on, at her own door, for her.
"Yes," the woman said softly. "That's very good."
Loser felt the sick come up into her throat.
"Don't."
"You're quite right," said the woman. "It's exactly that. I've never heard anyone put it so well." She was still smiling. She looked, Loser thought with a kind of horror, proud. As if Loser had done a difficult sum. "Most people tell me I'm kind."
"You're not kind."
"No," the woman agreed. "I'm not."
She held out the packet again.
Loser shut the door in her face, and locked it, and stood with her forehead against the wood and her eyes shut. She heard the woman stand there for a moment longer. Then she heard her laugh. Very quietly. Not cruel. Pleased. Like someone who'd been sent a present.
Then the footsteps went away.
She'd been right on the nineteenth of October, too, then. When she'd knelt there and pulled and begged. The woman had stood at the window and smoked slowly. Slowly.
She didn't sleep that night at all.
On the eleventh of December there were guests.
She heard them come. The intercom, and then the front door, and voices in the big room. Three, four, more. Laughter. Glasses. Later, someone up on the gallery playing the piano, not well, and someone laughing at whoever it was, and the click of cards.
She'd been told. In her room, with the door locked, asleep, never heard of any of them.
She wasn't speaking to the woman. She hadn't spoken to her in nine days. She'd shut the door in her face.
She sat on the bed with the lamp off and the door locked from the inside, by her own hand, and didn't go near it. She didn't press her ear to the wood. She didn't go out to the corner of the short corridor and look round it into the big room at their faces, the way she'd have done with anyone else in the world, to see what was under them.
She lay down and pulled the cover over her head so she wouldn't hear the voices, and after a long time, somewhere in the small hours, while someone on the gallery was still playing the piano badly, she slept.
You don't kill your own.
"The last one," the woman said through the door, on the twentieth, "is the oldest. You don't kill your own kind. Whatever else they've done to you."
Loser lay on the bed and thought about your own, and whose that was, and whose she was. She didn't know. She didn't say anything.
On the twenty-fourth Ellen knocked on her door at five in the afternoon, which she had never done before, and said through the wood: "Come out at six. Wear something."
Loser didn't have something. She had the black jeans and the black thermal and the T-shirt she slept in. She put on all of it, and the coat over the top, and at six she went out.
The big room had changed.
There was a tree. A real one, standing in a bucket in the corner by the bar, taller than Ellen, the needles so dark they were nearly black. It was hung with straw stars and little red apples and strings of tinsel thin as hair. And on the ends of its branches, clipped on in little tin holders, there were candles. Real ones. White wax, unlit.
On the table between the two brandy sofas there was a wreath made of fir with four fat red candles on it, and plates. Potato salad, a big bowl of it, pale and glistening. Sausages, a whole heap, the thin pink kind. A long loaf of something dusted in white sugar, cut in thick slices so you could see the fruit in it. Gingerbread on a plate, dark and round with almonds pressed into the top. A jug of something steaming that smelled of oranges and cloves and red wine.
Ellen was standing by the tree in a dark green dress Loser had never seen, with a box of long matches in her hand. Next to the tree, on the floor, very carefully placed, there was a bucket of water.
And the woman was on the far sofa, as far from the tree as you could get in the room, with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, watching Ellen with an expression of resigned endurance.
"It is Heiligabend," Ellen said to Loser. "Christmas Eve. In Germany this is the night. Not tomorrow. Tonight." She struck a match. "Sit."
Loser sat. On the near sofa, at the end furthest from the woman.
Ellen lit the candles on the tree one by one, starting at the top. Twenty, thirty of them. Each little flame stood up straight and still. The woman watched every single one of them being lit, and Loser saw, because she couldn't not see, the woman's hands tighten a fraction in her lap on each match, and not loosen again until Ellen shook it out.
When the last one was lit Ellen put the box down and reached up and turned off the bulbs.
All of them. Every one of the long cords of light, gone at once. The room went dark, two storeys of dark brick, and in the corner there was only the tree, alive with its thirty small flames, gold and moving, the light of it going up the old brick walls and shaking a little in the warm air, the straw stars turning slowly on their threads.
Loser forgot not to look at things.
She had never seen anything like it. Not in Reading. Not anywhere. At home the tree had been plastic and had come out of a box in the cellar and had coloured bulbs that flashed in a sequence and one string of them that never worked. This was like being inside an old painting. It was like being inside a church, if churches were warm.
Ellen sat down on the near sofa, not quite next to Loser, and poured three glasses from the jug, and put one in front of each of them. The woman's she set down in front of her and left. Loser understood, without being told, that it was for the look of the thing. That it was the woman's place being laid at the table.
They ate. Ellen's potato salad and the thin sausages, which were exactly what you'd expect from Ellen and also somehow the best thing Loser had ever eaten. The sugar loaf, which was called Stollen and had marzipan in the middle like a secret. The gingerbread. The hot wine, which made her face warm and her fingers loose.
Nobody talked much. Ellen said the names of things as she passed them. The woman said nothing. Loser said nothing to the woman, still, and the woman didn't seem to mind, and the candles burned.
After a long time, when the plates were empty, the woman got up. She went to the spiral staircase and up it, round and round, to the gallery, and a moment later the piano started.
Not like the night with the guests. Somebody who could play. Soft, and slow, a tune Loser had heard every Christmas of her life and never really listened to, in the store and the mall and the waiting room. Silent Night. But she'd never heard it like this, in the dark, slow, from somewhere above her, played as if whoever was playing had all night and nowhere else to be.
And Ellen sang.
In German. Quietly at first, and then not so quietly. Her voice wasn't good. It was low and a bit flat and very serious, and she sang every word as if each one had to be put down carefully in its proper place. Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. She sat bolt upright on the sofa with her hands folded in her lap and her face turned up towards the gallery and sang, with the candlelight on her, and her face was just her face. Nothing under it and nothing over it. Ellen, all the way down.
Loser sat between them, the singing and the playing, in the dark, with the tree burning.
She thought about what she'd seen in the glass. She didn't stop thinking about it. It was there, under all this, the same as Ellen's face had been under the bread knife. All of it was true at once. The tree and the wrist. The singing and the floor.
She thought she might cry. She didn't.
When the song was done, and the candles were burning low, Ellen got up and blew them out one by one, starting from the bottom this time, and turned the bulbs back on, and the room came back gold and ordinary. And Ellen went to the bar and came back with two parcels, and put them both down on the table in front of Loser.
"These are for you," she said, and sat down.
Loser looked at them. She hadn't got anything. Nobody had told her. She had nothing.
"I didn't," she said.
"No," Ellen agreed. "Open them."
The first was small and flat and heavy, in plain brown paper, done up with string in a very exact knot. Loser undid it. Inside was a box, a cardboard one, the kind that came from an office-supply store, and inside the box, in rows, there were ballpoint pens. Cheap ones. The exact kind. The ones with the clear barrel and the blue cap that you could pick up off any counter in any bank and nobody cared.
Fifty of them.
"So that you do not need to steal them," said Ellen.
Loser looked at the box. Then at Ellen. Ellen looked back at her, square and calm, in the green dress, as if she'd given her a box of pens.
Loser made a noise. She wasn't sure what kind. It came out of her nose and she put her hand over her mouth.
Ellen nodded once, as if something had been confirmed, and pointed at the second parcel.
The second one was bigger and done in black paper, and the ribbon on it was black too, a real silk ribbon, tied in a bow so perfect it looked like it had been printed. It had not been done by Ellen.
Loser didn't look up at the gallery. She undid the ribbon.
It was a Walkman. A new one, a good one, silver, in its box, with the headphones still wrapped in their little plastic bag. And under it, in a row, stacked neatly in their cases like books on a shelf, there were tapes.
Fourteen of them.
She took them out one by one. And they were hers. Not things like hers, the way people get you things like what you like. Hers. The exact albums. The ones that had been in the box that got stolen off her on the concourse in the first month, and the ones she'd never been able to afford, and two she'd only ever heard once, through a club wall, and never found out the names of, and had hummed to herself for two years trying to keep them.
How. How could anybody know those.
At the bottom of the stack there was one more tape, a blank one, in a plain case. On the label, in black ink, in handwriting that was small and upright and old-fashioned and very beautiful, someone had written:
For later.
Loser sat on the brandy sofa with the Walkman in her lap and the fifteen tapes spread out around her on the leather, and couldn't breathe properly.
She looked up.
The woman had come down from the gallery while she wasn't watching. She was sitting on the far sofa again, as far from the cold black tree as she could get, with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, and she was looking at the wall, at nothing, at the painting of the girl on the steps, as if none of this had anything to do with her.
Fifteen days. Loser hadn't spoken to her in fifteen days.
She held out for perhaps half a minute. It was the longest half-minute of her life.
"How did you know," she said.
It came out cracked. It was the first thing she'd said to the woman since the door, and it came out like a hinge that hadn't been used.
The woman turned her head from the painting and looked at her. Not smiling. Just looking, the way she looked at everything, with all the shutters down. Except that, very far back, one light was on.
"You hum," she said. "When you're drawing. You've no idea you're doing it."
Loser stared at her.
"I've run bars for fifty years," the woman said. "There isn't a song I can't name from four notes." She turned back to the painting. "You were never as quiet as you thought you were."
Loser looked down at the tapes in her lap. The blank one, with For later on it.
She didn't say thank you. She couldn't. It was too big; it wouldn't go through her mouth. She sat there holding the Walkman, and the woman sat there looking at the wall, and Ellen sat between them finishing her hot wine with great seriousness, and nobody said anything at all.
After a while Loser unwrapped the headphones from their little bag and put them on, and put in the blank tape, the one that said For later, and pressed play.
She didn't know what it would be. She closed her eyes.
It was the two songs. The ones from through the club wall. The ones she'd been humming for two years and never knew the names of. One and then the other, and then the first one again, and then the second, all the way to the end of the side, as if someone had sat up a whole night somewhere copying them over and over from one machine to another just to fill the tape.
She sat with her eyes shut on the brandy sofa in the big gold room, a long way above the city, with the smell of the blown-out candles still hanging in the air, and listened to them.
When she opened her eyes again the woman was still on the far sofa, looking at the painting. Ellen had put a blanket over Loser's knees at some point. Loser hadn't felt her do it.
The monster in the green dress, and the monster on the far sofa, and her.
She turned the tape over, and pressed play again.
Paid in Full
Philadelphia. January to March 1997.
6 Jan. 1997. Corestates Bank, Walnut St. Savings account opened. Deposit, cash: $2,000.00. Account holder's name: to follow.
Mr Kowalczyk, from memory (third attempt)
"You already see what they're afraid of," the woman said. "That's half of it. You were born with that half. Most people spend their lives never getting it."
It was the first week of January. The tree had gone, carried out by Ellen and the man from the desk in a shower of black needles that Ellen was still finding in the rugs. The woman was on the far sofa, Loser on the near one. The cigarettes were on the table between them, where they lived now.
"What's the other half?"
"What you do with it."
Loser waited. The woman lit a cigarette and took her time over it.
"Everybody you will ever meet," she said, "is carrying something they want someone to notice. Not the thing they talk about. The thing under it. The thing they'd be ashamed to ask for. Somebody to say their work is good. Somebody to ask after their mother. Somebody to see that they're tired." She tapped the ash into the little glass dish. "You notice it. And then you give it back to them. Not all of it. A little. And then you wait."
"Wait for what?"
"For them to fill the silence." The woman smiled slightly. "People will tell you anything at all to fill a silence. The less you say, the more they tell you. Never ask for the thing you want. Make a room where they can offer it, and stand in the doorway, and wait."
Loser looked at her for a long time.
"That's what you do," she said.
"Yes."
"That's what you did to me."
"No," said the woman. "I locked you in a room for five weeks. That was a great deal more honest."
Mr Kowalczyk telephoned his wife every morning at eleven.
Loser had known that for a month without knowing she knew it. She'd seen him at the desk with the receiver to his ear on the way out with Ellen to the market, and on the way back in, and she'd seen the ring going round under his thumb, and the way his voice went down when he said yeah, no, I know, I know. The voice of a man being careful on a floor that might not hold.
She started in the second week of January. She said good morning. She didn't say anything else. She did it every day, on the way out with Ellen, at ten past ten, before the phone call. Good morning, Mr Kowalczyk. She said his name as if it were worth saying properly, all the syllables.
The first day he went red and looked at his blotter. The fourth day he said "Morning" back, to the blotter. The ninth day he looked up.
On the twelfth day she came down on her own, because Ellen had a cold, which Ellen was furious about, and the market could wait. She came down at a quarter past eleven instead of ten past ten. She'd planned that. He was just putting the receiver down.
She stopped at the desk. She didn't say anything. She just stood there for a second, as if she'd forgotten what she'd come down for.
He looked at her. The ring was going round.
"Long morning?" she said.
That was all. Two words. Then she didn't say anything else. She looked at him, the way you look at someone you're not in a hurry to leave, and let it sit there.
He lasted about four seconds.
"She's at her sister's," he said. "In Cherry Hill. Since Thanksgiving. She says it's just for a while." He turned the ring. "Twenty-two years. She says it's just for a while."
Loser nodded slowly. She didn't say she was sorry. She didn't say it'd be all right. She stood there, and nodded, and waited.
He told her the rest of it. Not all at once. Over about a fortnight, in pieces, at a quarter past eleven, when she came down for the newspaper. Because there was a newspaper now. He saved it for her, the Inquirer, folded under the desk, every morning. And with the newspaper he told her about his wife and her sister and the sister's husband, who was a son of a bitch, and about his daughter at Temple who wasn't taking his calls either, and then, because he'd told her that, he told her everything else.
Who was in 22B and why the police had come in December. That the old lady in 9 complained about noise. That the old lady in 9 had complained about the penthouse twice since October, music at four in the morning, and he'd told her it was the pipes. Which day the super did the master keys. Which of the cleaners was on drugs. That a man had come asking at the desk, the week before Christmas, about a girl in a black coat, and Mr Kowalczyk hadn't liked the look of him and had said he'd never seen her.
Loser brought it all upstairs. Every bit of it. She sat on the near sofa at dusk with her cigarette and told the woman all of it in order, the old lady in 9 and the master keys and the man asking at the desk, and the woman listened without interrupting. When Loser got to the man at the desk, the woman's face did nothing at all, very carefully.
"That was well done," the woman said at the end.
And it went through Loser like hot wine.
That was the thing. That was what she couldn't get past, afterwards, in her room. It felt good. It felt good the way nothing had felt good since the warehouse by the river. Standing at the desk with her mouth shut, watching him crack open and pour out, every word going into her and staying there. And then upstairs with it, all of it, laid out on the table between them like a cat bringing in a bird. Well done.
It was warm. It was the same warm as the face in the glass.
She sat on the bed with the sketchbook and drew him. Mr Kowalczyk, at the desk, at a quarter past eleven, with the phone just put down. She'd drawn him in October, the first day, from four seconds. That had been a good drawing. This was a better one. You could see the twenty-two years in it.
She drew it three times. Every time she got him better. And every time she got him better she felt worse, because she knew exactly how she'd got close enough to see it.
The worst part was that he was happier. She could see that too. He stood up straighter. He said good morning to her first now, and smiled when he said it, and he had somebody to tell, which he hadn't had before. She'd given him that. She'd given it to him so that she could take what she wanted, and she'd taken it, and he'd thanked her.
She didn't know what that made her. She had a feeling she did know, actually, and just didn't want to say it.
22 Jan. 1997. Papers ordered. Birth certificate (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania), Social Security card, state identification card. Half in advance, cash: $1,500.00. Name left blank. Date of birth as given: 1975.
Ellen, cutting bread
Ellen had a cold for nine days and was outraged by it, as if it had been sent to her personally by the government. She went about the flat with a handkerchief in her cardigan sleeve and a face like a closed post office, and refused to lie down, and made soup for everyone, including herself, with great severity.
Loser drew her. Of course she drew her. She drew her at the bread board at five in the afternoon with the light going and her nose red and the knife going down through the dark loaf, straight, as if the loaf had personally offended her. Ellen at the bread board was the most Ellen thing there was.
It was a good drawing. Loser looked at it for a long time, and then turned the page so she wouldn't spoil it, and closed the book.
At six the far door went. At a quarter past, the woman came round the corner into the big room, and Loser, who was on the near sofa going through her coat pockets, said without looking up:
"Sapphire, we're out of matches."
The woman stopped by the bar.
At the end of the room, by the kitchen door, Ellen, who had come out with the soup, looked up. For half a second. Then she looked down again at the tray.
Loser didn't see it. She was looking in her other pocket.
"There are matches in the drawer," the woman said. "Under the till. With the cigarettes."
"Oh. Right."
Loser got up and went to the drawer and got them. The woman went to the far sofa and sat down. Ellen put the soup on the table and went back to the kitchen.
Nobody said anything about anything.
3 Feb. 1997. Reference letter typed and signed. "Miss ________ has been employed in my household since October 1996 in a domestic and secretarial capacity. She is observant, discreet and entirely reliable, and I recommend her without reservation." To be dated when used.
Hands, holding a lighter (eleven times)
"The city has a shape," the woman said. "You'll need to know it."
It was February. Snow outside, the city gone grey and white, every sound coming up from the street muffled as if it had been wrapped in cotton. They'd been at it for weeks, nearly every night. The woman talking, Loser listening, the cigarettes between them. Loser had stopped writing things down in the sketchbook. She didn't need to. It stayed in her.
"At the top," the woman said, "there's one who holds the city. You'll never say that name in a street. You'll never say it in a room unless you're certain who's in it. Under her there are a handful of others, each speaking for her own kind. And then there are offices." She ticked them off on her fingers, lightly. "Someone keeps the peace. Someone keeps the records. Someone sees that the rules are kept, and comes for you if they aren't. That one's called the Sheriff. At the moment it's John Sparrow."
She said it exactly as she'd said the others. In the same voice. As if it were a name on a list, which it was.
Loser was looking at the woman's hand, the one holding the cigarette. She'd been drawing it, lately. Hands were hard and the woman's were harder than most, because they never did anything by accident.
"Oh," she said.
She went on looking at the hand.
"He's the one who..."
"Yes."
"I didn't know that's what he was. He never said." She frowned at the ash on the end of the woman's cigarette. "Huh."
And she waited.
She waited for it the way you wait for the pain when you've stubbed your toe in the dark: the half-second before it comes, when you know it's coming and you can feel it gathering. She waited for the hand behind her ribs to close round the name. To make the excuses. He was busy. He had a lot on. He's important. He's the Sheriff. Of course he didn't have time for me, he's...
It didn't come.
She sat on the near sofa with her cigarette, and the snow coming down outside on the far side of a foot of brick, and waited for it, and it didn't come. There was nothing behind her ribs at all. Not a hand. Not a thread. She went looking for it, the way you go looking with your tongue for a tooth that's been pulled, and there was nothing there. Not even the gap.
She realised the woman was watching her.
Not looking. Watching. The way you watch someone open a parcel. The face was doing nothing, the shutters were down, but she'd said that name in that voice on purpose, and now she was watching to see what happened, and she'd known exactly what she was doing.
Loser should have been angry about that. She noticed that she wasn't angry about that either.
"You did that on purpose," she said.
"Yes."
"To see."
"Yes." The woman put out her cigarette in the glass dish. "Well?"
Loser didn't answer. She got up and went to her room.
She sat on the bed in the dark with her coat on and the sketchbook on her knees and tried to feel it.
She tried really hard. She thought about the warehouse by the river. About his wrist, the first time. About the one side of his mouth. She thought about every single thing she could remember about him, and there was a lot, there was so much, all of it still there, every word he'd ever said to her, every place he'd sent her to stand. She could have drawn the warehouse down to the rust on the girders.
None of it was attached to anything. It was like looking at somebody else's photographs.
That was when she got frightened.
Not of him. That was the strange part. She'd been frightened of him for five months and frightened of not having him for five more, and now she was frightened of this. The empty bit. There'd been a hole in her the exact shape of him, and she'd hated it, and it had been hers. She'd known where it was. She'd been able to put her hand on it in the dark.
Now there wasn't even the hole. There was just her. Nothing holding her up and nothing pulling her down. And she didn't know what she was without something in that place.
She turned on the lamp. The new lamp, the same lamp. She opened the sketchbook to look at something, anything, to have somewhere to put her eyes.
It fell open in the middle and there were hands.
Eleven pages of them. She'd known she was drawing the woman's hands. She hadn't known how many. She turned the pages slowly. Holding the lighter. Holding the cigarette. Holding a glass. Resting flat on the bar. Putting the cap on a fountain pen. Ticking things off on her fingers, lightly, one, two, three. The left one, open, palm up, in a corridor, waiting for a key.
And around them, on the pages before and after: Ellen at the bread board. Ellen at the counter in the market. Mr Kowalczyk. The tree with its candles. The window with the hand's-width gap. The red sofas. The propeller.
It was all the house. The whole book. There was nothing from the river in it at all.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she understood what had gone into the place where the hole had been, and that frightened her too, in a completely different way.
Her (not for anyone)
She'd been drawing it since the night of the mirror.
Not every night. Not often. When she couldn't sleep, which was less now. She'd started it in December, while she wasn't speaking to her, because she'd needed to put it somewhere outside her own head, and she'd been drawing it ever since, on the same page, at the very back of the book, coming back to it again and again, going over and over it. She never looked at it in daylight.
She'd known from the start she couldn't draw what she'd seen. She'd never draw Ellen like that. She'd cut her own hand off first.
So it wasn't Ellen.
It was a shape, kneeling. A person, you could tell that much, with their back to you and their head bowed and their hands up, on someone's knees. But you couldn't see the face, and you couldn't see the hair, and you couldn't see whether it was a man or a woman or anyone at all. Because the whole figure was hatching. Black, layer on layer, the way she did it when she went away inside herself and came back to find pages gone. Except she'd done this on purpose, awake, every stroke, for weeks. The kneeling figure was made out of the blackest black she had, so dense it shone like the back of a beetle.
And above it, the woman. Sitting. Looking down.
That was the only light in it. Just the face. And it was the face from the glass, every shutter up, every light on in every room, and what was in there: the warmth, the slow deep private pleasure, the look of someone looking at the most beautiful thing they owned. Loser had got it. It had taken her two months, but she'd got it. It was the best thing she had ever drawn in her life. She knew it the way you know the floor is there.
And it was the worst thing she knew about anybody.
On the eighteenth of February, at twenty past six, with snow falling past the brick and the cigarettes on the table and the woman on the far sofa, Loser took the sketchbook out of the lining of her coat and opened it at the back, and very carefully, along the perforation, she tore that page out.
She got up and went across to the far sofa and put it face up on the cushion beside the woman.
"That's you," she said.
Her voice was steady. She'd thought it would shake. She went back to the near sofa and sat down and lit a cigarette and looked at the propeller, not at the woman, because she couldn't.
There was a very long silence.
She smoked half the cigarette in it. She heard the paper move once, as the woman picked it up. Then nothing. The bulbs hummed. Far down, a snowplough went along Spruce Street, scraping.
She had to look, in the end.
The woman was holding the drawing in both hands, on her knees, and looking at it. Just looking at it. Her face was quite still.
And then Loser saw her understand.
It was very small. Most people wouldn't have seen it. The woman's eyes went to the kneeling figure, the black one, and stayed there, and then lifted, slowly, and went across the room and down the long corridor towards the door at the end of it. Just for a moment. Then they came back to the page.
She knew. She knew where it had been drawn from. She knew what Loser had seen, and when, and from where, standing in the dark in her socks.
She lifted her head and looked at Loser across the corner of the sofas.
She didn't say anything about it. She wasn't going to. Loser could see that too. She could see it as clearly as she'd seen anything in that face, because the face was letting her see it on purpose. I know. You know I know. And neither of us is going to say a single word.
Then the woman smiled.
It was the Christmas smile. The one from the door in December, when Loser had told her what she was, and the woman had said that's very good. All the way up into her eyes. Delighted. As if she'd been sent a present.
Loser waited to feel sick, the way she had in December.
She didn't, quite. She felt a lot of things. Sick was in there somewhere. But mostly she felt as if she'd thrown something as hard as she could at a wall, and the wall had caught it.
"What do you charge?" the woman said.
Loser stared at her.
"It's not for sale."
"Everything's for sale. What do you charge?"
"It's not, it's not for anything, it's..." Loser stopped. "It's what you are."
"I know," said the woman. "That's why I want it."
She held it up a little to the light from the bulbs, at arm's length, and looked at it again, and Loser saw her look at the face, at her own face, the one Loser had dragged up out of the glass and put on the paper, and Loser saw her like it. Saw her look at the worst thing anybody knew about her and like it. Not the way people like a flattering photograph. The way you like a thing that's true.
"Most people," the woman said, "draw me beautiful. Do you know how dull that is? Fifty years of it." She lowered the page. "What do you charge?"
Loser didn't know. She'd never sold anything. She'd never known anybody who bought drawings, except in films. She opened her mouth and what came out was:
"Twenty bucks?"
The woman looked at her for a moment without any expression at all.
Then she got up, and laid the drawing very carefully on the far sofa where she'd been sitting, and went to the bar, and opened the drawer under the till. Loser heard paper. The woman came back and stood over the low table between them and counted it out, one at a time, onto the wood, next to the cigarettes.
Fifty-dollar notes. Loser counted with her. She couldn't help it.
Twelve of them.
"Six hundred dollars," the woman said. "That's what a drawing like that sells for. In a gallery in New York with your name on a little white card next to it, they'd ask more, and get it." She sat down again, and picked up the drawing, and laid it across her knees. "I've bought drawings for fifty years. I know exactly what I'm paying for. Don't you ever say twenty to anybody again."
Loser looked at the money on the table. Twelve notes, in a neat row, squared off at the edges.
It wasn't a gift. That was the thing. She'd been braced for a gift. She knew what to do with gifts, with charity, with pity; she had a lot of practice. You said thank you and hated them. But this wasn't that. This was what it cost, and the woman had paid it, as if Loser were anybody, as if she were some artist in New York with a little white card. She'd paid it because she wanted the drawing.
Somebody wanted it.
Loser picked up the money. Her hands were steady. She folded it once, the way you'd fold a bus timetable, and put it in the inside pocket of the coat, the torn one, with the sketchbook.
She didn't say thank you. She found she didn't need to.
"And when you have a mind to," the woman said, not looking up from the page, "I should like one of Ellen. Cutting bread."
Loser went very still.
"How do you know about that one?"
The woman glanced up.
"You hum," she said.
18 Feb. 1997. Purchase. One drawing, ballpoint on paper, from the artist. Untitled. Cash: $600.00.
19 Feb. 1997. Framer, Pine St. Black wood, museum glass, archival mount. $85.00.
19 Feb. 1997. Commissioned from the same artist: one portrait, subject E. Fee agreed on completion.
It went up on the twenty-first.
Not by the painting of the girl on the steps. Across the room from it, on the brick by the foot of the spiral stairs, in a black frame with a wide white mount, so that the little drawing sat in the middle of all that white like something looking out of a window. Ellen hung it. Loser watched her do it from the near sofa, the spirit level and the pencil mark and the single nail, and when it was up Ellen stood back and looked at it for a long time with no expression on her face at all.
Then she went back to the bar.
Loser looked at it from across the room. Then at the painting. From where she sat she could see them both: the big one, the girl on the steps with her arms round her knees and her face turned up, the only light in all that black; and the small one, the shape on its knees, the only light the face above it, looking down.
She'd never noticed how much they looked like each other.
"Who painted that?" she said. "The big one."
The woman was at the bar, writing in her book with the fountain pen.
"A woman called Dörte Lemke. In Berlin. She sold nine paintings in her life." The pen moved. "I bought seven."
Loser looked at the girl on the steps.
"What happened to her?"
"She died."
The woman said it in the same voice she'd said Sheriff. Then she capped the pen, and closed the book, and put it under the bar.
Loser sat on the near sofa and looked from the big painting to the small drawing and back. Seven of nine. The rest of the woman's collection was somewhere. In storage, maybe. In Berlin. In a room Loser hadn't seen. Things she'd bought, from people who'd made them. Things she'd looked at and wanted and paid for.
And now one of hers. In a black frame. Across the room.
She'd been collected. She felt it as clearly as she'd ever felt anything, sitting there with six hundred dollars in her coat pocket. Bought, and framed, and hung where it could be looked at.
It should have frightened her. She waited for it to.
It did, a bit. But mostly what she felt, sitting there looking at her own drawing on the brick in its black frame, was that somebody had looked at what she'd made and thought it was worth a nail in the wall.
The red sofa, from where I sit
"Come if you like," the woman said.
It was March. The snow had gone grey and then gone, and there was water running in the gutters on Spruce Street all day and the sound of it came up even to the thirtieth floor. The woman stood at the opening of the studio corridor with one hand on the frame.
Loser had never been in the studio. She knew where it was. She'd heard things through its door sometimes, very faintly, late. She'd never gone near it.
She got up off the near sofa and followed.
It was dark inside, and warm, and smelled of dust and old wood and something sweet, like the haze they put in clubs. The woman went to a panel by the door and put up one light only. A spotlight, from high up, coming down through a faint mist that hung in the air and pooling on the floor round the foot of a microphone stand in the middle of the room.
There was a drum kit, and a keyboard, and a tall chair with a violin lying on the seat. There was a high window made of glass bricks with the city broken up in it into soft, pale squares. There was a leather armchair, and a sofa.
A red velvet one. Old. Long enough to lie down on.
"Sit wherever you like," the woman said.
Loser sat on the red sofa. At the end. With her knees up and her arms round them and her back against the armrest. From there she could see the whole room, and the door, and the circle of light, and the woman going into it.
The woman stood at the microphone and didn't touch it. She stood very still in the light with her hands at her sides, and Loser thought for a moment that that was all she was going to do. Stand there.
Then she sang.
Not what Loser had expected. She'd expected something old, something from the radio of her grandmother's kitchen, women in long gloves. It wasn't. It was a song Loser knew. Not well; she'd heard it in the car, maybe, in high school, on the radio of somebody's older brother's car on the way to somewhere that didn't matter. Guitars on the record, she remembered, and a man singing it rough and low. A slow one. About wanting something you knew would wreck you.
But there weren't any guitars now. There was nothing. Just the woman's voice, alone in the haze, slower than the record, low and clear and right there, without anything under it to hold it up. Every word put down separately like a cup on a saucer, the way she said everything. As if she had all night and nowhere else to be.
Loser forgot to breathe.
She'd heard people sing. In bars, in the subway, in church, her mother at the sink. She'd never heard anybody sing like that. Like there was nothing between the voice and the person. Like it was the only time all day the shutters went up on their own, for no one, in an empty room.
Except it wasn't empty. Loser was in it.
The woman sang the whole song, and then another one. Something faster, with a grain in it, a song Loser knew better, had hummed, probably, God knew, the woman would know. Then a third, very quiet, almost under her breath, so that Loser had to lean forward on the red sofa to hear it.
Then she stopped. She stood in the circle of light with her head down. Loser didn't clap. It would have been the wrong thing, like clapping in a church. She sat with her arms round her knees.
After a while the woman lifted her head and looked out of the light, into the dark, at the red sofa.
Loser looked back.
And she thought, very clearly, without any effort, the way you think your own name: Sapphire's going to sing another one.
She stopped.
She went back over it. Sapphire. She hadn't thought the woman. She'd thought Sapphire. She sat on the red sofa and went looking for when that had started, the way she'd gone looking for the hole in February, and couldn't find it. She'd been saying it. She'd been saying it for weeks, she realised. Out loud. Sapphire, the matches. Sapphire, there's a man at the desk. Sapphire, Ellen says. She'd been saying it and saying it and never once heard herself.
She couldn't remember the first time. It was just there, the way the drawing of the hands was there, and the house in the sketchbook, and nothing from the river.
In the circle of light, Sapphire was watching her. She didn't say anything. She tilted her head very slightly, as if she'd heard something.
Then she turned back to the microphone, and closed her eyes, and sang another one.
10 Mar. 1997. Papers received. Balance paid, cash: $1,500.00. Birth certificate, Social Security card, identification card: all complete. Account book, Corestates Bank, balance $2,000.00. Reference, signed, undated.
Name on all: blank. To be entered in her own hand.
In Her Own Hand
Philadelphia. 3rd to 4th April 1997.
18:10
The portrait was in a cardboard folder from the art shop on Chestnut Street. Loser had bought the folder herself, with her own money, out of the six hundred, and the man in the shop had asked if she was a student and she'd said no and he'd looked at her for a second as if he'd wanted to ask what, then, and hadn't.
She put it on the bar.
Sapphire was behind the bar with the fountain pen and the book. Ellen was at the far end, doing the glasses. Loser stood there with both hands flat on the folder and didn't open it.
"It's done," she said.
Sapphire capped the pen. "Show me."
Loser opened the folder and took it out and laid it on the bar between them, the right way round for Sapphire, and stepped back, and put her hands in her coat pockets so nobody would see them.
It was Ellen at the bread board. At five in the afternoon, in January, with the light going and her nose red from the cold she'd been so angry about, and the knife going down through the dark loaf, straight, as if the loaf had personally offended her. Her sleeves pushed up. Her hair pinned back so hard it pulled at the temples. Every line of her square and certain and exactly where it was meant to be.
It had taken Loser six weeks. She'd done it nine times. She'd never once let Ellen see her looking.
Sapphire looked at it for a long time. Then she turned it round on the bar, slowly, and slid it along the wood to the far end, where Ellen was.
Ellen put down the glass she was holding. She wiped her hands on the cloth. She looked down at the drawing.
She didn't say anything for so long that Loser started to feel sick. She stood there in her coat with her hands in her pockets and watched Ellen's face, and there was nothing on it, the way there was never anything on it, and Loser had seen what was under that nothing exactly once and was never going to say so, and she waited.
Ellen bent a little closer to the paper. She looked at the hands. Then at the knife. Then at the face.
"So," she said. "That is what I look like."
She straightened up.
"Good," said Ellen.
That was all. She went back to the glasses.
Loser stood very still. She'd waited for that word in October, for ten hours, with an empty tray in front of her and a full stomach. It hadn't come. She'd put her foot down on a stair that wasn't there.
It was there now.
"What do I owe you?" said Sapphire.
Loser turned back to her. The answer was ready in her mouth before she'd thought about it, and she let it come out without stopping it, and was surprised at how easily it came.
"Six hundred."
Sapphire didn't blink. She opened the drawer under the till and counted it out onto the bar, twelve notes, squared at the edges, and Loser picked them up and folded them once and put them in the inside pocket of the coat with the other twelve.
At the end of the bar, Ellen took the drawing in both hands, carefully, by the edges, and went away down the corridor to her own rooms with it. At the door she stopped.
"I will be in here," she said. "Tonight."
She didn't say why. She went in and shut the door.
Loser looked at Sapphire. Sapphire was looking at the closed door, and her face wasn't doing anything at all.
18:45
"You'll want to sit down for this one," Sapphire said.
They were on the sofas. The far one and the near one, across the corner, with the low table between them and the cigarettes on it. Loser sat. She didn't take a cigarette. She had a feeling she should keep her hands free.
"This is the last one," Sapphire said. "The last lesson. And you know it already. I want you to hear it anyway, from me, out loud, so that afterwards you can never tell yourself you didn't."
Loser nodded.
"You are a mortal woman," Sapphire said. "You have been since the middle of October. There's nothing of him in you. There's nothing of me in you. You're exactly what you were before the warehouse by the river. Except that you know."
She let that sit.
"You know what we are. You know where we sleep. You know there's one at the top of this city and you know what to call her and what not to. You know there's a Sheriff, and his name, and what he does. You know my name, and this building, and the floor. You know Ellen." She paused. "And you are nobody's. You have no domitor. Nobody holds the other end of you. Do you know what that means?"
"Nobody answers for me," said Loser.
"Nobody has to," Sapphire said. "Remember that. Has to. A girl who knows what you know, and belongs to nobody, is a loose thread. And people pull loose threads. Not out of cruelty. Out of tidiness."
The bulbs hummed. Far down on Spruce Street a bus went by, and Loser felt it in her feet through thirty floors of building.
"In December," Sapphire said, "a man came to the desk downstairs and asked Mr Kowalczyk about a girl in a black coat."
"I told you that. I told you that in January."
"You did. I'd known since December." Sapphire's face was quite still. "I saw to it."
Loser waited for more. There wasn't any more. Sapphire wasn't going to say what saw to it meant, and Loser found, looking at her, that she didn't want to know. She wanted to know only that it had been done. That somebody had heard that a man was asking, and had got up, and had gone out into the cold, and seen to it, and had come back, and had never said a word.
"I've been answering for you," Sapphire said. "Since the night you came to the door. Not because I had to. Because I chose to. Every night since, if you'd done something stupid, it would have been mine. If you'd walked out on the fifth of October and got as far as the man you were walking towards, and said one wrong thing, it would have been mine. Not his. Mine." She turned her head a little. "It's still mine. It will be mine as long as you're in this house."
"And if I'm not in this house."
"Then I'll go on answering for you as long as I can," Sapphire said. "From a distance. With much less to answer with."
She reached for the cigarettes then, and took one, and lit it, and didn't offer the packet.
"I can't make leaving safe," she said. "I want you to hear that most of all. If I told you I could, I'd be lying, and I haven't lied to you yet, and I'm not going to start tonight. I can't make it safe. I can make it possible."
Loser looked at her.
"That's all," Sapphire said. "That's the lesson."
19:20
She went to the bar and came back with an envelope and a glass.
The envelope was large and brown, the kind you put documents in, and fat, and not sealed. The glass was a plain one, a short heavy tumbler, the kind she'd seen Ellen hold up to the bulbs a hundred times.
Sapphire put them down on the low table, side by side, between the cigarettes and the glass dish. The envelope on the left. The tumbler on the right.
The tumbler was empty. Clean. Dry. Nothing in it at all.
Then Sapphire sat back down on the far sofa, and crossed her legs, and folded her hands in her lap.
"Open the envelope," she said.
Loser opened it.
A birth certificate. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The seal raised under her thumb when she ran it over the paper. The date of birth was filled in: 1975, the year she'd said, months ago, when someone had asked. The place: Reading, Berks County. She looked at that for a while. She didn't remember saying Reading. She must have said it at the market. Or not said it. The space for the name was blank.
A Social Security card. Blank where the name went.
A state identification card, with a square where a photograph would go, and a blank line beside it.
A bank book. Corestates, Walnut Street. One entry, in January. Deposit: $2,000.00. The account holder's name: blank.
A letter on heavy cream paper, typed, signed at the bottom in small upright handwriting that was old-fashioned and very beautiful. Miss ________ has been employed in my household since October 1996 in a domestic and secretarial capacity. She is observant, discreet and entirely reliable, and I recommend her without reservation. No date.
Loser laid them all out on the table in a row, the way Ellen would have, squared at the edges. She looked at them.
Two thousand in the bank. Twelve hundred in her coat pocket, in two folds of twelve. She did the sum without wanting to. Three thousand two hundred dollars. A room. A deposit on a room, and the first month, and the month after that, and food. A job, with that letter. A name, any name she liked. A whole person, laid out on a coffee table in pieces like a kit, waiting for somebody to write in the blanks.
She'd been a whole person on a coffee table once before. On her mother's kitchen table, under the sugar bowl. She'd left it there.
She looked at the tumbler.
Empty. She looked at it for a long time. There was nothing to see. It was a glass.
She looked up at Sapphire.
And she did the thing she always did. The only thing she'd ever been good at, before the drawing. She read her.
She looked at the face across the corner of the sofas with every bit of six months in her: the closed shop, the shutters, the one light very far back she'd learned to look for, the way the hands sat in the lap. She went looking for the thing under it. Whether Sapphire wanted her to stay. Whether Sapphire wanted her to go. Whether Sapphire cared at all, one way or the other, or whether she was a drawing on the wall that might or might not get a second one hung beside it.
There was nothing.
Not the nothing of the first night, the closed shop. Not Ellen's nothing, the wall you put your hand on and it's just a wall. A different nothing. Every shutter down, every door locked, every light off. Not a single thing showing. Not one.
Loser had never seen her do that before. She'd seen her guarded and she'd seen her open and she'd seen her pleased, she'd seen her in the glass, but she'd never seen her so shut that there wasn't even the shape of the building showing through. It was like looking at fog.
And Loser understood, sitting there, that Sapphire was doing it on purpose.
For her. She was holding every shutter down with both hands so that Loser couldn't see what she wanted. So that whatever Loser chose, it wouldn't be because of Sapphire's face. So that nobody, not even Loser, could ever say afterwards that she'd read it off her and done what she was told.
It must have been costing her something. Loser could see that too. Not in the face; the face was fog. In the hands. The hands in the lap were folded a little too tightly. One thumb was pressed into the back of the other hand, hard enough to leave a mark, if she'd been the kind that marked.
Nobody had ever done that for her. Nobody had ever hidden what they wanted so that she could find out what she did.
She sat there with all of it laid out in front of her. The papers and the empty glass, and the money in her pocket, and the fog across the table.
She thought about the street. Two years and a bit. The laundromat, the concourse. She thought about Reading, and her mother's face at the sink, and the locker with the word on it that she'd never washed off. She thought about the warehouse by the river and the one side of a mouth, and found it was just a thing that had happened, like weather. She thought about the door with the key on the outside, and the cigarettes, and the nineteenth of October. The glass at the end of the long corridor. Halloween. The tree with its thirty candles and the bucket of water. You hum. Twelve fifty-dollar notes in a row on a table. Ellen saying good.
She thought about the drawing on the wall by the stairs, the black shape on its knees. She'd known what that was when she drew it. She knew now.
She reached out and picked up the tumbler.
Sapphire didn't move.
Loser turned it over in her hand once. Heavy glass. Cold. Then she leaned over and put it down on the far side of the table, out of the way, next to the glass dish full of ash.
"Not in a cup," she said.
And somewhere very far back in the fog, one light came on.
19:35
She didn't kneel.
She'd thought about it, in the second before she moved. She'd thought about the drawing. And she got up off the near sofa and went round the corner of the table and sat down on the far one, next to Sapphire. Not at the other end. Next to her. Close enough that their knees nearly touched. At the same height. Eye to eye.
Sapphire turned her head and looked at her.
The fog was going. Loser could watch it go. Shutter after shutter coming up, light after light, all the way down the street, and there it was, all of it, the warm deep private thing from the glass, turned on her now, at a range of eighteen inches.
"I'm staying," Loser said.
"Yes," said Sapphire. "I can see that."
She lifted her left wrist to her mouth.
Loser watched her bite it. She'd seen it in a mirror, small and gold and backwards, from forty feet down a dark corridor. She saw it now from close enough to touch, the way the teeth went in, unhurried, the way the dark line came up on the white skin and gathered and started to run. She smelled it. Not from forty feet away, the way she'd thought she had in November. From right there. It went into her like the first breath after you've been under water.
Sapphire held out the wrist.
Loser took it in both hands. She didn't mean to do that. Her hands did it. Like Ellen's had, in the glass. Like something holy.
She put her mouth to it.
She'd had it twice before. In the back of a warehouse by the river, both times, on concrete, with the smell of the river coming in through the broken windows. She'd thought she knew what it was.
She hadn't known anything.
It wasn't like the warehouse. The warehouse had been good, the warehouse had been the best thing that had ever happened to her, and it had been like being given a single match in a cold room. This was like being put into the fire.
It came into her mouth, and it was warm, warmer than anything had a right to be, and thick, and it tasted of nothing she could name. Not copper. Not salt. Not anything that had ever been in her mouth before. It tasted like the inside of the word yes. It went down, and wherever it went, everything came undone.
Her shoulders went first. She hadn't known she'd been holding them up. Six months. Two years. Twenty-one years, maybe. They came down all at once, and her back went with them, and she felt her whole spine let go a link at a time like a chain being laid down on a table. Her eyes closed. She didn't close them; they closed. A sound came out of her, into the wrist, low, the same sound she'd heard come out of Ellen in the glass, and she'd thought it was strange then and she knew now it was the only sound there was.
Everything was warm. Everything was right. All the way down to the ends of her fingers and the roots of her hair. There wasn't anything wrong anywhere in the world. There never had been. She'd only thought so. She'd been cold all her life and she'd only just found out, because she'd never been warm before to know the difference.
And then, under the warm, the other thing.
The want. It came up under the warm like a tide under a boat, and it wanted more, and more, and more. She heard herself make another sound, different, and felt her hands tighten on Sapphire's arm, her nails going in, pulling the wrist closer. She didn't care. She'd been so proud, a minute ago, about sitting up. Eye to eye. She'd sat up. She hadn't knelt.
It didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. She was folded over Sapphire's arm with her eyes shut and her mouth open and her fingers digging in like the girl in the glass. Sitting up or kneeling, it was the same. The need was the same. It came up out of her all the same and there was nothing about how she sat that could keep it down.
And Sapphire watched her.
Loser couldn't see it. Her eyes were shut. She didn't need to see it. She could feel it, the way you feel the sun on your face with your eyes closed. The warm deep pleasure looking down at her, all lights on. Not one bit different from the glass. Not one bit kinder for her sitting up, or crueller for her not kneeling. Exactly the same. The same face it had always been, the face it was always going to be, because that was what Sapphire was and she couldn't be anything else and had never once pretended to be.
That was the thing. Somewhere very deep under the warm and the want, Loser knew it. Sapphire wasn't pretending. Not now, not in the glass, not on the nineteenth of October with her fists in her skirt. She'd never pretended. She'd told Loser exactly what she was on the first night, and every night after, and in December at the door she'd said yes, that's very good, and she'd bought the drawing because it was true.
Loser had chosen this with her eyes open. She'd chosen that. The worst thing she knew about anybody, looking down at her with the lights on. She'd seen it and drawn it and named it, and chosen it anyway.
And she felt a hand come into her hair.
It came in at the crown. Slowly. And went down, along the length of her hair, the bad home-dyed black with the brown coming through at the roots, down to the back of her neck. And lifted. And came back to the crown, and went down again.
Stroking.
Loser made a sound into the wrist that was nothing like the others. She didn't know what it was. It might have been crying.
The hand went on.
After a long time, or no time, the voice above her said, very quietly:
"Enough."
The wrist went away.
Loser followed it. She didn't decide to. Her mouth followed it two inches through the air, blind, the way Ellen's had, and found nothing, and stopped. And she sagged forward and put her forehead down on Sapphire's shoulder, because it was there, and stayed.
The hand was still in her hair.
21:00
There was a pen on the table. One of Ellen's fifty. Loser had put it there herself, out of habit, when she'd first sat down, because she always had one out, the way other people have their keys out.
She sat up, eventually. The world was still warm round the edges. Her hands were steady. Steadier than they'd been in months, in years. She looked down at them and they didn't shake at all.
She picked up the pen.
She took the birth certificate off the table and laid it on her knee, on the cardboard folder from Chestnut Street, and found the blank line, and wrote in it.
She wrote slowly. In capitals, because forms wanted capitals, and because her ordinary handwriting was all sideways from years of writing in notebooks on her knee on the concourse. She wrote it in the ballpoint that you could pick up off any counter in any bank and nobody cared. She pressed hard.
Then the Social Security card. Then the line beside the empty square for the photograph. Then the bank book. Then the line on the letter, between Miss and has been employed.
The same thing, five times. She didn't look up.
When she'd done the last one she put the pen down and squared the papers up on the table and sat back.
She knew Sapphire had been reading it. Upside down, across the corner of the table, every letter as it went down. She'd have read it on the first one. She'd have known the whole thing before Loser got to the bank book.
Loser looked at the papers a moment longer. Then she said it.
"Melissa."
It came out strange. She hadn't said it in two and a half years. She hadn't heard anybody say it in longer than that. It sounded like somebody else's, like a coat you find in a cupboard and remember you used to wear.
"Melissa Ann Kunkel," she said. "From Reading."
She didn't look at Sapphire. She looked at the papers.
"They called me Missy at home," she said. "I hated it."
There was a silence. Then Sapphire said, quite gently, in the same voice she'd used on the first night to say good evening, Loser:
"What shall I call you?"
Loser thought about it. Properly. She sat on the far sofa in the gold room, with the warm still in her fingers and the papers on the table, and thought about it.
"Loser's fine," she said. "In here."
She picked the papers up, all five, and put them back in the brown envelope, and folded the envelope in half, and put it in the inside pocket of the coat, the torn one, with the twelve hundred dollars and the sketchbook and a folded square of paper with four wrong mouths on it that she'd never thrown away.
"Melissa's for out there," she said.
She patted the coat, once, over the pocket.
"In case."
Sapphire looked at her for a long moment. Then she smiled. Not the big one. A small one, at the corner of her mouth, and it went up into her eyes anyway.
She reached over and took two cigarettes out of the packet and lit them both, one after the other, with the silver lighter, and held one out.
Loser took it.
05:40
Sapphire stood in the mouth of the long corridor, with her shoulder against the brick, and watched.
The night had been long and very quiet. They had smoked. At some point after midnight the girl had got up and gone down the short corridor and come back with the Walkman, and lain on the near sofa with the headphones on and her eyes shut, and Sapphire had sat on the far sofa and watched the bulbs, and neither of them had said anything at all. At two Ellen had come out of her rooms in her dressing gown, and looked at them both, and looked at the brown envelope sticking up out of the girl's coat pocket, and nodded, once, as if a train had arrived on time, and made a pot of coffee, and gone back to bed.
Now there was grey at the edges of things. Sapphire could feel it coming the way you feel a change in the weather in an old injury. She should already have been in her room. She was not in her room.
The girl was at the front door.
She'd got up off the sofa a minute ago, without a word, and pulled the coat round her, and gone across the big room to the door. She was standing in front of it now with her back to the room and her hand on the top bolt.
She leaned on it. It was stiff; it always had been. It went across with a crack like a knuckle.
The bottom bolt. Across, without a sound.
The chain. She took the loose link between two fingers so it couldn't swing, and put it into its slot, and it chinked once, very small.
Then she stood there, and put out her hand, and touched each of them. Top. Bottom. Chain. One after the other. As if counting.
Sapphire watched her do it and thought about the fourth of October, at a little after six in the evening, at the end of the bar. And if you had been wrong?
Ellen had not been wrong.
That had been the thing that frightened her, that night. That Ellen had been right, and would be right the next time, and the time after, and that one day she would not be, and Sapphire would be lying in the dark behind the curtains and would never know. It had been a question about Ellen's judgement, that night. About how much longer it could hold the whole weight of the house up by itself.
It was a different question now.
Now there were two of them. Two who read people, in two different ways. Ellen, who saw what they had done and would do. The girl, who saw what they were afraid of. Two who would be awake when she was not. Two pairs of hands on the bolts. Two who knew the old lady in 9 and the master keys and which of the cleaners was on drugs, and the colour of a man's face when he'd been asking at the desk for someone he should not have been asking about.
What Ellen had let in through that door on a Thursday morning in October, against every rule there was, was the next lock.
Sapphire stood in the corridor and let herself know that. All of it. She had not looked away from what she wanted since the summer of 1939, and she did not look away now. She had wanted this. She had wanted it from the moment she'd read a brand new person on that letter and folded it in half and in half again. She had wanted it on the nineteenth of October with the girl's fists in her skirt, and she had smoked her cigarette slowly. She had wanted it tonight, holding every shutter down with both hands until her thumb ached, so that the girl would never know how much.
It did not make her kind. It had never been going to.
She had carried three names in her life. She knew what it cost to put one down and what it cost to pick one up. The girl at the door was carrying two now. One for in here. One folded up in a brown envelope inside her coat, for out there, for later. Next week Ellen would take Melissa to a hairdresser on Walnut Street, and a department store, and buy her a coat that fitted. Melissa would have new boots. Melissa would have a photograph taken for the square on her identification card, with her hair one colour all the way through.
Loser would keep the old coat. Sapphire knew that the way she knew the grey was coming. Loser would wear it in the house until it fell apart, and then Ellen would mend it.
At the front door, the girl took her hand off the chain. She turned round.
She saw Sapphire in the mouth of the corridor and stopped, as though she'd been caught at something. Then she didn't look caught any more. She looked at Sapphire across the whole length of the big gold room, and Sapphire watched her read it, all of it, every shutter up. She let her.
"Go to bed," the girl said. "It's nearly six."
Sapphire smiled.
She pushed herself off the brick and went down the long corridor towards the door at the end of it, into the dark. Behind her she heard the girl cross the big room, and stop, and come back, and stand at the front door again, a moment, the way you stand at the door of a house you've only just found out is yours.
Then the touch of a hand on the bolts, one more time. Top. Bottom. Chain.
And the girl on the inside locked the door.