Page 28 of The Fall-Out

‘Just behind the British Museum,’ I translated.

I was surprised. I knew that when Zara visited from Paris, where she was now living, to see Patch, they tended to stay at his parents’ place, or went away to some romantic hideaway together. But when she came to London alone to join us for the Girlfriends’ Club on Wednesday evenings, which she didn’t manage every month but did at least several times a year, I’d assumed her work put her up somewhere properly posh, which any cab driver would have known how to find instantly. I didn’t have time to analyse that, though – my priority was keeping Zara awake until we reached our destination.

‘When are you heading back?’ I asked her. ‘Hope you’re not getting the Eurostar early tomorrow. You’ll have the hangover from hell.’

‘Never get hangovers,’ Zara insisted, her head flopping against the seat back. ‘Too much practice. Patch says I’ve got a liver of steel.’

I laughed. ‘Your liver and his abs. You’re quite the pair.’

Zara laughed, hiccupped, then started to cry again.

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry.’ I knew from experience that anything could have set her off at that point, but I still felt awful. ‘What did I say?’

‘I don’t deserve him,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have… I should never…’

‘Sssh.’ I stroked her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s okay.’

She lifted her face and looked at me, her eyes bright with tears but her mascara still, impossibly, in place. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. If you haven’t been through what I’ve been through, you can’t understand how it feels not to be able to trust anyone.’

I’d seen this side of Zara before, when she’d had too much to drink – a dark, paranoid, melodramatic side. I remembered her telling me about her childhood in the care system, and there’d been something else, too, once – about a boyfriend who’d sexually assaulted her. I’d been drunk too, when she’d whispered the story to me in the pub toilet with a broken lock, and we’d had to stand guard while the other one had a wee, so my memory of it the next morning had been so hazy I’d wondered if she’d actually said it or it had only been a dream.

‘You can trust me,’ I soothed. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘Can I, Naomi? Can I really?’ The question didn’t sound hopeful or needy – it sounded deeply cynical – almost angry.

‘The Regency,’ the cab driver announced, swinging over to the kerb and then muttering under his breath, ‘And not a moment too soon.’

Hastily, I thrust a ten-pound note and two one-pound coins through the slot, thanked him and opened the door. There was no question of leaving Zara to make her way in alone. Possibly if it had been the sort of hotel I’d imagined, with a smiling, uniformed porter waiting outside a brightly lit lobby where tourists were nursing post-theatre drinks, I would have – but not here.

The place was on a side street. From the outside it looked like just another of the terraced Georgian houses that surrounded it, mostly converted to offices, their stucco fronts pristine and their windows dark and shuttered. But I could see lights on in several upstairs rooms here, dim as if cast by single filament bulbs or flickering televisions, and the lights revealed ragged, grubby lace curtains half shrouding the windows. On a faded board in a downstairs window, I could see the words ‘Bed and breakfast’ with two red stars below them.

I wonder how long that’s been there, my logical brain registered cynically. When was the last time the AA inspected this place – 1998?

I hurried round the back of the cab and opened Zara’s door. She was slumped down in the seat, her chin on her chest.

I gave her shoulder a gentle shake. ‘Up you get, we’re here. Do you have your keys?’

‘Home sweet home,’ she said, swinging her legs out of the cab and clutching my arm for support as she stood up. ‘The good old Regency.’

Old, maybe, I thought.

As if she’d recovered the homing instinct of the drunk person, Zara found her keys quite easily, and I followed her up the three steps to the front door. The mosaic tiles in front of it were chipped and dirty. Zara fitted a key into the lock and turned it, and as the door swung open a dim light clicked automatically on.

Inside, the air was cold and sour smelling – a hint of industrial cleaning products not quite masking whatever grime was lurking. The hall light switched off and another above us came on, revealing a carpet that had once been dark green but had worn away to reveal its brownish-grey underlay in the centre of every step.

It wasn’t just the shabbiness of the place that unsettled me; I’d lived in more than my share of sketchy student houses and my current flatshare certainly wouldn’t be appearing as the ‘after’ picture in a bleach commercial any time soon. There was something else – an air of seediness, almost of despair, that seemed to seep from the walls as clearly as the unpleasant smell.

Zara didn’t seem to notice. Purposeful now, she climbed the stairs swiftly, past the first floor and on to the second. On cue, the stairwell light went out and a fluorescent strip illuminated the corridor.

Dimly, I could hear a woman’s voice moaning wordlessly.

Zara stopped three doors along, raised her key and fitted it into the lock at her second attempt.

Then she turned to me, smiling. ‘I’m all good now. Thanks, Naomi.’

I looked at her, appalled. Before, all my energy had been focused on getting her back to base – but now I’d seen what base was, the idea of leaving her here was unthinkable. As she turned the key and edged the door ajar, I could see it was barely thicker than plywood.

‘You can’t stay here on your own.’ I took a step towards her. Through the crack in the doorway, I could smell damp, overlaid with a blast of her perfume. ‘It doesn’t feel safe.’

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