About the Author

Róisín Lanigan is a writer and editor based in London and Belfast. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian and The Fence, amongst other publications. She was longlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Prize in 2019, and won the Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award in 2020. I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There is her first novel.

Róisín Lanigan

I WANT TO GO HOME BUT I’M ALREADY THERE

January

The trains were always cancelled on Sundays, which was, Áine thought, objectively the worst day to carry out planned engineering works. So they had to get the bus.

‘It’s definitely not the worst day,’ Elliott said, breathing condensation on the bus window and clearing little circles in the foggy glass with his gloved hand. ‘They can’t do it when people are at work.’

‘Some people work on Sundays,’ she pointed out, and he rolled his eyes but smiled so she knew he wasn’t really upset with her.

It was the sort of frigid January morning that seemed designed to engineer a level of seasonal affective disorder which UV lighting and mindfulness and lamps made of pink salt couldn’t fix. Elliott was Áine’s boyfriend. The bus was taking them to view a flat where they might live together. The first flat, in fact, where they might live together. Well, there had been a simulacrum of living together before. Shared houses and clumsy mornings with flatmates, all of them crammed together in the kitchen, crumbs sticking to their bare feet, the awkwardness of offering to make a third portion of pancakes or French toast and the silliness of this sad attempt at romance revealed by the offer itself. No thanks. Hi, nice to meet you. I’m just heading out to work anyway. Do you want to – no, you go ahead, I’ll just shower at home. Are you sure? Yeah, course. I’ll maybe see you again. Constantly in a state of vigilance and overpoliteness, negotiating nights in with stolen Netflix passwords which didn’t violate the shared living-room politics. Playing house in preparation for living house.

At the start of November, the annual unseasonable beginning to Christmas party season, Áine’s flatmate had announced that the sale had finally come through on the houseboat she had put an offer on with her own boyfriend, an American man named Alex she’d met on Tinder (bio: socially liberal, fiscally conservative; job: sustainable vegan meal kit start-up), who did coke off their shared IKEA plates with annoying frequency and spent an alarming amount of time on hunting trips to counties with names that, to Áine’s knowledge, could well have been made up (the meal kits were vegan, but Alex, he took great pains to point out, was plant-based, so the hunting trips were fair game, no pun intended).

‘I didn’t know you were buying a boat,’ Áine said when she came home from her work Christmas party that evening to find them both in mid champagne celebration.

‘Yes you did,’ Laura said. Laura is her flatmate’s name. Was her flatmate’s name. ‘I kept saying to you it was the only way to get on the property ladder these days.’

‘It really is,’ echoed Alex.

‘Yes, but –’ Áine faltered. ‘But I didn’t know you meant right now. You wanted to buy somewhere right now?’

‘Well, I kept saying to you … the stamp duty holiday, remember I kept saying to you about that?’

‘Yes, but –’

‘You have tinsel in your hair, you know,’ said Alex.

‘Thank you, Alex.’ With gritted teeth, Áine detangled the tinsel and stared at Laura. Laura cocked her head to the side like a confused retriever. She was still grinning, still red-faced and gleeful. She looked, Áine thought, like Christmas Day. The promise of her future, of their shared future together, made her glow positively golden. Áine swallowed. Some people walked through life golden. Laura was one of these people. As was Alex. It’s what made them work so well together. Their golden auras gravitated towards each other. They aligned like fridge magnets, securing a shared, glowing life. Sometimes it made Áine jealous, but it wasn’t really their fault. That’s just how some people were: irritatingly sun-kissed. A voice in her head cut through the selfish panic flooding her booze-slowed body and told her that if she ruined this moment, neither of them would understand. They’d stay golden, hurt but golden, and they’d continue their sun-kissed lives thinking she was bitter and hateful and cold and dark. Which, of course, was correct. Áine swallowed and softened her voice and accepted the warm foamy champagne Laura’s now live-in boyfriend had handed her. Try again. ‘Thank you, Alex.’

Laura smiled encouragingly, clinking their glasses together.

Ever since university, Laura and Áine had had a tradition called ‘Sad Wednesdays’, where they’d pause mid-week if they were stressed or miserable and bring all their bedding down in front of the sofa. They’d watch the worst that their YouTube algorithms could offer – woman reviewing soap, eight hours of elderly Japanese craftsmen making shoes – smoking inside and drinking canned gin and tonics. Afterwards, the flat would reek of tobacco but they would feel, despite the hangover, cleansed, light, free of misery. Laura thought it was a good idea to compartmentalize sadness like that, so you could get on with the rest of your week without the heaviness leaking into all the other days. Now, Áine worried about the myriad of emotions bleeding out across her weeks and months without Laura to contain them. Previously, she’d always had Laura there to check whether she was overthinking something, whether she was correct or in the wrong. She could test out all her spirals on the person who knew her best and had seen them already. Sometimes she didn’t even have to ask. She’d have a week where she didn’t shower for a few days, where she stayed up all night watching reruns of Family Guy on her laptop in the living room, surviving solely on pick ’n’ mix, and then sleeping seventeen hours a day to make up for it, and Laura would notice and ask if everything was okay. Sometimes Áine didn’t even realize things weren’t okay until Laura asked. She missed her friend but her friend was standing there. It was complicated and it wasn’t.

‘And now you get to live with Elliott!’ Laura was saying. ‘It’s going to be so exciting.’

‘So exciting,’ agreed Áine. She finished the fizz and put the tinsel in their recycling bin and thought about how long it would take before it disintegrated into the earth. A long time. Maybe never, actually.

It was exciting to move in together. Laura was always right about these kinds of things (things that implied happiness, positivity, personal growth). They constituted many of her specialist subjects, along with the best small plates restaurants in a five-mile radius and the exact length of time to leave between messages to lovers, colleagues, distant relatives and friends in order to appear the perfect amount of ‘breezy’. Áine was not breezy. Elliott, however, had an air of genuine breeziness that she enjoyed. Together they achieved perfect temperance, she liked to think. And she liked the way he texted her good morning and how they felt the same way about several important things – the necessity of having creative outlets, the unfairness of the British class system, the fact that wrestling was a sport – and that they could argue about things they felt differently about – art-house movies being pretentious, rom-coms being art-house, ready salted being the best crisp flavour, whether it was okay to listen to earlier Smiths songs even though present-day Morrissey was a racist – without heat. They were arguments where the stakes were so low nothing was really at risk. They weren’t real. They were safe. And she didn’t like that he lived a thirty-minute train ride away and sometimes more if there were leaves or a dead body on the line, and she didn’t like his two flatmates, anonymous-ish recruitment consultants he’d linked up with via a Facebook ad when he needed somewhere to live. They’d had lots of experimental and kind of bad sex when they first met with mixed results and now they had sex less regularly but with more success because they both knew what the other person liked. They were in love, she supposed. This was what love felt like. Maybe. And people in love were supposed to live together. People in love were meant to keep moving towards some sort of tangible end goal or they’d fall apart. Sharks, Elliott once told her, had to keep swimming or they would die. Cool, Áine had said, although it was a fact she’d already read on the internet.

The bus deposited them right at the end of the street where the potential new flat lived. ‘That’s handy,’ Elliott said. The estate agent was early and standing outside the flat waiting for them, bouncing from one foot to the other and staring up into an open window on the second floor with an unreadable expression. Suddenly he saw them, arranged his face into a grin and waved. This, they both agreed, was a good sign.

‘Hello!’ the estate agent barked as they came up the street towards him – ‘You got here okay, then!’ – moving towards the front door without waiting for a reply – ‘What with the trains’ – the front door swinging open with a surprisingly loud, comical creak. ‘We’ll fix that, obviously,’ the estate agent, who didn’t introduce himself, but who signed off emails as ‘Jack S’, said. The fact that he didn’t introduce himself and the creaking of the door, neither of these things were necessarily red flags. It took a lot to constitute a red flag in this process. Estate agents were invariably juvenile cokeheads with acne and hangovers and polyester suits (Jack S, judging from the back of his red neck as he’d fidgeted with the ancient Yale lock on the front door, and the great sniffs that punctuated his outlining of the property’s features, and his shiny elbows, was not an exception to this rule), and they rarely cared whether you liked what they showed you or not. If not, someone else would take it. Áine once viewed a flat on the twelfth floor of a tower block with an estate agent who refused to take the lift and refused to say why. To get into the building, he’d been forced to lift a dirty mattress away from the front door. She’d helped him do it too, the pair of them straining in the freezing cold, the ammonia scent of the mattress making them gag. She’d received an email an hour later, on that particular viewing, telling her the room had gone to someone else. So, the creaking door wasn’t so bad.

Nor was the entrance to the flat itself, all things considered. After the door to the building slammed shut behind them, the paint flaking off on to a battered ‘Welcome’ mat, the three of them found themselves in a corridor. A threadbare beige carpet snaked down towards two doors, side by side and covered in peeling white paint. The locks were flimsy and rusting. ‘This one’s yours,’ said Jack S, striding forward and unlocking the door on the right, bounding inside. ‘Well,’ his voice echoed as he disappeared, ‘could be yours!’

Áine lingered in the corridor, staring at the door on the left. It had been one of her pretend rules, when she and Elliott began talking about living together, about being proper grown-ups, about never having to eat dinner alone in a bedroom ever again. ‘I want my own front door,’ she’d said, before anything else. ‘I want to feel safe.’

‘Okay,’ Elliott had said as they lay in bed together, scrolling through property apps meant to look and feel like dating apps. ‘I’ll add the filter on.’ Clearly this one had slipped through the filter.

‘Come on,’ Elliott said now. He was on the threshold of the door on the right, his hand reaching back to her. ‘We’ll just have a look. We don’t have to decide anything now.’ The corridor was short and yet it felt stretched out. It looked cavernous. It stank of stale cigarettes and bleach and something else, something sour and vague she couldn’t put her finger on. The chill from the grey January afternoon they’d just escaped seeped under the peeling front door, raising the hair on her arms. ‘It’s just a door, Ain.’

He was right, of course. Elliott was usually right about these kinds of things (things that implied sensibility and health and well-being and measured responses to stimuli). And despite the strangeness of the corridor, the layout of the rest of the flat was normal. Well, it was at least the weird kind of normal you grew to expect in this process, its oddities unspectacular by comparison to the horror shows they’d seen already. The flimsy second front door opened into a curious triangular entrance hall, three doors splitting off into a living room, a bedroom behind that, and right at the very back of the house, a kitchen leading off into its own garden, which the bedroom window faced out on to. The living room was bright and sunny even in the depressing weather and empty except for a red velvet sofa filled with holes. The bay window looked out on to the street, where just now someone was parking a Tesla. Elliott lingered, transfixed for a moment, watching the owner disappear into a house on the other side, presumably with its own front door, painted in a glossy pale pink.

‘Single-glazed,’ Jack S shouted at the back of Elliott’s head, taking this lingering as evidence of an eye for structural detail. ‘But you can feel how warm it is.’

You could feel how warm it was, strangely, after the stale coldness of the hall outside. Jack S moved from room to room, turning on lights and kicking open doors and pulling back curtains, and with every inch he moved, the flat seemed to open itself up to them. The bedroom carpet was surprisingly lush and new. (‘The landlord just replaced it,’ according to Jack S, ‘something the tenants did to the last one.’) It must have been bad, whatever they did, to convince the landlord to do that, Áine thought. Landlords were usually impossible to convince to replace anything broken or damaged. In the first flat Áine and Laura had lived in together, their biannual legally mandated inspection uncovered that the ancient boiler in Áine’s bedroom had been leaking carbon monoxide for weeks. They returned home to find a red sticker on the front of the noisy machine, reading DO NOT USE. When they sent several panicked emails about it, their landlord offered them two weeks off their rent that month, via the property company, for the trouble of potential poisoning. They accepted it, of course.

In this case, though, Jack S didn’t provide any further details on the carpet or previous tenants or the landlord himself. Much like the entrance, this in itself was not a red flag. Landlords were, after all, shadowy and anonymous figures, who nonetheless were often promised to be personable and amenable, and invariably proved to be amoral and inaccessible. This they accepted, even as Jack S promised them that this particular landlord was ‘one of the good ones’.

‘Good news for us,’ murmured Elliott, and Áine jumped. She was standing in the middle of the bedroom that could be theirs and hadn’t realized he was so close behind her until she felt his wet breath on the back of her neck. When she turned, Elliott was at the door again, investigating the kitchen. Áine followed him back there, walking past a small door that led into a downstairs basement which smelled of damp and was lit only by Jack S’s and Elliott’s iPhones. ‘Cool,’ she could hear one of them saying, and something about storage space, their voices echoing in the darkness. She didn’t want to go down there. It smelled like something had crawled down the rickety stairs and died. The damp, even from the other side of the room, caught on the back of her throat.

Instead she traversed the kitchen, climbing over a haphazard array of wires littering the parquet linoleum floors (the previous tenants had arranged the room in a truly deranged set-up whereby the grey, coffin-like refrigerator was standing in the centre of the room, rather than against a wall, like a normal fridge might be), and she opened the door at the back. She discovered an old-fashioned bathroom off the kitchen and, directly opposite, a glass door that led out into the garden. Much like the mysterious new carpet in the bedroom, new decking led out into a jungle-like patch of private horticulture. Áine closed the door behind her and stood on the decking, surrounded by mulch and weeds and an abandoned disposable BBQ. Someone had tried to grow plants out here, or vegetables or fruit or something, anything, judging by the lines and lines of little white cardboard labels marking each attempt in each patch of dirt in the garden. Nothing, it appeared, had taken. The only things sprouting from the mulch were weeds and milky vines, straining up towards the idea of sunshine that had not yet come. Áine wasn’t a big gardener. She wouldn’t be continuing the previous tenants’ attempts at creating self-sufficiency out here, at filling the space with beauty. She toed the damp markers in the mud that had been left by the strangers here before them, optimistically labelled ‘carrots’ or ‘tomatoes’ with smiley faces. The place was swamp-like, overgrown with vegetation that made it difficult to see how far back the garden even extended. Nothing beautiful seemed able to grow here. But it was rare to find a garden at all, Áine reminded herself, chastising her internal pessimism.

The fences were warped and ruined by rain and ivy and Japanese knotweed, which sprouted out of every crack in the planks and brushed against her ankles, touching her bare skin with the breeze. It was not beautiful, but it felt like the best part of the flat. She could imagine herself out here, in the quiet and the solitude and the ugliness of the garden, listening to planes flying low overhead and the conversations of her neighbours. There was a peacefulness about it which Áine attributed only partly to the condition of never having a garden before. Generally, in a city like this, it wasn’t a problem – there was always a public park in which to get drunk in the sun. Still, there was something exotic in owning your own part of the outside world. She remembered the sweltering summers in her flat with Laura, how they’d hang out of the kitchen window smoking and watching the people in the garden-possessing flat below them drinking in the sunshine, and felt momentarily bereft.

Áine pushed further into the knotweed jungle and stood on her tiptoes to look over the fence and into the next-door neighbours’ property. Glancing back above the mess of greenery, she could see the windows of the flat above. The lights were off and the curtains, the same dark red velvet material of their abandoned sofa, were shut. She thought she saw one twitch, but when she looked again there was nobody there. The garden door swung open with the same creak as the front one. It felt less comical to her now. She hadn’t noticed that before. Elliott beamed at her from the patch of decking. ‘Your dream!’ he said to the jungle, and to her standing in the middle of it, in the mud and the weeds.

‘I think we should take it.’

They were in the pub, which was – like the bus stop – right next to the street where the flat lived, and this, Elliot said, was another good sign.

‘I dunno,’ said Áine. ‘There’s pubs everywhere here.’

‘This is a nice one, though.’

‘They’re all pretty nice.’

One of the girls who worked there brought them their drinks (sour craft IPA, G&T in an elaborate goblet with a wedge of grapefruit) and they sloshed when she put them on the table. It felt weird to have table service in a pub but the pubs here were what Laura would call ‘boujie’. The entire neighbourhood was boujie. Áine had been surprised, when Elliott sent her the listing on WhatsApp, that they could even afford a flat here. The listing was bizarrely well advertised for a flat that had been on the site for, by the time of WhatsApping, two full weeks. Usually when this happened it meant there were no photos or the lease was something insane, like four months or eight years. But no, there it was, a year with a possibility to extend, a sunny exterior with a cherry tree just obscuring the upstairs windows, photos of all the rooms, blank and well-lit and anonymous. Áine sent three question marks and three exclamation marks to communicate her disbelief and excitement and Elliott wrote back Yeah I know!!! but it’s not connected by any tube lines, u have to get the train so that’s why it’s cheaper imo, people are too lazy. Or something.

The neighbourhood was much prettier and more affluent than anywhere either of them had lived before. Next door to the pub there was a haberdasher’s called Maria’s Materials! and across from that an organic food shop that their estate agent told them opened, inexplicably, 24/7.

Áine had to agree with Elliott. It was a good pub. It was a good area. Still, though, something about it made her feel uneasy. Maybe it was the fact it was, as they had discussed at length, unconnected by a tube line that made it feel like an unknown quantity, a part of the city hidden to novices and uncovered by them, intrepid explorers in a new land, or colonizers in an old land imagining it to be new all the same. But the place felt unreal somehow. The neighbourhoods Áine had lived in before throbbed incessantly all around her and under her feet, even when she was in bed with a cup of tea and the doors shut and locked. This one was alive all right, but it didn’t throb. It breathed. She felt it exhaling warm and damp on the back of her neck from the moment she got off the bus. She smelled the stale mouth air as they walked around the empty rooms of the flat they might live in together. In place of a heartbeat there was the sound of prams rolling through puddles up and down the busy high street, babies in neutral babygros that made them look like tiny Copenhagen-based fashion influencers, or bundled up in expensive goose-down puffa jackets they’d grow out of in twelve weeks’ time, their chapped, cold red faces crying out of the expensive prams while little crusty-eyed dogs barked amiably at each other under the tables in matching red waterproof fleeces, the brand that was always sold out on Instagram.

The flat made Áine uneasy too. The fact that it was empty, the lack of the awkward dance where the current tenants had to leave or stand motionless in the doorway while you looked in judgement at their attempts to make Kallax units and Argos wardrobes into something resembling a home. Houses were never left empty in this city. So far they had viewed nine flats, all on cold grey afternoons like this one, or on even more depressing pitch-black evenings having raced from work to get there, only to find them too awful to consider or gone from the market so swiftly that they hadn’t even time to comprehend the awfulness. A week before Christmas they’d put in an offer on a fifth-floor flat in a new build over a train station. Even as far up as they were, the entire place rattled when the trains went through underneath, and you could smell the food that was cooking next door through the paper-thin, brand-new walls. The estate agent said sorry, someone else had put in an offer £150 a month over the asking price. Could they match it? They could not. Afterwards they’d got drunk on one of the recruitment consultant’s borrowed sofas and Áine tried not to cry into her warm flat seltzer. ‘We’ll get somewhere, don’t worry,’ Elliott had said.

And he’d been right, hadn’t he? Here was this inexplicably empty flat, sitting on the website for weeks now just waiting for them. It ticked a lot of their hypothetical boxes: it was on the ground floor, there was a little garden at the back, just off the kitchen. It was overgrown for now, but it could be an opportunity, Áine told herself. She could be the kind of person who was into gardening. She could adopt that as a new, wholesome hobby. Why not? Jack S had painted dreamy, enthusiastic but vague images of summer BBQs and lunchtime picnics, reading in the private sunshine. It missed some of the things Áine would have liked – an upstairs to the downstairs, so it felt like a real home, and – crucially – its own front door. They would have to share with one other property, the flat upstairs. ‘The landlord is lovely,’ the estate agent said several times. ‘They’ve owned this for years,’ he said. The neighbours were friendly and gave no trouble. They could help out with things. Áine didn’t know whether he meant the flat upstairs or the street in general, and didn’t get a chance to ask before the viewing was over, what felt like five minutes after it began.

‘At least it’s only one other flat,’ Elliott had said when Áine lingered in the shared hallway, staring at the stained, cracked white door that led upstairs to the neighbours. ‘It’s not as if we’re in a tower block or something awful.’ Áine had looked at him significantly. She felt embarrassed that he would say something like that in front of a stranger. Sometimes Elliott came across the wrong way, she thought. Generously. He said things that felt or sounded mean, but he himself wasn’t mean. She was the mean one, of the two of them. He didn’t really mean tower blocks were awful. We’re not those kinds of people, she wanted to say to the estate agent. But Jack S just nodded at Elliott as though this was an uncontroversial statement of fact. ‘Exactly,’ he’d said.

But something still felt wrong about it. Wrongness persisted despite the ticked boxes and the beautiful bay window (‘Single-glazed, but you can’t have it all,’ Elliott said, ‘and we’re used to damp at this point, surely’). It felt somehow wrong, even, that the place had been empty at the right time, thereby solving the ticking time bomb problem that was finding a place before both of their leases ended. The emptiness, the perfectness of the circumstances. Even the fact that they were able to have a debrief like this, to decide on a course of action afterwards at the pub rather than there on the spot about whether they wanted it. Both of them were used to meeting estate agents who looked about twelve and transferring to these pre-teens hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds minutes later to secure somewhere to live before the next viewers arrived.

When Áine first came to the city, her mother had texted to remind her to actually view her first prospective flat (in a tower block, washing machine never worked, bed bugs from the previous tenant, Elliott would have hated it) so she could get a proper idea of what it was like. Your daddy and I viewed this house three times, she wrote. The house she and Daddy had settled on was the only one they could afford, a two-up two-down which was so damp that Áine had severe asthma until she moved out at eighteen. She didn’t say that, though. I don’t think it works like that here, mammy, she replied instead. In fact, the situation was getting even worse. Now the properties went even without the viewing and the physical passing of thousands of pounds. You could click online and take them from pictures and videos, a Tinderification of housing by necessity.

The previous tenants in the flat they had just viewed had left in a hurry, the estate agent said. It was technically unfurnished but they were more than welcome to take the furniture, take the wardrobe, take the battered sofa, if it would help. Yes, they said, it would help. But Áine wanted to know why they had done that. People are strange, Elliott had shrugged. Something didn’t feel right about it. But there were twelve days left until the new tenants moved into the flat she shared with Laura. The recruitment consultants had already collectively vetoed a new lease with Áine added to it, and anyway, the rent there was going up by £500 a month. She wouldn’t be able to afford it.

‘Two secs. I’ll pay for these,’ she told Elliott, nodding to the drinks. But instead of heading for the bar she slipped out of the pub’s side door, finding herself on the busy, floral-scented high street of what could be their new neighbourhood.

Despite the frigid weather and the demonstrable Sunday-ness of the afternoon, the independent butcher’s and 24/7 organic food shop and Montessori nursery were all heaving with people. She had to huddle into a corner to light her cigarette, watching the flat across the street as she puffed. Technically, she was supposed to not be smoking. It was her New Year’s Resolution. She’d made a fuss over asking Elliott not to smoke in front of her any more and everything. She’d bought patches and a white plastic tube you were meant to suck on in place of cigarettes. It was a poor imitation, though, and she missed smoking already. It was something to do with her hands and, embarrassingly, contributed a great deal to her sense of self.

It was a plus that the flat was so close to the pub, Áine told herself. A proper local. You could see it right from the road. As she watched, ruminating, the front door that could soon be her front door suddenly swung open. Áine watched the wood and stained glass, painted in an odd sludgy hue of flaky green-black, fly open and she fought the pointless urge to duck out of view. She was, after all, just a stranger smoking outside the pub. It wasn’t even her flat. Not yet. What emerged – who emerged – must have been the upstairs neighbour. She didn’t know why she had assumed there was a woman living upstairs, or maybe a young couple like themselves, perhaps only through force of habit. But the person who rounded on to the pavement now, the door slowly swinging shut behind him, was an older man. His dark hair was greying and his face was, even from her vantage point across the road, etched with age and curled into a scowl befitting of the time of year and week and weather. He had bundled himself up with a grey wool scarf and, over that, a dark leather coat which came right to his ankles. Odd, thought Áine. Odd choice. It felt more like an ironic dad trainers and unseasonable linen artist jacket kind of place. Perhaps that was the neighbour’s dad, she thought. Or maybe that was ageist. Perhaps it was the neighbour’s boyfriend instead. After all, older people could live here, did live here. She was one of them too, almost, wasn’t that true? Moving in with a boyfriend. Quitting smoking. Caring about pension plans and which retinol was the best retinol. The thought gave her a small shiver. It could also have been the way the man, a perfect stranger, was now looking directly at her as he crossed the street parallel. Áine felt herself redden and then pale. The man’s eyes were set very deeply into his face. She was unable to look away until she realized the cigarette had turned to ash in her hands, burning her fingers. When she looked up again after dropping it, swearing, stubbing it on the pavement, the man had disappeared. She looked for him in the crowds of blond, sunny toddlers and mothers in Ace & Tate sunglasses, but he had vanished.

When she returned, knees wobbling slightly in a way that had nothing to do with the single watery gin and tonic, Elliott was looking at her expectantly, gripping the dregs of his cloudy pint. He said nothing about the smell of smoke quite obviously clinging to her hair and jumper. He looked so cautiously optimistic, so earnestly buzzing with hope, Áine felt a sudden surge of affection for him. She pushed the man in the crowd out of her mind together with the single-glazing and the overgrown garden and the flaky paint and the holes in the sofa. She swallowed. She chewed on the gin-soaked remnants of grapefruit, remembering too late she wasn’t supposed to eat grapefruit. A smile broke out. There was pulp in her teeth. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’

After they’d decided, things moved quickly. As soon as they’d emailed, the estate agent had replied, instantly asking for hundreds of pounds as a ‘holding deposit’ which was the custom. Fine. Áine transferred half of what was required into Elliott’s bank account. It was too ridiculous to even consider a joint account, and her credit was laughably bad, so they had decided he should deal with the finances. In the end, though, it didn’t matter about her bad credit or about any other potential tenants edging them out. It was the most seamless lease-signing either of them had ever experienced. They weren’t required to offer over asking. They didn’t even have to print anything. The estate agent sent them electronic contracts, planning out the next twelve months, locking them together in writing, which they just had to click to sign. Elliott pored over them, trying to make sure they weren’t being scammed, whereas Áine signed her electronic signature immediately. Even if they were being scammed, there was nothing else to do about it now. They’d sent the money to their landlord – identified only as THE LANDLORD on their thankfully scam-free contract – and gone on an incredibly stressful afternoon trip to an indiscriminate grey retail park together and packed up their things. It was too late to go back now.

After a dizzying trip around IKEA, dazed and bored and famished, they wandered through the retail park and sat side by side in the car they’d rented off an app, eating chips from McDonald’s that Elliott had bought just because Áine told him she’d never done a proper drive-thru before. Growing up, there’d been three McDonald’s within a fifteen-minute walk of the house, but her mother was against the idea of going there except for special occasions, more for financial reasons than a concern for her child’s nascent poor health. Elliott could have been mean about this admission but he wasn’t. He never made fun of her when she told him things she’d never done. Like eating steak tartare or putting a shot of McCafé espresso in a vanilla milkshake and making your own affogato. Or skiing. Instead, he just said, ‘Well, we can do it now.’ He smiled at her and dipped a soggy chip into one of their shakes. She was filled with a wave of affection so overwhelming she thought she might cry into the brown paper bag of ketchup sachets and napkins on her lap.

‘Bloody hell,’ Elliott said, putting a hand on the back of her neck. ‘Next time I’ll get you nuggets. There’s no need to be dramatic.’ Áine laughed and sniffed and blew her nose into one of the napkins and told him to fuck off without meaning it. She did not consider herself an emotional person. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that she didn’t consider herself an emotionally incontinent person. She wasn’t prone to big displays of feeling or affection. She never collapsed into sobs around him or anything. Or around anyone, really. And Elliott took this as an unspoken understanding to not make a big deal out of it when she did threaten rare tearfulness, which she appreciated greatly. She would not have been able to handle it if he was one of those people who treated someone with kid gloves when they were upset, or worse, one of those people who thought it was weird that she wasn’t more openly emotional. Instead, he just shrugged and moved on without delving into the reasons why she was quieter than usual, or why she drifted off into her own world sometimes and refused to come back for hours. The idea of talking about feelings with someone made her come out in hives.

After they finished their McDonald’s they wandered across the retail park into one of those bed superstores, where Elliott ushered them over to an assistant manager, a dour-looking woman in her mid-fifties with a severe mousy brown bob.

‘We’d like to buy a mattress, me and my wife,’ he said.

Áine coughed to cover a snort of laughter, and not just because the thought of buying a brand-new mattress was a ridiculous expense. Nobody she knew in the city had ever bought a brand-new mattress when they moved into a new flat. It was decadent and absurd. Behind her back, she felt Elliott’s oily fingers slipping a cheap Claddagh gold ring she wore on her middle finger on to her ring finger. When the woman sternly told them they’d have to undergo a whole ‘sleep profile’ to achieve this task, Elliott nodded sharply and followed her, winking at Áine behind the assistant’s back. For the next forty-five minutes they lay prostrate side by side or spooned each other ostentatiously on a variety of mattresses, each more ludicrously expensive than the last, while Elliott lied dexterously to the woman with the bad haircut. When she told them it mattered how they slept, he told her they both slept cuddled up next to each other, like newborn puppies do to stay warm. He nuzzled Áine’s hair. She was quite red, not through embarrassment, more through the effort of not laughing. She went along with the charade, biting her lip when Elliott jumped on a king-size memory foam, asking how much weight it would hold, while the sales assistant looked scandalized. But she wasn’t as good as Elliott was with these things. He could take a day that was ordinary and boring and expensive and even a little sad and make it ridiculous and funny and adventurous. He opened stuff up to her, the mundane, and made it interesting.

All of the mattresses the sales assistant showed them had women’s names. The Sally and the Morgana and the Esther. ‘She’s a tough one, but she’s better for your lumbar region,’ she told them with great seriousness about the last bed they saw.

‘We’ll think about it,’ said Elliott. ‘Thanks!’

He ushered Áine back out of the shop, his hands on the small of her back.

‘Come on, darling,’ he said.

Áine’s shoulders were shaking with concealed laughter; she could tell the woman could see from behind. They didn’t buy anything, obviously. All of the prices were more expensive than their monthly rent payments.

‘Why were they all named after middle-aged divorcees?’ he asked when they were back in the car, which still smelled vaguely of oil and potatoes. ‘Did she think we were going to fuck the beds themselves?’ And Áine laughed so hard she couldn’t breathe until they got past the next roundabout.

The night before the move, Áine and Laura began to pack up the flat in earnest. They had been doing it at a leisurely pace for a few weeks, both of them reluctant to fully commit to the plan. While they were boxing up the mugs in the kitchen (which were mostly not hers), Áine’s parents FaceTimed, and both she and Laura perched on the kitchen counter, holding the warm phone on their knees in landscape and smiling down at them. Her parents only ever bothered to FaceTime rather than simply call when they knew the girls were at home together. That’s what they called them: the girls. Áine had heard her mother saying it to a friend in the supermarket once when she was back in Ireland, home for the weekend, helping to get the messages in: ‘The girls over there in London.’ She said it in a very nasal, proud way, as though Laura was her sister and not her flatmate. Áine had smiled at her mother’s friend with her lips pressed tightly together, dragging a fingernail along the rust on the Sainsbury’s trolley she was pushing.

‘How’s everything going, girls?’ her mother was asking now. ‘How’s the boat, Laura? Oh, how exciting!’

Áine liked these moments, all of them conspiratorially gathered around the screen, like they really were one family. But she sometimes wondered if her parents wouldn’t prefer if Laura was their actual daughter, rather than her. Even though this would not be possible, because Laura had a different accent and a totally different life that she’d experienced in a different place. Her parents thought that Laura was a good influence on her, Áine could tell. They spoke to her with an excitement and deference that bordered on the religious. Sometimes she expected them to bow their heads on their pixelated screen, the screen that somehow they only managed to operate when they were speaking to both girls together, never Áine alone (her mother would just phone instead, saying it was ‘easier to set up’), as though they were talking to an actual deity or a member of the Royal Family.

Áine found her parents’ reverence for both these institutions – monarchy and Catholicism – to be nonsensical, and she often cajoled Laura to agree with her, although Laura only ever said it was mean and joyless to point that out. Her parents had a postcard of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle taped to the fridge at home, and one Christmas she spent a full day complaining about it to Laura over WhatsApp. She sent a picture with an emoji of a person being sick. Like, it’s right next to the sacred heart of jesus magnet she wrote, and then loads of exclamation marks. Laura wrote lol but Áine could tell she didn’t think it was that funny; Aw, she followed up, I think it’s sweet.

‘Why don’t you have a picture of Elliott and me on the fridge?’ Áine had asked her mother, deleting the picture from her photos folder and shoving her phone in her back pocket.

‘Awk, Áine, for goodness’ sake,’ her mother had said, pushing past her to retrieve a carton of milk from the fridge. Áine watched Harry and Meghan’s faces swing back and forth in front of her. She heard her father laughing in the other room. ‘They’re only after getting married. I just saw it in the shop. It’s only a laugh.’

‘Do you know how much royal weddings cost the taxpayer? When half of the country is relying on food banks?’

‘Christ Almighty,’ said her father, and she’d heard the volume of the TV go up.

She and Laura spoke to her parents on the phone about Laura’s boat for forty-five minutes until the screen went black. ‘They never charge up the iPad properly,’ Áine said apologetically, hopping down off the counter. Laura shrugged and went back to stacking mugs into a cardboard box on the floor. She looked flushed and alive from the joy of talking about her future plans.

‘Your parents are so bloody lovely,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you always complain about them!’

Later, Áine sat cross-legged on the floor of her empty bedroom, the walls and drawers and sheets stripped, everything waiting in boxes to go tomorrow in the back of a rented-by-the-hour van that would take her to her new home.

‘Was it always this colour?’ Laura said, laughing. She was lying on the carpet, her head in Áine’s lap. Áine looked at the pockmarked walls, free of her carefully placed renter-friendly cheap prints, ticket stubs and artfully displayed jewellery. They were both surprised to find the paint was a pale pink.

‘Oh,’ Áine said. ‘I always thought it was white, actually.’

‘Me too.’

They sat with this realization for a moment. Áine absently plaited and unplaited a strand of Laura’s hair. At university they would lie side by side and she would plait their hair together, one strand of each. At first you couldn’t tell whose was whose because they were both dark and long and brown. Then Laura got a balayage in final year. They still did it sometimes, though.

Outside, they could hear the ecstatic screeching of the beginning of a night out for what felt like everyone but them. Tomorrow, Laura was moving too. Alex was coming to collect her very early in the morning. They’d shared a single lukewarm beer after cleaning out their fridge and defrosting the freezer, but it felt silly to toast the end of their flat properly, to get drunk, when they had to be sensible tomorrow, so early. It felt easier to do it all at once, quickly and painlessly. Otherwise it was too overwhelming, too big to consider. Tomorrow a cleaner would come as mandated by their property company and would charge them upwards of £300 to clean their four rooms, to scrub any part of either of them off the place, to suck up their dead skin cells and strip their split ends off the fabrics. It felt like the end of something, an era that neither of them had realized was an era until it finished. Thinking about it felt like looking at the sun.

‘I’m excited.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, yeah.’

‘Yeah. Me too, obviously.’

‘I love you, you know.’

‘Yes. I know. I love you too.’

February

The bedknobs were rusted and looked like they would hurt if you rested your palms on them. The pattern of the bare mattress matched the same deep red velvet that covered the threadbare sofa. The bed was in the middle of the room, not touching any of the walls, at the kind of angle which suggested it had been dropped in through the ceiling and had bounced a little on its rusty brass frame before settling. On instinct, Áine looked up to the ceiling and found it stained but intact, hole-less. She shivered. It was cold in here. She was sure that during the viewing it had been warm. She was holding a cardboard box marked JUMPERS TRAINERS HATS. It was digging into her fingers because she didn’t listen when Elliott said lift with your legs not your back.

‘Are you sure this was in the inventory?’ she said when Elliott came in behind her then, dropping another cardboard box, this one marked COATS, on the mattress with a dull thump.

‘What? The bed? Yeah, he said, didn’t he? You can have it if it helps. And we were like, yeah.’

On instinct, Áine got out her phone to check. She worried that Elliott would think she was stupid, or not taking the move seriously enough, to have missed something this big. This conversation could well have happened. But why didn’t Elliott mention it at the pub, when he was outlining all the reasons they should take the place? Laura told her that sometimes her eyes glazed over during conversations; her thoughts got too loud and she missed things. Áine looked at the bed in the middle of the room as though the size of it, its reality, would jog her memory. It did not. ‘That was just the wardrobe,’ she said. ‘And the sofa, right?’

She held her phone uselessly while Elliott panted under the weight of his computer, pushing it in the tight squeeze between their new front door and the living room. The viewing had been so short that Áine had not realized how awkward the flat’s layout truly was. It looked as though it was once half a house and had been hastily, clumsily, converted into something else. It looked like this because it clearly had been, of course. Elliott gestured for help and she dropped the phone down on the mattress. It squeaked.

‘Does it matter?’ he asked, stopping to wipe his brow. ‘It’s good either way. It’s one less thing to buy.’

‘Yeah, I just –’ She stopped when he looked up. ‘Yeah, it’s fine. It’s a good sign.’

This was the right thing to say. Elliott smiled and handed her a box of books and magazines, and her knees buckled. ‘I told you!’ he said.

Maybe he was right. The viewing had been so quick and maybe she just got confused. And even if that wasn’t true, he was still right, it was still handy. Áine had underestimated how much it cost to buy the detritus that made up an everyday life, the budget sets of cutlery and the colourful cereal bowls and the clothes hangers and the tea towels and the cheap rug as an afterthought because otherwise the room looked bare and empty and unlived-in. She had forgotten how expensive it was to get the app to get the car, to buy the boxes and pack up the things that had previously made up the detritus of her life, with a different person, a different life. It was sad to look at all her things in boxes and think That is my life, but it was also scary to look at her bank balance after it all and think This is my life, there is no option to do another life another time over. She hid her banking app in her phone and busied herself with the rest of it all, trying not to think about the days left in the month.

It was easy to be busy and not think about this, at least. On the day they moved in, the pair of them did several short trips in the app-rented van, all of their things in boxes between two addresses and now a third. Elliott drove. It frightened her to drive in the city, frightened her to be behind the wheel of a car in general, without having to listen to the small, erratic, occasional voice that whispered drive off the bridge plough into traffic merge into the eighteen-wheeler. Áine had looked it up on the internet and the internet said there was a name for this impulse and it was common. It was called the imp of the perverse. Before she knew the name of it she wouldn’t have told Elliott about it, in case it was something specific to her. She had pretended she couldn’t find her driving licence instead, a vague and obvious sort of lie that Elliott seemed to accept suspiciously fast. He told Áine he would drive. And he parked and carried boxes and retrieved boxes and parked again, building the Lego bricks of their new life.

Elliott was at his best when busy like this. It was the first thing Áine had noticed she liked about him. When they’d met – at work – he’d been purposeful and driven and impressive. It was her first real job after what felt like an endless era of temping and working in pubs, of being paid cash in hand, sleeping on her friends’ sofas, justifying herself and her lifestyle to herself and her parents. Finally, what felt like torturously late, she’d arrived at reality: the office lifestyle, the real job, a flatmate, an identity she could hold on to. Elliott already had one; he was a few years ahead of her in the office-job trajectory. She didn’t totally understand what he did then (and still occasionally now). Sometimes it felt like the professional world they occupied was filled up with pretend terms and pointless positions. How could anyone possibly define themselves as something as meaningless as a ‘creative’ and still be paid for it, relatively handsomely? But she knew he did whatever it was he did confidently, striding around the open-plan office while she hunched between two screens, speaking loudly on the phone to no one and everyone, smiling at her in the kitchen. She watched him and felt both envious and impressed by his presence, his life, his knowledge of the place and the job and himself. His confidence extended towards Áine; introducing himself and then introducing the city to her in a way nobody had bothered to before and that she hadn’t had the time or the inclination to do herself, recommending art galleries and cocktail bars and flower markets and parks so high up you could look at the whole place, the high-rises and the river and the wheel and the magic of it. It took her a while to realize he was not just recommending the city but also himself, that it was not just talking he was interested in but specifically talking to her. Laura knew first, of course, but Áine was slower to notice these kinds of things. ‘He likes you,’ Laura had said, and then, when he finally did ask her out, ‘You should go.’

And then their first date, Elliott opening himself and London up to her. He’d taken her to the Hampstead ponds and smiled, treading water, while she stood shivering on the deck, too scared to climb in. He had glinted in the sun, looking healthy and solid and warm. She watched him disappear and reappear between strokes, his shoulders freckled, his hair streaked with sun. The water was dark and unchlorinated, wild and unknowable. Áine thought about bacteria and how she looked in her swimsuit, pale and squinting at the sun, but Elliott said, ‘Jump!’ and so she did, plunging into the blackness, her nose filled with the watery smell of stale moss.

Then they were together, tentatively, properly together. That was the start of it, the dark water and the way she’d flailed until Elliott steadied her. Their legs tangled together between reeds and rubbish. There were a lot of activities – mini golf, cinema, jazz bar, ‘immersive’ art exhibition – and a lot of excitement, every new thing they learned about each other – what music they liked, what they thought about the government, how they felt about their mothers – charged with the possibility of sex and romance, and so even mundane snippets of their lives took on new significance. They found out about the more serious things too. They bonded over their families, in a horrible cocktail bar where people kept posing for Instagram by a big neon sign that read WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY. Áine remembered being surprised to learn that other people felt the way she did. She had thought everyone in the city had money, smiling mothers, fathers in suits. She felt drawn to Elliott then, like he might be the only person in the whole place who didn’t have this, who was treading water alone, like her.

Nonetheless, the pressure to be fun and likeable throughout all of this was immense. And it ramped up, gradually, suddenly. It was a year after the pleasant stasis of constant Áine+Elliott dating that Laura met Alex, and at one point their flat was basically empty from Thursday to Sunday, when they would both depart to be other people in other people’s houses. When they returned on Sunday evenings, full of mediocre roasts and the kind of excitement you only get with the early stages of a relationship – the constant urge to look over the phone, the excitement when they text, the frantic rereading of old messages if they don’t, the need to dissect every word they’ve said with glee and horror, to recount what they have in their room and whether they make their bed in the morning and compare yourselves to the old girlfriends you’ve found in their Instagram tagged photos and debate whether they are still maybe a little bit in love with them – they were both understandably fatigued.

Áine always felt that fatigue would hit her harder than Laura, her battery depleted after socializing and being beautiful and bright and happy on cue. They’d spend their Sunday evenings revelling in unperceived ugliness, in university pub crawl T-shirts and Christmas pyjamas, eating Pringles and crispy M&M’s, and scrolling mindlessly through videos of dermatologists lancing boils and popping strangers’ pimples. But on Monday morning Laura was rejuvenated, refreshed, off to work in an art gallery, where she mostly went on her phone or cheerfully upsold frames to strangers who were almost certainly deposed oligarchs, with a totally recharged social battery. It took Áine longer. Most Mondays she worked ‘remotely’ from the same sofa in the same T-shirt and Santa-hat bottoms, putting in the bare minimum effort, scheduling social posts and pretending to be ‘doing reports’ and ‘in meetings’ while watching The Real Housewives of Orange County and texting Elliott about people who she thought were being annoying on Twitter. By Wednesday she was usually fine and ready to do it all again.

Today was not Wednesday. Today was Sunday. And that was the last box. Elliott announced it loudly from the shared hall, shouting ‘Last box!’, holding it over his head like a trophy. He dropped it by the bedroom door, leaving the flat an awkward Total Wipeout ‘floor is lava’ course of the things they’d acquired and held on to over the last decade or so of their lives. Elliott’s semi-ironic stack of back issues from a Bart Simpson-themed magazine from the late 1990s, Áine’s matching semi-ironic array of snow globes from holidays they’d gone on together or apart, bringing back souvenirs to add to the collection. She’d been pulling some of the boxes open while he fussed with the car rental app, trying to work out how to return the moving van. One of these boxes contained, or should have contained, an ugly vase she’d made with Laura at one of those booze-and-pottery-themed evenings, from years ago, at uni. They’d made two of them together after a full bottle of gin. Hers was the moon and Laura’s was the sun. They’d tried to do shots out of Laura’s with the last of the gin on the way home and smashed it, and for some reason they’d both cried. Ever since, they’d treasured the moon vase. It sat in pride of place in whatever living room they were living in since that night, poorly made with the moon’s eyes pointing in two separate directions. Their talisman.

Have u seen moon???? Áine texted Laura, after pulling open the fifth box, looking for him. They’d flipped a coin in the end, while packing up, because nothing else seemed fair, and then when Áine won the coin toss even that hadn’t seemed fair, so they’d decided on joint custody for Moon. Áine would take him for six months while Laura sorted out the weirdness of living on a boat, and then she would take him for the next six. And they would go from there, co-parenting pottery because it belonged to both of them, it belonged as much to their friendship and their past as it did to one person, even though it was technically Áine who had made it, when Laura’s was lying in pieces in a grate outside their now-demolished students’ union.

No!? Laura replied instantly. Did u lose him??? I love moon!! pls no!!

Áine frowned at the phone. No, she hadn’t lost Moon. She just couldn’t find Moon. She wasn’t careless enough to actually lose him. She would never do that. It bothered her intensely, even amongst the chaos of the day, that Laura would think that. But there wasn’t time to dwell on it, or time to reply even. Elliott was shouting from the front door now, panicking because he’d messed up the times of the van rental, and he had to return it now or they’d face some sort of ridiculous surcharge for their hubris and stupidity.

‘I won’t be long,’ he yelled, grabbing the borrowed keys, sprinting out the door, leaving her amidst the mess of boxes.

The morning had been busy and exciting and full of life, but as soon as the door closed, the flat shut itself off from the loud, chaotic, life-filled world, with Áine inside it, and the place was oppressively silent. She had forgotten the weirdness of moving into an empty building and calling it home, how when the dust settled you were left there with none of your stuff out facing you to confirm your aesthetic choices and the fact that you were alive. The flat exhaled on her and in the quiet it smelled strange and unfamiliar; an atmosphere she didn’t have the context to define. She hadn’t yet got to know it, and wondered suddenly, against her will, if she would want to.

She shivered even though the exertion of the morning’s move had left her sweaty and out of breath. Alone in the flat now, the sweat cooled and felt slick and disgusting at the bottom of her back and pooling under her armpits. She decided to make herself useful while Elliott was returning the van. She would unpack some of the boxes, decide where their things would live. She would make it normal. But the boxes looked insurmountable and she felt scared to look at them. Here it was, all of her life, all of Elliott’s life, together and packed up. The air in the flat, while still unfamiliar, was tinged with sweetness, she realized, saccharine almost, as though someone had sprayed cheap body spray everywhere just minutes before their arrival, or layered air freshener over stale vomit. But nobody had been here before they arrived. There was dust on every surface she touched to prove it. She retrieved some antibacterial wipes left forgotten under the sink by whoever had lived here before – Jack S had not been forthcoming with her semi-nosey requests at finding out who they had been, if they had liked it, whether they had stayed long – and went to work attacking the dust, which settled in her throat and scratched at it. She wiped and scrubbed uselessly, her fingers coming through the material and stinking of bleach. She thought about how she had never moved into a place that was clean, never left a place without cleaning it, and had never received a deposit back without an extortionate cleaning fee deduction.

The dust drifted down from her throat and into her lungs and made her cough. She thought about how dust was made of other people’s skin, and it felt weird not knowing whose skin she was coughing up now. The entire flat emanated a kind of expectant emptiness. Waiting for her, looking at her, judging her. She stood in the middle of rooms surrounded by clutter, not knowing yet how to exist in them. For something to do, she ripped the red velvet cover off the sofa that wasn’t theirs, frowning at the stains, and then realized they didn’t have any detergent yet so threw it on the bed to deal with later. Throughout all of this, she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her carry out the tasks. It wasn’t the usual feeling she got of being watched, the idea that even alone she was performing for some sort of unseen audience, and that she had to look beautiful and sane and busy at all times or the audience would be annoyed at her. It was a different kind of watching. The audience felt closer. They felt threatening. Almost malevolent. She kept looking over her shoulder when stacking things, expecting to see someone there, tsk-ing at her for arranging her books by height instead of colour.

Elliott had been gone a long time now. Áine thought about messaging him to see when he would be back, but she didn’t want to bother him, to spoil the excitement of the day by nagging. And anyway, the signal inside the flat was patchy. She would walk from the kitchen to the bathroom, half-heartedly putting out a towel or stowing away a colander she wasn’t convinced they’d ever use, and find that the temperature dropped. The fridge reeked of stale, defrosted ice. The bathroom was freezing. They didn’t have Wi-Fi yet but Áine was pessimistic about whether it would ever pick up towards the back of the flat. When she walked to the end of the kitchen, where the freezing bathroom and the basement door lived, her 5G dropped entirely. Great, she thought.

There were other things they clearly hadn’t noticed before. The flooring wasn’t wooden, it was those clacked-together PVC boards that looked like wood. They bevelled in awkward places, leaving gaps and bubbles that she knew she would trip on. The lampshades were all gone and the ceiling lights hung naked from their wiring. All the plug sockets were painted over, naturally. And then there was the bed, the bed that maybe Elliott had said was always there, the bed that she should have noticed, that was always going to be included in the inventory. Elliott was always right. Elliott noticed things. Elliott said so, but she wasn’t so sure.

There was creaking where nothing was moving; the old house wheezing and straining around the modern little flat carelessly shoved inside it. The single-glazed windows leaked noise from the street. Most unnervingly, Áine could hear footsteps and signs of life from upstairs. If you stood in the kitchen right next to the basement door, as she was doing now, you could hear the low rumble and hum of voices from the flat above. A woman laughing in what sounded like a shriek. A man, the man she’d seen at the pub, she presumed, sounding both angry and amused, somehow, just in the inflection of the noises he was making. It sounded almost like chanting. She wished Elliott was here to hear it, to know whether it was loud enough to be a problem. But Elliott wasn’t here. The door rattled on its hinges and she jumped, expecting Elliott, but when she rushed to the front to check for him through the window it was the man from upstairs again, in his long coat, the same inscrutable expression etched into his prematurely aged face. He looked directly at her through the glass and Áine recoiled, embarrassed and shaken. It had sounded like someone was right here in the flat, the way the door had rattled.

When the door eventually rattled again, she hid in the bedroom, but it was only Elliott, beaming, carrying several brown paper bags filled with takeaway. Fried dough and oily potatoes wafted through the flat, hiding the scent of sickly dead air that had been there before, and Áine was grateful.

‘I couldn’t decide what to get so I just got us everything,’ said Elliott, and she smiled back at him. They hadn’t had time to buy food, and nor, really, did Áine have any money left to do so. Elliott always thought of things like this. He was good like that.

They ripped open the brown paper bags and sat cross-legged on the floor of the living room, resting chips and pizza and burgers on top of half-unpacked boxes and eating till Áine felt sick. Elliott had bought beers too, and they clinked the bottles together dramatically to celebrate the new house, to toast it. To make up for the eerie technological silence of no Wi-Fi, Elliott – obligingly, because it didn’t bother him, but he knew it unnerved Áine – plugged in the old TV he’d liberated from the recruitment consultants and they left it on in the background with the sound off just to make the house feel normal and alive. Afterwards they lay on their backs side by side on the floor, complaining about having eaten too much. The ceiling was magnolia waffle and cobwebbed at the corner. After a while their backs began to hurt too, so Elliott carried her, over-the-threshold style, into the new bedroom, both laughing.

There were no sheets on the bed yet; just someone else’s mattress (they obviously hadn’t parted ways with hundreds of pounds of their own money to actually buy any of the Sallies or Morganas or Esthers they’d tested out in the shop) with the red velvet sofa covering Áine had put there earlier and forgotten about, and a four-pack of Asda basic pillows still in their squeaky plastic. Lying on it made Áine feel uneasy, not just from the food and the warm beer but the idea of it belonging to someone else, of not knowing who they had been or what they had done on it. She didn’t want to touch it before bleaching it and covering it with her own bedsheets and her own mattress protector and her own satin pillowcase (because someone at work had said that meant you would never get wrinkles). But she didn’t want to complain and ruin the romance of the moment. Elliott was kissing her now and he was on top of her and then he was inside her and all she could think about was the dirt in the springs of the mattress and the velvet sofa covering scratching the backs of her thighs, and then she got annoyed about thinking about these things and not thinking about Elliott and being with Elliott for the first time in the new place, which she imagined was important and significant. Sometimes she got like this, too inside her own head and not able to feel anything at all, just pressure and warmth and noise.

Afterwards, Elliott ripped open the plastic of the basic pillows and fell asleep, his arm thrown over her, the red velvet material acting as a blanket because they’d accidentally left the duvet behind in Asda in the chaos of the day. He was exhausted and slept instantly and soundly, his nose making a low whistle. Áine watched him, his chest rising and falling rhythmically, the curl of his dark eyelashes, the murmurs he made when he stirred in sleep, usually every time she coughed. She stared at the ceiling and thought about the mattress. Elliott’s arm was heavy and sweaty on her. She scrolled on her phone with the brightness turned down as far as it would go and then finally, when she got the little text that warned her she was dangerously close to running out of data, she slipped out from underneath him and thought about showering.

It would wake him up, though, she decided. And besides, in the dark the flat was more unknowable, more unnerving. She pulled on Elliott’s jumper and boxers from where he’d left them on the floor next to the bed which, she made a mental note, would now have to be referred to as their bed, and wandered to the kitchen for a drink. The taps spluttered too loudly to even consider a shower, and the water they produced was cloudy and hard. Áine frowned at it, shivering. The kitchen smelled like fried food and lager and almost normality. As you got further in, there was the same horrible vomity sweet smell, building like fog. She realized it was coming from the basement. Coming from the black damp that was seeping out from behind the door. Áine edged towards it and pressed her fingers on the frame and they came away wet and dark. Open it, a rational voice in her head said. Rational but small and weak. Open it. They should have told you about that. They were trying to hide that. That was the sweetness you noticed. It was hiding this. You should complain about that. The door stared at her and she stared back. Cold air blew out from underneath the frame and chilled her toes. The light from her phone flickered. Turning the light on might wake Elliott and he’d ask why she wasn’t asleep. I’ll look in the morning, a louder, more childish, scared voice inside her said.

Still unable to sleep, Áine retreated to the living room where it felt safer. The living room, at the front of the flat, was closer to their bedroom, as far away from the basement mould as she could get without standing in the street outside. Close enough to Elliott that she could hear him breathing steadily next door. She opened a box marked BLANKTS BOOKS and spread an old tartan throw she’d had since uni over the exposed fuzz of the sofa and lay down on top of it, scrolling again, watching endlessly updating videos and getting annoyed when the algorithm suggested the wrong things to her. She pressed ‘not interested’ very hard on several clips about how to use lemon juice and vinegar to clean the grout between bathroom tiles, but after a few minutes a new one would come up as if to taunt her that the app knew better, that this is what she should be watching. On Instagram Laura had set up a renovation account for her new place. It was a bit soon for that, Áine thought. The account only had one photo, a selfie of Alex and Laura embracing in front of the boat, their smiles wide and toothy. Two idiots bought a boat, the self-deprecating bio read, follow us on our journey to make the little ship a little home.

Áine’s mind spontaneously recalled a snippet of a conversation with Laura from years before, the two of them lying under one duvet, being nasty (in a good-natured way) about everyone on their combined timelines. ‘What do you think the worst type of themed hobbyist Instagram is?’ Laura had asked. ‘Is it plants, home renovations, fitness, food or books?’

‘All wrong, it’s babies.’

That seemed like a long time ago now. Áine followed the renovation account and hid her phone underneath her stomach, where it burned pleasantly against her skin. She had been using it too much. She switched on the TV, the volume turned way down, subtitles on. One of the proper channels nobody ever bothered watching when they had the internet was showing Notting Hill. The film was about halfway over and she’d seen it a million times before but she left it on. It was the scene in which the main character, played by Hugh Grant, went on a series of dinner dates organized by his well-meaning best friends. One of the women they set him up with was perfect for him but he didn’t want her because he wanted to go out with the famous actress who had left him for someone else, played by Julia Roberts. Áine unexpectedly found herself incredibly irritated by this plot device, even though you were clearly supposed to root for Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts to get together, obviously, in a love conquers all kind of way.

She closed her eyes for what felt like a second and when she opened them again Elliott was taking her to bed and the TV was showing fuzz and static, glowing blurry and blue. The shadowy Elliott led her – half asleep, seeing only colour and form – from the room, holding her up by the shoulder this time rather than carrying her over the threshold. Her legs were filled with static too, and sleep, and she stumbled over the boxes on her way to the bed, tripping up and feeling Elliott move beside her on the mattress. She turned away from him and looked up and there was another Elliott, the shadowy one, stood above her, still holding her hand. It felt rough and calloused and cold. She murmured his name and next to her the other Elliott – although she couldn’t work out whether it was the real one or the fake one – mumbled back. She frowned at the Elliott looming above her, the general shape of a man she presumed was Elliott, trying and failing to ask him which one was real, but he said nothing. His face was shrouded in gloom; she could just make out the outline of his nose, his eyelashes catching the light leaking through the gap in the curtains. Her mouth was cotton dry, filled with sleep. She dropped her hand from one of the Elliotts and it fell on the other one, the one in the bed. She woke with a start when it made a dull thud on his chest to find herself sweating and wrapped in the filthy red velvet fabric, and Elliott – both Elliotts, dream and real Elliott – gone. For a second she forgot where she was and then remembered. The still-unfamiliar layout of the room arranged itself for her. Fighting this disorientation, she found a socket and started charging her phone, waiting for the screen to glow with life again so she could text him. She knew he was at work, rationally, but waking up in a different place to where she’d gone to sleep made her anxious and afraid.

Elliott had quit their shared workplace not long after they’d got together and Áine was grateful for it. She didn’t want to be seen as the girl who joined the office just to find men to sleep with. She hated the idea of strangers observing them in a shared kitchen and catching snippets of their conversation and dissecting it over instant messenger to each other, laughing at them. It was less that she wanted to be seen as her own person at work, more that she wanted to construct a fake person for work and live inside it, with her real self unperceived by everyone. Or maybe partially perceived by Elliott. When he left, they’d held a little going-away party for him in the shared break-room where they had flirted awkwardly in the early days of their relationship, doing a dance around each other to the microwave, enjoying the mundane thrill of asking the other about their weekend for the benefit of a third person to overhear, knowing they’d spent it together. Everyone said nice things about Elliott at the leaving party. They ate cupcakes and drank warm prosecco and signed a big card for him, one that he still had (Áine saw it in one of the boxes) and told him they couldn’t wait to see what he did next, which was, he kept saying to Áine, a screenplay that would be ‘like Fleabag, but for boys’ or ‘the next great American novel, but for English people’. As it turned out, both of these things were more difficult than first anticipated. For three months Elliott remained listless and aimless, and when he eventually suggested tentatively that it might be better to go back to work in an office ‘just for inspiration’, Áine said, ‘Yes, I agree.’ She’d realized in the time Elliott had gone from her own workplace that she disliked it more than she thought she had, that it was boring without the distraction of someone to fancy, and actually she could do her job, the vague social-medianess of it, from anywhere. Using Elliott as her tester, she decided against a doomed freelance move herself, but convinced her bosses to let her work from home, just one or two days a week, not all the time, she told them. These were the days when she could lie in bed all day, intermittently scrolling the mousepad to appear ‘active’.

When the glowing apple appeared, showing her phone had come back to life, she texted him Good morning and then Thanks for taking me back to bed and he replied instantly Huh??? because he always had Web WhatsApp open.

Áine’s hands hesitated on the keys, the chat still open on her phone. She felt sick, the way you do after sending a risky message to a boy you like who doesn’t care whether you live or die. She had the sudden urge to chuck her phone across the room so she wouldn’t have to look at the messages any more, the way she had done when she was single and frequently sending these kinds of messages to these kinds of men. Elliott had taken her back to bed. She remembered it, and it was real and not a dream. She thought these things very hard. She was sure it had been real. Not a dream. She knew the difference. She tapped the phone again so it wouldn’t lock itself because she’d been looking at it for too long. Her fingers were shaky and cold and blue at the tips.

Then she wrote:

Oh I must have dreamed it nvm lol

Nice to know ur dreaming of me

Fuck off x

After that, she used the dregs of her data to email her boss, complaining that the internet was late being switched on in the new place even though she had deliberately arranged it to come on Wednesday so she could avoid doing anything productive the day after moving. She waited for the expected Don’t worry, good luck with the new place! And when it came she put the phone face down on the carpet and promised herself she’d go to the office tomorrow instead, without really believing she would, and set about making some meaning and order of the boxes and the mess.

She went to the corner shop, struggling to figure out the new keys, which were clumsy in the old-fashioned locks on the door, and bought detergent and soap and shower gel and a candle and some bread from the inexplicable 24-hour organic shop, putting it all on her credit card so it didn’t feel like real money. She put books on the shelf, trying to organize them by colour in a rainbow like she’d seen someone do on a Pinterest board, before realizing this was deeply tedious. She dusted down the broken blinds in the living room and put the stained curtains from the bedroom in the wash and texted Elliott to complain that the washing machine was aggressively loud and leaked grey water into the kitchen sink, smelling of death. Typical, Elliott replied.

She tinkered with the thermostat all afternoon, intermittently sending Elliott pictures and following the instructions on a peeling safety manual someone had pasted to the front of the little plastic box an interminable number of tenancies ago. No matter what she set it to, the house remained cold. It felt like every time she returned to the kitchen, to put away plates or find her phone, the thermostat would be green and normal but the room so cold she could see her breath. She texted Elliott about this.

Oh annoying he replied instantly, in a way that implied he was not annoyed whatsoever.

Just think it always takes a while to get hang of tho in new places

Plus it’s freezing outside maybe that’s why

Can never really figure it out lol

Feels like every fucking flat has a different heating system

Kafkaesque said Áine, because she thought it was clever and that he would like this.

Lol he wrote, after typing for what felt like a long time for three letters.

She put clothes in the wardrobe, arranging hers on one side and Elliott’s on the other, and then mixing them up together by the end because this, too, was tedious, and surely they had to share everything now. She itched at a red mark on her arm that looked like it could be the curved red half-moon of a fingernail print or a bed-bug bite, standing in front of the mixed wardrobe and scratching at it until it bled and was sore enough to not itch any more. She made several trips back and forth to the outside bin, leaving the door ajar for convenience and finding it shut every time she came back. It had to be the neighbours. She worried about annoying them. She thought about the man in the long coat looking at her through the window. She filled up their bin and then snuck the last of the cardboard into the neighbours’, making sure to check the upstairs window to see if she was being watched. Their curtains were the same red velvet fabric as the sofa, the same pattern on it that looked like either chintz or bloodstains. There was nothing in their bin but empty glass bottles that had once housed wine or beer or vodka or gin, and under that, smelling rancid, some congealing steaks that looked faintly purple. She texted Elliott about it and he wrote back:

In the nice neighbourhood one day and already she’s a curtain twitcher

Áine felt embarrassed about that. To pretend she didn’t, she wrote Lol.

In the afternoon she realized she was bored of unpacking, and starving, and also hadn’t showered since leaving her old flat, which was disgusting. The hot water was unreliable in the shower. She stood under the shower head, jumping from foot to foot as it alternated between screaming hot and freezing cold, and emerged with the rest of her skin looking as pink as the fingerprint, which had now, thankfully, miraculously faded. As a reward for showering, she went on the now fully charged phone. Two red notifications. One from Laura, asking about Moon again, which she ignored. And one other:

Did Laura buy a boat lmao

The text was from Cian. It hadn’t occurred to Áine that Cian wouldn’t have heard this directly from Laura herself, but she realized it made sense. The three of them had been friends at university. Or more accurately, the three of them had been together in first year, each of their rooms next to the other, the universe – or at least the higher education system – willing them to be friends. And Áine had willingly obliged. Cian’s room to the left of hers, Laura’s to the right. She had split her time between them, occasionally forcing them to hang out together as a three and ignoring the animosity between them. Cian thought that Laura was stuck-up, which Áine disputed. It’s just her accent, she’d always told him. That’s not her fault. Laura thought that Cian was childish. She thought he had no ambition and took it as a personal attack on her own ambition. After university, Laura had moved back to London and asked Áine to come with her and treated it as a next step. Áine had acquiesced because she couldn’t afford to keep living near their university, couldn’t afford to move back to Enniskillen – there were no trains to get into the city, no proper ones anyway, and no jobs where she lived, no proper ones anyway, and she didn’t have a car. No excitement. Nothingness. So why not London? Nothingness might be there too maybe, but nothingness in a different environment, which was somethingness, she guessed. She sofa-surfed, dutifully and without complaining, at least to Laura, until Laura – who was living at home with her sister but insisted she knew the city better and was just really busy but would definitely sort it – found them a flat. Áine emptied the last of her student loan into the city and felt grown-up and far away from home and rootless and free and consumed with the pressure of more money for more rent, with the things money could do, with the general idea of money itself and how it circulated here compared to how it had circulated at home.

When Cian floated to London afterwards, at the end of the summer after university, Laura had sniffed at this, said that he was only here to continue to be childish, to get fucked up and work at nothing, that he would never grow up, that he didn’t know what he wanted and would never do anything with his life because of it. She always framed these statements as worry rather than insults, as though Cian was a little brother who she wanted to do well, even though they were all basically the same age. Or else she talked a lot about how Cian was in the nihilistic possession of male privilege as though this was the only privilege anyone could be in possession of. Áine usually said she agreed with her but she only believed it sometimes. Sometimes it felt good to not have ambition, to not have a plan, to do things just to do them, to press a button and see what would happen, to lie in the dirt and see how weird things could get. But she didn’t say this to Laura. Maybe there was an expiration date on this school of thought.

Yeah lmao she texted back, feeling guilty about the lmao already. With her bf

Jesus, said Cian.

He was typing again but Áine put the phone away. She was hungry now, but eating in the kitchen made her uncomfortable. She was still coughing from the day before, even though the majority of the dust was now gone, and she couldn’t shake the idea that she was being surveilled by something – or someone – lingering just out of sight. But this was a stupid feeling, a childish one. She settled for eating the bread she’d bought from the extortionate 24-hour organic shop on its own, lying in bed. She’d put a mattress protector on now, and it felt safer. The bread was stale.

You have to get used to it, said a voice in her head that sounded unlike her own. The feeling of someone watching. You’re not alone now. You’re never alone. Áine told the voice, consciously, that this was a good thing. That this was something everyone wanted. To not be alone. That was the goal.

But it worried her a little, it would be stupid to pretend otherwise, that she was suddenly being perceived more intently, more consistently, and that her laziness and isolation and social media stalking of inconsequential people and her intentional (and unintentional) ugliness would not go unnoticed now. Elliott liked to play football on Sunday nights. He liked to make a roast in the afternoon because the ones in the pub weren’t as good, so he thought. He thought the pimple videos were gross (which, of course, they were). There was no space to be alone and cretinous. No more Sad Wednesdays. And even if there were, Áine wasn’t sure she’d want them. Not just because Elliott would see her and judge her for it but because the house would too. She shut the curtains in the afternoon and sat cross-legged on the sofa in the dark, away from the view of whoever it was that might see her.

It always feels like that in a new place, don’t you think? said Elliott when she texted him about this after finishing the stale bread. About the feeling of being in the wrong place, or watching over a place that wasn’t hers, never meant to be hers either.

He wrote:

I always feel like ‘oh whose house is this?’ and then I realise it’s mine because I’m paying for it and then I can relax lol

Maybe lol. That’s probably what it is x

Don’t worry x

I’m not!!!

Be home soon anyway x

Ok x

When he came home he brought pasta and sauce and she sat on the counter while he cooked.

‘The house looks great,’ he said, stirring pesto into a scratched pot, also liberated from the recruitment consultants, who had been left, she thought, with considerably less stuff than they had before Elliott had moved in or out.

‘Thanks,’ she said when she’d finished coughing. She swung her feet against the counter, picking at the scab left by the bite/fingerprint. Elliott raised an eyebrow and she cleared her throat.

‘I think it’s the damp,’ she said, drinking the glass of water he handed her. Her voice sounded croaky and scratched, out of use. She’d only realized when he came home that she hadn’t spoken to anyone in real life for the entire day, just on the phone, which didn’t count. Elliott looked sceptical.

‘Have you eaten today?’ he said instead. Áine was looking at the basement door over the rim of the pint glass. She felt as though the mould was inside her throat, growing, snaking down into her lungs. ‘Did you drink any water?’

‘I am currently drinking water.’

‘Okay, other than that.’

Áine said nothing. She listened to Elliott chop vegetables inside their plastic boxes and thought about whether they had a chopping board, where it could be. Sometimes they didn’t say anything to each other and just leaned into the silence, which was uncharged and relaxed. She liked how Elliott felt confident and comfortable in the quiet, and wished she could be like that. She wished she could be a girl who was mysterious and self-assured and silent, but instead she felt awkward when there was a lull in conversation and she filled it with fast, nonsense words. Elliott had taught her it was okay to not speak, to not try to drive conversation forward as though nobody would like you unless you provided enough jokes and anecdotes to convince them otherwise.

Elliott put the chopped vegetables in the pan and they hissed and sizzled in the oil while they listened to it in silence. Áine wanted to ask how much oil he’d used, because she knew the exact amount of calories in a tablespoon of oil, one of those useless facts that she could never shake out of her head, but she stayed quiet and they listened, her still swinging her legs off the side of the counter, chugging the water. Elliott put the sautéed vegetables in with his cooked pasta, and then tipped in pesto from a pot, not measuring according to the serving size on the back, and Áine said nothing.

‘Taste,’ he said, and it was the first thing either of them had said in ages, and he held the spoon in front of her and she opened her mouth and nodded encouragingly. ‘Good,’ Elliott said, and he handed her a bowl. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll go out.’ Áine nodded again. Sometimes it felt good to be fed and to have things decided for you. The pasta burned the top of her mouth and tasted warm and fatty and comforting. She could feel the button of her jeans imprinting on her distended stomach.

When she was done Elliott took the bowl from her and left it in the sink and she wanted to clean it before they went wherever they were going, but she also didn’t want to spoil the moment, to break away from her own warm, comforting passivity. She let Elliott take her hand and slide her off the counter. She let him hand her her overcoat and ease herself into the sleeves. It felt good to be looked after, she thought, as he interlaced their fingers and checked the front door was locked by wiggling on the handle, which clunked and rattled.

Outside, it was cold and she shivered, and Elliott pulled her towards him and manoeuvred her so she was on the inside and he was nearest to the road. Áine thought about how it got dark so early in the evenings and how awful it would be to be on a dating app, how when she read tweets about men ghosting women off those apps she felt superior and safe. How it was nice to have someone to go on a walk with after dinner, even if sometimes they didn’t have anything to talk about, and how she didn’t really like pesto pasta, if she was being honest.

Elliott wanted them to go on an explorative walk of their new neighbourhood. He was excellent at randomly deciding they should do something, have a date night, or embark on something ordinary like a walk, and through the force of his enthusiasm and positivity make it something adventurous. He had an uncanny ability, Áine thought, to tell when she was reaching just the perfect point of glumness to alleviate it through a spontaneous activity. When they had started to look at flats together, for instance, and she was feeling low about leaving Laura but trying not to show it – because by extension it meant she was feeling low about coming to him instead – Elliott had surprised her one evening, waiting outside the office with a bulging plastic carrier bag filled with treats they made and sold in Ireland but not here. He made them sit together, freezing on a park bench in a little square of green in amongst the grey neighbourhood where she worked, ranking all of the cheap chocolates and fluorescent orange sugary drinks she’d loved so much as a child and raved about but never bought in London because they were ludicrously overpriced and only stocked in specialist stores that she could never be bothered to find and travel to. ‘How did you find them?’ she kept saying. ‘How did you remember? How did you know?’

‘I just listen,’ Elliott had said through a mouthful of desiccated coconut biscuit. Sometimes he actually didn’t listen, Áine thought, but she did talk an awful lot. Too much, in fact. Once Elliott told her on the train that she ‘squandered the asset of silence’ and she fell instantly quiet and he looked pleased. Later she found the same line in a Shirley Hazzard book he’d lent her, but she didn’t point it out, in case he was embarrassed about stealing it. Anyway, he was good at gifts, as good as she was at talking too much when he wanted her to be quiet.

Afterwards he took the bag to the pub where they met some of his friends from university, and, fuelled with sugar and the adrenaline of such a romantic gesture, Áine found it easy to talk to them for once, in spite of the obvious fact they had little in common. She fed them chocolates and mixed her gins with orangeade and Elliott made them provide reviews as payment, in obnoxious, over-the-top YouTuber style, just to make her laugh. On the train home to his that night he was so happy with her, the gregarious, social version of his girlfriend they’d all got to meet. He kept kissing her and he tasted of coconut and gin and chocolate and she could tell they were being smug in public but neither of them cared.

She often thought of that moment fondly, even long after she’d decimated the rest of the spoils of his pilgrimage to find her favourite foods. She thought about it now on their walk as she leaned into his armpit. They stood on a street corner near some graffiti that looked like a derivative Banksy and took a selfie. They walked until her jeans stopped hurting her stomach, and the houses thinned out and got bigger, more spaced out, more obviously designed by architects rather than councils. They stopped on the street nearest to the big park and stood side by side, in awe of these houses. Across the street there was a sign that said NO PARKING and then one that said RESIDENTS ONLY. When Áine had first watched Notting Hill, she’d thought the private garden thing was a joke, something invented just for the movie, but Elliott said they existed. She’d never seen one until now. A toddler with a shock of white-blond hair was waving at them from a bay window, putting his sticky hands on a vast, green velvet sofa. Áine waved back, looking dazed, and Elliott smiled at her wistfully. An undigested piece of fusilli twisted uncomfortably in her gut.

‘I love you,’ Elliott said suddenly, and Áine craned her neck up at him. He was still smiling.

‘I love you too, obviously,’ she said. ‘Why are you saying you love me?’

Elliott laughed. ‘Do I need a reason?’ And she shrugged and he said: ‘We’re going to live in one of these one day, me and you. In a dreamhouse.’

‘I’m cold. Take me home.’

On the way back they stopped by the estate agent’s, which was shut now, and squinted through the frosted logo on the glass to look at the little pictures of the houses up for sale. Áine thought about Christmas when she was a child: leafing through the Argos catalogue and picking out what she wanted, drawing big black circles around her favourite things in marker, and her mother saying ‘Maybe’.

‘Which one would you live in, if money was no object?’ Elliott asked. She could see their reflections in the glass, another Áine and Elliott, looking pink-faced and happy and conspiratorial. They didn’t need anyone else, and in fact everyone else was a distraction. Elliott counted to three and they pointed to their favourite. Elliott’s was a modernist, brutalist duplex apartment on top of a hill, with a garage and a pool table. Áine’s was a red-brick with a stained-glass front door and steps leading up from a garden full of wild flowers.

‘I knew you’d pick that one,’ Elliott said affectionately. She could feel his hand stroking the small of her back through her overcoat. ‘You always go for witchy houses.’

‘Shut up,’ Áine said without heat, and she shoved him. As they walked home, she thought, this is probably love. I wish all my friends and family and enemies were here next to us, watching us on this romantic walk just for the sake of it, noticing how good we look together, seeing how much he loves me, my boyfriend who I live with, who feeds me and keeps me warm and makes sure I drink water, like a little plant he tends to.

When they got in, the house was dark and cold. Closing the door felt like missing a step on the stairs going down, your stomach dropping for a second. Elliott hung up their coats. Áine put her hand on the wall and it was wet and he put the kettle on and then she said: ‘I thought I might email them about it, actually.’

She said it as though their romantic moment hadn’t happened, as though they were still having the conversation from before. She watched his shoulders stiffen from behind as he stirred the teas – she hadn’t asked him to make her one, he just did – and then untense. It was brief, almost imperceptible. But she knew him so well. And then quickly, before Elliott had a chance to say anything else:

‘The letting agents, I mean. It’s just there’s a lot they didn’t tell us, about the damp and the shower, and I wanted to ask about the floor, because I nearly tripped up on it earlier and –’

She stopped. Elliott dropped the teabags into the bin and he exhaled once, long, through his nose. Then, as though this hadn’t happened, he smiled at her and shrugged. ‘It’s only been a day,’ he said. ‘Let’s hold off, eh? Let’s get you some Strepsils or something. Some antibiotics. Some vitamins or something. Let’s give the place a chance, Ain.’

She arranged her mouth and smiled back. She nodded. He’s right, she told herself. It was probably her, not the house. It was probably nothing.

March

Hey Jack!

Áine here. Just wanted to check in about some issues [backspace] minor issues we’re having with the flat. Nothing serious just a few things we thought we’d raise [backspace backspace] just a few things, if you could put us in touch with the landlord? Feel free to give me a ring, here’s my number.

Cheers. [backspace backspace backspace] Cheers!

It wasn’t technically going behind Elliott’s back. Not really. She had waited like he asked. Long enough to feel justifiably bothered enough to complain. And in the time before a justifiable complaint, Áine had tried to like the place. She’d rearranged their things after the first hasty unpacking. She’d gone to Home Bargains and IKEA and Facebook Marketplace and bought MDF side tables and plastic frames and second-hand full-length mirrors from middle-aged couples who smiled at her as she carted them out, dancing around beige wooden toys and trying not to trip on mammoth chequerboard rugs, sweating under the weight of the things they wanted to get rid of for approximately £20 cash. She’d bitten her tongue when Elliott had come with her on these trips, using their weekends to compare ergonomic desk chairs and the perfect-sized desk for his dual-screen set-up.

‘But you don’t work from home,’ she’d said, after he’d finally decided on a leather nightmare with lumbar support that was on sale for half price in IKEA, and carted it the whole way back on two different trains. It looked bigger once they got it into the living room and she hated it, how it threw the already awkward feng shui of the room out of whack.

‘Yes,’ Elliott said patiently, as though speaking to a small child, ‘but the job isn’t all I do. It’s for my creative stuff, you know. It’s good to have a place to write, it’s important. I was just reading something about it the other day, how it charges your synapses better than, like, working in bed.’

‘Right,’ said Áine.

Elliott got a little embarrassed about how unmoved she was by her job. When she told people about it – mostly his friends – he would qualify it as something she was doing ‘for now’. He would suddenly begin talking about the books she liked to read, or her thoughts on poetry, or the music she listened to, or – worst of all – what she’d got in her A levels. Sometimes she would hear him tell people fantastical things about her on her behalf: like that she was going to create a new social networking app, or launch a website about sustainability in fashion, and she’d think, who is that, that person you’re talking about? Who are they? And she’d think: quitting a job is a privilege but having a job you hate is one too. But instead she just said: ‘I don’t mind it. It pays the rent. It’s easy.’

Most of the day Áine spent not working but just looking at things on the internet, which arguably she could explain away as ‘research’ if anyone asked, but nobody ever did. She watched videos of riots at funerals in the Middle East, and of e-girls having their throats slit open by their jealous redpilled boyfriends, and of tearful, pale YouTubers explaining why they stopped being YouTubers, and videos of apoplectic, bug-eyed pundits arguing about pronouns, and of beautiful women explaining the feminist theory behind their fox-eye cosmetic surgery. She read articles about people who gave back their adopted children from China, and articles about how landlords were bringing back feudalism to the capital, and articles about how the cost of living was going up, and articles about how more people might have ADHD than you’d first think, and articles about what would happen when the Queen died. She felt the same thing looking at all of these things, which was nothing.

When she wasn’t doing this, she texted her mother, and when her mother didn’t answer (invariably because she was working and not technically allowed to have her phone on shift), she scrolled through her old conversations with Cian and replied to his unread messages. Sometimes she found she saved them up to read when she really needed the distraction, or when she’d managed to think of something funny and smart enough to say back to him. It meant a lot to her, too much probably, that their conversations flowed seamlessly, that she appeared to him glamorous and fun and intelligent and hilarious. Today his unread message said:

Do you think Laura will marry the boat man?

She replied:

Why? Are u sad u didn’t get to marry her first

Yes I’m heartbroken

All this time I’ve been secretly in love with Laura

It’s why I can’t bear to stay in the same city as her for too long u know, it’s just so painful

Well you’ve missed ur chance now

No I still have time

I’m back in London next month

I’ll go to her and confess my undying love and beg her to leave him

She’ll say no

She’s going to marry Alex and have children called Sage and Ember and Tofu

Are u ignoring the fact I said I was coming back to London because u don’t want to see me or is it just because you want my welcome party to be a big surprise

Sometimes Áine felt like Cian brought out the worst, most spiteful side of her. She wasn’t sure if it was the same for him, and anyway, she never asked. Messaging him made her feel guilty in a remote way, but then the spell of the guilt would always be broken by something. They never talked about her relationship with Elliott. Now, a notification on her phone showed that Cian had sent her a picture. She opened a text that said I thought you got custody of moon? Bitch!

The picture was a screenshot from Laura’s home-boat-house renovation Instagram account, an artful display of their window frame and newly tiled work surface, with a short, witty caption extolling the virtues of space and how you can make the most of it. Áine had been dutifully keeping up with Laura and her double Instagram lives since the move, even though they were seeing less of each other than ever now. They had never really lived apart, not since meeting, and neither of them had ever had to bother with finding out how to be friends if they had to work at being friends and organize being friends around the rest of their lives. But still they kept up, texting each other updates from work and about Alex and Elliott and their parents and whether or not Laura should get a cat for the boat, because cats didn’t like water, but she did really like cats. But the monotonous nature of these messages depressed Áine. They had talked so much in person that she realized they had never really texted each other, never really FaceTimed or called when they already lived so deeply entwined inside each other’s lives. As a result, it felt forced and fake and weird. It wasn’t like that with Cian, who she saw so rarely that she sometimes thought he only lived inside her phone, saying short mean things to make each other laugh without awkwardness or consequence.

Áine liked all of the photos on the home renovation Instagram, even the ones that made her cringe, even the ones she suspected made Laura cringe too, or would have made the old Laura cringe. But she hadn’t seen this one, the one Cian had screenshotted and sent to her without liking it. Someone, Laura or Alex, had carefully arranged an array of items on the cramped worktop that suggested domesticity and affluence and life: a cream-coloured KitchenAid mixer, a slim, clean Nutribullet blender, a potted basil plant just catching the light on the windowsill, and then, by the other side, propping up a small selection of pastel cookbooks organized by colour, holding a few sprigs of gyp and daisies, was Moon. Áine stared at it for a long time. It was definitely Moon. The vase had a smudge on the bottom where she’d grabbed it at the end of the class and Laura had leaned over, laughing drunkenly at something someone had said, and taken her hand at just that moment and so they’d left a mark on the porcelain, both of their thumb-prints laid over one another like a prayer. She had searched frantically for it in the days after their move, texting Laura three separate times asking You definitely didn’t accidentally lift moon?? And I’m so upset and I’m sorry i would never lose him like this i don’t know what happened. And Laura had been so kind about it. She’d said how it was a stressful time and how the fact that their deposit was currently being held up from the last place was making it even more stressful and how she understood and how it would turn up eventually and that she loved her, Moon or no Moon. And here was Moon, sitting in the window, proudly displayed on the home renovation Instagram Laura would once have laughed at.

Áine closed the chat window without replying to Cian and opened Instagram, searching for the account with shaking, furious fingers. But the photo had already been deleted. Fucking bitch, she texted Cian, meaning it for once.

Áine herself didn’t post much online. The thing about spending all day on the internet was that eventually the internet lost its shine and you started to see everything as not an outpouring of emotion or a sharing of people’s lives but as an algorithmically constructed ploy for attention. But equally, it was something to do. She had never felt guilty about wasting her days like this and she didn’t feel it now, not guilty exactly. But still Áine couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her scroll aimlessly, or mouth f u c k o f f at the screen when her line manager emailed her, or pick her nose and then immediately go back to typing without bothering to wash her hands. She started to close all the curtains and sit working in the dark or hidden under blankets and inside hoodies, even in the grey afternoons, lit by the blue glow of her laptop, becoming deficient in vitamin D. When the sky darkened outside she knew it was time for Elliott to come home and her skin would begin to crawl a little less. She’d think to the house and to the watching feeling: You can’t get me now. This thinking was irrational, naturally. She knew this.

Sometimes she texted Elliott pointless things that came into her head – Would you ever want to go on a hot air balloon? I think everyone who lives here votes Tory. My friend from school just had her second set of twins. I think I’m going to start making my own pickles – or she’d speak to Cian or her parents, when she managed to get them on the phone.

Áine’s parents both still worked, despite being well into their sixties now. Her mother had a job in the kitchen at a themed cafe meant to cater mainly to American tourists who were tracing their genealogy and sold things called, like, ‘O’Bama wheaten bread’ and ‘end of the rainbow shakes’. Her father worked in maintenance at the hotel in the town that the same Americans retired to after their themed meals, laden down with bags filled with Aran sweaters and novelty keyrings. They both did shift work, which meant it was difficult to predict when they would call, and they seemed uncomfortable and sceptical with the general idea of her job – that working meant simply opening her laptop and sitting on it all day – and trying to see it from their perspective, she thought that was probably fair enough. Áine had once heard her mother, when home for Christmas, telling a cousin that she worked ‘in computers’, which she decided was just accurate enough to not bother correcting anyone.

Her mother would always do most of the talking, telling her a litany of things that were happening back home, both horrible and traumatic, all recounted in the same matter-of-fact way. Dennis’s daughter had a wee one and then it died in the cot and they didn’t know why, the whole place was devastated. The big Lidl was getting redone and now you had to pay to park there for more than two hours. Did she remember Noreen from two doors down? She was getting remarried, to a fella she met on the internet, of all places. Daddy had seen them together in the hotel, like an affair. A big scandal. There was a leak in the hot press and the kitchen ceiling had bowed down in the middle, bloated and worrying, and the council refused to fix it so they were going to ask Darren from the cafe to do it cash-in-hand and just not tell the council.

‘Do you need me to send some money?’ Áine would ask at this point.

‘No, we’re grand. Stop that now, don’t be silly.’

‘Are you sure?’ Áine would say, although she didn’t have the money to send anyway. Her mother would do a little gasp of ‘no no no no no’ and a guilty silence would settle between them. At primary school they’d said she was a gifted child and they said to her mummy and daddy she could be a doctor or something, if she really worked at it. Or a solicitor. Sometimes when she spoke to her parents on the phone she would google starting salaries for these kinds of jobs, real jobs held by real children, helpful gifted children, the keys gently clacking eerily, echoing in the silent flat in the background of the calls.

‘And how’s Elliott?’ her mother would ask finally, sounding pained, listening to the clicking. ‘Is he well? Is he with you now?’

And here Áine would oscillate between two responses. If she was at work, lingering in the corridor and pretending to be on the phone to the doctor or dealing with a family emergency so she didn’t get into trouble for taking personal calls: ‘No, I’m on my own. Sure he works in a different place now.’ Or if she was at home: ‘No, I’m on my own. Sure he works in the office now.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Well that’s good.’ And then, without letting this sentiment rest, her mother would go on quickly: ‘Listen, I’ll put Daddy on for you now before you go back to your work.’

Her father was worse on the phone than her mother. ‘Well,’ he would say. ‘You’re all right, are you?’

‘Yeah yeah. How’s the leg?’ Or the arm or the back or the head or the hot press.

‘Ah, you know yourself.’

‘Yeah, this is it.’

‘Desperate. You’re all right for money?’

‘Ah, you know yourself.’

‘You’re okay?’

‘Don’t worry.’

‘Well, I’ll put you back now. Look after yourself.’

‘You too.’

Her mother would briefly return to the call and ask if she was eating all right (yes) and what she was doing at the weekend, and Áine would search around for something vaguely impressive and modern to tell her, like she was getting on the train to Brighton to go to a gig, or she was going to visit Laura on the boat soon, or she was going to an ASMR exhibition or something (and here there would be a brief aside where she explained the concept of ASMR and heard herself explaining it and how ridiculous it was). ‘Oh right,’ her mother would say eventually. ‘Well, that sounds very interesting.’

A pause. ‘And will you be home soon?’

Their house was the same house Áine had lived in all her life, a grey pebble-dash two-up two-down terrace with narrow sash windows and a uPVC front door. It was lucky that they’d only had one child – something she would never point out to her parents, obviously, because she knew they wouldn’t agree and she remembered the spells her mother had in hospital growing up, the unexpected bleeding, the weeping when she thought Áine was asleep, and once even the little white coffin, Áine holding on to her daddy’s calloused hand, her mother wide-eyed and tranquillized – because there were only two bedrooms. One for her parents and a little dark box of a thing for her that was always cold and damp. The doctor prescribed big, medieval-looking ventilators, diagnosing asthma and bronchitis, recommending tonsil removal and adenoid removal and more running around outside.

When Elliott had been with her long enough to justify the meeting of the parents, she heard her mother’s worry on the phone about their grey little house and about Elliott’s view of the grey little house, and her eventual WhatsApp suggestion, painstakingly crafted, that instead they meet somewhere else, somewhere neutral, so they could ‘make a weekend of it for themselves’. In the end the four of them met in a chain restaurant in Dublin and shouted over the din to complain about the price of drinks. It was fine, she supposed.

She knew her mother didn’t want her home and her mother knew she didn’t want to come. They loved each other in a complicated and simple way, a love that depended more on the things not said than the things that were. She thought of them in the house, worried about the stairs and the car and the work, which she wanted them not to have to do. She thought that soon they’d be old, and then who would help them? Who would help them with the hot press and the leak and getting the messages in? What then?

‘Yes,’ Áine always said. ‘Soon.’

Elliott never had calls from home. This was, Áine thought, because he just had his dad. His mum had died when he was still young. He was deliberately vague, she thought, on how old he’d been when she got sick, how old he’d been when she actually died. He claimed not to remember large swathes of his childhood and Áine pretended to believe him because it was kinder. His dad had sold their house when Elliott went off to uni – she didn’t leave us any money, Elliott always liked to joke, and sometimes people didn’t laugh but Áine always appreciated the attempt at humour – and now lived in a small one-bedroom flat on the edge of a grey little town off a motorway in some anonymous part of the coastline. He used to run an internet cafe and then when internet cafes became obsolete he retired. Now he just stayed in the flat, Elliott said, reading conspiracy theories online.

When they met him during the same parent-meeting stage as when they’d gone to Dublin for the weekend, Elliott had suggested they do the same no-man’s-land approach for his dad. They met in a pub in town (uncannily similar to Áine’s hometown in both town and pub vibes). His dad was quiet and small, dressed in clothes that were almost deliberately nondescript: a dark blue jumper, dark blue jeans, scuffed white trainers that Áine recognized as ones Elliott had bought him for Christmas. Elliott and his dad both ordered fish and chips. He asked some dutiful questions about where she’d grown up and what she did but mostly the meal was awkward with long periods of silence. They were like strangers around each other, she thought. There was a brief argument at the end about who would pay for the food (Elliott wanted to, his dad was annoyed by the suggestion) and Áine excused herself to go to the toilets to get away from it and when she came back the man was gone. ‘That was nice,’ she’d lied, and Elliott had smiled and drained the rest of the pint his dad had left. Afterwards, Áine had added Elliott’s dad on Facebook as an offering of friendship, even though she didn’t use Facebook. It had taken him a week but just as she’d begun to regret it, to think the old man hated her, she got the notification to say he’d accepted and suddenly her timeline was full of garish YouTube links saying Queen Elizabeth was really a lizard and paedophiles were running an elaborate child sex trafficking ring in the Hollywood Hills. She searched his friends list and found Elliott wasn’t on it.

Mostly they didn’t talk about their families at all. They lived in a little bubble, free of the past but also not totally in the present, the future pressing in on them, sitting on their chests. Sometimes it felt like Elliott believed she hadn’t existed before him at all, as if she’d arrived in his life shiny and untouched, like a newborn baby. Sometimes she would tell a story from before she knew him and he would look bemused, like it was someone he didn’t recognize at all, like she was talking about a character from a storybook, or the protagonist of a film they’d both seen together.

For a while after sending the initial email to Jack S, Áine was filled with nervous, guilty energy. She kept expecting the reply to come through at night when she and Elliott were talking in bed or eating together, with Elliott on cc. And her transgression (going behind his back, lying to him) would be exposed, and he’d be furious. But Jack S never replied, and in a way that was worse.

In the meantime Áine continued to do as she was told, which was to give the place a chance, and to try in a conscious, concerted way to be blissfully happy. It was easiest in the mornings. She would wake up warm and entangled with Elliott, the solid expanse of his back, his armpit on her forehead, and gently ease herself into being awake until he would lift her phone and place it directly on her chest so she could feel the vibrations through her sternum and could no longer press snooze. It always made her laugh, this unspoken ‘time to get up’ that he had invented. It felt easier to roll out of bed in the dark mornings when he was there with her, on the days they both went to the office. They would drink cheap, shit coffee out of their cracked cafetière together and play rock paper scissors to decide who would clean it up when they got home. Elliott always let her win. ‘Not fair,’ he said, pretending to be affronted. ‘Life’s not fair,’ Áine replied, swallowing and breathing her coffee breath into his mouth when she kissed him goodbye.

She was forcing herself to keep going to work. A few days a week at least, for increasingly pointless reasons that had more to do with getting away from the flat, which was cold and unwelcoming, than actually having to be there in person. She wasted money on train journeys to collect a mouse, to have a meeting about her wages (she had expected a pay rise but it was only one in line with inflation in the end). She told people in the office the heating was broken, because that made it seem less weird and ominous than the fact that the heating supposedly worked absolutely fine, and yet she still shivered under hoodies and blankets all day at home, jumping every time there was a loud noise that could be – and often was – a footstep from somewhere above. She didn’t even know why she bothered telling them the cover-up. It wasn’t as if they cared.

On other days at home it felt like it was dark all morning and dark all afternoon, a few hours of grey in between. The whole world, from the perspective of her window, looked grey, pale, desaturated. The panes rattled against their frame and smog gathered in the corners where the glazing was thinnest. When she asked Elliott about the rattle he said the flat was just old, that it gave the flat character, that it was a silly thing to be scared of and an even sillier one to complain about. The outside world looked inhospitable, but that didn’t mean the inside world looked any more attractive. She sat inside her hoodie watching droplets of water run on glass, seeing it turn into steam, and felt distinctly uncosy. Sometimes the steam would make it look like someone was standing behind her and she would jump and twist. But there was never anybody there. Nobody was watching her. Nobody was checking on her. In a way, that was just as unnerving.

She made repeated valiant albeit unsuccessful attempts to clean the flat. And clean it again and clean it again and clean it again and keep it clean, as though someone was going to drop in on her one afternoon and say Why are you on Instagram and why is this cupboard greasy underneath? Maybe the neighbours from above, who on her work-from-home days pestered her with their noise as she huddled by the basement door, trying to remove the rapidly developing mould, coughing bile and mucus back into a tissue as she scrubbed at debris that looked much the same as what had just come out of her nose and lungs. Sometimes their stomping above appeared deliberate, intended to drive her insane or distract her from her work. It sounded like there were hordes of people up there, wearing heavy boots, slamming them again and again on to the floorboards. If she followed the noises, they became louder the closer she got to the basement door, and sometimes above the stomping there were muffled voices raised in anger or despair. She could hear the woman’s high-pitched mewling cries and the rumbling of the man responding to her. Once she tried to record it to send to Elliott but it didn’t come out properly, you could only hear her breathing on the voice note. I think your mic is broken, Elliott eventually wrote. And then, If it’s loud borrow my headphones x

She took out the bins every evening, often hearing the screeches of the woman above but only ever seeing the man. Some mornings she toyed with going up there, knocking on the door, speaking to them about it – about the noise, the woman, the woman she never saw – but every time the words lodged themselves in her throat. Why did she even care what they were doing to each other up there, why was it her problem? And anyway, she knew the man’s reaction would terrify her. She was already unnerved by him, the way he would appear as if on cue the instant she went outside, as though he had been waiting on her. They seemed to collide every time she left, jostling in the shared front door, avoiding each other’s eyes. He never said hello, and when she complained about the unfriendly neighbours to Elliott, he said it was just what people did here. Then she complained to Cian about it and he said the same thing, but in a different way, complaining about the place and the people who lived in it and making her laugh ruefully.

The flat seemed to repel any attempts at order in an almost malevolent way. She scrubbed the mould and the next morning there was twice as much on the door. The fruit she bought turned to sludge so quickly she had to force herself to eat it as soon as she bought it, and then it made her feel sick, as though it had already gone bad as soon as it had crossed the threshold of the door. Dust made her sneeze and cough, but the broom was never where she thought she’d left it to get rid of it. Elliott said they should buy a hoover instead, which wasn’t the point. More than all of this, the flat laughed at her attempts at creating order or cleanliness. This was illogical, of course. She knew that. On the internet an American woman had built a large following by making videos where she showed other adults how to clean. All her clips began with the same intro, which was supposed to be reassuring, about how she was here for anyone whose parents hadn’t taught them how to look after themselves. Áine thought about whether her mother had ever taught her to clean properly, and whether if she didn’t this meant she had been neglected. Sometimes she woke up and found new things to feel insecure about and was annoyed she had never noticed them before.

Elliott didn’t help the general malignant repelling of cleanliness and order in the house, either. She had never noticed before how untidy he was, how he left cold teabags out on coasters, how he hung up clothes out of the washer without letting them dry first so they would end up smelling damp and rotten for days. His flat before had been disgusting but just in the general way that boys’ houses were disgusting. She had attributed it mainly to the interchangeable recruitment flatmates rather than Elliott personally, but now she saw that was a kind of deliberate overlooking of his flaws. And when Áine pointed out anything to him she heard her mother’s voice inside her own, nagging him, and it made her hate her mother and herself, so instead she just swallowed annoyances and seethed for a few moments and then it passed. One night she’d asked him not to leave his nail clippings on the sink and he’d rolled his eyes, and in a moment of madness when he’d left to clean them up Áine had spat her illness into the beer he was drinking. She felt briefly triumphant, euphoric, and was only horrified after she had seen him drink a glug of the beer, flopping down on the sofa, sniping ‘Happy now?’ It was a crazy thing to do. She looked at him drinking it, eyes glued to the PlayStation, and thought: Did I really just do that? Am I the kind of person who does things like that? She felt as though it was a moment of fleeting demonic possession, as if a shadowy figure had lifted her like a marionette and forced her hand. She remembered from school the old wives’ tale that if you wanted to make someone love you, you put your menstrual blood in their food and they’d be obsessed with you forever. One girl in the year above had sworn she’d done it and it had worked. Áine remembered telling Laura about this one night years later and how she’d said, ‘God, girls’ schools are so weird, aren’t they?’ and launched into a story about how her friend at boarding school had once got into trouble for climbing out of a window at night to see a boy and accidentally breaking her ankle. Áine had thought that wasn’t the same kind of thing but hadn’t said anything.

All this made it seem like things were bad. They weren’t bad. Áine told herself this and she told others this, when they asked. It was great living together, she said. She loved having Elliott there to make her laugh at bad TV and to pretend to make a fuss about how cold her feet were in bed before giving in and letting her warm them against his legs. She loved spending the weekends with him. The weekends were when they were at their best, actually. Elliott was at home and she had the opportunity every five days to either convince him that the flat was weird or use him as an excuse to get out of it, the weirdness. And she never managed the first one, so they filled their weekends with the second. Every Saturday she would wake up to find the bed warm but empty and would pad into the living room, where Elliott would be frowning at his elaborate workspace, not typing anything, chewing on the skin around his nails. She would make a point to yawn loudly so he knew she was there, and he would make a point of rearranging the glum face she could already see in the reflection of the dark computer screen to smile at her. And he’d say ‘Morning’ and then he’d suggest something at random that would mean they could leave the house for a while. The ideas, clearly meant to distract Elliott from the work he wasn’t doing, were flimsy and ridiculous – ‘Let’s go to the museum and look at the dinosaur bones’, ‘Let’s pick a direction and walk there, just to explore, like an adventure’, ‘Let’s find the pub that looks the worst and see how they pour a Guinness’ – but Áine always went along with them because it felt good to be out in the world, away from the unsettling sickly feeling she got if she was in the flat for an entire weekend, and it felt good to have Elliott decide her weekend for her, just like it felt good to let him feed her and hold her hand when he decided it was time to cross the road.

This Saturday morning, he had decided they should try all the different pastries on offer at a new, ridiculously overpriced bakery that had opened just across the road from them. Áine had been following the progress of this ridiculously overpriced bakery for several weeks in a violently passive-aggressive Facebook group for the neighbourhood. There were hundreds of people in the group and they were always apoplectic with rage. There goes the community, they wrote under a post about the new bakery on Elliott and Áine’s street. Another chain! ‘I bet our rent goes up,’ Áine had said to Elliott when she saw the post, and he rolled his eyes and said, ‘You can just be happy about the pastries, you know,’ and she laughed, genuinely laughed, and it felt good to laugh in the flat, like she was beating it at its own game by being happy, like she was expelling the bad feelings from it with their joy. Áine told herself these things like a mantra in her own head, a talisman she held against encroaching negativity: Elliott made her laugh and he was best on weekends and she loved him.

The sunshine hit the living room perfectly on Saturday mornings, and Elliott queued opposite their flat amongst the hundreds of people who had complained about the bakery and who were now waiting to try it. It took twenty minutes for him to get to the front and buy a panicked selection of tarts and biscuits. They WhatsApped each other memes and when he got to the front Áine sent him a nude picture of herself and he bounded across the road with armfuls of food and she pulled open the living-room window and they sat side by side on the peeling white paint of the frame, him perched on the wall outside, her hanging over the back of the borrowed sofa. They stuffed themselves with pastries and smiled at the idiots still in the queue, and were smug and overly, obviously tactile with one another. ‘I do think the rent might go up, though,’ she said, and Elliott put a piece of doughnut in her mouth to shut her up. After she left half of it on the side, intending to finish it later, she found it covered in fruit flies and gagged before throwing it in the bin, her skin dimpled with goosebumps.

Still, the pastries set the tone of a good day, a good weekend. It made her feel relaxed, knowing that they wouldn’t bicker, that things would be good. Because they were meant to be going to a party that evening. Kind of. A dinner party. Which was how you had parties when you were grown. She would rather have gone to the pub, but this too was how parties worked in adulthood: you went even though you knew you weren’t going to enjoy it, because you had made a commitment. Being grown-up was a lot of making commitments to things you fundamentally knew you would hate. And so: they were going to the dinner party.

More specifically, they were going to the houseboat to see Laura and Alex. It would be the first time Laura and Áine had seen each other properly since they’d moved, something that surprised her when she realized it. It was the longest they’d gone without speaking in person in all the time they’d been friends. But suddenly Laura’s weekends were taken up with things that were both time-consuming and boring to Áine, the kinds of things she avoided, the kinds of things that made her dread her own future – friends having babies, friends getting engaged, people that weren’t even really friends having babies or getting engaged, but you basically had to go see them and celebrate it anyway – and there were Thursday nights, when they were both free, but that was the only day Elliott tended to leave work early and he said they should always make a night of it, walking around the neighbourhood to get to know it and drinking in some little pub or other until it felt like it was second nature and somewhere they really truly lived and knew. Once or twice Áine had suggested skiving off in the afternoon to Laura and getting a coffee somewhere, but Laura was taking the gallery seriously now, because she worked on commission when it came to framing and she needed money for, like, sinks and flooring and shit like that. So basically, they had put a date in the diary – a literal diary now, a calendar that Elliott had hung on the wall for them both to keep up with all the appointments and engagements and christenings and work parties and dinner parties that loomed in their future, suddenly and unexpectedly, as if their whole social life had changed while Áine wasn’t looking – and now the date had come round Áine realized she felt weirdly nervous about it. She thought about Moon and the curiously dry updates she and Laura sent each other on WhatsApp and ruminated. Sometimes she sent Laura a meme and wrote lol u and Laura would see it (you could tell that on Instagram) and didn’t reply for hours.

Áine fidgeted and picked off all her nail polish on the walk to the bus and then the train they needed to take to the part of the canal where Laura and Alex were currently living.

‘Is everything all right?’ Elliott asked her finally, when they stopped in the corner shop just before the boat to pick up prosecco and cheap flowers.

‘Yeah,’ she said, chewing on a bleeding thumbnail. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

As it turned out, when they got there it was fine. It was beautiful really. The evening was still light blue and the weather warm enough that, when they approached, Laura and Alex were sitting on the deck of the boat, both wearing matching cable-knit jumpers, drinking and playing music from a phone sitting inside an empty mug. When Laura spotted them in the distance she jumped up and squealed loudly enough to make a few people sitting outside some of the riverside bars dotted along the walk titter quietly, and she jumped off the boat and pelted towards them and engulfed Áine in a hug tight enough to crush the flowers and she knew instantly that everything would be fine. They just had to see each other in real life, that was all, and now it was fine again.

‘I missed you so much,’ Laura said, muffled by Áine’s hair. When she dragged them along to the deck to greet Alex, now standing and grinning at them too, the boat was still bobbing from the force of Laura’s departure.

‘All aboard,’ Alex said and Laura pushed him lightly and told him he was being cringe.

They didn’t go inside right away. Laura said the evening was too nice to waste and she was right really. March was a good month in London. After the clocks went forward. It felt pregnant with possibility, the light changing optimistically, the nights extending themselves with the promise of adventure. Even if they weren’t actually doing anything adventurous, it felt like it, sitting out on the deck, all crushed in together, catching up about the nothingness that had passed since they last saw one another. Laura pressed herself tightly against Áine on one side and left Alex and Elliott to perch on the other. They hung their legs over the side of the boat and Laura leaned her head on Áine’s shoulder, and when the two boys ducked inside Laura said they’d follow in a minute, to postpone the tour until they got there (which was only a little joke really as the boat seemed laughably small, far too small to actually house people permanently, continuously, without driving each other insane or throwing someone overboard), and when they were gone, Laura said: ‘Are you okay? Are we in a fight?’

Áine angled herself awkwardly, examining Laura’s face. It felt too ridiculous then to bring up Moon. Too ridiculous to tell Laura about how angry she was at the letting agents. She didn’t want to tell her about the odd neighbours or the mould. Áine didn’t want Laura to think she wasn’t doing as well as she seemed to be doing. She wanted the ease Laura had with Alex, with life, the ease she and Elliott had both witnessed as they approached them cuddling on the deck of the boat, which had made Elliott briefly hold her hand as they walked closer, as if to show they were the same. She wanted them to be the same, and wanted Laura to think so too. And so she said:

‘Of course we’re not in a fight.’

‘Really? Because I thought –’

‘I just haven’t been very well,’ Áine said, and then when Laura’s brows knitted together in concern, she said, ‘Just a bad cough. A chest infection, I think.’

‘Oh,’ Laura said, visibly relaxing and scrambling to get up. ‘You’ve always had those, though, right? You should go to the doctor.’

‘Yeah,’ said Áine, but Laura was already shouting down to the inside of the boat for Alex to begin the grand tour.

Inside, the place was, of course, not grand, but it was on its way to becoming so. The bare bones of the boat had already been ripped out and replaced with an open-plan living area that was filled with pastels and bright beechwood. You could walk right from one end to the other in a few well-spaced paces, but a little folding door separated out a bedroom at the back with special in-built wardrobes and a full-sized double bed and an en suite that would soon be modernized with a much better and more energy-efficient shower. Laura told them all this. She would be learning to tile the en suite herself, with videos off the internet.

In the main living area there were a lot of tasteful accents, prints of minimalist boobs and an Ottolenghi cookbook ostentatiously placed on the dining table (which, Laura said, could be folded away and turned into a sofa too). Now it was set for the four of them, with decidedly non-IKEA-looking clouded coloured glasses and gold cutlery and, in the middle, a plain stone vase which held peonies. Áine’s eyes lingered on the vase and she thought about Moon and where Moon had been hidden in preparation for their arrival. When she looked up, Laura was watching her, looking faintly flushed. ‘So, yeah,’ she said quickly, ‘that’s the place!’

She gestured for them to sit and they did.

‘You’ve done so much already,’ said Elliott, sounding genuinely impressed.

Alex was facing away from them, at a tiny sink and hob where he was making a kind of chickpea curry. It also contained tofu. Áine thought of Cian and wanted to laugh for no reason, but then she felt mean and swallowed it.

‘We’ve certainly been busy,’ said Alex. He turned back to the table and put down some artisan loaves, still housed in their brown, waxy paper, nodding for them to dig in. Laura jostled against him, retrieving a bottle of wine from a tiny fridge hidden away in a cupboard.

‘It’s all Laura, of course,’ Alex added. ‘She’s the real brains of the operation. And the heart.’

This was another obviously cringe thing to say but Laura didn’t seem to mind. She rolled her eyes but also squeezed Alex’s biceps affectionately through his cable-knit sweater. Next to her, Elliott put his hand on her knee under the table, and Áine thought about saying to him, Why do you keep doing that? Why do you keep doing it when you see them together? Affection is not a competition. But she sipped her wine and didn’t say anything.

They talked differently in a four, differently to how Áine and Laura spoke when they were alone, or Áine and Elliott, or, she suspected, Laura and Alex. Áine ate overpriced crumbly bread and overpriced salted butter from a dedicated butter dish in the middle of the table and thought about how relationships were basically languages, secret and private languages, little worlds made up in a vacuum, with their own subtext and references and jokes and side characters. They talked about safe things, like work and other people they knew. Laura’s older sister, India, had just had her first baby, and they cooed over the pictures on Laura’s phone, agreeing the baby was beautiful and fat and happy, and his name – Oliver – suited him. Laura and Alex talked briefly about the baby names they liked, and Laura joked that it would be a bit tight in here for babies and they said this was just a ‘starter place’ and that in a few years they would buy somewhere ‘real’ and something about ladders. Alex was launching a new app that coincided with the vegan meal kits, and he needed someone to do the copy for the app. Elliott said in a very obvious way that he could ‘ask around’, which was a way of asking Alex to ask him to do it, which he then basically did. Áine told Laura that Cian said he would be back in town soon, that he was saving up to travel across America. ‘Oh,’ said Laura, emptying her glass.

As with all dinner parties, there were some lulls, some awkward moments. When conversation ebbed, Áine found herself inexplicably annoyed by the entire experience. It was demonstrably nice. But it felt like a performance. The selection of European cookbooks, the artfully arranged flowers, the artisan loaves. Even the complaints about the houseboat and the problems they’d come up against in the renovation felt fake. This wasn’t, they kept saying, their ‘forever home’. Other homes opened themselves up to Laura and Alex in the distant future, empty and vaguely affordable, ready for them. They were play-acting at the idea of having to live here. They were playing house, and it bothered Áine. At one point, Alex lamented the fate of his best friend from college, who had just broken up with his girlfriend after buying a three-bedroom house with her in some anonymous suburb.

‘He’s just stuck out there now,’ Alex was saying, ‘rattling about the place, trying to work and not able to work.’ (The man was some sort of artist, which basically meant he did not work.)

‘At least he has the house to rattle around in, eh?’ said Áine, trying to lighten the mood, and Alex looked at her levelly over a spoonful of chickpea curry. It dripped unpleasantly on to his plate.

‘Wealth does not insulate you from pain,’ he said, like he was teaching her something important. Laura cleared her throat.

‘No, it just insulates you from most pain,’ said Áine. It was a deeply irritating, quintessentially American thing to say, she thought. Elliott laughed like she was making a joke.

Apart from that, though, the evening was a pleasant one. The dusk finally became night and Laura put on some tasteful mood lighting. There was a lamp that looked like a monkey, hanging upside down and gripping the bulb like a tangerine. They finished the wine and opened another bottle. Alex cleared away the plates and when he sat back down again he took Laura’s hand in his and they smiled at each other expectantly.

‘The reason we asked you to come, the real reason, is that we have something to tell you both,’ he said.

‘We wanted to tell you both in person because you’re so important to us, it didn’t feel right just to, like, post on Instagram or something. It felt vulgar,’ Laura picked up.

‘Oh god,’ said Áine, and Elliott cut across her and said, ‘Are you getting married?’

And they said ‘Yes!’ in the same dramatic fashion Áine expected they’d said it to each other when Alex got down on one knee and presented Laura with an ethical, lab-grown diamond that was currently being resized. Laura waved her naked hand at them anyway and they all hugged and grinned so hard that it hurt their faces. Well, Áine’s face hurt, at least. Elliott wanted to open a new bottle of prosecco but they found they’d drunk it all and he suggested vaguely returning to the corner shop and trying to procure champagne, which Áine knew neither of them could strictly afford, it being the lean part of the month (post-rent, post-council tax, post-water, post-gas, post-electric, post-internet bill, pre-wages). Luckily, though, Alex and Laura had stowed a bottle away for this exact purpose and they got it out now and popped it and they all whooped. Elliott patted Alex on the back and Laura came to hug her and Áine felt her cheeks wet on her T-shirt when she came close. ‘Of course, you’ll be a bridesmaid, won’t you?’ she asked. ‘I can’t imagine getting married without you.’

‘Of course,’ she said. And then, randomly, she added, ‘Will you change your name?’

Laura and Alex smiled at each other conspiratorially, like they had a secret which only they shared. ‘Probably,’ Laura shrugged, and then, ‘I just think it sounds better. More chic. Wouldn’t you change yours?’

It took Áine a moment to realize she was talking to her, to her and Elliott, to both of them as a couple.

‘Áine Andrews,’ said Alex. ‘It definitely has a ring to it.’

Áine grimaced on instinct, and Elliott laughed quietly and said, ‘Right, thanks for that,’ and she knew this response had been an error.

She wanted to tell him she was only joking, that she’d never thought about it before, the ceding of her before to become his after, but that she would think about it more, that the reaction was involuntary and didn’t mean anything. But the cadence of the conversation had already shifted and now Laura and Alex were talking about places they liked for the ceremony and there was no time for her to say anything at all.

They left not long after the announcement, still hugging each other and grinning and tearful and excited. Once they were in the fresh air Áine realized how drunk Elliott was as he stumbled on the boat and for one terrible moment she was convinced he was going to tumble into the canal with the shopping trolleys and trainers and stolen bikes and anonymous murder victims stuffed into suitcases. She wondered if she would dive in and get him or if they’d just have to phone an ambulance or enlist a stranger going by to help. She wasn’t a strong swimmer. What actually happened was that Alex helped Elliott safely navigate himself back on to dry land and then he called them an Uber and he helped Áine fold Elliott inside, patting the roof gamely and promising the driver that nobody would vomit on the way home. Áine watched Laura and Alex wave them off in the window as the Prius crawled into the darkness, Elliott lightly snoring in the back seat next to her.

When they got home, Elliott leaned on her unsteadily on the way up the path, so heavily it was almost painful. Áine fiddled with her keys, struggling to find the keyhole in the dark, but then the door opened by itself and the man from upstairs stumbled out, just as drunk as Elliott. For the first time she noticed how similarly they dressed, both of them in their long matching coats. A blast of cold air followed him as the door swung open, a stale sort of chill that felt like it had been exhumed from an empty tomb. In the gloom it was almost impossible to distinguish between them, and the smell of spirits hung in the air between the three. They jostled each other without speaking, Elliott and the man clearly too drunk, Áine feeling for some reason frightened into complete silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ she finally managed, her voice small. The man pushed past them both without replying.

‘Why are you apologizing to me?’ Elliott slurred, trying to roll his eyes at her but failing because he could barely open them.

Her shoulder ached. The keys shook in her hand. Elliott lurched when the second door opened into their flat, finally. He collapsed on to the bed, rolled on to his stomach and vomited on the carpet. It was thick and black. When she went to get a bucket for him she found the door still open. She watched it swing back and forth on its rusty hinges. The man was gone.

April

In the aftermath of their drunken night and the mistake she’d made when she accidentally said she didn’t want to marry him, an unnerving harmony settled between Áine and Elliott. It was perhaps down to the fact that both of them were so conflict averse. For this same reason both of them resolutely ignored the unnerving aspect of it and settled down into the harmony, neither especially tempted to discuss the night in question. The morning after he vomited on the carpet, Elliott had decided not to leave early for the office he went to for inspiration, due to his hangover. He made Áine a cup of scalding coffee and said, ‘Sorry,’ and she said, ‘That’s okay.’

After he’d vomited, she’d turned him with great difficulty into the recovery position and sat next to him, biting her nails and breathing through her mouth, until she was reasonably certain he wouldn’t choke to death in the night. Then she went and slept on the sofa.

In the morning, she had gone to him and climbed into his lap awkwardly and her head found a space in his neck that she liked to hide in. ‘I’m sorry too,’ she said against his throat, even though she didn’t know what she was apologizing for.

‘It’s okay,’ said Elliott.

When he untangled himself, she drank the coffee even though it was too milky and too sweet, and showered while he scrubbed vigorously at the mess. He made a good go of it, she had to admit. All of the horrible, worrying blackness and sludge was gone but there was still an almost indistinguishable ring of stain where it had been.

After he’d given up and showered, she watched him dress deliberately unlike the current iteration of himself, putting on jeans and a sweatshirt that he’d found in a vintage shop, which bore the insignia of some anonymous American university. She liked him better when he wasn’t in the adult man cosplay he wore to work, the costume that made her think of the upstairs neighbour, the shiny shoes that pinched his feet and left him blistered and turned her off. He knew that, of course, that’s why he’d picked the jumper to wear even though he’d told her before that everyone else in the office wore a suit. And she’d burned her mouth on sweet milky coffee and that’s how they showed each other that they were sorry, really, and they loved each other, really. She had smiled at his back when he left, and taken her laptop into the living room, because the bedroom smelled of stale coffee and vomit.

Since the move, her commute had become even more ridiculously complicated than before. The fact that they were not on a direct tube line, which had before seemed like an advantage (it made the place cheaper), now revealed itself to be a huge inconvenience (this is why it was cheaper). It took her over an hour to get there, an hour to get back, on two buses each time, and she arrived home after dark in the evenings, flustered and irritated by the whole experience. Recently, Elliott had intervened, gently suggesting alternatives while they lay on top of each other on the sofa one night, watching terrible reality TV, Áine wearing his hoodie and boxers, having been caught, somehow, between buses, in two acute but torrential rainstorms on her way home.

‘You know, if it’s really this stressful for you, we could go somewhere else,’ he murmured into the crown of her head. She felt his breath on her still-damp hair, warm and tingly, and had the disconcerting experience of being both soothed by the tone of his voice and alarmed by the content of what he was saying.

‘What?’ Awkwardly, Áine twisted on the sofa so she was facing him, lying chest to chest. ‘What do you mean? We have a lease.’

Elliott shrugged and Áine moved with the motion. ‘If it’s making you this unhappy …’ He left the end of the statement hanging unsaid between them and Áine felt embarrassed, embarrassed by the obviousness of her inability to cope, of having inadvertently performed her sadness so obviously that he was willing to suggest this demonstrably bad idea that would cost them thousands of pounds which neither of them had. She felt like a sulky teenager all of a sudden. She worried now that she was making his life miserable through the spectacle of her own misery, over stupid, pointless things: The house is haunted, I don’t have any money, I don’t like getting the bus, it’s cold out there, I don’t have any friends in the office any more, I’m lonely. The house is haunted. She went back to that one again. Trying to convince herself it was stupid by looking at it hard and long. She couldn’t quite get to the point of dismissing it.

‘But where would we even go? We were lucky to get this place. I mean – it was so hard to find anywhere. It took us so long. And what if we ask them to leave early and they say no and then they turn on us and they get pissed off and they evict us anyway and we still don’t have anywhere to go, and then we have to find a new deposit and maybe they’ll be so pissed off they won’t give us the deposit back on this place and I still don’t even have my deposit back from Laura’s and – why are you laughing?’

Elliott held up his palms in surrender and she laughed with him, slapping him lightly and repeatedly on his forehead until he pinned her arms down.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I give up –’ he said, and his laugh faded into a soft, concerned expression. ‘You’re right, I know, of course you’re right. I just want to help.’

‘You always help me,’ Áine said, too quietly.

‘If you don’t want to move, why don’t you just ask them if you can work from home all the time? You said your friends were doing it already. Wouldn’t that be a solution? Hmm?’

Áine nodded. Elliott was always geared towards finding the solution, not raking over a problem ad nauseam. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

He even helped her draft the email to her boss, who was almost comically unbothered by the suggestion. Áine wondered if perhaps they had simply forgotten who she was.

And then she began a new life. In the flat. No more buses. No more rain. No more paying for public transport or buying overpriced stale supermarket sandwiches. Instead, every day she moved from the bedroom to the living room and forced herself to sit at her computer and work and chug pints of water, and Elliott checked in on her at lunch, sending pictures of dogs he’d seen on the way to work, asking her if she’d read an article she’d already read, and her saying No send it to me x. She put an alarm on her phone and when it buzzed she took her medication. She was shocked at how quiet the days became, the weeks spreading out in front of her without end or noise or distraction. It was both relaxing and daunting.

When she began to feel the creep of misery and coughing coming on again, or when it felt like the walls were pressing in on her, she made herself get up and walk to the 24/7 organic shop where she spent too much money on tiny biodegradable bottles full of mushed fruit and vegetables. The weather had finally begun to turn, it seemed, after the grey endless wintriness of the past few months. She strolled in circles around the block from the flat to the organic shop, cherry blossoms getting stuck to her jumper and the worn soles of her trainers, avoiding returning to the flat and work. When she couldn’t avoid it any longer, she threw the biodegradable bottles in the recycling bin outside their shared front door, conspicuously so Elliott would see them there on his way home, and sat in the garden on her laptop.

They had not been out here much since moving in – too cold, really – and their abandonment of the space had left it to grow into a kind of feral jungle, even more so than when they moved in. Weeds sprouted between the cracked, jagged paving stones, ivy curled around warped fencing. When the wind blew, leaves touched her and made her shudder. It was too daunting to cut it all back like she’d meant to. She didn’t even have the tools, anyway. But still, she was forcing herself to be out here now, and that was enough. She perched on the step at the back door, the greenery encroaching upon her so much it was hard to see where their garden ended and the neighbours’ began. Being in the space was important, Áine thought, given how much of a fuss she’d kicked up about having a garden in the first place. She wondered if it annoyed Elliott that she’d wanted it and now hadn’t spent any time in it, and toyed with the idea of sending him a happy selfie in the garden so he could see she was being grateful for his efforts in finding a place with the outdoor space she’d wanted so badly. But when she held up the phone it looked all wrong; the weeds surrounding her, the fact that she’d taken off her jumper to show it was getting warmer but her skin was visibly goosepimpled even in the tiny screen. Behind screen Áine a fly buzzed and she jumped and dropped the phone and swore, and then jumped again because she thought distantly above she could hear a high, whinnying laugh. On instinct she looked up towards the neighbours’ flat. A curtain twitched. Did it? A curtain might have twitched. Were they watching? She put the phone away and closed the laptop. She hadn’t spent long in the garden. But still, it was better than sitting inside, she told herself. She was scared to be in there all day. She was scared to be out here all day. She was scared.

A few weeks after her decision to leave the office, there was a work ‘get-together lunch’, the kind of thing that was supposed to make up for not having a Christmas party (cost-saving measures). On the day of the lunch – for further cost-saving reasons, a Monday – Áine woke late and saw Elliott had gone. By the bed she found a note he’d scrawled for her saying Good morning! and I love you!, which he sometimes did if he went to work without bothering to wake her. She kept all of these little notes in a shoebox in the wardrobe and looked at them sometimes when she needed to be reminded that Elliott was the right person to be with, that they were good together. It was a sweet thing to do. Elliott was the first person who had ever done things like this for her. She could never tell if that was evidence of his goodness or evidence of her own poor taste in men. Thinking about it too much was probably spoiling the sentiment of the ‘good morning’ messages, though, negating their romance. She put the note in the box with the others and ran for the bus. There were no seats and so she had to squeeze herself against the window and stand while drafting another email to Jack S, more pointed this time.

Hello Jack. It’s Áine again. Did you get my last email? Would it be better to put us in touch with the landlord directly? I don’t want to be bothering you too much.

The Landlord was an anonymous figure that the letting agency had promised they would deal with on behalf of Áine and Elliott for the entire tenancy. Sometimes Áine thought about how much he knew about the two of them (the things they spent money on from their printed-out bank statements, how long they’d been together, where they’d lived before, how much money they both made, whether their parents could be guarantors) and how little they knew about him, or her, the anonymous spectral gombeen that sucked up all of their capital, and it made her briefly and furiously annoyed. It was probably for the best that she had no information, though. It made her no less annoyed, historically speaking, when she was able to look up their names and glare at photos of them found through Google. Once she’d rented a place with Laura where the landlord was a girl their own age and it had consumed Áine’s thoughts for months on end. She found the woman on Instagram and went through her tagged photos until she found a school reunion post, through which she deduced that the woman had attended a public school which cost upwards of £30,000 a year to attend. When she complained to Laura about this, Áine found her surprisingly unmoved by the discovery, except for being amused enough to say she should retrain as a private detective.

After sending the email, she deleted it again from her sent folder. A message came through from someone at work, a kind of friend that she hadn’t seen in person in a long time. The message asked when she’d be arriving at the restaurant. Today was supposed to be jolly, but clearly everyone was worried it would actually be one of those ominously important ‘all company’ meetings where their bosses promised to unveil big changes and new announcements, and which often meant they’d simply run out of money and loads of people would end up sacked.

The sales exec had texted Cant wait to see u today I’m literally going out of my mind with boredom lol. She had recently moved to some tiny village in Kent, the kind of place where people cared deeply about using cash and had a year-round war memorial. Over the past year or so several of the people she worked with had slowly but surely begun to move away from the city, to recontextualize their lives, to place work lower on the totem pole of importance and identity, to work from home, to spend more time embracing domesticity.

Áine wrote Me too x and then closed WhatsApp and scrolled aimlessly as the bus lurched from side to side. She read a story about a terraced house in London that was less than nine foot wide and had been put on the market for £1.3 million. All the people in the comments were really angry.

It was making her anxious, thinking about how long it was since she’d been with the entire company at once. Months. Crowds made her nervous. There would be too much to catch up on – everyone had seemingly decided to totally change their lives in the last six or so months – and she worried about what she looked like now compared to what she’d looked like before. It was difficult to conceptualize this, to compare whether she was fatter or thinner or whether the rings under her eyes were darker and more pronounced. She’d been sick a lot, and taken a lot of sick days, so there was the anxiety of looking both sick enough to justify that but not too sick for the lunch or the position itself.

The night before, she had been unable to sleep with the anxiety and got up at 4 a.m. to take a series of straight-faced mirror selfies in the gloom, standing in her underwear and zooming in on the reflection until her body turned to pixels. It was freezing cold in the bedroom, the only light coming from her camera, the dark mornings refusing to shift and lighten as though out of spite.

‘What are you doing?’ Elliott had said groggily from the bed when the flash accidentally went off.

‘Nothing.’

Making her hair look presentable for the purpose of this lunch had been a particular struggle. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d properly washed it, nor when she’d last brushed it free of tangles. Most of the time it was lank and pulled back, clogged with oil and dry shampoo and held in place with stretched-out ties and sheer force of will. It was a daunting, stressful process. The shower ran ice cold and scalding, and her arms hurt from holding them above her head too long, and her head spun, and she sat down in the bath to finish shaving her legs, leaving little nicks, strawberry marks in between milk. It took two sessions to detangle – she stopped in between to drink coffee for sustenance and motivation – and left a ball of dark hair in the bin, pulled out of her ruined brush. It looked like a rat’s nest. Afterwards, she ran her fingers through the result and felt it drip down her back and on to the floor. Towards the back, her fingers found a single grey strand. More white than grey, actually. Pure white. She caught it easily amongst the dark and it glinted under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the bathroom. She pulled it out and it hurt for a second and then she regretted it. There was that old wives’ tale, wasn’t there, that if you pulled out a grey hair ten more grew in its place? Was it age grey or fear white? Stress white? She held it up to the light and looked at it until it blurred but there wasn’t an answer.

After the bus, she had to change to a train, which was even more full of people. She texted Elliott about how busy it was – a picture of the platform with a stream of angry face emojis – but he didn’t reply. He had a lot of meetings during the day, was what he told her when this happened. His job was very important. He couldn’t always be on his phone. ‘Okay,’ Áine had replied when he said this. ‘Sorry.’ They spent much of their time together being contrite. When she thought about it, most of their recent conversations had been punctuated by apologies.

That entire week after the surprise engagement party that was meant to be a dinner party, Elliott was so contrite and apologetic about being sick that it made Áine almost embarrassed. He had insisted on taking them out to dinner to really drive home the apology. She wore one of Elliott’s old American university hoodies and he wore the terrible full-length coat and they huddled outside the pub, the one so close to their flat, so convenient, and shivered, and ate chicken wings and truffle fries and olives, because neither of them had realized there wasn’t a proper menu. She had forgotten what it was like to be with Elliott outside of the heavy energy of the flat. Seeing him in the world like this reminded her that they both existed in it, and that she loved how he would strike up conversations with strangers in any setting or how he’d always walk on the part of the road closest to the pavement so she was safe from everything and nothing. And that he was funny. They even managed to laugh together about that night and how she had kept trying to wake him up in the Uber, to convince the poor driver he wouldn’t throw up on his back seats. They laughed about how ostentatious the cookbook in the middle of the table was. She had forgotten Elliott could laugh at people, had forgotten that he wasn’t fully good and that she, consequently, didn’t have to be the one that was fully bad.

‘It was a fun night, though,’ he’d said finally, when their plates had been cleared. ‘It was nice just being with them.’

‘Yeah,’ Áine had agreed. She felt like saying it was nice also to be out of the flat with Elliott, to hang out like they used to, to have a date. A date in the romantic sense, not a date as in a note on the calendar for future social occasions they’d have to endure – the christenings, the weddings, the engagements – without actually wanting to. But maybe Elliott would think she was having a go if she said that. So instead she just said ‘Yeah’, which was safer.

‘We should do it, I think.’

She looked at him over her glass. ‘Get married?’ she said, and was relieved when he laughed.

‘Have a dinner party, idiot.’

This was a better suggestion. And Áine agreed to organizing one of their own. A dinner party that was, not a wedding.

In the end, her worrying over the lunch was basically for nothing. It was all kind of fine. Áine sat at the end of a long table in the room the company had hired out in a tacky-on-purpose Italian deli in the city, in a random part of town. It turned out it had been chosen because their managing director’s brother-in-law had invested in it. Nobody was supposed to know this was why the restaurant was chosen, so naturally everyone was gossiping about it ferociously. She picked at gnocchi and listened to the conversations of people around her buzzing like bluebottles. The announcement, it turned out, was not that they were all being laid off, but that the offices were moving further out of the city, the opposite end of the city to Áine’s flat, in fact. The new offices would be smaller and ‘more affordable’, her bosses said. This, in many ways, simply felt like a precursor to sackings, but nonetheless it was a relief. Their working situation would be more ‘flexible’, it was promised. Hot-desking instead of permanent positions. No need to come in at all unless you wanted to if your job could be done from home. Several people seemed very pleased with this situation. Áine shifted uncomfortably in her seat and surreptitiously looked at maps on her phone.

After the speech, things were lighter, though, easier. It felt good to remember that a world existed and she could be in it. Her line manager had managed to procure a puppy, which was lately a very expensive feat, and she gushed and complained in equal measure about what it had done to her life and living room. She passed around her phone so they could all look at videos of the puppy bouncing around on a vast corner sofa of crushed grey velvet, chewing into a duck-feather pillow. It was a little cockapoo called Mabel. Very cute, they all agreed.

Next to her, the sales exec who had WhatsApped Áine was talking about moving to the countryside and how it was surprisingly very well connected to London for things like this. Her husband also worked at the company. He did the payroll. He nodded sagely when she talked about how the trains went directly into central London, and how they didn’t have a Tesco near them, just an independent health food shop.

‘London was far too stressful for us, we just realized,’ he said, as though this was something nobody else had discovered. ‘We were having such bad anxiety.’

His wife, the sales executive, smiled at him. They’d met at work and fallen for each other, something Áine often liked to joke about with Elliott.

‘Really uncouth to fuck someone from work,’ she would say to him when they saw the couple on Instagram, collecting wild garlic or putting up a print from a local artist or something, just to make Elliott laugh.

‘God, yeah,’ he would say back. ‘So cliché.’

After lunch, everyone hung around for drinks – these things usually descended into being quite boozy – and the sales exec came to the toilets with Áine and asked her about her new flat (fine) and if she wanted cocaine (sure). She’d accidentally moved to the new cottage with a small bag left in her purse, she explained, and now it was stuck out there in this countryside idyll and she wanted to get rid of it. ‘Sure,’ Áine said again, and they locked themselves in a cubicle and sat side by side on top of the cistern as the sales exec tapped out two long skinny lines on the cracked screen of her iPhone. Before she’d moved out to the countryside with her husband, the sales exec had been a lot more fun.

‘Thanks,’ the sales exec said, sniffing. ‘Christ, it was making me too anxious having it. I thought I’d just bring it with me and get rid of it here.’

‘Why didn’t you just flush it?’ Áine asked, passing the bag back, but the sales exec held up a palm.

‘Seemed like a waste. You keep it.’

‘You sure? I don’t really do it any more either.’

‘Still, though, can’t have it in the house.’

‘You want one more?’

‘Nah, probably shouldn’t,’ the sales exec said, dusting off her phone. It had an elaborate shock-proof case. A sudden notification pinged: a little pink cartoon baby reminding her to have sex later that day because she was ovulating.

When she got home later, Áine still felt vaguely buzzed and decided not to tell Elliott why. She didn’t want to jeopardize all that lingering harmony. He would be annoyed, she thought. I don’t want to make him annoyed. I will drink some water and he won’t notice, she told herself. She was so busy telling herself this that she only realized when she put her keys on the table that the man from upstairs was in the living room, looking at her like he wanted to kill her.

He was standing there amongst her things in her house with the unsafe shared front door and she thought for a second that she would die and his eyes were bugged with anger and there was a vein protruding in his neck and his fists were clenched by his sides and she screamed then, she actually screamed, and she dropped her tote bag and the contents of it spilled out, exposing her. Near-empty packet of cigarettes she didn’t smoke. Near-empty bag of cocaine she didn’t do. Near-empty packet of pills she didn’t take when she was meant to take them, the tablets themselves crushed and loose against the canvas of her bag. The last vestiges of her anxious colleague’s gummy coke throbbed inside the veins in her arms and her heart thudded unpleasantly fast, but the adrenaline, rather than doing anything useful, had rooted her to the spot. Here was the man inside her flat and she was terrified and panicked, and all she could do was scream and gasp rather than fight him off or call for help or stand her ground. Panic clouded her vision and she could see his coat and his anger but she couldn’t make his face into anything that made sense. It appeared to her in flashes and parts. Angry teeth. Narrowed eyes. White knuckles. Here was the man stomping into her home after stomping around upstairs and she couldn’t breathe and the fear was hot and she was sweating, but part of that was maybe the cocaine too.

And Elliott said, ‘What the fuck, Aine,’ and she realized it was not the man from upstairs at all, it was Elliott in his coat, Elliott wearing his grown-up clothes, or it had been the man and now it was Elliott, and his face was Elliott’s face and the man opened his mouth but it was Elliott saying ‘What the fuck’ and taking her by the shoulders and it was the man’s hand over her mouth and it was Elliott’s too and the screaming stopped.

‘It’s me,’ he kept saying. ‘Calm down, it’s me.’

And then, when she did calm down, Elliott absorbed the uncalm energy and they screamed at each other. Jack S had replied to him, not Áine, and the whole thread had revealed itself to Elliott, and Jack S was not happy about the vagueness and the hostility of the email, especially not so close to when the rent was due, and Elliott was saying ‘Six emails? Six fucking emails?’ Although she could only remember sending two.

‘I told you to wait,’ Elliott said, in a sort of shout-whisper because, Áine imagined, he had realized that the neighbours upstairs could hear them screaming at each other.

He must be embarrassed, she thought.

‘I told you to give it a chance and you went behind my back –’

‘I did give it a chance but –’

‘You went behind my back and I’m speaking.’

Elliott had moved his hand from her mouth but he raised it as though he meant to cover it again and then thought better of it. They didn’t often fight. They both avoided conflict like this, in fact. And when they did argue, she came away feeling humiliated and totally at fault, as though she’d goaded him against his better, sweeter, kinder nature to fight with her, as though something in her was rotten and ugly and could turn calm people into angry people like this. She wished in these instances that he would do something extreme. That he would shout instead of whisper or hold his hand over her mouth, and sometimes she wished he would hit her because then she could be upset afterwards, unequivocally. She could say: Look, look, it’s not my fault this time.

When she thought things like this, Áine found herself overcome with guilt and wondered whether Laura would say wanting someone to abuse you disbarred you from being a feminist. Elliott had never, would never, be physical like that. He had gone through a period of choking her when they had sex, but only at the start, and while she’d never specifically said she was into this type of thing, she didn’t blame him for doing it anyway. It was the era when the general ethos around sex was that everyone liked to be choked or spanked or slapped, and he did do this once, he drew back and slapped her across the face, and she said nothing about it because she imagined he thought it would be sexy and she didn’t want to embarrass him, and anyway, being hit like that didn’t count. Laura believed that expecting women to be into this kind of thing sexually was also bad feminism. It wasn’t empowering, Laura said, to beg someone to hurt you and then pretend you enjoyed it. But when she said this, Áine told her that it was vanilla to believe so. She didn’t really think that either, but it was something Cian had once said and she’d absorbed it like a malignant tumour.

Elliott didn’t hit her now and instead she said, ‘You don’t believe me that something’s weird about it here and –’

‘Listen to yourself, Aine,’ Elliott said, and he wasn’t shouting any more but he was speaking very calmly and carefully and in a way that was scarier. ‘You sound fucking insane. You sound really crazy. It’s not the flat, you’re just sick!’

‘Only because it’s so gross in here,’ she said quickly, deciding he meant sick in the physical sense because if he meant anything else it was too horrible to engage with. ‘Only because it’s damp and horrible. I’m sick because of the flat.’

He spun on his heel to walk away from her then for some sort of dramatic effect and tripped on the contents of her bag splayed across the floor and said, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ and kicked away the near-empty pill packet that had been lost in its depths. His eyes scanned the baggie and the cigarettes and his jaw clenched and then unclenched and he said nothing and she was glad of that. The pill packet was a familiar one, and she was glad too that it wasn’t full, because maybe then Elliott would think she was taking her Prescription as she was supposed to, when in reality the tablets had just come loose and dislodged at the bottom of her bag. She heard them rattling around inside the lining on the train sometimes, and she thought Oh in a remote way, and sometimes she fished one out. And sometimes the train was too busy or she was too tired and she didn’t bother. Elliott looked at the packet and at her and said, ‘You’re being fucking crazy. It’s not ghosts, Aine. It’s not haunted.’

It was the first time either of them had said those words. Áine heard them and then heard the ridiculousness of them, said out loud with a proper name on them. She cringed. He kicked the pill packet back at her in a Here, pick it up way, not a I hope this hurts way, she thought.

‘It’s not the house, it’s you. You’re just sick, that’s all. You’re sick.’

She picked up the packet and went into the bedroom and closed the door and lay on the nightmarish wrought-iron bed and faced the wall because she thought she might cry and she didn’t want Elliott to see her crying. The wind from this morning had not abated. It clattered the windows. Even covered in her film of sweat, she could feel that the room was freezing. Áine crawled under the duvet in her outside clothes and shivered, squeezing her eyes tight shut like a child, listening to the house groan and creak around her, breathing through her mouth but refusing to look to see if it became mist in front of her face, proving it really was as cold as it felt. The branches scratched at the glass. The duvet was thin and bobbly. She didn’t cry, in the end. He didn’t come to bed.

The harmony left then. It was replaced by a vague sense of unease. Constant unease. During the day she lay on top of their bed, feeling uneasy, pretending to work on the laptop. At night she lay under the covers in the exact same position and thrashed. The nightmares had been there for years. Coming and going. Áine hadn’t had them since the early days of uni, when she would wake up in a cold sweat, finding herself out of the bed and holding a mug in the shared kitchen, all of the lights switched off, terrified for a second and wondering where she was. Or once when she slept with a boy after a night out and endured the humiliation of him shoving her awake in the early hours of the morning, telling her she was whimpering in her sleep and panting and he had to get up very early for work, actually, so could she stop that? And before that when she was a child, waking up in the little grey box room with her hands over her face, her fists inside her own mouth, dreaming of little white coffins and her locked inside them, scratching frantically to get out. And once after uni, too, the time she stayed at a boy’s house and woke up to find that he’d gone to work and that she’d ripped down all the posters on his wall while asleep, and she had to leave quickly and block his number and tell herself to never think about it. The nightmares came at periods of great stress in her life but if anyone asked, and nobody ever had, Áine would pretend they were unpredictable and kind of funny in a way, and that everyone got terrors occasionally when they surrendered to sleep, didn’t they?

While sleep had never come easy in the new bed (‘Hardly “new” now,’ Elliott kept saying when she affixed the descriptor to anything related to the flat), lately it had been impossible. The mattress was lumpy and the old-fashioned springs dug into the small of Áine’s back. Anytime Elliott stirred next to her, the entire thing creaked and squealed, and she could never understand why it didn’t wake him up when it was so intolerably loud. If she rearranged the pillows or reached for the wire of her phone and accidentally brushed her fingers against the cold rusted metal of the frame, she cringed. It was the same feeling as listening to felt-tip markers on paper or grinding teeth. The longer she lay awake, the louder and creepier the room became. The squeaking of their mattress’s springs became reedy laughter. Her eyes darted between the dark corners, half expecting someone to leap out at her. Elliott’s breath blew hot and sticky on her skin. She sweated. She googled ‘night sweats’ and convinced herself she was dying. She tried counting her breaths, being in her body, all the things Laura had told her to do when she got stressed and experienced what Laura called ‘dissociation’, but the breaths didn’t work. She could feel her heart racing, lying still with the vitals of someone being hunted for sport. Everyone said blue light was bad for you, but the darkness felt worse. She clutched her phone to her chest, pressing the little button on the side so it intermittently lit up, but the glow only illuminated and threw into relief the strange shadows of the room and made her more scared.

She scrolled for hours, willing sleep to come, reading angry Instagram infographics posted by people she went to university with about the number of rental homes in Ireland (853 across all thirty-two counties) or threads about people who had been caught DM-ing other people behind their partner’s back and whether this constituted cheating (she thought no). Sometimes she’d be right on the edge of it but still sleep would tease her, flitting in and out in an unreal way. She’d be staring at the mottled paint on the ceiling and suddenly the paint would become dark brown, rancid, last-day-of-her-period blood, and it would spread from the centre, the naked hanging bulb, all down the walls. It seeped into the carpet and she would hang over the side of the bed to stop it, to blot at it with her hands and stop it stealing their deposit with its unwashable stains, and then she’d open her eyes and find herself half twisted out of the sweaty sheets, her palms pressed into the rough, dusty, unstained carpet, and realize it was a dream, she was just dreaming.

Once she woke slick with sweat and pulled back the covers to find them stained with her own blood, and the panic rose once more. Dream? Or not dream? To check, she pressed her fingernails into the top of her thighs until it hurt, to check if it would hurt. It hurt. Her mind was fast when she couldn’t sleep. It jumped from place to place. She needed to change the sheets. She needed to buy a calendar. She needed to paint the ceiling. No, stop. That part was a dream. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

The night after this, Áine drank Nytol without believing it would make a difference but found that sleep came surprisingly easily. She sank into the mattress, literally sank, her limbs melting into the springs of the duvet and twisting themselves around the slats underneath, her blood like warm milk. She dripped herself between the slats and on to the carpet and she slithered out, and in her milky, unreal form she floated from the bedroom to the kitchen, feeling lucid and calm and totally devoid of the usual anxiety she felt when she went anywhere near the mould and the dark and the beneath of the basement door. Her dream arms were splayed out and her nails scratched the flaky paint of the wall and it felt good under her skin. She turned on the taps and the water flowed warm and thick on her hands, and the dirty dishes Elliott had left there before bed clinked pleasantly under the drips, playing a light, syncopated tune. She tapped out a rhythm on a sauce-covered plate with a kitchen knife and hummed and she heard the hum in her waking, small sleep-voice, still safe in the bed. She twirled at the sink, holding the kitchen knife like a wand, and floated back to the room, and then she was scared, in the dream and in the bed, because she could see herself in the bed and could see another self, a third Áine, standing at the edge of the bed and dripping wet and holding the kitchen knife out in front of her and humming, and she leapt forward to tackle the third Áine and kill her because she was tired, so so tired, and she needed the sleep, but the third Áine turned to face her and smiled, and Elliott sat up in the bed and she opened her eyes and she was the third Áine and she was holding the kitchen knife and he was breathing hard and he was scared, she could see that, really scared, and she couldn’t remember when she’d woken up and when she’d got out of the bed and someone said: ‘I think I’m inside a nightmare. I’m sorry.’

May

As Laura and Alex had instigated the dinner party tradition amongst their now coupled-up and cohabitating group of four, Elliott said it made sense for them to repay the favour and host their own one for Áine’s friends first rather than his. Áine thought that this was pretty sneaky actually, because it meant they could test out their hosting skills on people she knew to perfect any mistakes before making the leap to his own friendship group. But it was serendipitous really. Laura had been asking to come over to the flat, to see it properly and go for a coffee or to a Pilates class – she’d recently become an ardent follower of reformer Pilates, as well as barre, spin and a host of other fitness activities that were for some reason ludicrously expensive on a class-by-class basis – and also to see if it was ‘really that bad’, referring to the hints Áine had been drip-feeding her for the past four months about the mould and the dirt and the strangeness of the place. Áine suspected Laura thought she was doing this to make her feel guilty – which was partially true – for ending the lease on their place, which had been warm and friendly and unstrange and relatively mouldless, at least for the city they lived in.

So the dinner party was as good an opportunity as any to prove that she was being honest and not simply spiteful. They made a plan for two weekends away and Áine set about googling recipes that were both unfuck-up-able and cheap and what Elliott would call ‘aesthetic’, meaning it as an adjective rather than a noun, while Laura found a barre-mix class for them to attend together the following day. It would help with their wine hangovers, she promised. They could make a weekend of it. Áine suspected she wanted to talk about the wedding too. She had been WhatsApping more often since the night on the boat, showing Áine pictures of things she found tacky when other people did them, and ideas for how to avoid the tackiness at her own wedding. ‘Sure,’ said Áine, both to the class and to the majority of the messages.

It was true also that she would rather host her own friends than Elliott’s. Elliott’s friends were nice enough, of course, but they made her anxious and she wasn’t quite sure why. They were very different, maybe that’s what it was. If anyone had asked, she would have said: we’re just different people. Elliott’s friends liked barbecues, fantasy football, macramé, Facebook, the crying laughing emoji, burrata, heterosexuality, Lewis Capaldi, the help-to-buy scheme. They were all in couples and some of them were already married and a few of them already had children, bald squealing little things they sometimes brought to parties and weddings but more often than not used as an excuse to avoid the parties and weddings. They posted Instagram photos of completed puzzles and they all had interchangeable, Labrador-ish-looking dogs and unironically did hashtags like ‘adoptdontshop’. When she and Elliott had been together for a few months, all of the wives and girlfriends added her into a group chat called ‘Nip Slips’ and the name was never explained and they only ever used it when Elliott and the boyfriends went away on a weekend together, when they would post lots of jokey complaints about them getting drunk and shitting themselves, and Áine always felt too embarrassed to comment so most of the time she thought they must hate her and think she thought she was better than them, which wasn’t really true. Sometimes at parties she would look at Elliott’s friends discreetly and wonder how he fitted in with them when he seemed so different to her, different when they were alone. She wondered what he was like when she wasn’t around, and what he was like when he was alone, apart from them all. A part of her hoped the dinner party was enough of a disaster that they would never repeat it and she wouldn’t have to host Elliott’s friends ever, at all.

Perhaps that was why she invited Cian too. She tacked him on to Laura and Alex, telling Elliott that he was back in town and had been nagging her to hang out. She phrased it in this way, as though it was a favour she was doing for an old friend she didn’t like any more. ‘Might as well just get it over with,’ she’d said, texting Cian the invite while Elliott was getting dressed for work one morning.

She watched Elliott frown at himself in the mirror and fumble with one of the buttons on his shirt, but out loud he said, ‘Yeah, whatever, fine. Invite him if you want.’ So she did.

In the run-up to the rearranged date – Laura kept postponing, citing work and savings and a running club she’d joined to ‘fit into her dress’ – Áine continued to get sicker. She continued to thrash at night, to wake up terrified, to spend all her days grey and knackered. To cough. She was sicker than she’d been while living with Laura, sicker than when she’d been going to the office every day, breathing in the smog and germs of rush-hour public transport, sicker even than when she had been at university, living on mouldy toast and Diet Cokes. The only time she could recall being this sick, the kind of low-level constant illness she felt now, waking up wheezing, unable to smell or breathe, her eyes streaming, her chest heavy and cavernous, coughing daggers continuously, was when she was a small child in the box room of the house. And that had been because of the house, the doctors and health visitors had practically told her mother so. So it must be because of the house now too.

Elliott had little time for this theory. He remained healthy, even on the weekends when he was actually in the place, even though he ventured down to the basement when Áine refused to, saying it was too damp and would aggravate her respiratory system. ‘What’s the point of having it when we don’t use it?’ Elliott would laugh, descending the groaning steps and disappearing into the darkness. She waited on the top step, the hair on her arms tingling, looking down into the black mouth of the cellar. She could hear Elliott rumbling about, see the light of his phone illuminating the slick walls. Somewhere something was dripping, and she used the noise as a metronome, counting the seconds before Elliott would come back and she could shut the door and forget about the room altogether. If she didn’t look at it, it wouldn’t exist.

It became his place, their place really, for putting the things they didn’t want to think about or look at every day (the empty box that housed the PlayStation, the tennis rackets and golf clubs Elliott had insisted on bringing with him when he moved despite the fact Áine had never seen him play either, Áine’s cumbersome wheelie suitcase that she would use to go home every Christmas and sometimes Easter but often not). He thought she was silly for not going into the basement, she knew this, but still she couldn’t bring herself to go near it. She stood far back when he went down there, gripping the edge of the kitchen table, watching the black hole left by the door, like some sort of cavernous maw, until he finally returned, rolling his eyes affectionately at her. ‘There’s no need to be so dramatic, Ain.’

Elliott’s theory was that she was sick because she wasn’t looking after herself. She wore thin, short T-shirts at home, huddled under scratchy blankets, shivering with the curtains closed. She deprived herself of vitamin D and – though neither of them admitted it – both of them knew she was still smoking in the garden, even more so now than when she was at the office, where she would smoke at lunch and spray herself with perfume before coming home so Elliott wouldn’t find out. She had been hiding the cigarette butts under a smashed plant pot and spraying herself with even more perfume when she returned in an attempt to save face. She would dash into the garden before Elliott was due to come home to dispose of the hidden butts in the bin outside, but sometimes she’d worry he’d already discovered her hiding place because she couldn’t find them under the plant pot. Other times there were twice as many as she remembered smoking, and she’d stare down at them feeling sick, wondering if there was someone else sneaking around in the jungle of weeds and mud and ivy that was their outside space, smoking too, hiding from her. Sometimes the man upstairs smelled strongly of cigarettes. Áine tried not to think about it. Sometimes she would allow herself to have one more, just to calm herself down from this spiralling paranoia, and then feel worse about her willpower and ill health.

In her defence, she did try. She’d buy spinach in the morning, intending to make smoothies, and by the time Elliott came home in the evening it would be sagging and wilting on the table. She put apples in a bowl on the table and immediately flies would buzz around them like vultures. Kiwis would turn to mulch in her hands or her mouth, making her gag and killing her appetite for the rest of the day. She knew not to tell him that it wasn’t right, how quickly everything died here. That the energy of the house felt deliberately formulated to repel life. She thought about the congealing meat in the neighbours’ bin when they’d arrived. ‘Try frozen instead,’ Elliott suggested.

But eventually even he had to admit that the cough was becoming unbearable, enough to warrant a reluctant trip to the doctor to beg for antibiotics and endure an inevitable lecture about antibiotic resistance and how they wouldn’t work anyway. Elliott said she couldn’t host a dinner party, not with a cough like that. The cough, along with the nightmares, made sleeping impossible. Sometimes she’d be so exhausted from the night-time hacking and gagging that Áine would be unsure whether she was asleep or awake at all. Frequently she opened her eyes to see a figure standing at the end of the wrought-iron bed, staring at her in the darkness, and she’d be frozen in fear for a few minutes until she realized it was only Elliott, probably.

So she set about the gargantuan task of arranging a trip to the doctor. Like many people, Áine hated going to the doctor. And the ordeal and the inconvenience of it meant she didn’t go often. As it happened, she was still at the same doctor she’d registered with when she first moved in with Laura, five houses ago, and so getting an appointment and attending it necessitated a journey to the opposite end of the city, two trains and a short walk. She wasn’t technically meant to schedule dentist and doctor’s appointments during the work day (an unspoken rule) but secretly she was glad to be out of the house that afternoon, glad to be travelling across the city and in the energy of the world again. Lately, the empty flat had become so oppressive to her that she’d been neglecting her work even more than usual, setting her status as ‘online’ and then crouching in the freezing garden, half-heartedly pulling up weeds and smoking. Now that the weather was turning she kept telling herself she’d tackle it; that she’d find gardening came naturally to her and was deeply therapeutic. But the place was wilder than she’d anticipated. Áine wasn’t sure how far back the garden actually went, and she couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to explore and confirm this. It would just mean more work, more weeds. She felt bad about it. More often she’d lie on their macabre iron-wrought bed, moving her fingers on the mousepad intermittently so it would seem like she was working while talking to Cian on the phone for hours.

He had been back at home for a while, living with his parents after an extended trip to Canada, saving up before returning to London. He intended to sleep on his friends’ sofas and work at festivals until the season ended, when he would go on to visit America with the money. Beyond that, he had no plans. Áine would listen to him outline this and feel jealous but also proud of her own decisions. She wanted to sound fun and spontaneous but sleeping on other people’s already second-hand sofas, living out of a holdall, camping by choice, it sounded like hell on earth. Maybe not five years ago, but now it did. She didn’t tell Cian that because she thought he might think she was boring and, in return, out of the same kindness, he didn’t tell her he thought she’d become boring. Instead they stuck to more neutral ground, which was mainly making fun of Laura and Alex and everyone else they knew.

She was generally wary and sceptical of modern medicine, a mentality not shared by her parents who were and had always been voracious supporters of the pharmaceutical industry in all its painkilling and tranquillizing guises. Áine liked to complain about the sagging, ruinous state of the health service in a moralistic way. She despaired over its systematic decimation by right-wing politicians, but it only felt good to do this in an abstract way. When she actually had to experience the sagging, ruinous health care first-hand she was frustrated by it and found herself wanting to snap at nurses and receptionists even though she knew it wasn’t their fault. She wondered if this made her a bad person. It took nearly a week to get the appointment, speaking to brusque receptionists who demanded to know what the problem was themselves and scheduling it weeks away and seemingly on purpose at a random and inconvenient time. She didn’t mind, naturally, but what about people who did mind? This was the kind of thing she would tweet, angrily, if she was that sort of person. What about the people who couldn’t leave their jobs in the middle of the day? she would say. What then? Generally she only interacted with doctors when absolutely necessary, which was usually to refill her Prescription, which she did, they always pointed out, too haphazardly to get any benefit from anything they prescribed her.

There had been an incident once years before, a particularly bad break-up that wasn’t even a break-up. If you asked her now, she wouldn’t even be able to remember anything noteworthy about the man who had caused such heartache. Arranging his features in her memory was like looking at someone through frosted glass. Once he had held her by the neck in a train station during an argument. Once he had accused her of sleeping with one of his friends (which she had not done) and said that if she did that (she hadn’t) he would kill himself (he didn’t). She couldn’t remember a single thing they had in common, but at the end of their short and sordid affair, all she could do for an entire summer was lie in bed, rereading their old chat history and eating pickled onion Monster Munch. ‘I think,’ she’d told Laura during this time, ‘that he was the love of my life.’ And Laura had said, ‘Right,’ and arranged for her to see a doctor – she called herself, at 8.30 a.m. every morning until she got an appointment for Áine, and then she chased up that appointment with great pains to make it into a referral – in order to pursue a course of therapy.

Some people, Laura amongst them, were big believers in therapy. The referral had taken a long time to come through, and in the interim Laura had offered to pay privately. Áine said she didn’t believe in paying for health care even though really she would have just felt too guilty to take her up on the offer. When finally she did get to the top of the list, though, she found the type of therapy offered by an anonymous trainee psychiatrist in a community centre near their flat to be almost comically unhelpful. The pain had settled into a more normal, quotidian misery by then anyway, and Áine felt retrospectively ashamed of its intensity. When she thought of the texts she’d sent the man, she cringed. The thought of having sex with him was deeply embarrassing. Both these things were usually a sign that the infatuation had passed. She went to the appointment anyway, mainly out of some sort of morbid curiosity.

‘Imagine your feelings are a tree, the branches right down to the roots,’ a cheerful woman with a pink buzz cut had said, showing Áine a series of worksheets and asking her to try out some breathing exercises. ‘When you feel too overwhelmed,’ she’d finally said at the end of the session, ‘try some self-care activities. Have a lovely warm bath or a nice cup of tea.’ ‘Thanks,’ Áine had said. After that she only pretended to attend the next eleven sessions, feeling bad about wasting resources and justifying the guilt with annoyance over the fact that they’d only allocated her twelve sessions to begin with and never even followed up when she stopped showing up to them. She was caught out occasionally afterwards when Laura tried to instil the tenets of CBT into their day-to-day lives. Once at a day festival Áine had overdone it and panicked and pressed Laura’s hand into her throat, urging her to feel her heart rate and determine if it was normal or if death was imminent. Laura had refused to do so, instead holding her by the shoulders by the portaloos, asking her to name five things she could see, four things she could touch, three things she could hear, two things she could smell and one thing she could taste.

At the appointment, the doctor was not like the pink-haired well-meaning health worker Áine had seen before. He was younger than she was, which felt weird, and he seemed frazzled and rushed, which he probably was. He didn’t even look at her when he called her name in the reception, just read it off the iPad he was carrying and then walked back towards his surgery, expecting her to follow him. He said ‘Annie Ward’ but that was as close as she ever got here, and it was good enough, so she followed him.

On TV, doctors always asked ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ but he didn’t ask, just read off the screen what she’d already told the receptionist, and then asked her to remove her T-shirt and listened to her breathing with a cold stethoscope that made her wince. In the quiet, stale little room on the folded bed she heard the wheeze and rattle of her chest, watching herself in the mirror opposite. Her ribs strained against skin when she inhaled and exhaled. Her skin was mottled and pale. The hair on her arms was dark and fuzzy. Her veins were bright and blue. There was a greening, purple bruise on her collarbone and she couldn’t remember where she’d got it from. She looked thinner than usual and scarier than usual and realized in a detached way that she kind of enjoyed this. Sometimes she looked in the mirror and for a split-second she didn’t recognize herself, and then she thought, hello, there you are. She didn’t mention anything except for the cough and the chest, and he didn’t ask. You were only meant to raise one issue for each ten-minute appointment anyway.

‘You can put your shirt back on now, Annie,’ said the child with the stethoscope, and he prescribed her a short course of antibiotics and recommended a healthy diet and lots of exercise and told her that her Prescription hadn’t been filled in too long and to go to the pharmacy after this appointment to pick up her tablets. She did do this, which felt responsible, and she shoved the paper bag they gave her into her stained canvas tote bag and made a vague plan to add an alarm to her phone so she remembered to take everything on time. She already had one, but when it went off she always hit snooze until she got annoyed enough to hit stop and forget about it instead. But maybe two alarms would work, the second one reminding her not to hit snooze on the first, because it was important. She had never been good at remembering to take medication. There’d been several pregnancy scares with pickled onion Monster Munch man, in fact, before she’d decided that she’d better just get an IUD instead. It was an incredibly painful procedure – you would imagine so, having a piece of plastic filled with hormones shoved inside you – but the nurse described it as ‘light pressure’ so she didn’t feel like she could complain and had stared at the ceiling biting on the inside of her cheeks until she tasted blood. Now she didn’t need to remember to take the pill and she also didn’t have to pretend to care enough about the environment to forgo tampons for a mooncup.

On the train back Áine sat with her forehead against the window, gazing into some new flats that had just been built by the river. They had floor-to-ceiling windows and every room was filled with exercise bikes and bright plastic toys. She arrived home to a vaguely official-looking letter, with the estate agent’s branding on the front of the envelope, addressed to their flat but without either of their names. Áine was someone who generally feared post, particularly official-looking, out-of-the-blue post. In her experience, this genre of post only meant bills and panic and perhaps also bad medical news, but never anything good. When she was young her mother would shred or burn these kinds of letters, as though that eliminated their power and made the money they owed to banks or building societies or credit unions or loan sharks or catalogues suddenly disappear. Áine would lean over the sink watching her mother burn them with her father’s lighters, like they were casting a spell together. Now, Áine picked up her own cursed post like it would burn her or cover her in anthrax the moment she opened it, and carried it into the kitchen where she dropped it in front of Elliott and immediately started chewing on her fingers.

‘We’re being evicted.’

Elliott rolled his eyes with the air of someone who had never grown up fearing red notices. ‘We’re not being evicted.’ He opened the letter. ‘Wait –’

Unable to handle the tension, Áine hunched behind him and saw the word ‘evicted’ and thought, maybe I’m psychic, but then Elliott’s shoulders dropped and he exhaled a low whistle of relief because he could read faster than her and he said: ‘Oh fuck, okay, fine. It’s just a mistake, it’s for upstairs.’ He put a steadying hand on the small of Áine’s back and she stopped thinking about putting all their stuff in boxes when half of it wasn’t even out of boxes yet, and about the thousands of pounds they’d need for the next place, and if she even wanted the next place – if they were getting evicted, maybe it was a good thing because maybe it would give them time to think, but what was even the point of that when there were no other options, all their friends already lived together or they were moving in together and they were supposed to be enjoying it, but everyone would understand, right, if The Landlord and the estate agents forced their hands? But none of it mattered because it was just a mistake, some lackey like Jack S in a glass box of an office sending a clinical and uncaring letter to the people upstairs, marked on the letter as a boilerplate, impersonal and careless [TENANT] and putting it in the wrong envelope, for the tenants downstairs, that they still didn’t give a fuck about. ‘It’s not for us,’ Elliott said, and she stopped thinking about it all, and he laughed because it wasn’t their problem any more.

The letter said vague things about redevelopment and ownership and the changing neighbourhood and inflation. ‘I just presumed they owned it,’ said Áine, but Elliott had left the kitchen already, having dropped the crumpled envelope back on the table. She didn’t know why she had thought this. Jack S hadn’t said so. But they were older, maybe that was why. And she had a habit of assuming that older people, smarter people, all other people really, could buy a house but she couldn’t. It just wasn’t something she could do. Elliott didn’t come back to ask why she’d thought so. The letter had briefly entered his universe, but it was a bad thing happening to someone else, not him, and now it had disappeared again.

‘Don’t you think we should tell them?’ she said.

Elliott had returned and was by the kettle now, and he didn’t bother turning round, but he shrugged. Áine stared at his back, feeling something shift inside her. She thought about the joke he had made to Jack S when they first viewed the flat, about living in a tower block, and how much she hated his casualness with it. She didn’t want to think about that. Elliott was a good person. Elliott always thought about others. Elliott would never dismiss people like this. Right? Elliott always reposted politicians’ videos on his Instagram story when they talked about fairness and poverty. Elliott owned a copy of Das Kapital. Granted, she had never seen him read it. The spine was unbroken, intact.

‘If you want,’ he said eventually, sounding bored. ‘I thought you hated her.’

‘I don’t hate her,’ she replied. And it was true; she didn’t hate the screeching woman. It was the man, with his soulless eyes and booming voice, who gave her the creeps. ‘I just … It all just freaks me out.’

Elliott turned and his eyebrows disappeared under his hairline. Áine felt her neck get hot and knew she was going red. She didn’t mean it like that. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘That’s how it sounded!’ Elliott was using a sing-song voice. He was smirking. She didn’t mean it like that. But she wanted to avoid the people upstairs, the man in his weird billowing coat, the fact they were older, the meat they let rot in the bins. It would be better if they weren’t here, in the flat, in the city, but she felt guilty for thinking it. It was a bad, involuntary thought, that she’d prefer it if they weren’t here. They were here long before Áine, or Elliott, or any of their friends. It was their city, properly, their building, and here were these interlopers laughing at the fact they had to leave.

In the end she slipped the opened letter under their door, leaving Elliott in the kitchen, because she felt bad but also because she thought, madly, that if she didn’t at least tell them and they got kicked out without knowing that, they might go nuts, they might kick off, might pull a knife or put a hex on her. She didn’t tell Elliott that thought. He would judge her for it again, and it was crazy, she knew that. But all the same, she didn’t want to look at them while she handed the post over, to explain why it was open and to offer commiserations, to say comforting things like I can barely afford it either, things that would sound empty and patronizing. She hid behind the curtains when she heard them come in and prayed they wouldn’t ask about it and they didn’t, and when she heard the low keening cries of the woman, later, like a banshee in the next room, once again she didn’t dare knock on their door. It wasn’t the kind of thing you did here. Everyone was too busy. Nobody had the time. Especially not when they were supposed to be hosting a dinner party, the perfect embodiment of happy coupledom, fresh from a fight about being evicted. She forced herself to swallow an urge to call the entire thing off and scream at Elliott.

Nobody seemed as time-constrained recently as Laura. She had been posting a lot since her engagement announcement party. Instagram posts about flowers and mood boards and whether long veils were chic. When Áine had first texted about returning the favour and inviting Laura and Alex over, she didn’t reply for seven hours. Áine kept checking her phone, watching for the ticks to go blue. Eventually she said:

Sorry sorry sorry

SO busy with all this stuff

Next month?

Áine sent a smiley face, and then sent one of Laura’s more offensive Instagram stories (about how expensive it was to hire a white limousine) to Cian instead. He always replied instantly, obviously. When Laura posted her engagement photos, he’d texted her:

She’s marrying the tofu man?! Lmao

In the weeks preceding hosting her own dinner party, Áine herself had been resolutely ignoring near-constant notifications from a group chat she’d been added to against her will. It was titled – unironically – Bride Tribe and was filled with herself, Laura, Laura’s sister, India, and her mother, who was also called Laura – a situation Laura did not find funny, and was in fact nonplussed by whenever Áine pointed out she thought it was – and two of her cousins that Áine had met at graduation. There were also some other numbers she didn’t recognize, people that weren’t saved as contacts in her phone, who she assumed were friends from work or university that Áine hadn’t bothered keeping in touch with but Laura clearly had. The group chat was already incredibly active. There were five photos of almost indistinguishable bridesmaids’ dresses, evening gowns in different shades of periwinkle blue, each costing hundreds of pounds, and a link to a doodle poll to vote on something to do with the dresses. She had also been added to another group chat – Bride Tribe II – which was led by India, who, Áine gathered, was de facto Maid of Honour for the upcoming nuptials, and contained the exact same group of women as Bride Tribe I but without Laura. India was posting endless Airbnb listings for Italian vineyards and brilliant white Greek cottages in the group, describing them as not that expensive and that if it comes to it, we can always slum it with Ryanair lol!! On the day of their dinner, Bride Tribe II had been particularly, irritatingly active. She put her phone on ‘do not disturb’ and tried not to think about it while she arranged place mats and lit candles.

They didn’t often use the kitchen table, and when they did it felt laughably big with just Áine and Elliott eating lasagne, beside unmatched empty chairs. Usually they ate all their meals on the ubiquitous red velvet sofa, their feet tangled together, dropping crumbs into the holes in the fabric, or one of them sitting on the floor, slurping noodles in between the other’s knees, both facing Netflix. Tonight, though, with all of the cutlery set out waiting, the table and the room itself looked full and adult. Áine polished cutlery and Elliott chose the least chipped of the IKEA plates and bowls. He put third-cheapest from the shop prosecco in the fridge while she chose music from a pre-made verified Spotify playlist called ‘light jazz for dinner parties’. They moved in perfect harmony through the room; an easy kind of dance, the once-ominous rat’s nest of wires tamed, the fridge in its rightful place in the corner. It looked like a proper kitchen. If you squinted. A proper kitchen in a proper home. Áine silently and resolutely ignored the letter until she felt warm towards him again. Until the only thing spoiling the platonic ideal of domestic bliss they were creating together was the mould. Even with the cutlery and the prosecco and the ambient music, it lingered. It was hard to ignore, creeping across the wall, close enough to curl itself around the table legs. Áine rubbed at some of it with a dish towel while Elliott wasn’t looking, but it was no use. It stayed, and being near it made her feel sick.

When the doorbell rang – a buzzer more than a doorbell, the sound of an electronic gate opening, a scanner at the airport detecting a gun or forgotten liquids over 100 ml – they were both standing at the sink like matryoshka dolls, Áine washing grapes for a charcuterie board she was trying and failing to recreate from Instagram and Elliott standing behind her, his head resting on the groove of her collarbones, his hands around her waist, being very sweet about her failed attempt in order to make her laugh and not feel bad about it. They both jumped together when the alarm buzzer doorbell went off, the outside world spoiling the perfect fleeting moment of domesticity they had created.

‘I’ll get it,’ Elliott said, and he was only going to the door but he kissed her neck before he went to say goodbye. Áine’s skin felt warm but when the door opened goosebumps rose on her exposed arms. The weather was not yet hot enough to ward off cool evenings, but it was nonetheless improving. At first she had hoped – they had both hoped – that this weather would improve the damp. But it hadn’t, of course. In a way, Áine had expected as much. Instead, the dehumidifier filled itself up and they dutifully emptied it and still the green horror grew out from the basement, spreading across the ceiling in the kitchen, leaking in tendrils over the frame of every door. Elliott told Áine to hold out. ‘It’ll get hotter,’ he said, ‘it’s still early.’ He was right, she thought (even though she imagined he said this to ward off further emails to Jack S). Optimistically sunny afternoons gave way to nights that felt positively arctic. The chill spread into the kitchen with Elliott when the front door creaked open, and stayed in the room long after it banged shut again. It was only when Laura and Alex were not the first to arrive that Áine realized she wished they had been.

Cian had a habit of walking into rooms that he’d never been inside before as though he knew them intimately, to the point of almost living there himself. Áine hadn’t noticed this before his brief stint sleeping on the sofa at her and Laura’s, when Laura pointed it out to her tersely and privately in the kitchen one morning while he slept. He walked ahead of Elliott into the kitchen now and placed a bottle of Merlot he’d brought with him in the fridge before hugging her hello. You kind of weren’t supposed to put red wine in the fridge, but then a recent article that became famous on Twitter said maybe you kind of were.

‘Look who’s here,’ Elliott said, his voice muffled by the shiny black fabric of Cian’s bomber jacket.

‘Nice place,’ Cian was saying at the same time.

Cian was a few inches shorter than Elliott. When they hugged, her face was higher up than when she hugged Elliott. It was a disconcerting thing to compare. When they pulled apart, she busied herself at the chopping board for no reason. It was the first time they’d seen each other since his last stint in London, which had been almost a year ago. They’d gone to a day festival together, and Áine had forgotten to buy gum and had split her lip chewing on it. She texted Elliott a picture of her blood-stained mouth the next day and he’d replied with three emojis of a monkey covering its face, but she also got the feeling he didn’t find it very funny.

Considering they’d spent a whole year apart, their greeting was weird: more awkward physical contact than emotional happy embrace. It did not suggest the easy intimacy of two people who had been friends, albeit spontaneously and unreliably, for nearly a decade. Cian looked and felt thinner and more tired than before. But she knew not to point this out, for Elliott’s sake more than Cian’s. Elliott had probably greeted him at the door because they hadn’t shaken hands. He wasn’t a big hugger, Elliott that was. He could be a bit formal.

‘Thanks!’ Áine said, a bit too brightly, gesturing to the table, where Cian was already sitting down. When they talked in person, she made sure to always look just a little bit to the left of him, to the damp stain on the wall and the crockery. They spoke a lot over text but in real life sometimes they did this: spoke to the rest of the room and didn’t look at each other. Neither of them felt inclined to investigate this habit. It felt too intense to think about. Cian draped his jacket on the back of the chair by the fridge and opened it again, instantly retrieving the controversially chilled Merlot and pouring it into three of the empty glasses. Elliott watched this happen and then returned to the hob, stirring a pot that was threatening to simmer over. She thought maybe he wanted to say something about the temperature of the wine but he didn’t. Cian was sitting underneath the mould. It was creeping out from behind the fridge, just stretching on to the cornices on the wall above his head. She’d tried to position the guests sitting away from it, so it wouldn’t be in their eyeline and put them off the food.

‘Laura’s coming too,’ Áine said, just for something to say. The clinking of wine being poured and the hissing of the pot on the stove felt oppressively loud. ‘With her boyfriend.’

‘Oh god. Laura hates me.’

‘No, come on. She doesn’t hate you.’

‘She totally hates me! But anyway. It’s fine. Elliott, how’s things? How’s the screenplay? Sorry, book! How’s the book? Or is it a play?’

The doorbell prison buzzer rang again so Elliott didn’t have to answer that. Áine watched the muscular expanse of his shoulders tighten under the white waffle shirt she’d helped pick out earlier.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Cian.

He bounded away from the mould and the table with manic energy. Elliott spun at the stove and widened his eyes like fucking hell and Áine went to him and squeezed one of his arms to be like I know I’m sorry but the waffle shirt irritated her palms and the matryoshka positioning felt too awkward to replicate now.

‘I think he’s just nervous,’ she said quietly, arranging slices of chorizo on a slab of wood that was really a chopping board, imagining how it would look captured from above, on grid. ‘I think, because sometimes around new people –’

‘I’ve met him before, haven’t I? I’m not “new people”. I think he’s on something.’

‘Nobody says “on something”.’

‘I think he’s a prick.’

Áine opened her mouth and closed it again. She tried to remember where they’d met before. A party, maybe? A birthday party for Laura, at their old flat. One of the few times their paths had crossed. She’d just started seeing Elliott and had been worrying a lot over the right outfit to wear to her own living room because it was one of the first non-dates she’d invited him to. She’d wanted something both revealing but that also looked like she hadn’t tried at all. Cian had sat on her bed pre-drinking one of the beers Laura had bought specifically for party guests, scrolling through his phone and looking uninterested while she dipped in and out of the wardrobe, throwing sundresses on the floor. He’d pulled up Elliott’s Instagram profile and said he ‘didn’t post much’, in a way that made it seem like this was a bad thing. When Áine said she liked this about him, Cian said he thought Elliott was handsome but ‘in an obvious way’. They must have met and spoken later in the night, but she couldn’t remember it.

‘Oh my god, the flat’s gorgeous!’ Laura shouted from the door. This was, of course, a lie. In the hall Áine could see the neighbours had left out black bin bags of rubbish and they were sweating unpleasantly as though they’d been there days, not hours. There wasn’t time to be fully cognisant of this annoyance. Alex was holding a huge bunch of flowers. They were wrapped in brown paper so you knew they weren’t from the supermarket. Elliott smiled at them both, the fucking hell expression instantly gone. His shoulders had dropped significantly. ‘You made it sound practically awful,’ said Laura, hugging her tightly. ‘God, Áine, you’re so dramatic.’

Later, after the chorizo and the mezze plate and the flowers were exchanged and they all caught up on their newness and niceties (the houseboat was having a shower system installed, but it was difficult to decide which company was the most sustainable, Cian was back in London again now, doing some ridiculous house-sitting job for a few weeks, for a semi-aristocratic woman living in Maida Vale who owned a lot of colonial era art – they argued briefly over whether it was offensive to still own and display colonial era art – Elliott’s book was going very well, thank you, still heavily in research stages), the awkwardness finally abated. Áine told herself that it was always awkward at the start of a dinner party, which she put down to a combination of novice cookery and initial sobriety and forcing together a group of people who invariably never spent time together as a group. But usually by the time the sun had gone down and the second or third bottles were opened, things became easier. Tonight was no different. The atmosphere unwound itself, the tension eased in her shoulders. She ate seconds of Elliott’s prawn and asparagus linguini and laughed and was skilled at sarcastic games of charades.

‘You’ve taught her how to eat like a grown-up,’ Laura said, watching her slurp on the end of an overcooked asparagus stem. Alex laughed and Áine rolled her eyes affectionately. ‘No, god, seriously. We lived on, like, crisps and instant noodles when we first moved in together. Áine was worse for it, though. She’d never eat properly before you. It was a food pyramid of top to bottom salt and vinegar.’

‘Would she not?’ asked Cian, looking very amused by this. He nodded to Elliott. ‘Did you fix her?’

Áine finished a mouthful of claggy garlic bread and poured another glass of wine. They were switching between bottles: Cian’s Merlot then their prosecco, then some horrible organic orange thing Alex’s friend had made in a new microbrewery he was launching. Elliott was sitting directly across from Cian, who was cocking his head to the side, waiting for an answer. Elliott was facing the window and she could see his reflection in the thin single-glazed glass, chewing on the inside of his cheek, his eyes reflected in the dark hair at the back of Cian’s head. Elliott was very blond when the weather lifted. It was too short at the minute, she didn’t like it. In the glass they looked like distorted photo negatives.

‘Will we play another game of charades?’ Áine asked, swallowing.

By the time she was serving dessert (tiramisu, it hadn’t set properly, not cold enough) from the fridge, Áine’s hands were shaking. The spoons clattered to the floor when she went to place them in the middle of the table and Laura dipped to help her pick them up again, placing her own hand briefly on Áine’s shaking fingers. It was as if the house itself was repelling any attempt at harmony. It had to be the house. There was a dark energy in the place that felt as though it was emanating from the walls, the damp map above them. Áine couldn’t finish the tiramisu. There was another pregnant lull in conversation. She followed the mould above Cian and Laura’s heads to its origin, the basement door now almost warped with green and black vegetation, and looked up to find Cian’s eyes on her.

‘Tell us about the ghost,’ he said then, nodding to their side of the table, where Elliott was finishing his dessert, half-heartedly listening to Alex talking about a subreddit where people quit their jobs to live off-grid. ‘That’s the only reason I came, to hear about the ghost.’

Elliott looked away from Alex. Áine could feel his eyes on her neck. It was hot in the room. She realized she was drunk. The table was swimming unpleasantly and she had eaten too much pasta. It pressed on the inside of her ribs, sweating and twisting. She felt like she would vomit.

‘Not this again, Ain,’ said Elliott gently, but rolling his eyes in a very obvious way, to show he wasn’t annoyed, even though he kind of was. Elliott was very good at maintaining the general mood of an evening. It was why he had so many friends. It was a real skill.

‘A ghost?’ This was Alex, now done with the subreddit.

‘They have ghosts in the house,’ said Cian, too loudly. ‘Oh my god has Áine not told you? They live in the basement. The neighbours are also ghosts. Or wait, no –’ He got out his phone and started scrolling through WhatsApp to confirm. He spoke to a lot of different people. He had to scroll to find her name. Their conversation was very long. Laura was looking at the phone. Áine was looking at the mould behind Cian’s head. She knew Elliott was looking at her. ‘No wait, no, the neighbours aren’t ghosts. Excuse me. But they’re still part of it. The general hauntedness.’

Laura hadn’t spoken. She was pressing crumbs of garlic bread into her thumbs now, looking down at her empty plate. Cian set his phone down on the table face-up and Laura’s eyes drifted to it. Their conversation was still open. She wished it would lock itself. She’d told Cian about the argument and the G and the H words but she hadn’t told Laura. She didn’t want to think about why that was, actually.

‘Right,’ said Elliott, still doing his everything is fine amused face, putting down an empty glass. It left a ring of red sludge on the table she knew they would never manage to remove. Where did the coasters go? ‘Okay. That’s enough, mate. We get it.’ He gave a small laugh, rolling his eyes. Elliott thought ghosts were ridiculous. That haunted house stories were funny. That superstitions were small-minded and unscientific. That traditions were primitive. That there was no such thing as ghosts. He was half laughing in Cian’s face, as though he was ridiculous too. Cian’s eye twitched, which Áine noticed but Elliott did not.

Áine gulped the tumbler of water in front of her but it didn’t help. She got up to go to the fridge to get more from the filter but, standing up, the drunkenness was more profound and she stumbled. Cian caught her awkwardly and held her leaning against him sitting down. She could feel her hip bones rubbing unpleasantly against his clavicle like tinder wood. In profile from above he was smiling and his teeth were stained with red wine. Some people had two extra incisors that were very pointy. Cian had these, she noticed. He suddenly pouted dramatically up at her. It was easier to look at each other later in the evening.

‘I can’t believe this, guys. This is very small-minded of you all. I believe in ghosts. You believe in ghosts. Don’t you, Ain?’

The basement door was swimming unpleasantly in her eyeline, doing concentric Catherine wheels when she tried to focus. In her blurry vision the mould pulsed, growing bigger and then shrinking back. She felt dizzy and nauseous and scared. The pasta and wine cocktail congealed in her stomach. Cian’s fingers were pressing against her hip bone and she felt the food and alcohol swirl against the pressure unpleasantly. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ she said, and then she was, in the sink.

The next morning her phone went off five times, at 8 a.m., 8.05 a.m., 8.07 a.m., 8.11 a.m. and finally at 8.15 a.m. She had forgotten the promise of the gym class with Laura and how it was intended to melt away their wine hangovers and give them time to debrief and sweat until they emerged from an underground fitness studio lighter in body and mind. ‘Fuck,’ she said to the stained bedroom ceiling.

She couldn’t remember much after throwing up in the sink. There was a vague recollection of being helped into the bedroom by someone, probably Laura, and of being scooped into bed while people shouted at each other in a muffled way from the kitchen, her head buried into the pillows. And then the front door banging as everyone left, the soft hiss of black plastic as they tripped over the vile sweaty bin bags in the hallway. She awoke in her pyjamas, so Laura must have undressed her. Or Elliott. Áine didn’t feel inclined to press into these hazy memories too much. The guilt was unpleasant enough while hazy, but she knew if the full weight of the evening came back to her it would be overpowering. And she had a headache.

She rose and dressed in black leggings and a horrible oversized T-shirt, the first thing she could find in the basket to approximate athleisure – since her period of what Elliott sometimes sarcastically referred to as ‘convalescence’, she’d felt too sick to work out, too unmotivated to try to be healthier. It annoyed him, she could tell. Elliott watched a lot of YouTube videos about getting the perfect six-pack. Elliott read Men’s Health magazine and sometimes drank Huel. He didn’t actually go to the gym often, but he made a point of the fact that Áine went less. She tripped over herself in the gloom, deliberately not opening the curtains because Elliott was curled up on his side, his body rising and falling with obvious regularity, as though he was asleep and could not talk to her because he was asleep, not angry at her or worried or anything, just asleep, in such a deep sleep he hadn’t been roused by five separate alarms or the banging of the front door as Áine rushed out.

The morning was bright and crisp and the thought of getting on a cramped bus with her intestines still in knots was intolerable, so she walked with one headphone in, the robotic Siri voice of Google Maps directing her through labyrinthine streets, past mansion blocks and closed shops beneath tower blocks and ten-foot-high facades painted with cartoon trees and children and covered with nightclub flyers and ‘missing’ posters and printed announcements from the council that the site of once-historic buildings would soon house luxury flats with a 15 per cent allocation to social housing. While Áine didn’t subscribe to Laura’s belief system about the testament of listing five things you could hear, feel, see and taste ad nauseam, she had always found the meditative quality of walking in the city to be deeply effective at healing anxiety, hangovers and the quotidian stress of living in a place that at times seemed to be actively trying to expel you from living there. That at times felt like it actively hated you. And that you couldn’t blame for the hate, because you were fuelling it by living here, by coming here, by greedily chugging back the poison and hoping someone would hand you the antidote before it killed you personally, even if it killed someone else. By plunging your hands into the nettles and complaining to each other about how badly it hurt when they stung.

When she got to the gym – an aggressively pastel building with a bar at the front which sold only smoothies and was filled with beautiful people who, Áine realized with an unpleasant start, were visibly younger than her – Laura was already there, sitting cross-legged on the pavement outside, sipping an electric-blue drink from a plastic cup with a dome lid and scrolling through her phone with furrowed brows.

‘Morning,’ Áine said, which she discovered was the first thing she’d actually properly said since waking up and swearing. Her voice was a dry croak.

Laura smiled but she looked distracted. She was dressed in cycling shorts and a boned black zip-up jacket that had been sold out in shops for three weeks because it was supposed to make you look like you’d had a Brazilian Bum Lift (Áine had read about it on the internet).

‘Sorry I’m late. I walked here. You look amazing.’

‘Shut up,’ said Laura, rolling her eyes but smiling. She passed Áine the radioactive smoothie. ‘It has spirulina in it,’ she said. ‘For the hangover.’

‘I’d rather have an IV drip.’

Laura laughed and pushed open the door of the pastel hellhole and together they followed a group of women in the same black zip-up jacket to a cavernous studio in the basement. Unlike the nursery colour scheme of the upstairs gym, the studio was painted Anish Kapoor black from floor to ceiling, the only light sources LEDs which were laced around the cornices of the box-like room. It felt like what Áine imagined sensory deprivation tanks might feel like. Her stomach lurched and she gagged quietly and Laura’s smile faltered and she detected in the gloom the first inklings of what she thought was a mild annoyance.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Laura passed her a bottle filled with water, the sides marked with random timings and motivational sayings like KEEP GOING and STAY HYDRATED and YOU GOT THIS.

‘You should have said if you weren’t feeling up to coming.’

Áine was about to protest this but at that moment the LED lights lit up and music came so suddenly and so loudly through the speakers mounted on each wall that several people, Áine and Laura included, visibly jumped.

‘Welcome to the weekend, ladies,’ said the instructor, striding into the room and attaching a headset. The instructor was lithe and impressive and at least forty. She stretched in front of the class, contorting her muscular thighs in a wide circle and back and forth, scuffing the ground, promising them the workout of their lives that would make them forget what they did the night before and set them up to do it all again tonight. Several people in the front row tittered. Áine, not laughing, pulled Laura to the back row by the material of her BBL jacket. Perhaps out of sympathy, perhaps out of embarrassment, Laura relented.

The class she had chosen for them both was called Mental Insanity and promised to be some sort of barre HIIT hybrid Pilates dance workout that sounded like torture and, it became quite clear, felt like it too. It was more complicated than Áine had expected, with a lot of jumping and stepping and remembering rhythms and occasionally dropping to give sit-ups and push-ups if you missed out on those steps or fucked up the increasingly convoluted rhythms. Laura grasped it quickly but Áine, despite hiding in the back row near the door, had clearly designated herself this morning’s rhythm fucker-upper. The instructor – whose name was Olivia – asked her four separate times to drop in the middle of the pop mash-ups and the torture that, Áine kept remembering, she was literally paying to experience, to add more and more push-ups. She could only do them on her knees and even then her arms shook and gave out and Olivia kept saying, ‘Come on, Awnyuh. You have more in you than that! Dig deep!’ Until finally Áine said, ‘Fuck this,’ and picked herself up and walked out.

Outside, she panted and fumed and burrowed into her own embarrassment, wiping a film of sweat off her face with the front of the old T-shirt. The door swung open and she got a blast of a remix of a techno song that was ubiquitous when they were at uni together, the bit where she keeps talking about her cunt getting eaten, and came face to face with Laura and was about to apologize before she saw how angry Laura was and swallowed the sorry.

‘You should have told me if you didn’t want to do it,’ Laura said. ‘You didn’t need to embarrass me. That was fucking mean.’

‘Not being able to do a push-up was fucking mean? How was that fucking mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’

Áine gulped a bubble of bile that had risen in her throat, dislodged from the previous night by the failed push-ups and burpees. ‘Clearly,’ she said, ‘I don’t.’

Laura swallowed too, looking like she was deciding whether or not she should say something and then deciding to say it after all. ‘It’s like I don’t know who you are any more. I don’t know who this person is!’

‘Me?’ Áine said, so loudly she heard it over the thumping techno leaking under the door. In the mirrored wall behind them, she watched herself scream at the person she loved most in the whole world. Under the strobe lighting her eyes were bugged and stained pink and bloodshot from the previous night’s vomiting. ‘You’re saying that to me?’

As soon as the sentence was out Áine wanted to bite it back. The pink lights had stained Laura too, but Áine saw, with some satisfaction, that the skin on her face and neck was flushed. Even without context, she heard the question and saw the home-cum-boat renovation Instagram, the lab-grown ethical diamond, the off-grid subreddit, the vase stolen from their old living room. Everything was exposed. Then the flush of recognition cleared and Laura laughed, a harsh bark of a thing that made her flinch.

‘Grow up, Áine!’ the bark laugh said. ‘We’re supposed to do this. This is it! I’m not going to be embarrassed for being normal –’

Behind them, the door opened and the thumping techno grew temporarily louder. ‘Girls, we can hear you in h–’

‘So, what? You’re saying I’m not fucking normal?’

The instructor, interrupted and clearly perturbed by this situation, gave up and shut the door again quickly. A Lizzo remix thudded over awkward laughter from the acrobatic masochists still inside.

‘Do you think what you’re doing is normal? Do you really think that? You sound insane, Ain. This stuff about the house and the neighbours and all these texts you’re sending me about being sick and then sending Him texts about fucking ghosts.’ Sometimes Laura avoided talking about Cian by name. She gave him cruel nicknames or resorted to pronouns, as though she believed using his actual name was going to summon him like a demon. She must have read Áine’s conversation with him when he’d left his phone facing up on the table. Áine tried not to think of what Laura had seen. Sometimes she and Cian texted very late at night. Sometimes they both deleted their sent messages in the morning. But not always. Áine felt hot. Laura kept going. ‘Like, it’s not going to lower the fucking rent, babe. I don’t think you can get a Foxton’s discount for demonic possession.’ Sometimes Laura could be very creatively mean, and funny. ‘When you moved there, I thought, oh typical Áine.’ In front of her, the real-life typical Áine winced at the embarrassment of being perceived like this, of being perceived at all. Laura ploughed on, undeterred, releasing everything she’d bottled up since they’d moved out and maybe even before that. ‘It’s always something with you. It’s always squalor and being a tortured artist. But now it’s not even enough to be a tortured artist in squalor, it has to be haunted squalor too.’ She laughed in exasperation, running her hands through her hair. A pause. She seemed to swallow something down, then vomit it back into her throat and decide to say it anyway. ‘And now this other thing is even worse, this thing with Cian –’

‘Oh fuck off,’ Áine said quickly.

‘What do you want? No, I know what you want. You want me to say what you’re doing is okay. You want me to pretend something is happening when it’s not, and nothing is happening when it is.’

‘That’s not tru–’

‘Last night was hell. All of us sitting there ignoring it happening, ignoring the fact something’s clearly going on, and poor Elliott. I know you fight, or whatever, but he adores you, he really does – and last night, I just … On the way home Alex just kept saying, that poor guy.’

Áine realized the water bottle she was gripping had leaked on to her trainers. She was shivering in the moist room. Her teeth chattered. She saw them from above, as though she was standing at the top of the staircase that led down into the cavernous underground gym. She saw the reddening crowns of their heads and their shaking hands and years of unsaid becoming said. She only realized they’d been shouting when her voice was quiet and shaky.

‘Elliott’s not your friend, though, is he? I’m your friend. I’m the one you’re meant to believe.’

If it sounded childish and thick, she thought later, that was only because it was.

Laura looked at the pool of wet on the floor. ‘I d–’ she said, but Áine had already left.

When she got home she was so wet the T-shirt had gone totally see-through and draped itself towards her knees with a mixture of stale sweat and the heavy drizzle that had unleashed itself on Áine’s walk back from the gym. She was still carrying the vile blue drink, she’d realized halfway, and rested it on top of an overfilled bin by the side of the road. A fly buzzed around it disinterestedly and then flew off. About right, she thought. The drink was disgusting. She looked so bad that Elliott, now no longer pretending to be asleep, saw her and clearly decided not to talk about the night before. Áine rubbed her face when she saw him sitting on the horrible red sofa and found that, in addition to the sweat and the rain, she was crying. She didn’t know when she had started crying.

Elliott stroked her hair while she cried but he also kept saying quiet soothing things about Laura having a very stressful time at the moment, and how she must be feeling awful too, which was deeply annoying. He was a very fair person, which Áine hated. She was incredibly pissed off and upset about it now, and she batted his hand away weakly, but he just started stroking her again after a few seconds. It was difficult to hate Elliott. He was a very emotionally passive person, she thought. She knew she was an emotionally capricious person. Sometimes she took up a position just to have a position. She acted pro or anti something at random, simply to fill space in a room. She decided to like something or dislike something so vehemently that only later she’d wonder, is that true, is that what I think? When the two of them were together, she tried to model her principles around his own instead. Subsequently they both often deferred to each other on small decisions to avoid conflict. Sometimes they’d wait for hours for the other person to decide what they should watch on TV, the Netflix logo tu-dumming in the background.

Áine had hated people intermittently throughout her life, an activity she thought was fairly normal. She often hated Cian, spontaneously and enthusiastically, but not now, of course, because Cian believed her, about the ghosts and the house and the neighbours and the haunting, even when nobody else did. But still she was allowed to hate him sometimes, and she did, passionately. And she would sometimes hate Laura, guiltily, and her mother and father even more guiltily than that. Currently she hated the instructor at the gym who’d admonished her for arguing too loudly, a white-hot hate that Olivia, with her beautiful legs and sunny attitude, probably didn’t really deserve. But Elliott wasn’t the kind of person you could hate. She imagined herself telling someone she hated him, perhaps while crying, perhaps in a hypothetical future after a hypothetical break-up. Even in the hypothetical, whoever she told looked at her sceptically and asked whether it wasn’t her fault they broke up in the first place. She thought about how, when he’d met her parents, her father had said, ‘Áine’s a tough woman to live with,’ and how this was repeated frequently afterwards as a sort of running joke. It had upset her deeply but she wouldn’t tell Elliott that. He was a good person.

June

When the weather changed the city felt like a different place. Not just a better version of the same place, but a completely different one. The sun broke through skies that until then had been relentlessly grey and empty, and heated the pavements and promised endless afternoons that seemed to exist totally in sepia tone. The place wasn’t lonely and dark and cruel, it was sticky and open and alive. It was new. Outside Elliott and Áine’s flat the city bloomed into life again as it did every June. The contrast had been turned up on the world, the trees stripped bare of pink cherry blossoms by the wind and filled with foliage and carrier bags and parakeets. The streets sounded different, lighter, full of the constant murmur of connection, of peals of squealing laughter and pints smashing on the pavement, followed by roars of recognition.

Inside the flat, the weather did not infiltrate, and the transformation had not happened. In fact, the coldness and the damp and the dark dusty corners and the black bile stain on the carpet and the ever-present creeping mould became more pronounced. Sun shone through the thin windows and illuminated the darkness and the dirt inside. They pulled up all the dusty, stained wooden blinds to let the light in but the light revealed the dust, and the man from upstairs, still unbelievably clad in his heavy overcoat and looking mysteriously unsweaty, came and went frequently, slamming the shared front door and gazing at her through the window. It unnerved Áine, so she pulled the blinds back down, claiming the light was making her squint and blocking out the screens (phone, laptop, TV), and they ended up sitting in the gloom and cold again.

Áine could tell they both felt the chill, but neither of them discussed it. They wore jumpers indoors (Elliott used his ominous overcoat as a kind of daytime dressing gown) and avoided talking about it, filling their days with vague chatter about buying tickets for one of the endless day festivals that were about to take over the city for the next few months, or a cheap package deal to a Greek island, if Elliott could get the time off work (he rarely took holidays). Áine redoubled her efforts to clean the flat regardless, in a failing attempt to make it look somewhat presentable, to represent a simulacrum of the beauty of the world outside. It didn’t work, of course.

Áine turned to the untouched and unkempt garden instead. It was warm enough now to actually be in it, but since neither of them had properly attempted to tackle the jungle of weeds and mulch and dying plants since moving in, the garden had become a small swamp. But it was warmer than the flat. One weekend Áine convinced Elliott to help her try to tame it, half-heartedly suggesting they could tidy it up and have a garden party, even though after the disaster that was the dinner party neither of them really wanted this.

Towards the back of the garden there was a mess of thorns, overgrown rose bushes from the house next door, the neighbours who never spoke to them nor seemed interested in cutting the bushes back. And there was the warped, damp fencing that Áine worried about when it was too windy or wet. Neither of them had ever been to this part of the garden but now they both made their way there and covered their exposed skin with thin sleeves and swore under their breath when the thorns from next door pricked them and they bled anyway. Elliott disappeared beneath the web of vines and discovered a tiny shed, hidden away and in complete darkness. ‘This is mad, Ain, look!’

Áine looked because Elliott told her to. She didn’t go any further into the thorns and the dark. It was a balmy day out but suddenly she was fighting a shiver. Jack S had never mentioned a shed – and it felt like the kind of thing estate agents inevitably mentioned, mentioned to death, mentioned to the point of jacking up the rent by another hundred for the privilege of even a tiny ramshackle one like this – but there was a mess of footprints in the mulch surrounding it that matched neither her shoes nor Elliott’s. She had the sudden sick feeling that maybe the neighbours, the man from upstairs in the billowing coat and the woman keening like the banshee over their probably imminent eviction, might have managed to get access to the garden, their garden, and were walking around in here at night or when Elliott was out and she was alone in the living room pretending to work, touching their stuff, looking in their windows. At the other end of the garden, away from the hovel shed, you could see right into her and Elliott’s bedroom window. She imagined the man in the coat standing there at night, hiding out in the shed and then glaring in at them through the slit in their thin, horrible, landlord-mandated curtains, and she thought she might vomit. It was a crazy idea, obviously. She probably felt sick because she hadn’t eaten anything yet today, Áine told herself, and when she took her Prescription on an empty stomach sometimes she felt like this, nauseous and vaguely delirious.

Elliott didn’t make her come any closer, but he wrenched open the rotting door of the hut and stared into the darkness and coughed and said it smelled gross in there, like something had died. ‘I can tell from here,’ Áine said in a voice that didn’t feel like her own.

Elliott found plant pots, lots of them, and pots painted black that Áine knew better than to say looked like cauldrons (too embarrassing, too obvious), and he retreated further into the fetid-smelling darkness until she couldn’t see him any more, just a dark crater in the middle of the greenery and thorns. She stared into it until her vision went fuzzy. She was thinking about the summer when she’d visited Achill Island, one of their only family holidays. She’d walked through the overgrown fields and abandoned villages, past remote little enclaves and empty, thatched, bleached white cottages, abandoned when industrialization and the possibility to move to somewhere better and richer – America, Canada, Australia – presented itself. Her daddy had joked about them moving into one. He meant it to be funny but she’d felt so sad looking at them, imagining all the people who had just left them behind, wondering if they’d missed them. There was a sudden ring of a bell and she was back in the present again and Elliott had emerged from the shed at last, holding a rusty bicycle and grinning. ‘Look!’ he said, like he’d said that Sunday they’d first viewed the place. ‘Your dream.’

When she’d first moved to the city Áine had been convinced she would be one of those adults who rode their bikes to work every day, lithe and active and humming with health. But she’d never properly learned to ride on the roads, and the roads here were so terrifying, and the kit and the bikes themselves so expensive that it just became one of those depressingly banal items you added to a bucket list with only a vague intention of actually completing. Seeing the rusted thing Elliott had so serendipitously found now, she was still unsure, but he was certain. He said they could clean it up and she could use it to get out of the house more, to explore the neighbourhood, to maybe go into the office.

‘Maybe,’ said Áine, even though by this point Elliott was already manoeuvring the bicycle through the flat to the front door so she could do just that. It looked like the bike the witch rode in The Wizard of Oz, she thought, a great big old-fashioned thing with a basket and a frame that, underneath the dirt and grime of the hut, was black and somehow still greasy. She was nervous that it was stealing, a worry Elliott seemed unmoved by.

‘Someone just left it here,’ he shrugged, ringing the bell again, using the kickstand to set it up on the kerb, nodding to her to get on. ‘If they’d wanted it, they would have taken it.’

‘Maybe it’s –’ Áine’s eyeline wandered to the flat above, where she was certain the old-fashioned, horrible red velvet curtains, the same ones they had, were twitching now, watching them. Elliott clucked his tongue and rolled his eyes and put his hand on the small of her back and pushed her towards the bike.

‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘Anyway, fuck it.’ His voice was quite close to her ear. ‘Whoever owned it left it here. We can just take it. It’s ours now.’ She could feel his breath. She shivered again despite the heat but this time it wasn’t unpleasant. She thought about how well they worked when they were like this, when he was certain and she wasn’t. That maybe things would always be fine if she just reminded herself that Elliott could decide everything about her life for her. Elliott pushed her again and moved the kickstand and she went down the kerb and on to the road, hearing him whoop in the background and feeling grateful they lived on one of those streets where people just charged their overpriced electric-powered hunks of metal without actually driving them. She could feel the grease on her hands and it was exhilarating and terrifying. But the bike wouldn’t do what she wanted it to. It felt weird and alien under her, too big and cumbersome and wheezing when she tried to turn the handlebars or switch gears. Elliott shouted instructions from the kerb and she went past him in ungraceful circles, around and around again, feeling the bike that wasn’t hers twist the other way when she wanted to stop, sliding about on the tarmac, sending her careening into bushes and dangerously close to parked Teslas. Every time she felt like she was getting the hang of it, something would click or creak and she’d feel afraid again. Until finally, turning the bend at the end of their street faster than before, she saw – for certain this time – the grey face of the man in the coat glaring down at her from upstairs. The rust on the handlebars suddenly aggravated her skin. Her legs shook unsteadily on the pedals. She could hear Elliott’s voice, distantly, telling her to keep her eyes on the road, but she couldn’t break the stare between herself and the man in the coat. She felt it was important that he broke it first, like not stepping on a crack in the pavement or touching wood for good luck. He stared and Áine stared and Elliott shouted her name louder and louder until, in spite of herself, her head turned back towards him and she twisted off the bike and fell face first into the gravel.

‘It’s okay, really,’ Elliott was saying afterwards, holding her face over the sink and gently dabbing at her bloodied cheeks and nose, helping her pick loose tarmac from between her teeth and spit it down the drain. He’d helped her inside. The man wasn’t there any more when Elliott picked her up. Áine kept looking for him, turning her head so frantically Elliott asked her if she had some sort of cycling whiplash. ‘It probably just needed more fine-tuning before we took it out. I’ll fix it up for you, I promise.’

Áine knew he wouldn’t, but she didn’t mind. He had taken the bike back to the shed, using the cauldron-like plant pots to keep the door shut and stop it falling off its rusted hinges completely. ‘I’ll fix it for you, I’ll make it so nice for you, I promise. You’ll see.’

‘Okay,’ Áine said obediently, smiling at him with a mouthful of dirt. He didn’t bother asking why she’d fallen. Áine got the impression he assumed she was just not very good at riding the bike. It was better, she decided, to keep that impression.

The bike had at least been a welcome temporary distraction. She hadn’t spoken to Laura since the incident at the pastel torture chamber of a gym. It felt weird, not being able to speak to her, even if the way they had spoken to each other recently had been weird in itself. Áine typed out apologies a few times, on WhatsApp and email and Instagram DM and Twitter DM and Facebook Messenger and text, trying out each medium to see how they felt, if it made it any easier (it did not). She wrote out long paragraphs, essays of explanation, short little messages (that was weird lol) but none of them felt right. She would get to the end of a particularly emotional outburst and wonder what exactly she was explaining, what exactly she was apologizing for in the first place. And why Laura needed to be the one to forgive her for it.

They had never really fought before, which, Áine supposed, added to the weirdness, the unprecedentedness of it all. She lay in bed at night and scrolled through their WhatsApp chat history, rereading conversations from when they lived together, perturbed to find them deeply pedestrian in their content.

[Meme about men going to therapy]

[Depop listing]

Fucking huge spider in the bathroom this morning, heads up

Did u hear next door having sex last night lol

No?? Omg

She was being SO dramatic I’m honestly embarrassed

That’s not very feminist, good for her imo

Nah I think she was faking it

Did u drink the almond milk in the fridge?

Nah it had gone weird I threw it out

Ffs

I’ll get more in small tescos later

Ok love u

[Meme about landlords]

Áine knew the messages were unremarkable, boring even, because they had lived together so closely, because their lives in real life had been so deeply entwined that their digital lives didn’t need to be. But still, there was something about it that made her feel miserable. She started to go through their tagged photos together instead, looking at her and Laura on holidays and at parties and festivals, grinning together with grinding teeth and dilated pupils. And then her and Laura as babies in the first year of university, wearing neon T-shirts and looking chubby and happy. Cian was often with them in these pictures, all of them in the same matching outfits. Cian and Laura hugging in the kitchen. Áine bleaching Cian’s hair in a grimy bathroom while Laura posed behind them, mixing peroxide in one of those ironic red cups like in an American film. Áine pressed her cheeks and pulled at the corners of her eyes in the dark now, lit by the blue glow of her phone. There were wrinkles on her forehead, but maybe they had always been there.

The last WhatsApp from Laura had come through the day after their argument in the pastel nightmare gym and was worryingly long. It had truncated itself on Áine’s lock-screen in fact, it was that long, and it panicked her to look at it so she left it unread for hours and forced herself to look at it only when she was alone. It felt too overwhelming to imagine Elliott reading her as she read the text. She kept hearing Laura’s voice over and over in her head, telling her Elliott was so nice, how she was so lucky to have him, how her existence and behaviour was fundamentally harshing his moral and virtuous vibe. Or whatever it was she had said. She hadn’t told Elliott in detail what the argument had been about and he hadn’t pressed her on it afterwards. Which, Áine presumed, meant he obviously knew.

Hey

– This was the text from Laura, when Áine finally opened it, lying on the sofa in the middle of the night because reading it in bed, even though Elliott was asleep, was too stressful.

I don’t know what’s going on between us and I don’t really know what happened this weekend. But I think it’s probably for the best if we give each other time to get some perspective

– Áine could read Alex’s influence on the text and it annoyed her, imagining Laura drafting it with him reading over her shoulder, perhaps placing a calming hand on the space between her shoulder blades, rubbing supportive circles –

Obviously I still want you in my life and I still want you to be my bridesmaid, but I think we’ve become too codependent too, maybe, or we need space to learn how to be our own people. I’m not trying to sound toxic, I just want things to be calm and positive, especially now with all the stress of the boat and the wedding. I hope you and Elliott work things out, because I meant what I said. Remember the things in your life that are good for you Ain. I wish you were better at talking about your emotions. I wish you knew how much we all care for you. Don’t press the self-destruct button on your life when it’s only just starting. I love you so so much. Laura

Áine typed out the beginning of a message – Hey – and then deleted it. She typed out a mash of nonsense on the keyboard too, because Laura was online and she wanted her to see Áine typing, then not saying anything. This was petty. She knew that. But it erased the temptation of actually texting back something horrible, the humiliation of watching the ticks turn blue after Laura had seen it and chosen, in her healthy wisdom, to not even bother replying. Áine’s fingers shook uselessly with rage. There was no need to sign off the message ‘Laura’, when it was a fucking WhatsApp that came from Laura’s number, she thought. It was an affectation she found annoying. She archived the chat. It felt too hard to formulate a reply, so she’d rather imagine it had never come through at all. She scrolled through the rest of her messages instead, without the intention of replying to them.

Her mother had sent a picture of the scruffy front garden, which she’d been trying to tackle after her shifts now that her father’s hip was getting too bad to look after it. They’d put fairy lights along one white wall. Her mother’s thumb was over the bottom corner of the image and her dad was smiling, leaning against the kitchen window, holding a cigarette and a can of Magners – We’ll do a bbq when u r next home x o x Áine made a mental note to look at flights, and to check online for gardeners in the area that could help her mother out. It felt too sad to look at the picture and imagine them doing it themselves. Even though it wasn’t really fair to think that. They looked happy. They were proud. Sometimes she felt like maybe she was making things seem worse for other people so that things in general seemed better in comparison.

The next day there were three more texts from Cian and she hadn’t opened any of them. After the essay from Laura, Áine had deliberately changed the setting of her WhatsApps so that when anyone messaged her now she couldn’t see what they wrote, just the little notification with their name. ‘You trying to hide your messages?’ Elliott joked when he saw she’d done this, the phone buzzing next to him on the sofa, in a way that wasn’t really a joke.

After all her optimism and resolve the day before, she now found she couldn’t be bothered to book her flights home. Instead she spent the entire day idly scrolling, flicking from one app to the next, her notifications silenced by the ‘do not disturb’ function. When Elliott came home from work he found her sprawled on the sofa much as he’d left her. Choosing to say nothing about this, he flopped down beside her, smelling like outside.

‘Hey,’ Áine said, without looking up.

Elliott kissed her forehead and was silent for a beat too long. Then he said, ‘You didn’t text me back,’ and when Áine looked up, ‘Did you see the email?’

The email, which Áine had not seen, was from Jack S.

Hello tenants

‘He knows our names,’ Áine said aloud as she read the email off her phone, but Elliott nodded at her to read on without interrupting –

As you know we are now reaching the halfway point of your tenancy (subject to your decision to renew at the end of your 12 month contract and subject to The Landlord’s acceptance of this decision) and as indicated in your contract we are obligated to carry out our annual inspection of the property. Please let us know a time and date that would be convenient for us to carry out the inspection. It would be preferable if the tenants were not in the property when the surveyor carries out his work. Thank you.

Elliott said she should get out for the day of inspection and ‘work at a cafe or something’. She bit back a snipe that he had been the one to tell her to begin working remotely in the first place. It felt like the universe was tempting them into a fight. Or at least was telling her to get out of the house. She told Elliott she would reply to Jack S and he said, ‘No, don’t worry, I’ll do it,’ and she agreed to go work at a coffee shop.

Which she did, the very next day, when Elliott had told Jack S it would be fine to come immediately, without asking Áine. When she complained about this, Elliott said she had not replied to his text asking when would be a good time, and also that it was easier to get it over with quickly. She sulkily decamped to the nearest coffee shop for the day, wasting £8 on flat whites and feeling queasy and getting a sore neck from the unforgiving cheap leather sofas.

When she got home Áine shouted, ‘Hey,’ but there was no immediate reply, even though Elliott was in, and a dark mood settled on her instantly. It was an overreaction, she knew this. It was something her mother had said once, years ago, that stuck with her: she’d said the best thing about being married was always having someone to greet you when you came in through the door, even if you’d had the worst day of your life, you had that to come home to. Áine reminded herself that Elliott was not, after all, her husband. But still. He followed her into the kitchen, dressed in the horrible floor-length coat as though he’d just come in from work. Which, in fairness, he had. She’d stayed in the poky coffee shop all day until it closed, wearing her headphones with the volume turned up loud enough to block out the children dragged in there by their mums to climb all over the furniture and scream while the mothers spoke to each other, apparently unperturbed by the noise and chaos. The barista had been glaring at her, waiting for her to finally piss off, when Elliott texted to say he was home. After the humid chaos of the coffee house, the flat was particularly frigid. She hated how miserable Elliott was with turning on the heating. Other thoughts that were ugly like this simmered in her caffeinated blood. She went to the bathroom to brush coffee stains off her teeth.

‘How was work?’ he said through the door.

‘It was just –’ She gesticulated pointlessly to herself behind the closed door. ‘It was normal.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t mean anything.’

She could tell she was being spiky for no reason. When she opened the door he raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Fine,’ he said, and strode back into the living room, the coat billowing weirdly behind him.

Áine thought very often about how the problem was not with Elliott but with her, and it made her feel guilty and unclean. She had known this since she met him, known it even before. Like the flat, there was something wrong with her, deep down, hidden somewhere. Something inside her was amiss and she couldn’t love properly. Loving her was like loving a haunted house. She didn’t love Elliott the way she wanted to love him, the way she felt she should love him. She wanted to love him so much she would let him hit her with a fist or run her over in a car. She wanted to love him so much that if he asked her to put her hands in a fire she’d do it without question and would watch her skin blister until he said she could stop. She wanted to love him so much that she’d let him drag her into hell if it meant she could hold his hand on the way down. She’d loved other people like this, and it had been a kind of life-affirming agony. But Elliott never asked her to burn herself or lie on the road in front of oncoming traffic and Elliott didn’t believe in the concept of heaven or hell. He just smiled at her over cups of coffee in the morning and asked absently how she’d slept and never cleaned his mugs properly, and sometimes she was so bored she thought she might actually die of it. And then she felt bad. Because boring was mean and she shouldn’t think that something was boring just because it was the absence of cruelty. And yet: sometimes it felt hard to breathe.

It didn’t feel like anyone had been in the house. Obviously this was a crazy thing to think, but nonetheless, it really didn’t. They had, knowing the inspection was due to take place that day, left the place incredibly tidy, but leaving that morning Áine had, for a reason she didn’t quite understand, left deliberate errors in their attempts to make the place look like they didn’t live there, they just paid thousands of pounds to look at it and keep it pristine and untouched. There was a thumbprint on the bathroom mirror and the handle of the kitchen door was at a very specific angle, half bent as though someone was just about to emerge from the other side, waiting to come in. One of Elliott’s socks had been left half under the bed, at the exact angle where it would be disturbed by someone stomping about the place in a cheap polyester suit, taking photographs of their private space to show to an anonymous gombeen who would decide whether or not they were living there correctly. The sock, thumbprint and handle were all in the exact position that she’d left them. And the atmosphere of the house felt like it hadn’t been disturbed by anyone, on a spiritual level, apart from Áine and Elliott.

It was all the more pronounced, this feeling, by the fact that often when Áine re-entered the flat from visiting the 24/7 organic food shop or one of her pointless walks to avoid working she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been here in her absence. That someone else had access to the place and was rifling through their personal things every time her back was turned. Sometimes she felt like someone else was here even when she wasn’t out, even when she was home, ostensibly alone, for the whole day. The idea that someone was watching her was omnipresent and unnerving. It made her jump each time she heard the shared front door creak and slam and bang as the man in the coat came and went, often smoking outside and leaving the corridor reeking of cigarettes and stale breath.

She leaned against the bathroom door and looked at her phone, lifted slightly and distracted by the sight of several more unread messages from Cian. He was leaving for his summer in America, he said. I’m going to get fat and buy a MAGA hat, he said, which was like saying bye, and then I’ll bring u back a brick of cigarettes that u can pretend u won’t smoke so Elliott doesn’t get annoyed, which was like saying I’ll miss you maybe. And Enjoy your awful hen do, which was like saying see you soon, I guess. She opened them and watched the ticks turn blue and deliberately replied to none of them. Although they were texting again, Áine was still upset at him, but wouldn’t bother trying to explain to him why. She didn’t believe in sending cleansing essays over DM, like Laura. She just believed in ignoring problems until they went away or resolved themselves because the time made hurts hurt less. ‘Time is a great healer,’ her mother always said, which was just another way of saying that confrontation was messy and complicated and irritating, and resolution was even harder. Cian must not have had a leaving party, she thought, or maybe she just wasn’t invited to it. The night before, while trying to fall asleep on the sofa, she’d seen him tagged in other people’s Instagram stories, people she vaguely knew from university or parties or festivals, saying things like Good luck! or See u out there!

She thought about texting him back that she wouldn’t need to enjoy the awful hen do. Another of her notifications, now she’d opened WhatsApp, showed that she’d been removed from Bride Tribe II, presumably because Laura had already ordered the dresses, but had then decided she couldn’t tolerate dealing with seeing Áine on the hen do. It was annoying that she’d chosen to make this distinction after Áine had been forced to pay her sister a deposit for an Airbnb in Mykonos. But, she supposed, it was also inevitable. Áine thought of Laura’s essay again, the implication that she was emotionally stunted, the pretentious sign-off. It made the pointless deposit sting a little less. But only marginally so.

The final notification was an email from Jack S. Dear tenants, it read. Áine began walking to the living room while she was reading, so she could complain to Elliott as she went through.

We have now completed your annual inspection of your property. Thank you for your cooperation. I have attached photos of the property taken by the surveyor

– Áine walked faster. She had reached the living-room door. Elliott was on the sofa, playing a recently rereleased Mario Kart game, still wearing the strange coat, his feet up on the coffee table (Facebook Marketplace). There were no photos attached –

As you can see there are several issues and The Landlord is concerned about the state of the property, in particular damp and condensation issues that have not previously been raised properly by the tenants. As you are aware and was outlined in your contract

– Áine was gripping the phone tightly. Her knuckles were white and her fingers were shaking in annoyance –

it is your responsibility to keep the property adequately warm and well-ventilated. Particularly at the back of the property and around the cellar/storage area there is damp and condensation which we can assume has come from not properly ventilating when the tenants are cooking and showering. Please make sure you are cooking with lids on pots and opening the windows when you are taking a shower. Any further damage to the property will be deducted from your deposit at the end of your 12-month tenancy, subject to your application to renew and The Landlord’s acceptance of your application. Thank you.

She finished the email and looked up to find Elliott’s eyes on her. ‘I’ve already read it,’ he said, ‘before you say anything.’ He did not sound annoyed. Or if he did, it wasn’t at Jack S and his inability to properly attach files to email correspondence.

‘He can’t be serious,’ Áine said. She gave a choke of laughter and then was surprised at where the noise came from. ‘He can’t seriously be blaming us for that. I already told them –’

‘I know.’

‘And they’re blaming us for doing –’

‘I know.’ Elliott looked up at her without pausing the game. ‘What do you expect, Ain? It’s not our house. They’re always like this. You know that.’

Elliott was right, of course. Deep down she knew that. It wasn’t their house. And they were always like this. She knew this when their rent came out of her account every month two days after being paid, when she got the text from her bank telling her that the amount sitting in her current account was currently lower than the goal she had set for herself on the app. She knew it when she looked at the houseboat renovation Instagram and when she cringed about marks Elliott’s rucksack made on the wall when he banged it every – single – day going to and from work, googling what removed stains from magnolia. She knew it when she lay on the scratchy sofa or in the rusty metal bed or when the door slammed and it was a stranger from somewhere else using their same door, making her feel observed and scared. They were always like this and it wasn’t their house. This was true. It had always been true. It was true when she first moved to the city, her and Laura taking over a flat from two girls Laura’s older sister knew, all filled with positivity until they both got bed bugs and Laura said they shouldn’t mention it because it would upset her sister. It had been true every time she had sat in her room when Laura brought home a date and called the living room, because they had a rota and it was only fair, and Áine had eaten crisps in bed for dinner and smoked rollies out of her window and watched foxes play in the grass below and bought noodles with a credit card and ran up an overdraft that left her with such a bad credit score it had become a running joke that only she didn’t find funny.

‘And they’re lying. They must be lying. How could it have never been a problem before? There’s no way it wasn’t an issue for the people who lived here before. Or the people upstairs. They have to have mould.’

Elliott went back to playing the game. He skidded around a corner and Bowser overtook him. He was playing as Mario.

‘Or maybe it’s their fault we have mould.’

Elliott raised an eyebrow and deftly avoided a banana. ‘Yeah, they’re poisoning us,’ he said drily. ‘They’re terrorists. They’re targeting us with chemical weapons.’

‘No, I just mean that –’ When the words came it was all at once and against her will, in a desperate flurry. She knew he was already mocking her and she didn’t care. Or it was spurring her on, even. ‘What if, like, they could have put a spell on us or something, like a curse.’

Across the room Elliott pressed the X on his controller and the noise of the race stopped. He looked at her and when he finally spoke she wished he hadn’t. ‘Aine,’ he said, like the name itself was a curse. ‘You can’t be fucking serious.’

Áine felt red shame bloom on the mottled skin of her chest and begin to climb her neck like vines. Elliott hardly ever said her full, proper name. She only noticed it when he did. By the time the flush reached her face the embarrassment had transformed into anger. ‘Fuck off, then,’ she said. ‘I should have known you would be like that. Shouldn’t have bothered.’

Elliott rolled his eyes and threw the controller into the sofa, where it landed on a heap of second-hand throw pillows (Freecycle) with a dull thump. ‘Don’t start that again. I said I was sorry about that.’

She thought of the weekend they’d met her parents. The end of the talking phase, this was called. The talking phase meant it was too early to meet parents. At the beginning of the end of the talking phase Elliott had said they should fly over, that he would like to meet them. But by that time Áine’s dad was really struggling with his hip. Cold weather irritated it, as did Ryanair, as did English people. It was easier to meet on neutral territory, as her parents had suggested, and Elliott said if they were going to fly over they might as well make a proper trip of it. Like all English people Áine had met, he had never been to Ireland. And like all English people Áine had met, when he talked about going to Ireland, he really meant going to Dublin. Áine said fine. So her parents drove to Dublin and they flew in and stayed in a hotel and they all went for dinner with drinks that cost upwards of nine euros each.

Elliott had asked about Irish traditions and word meanings on the flight over, two pints deep, and she had thought it was sweet. Áine had told him some facts in advance, bits of trivia he might like. Her dad was interested in mythology and history and she thought perhaps this was something they’d bond over. It had started off okay and everyone was in high spirits. The pub they were in was still decorated from Halloween. Elliott boasted about how much Áine had taught him about Irish history, which, Áine thought, was actually not a lot. He was overexaggerating to make them like him, maybe. She thought it was sweet. Elliott said that until Áine had told him otherwise, he had always assumed Halloween was an American thing. It’s an Irish thing, the three of them enthused in near-unison. And that started off a discussion about traditions and the origins of Samhain and the days when the film that separated their world and the netherworld was at its thinnest. After her second gin and tonic, Áine’s mother began to tell the story of when her own mother, Áine’s granny, saw a banshee out in the front yard of her house. She was keening on the low stone wall outside Áine’s granny’s kitchen window, running long ghostly fingers through her silver hair, clutching a comb and crying. As a child, this was one of Áine’s favourite stories. And she knew it was a story, but somewhere she believed it to be true too. Soon after, Áine’s granda had died, when her mother was still very small. If the banshee wasn’t real, if she wasn’t warning that death would soon come to the house, then why did it come all the same?

It was only the first half of the real banshee story in their family, but they never got far enough to tell him the second part. Elliott laughed at the story, which was not intended to be funny. Áine still heard the laughter even now, how it reverberated around the pub and doubled back on them, setting her teeth on edge like accidentally chewing on tinfoil. The rest of the evening passed with no awkwardness, but Áine felt the change in atmosphere as though a banshee had passed through the four of them, leaving a film between them, her parents on one side, she and Elliott on the other. She could tell her parents were embarrassed, they felt they had exposed themselves as provincial and superstitious and silly. Afterwards she texted her mother That was nice :) x and received no response until the next morning. We love you very much.

‘You have no belief,’ she told Elliott now, fluffing the second-hand pillows that the controller had thrown into disarray. He never arranged them properly. Only she could do it to hide the damp on the wall behind in an artful way. It felt like she spent most of her life rearranging the fucking pillows to hide the damp. It felt alive, growing, always peeking out behind the fabric, mocking her too.

‘Ain.’

‘Nothing can be real unless you say it is.’

‘Fuck off,’ Elliott said.

Áine blinked. He never told her to fuck off. In arguments he was mainly passive, withholding, as though to illustrate his annoyance at the fact she had baited him into a conflict against his will. She wondered, absently, if there was something to blame for this other side of him now. Maybe it was the flat too. Maybe it was a curse. What else could explain it?

‘You don’t believe any of this shit either,’ he said. ‘You’re just saying it to disagree with me. When are you going to let this go?’

The room was so cold Áine was convinced she would see her breath as she hyperventilated. She was trying very hard not to cry, so she didn’t say anything.

‘What do you expect?’ Elliott said again. ‘It’s not our house.’

Áine didn’t answer but she sat on the edge of the sofa and watched him race around the track again and again, her heart thumping erratically against her ribcage.

July

Áine’s birthday was in the middle of summer which, she thought, was definitely the best time to have a birthday. It wasn’t beholden to the same rules of birthdays in the rest of the year in that it didn’t really matter what day it fell on, people would inevitably want to celebrate. Not because they were Áine ultras, she understood this, but more because of the enduring appeal of getting drunk somewhere in the sun. If you weren’t lucky enough to have a middle-of-the-summer birthday people tended to start to get aggro if it fell on an objectively dead day of the week, like Tuesday. This meant she had ended up always having quite pleasant birthdays without much effort. She could never organize an event in earnest because she got embarrassed about placing herself at the centre of it. Usually Laura helped and it was fine.

Elliott’s birthday was just before Christmas so he had the opposite experience. Once, Áine had looked up their astrological compatibility and it said that Elliott was a very protective person who showered a lot of affection on his partner, who, astrologically speaking, appreciated being adored. There was a mutual respect between the two, which the first SEO-suggested website she found said ‘makes them an adorable couple who will always take care of one another’. Elliott had laughed when she read it out to him and said he didn’t believe in astrology and then asked her to google their sexual compatibility next and whether the stars said they would get married and have children, and Áine had said, ‘I don’t believe in it either,’ even though she kind of did.

This year, with its demonstrable friend-shaped absences, she would not be organizing a party which was a shame because the universe, in a sort of cosmic joke, had decided her birthday would be on a Saturday. The best day! As she approached the big day, a familiar ennui had settled on Áine. She fell into old habits of comparing her age to celebrities, famous actors and models and authors and politicians, their current ages if they were close enough to her or the ages they were when they achieved great things, and where she sat in comparison to these ages and achievements. She did it with her parents too, factoring in their dating history, their wedding, her birth, their mortgage, their major life upsets, illnesses. She called it the birthday blues. The birthday blues were relatively unserious. They were by definition acute and not long-lasting. They were unlike hangover scaries or end-of-relationship gloominess or what she affectionately termed Big Bads. In the sliding scale of misery, birthday blues were rather quaint.

The birthday blues ennui was compounded by the mysterious change in atmosphere that had descended on the flat. Having previously repelled the heat outside, the place had now apparently absorbed it. It was so hot and humid inside that Áine thought they’d both come down with fever at first. The floors in the morning, with the sun refracted through their thin windows, were warm underfoot, but not in a pleasant way, more in the way you burned yourself on beaches on the first overeager morning of your holidays. The unpredictable shower, which had all winter spurted ice-cold water over them, now resolutely refused to do so and they stood underneath near-boiling sprays, trying not to faint. Sleeping was impossible. They sweated through the sheets every night and were forced to change them three times a week. They began taking it in shifts to split the sofa sleeping. It was simply too hot to bear to be near each other at night, clammy and wriggling. After an initial period of heatwave jubilation, the newspapers had stopped illustrating the front pages with broken thermometers and pints, and had started talking about the heat as deadly. ‘A hot, deadly summer is coming with frequent blackouts worldwide’, the stand outside the 24/7 organic food store said. ‘There won’t be enough energy supplies to go around as sweltering heat boosts power demand in the months ahead, putting lives at risk.’ Through it all, the mould and damp persisted, growing steadily across the walls and festering so impressively around the basement that the door actually bloomed with it, warping itself and swelling so much it was near impossible to open it. Not that Áine ever tried.

The conditions were infuriating, the heat and the damp somehow living in tandem, all the more so because Jack S’s email had blamed them specifically for this mysterious set of circumstances. They had not spoken about it since the email came through but they had been dutifully living under his orders, cooking with their pots and pans covered, emptying the pointless dehumidifier every day, drying all their clothes and sweaty bedsheets outside. (Elliott had discovered a drying rack in the basement left behind by anonymous previous tenants and Áine would drape the bedding over it, trying to touch it as little as possible, resolutely keeping her gaze trained away from the shed, away from the upstairs window. She’d rush the job and Elliott would tsk and adjust the sheets after her, muttering about how they didn’t dry properly when you bunched them up.) Sometimes Áine found herself so frustrated with it all that by the time she’d finished cooking she was too angry to even eat the meal. She’d stab away at food with her fork until it turned to mush and then throw it in the bin. The week of Áine’s birthday, the heat had become so sweltering inside and outside the flat that she gave up entirely on work and spent the day watching YouTube clips of talk-show pundits discussing climate apocalypse. The coldest spot in the flat was right by the basement door and, despite the fact she mostly avoided this area, Áine took to standing next to it in the morning, her sweaty back against the damp chill, and feeling momentarily cleansed and cool.

Every day she woke up and checked the shared front door for mail, for birthday cards and postcards and 10 per cent vouchers from every business she had ever patronized in celebration of her special day. Nothing came. When she asked Elliott about it she suggested sarcastically and not sarcastically that someone was stealing their post, because this was the only explanation for her not receiving anything. She used to do this with Laura when they were both single: if one or both of them were suddenly ghosted by a man they were talking to, they’d simply pretend he was dead. They made an elaborate show of this, talking to each other with grave seriousness about the man. ‘His poor mother,’ they said to each other. ‘He was so young. And now dead! There’s no other explanation for his lack of contact.’ ‘I think perhaps it was the consumption which got him in the end!’ And so on and so forth. Elliott didn’t really get the concept. The sarcasm seemed to make him a little bit sad. He blamed it on the Post Office and sent Áine a lot of Twitter links about austerity cuts to the postal service in order to back this up. Which was very kind, really, although she would have much preferred if he’d started an elaborate pretence about the postman dying of tuberculosis on the way to deliver her birthday cards instead.

It was still kind, though. They were being very gentle with each other at the moment; a symptom of encroaching birthday blues and the aftermath of their weird argument about the inspection email, Áine thought. She still wasn’t convinced that anyone had actually been in the house to see the damp and photograph it. She wouldn’t tell Elliott this, of course. It didn’t make sense, even in her own head, that they would know about the condition of the flat but also not provide evidence for the condition. And there were other inconsistencies too. Jack S’s email hadn’t mentioned the stain on the bedroom carpet, for instance, left by Elliott’s drunken black bile. It had failed to mention how frequently piles of congealing rubbish, in swollen black bin bags, clogged up the shared hallway because the man in the long jacket from upstairs refused to take them out daily and instead did weekly trips when the stench and the flies became too overpowering. These seemed like the type of things Jack S and, by extension, The Anonymous Landlord would be angry about, but they didn’t mention them. Just the mould and the blame. It was confusing and intriguing and the intrigue and confusion itched under Áine’s skin. Perhaps because she didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. She had refused to answer Laura’s pretentious essay on toxicity and had temporarily muted Cian on all platforms after ignoring his messages about going away. And it wasn’t the sort of thing she could bring up with Elliott without annoying him again. After all, they were trying very carefully to be tender to one another.

For instance: on the morning of Áine’s birthday she awoke to the smell of coffee on the side table by the bed (iced and hot varieties were available) and Elliott trying to sneak in with pastries in a brown bag that indicated he had at some point slipped out and spent upwards of £12 on breakfast. When he saw her awake, he made a show of looking caught out and said, ‘It was supposed to be a surprise!’ and she said it was okay and laughed and drank both varieties of coffee and was awake and wired and decidedly free of birthday-morning blues.

She felt a sudden and familiar rush of affection for him, lying in bed covered in crumbs and flushed with carbs and happiness, and then guilt at feeling it, because she wasn’t sure if she was only feeling it now because he was being so devoted and she was so grateful. And if that was really the case, then was it real affection? Wasn’t love meant to be unselfish and egalitarian? Shouldn’t you love someone to the same degree when they were buying you birthday breakfasts and kissing your neck as when they were screaming at you or crying or throwing up on the carpet or leaving their cold teabags on the floor? It was impossible to know because you couldn’t really ask someone else without them looking at you judgementally. That was the great scam of it, that you were just expected to know and not compare, and that if you ever felt the urge to compare then it cheapened your emotions and meant that deep down you were probably only ever faking it in the first place.

After breakfast they lay in bed together, doing nothing, talking about nothing, scrolling through each other’s Instagram feeds and laughing at other people in a good-natured way. They grimaced at posts from other couples, the kind of earnest, cringe, overly romantic messages they would never do. It made both of them feel better, Áine thought, to compare their relationship to other people’s behind closed doors like this. Maybe everyone did it. It was mainly harmless, arranging themselves on the totem pole of goodness to badness in the game of love. It wasn’t as if they were saying it to anyone’s face. When Elliott was bitchy and funny it made Áine remember that he could be bitchy and funny, and he wasn’t watching over her, making sure she was being wholesome all the time. She looked at him in profile, resting her legs against his knees under the covers and feeling him solid and warm, and thought, oh there you are. Where did you go? Hello again. He looked freckled and his nose had caught the sun and she realized she couldn’t remember the last time they’d had sex and climbed on top of him and took his phone and he raised his eyebrows like, yeah? And she kissed him hard and heard their teeth briefly clunk together like cheap crockery.

Clearly the time apart from each other, sexually and emotionally if not physically, had made them a little awkward with each other. He misread her intensity as some sort of play for violence and he gripped her neck while she was on top of him and she had to bat his hands away and pin them by his sides. He misread, too, her wish to somehow mark the event of her birthday with More Special Than Usual sex and he kept stopping in the middle to pick her up and carry her into the other rooms of the flat to do it there, and it was funny but also felt performative, and it was hard to stay in a rhythm after that. But, nonetheless, it was good. It was as good as it ever got in the flat. Áine always felt vaguely out of her own body when they had sex here. It was when she experienced the feeling of being watched inside the flat at its most intense. She never wanted to make too much noise because she was convinced the upstairs neighbours would hear, but she knew that annoyed Elliott, and as a result ended up feigning the performative mewling that he watched in porn videos on his phone after he thought she’d fallen asleep, and hated it because it sounded too similar to the mewling cry she heard from the woman upstairs that she’d never actually seen. She always made Elliott check the curtains were closed and the door was locked before they did it and she could tell that annoyed him too, that he thought she was being over the top. ‘Nobody’s going to see us, Ain,’ he would say impatiently. ‘It’s our house.’ And she would look at the ceiling and think, no it’s not. But anyway, none of that today. It was her birthday. She’d moan and move from room to room and wait until she was facing away from Elliott to look subtly over at the window, where she always expected to see the man in the billowing coat watching them. She didn’t come but whatever, that was fine. Afterwards they lay together on the red horrible sofa, where they had returned at the end of his weird spells of taking her from room to room (she was glad he’d given up on the idea of doing it on top of the washing machine, which felt a little bit obvious, too much like an old-school porno) and panted and he suggested they open her presents.

‘I have presents?’

‘Of course you have presents,’ Elliott said, and he stood up and disappeared into the cellar, where he’d kept them, and Áine thought, oh, that’s why I didn’t notice. She was a naturally suspicious person, but a naturally superstitious one too, and she couldn’t go anywhere near the cellar. When he returned with two boxes (a big rectangle and a tiny cylinder), she noticed that they smelled of the room, cold and damp and sweet and mossy, but she decided not to say anything. It would spoil the mood. Elliott was good at wrapping, much better than her. The edges were so clean and tidy.

Áine was impressed. She was always impressed when Elliott managed to surprise her, keep things from her, no matter how inconsequential. Her innate distrust meant she had never had a boyfriend and not gone through their phone at some point while they were asleep. It didn’t have to be a boyfriend even. It could be a friend or her mother, and she’d wait until they were out of it and go through their messages, pulling down from the top of the screen and searching for her own name, greedy for some evidence that they were secretly betraying her with infidelity or a fundamental hatred of who she was as a person. You were never supposed to admit to doing this kind of thing because it was what the internet called a textbook red flag and it was definitely not the breezy vibe she had been aiming for with Elliott. Everyone said it was a cardinal sin to go through another person’s phone, like it was an electronic diary that they carried around with them at all times accumulating dick pics and surface E. coli. Still, though, she was unconvinced that it was a vice nobody shared with her.

And it was often a successful endeavour too. She had found so much dirt on herself on the phone of the man who drove her to pickled onion Monster Munch and CBT that she became almost addicted to the ritual of going through it every time he drifted off to sleep. She would lie silent in the darkness after they had sex, waiting until his chest rose and fell with a deep, reassuring rhythm, and then she’d yawn and reach across him (so if he woke up she could pretend that she was just cuddling in her sleep, which was only mildly less embarrassing and thus believable) and she’d methodically go through his chat history on every platform. He was sleeping with or attempting to sleep with many other women and talking about Áine and how she was ugly and crazy and semi-annoying in many group chats. She would sit up for hours reading all the messages. It felt like picking at a scab, or cutting yourself just so you could pick at the scab afterwards.

But the one time she did it with Elliott, Áine had found nothing, and the experience was not clandestine and it was ruined by his virtue. When she searched her name she found only their own conversations and mentions of herself to his friends that were deeply normal – Ain is gonna come later. Gotta pick up Aine first. Oh yeah Ain was saying that film is good. Lol look at this meme Ain sent – and made her feel embarrassed and guilty for looking in the first place. It wasn’t as if she would even mind if he had been flirting with other girls, or even sleeping with them. She felt largely unmoved by the experience of fighting with other women in order to have Elliott’s full attention, or anyone’s. She didn’t mind if he loved other people, so long, she thought, as he loved her the most. She’d said this to Laura once and Laura said, ‘That is really fucking depressing,’ but Áine didn’t think so. Anyway, there wasn’t anything like that in Elliott’s phone. He was a good person and his E. coli-ridden electronic diary reflected that. The experience made her feel amoral and grubby and she never repeated it. Which was, she reasoned, how he had managed to surprise her with these birthday presents, despite her inherently suspicious nature. Funny how things turn out.

‘Open this one first,’ he said, and handed her the little cylindrical present. Áine obeyed and inside was a small brown bottle, with a dropper lid. She tipped it and the liquid inside slowly tipped with it. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s mushrooms.’

‘Oh.’

‘Well, it’s mushroom liquid. It’s better than actual mushrooms. You put a drop on your hand and you lick it off, that way you know how much you’re doing and it’s fine. I got it off a guy at work. It was really expensive.’ Realizing he’d said the last bit out loud, he laughed at himself and bit it back. ‘No, I mean, more than the plants. I wanted you to have the best stuff.’

Nice save, she thought. And then, even though she had never before expressed any interest in doing psychotropic drugs with Elliott, she said, ‘Thanks.’ He beamed.

Elliott could be a little weird about drugs. When they’d first met, younger then and working together in the kind of place where everyone did drugs, casually and voraciously, they fell into a routine of doing coke together when they went to parties, and then as they went to more dinner parties and fewer parties with a queue for the downstairs toilet, they did it less and less and then not at all. Áine was glad of it, not because she wanted to be more mature and healthy and sound of mind, but because she found drugs made Elliott like a more distilled version of the bad parts of himself. He was, like everyone, more anxious and jittery and self-involved, and she hated it, because it reminded her of herself. And although he only ever dabbled, she’d hated how he had to be a connoisseur about it. He was affronted if he found out she bought bags off strangers in the smoking area or at festivals. He affected an air of refinement over who he bought from and who recommended it and how much it cost that Áine thought was fundamentally unlike him, or at least unlike the parts of his personality that she’d identified and liked when they first met. Hence, he couldn’t have bought them just any old mushrooms to do together in … what? Some sort of birthday attempt at deepening their spiritual connection, adding a new element to their relationship? He had to buy the best ones. The idea needled her, but it was her birthday, and nobody else had even bothered to send a card, and here he was trying to be a good, attentive, caring boyfriend and she was being mean about it. So she smiled and leaned over and kissed him and said thanks again. Elliott was still beaming.

‘Now the other one,’ he said, and passed her the rectangular parcel. Again, excellent creases in the wrapping paper. Áine almost felt bad about tearing into it.

She could tell from the look on his face that she had not reacted appropriately to the second present. Elliott’s own grin disappeared and he looked blotchy and embarrassed. ‘Sorry,’ he said quickly, and attempted to pull back the now-opened present, but Áine gripped on to it and her knuckles turned white. ‘It was just … I meant it as a joke. I thought we could do it together. You know, the shrooms and then this. I didn’t – You hate it, don’t you?’

Someone said ‘No’ and Áine realized it was her. Her own voice sounded small and far away. She looked down at the package because it was easier to look at this than Elliott. She hadn’t even known you could buy ouija board kits like this, ready-made and assembled, with the little pusher and an instructional booklet featured on the front of the box in a big red square, like a special edition of Monopoly. But apparently you could. She made a mental note to start checking through Elliott’s phone again, and to this time look on his Amazon Prime as well. ‘No,’ she said, louder, reminding herself it was her birthday and nothing bad would even happen, it was just a stupid wooden board from a warehouse in the Midlands where people pissed in bottles because they weren’t allowed to take breaks. Nothing about that was supernatural or spooky or scary. That was real and what was happening in the flat, what she had convinced herself was happening: that was not. ‘It is funny. We can do it together. We will.’

That was how they found themselves back on the living-room floor later that evening, sitting cross-legged facing each other with the ouija board and the little brown bottle in between them. Elliott was visibly excited. He had been buzzing with adrenaline all day, in fact, as though he was the birthday boy, not her. He had insisted on making them dinner – it was important not to do drugs on an empty stomach and presumably you needed a strong constitution to commune with the spirit world too – but Áine had been too nervous to eat any of it. She picked at the steaks he’d seared in the pan but found hers too bloody. Red liquid oozed out on to the plate and stained her palms when she spat half-masticated chunks of the most expensive cut Elliott could find into her hand when his back was turned. She had tipped it all into the bin and hidden the remains under empty cereal boxes and kitchen roll and thought about being a vegetarian and why Elliott didn’t mention how loudly her stomach was growling. He was too distracted, maybe, she thought.

Elliott said they should do the mushrooms first, then drink a little wine, then do the ouija stuff as it was kicking in. Áine was like: fine. Everything’s fine. She sipped the wine while he set it all up, thinking about how when she was a child her mother said they couldn’t even have homemade spirit boards in the house. One of her friends at school had made one and they’d had to have a school meeting about it and on the way home from the meeting her mother had been furious and terrified at the idea of the primary school coven that was convening on the pitch behind their house, demanding to know whether Áine was involved and explaining that if those materials even crossed the front door it was an invitation to darkness and evil, the kind of bad you could never really get out. And Áine had cried and protested her innocence like a pilgrim accused of witchcraft. It was true as well. She’d never gone near the thing, a primitive little A4 sheet of paper with letters and numbers and YES and NO written on it. She was too scared, even then, of what it meant. She’d grown up in a house where her mother casually said things like ‘the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he doesn’t exist’ because those were the things her own mother said, and both of them in their separate houses put out little bowls of salt for spirits the day after Halloween and made sure the first person who crossed the front door after New Year’s was a friendly one, and had a priest bless their floorboards for good luck. It was better to be safe than sorry with these things. But still, she was a grown-up now, and none of that stuff really existed, and if she told Elliott about any of it he would laugh. And maybe it would be fun, she thought. Maybe it would bring them closer together.

Elliott frowned at the drop he’d put on the back of her hand. ‘I think it’s watered down,’ he said, deeply serious.

‘How can you tell? You’ve never had it before.’

‘Well, the guy said it’s supposed to be black and thick. Like treacle. This doesn’t look like treacle.’

‘It looks like coffee.’

He put his face to her hand and sniffed. She could feel the prickles of his stubble in between her fingers.

‘It smells like sherry,’ he said. Áine had never had sherry, so she said nothing. Elliott said, ‘Let’s do a few extra drops, just to be safe. Otherwise we won’t feel anything.’ Then, seeing her hesitation, he did the birthday smile again. ‘And we’re at home. It’s just me and you, at home. What can happen? We’re safe. You’re safe. You trust me, right?’

‘Yeah,’ said Áine, and she squeezed what was left in the dropper out on to her hand and slurped it up. Then, because it tasted terrible and bitter, like dirt and blood and what she assumed was sherry, she slurped up the entire glass of wine as well.

Elliott hadn’t said how long it would take for her to feel anything, or what she should feel, and she hadn’t had a chance to google it behind his back and panic. But it didn’t seem like much time at all before she felt warm and her thoughts disappeared. In movies and the kind of books boys carried around with them to prove they were well read, when characters did mushrooms or acid or heroin or ketamine they said fantastical things happened, like the walls started to melt or they saw the face of Christ. But none of that happened for her. She felt herself sink into their Facebook Marketplace rug, sure, but mostly she just felt her mind go quiet and blank and numb. The lights in the room were brighter and more beautiful. She could see them reflected back at her when she looked at Elliott, dancing around in his irises. The thoughts that ran in a constant loop in her head slowed and ran into each other, slumped up against each other, slid out of view until she could only catch the end of them, and then – and she only realized they were there in the first place when this happened – they stopped altogether. Áine smiled at Elliott, and he smiled back, obviously pleased with himself, which did not bother her at all. Nothing was bothering her. Not even when he pulled her hands forward, warm and slow, to the ouija board, and began asking it questions.

Áine could hear the questions, and she could feel the planchette – Elliott said that was the proper name for it, she heard him explain it at some point – moving, but she was floating above it, or beside them, watching it all happen, watching their hands. At first Elliott tried to be funny. ‘Can you wish Ain happy birthday?’ he asked, and then the planchette wiggled around wildly and he said, ‘Look, it’s singing.’ Áine rolled her eyes but they were moving too slowly inside her own head. She felt her pupils get stuck on the inside of her eyelids for a moment too long. Elliott said, ‘Is there anyone here?’ Which, in her sobriety, Áine would have felt was a bit of a cliché question, but dulled by drugs and love and birthday, didn’t really mind. And the planchette said yes and she heard herself laughing, high-pitched and loudly, as though this wasn’t scary. And it wasn’t really, because she knew that already, and now Elliott did too. Everything was going to be fine now. He was laughing as well, but it was low, lower than his naturally pitched voice. She could feel it in her pelvis and it made her want to be sick. But they kept laughing.

‘Do you like us?’ Elliott asked, and the planchette moved slowly to no and Áine tried to think about whether or not Elliott was moving it himself, but the thought was too slow to come to her. Her head was too thick and sluggish now, filled with brown goo. And anyway, why would Elliott fuck with her like that on her actual birthday? And anyway, she felt like the planchette was moving of its own accord; not quite her pushing it, but not Elliott either. She looked at her cracked nail polish holding on to the edge of the thing and it felt like it was warm, like it was burning her. ‘Are we welcome here?’ Elliott asked, and the planchette kept burning Áine’s fingers but it stayed at no.

In the normal non-birthday, non-ouija, non-mushroom world, this is where Áine would have protested. In the horror movies and books about haunted houses, this is always the point, she thought, where beautiful, long-suffering wives protest and say This isn’t funny any more, stop it! and the blond, carefree boyfriends laugh and say Relax, babe and then are swiftly murdered by supernatural forces in the next scene, leaving the women traumatized but vindicated, as though this is the best and maybe only thing a woman can be. But Áine didn’t protest and when she looked at Elliott he wasn’t laughing. He looked grey and scared and she remembered he wasn’t good at taking drugs even though he liked to think of himself as someone who was. And she said his name but it came out weird, high-pitched and sing-song, like she was mocking him, and the planchette moved again even though neither of them had been asking the board anything, and it spelled out go, which sober Áine would have thought was a little on the nose, although maybe get out was worse.

‘Not funny,’ said Elliott in a muffled, childish voice unlike his own. Áine had been staring down at the O and her own fingers and when she looked up to ask him what wasn’t funny Elliott was gone. It was still his clothes but the man from upstairs was there now, sitting cross-legged across from her in his billowing coat. Her pelvis rumbled. She thought she was going to be sick.

‘Elliott,’ she said again, in her normal voice now, a shakier one, and she moved her hand off the planchette to touch his face and make him into her boyfriend again, but then he stopped being the man from upstairs and he became Laura. Áine moved her hand from his face and ran it through Laura’s hair and Elliott smiled except it was Cian now, not Elliott or Laura or the man from upstairs. Then she thought it was her. She was sitting cross-legged in front of a mirror of herself, her eyes big and black and her skin flushed and blotchy and her head cocked to the side like a puppy. Then she disappeared, the mirror Áine. The room was dark, so it could have been anyone. She didn’t want to talk to the board any more. It was making her scared even in the quiet of her brain.

‘Where did you go?’ she asked and took her other hand off the planchette and put it in his mouth and he said, ‘Nowhere. I’ve been here all this time,’ but his face was Cian and his hair was Laura and his voice was the man from upstairs, muffled and full of her fingers and gravelly and unreal, and foreign too, even though it wasn’t, even though it was the real voice of the people who should be here. It was coming out of Elliott’s mouth but it sounded like it was coming from the board.

‘It’s still moving,’ she said. The planchette throbbed and swayed, and Áine tried to train her eyes on it. The edges of the black pointer seemed to bleed out on to the wood of the board. The colour became ink. It spread like the mould on the wall, seeping across the board until it was entirely black. She reached out to touch it but her hand swam and disappeared into the darkness. She wiggled her fingers without seeing them. They felt wet. The planchette was still moving, she could tell, but she couldn’t see it any more either. The entire board was darkness.

She was sitting on Elliott’s lap now. His jumper looked like the man’s coat from upstairs and she was scared but distantly, because his arms were around her and his hands looked like Cian’s. She could see where he bit away the skin around his nails. She thought about how they both did that. ‘What?’ whoever it was said into her hair, because he was distracted now by having her on his lap. The pretend scariness of the birthday date was over, the person in the house with Áine was indicating. He expected now they would have sex again. The inevitability of it. She felt suddenly weary. And like she might cry.

‘Look,’ she said, but his face was in her neck. ‘It’s still moving.’ It was too dark to see it. But she could feel it; she knew it was happening.

‘You’re high,’ said whoever it was she was with.

She woke up next to Elliott in bed wearing the same clothes as yesterday and no idea where she’d left her phone, so she couldn’t check the time, although the grey sky made her think it was quite early. Áine couldn’t remember going to bed. She couldn’t remember much of the previous night, in fact, after the board and crawling into the lap of the shapeshifter that scared her but drew her in. Lying there, looking at the ceiling, she could piece together snippets, even though she didn’t really want to. There was a remote embarrassment to it all, and underneath that something more primal, like fear. She remembered the board pointing out the same word over and over again, and her saying it was doing it and she could hear Elliott saying ‘No it’s not’ and then her name, more insistent, when she was crouched over the board, her nose to the wood as though looking at it closer would prove to him that it was. And she remembered having sex, or remembered the pressure and the noise of it and her nose being pressed against the board. And she remembered Elliott being angry about something, furious. Something she’d said while they were fucking, a name or a secret or a memory, and him shouting at her. Elliott was annoyed because she’d said a name. Not his name. Someone else’s name. He was upset. She felt bad, but in a remote way. It was hard to remember exactly. And she remembered gagging and vomiting, somewhere, all the chunks of raw meat she hadn’t eaten – had she fished them back out of the bin? She couldn’t remember going to bed. She couldn’t remember what happened to the ouija board, or the little bottle of thought-stopper liquid. She wouldn’t mind, though, having some more of it now.

She groaned and reached over and checked on Elliott’s phone and discovered it was just after 7 a.m. It didn’t feel right to wake him and force him to be hung-over with her, not after all the effort he’d made in expelling the birthday blues with distractions and copious amounts of alcohol. In fact, Áine thought, with a sudden brainwave, she would repay him for all his trouble. She crept out of bed, slipping into trainers and out of the front door as quietly as she could.

Small Tesco’s was always closed on Sunday morning so she spent a phenomenal amount in the organic 24/7 food store instead. It felt good to be out of the house. There was a kind of heaviness this morning that Áine couldn’t place. It wasn’t a hangover exactly. It felt like something had been unlocked, in her, in Elliott, in them, in the flat. She lingered in the aisles of the shop and then outside it, pretending to be considering purchasing papayas at upwards of £6, purely to feel the light on her skin, as though the strip lamps and sunshine would cleanse her of whatever it was that was pulling down and making it heavy, prolonging the inevitability of returning to the flat that Elliott kept calling home.

When she finally did return, Áine kept her eyes down, like she was sitting a test that someone suspected her of cheating on. She looked at the pan and the dirty plates from their dinner and her hands and the steak knives in the sink, and not at her surroundings, which were suspiciously unkempt and chaotic. The Facebook Marketplace rug was rolled up in the middle of the floor and it smelled damp and odd. The bin was on its side and she studiously ignored it, stepping over it like it was infected and disgusting. She had the unshakeable feeling that someone had had a huge party here, a party to which she hadn’t been invited and knew none of the guests and couldn’t remember a single thing that had happened. Eggs, she thought. Flour. Butter. But without the mushrooms, her head was loud again, and quick and clear. Breakfast, she thought, louder, in defiance of the loud head. Elliott. Food.

But when Elliott finally arose later, woken by the wafting smell of pancakes and bacon, a cafetière of coffee steaming on the table, he looked irritable.

‘I made breakfast! Pancakes and bacon,’ Áine said, almost shouting, clearly, in her enthusiasm. He winced at the noise and looked at the table. ‘Sorry,’ she said, quieter this time, smiling. Elliott didn’t smile back. Sometimes he could be delicate when he was hung-over. And the bacon was a little burnt.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why did you make breakfast? I was going to make you breakfast for your birthday weekend.’

‘Oh. I didn’t –’ Áine realized she was standing stupidly in the middle of the room, holding the pan still in her hand, bacon sizzling. She blinked.

‘It’s fine,’ said Elliott, looking like it was very much not fine. He looked different when he was hung-over, sometimes, really hung-over. Like the life had left him and he was greyer and paler and more unknowable. He didn’t look like the man who lived in the flat with her but he also didn’t look like the man she’d known before the flat existed to them. Or any of the other men she’d seen the night before. It was a third Elliott this morning, hating her across the formica. ‘It’s just a little emasculating, that’s all. I wanted to make you breakfast.’ He peered at the table and poured himself a coffee. ‘And those aren’t pancakes, those are crêpes.’

She wasn’t angry at him because he was right that it was probably the wrong thing to do. She should have remembered what he’d said the night before, about the benefit of buying experiences and not presents, and she felt stupid about how she had ruined her own birthday present and also stupid because she had spent a lot of money buying orange juice not from concentrate and free-range eggs, which she hadn’t even had the chance to fry. They ate the breakfast sitting side by side on the sofa and Áine was on the still-wet patch from the night before but didn’t want to complain.

When they’d finished she left the dishes in the sink – Elliott’s plate was largely untouched – and then out of habit she checked the shared hallway, even though it was Sunday and there wouldn’t be any post, and stared down at a pink envelope with Áine written on it in her mother’s handwriting. There were cards from her aunts and uncles that she never saw but who sent her £20 every year as though she was still a small child. There was a card from Laura and Alex, printed off a website with both their names side by side. There was nothing from Cian but that was expected, he was unreliable, and he was travelling, and anyway, he was back soon, so it wasn’t as if he would bother sending a postcard. There were no fewer than five voucher packages offering her 10 per cent off with the code BIRTHDAY.

‘Don’t you think it’s weird that they’re all suddenly here?’ she asked Elliott as he moved around the flat in the dark, stumbling and turning on switches. ‘Like, as if someone was keeping them from me. I don’t know. It’s just like … they don’t even do post on Sundays, right? Don’t you think it’s weird?’

Elliott didn’t look at her. ‘I’m really fucking tired, Ain,’ he said.

August

Elliott’s tiredness continued in the days and weeks after her birthday, so much so that Áine was convinced it had never been a hangover in the first place but instead some sort of psychotic break or perhaps carbon monoxide poisoning or demonic possession. Neither of them discussed the events of the birthday. She didn’t ask where either of her presents had disappeared to. Bringing them up again was terrifying and uncomfortable, too hard to think about. She tried to convince Elliott to see a doctor but he refused, saying over and over that he was just tired, just so incredibly tired. She began thinking of suggesting that he go to the seaside to try to purge himself of the chronic fatigue. She read a lot of accounts of Victorians doing so for the same reason, but she just found herself growing restless and even a little jealous when she thought of the women – because they were always women – who withdrew from society to the coast to burrow into deep meaningful periods of cleansing solitude and clear their lungs and minds of smog. It must have been relaxing not to have to think of anything, not bills or jobs or carbon monoxide leaks, just the intensity of your own feelings, consuming you, wondering whether or not you had actual consumption. But she could never find the right moment to look through his phone and find a time when he was free to book a spontaneous weekend for them or just for him. He began sleeping with it under his pillow or sitting on top of it all night while he stared at the PlayStation, for hours and hours on end, not eating or talking much to her. Once she toyed with the idea of pulling it out from underneath him while he slept facing away from her, but as her arm crept out he turned suddenly and in the darkness his face was not Elliott’s face at all but the man from upstairs and she gasped loud enough to wake him up. And anyway, he might have found it emasculating again, if she tried to send him away like a Victorian wife.

It didn’t help things – the tension in the flat, that is – that Elliott’s mushroom party also appeared to have had a bad effect on Áine, physically speaking. The evening seemed to have opened her respiratory system up even further to the negative effects of the damp and the mould and the sweat and the heat hanging in the atmosphere of the place, and no sooner had she recovered than she would find herself beginning to get sick again. She noticed it at night, at first. She would lie down and the dirt and mould would settle on her chest the second she was horizontal, and she’d start barking and wheezing so incessantly that Elliott would loudly huff and turn on his side, away from her, and tell her to go drink water, and she would usually sleep on the sofa just to give him some peace, just to try not to exacerbate the tiredness by keeping him up at night too. On the weekends Elliott began sleeping for most of the day as though trying to make up for the coughing spells that were keeping them both up at night. Áine wiped the damp and mould off the wall with a dishcloth at regular intervals, grimacing throughout, and kept all the curtains closed for him late into the afternoon, in an attempt to assuage her guilt. They moved around each other, coughing and yawning and speaking in prickly half-sentences.

A few days after the mushroom trip, she’d come back from the 24-hour organic vegetable shop, her arms laden with produce that felt as though it was wilting against her skin already, to find he’d taken her sad, small array of belated birthday cards down from where she’d balanced them on the coffee table.

‘Why did you do that?’ she asked, standing uselessly in the middle of the living room, looking at the naked table and holding the bags, their plastic handles digging red grooves into her palms.

‘I never touched them,’ said Elliott. He wouldn’t help her look for them, though, claiming to be offended that she thought he had moved them or thrown them away. Áine could never find them to confront him about it. They appeared to have vanished into thin air in much the same way they had appeared in the first place.

But Áine couldn’t, wouldn’t deviate from the idea that Elliott had thrown them out, nor could she deviate from the idea that the man and woman from the upstairs flat had withheld them from her on her actual birthday in some sort of power play. Of course, this didn’t make sense, and she understood that. How, after all, could they possibly know when her birthday was? A better question, Elliott would say, is why would they care? People ignored birthdays all the time, after all. Cian had only remembered three days later. She kept checking on WhatsApp until the little [1] notification revealed he had added more messages to their muted chat.

How was your birthday

Did they ruin it?

Did the ghosts ruin it?

She spent a long time looking at it before sending a reply that deliberately concealed how hurt she was, and made her sound imperious and annoyed instead.

Three days late is pretty poor form even for you x

He called her instantly after that but she didn’t answer and waited until Elliott was in the shower to start replying and accept his apologies. Elliott didn’t like it when she was on her phone a lot while they were at home together. He thought it was rude. Especially when she spoke to Cian.

‘Wished you happy birthday in the end, did he?’ Elliott sniffed as he passed, wrapped in a towel, craning over her shoulder when he saw her smiling at the screen. Áine thought about telling him that at least Cian didn’t pull her cards down, but then she remembered that Elliott said he hadn’t either and that Cian also hadn’t even sent one. She decided against saying any of this; it was safer to redirect this level of animosity at the neighbours, who had hidden the cards from her in the first place, probably, and didn’t invoke the same complicated feelings she had when she thought about Elliott and Cian.

Áine had felt the neighbours’ animosity growing towards them in the months since the letter had arrived implying imminent rent hikes and evictions. Ever since their encounter with the man the night Elliott had been sick and drunk, Áine had been avoiding him, avoiding them both, ducking in quickly and bolting down the hall to lock the door behind her. She would press her back against it and strain her ears to listen for signs of life, and always she would hear them murmuring beyond the door, through the shared wall. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but sometimes she heard something that made her feel so scared she wanted to throw up: a reedy cackle from the woman, a bark of derision from the man. Once she could have sworn she felt, even through the door, a long fingernail being dragged down the other side as soon as she’d disappeared into the flat. That night she couldn’t sleep. She kept getting up to check she’d locked the door. The third time she did it, Elliott yelled, ‘Please, Ain, leave it.’

But why wouldn’t they be angry and bitter and hateful? Why wouldn’t the neighbours be deliberately trying to unnerve her? Áine and Elliott got to stay, to pay to live here even though they hated it, with their pretend money from their pretend jobs, while they had to go. It was the neighbours who were considered unwelcome, phased out, part of the past of the neighbourhood with the fancy breads and the organic food shops and the Montessori nurseries. Áine could feel their hatred every time she saw the man pass their front window on his way in and out, in and out, more frequent than before – ‘viewings’ Elliott said, although Áine never saw anyone going in to actually view the flat, and so she harboured a secret belief, one of her many secret beliefs, that the man from upstairs was doing it on purpose to scare them. Or rather, to scare her. Elliott never seemed to be scared. Elliott never seemed to notice any of this was going on at all. Áine began to feel as though they had a personal vendetta against her, specifically. That Elliott had escaped for some reason. Every time she heard the woman crying through their cracked plasterboard ceiling, late at night when Elliott was asleep, she thought of the ouija board telling them they weren’t welcome and wondered who sent the message, who pushed the planchette to warn them to get out, or better yet, to fuck off.

Her fear and their anger were bubbling, she could feel it, and eventually they would both boil over. And so it felt kind of inevitable when one Saturday afternoon after her birthday debacle – Elliott playing FIFA in silence, Áine coughing on the sofa – the man appeared at the window again and Áine recoiled with the usual fright, and then, because she couldn’t bear any of it any more, the weight of it hanging over her, the idea he might always be just out of sight, she gesticulated at him madly, waving her arms as if to say hello I am here I exist I am allowed to be here and met his eyes. This was only the second time in the months they’d lived here that she’d properly looked at him; since the bike incident she’d deliberately avoided meeting his gaze. She was too afraid to. But whenever their paths crossed she could feel his eyes boring into her scalp as she kept her face turned towards the ground. She half expected her hair to come away singed. But looking at him now, she felt not hot but chilled. His eyes were deep-set and almost completely black. He was wearing a peaked hat, the weird, unseasonable coat, holding a half-smoked rollie.

‘What?’ she mouthed, except she didn’t mouth it, she said it out loud. Her hand slapped against the glass. ‘What’s the problem? Hello?’

She realized this was the first time they had spoken. Well, he didn’t actually speak. Áine heard a man speak but it was just Elliott behind her saying: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ She jumped and moved away from the window, looking back towards where Elliott was sitting facing the television. From the angle he was facing, she wasn’t sure whether he’d seen the man, or just seen her banging against the glass like an insane person. The man still hadn’t said anything. Áine opened her mouth, but something about Elliott’s bewildered, disdainful expression silenced her. She looked back towards the window to find the man still glaring at her. Well, she took it as a glare. Truly, it was more of an unreadable expression. It was as though he were looking through her. Áine could see her reflection in the smudged glass. He shook his head and slowly walked off, the gate swinging shut behind him with a loud creak. The way he’d shaken his head made her feel ashamed and embarrassed and frustrated with herself; it was as if her outburst, her finally revealing her disdain for the neighbours and who they were and how they lived and how much space they took up in her life and the life of the neighbourhood and the city, all that had confirmed something to him that he already knew. Wait, hang on – she wanted to open the window and shout after him. She wanted to say: I’m not like that. I’m the same as you. Almost the same. I just want to know why you look at me like you hate me. Are you trying to do something to me? Did you steal my birthday cards or did my parents just not send one in time?

But instead she stayed silent.

‘What the fuck was all that about?’ Elliott said.

She didn’t answer. She turned away from the window and sank down lower in her seat. The man was gone and she wished she’d never spoken. Elliott was staring at her, his game unpaused. His expression was markedly similar to the man’s and it made her feel queasy. He was wide-eyed, unreadable, expressionless. Perhaps shocked. He shook his head too, and Áine felt a new wave of shame wash over her, and under his breath he mumbled: ‘Fucking hell.’

She wouldn’t tell Elliott what she really thought was the problem, the real reason why she was sick and he was quiet, and sleeping all the time, and the birthday cards had disappeared and they never got any post at all any more except for flyers about selling the home they didn’t own to the letting agents they were in fact renting it from. But what she thought was the real reason was the flat itself. That had always been the reason, she thought. Except that now, somehow, it was getting stronger, whatever force had always lived in the flat. It was feeding off them both, turning them against each other, making him tired, making her sick. It ate money and spat out black bile and sweet, damp mould. It was getting stronger now, she thought, strong, to live inside them and grow. It made Elliott angry and remote and emasculated. And now it had stayed with them, like those people who did acid once and got stuck on a bad trip for the rest of their lives. The things that were meant to bring them closer together and rejuvenate them had become stale and poisonous and were infecting them both. Áine thought of what her mother had said about bringing evil items across the doorstep, how it changed the energy, how it was bad luck, an opening of a Pandora’s box that you could never close again. How else, she thought, to explain any of it, the weirdness between them, if not the flat itself?

And she was too scared to search around for a solution, not out loud, at least not out loud with Elliott. She knew what he would think: that her health was her own responsibility, that they couldn’t afford to heat the place properly and that was why it was damp, that living together was hard. Ordinary and sane solutions to a supernatural problem. Clearly. Elliott wasn’t to blame for jumping to such ordinary answers. It was part of his culture, she thought, to be practical and sceptical and to trust in normality and to not want to bother anyone and to pretend everything was all right because if you pretended hard enough eventually it would be. So Áine had to be the brave one. She had to search for the solutions secretly that he didn’t want to think about.

She waited until he was asleep and lay beside him in bed, swallowing hacking coughs like she’d done all those months before, googling haunted house and demonic possession and poltergeist and reading sprawling message-board threads where people swore to have seen ghosts who wanted them out of the house and tried to kill their husbands and maim their children. She read true-life ghost stories. She spent a long time reading about the family who inspired the Amityville horror movies, but couldn’t decide whether to believe them or whether they were faking. She read the plot of The Shining on Wikipedia and half of a royalty-free Henry James book. She tried to buy another ouija board on Amazon Prime but they wouldn’t ship outside the US. She liked comments where people supported the haunted and afflicted, and downvoted comments where people said stupid things like Why wouldn’t you just leave??? and I would have been outta there and Who cares about the money if it’s real you would go. People on the internet often simplified complicated things, she told herself.

When the ridiculousness of what she was doing dawned on her, Áine changed tack. She cleared her history and opened incognito windows and started instead to channel Elliott, to channel Laura, to focus on the productive, to listen to the mean comments on the internet. She opened up the housing websites and scrolled through listings for hours on end. At first, she told herself, she was simply looking for a flat to replace the flat they were currently living in. Something anonymous, something clean, something free of negativity and supernatural influences. It had been months since she was on these websites but, like actual dating apps, the websites remembered her, even through the veil of the incognito window. Hello again, they said, with cute little robot avatars and cats and houses with legs and windows for eyes, let us help you find your new home.

Despite their promises, the avatars could not, in fact, help her find their new home. She scrolled through the flats she’d seen before, finding them empty again and on the market for hundreds of pounds more per month. She changed the filters to the things she’d wanted with Elliott and a little notification pinged No results found, widen your search? She widened her search. She removed the garden filter, the own front door filter, the upstairs downstairs filter, the separate living room kitchen filter, the area filter. She set the net as wide as the entire city and scrolled through the smattering of results. One of the flats had an elaborate description from the landlord that went on for several pages: … For decor, think Portrait of a Lady on fire … The mouse has gone. Here you may feel like you can quietly get on with your own life and not be imposed upon or lose your own time. Italian are welcome. My late father was British Army intelligence in Italy from 1944 onwards to circa 1950 … It went on like this for a long time. The rent was more than they were currently paying and more than either of them could currently afford. She moved off the websites and turned to search engines instead, but rather than listings, Google presented her with ghoulish articles about the concept of apartment listings in general: Student shares the grim reality of sharing her £1,000-a-month flat with three men. A couple were stabbed to death after their housemate became paranoid about catching flu from them. Another housemate told the court the defendant was ‘constantly in a bad mood’. £1,800-a-month flat in Woolwich slammed for having window ‘like a prison cell’.

After a time Áine realized, as though the action had presented itself independently of thought or motivation, that she had begun looking at places which were clearly not suited for a couple, not for her and Elliott, just for her. She moved the filter, or someone moved the filter – someone moved her hand to move the filter – from 1 bedroom to 0 bedrooms and she began looking at studios and thinking very softly, very vaguely, almost like free-thinking, not deliberately at all, about whether she could afford to live like that. And what living like that would look like. What it would be like to wake up and sit on the edge of your bed and reach the kitchen sink and the hob? To have your sofa next to the front door, always faintly wet from being right next to the shower? To live inside a bedsit, a prison cell, a tiny box that seemed to all cost more, much more in fact, than what she paid for half of the place here with Elliott? She thought, again very softly, again not deliberately at all, about what people would think of her living like that. Would it seem cool and independent? More likely people would think it was sad. Was it sadder than living in a haunted house? Was it sadder, too, than leaving the haunted house and living with strangers, anonymous housemates that could one day stab you to death for forgetting to wipe down a shower screen or getting toothpaste on the sink? She imagined, too, what someone would think coming back to one of the overpriced little box studios on the website, a person she’d just met and wanted to have sex with or fall in love with. But then that thought was too oppressive, too overwhelming, too obviously scary and bad, and she finally came out of the possession, out of the fugue state that had brought her to this website and this point, and closed all the windows and decided not to look again. Before shutting down her laptop she went back to the message boards where strangers called people stupid for not leaving haunted houses or running away from demons and called someone a cunt for no reason.

And then Elliott came out of his possession too, out of the supernatural depression that had descended on him. It lifted just as suddenly as it came and he emerged from the bedroom one morning to find her lying on the sofa, and he was looking so purposeful she thought for one moment of terrible clarity that he was going to say ‘we need to talk and we need to break up’. But what he actually did was show her a picture on his phone of a little black-and-white puppy with a broken leg, being cared for by two earnest-looking blonde women wearing blue polo shirts. He’d been found by the side of the road, the caption said. Elliott’s eyes were strangely wet. ‘I think we should get a little dog,’ he said. ‘Or a cat maybe.’

‘Oh,’ said Áine. ‘Right.’

And she hadn’t actually said anything more agreeable than that but soon Elliott was consumed by the idea and totally transformed from his sleepiness and his grumpiness. He kept sending videos of cats being bottle-fed and Chihuahua mixes who had to be put on diets. He suggested on the weekend they take a trip out to a rescue centre, just to look, not to decide anything. Áine thought about how that was what he’d said when they looked at the flat, but she also remembered how much she liked him when he was purposeful and energetic. That it was good for him. And that maybe it would be good for him to have a pet to be purposeful and energetic for, and responsible for. Maybe it would be good for them. ‘Sure,’ she said, and she helped him fill out some forms about where they lived and what they did and if they had a garden (yes) and if they owned their property with the garden (no). Until recently, it would have been an unheard of possibility to own a pet, even if you were in a couple, even if you had a flat that was like a grown-up flat. All of the listings Áine had seen when she first moved had the same caveat to their search for tenants: No DSS. No pets (sorry). She had always found it unseemly and callous that they put the apology in parentheses after the pets thing rather than the benefits thing. But she had found that people here generally liked dogs much more than they liked poor people. So it made sense in a way.

Elliot was so buoyed by the idea of them getting a pet that even the actual experience of the trip did not depress him, despite the fact it was demonstrably depressing. The place reminded Áine of a prison for small animals. Even the way you had to enter and leave was prison-like: a metal revolving door and a security guard that asked them for a donation. She was half expecting to be patted down for shanks. It was a sweltering Saturday afternoon and they traipsed in after a slew of other couples that looked just like them, or just like Elliott, full of optimism and googly-eyed for the puppies and kittens and elderly cats and dogs who pressed themselves to the frames of their perspex cells, panting and lolling in the heat.

Elliott favoured little dogs, which surprised her. She expected him to go for golden retrievers, or at least the golden retriever-like mongrels that had been surrendered to be ogled by strangers all day every day until someone, anyone, brought them home and treated them better than they had been treated before. Or, like, border collies. But instead he kept gravitating to tiny terriers and yappy lapdogs, the kind of animals that screamed at nothing and slept next to you on your pillow and shook when they were cold or scared or angry. He looked in a non-committal way at a few big ginger cats too, but they were patently uninterested in his affections, and this seemed to make the decision for him that they would be getting a dog. ‘I don’t see the point in having something that doesn’t need you,’ he said. And when Áine didn’t answer, he added: ‘Plus, the dead mouse thing.’ She hung back when he was making his selection, feeling hot and uncomfortable. The big, old dogs peered up at her and made her stomach lurch.

In the end, it didn’t really matter what Elliott wanted, because the cats’ and dogs’ home were more selective than he might have first anticipated. The big, golden dogs couldn’t come home with them anyway, nor could a lot of the little nervous creatures he seemed to want so much. There was an over-the-top list of criteria in order to match pets with homes here, and a lot of the criteria seemed to be out of their control and out of their capacity. Some of the dogs wanted, needed, the kind of large country house where they could run around and dig in lush grass and bother foxes and badgers. Some dogs needed small children to give them attention and companionship. Others needed quiet roads. Some feared men. There was a general reluctance, regardless of the animal in question, to surrender anything to people who didn’t own their own place. But then again, they needed to find them homes too. The list of requirements for the animals’ housing was invariably longer and more specific than any list either Áine or Elliott – or anyone else they knew – had ever created for their own human housing. It wasn’t really fair to be jealous of the dogs in this sad little shelter on that point, though. They deserved to be happy. They deserved not to live in a place that would make them lonely or sick or sad or scared. But still, Áine couldn’t help but think she also deserved that.

One of the staff was speaking to Elliott while she hung back, letting a three-legged Staffordshire bull terrier lick her fingers weakly. He jerked his head towards her and she patted the Staffie, then followed Elliott and the woman to the back of the centre where the animals were older, the crowd of spectators thinner. Some of them had clearly had mange. More than one of them were scarred from dog fighting. They were invariably bull terriers and a few Rottweilers, the breeds of dogs that people were suspicious of and superstitiously avoided. The handler talking to Elliott was telling him that these dogs needed homes with only adults, and that if one person was home a lot, even better. They needed patience and an open mind. They were often left here to languish for months. Áine saw Elliott’s face contort, softening and tightening as he considered. The three of them stopped at the end of the sort of canine death row they had been meandering through during this conversation, in front of a magnificent, huge black Rottweiler. He only had one ear and the corresponding eye was milky and blind. His coat was thin and patchy, his hind legs twisted. He was old and ugly. He looked up at them and bared his teeth. Áine felt strangely drawn to him. It was the ugliness, she thought, and the way his expression was resigned to their rejection already, braced for dismissal and pain. His name, the little tag on his cage said, was Puca. He looked at them with his milky eye. ‘I like this one,’ she said.

They’d had to do a meeting first, with two handlers and with Puca, in a little room off the death row of unwanted pets that was the main arena of the dogs’ home. The handlers were very smiley and encouraging and dressed in the same bright blue as their charity’s logo, and they encouraged Áine and Elliott to sit with Puca and play with him, to ‘see how they got on’. Puca was patently unsure of them, unsure of all people, in a way that endeared Áine to the dog even though she remained ambivalent in a more general way about becoming a pet owner. He stuck to the corners of the room, looking sheepishly at them in fleeting glances, ducking under them when they petted him, contorting his spine. Áine touched his head and the rough, ugly skin of his mangled ear while the staff told them both that he just needed time and divulged some of his story and the encouraging environment he would require. They had found Puca on the side of the road and they thought he might have been used for dog fighting but, honestly, they didn’t know. They couldn’t pinpoint his age but the marks of his abuse indicated that the injuries were years old and so he must be too. People tended to avoid him on their trips to look for cute puppies and kittens, they said, in an admittedly emotionally manipulative way, because they were superstitious, holding on to supernatural and silly beliefs about the breed, or wary of a challenge.

Nonetheless, Áine and Elliott were both allowing themselves to be emotionally manipulated. She felt sorry for Puca. For Elliott, she suspected it was more of a chance to perform a morality that he believed he possessed, that they both possessed. He nodded sagely at the staff and said things like ‘adopt don’t shop’ in an earnest, unironic tone that made Áine suddenly want to stop petting the dog and put her dirty fingers into his mouth, to twist his molars until they popped and broke and bled on his chin and he would shut up. The image dissipated almost as soon as it appeared. She swallowed and looked at Puca instead, who was regarding her steadily with his unmilky eye, like he knew what she had been thinking about and that she was maybe a bad person. But the staff seemed fine to let them have a weekend with the dog to test it out anyway. Maybe they didn’t clock it as fast as the dog.

The trial would begin the next weekend, to give Áine and Elliott proper time to prepare themselves for the new arrival. The handlers kept saying it like that, as they filled out forms and arranged drop-off times, a new arrival, as though they were expecting a baby and not a 50 kg street dog. And all of this was fine but then they returned to the flat to do the new arrival preparations and that, Áine thought later, was when the troubles really started.

The animal jail had sent them home with a kind of checklist, and they quickly realized they had underestimated the amount of things they needed to buy, what they needed to get ready. There were the bowls for food and water, and the toys and the bed and the sanitary towel-looking squares of absorbent pads in case he had any accidents in his new environment, even though the centre had promised Puca was old enough to avoid them. There was the choice of food, and how much to feed him, and what was the best food to give him. The centre had advised them to continue with the food they had him on but Elliott had got it in his head that they should feed him raw meat, which had recently become the word of God in dog-rearing, that it was organic and healthy, and so, by extension, boujie. Puca had his own collar and leash and a blanket, but Elliott insisted they buy replacements for these too. He picked out a lush brown leather set in an independent pet store near the flat, on the fancy high street, and on top of the raw meat and the special slow-eating bowls and the unbreakable, mind-stimulating toys, it had become eye-wateringly expensive.

‘Are you sure we need all of this?’ asked Áine, watching Elliott deposit blocks of pink, raw mince into the freezer in anticipation of Puca’s arrival. ‘It is just a trial. He might not –’ And then she caught Elliott’s expression, watching her, his hands full of brain matter and offal and bone marrow and blood, and stopped talking.

Most alarmingly, he had researched and decided on getting a sort of large metal cage to keep the dog in at night during the trial. Elliott called this a crate and he had it delivered to their house in the middle of the week, when he was at the office. Áine had to dip out of a meeting to accept the package and you could see when she got up that she was wearing pyjamas on the bottom half of her pinstriped shirt and she was annoyed that Elliott hadn’t warned her it was coming. And that he hadn’t warned her how horrible it looked. The cage was huge and cold and noisy. Áine had never had a pet before, and Elliott said that she wouldn’t have possibly known, then, that this was what you did when you got one. It was to train it not to cry at night and not to eat up soft, beautiful furnishings and also to teach it boundaries. He said this despite the fact he had also not had a pet before in his life, but Áine accepted it as fact. It seemed odd to her that this rule existed in the country that adored dogs so much, that adored them more than people, that treated them as though they were practice children and constant emotional companions, but put them in cages anyway, just some of the time, just to remind them of their place in the hierarchy of human importance. When Elliott came in from work, he chastised Áine for leaving the horrible cage in their shared hallway, as though she was doing it deliberately to broadcast their decision to get a dog to their neighbours. He tsk-ed at her in a voice she hadn’t heard before and she wondered if it was something he was trying out for Puca and what it meant that he was trying it out first on her. He lifted the cage into the flat and tried placing it in different areas and imagining Puca inside it. It was too big for the living room and it didn’t make sense to keep it in the bedroom, he said, because the internet said that wasn’t really the point of crating. Eventually he decided the most sensible place for the crate and for Puca’s sleeping quarters was near the garden, so he could quickly get used to needing to go outside to relieve himself. He nudged the cage up close against the damp basement door.

‘Won’t he be scared here?’ Áine heard herself saying, bemused at the fact she had suddenly become the dog’s advocate when she hadn’t even been the one who wanted to do this. ‘Won’t he be cold?’

Elliott put pillows and blankets inside the cage and said, ‘He’s covered in fur, Ain.’

Puca finally arrived on Friday afternoon and Elliott was the one who went to get him, smiling and greeting the blue polo-shirt-wearing staff and ushering the confused dog inside. They promised to come again on Sunday evening and that no decisions had to be made now. They wished the new family luck. Áine listened to it all from the living room, sitting on the edge of the borrowed sofa, surrounded by primary-coloured dog chews that blended in with the delirious fabric of the couch. Puca padded softly towards her and then away again, and then towards Elliott and away from him. Elliott sat on the floor opposite the drooling beast, offering him toys and small crunchy pellets from a bag of treats, and Puca considered him and backed away, ignoring her, his one good eye darting around the room.

‘Come on, boy,’ Elliott kept saying in the same unfamiliar voice he’d used on Áine, soft but authoritative and somehow still wary. He was nervous, she realized. He was trying to hide it but she could see it in his uncertain movements, in the way he held his hand out to the dog and then recoiled every time Puca bared his teeth, his spit dripping in big globs on to the uneven floorboards.

She had expected Elliott’s persistence to last longer, honestly, but he gave up more easily than seemed normal. It couldn’t have helped that Puca’s behaviour, after his initial wariness of them and their vibe and their horrible little home, got worse and worse and more erratic. When they tried to coax Puca towards the crate with stuffed toys or treats, he cowered and whined, making an offensively terrifying high-pitched noise that hurt to listen to. Elliott sat cross-legged in front of the mouldy door, his palm outstretched and smeared in peanut butter and kibble. Áine had decided she would be the pusher rather than the coaxer. Like the dog, she didn’t like to go near the basement either. ‘Come on, boy,’ Elliott kept saying, and Puca kept crying. ‘Aine, please just help, for fuck’s sake.’

‘I am helping,’ she said. But it was hard to push Puca any closer. He stared up at her with wide eyes. She could see the white of his healthy one. He was shaking against her legs. He peed. She felt bad. She didn’t want to force him to do what he didn’t want to do, to be close to people he didn’t want to be close to, to live in a place that made him afraid. When Elliott swore under his breath and got up to scrape his hands clean and find the mop, she found herself kneeling down to meet Puca’s eyeline and shh-ing him. She was afraid to get close to him. He was too panicked to cuddle.

He bared his yellowing fangs and snarled at them quietly, his sour hot breath smelling of metal and meat. He prowled from room to room, sniffing the air and occasionally barking loudly enough to make them both wince. He refused the expensive raw meat Elliott had defrosted, having thought Puca was just hungry, and nudged water away violently when Elliott had thought maybe he was just thirsty. He tore apart several of the supposedly unbreakable toys in quick succession, leaving a trail of white stuffing destruction in his wake. He cocked his leg and peed on the table and the cupboards and the edge of the bed, and it seeped into the rugs and the carpets and left the place reeking of ammonia. He refused to go anywhere near the garden when they opened the door and tried to usher him out there, the two of them pushing against his great weight. Elliott had seemed relieved and defeated when night-time came and he could finally lock Puca inside the huge cage and think that this, at least, was something correct, something he had done right.

Elliott shut the door on Puca and said he was exhausted and went straight to bed, his shoulders hunched. Áine and the dog watched him go and then she looked around at the mess. It was hot in the flat and the smell of urine and congealing meat made her gag. She wandered into the bedroom but Elliott was lying on his side, his back to the door and her, already sleeping or pretending to. On autopilot she returned to the kitchen and got on her hands and knees and started cleaning up the accidents and the already-moulting dog hair and the fuzzy white innards of Puca’s new toys. She wondered when the responsibility had been allocated in this way but Elliott had seemed both so elated and so despondent over the idea of becoming what she teasingly kept referring to as a ‘dog mom’ that it seemed cruel to complain to him now about being left to clean up something he had insisted they take on.

By the time she had finished, her hands reeked and her back ached and the kitchen still smelled of piss and metal. She thought about doing this every night while Elliott slept. She imagined Puca as a tiny baby rather than a cumbersome animal, his milky eyes intact and wide and blue, his plaque-addled teeth instead a set of red gums that attached themselves to her breasts for months on end. She imagined herself bloated, her veins showing through the skin, a tiny Puca with Elliott’s face clinging to her ankles and tugging and howling and wanting the way Puca was howling, needing her, needing attention. Because that is what would happen, she thought. That’s what was supposed to happen. That’s what she should want to happen. The responsibilities kept getting bigger, the love had to keep growing, legitimizing itself. Sharks have to keep swimming or else they die.

Puca’s soft, high-pitched, sad little whines became howls of desperation that did not stop. Alternately he howled and barked and snarled and whined and demanded to be let out of the cage. He thrashed inside it and banged against the basement door violently. Áine listened to the noise all night long, looking at the ceiling, wondering how Elliott could sleep through it, counting in her head the days since her last period just to be safe. In the morning the dog was still howling. When she judged it was early enough to set the poor thing free, she rushed to the kitchen and found him still trapped in his crate, which was shut, but the basement door was gaping open, revealing that the mould creeping around the frame had almost totally infested the other side. It was a green map of darkness, sliding down into the black hole of the staircase. The dog was howling into the hole, shivering, backed up against the wire bars of his prison. Áine howled for Elliott. Elliott lurched in groggily, his hair standing on end, and said it must have been the wind. Or Puca thrashing. And anyway, she was being dramatic. He said all this without looking at her. He could be a bit short when he was sleep-deprived. Áine told herself he was right and it was fine. She let him shut the door and she lingered in the bedroom, avoiding both her boyfriend and the dog. It was Saturday but they both discovered with joint notifications that they had received an email from Jack S at 9 a.m. sharp reminding them that while contractually they were allowed pets, they must maintain the integrity of the property and make sure any pets didn’t damage the property or the general ambiance of the neighbourhood. Jack S never emailed them out of the blue and never on weekends.

‘Did you tell them we were getting a dog?’ she asked Elliott, who was making himself a cup of strong coffee without offering her one and still ignoring Puca’s noises.

‘No,’ he said flatly.

She wondered if the neighbours had got in touch, and then wondered how quickly they would have noticed the dog, and then wondered about the relationship they had with The Landlord or the agency or with Jack S himself that would have facilitated such a quick condemnation of their abilities as responsible adults and cosplaying dog parents. She wondered if they were trying to sacrifice Elliott and Áine for their own survival, maybe. A last-ditch attempt to save their home by telling on them. She didn’t wonder any of this out loud. You couldn’t, over the pitiful noises Puca was making. Looking at him in the cage that Elliott kept saying tersely was a crate made her want to cry. She thought of Puca by the side of the road and Puca in dog fights and all the unknowability of Puca’s life before them and of the small, dank unkindness of his life now and felt guilt press heavy on her. She went to open the cage and release him and Elliott said not to do that yet and he pushed her hand away as she was releasing the door and Puca foamed and snapped and bit and Elliott swore and dived back, his fingers covered in red wet blood.

After that: chaos. Elliott screamed and the dog howled, high and painful as though he was the one bitten, as though he was terrified by something in the house, by them or the cage or something evil. But there was no time to think on it. Elliott swore and shouted and rushed into the bathroom, cradling his mangled bloody hand. Red ran in stripes, covering his freckled forearms. He slammed the door in Áine’s face and she heard the taps running and his laboured breath and she thought about calling an ambulance for him, wondered if it was bad enough for that, but instead she stayed in the kitchen. Puca had bucked wildly, wild enough to free himself from the cage crate that she’d half opened, and in the chaos it had knocked against her. Her arms stung and she didn’t think about it so they would sting less and on instinct she put her arms around the dog and gripped his black fur and put her head on his back and tried to calm him and he howled and thrashed and shook with fear.

In the end they didn’t need to ring an ambulance. She didn’t know how long she’d held Puca but at some point Elliott came out of the bathroom again, a brown-red towel that was once white wrapped around his left hand, his face set. He looked down at them both on the ground and he went into the bedroom and when he emerged he said, no more, it was a mistake, and for a second Áine didn’t know what he was talking about, what he meant, who he meant.

The staff from the dogs’ home weren’t coming out again until Sunday, and even then just to check, but when Elliott called they came fast and they took Puca back. They slipped their bright blue, branded rope over his neck and led him out of the flat and into the shared hallway and through the warped front door, leading him back towards the van, the dog sadly padding between them. His head was bowed, his tail between his legs. He didn’t look happy, but he also didn’t need much convincing from the staff to leave the place. In fact, he was trembling. They were a different two women from the pair who had dropped the dog off the day before. They kept apologizing to Elliott and he kept saying it was fine and that these things happen and that it just wasn’t meant to be. But still Áine could tell Puca’s demonstrably broken soul had unnerved them. She wanted to tell them that they hadn’t hurt Puca. That it wasn’t their fault. But Elliott was dealing with it all. He shook their hands with his one unmaimed one. Áine hung back, unable to watch the last minutes of Puca’s sad, doomed attempt at domesticity. It hurt too much.

‘What will happen to him now?’ she kept asking Elliott after the door had been shut. Once Puca was gone things felt calmer, somehow, in the flat, even if Áine felt panicked about his fate. She could feel the place exhale now it just had them to feed on. ‘What will they do with him? Will they kill him?’ Elliott said they didn’t use that language with dogs, they said destroy. The backs of her thighs were wet, something was dripping, staining her dress. She withdrew her hands from behind her back and only then did she see the blood and realize Puca had bitten her too.

September

Áine’s dog bite refused to heal. Elliott’s, despite looking incredibly red and gory and dramatic, had not needed medical attention, and by the morning after Puca had been returned, before the weekend was out, the gash had scabbed neatly. Áine said he must have a good immune system for it to have sorted itself out so quickly, or cold and thin blood for it to have looked so bad in the first place. Elliott was non-committal about these theories. But Áine’s bite, which had bled out more slowly and looked dramatic only after the fact, refused to heal quite as obediently. She had wrapped an old T-shirt around her hand after Puca left, because Elliott had been anxious about his injury and about the failed dog experiment and she didn’t want to contribute any further to that anxiety. She ran it intermittently under the cold tap, wringing out the T-shirt and tying it back on. It had been white but by the time she slipped into bed beside Elliott, who was turned away and reading about tetanus on his phone, it had gone pale pink with the wringing and retying. She woke up the following morning to find the ruined T-shirt had soaked through on to their sheets, leaving a patch the same dark-brown red as the horrible borrowed sofa and curtains. The bleeding didn’t stop, in fact, for a full twenty-four hours. Elliott said maybe she was anaemic, and that maybe the experience was a worthwhile lesson for them both.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Áine, although she didn’t really understand what he meant.

Elliott had gone to A&E the day after Puca was sent back and spent four hours waiting for a tetanus jab, just to be safe. Áine didn’t see the point of this precaution, and she would have told him so if he had asked her to come, which he did not. The idea of waiting around in a hospital, with genuinely sick people who needed genuine help, just to avoid some sort of imagined rabies, just to have them look at a wound you essentially inflicted on yourself, was intolerable to her. Besides, she’d had a tetanus injection years before, at university, when she’d refused to wear her shoes home from a nightclub and stepped on broken glass and then, out of pride and spite and because Laura had said, ‘I told you not to do that,’ she put the shoes back on and wore them the whole way back to their flat, digging the shards further and further into her heels until the soles of her stilettos were slick with her own blood. She’d thought it was funny at the time because she was too drunk to feel anything, but then the next morning she’d gone to the health centre with Cian and begged him not to tell Laura that she’d been right all along. The wound was incredibly painful by that point but Cian, at least, still thought it was funny. He kept laughing and taking photos of her while she sat bleeding and feeling sorry for herself on the fold-up medical bed.

So Áine didn’t go to A&E for another shot. But it had brought Elliott some comfort, she supposed. By Monday morning he was pretty much back to his old self. He left for the office offensively early and said they were having some sort of pizza evening, so he would be back late. It was as if he had bled out the infection that had made him sleep for sixteen hours at a time and decide to care for an animal and then not want to care for it. As if the humours in his body had been briefly off but the spell had now lifted. As if he had been leeched of bad feeling. Or perhaps that the sickness in him had passed to Puca and then passed on to Áine, whose hand, while not bleeding, was now throbbing faintly. One of the A&E nurses had put a proper dressing on Elliott’s cut. It was partially obscured by his shirtsleeves.

‘Okay,’ said Áine. ‘I’ll see you later.’

Áine was not sleeping well again. She was in another jag of nightmares, recurring dreams in which Puca frequently appeared, often wrapped in blankets and the size of a baby but with his snarling face on the chubby infant body. One especially bad night she found herself trying to communicate with him, or the ghost of him, because the shelter had by now surely killed him. Even if Elliott said that wasn’t the right word, she knew they had. And she thought dogs weren’t meant to have souls either. But still, somehow, Puca came to visit her when she drifted off, his wide, human-like eyes staring up at her. It was as though there was a tether between them that allowed them to communicate without words, like an umbilical cord. Áine would stare up at Puca, who would climb on to the bed and sit on her chest, telling her with his eyes that she was right and sane and true, and that whatever the bad thing was in the house it had gone into Elliott, and then had gone into him. In life and reality he had snarled and bit and lashed out, but in these night-time visits was docile and pleading and contrite. He rearranged his paws on her chest when she found herself – the real Áine and also the dream Áine – struggling to breathe. He told her with his wet, sad eyes that whatever had been in him, when he bit her, it was in her now, and she had to be careful, and that he was sorry. Dream Puca licked forlornly at her bite. In the morning, Áine awoke to find her hand wet, and wondered if it was a visitation for real. Or perhaps she had been sucking at the wound herself in her sleep, a possibility she hated even more than the first because it was disgusting.

She began trying to stay awake, just to avoid her own psyche at night. She did laps of the flat in the darkness, because the lights might also wake up Elliott, too tired to be truly afraid, too afraid to be truly tired. Every noise in the flat at night made her jump, but at least they kept her awake. She followed the noises, able in her half-conscious state to investigate them more fearlessly than daytime Áine normally would. She adjusted dripping taps, she followed creaking floorboards which led to nothing. One night, feeling particularly delirious with exhaustion, she followed the sound of a scratching noise from the window and found herself face to face with the man. In the moonlight he looked illuminated and celestial. Áine swayed slightly, breathing through her mouth, and the man bared his teeth at her like the Puca baby, and she saw they were crowded and yellowing. Then he drew back and spat and she watched it splatter on the glass between them. She stood there looking at it until he slowly walked towards the hut at the back of the garden and shut himself into the darkness and disappeared. It didn’t make sense. The door to their flat was at the front of the building. The garden was at the back. The hut was at the back of the garden. Was he just going to stay there forever, watching them? Biding his time until he could get rid of them for good? When she finally took a deep-enough breath to scream, she found herself sitting upright in bed.

Still, there were sticky, dirty handprints on the window, on the inside of the window, and she wiped them off without saying anything to Elliott. She didn’t want to mention the neighbours to Elliott any more, because he was reasonably convinced that they’d told on them for having Puca, that they were trying to pit themselves against Áine and Elliott to see who would survive in their hotly contested hellhole. He was angry about it. Not angry enough to shout at them through the window, but angry nonetheless. She didn’t tell Elliott the full details of any of these nightmares, but on the occasions when he found her in the kitchen in the middle of the night, standing over the sink as he was on his way to the toilet, she told him she’d been dreaming of babies. Elliott blamed it on the school in the opposite street, how now it was September again you could hear them screaming in the playground, how Áine was listening to that all day. ‘Sure,’ she said. In the mornings she was always exhausted, as if she’d not slept at all, just lain awake all night thinking about it consciously instead, her eyes wide and dry.

Her hand throbbed all day, making her typing clumsy, her work filled with typos and half-finished thoughts and actions. She felt vaguely nauseous. In spite of herself she googled symptoms of rabies and then speculated to herself that the bite had set off more and more serious illnesses until she was fairly certain, by around three pages of search results, that she had terminal brain cancer or at some point in the past year she’d suffered some sort of aneurysm without realizing. At lunchtime she switched tactics, convincing herself she had a flesh-eating virus instead, some sort of necrosis. The computer didn’t tell her this, actually. It was the smell. The flat was warm and had, since Saturday, been unable to rid itself of the smell of ammonia, blood and hair that Puca had left after his short stay. But now that lifted slightly and underneath it Áine could detect the familiar sour, sweet, mysterious smell that lived in the atmosphere of the building and had done since they moved in, and then, beyond that, a faint rancidness that concerned her enough to unwrap the T-shirt still around her hand, expecting the wound underneath to be weeping pus, her flesh falling off and dying. When it wasn’t, she wrapped it up again with a tea towel and threw the T-shirt in the bin and set off in search of the smell. She opened up the freezer, thinking it might have been the raw meat for Puca that Elliott had convinced them to buy in bulk, but it wasn’t that. Not that the freezer smelled particularly pleasant, but the smell lingering in the air was worse. It wasn’t fresh. It smelled like death, like something had recently died, or more likely that something was about to. It made her not want to eat and for the rest of the afternoon she covered her mouth and nose with the collar of her jumper, grateful at least that her hand was, in comparison to the smell, less of a distraction, but still mildly concerned that perhaps smelling death was an indicator of terminal illness or brain-tumour-induced psychosis.

At 5 p.m. exactly she shut the laptop in a weak attempt at achieving some peace of mind, and then immediately transferred herself from the sofa to lie on top of the bedsheets, which she hadn’t yet bothered to change. She rested her injured, possibly rabies-infected, possibly terminally ill hand on the now-dried bloodstains and, as a treat after a day of using the medium screen, treated herself to scrolling on the little screen of her phone instead, awkwardly using her non-dominant hand and feeling like someone else was doing it on her behalf. On Instagram Laura had posted a short, sped-up video of Alex tiling their new eco-friendly bathroom stall. Cian had posted a photo of Heathrow airport on his story, followed in quick succession by several photos of him in a pub with a group of people she didn’t know who were all welcoming him back to the city with open arms and poorly settled Guinness. She thought the smell maybe was the dried blood on the sheets, so she put on a wash but it didn’t go away.

When Elliott came home it was very late and he said he couldn’t notice the smell. Áine realized she hadn’t left the flat, and she didn’t the next day or the day after that or any of the other days, and the smell got worse and her hand wept even when Elliott ordered her a pack of bandages off Amazon Prime that were supposedly ‘fast-healing’ bandages. The sickness moved up her arm from her injured hand, navigating her body through her cardiovascular system. By the weekend that should have been Laura’s hen do she could feel it throbbing in her veins and looked at them a lot through her skin and thought they were bluer than usual, but maybe not, and maybe that didn’t mean anything even if they were.

But it was still necessary to do irritating things that confirmed her place in the world, however small. At some point during the week she had to take the bins out, for instance. She hauled black bin bags full of rubbish out into the shared hallway, along with several expensive plants she’d bought months ago and allowed to wither and die. The florist had solemnly promised her that these particular species were almost impossible to kill, but somehow she’d managed it. She’d bought an app to remind them when to water them, but the app had stopped updating itself. Besides, Áine told Elliott, nothing grew or thrived in the building. It was too damp and lifeless and ugly. He had rolled his eyes when she said that, as though it was a joke. Which it kind of was, maybe.

As soon as Áine got the rubbish into the hallway the smell became intolerable. She gagged and covered her mouth and nose with her wounded hand and then winced again at the pain of holding it up, the blood sloshing around inside her extremities. The hallway reeked of death; a wave of heat and she was convinced that she would trip over the corpse of some animal, a fox or a feral cat that had managed to sneak its way inside the property, looking for a warm place to curl up and die. But there was nothing. Áine breathed through her mouth and her eyes watered as she edged down the hallway. At the shared bins the smell was so bad she doubled over, opening the lid and retching into the darkness, and then finding the culprit, congealing packages, sweating like organs, wrapped tightly in tape and white plastic. Áine didn’t want to touch them. They looked like meat, leftover meat, thrown out from the butcher’s. But the way they flopped on top of the mounds of rubbish bags didn’t seem like they were meat. Too soft. She peered closer and covered her nose. Whatever was in there was fleshily unidentifiable. The edges of the white plastic had become stretched, revealing what looked almost like hair or fur. They were addressed to their house but without her or Elliott’s name on them. They must have been for the people upstairs, she thought. The smell was worse up close but she was mesmerized by the appearance of the packages and she hung over the open bin, unable to look away, watching them and half expecting the plastic to exhale or throb like an abandoned human heart. Then she accidentally inhaled through her nose and came back to reality and shut the lid hard, wondering what the neighbours possibly could have been sent or were sending to others that would infect every room of their flat with the stench of death. Afterwards she felt like it had stuck itself to her clothes and affixed itself, too, to her skin and hair and eyelashes, like some sort of acrid cigarette smoke in a basement nightclub. It was intolerable. She stood under the shower with it on high, and emerged pink and angry, and texted Elliott asking how he could possibly not have noticed it.

Is this a big deal??? he replied, after typing for a remarkably long amount of time, a length of time that made Áine think he had typed something else and then deleted it. She stood in a towel in the middle of the living room and chewed on the fingernails of her unbandaged hand, thinking about how Elliott texted differently to how he spoke. How it felt like there was one person in the phone and another person in the flat, and maybe a third person, better than both of the others, out living in the world without her. She scrolled up in their conversation to confirm this theory and found their previous messages alarmingly boring. Elliott had made them download an app to split all their bills and had reminded her she owed him £68.13 that month. A text from her about the dehumidifier not working and calling The Landlord a cheapskate. Elliott saying he’d missed the train but he’d be home in seventeen minutes. Before they’d moved in together they’d gone through an era of sending incredibly explicit text messages, which Áine screenshotted and looked at before they had sex, as a kind of textual aperitif. She thought about their early text conversations, when they’d just started secretly dating at work, how everything felt charged and clandestine and like some sort of word game that only they were playing, a novel that they were writing together. She thought about how you could measure all relationships this way, a long thread that connected them to each other digitally, getting steadily more intimate and stale over time.

Maybe we should email Jack S about it

Ffs why??

Because it’s unhygienic

You don’t even know what’s in it!

Come on though

It smells SO bad

Like an animal has died

Or its some kind of weird meat

The phone said Elliott was typing for a long time and then finally he said that it was nasty and actually problematic for her to think things were weird just because they were different, and that he’d thought she of all people would know that, and that he was surprised at her. Áine didn’t know what to say to that. She felt chastised, which maybe meant Elliott was right. She thought about how Elliott had a better tolerance for things than her, how he never complained, and maybe that meant she was a bad person, or that she would never be able to live in harmony with another human being. She felt embarrassed enough not to email Jack S. They didn’t talk about it when Elliott came home that night, but the next day the smell was much less violent and, when Áine went out to investigate, all the rotting packages were gone, leaving only a congealed mass of liquid in their place, settled in the bottom of the cavernous bin. When she came back inside, Elliott was in front of the mirror, watching her in his own reflection.

‘I told you not to email about it,’ he said.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Okay, Ain,’ he said, which really meant, I bet you did.

‘Do you not trust me?’

Elliott didn’t answer, and Áine chose not to press it. It bothered her to have arguments about the flat, or not quite arguments but prickly little discussions like this, things that didn’t deserve to become arguments, but things that shouldn’t have even come up in the first place. It didn’t feel fair to harbour bad feelings towards each other for anything that wasn’t related to who they inherently were as people. Anything about money, about the flat or about their circumstances, it felt like cheating to have to argue about these things, which weren’t really their fault at all. It felt like they were being cheated to have to care about them. But that didn’t mean anything, that it was unfair. They still had to think about those things. They pressed in closer and closer and ignoring them felt as ridiculous as addressing them in the first place.

‘Maybe you should get out for a bit,’ Elliott said, finally, looking at Áine as though he had only just noticed she was there. It was a sunny afternoon, he said. Áine looked out of the window and noticed he was right. Whether it was because of lack of sleep or the bite or the packages, she still felt sick. Sick enough to worry that if she went outside she would throw up on the pavement or something, in front of everyone, in front of all the babies and crusty-eyed little dogs and the boyfriends who were wearing football shirts to the pub but, like, in an ironic way.

‘I think it would do you good,’ Elliott was saying. ‘Get some vitamin D.’

Áine looked down at the bandage on her hand. It was vaguely yellow. Or maybe it only looked yellow next to her skin (lately always a light grey tone). Elliott was probably right.

‘Okay,’ she said.

In the early days of her move to the city, Áine had already done the exposure therapy necessary to explore places on her own. It wasn’t lonely, but it also wasn’t very exciting either. Laura had a network here that had existed before her, a network she seamlessly managed with visits and catch-ups that sometimes included Áine but often did not, which was fine. Elliott had a group too, here, or at least a disparate network of friends from university and school and previous jobs that he would see occasionally and sporadically. And on those occasions when both of them were otherwise disposed and Cian away from London or it was daytime (in which he was less useful, because he was invariably too hung-over for anything self-consciously wholesome), Áine would wander around exploring by herself, when she could be bothered. Which was not often, because she still, in spite of all her experience, found it if not lonely then at least awkward. She’d walk past a group of Spanish teenagers in the Natural History Museum and they’d shriek with laughter at something unrelated but that she’d be convinced was about her, her outfit or the fact she was here alone. Or she’d take a picture of a landmark, some sort of ghoulish statue or war memorial, and a well-meaning older couple would offer to take one of her standing in front of it and she’d feel her aloneness acutely and say ‘No, no, that’s okay, thank you anyway’. But still, Elliott was right.

And there was no point living here if she wasn’t doing these things. You had to do things here, had to force yourself to do them, and force yourself to enjoy them, in order to justify the experience of being here in the first place. If you weren’t always doing things, always moving, always experiencing something that made up a life, then what, you might ask yourself, was the point of being here in the first place, in burning through money and time without anything to really show for it? You had to keep playing the game or else everyone else would win. So she said, ‘Okay fine,’ and picked a place at random, a botanical gardens that her phone said was a forty-five-minute walk from the flat, and she put on one of Elliott’s hoodies, one with sleeves long enough to hide the bandages if she made a fist while she walked.

The weather app on Áine’s phone said that the afternoon was breezy, just on the precipice of chilly, with light winds and cloud and a 30 per cent chance of rain. But inside the hoodie, the fibres of which still held the ominous smells of the flat, she was sweating profusely. Her hand thudded with every other step. She could feel droplets leak from her neck and armpits and roll unpleasantly down her back. All around, people were out enjoying the dregs of the weekend and the dregs of the summer. There was a long queue outside a gelato shop at the end of the high street. Toddlers waited patiently in prams, playing with beige wooden toys, or screeched at the top of their lungs while their parents talked above them, choosing their flavours ahead of time. She briefly entertained the possibility of getting a cone for the walk, holding it with her unharmed hand and strolling along with it. The flavours were on-purpose peculiar, the kinds of things that toddlers wouldn’t want to have. In place of candyfloss and bubblegum and mint chocolate chip they had pistachio and rum-and-raisin and lemon sorbet. She even joined the end of the winding queue for a moment or two, but then two kids in a double buggy ahead of her began screaming even louder than the single toddlers had done and she recoiled instinctively and their mother looked embarrassed and then Áine got embarrassed too, because that was a horrible and cruel thing to do, to judge other people for their screaming babies. You were supposed to show solidarity with them, she thought. You were supposed to sort of cluck and roll your eyes and maybe even intimate some sort of offer of sisterly help. You definitely weren’t supposed to be visibly revolted. She slipped out of the queue and continued to walk, following the cut-glass accent of her phone that kept advising her to keep right or turn left or take the second exit at the roundabout.

Eventually the high street thinned out, from independent sustainable clothes shops and non-independent estate agents with floor-to-ceiling glass dotted with listings and posters that said LANDLORDS! RENTS ARE REACHING RECORD HIGHS! CONTACT US TODAY to smaller corner shops and then dentists and small Sainsbury’s and then nothing, just houses squished on top of each other, three storeys high with seven or eight buzzers beside each front door. The road, which until now had been flat, suddenly curved upwards into a steep hill. Underneath Elliott’s hoodie Áine’s T-shirt was drenched in cold sweat. Her hand throbbed unpleasantly. Her shins hurt. But she kept going because she was only halfway to the botanical gardens, and because she had a goal in mind, and because she didn’t want to prove Elliott right, that her health was inherently the problem, not the house, or that she was inherently the problem, not the house. And she kept going too because on top of that she was suspicious that there was something in the house that infected her and if she could just get far enough away from it, outside of the building and who she was when she was inside the building, then the spell would lift and the poison would subside and she would be healed and breathe easily and her hand would scab and the grey skin around the wound would be pink and healthy again. She just had to keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, walking further and further away from the flat. But it was difficult because it felt like whatever was in there was pulling her back, slowing her walk, making her heavy and dizzy, her breathing laboured and shallow. She stopped a few times along the endless hilly street of endless flats, holding herself up on someone’s railings, where five or six bicycles had been woven together with locks.

‘Are you all right?’ someone said. But the voice was distant. Áine waved them away with her bandaged hand and the blood sloshed around inside it again. It was bad blood because it had come from the flat, and then into Elliott, and then Puca, and then her, and she wasn’t far away enough to have it leeched out of her and replaced with good blood, like the nurses had done for Elliott at the hospital when they’d made him better.

‘I’m fine,’ she tried to say but it came out breathy and quiet, like vapours, like when you try to scream during sleep paralysis and all that comes out is a silent wheeze. She tried again to say it, louder, fighting against the well-spoken robot in her phone that was telling her to take the next left and keep going for half a mile, but the voice was louder than her own and the effort and the pounding in her fist made the street go black and her vision blurred. And then nothing.

Áine had never fainted before. It was a weird thing to experience. The world went black and then opened up again. It felt like a long time had passed, though it hadn’t. She was walking and then she was on the ground, and the person who had spoken to her (it transpired it was one half of a couple smoking outside their flat) was crouching on the ground with their phone in their hand and she imagined they were phoning an ambulance. There was no need to phone an ambulance, of course. Áine kept saying this to them, or she kept trying to, but her voice was still wispy and nothingy and words wouldn’t come out right. The couple were far away from her. Their faces were blank. Not in a ‘oh, you can’t tell what they’re thinking’ kind of way but rather when she looked at the hole where their faces should be, there was nothing there, just ovals with no eyes or nose or mouth. She was suddenly unable to breathe. She sucked air in shallowly through her own mouth oval and tried not to throw up. The face holes swayed in front of her. She felt as though something had snapped and now she would never see a face again, or maybe faces had always looked like this, and she was just seeing them in their true form for the first time. She tried to stand and gagged. The face holes pushed her down again. One of them said she was hyperventilating, the words falling out of the abyss in the middle of their head. She shut her eyes and rubbed them until all she saw were red dots. She kept them shut until the swaying stopped and the faces rearranged themselves, tooth by tooth.

When the ambulance came they dashed back into the house and she couldn’t really blame them. It was all very dramatic and embarrassing and also they clearly thought that maybe she was on drugs and didn’t want to get too close, or that she was psychotic, in which case, same reasoning. She kept telling the paramedics she was fine too. That it was just too hot and the house was making her sick and a dog had bitten her but she didn’t need a tetanus jab because she’d already walked across broken glass before. They agreed this was probably true, and so they called her emergency contact but decided not to take her to hospital. Even half-conscious, Áine felt a little annoyed by this. What if she was dying? Was everything falling apart so much that hospitals were too busy for the maybe actually dying?

She couldn’t remember much about getting back home. She remembered telling the paramedics she was fine, them insisting she wasn’t, her saying she really was and she could get a taxi. She remembered taking out her phone and spending a long time trying to unlock it. She couldn’t remember what Uber was called. Someone must have reminded her. She remembered a car pulling up. She remembered apologizing to the faceless onlookers, to the paramedics, to everyone that passed by, for all the trouble she had caused them. She could hear unfamiliar voices speaking to the emergency contact on her phone and she could remember arriving at her front door and thinking that it smelled so unlike a hospital. She wanted the cleansing, flooding aroma of antiseptic and bleach, and a bed that someone had probably died in but that was dressed with white sheets cleaned and cleaned over again by an army of porters. Instead she had a vague recollection of being set down in another bed someone had probably died in, but a less comfortable one. The ceiling light was too bright. Her hand throbbed. The springs dug into her back. She didn’t want to be here. She groaned but it was quiet. She was, she realized, so tired. She could hear someone keening softly and thought for a second that it was a banshee, that the exhaustion meant death was imminent. But then she realized it was just the familiar soft crying of the woman upstairs who would soon not live there any more. She was home. Maybe. Or maybe already dead and this was what death was, in which case, not great.

Someone had opened her bandage, presumably to take a look at the dog bite and see if it was weeping or if she was likely to go rabid at a doctor. Áine looked down at it and was surprised to find it was almost totally healed. It looked similar to Elliott’s hand now. But she remembered it throbbing. Every morning she had peeled back the plasters to look at it and frowned at its lacklustre attempts to coagulate and scab over. But now here it was, clean and nearly entirely healed. It didn’t make sense. Nothing about the situation made sense. Which didn’t stop the fact it was happening.

The paramedics on the phone had been talking to someone that wasn’t her, saying things that she couldn’t grab hold of. Like dehydration and exhaustion. There was a woman’s voice in the room now, saying these things into another phone. Áine tried to see whose voice it was, and at the end of the bed, perching on the side and looking ethereal, was Laura. An angel that looked like Laura. I must be dead, she thought. She sat up to try to walk around in the room that was now, inevitably, the afterlife, and the room lurched sideways again and the angel at the bottom of the bed, the one that was shaped like Laura, pushed her gently back into the pillows and hung up her phone. The angel rearranged itself, sitting cross-legged on the sheets. The angel that looked like Laura had deliberate differences, which, Áine thought, confirmed the fact it was a celestial being and not the person who had been her favourite person, who maybe still was.

‘You’re an idiot,’ the angel said.

Áine thought that angels, in visions close to death, were not generally supposed to admonish you. And she worried absently about whether that meant she was in the other place and Laura was some sort of demonic manifestation of her badness. That would make more sense. She didn’t look demonic, though. The vision’s hair was lighter, shorter, blonder than real-life Laura’s. Her skin was deeply tanned and it made her teeth whiter and her eyes brighter. She was wearing a very strange angel costume, made up of a veil and sparkly hat instead of a halo and a gown. She realized, as the IV drip was hydrating her parched body, that the IV drip was just the angel gently holding a bottle to her lips and encouraging her to drink, and that the angel was just Laura, post hen do, looking healthy and mildly annoyed but mostly concerned and glad – despite calling Áine an idiot – that her friend was not dead.

Laura, it transpired, was still Áine’s emergency contact. The call had come through from a withheld number when her phone had come off flight mode. She’d come straight from the airport to the flat she’d only been to once before; that horrible doomed dinner party. She was still wearing her pretend veil and a big, Burning Man-esque bejewelled hat that said BRIDE. She had got an Uber all the way here from the terminal, Laura said. It was the longest ride of her life. ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ said Áine. ‘Was it a really bad surge charge?’

‘Oh my god, shut up.’ Laura smiled and swung her legs off the bed, disappearing beneath and emerging with a holdall bearing a travel tag for a Greek island Áine couldn’t pronounce. From the holdall Laura retrieved a bulging carrier bag, and from this she removed another bottle of Lucozade (the first one that had revived Áine now sitting next to the bed), a giant Toblerone – the ones you get from the duty-free – a plastic packet of red grapes and finally a tiny snow globe, the style she knew Áine collected when she travelled. Inside the snow globe the Greek island she had been disinvited from was white and blue and swirling in an unseasonable blizzard. These things were presented one after the other on the bed. Áine was already chugging dayglo orange fizz and eating a handful of grapes, struggling to snap off one of the chocolate triangles, when she saw the snow globe. She swallowed and looked at Laura, who had stowed her luggage away again and was pensively eating a grape.

‘You said you only found out when you got back,’ Áine said. She picked up the snow globe and shook it.

Laura watched her do this. She shrugged. ‘I know you like them.’ For a moment they sat in the silence of this. ‘I was always going to bring you one back,’ Laura said. She nodded to Áine, lying grey and damp in a heap of sweaty sheets, and added drily, ‘you didn’t need to be so dramatic about it.’

Áine laughed and it hurt her throat, which was tight for some reason. When she spoke again her voice was rueful and thick. ‘God, yeah. It is dramatic, isn’t it. I did tell them I was fine.’

Laura swallowed a chunk of airport Toblerone. ‘Are you fine?’ she said.

Áine mirrored her shrug and said nothing, drinking some more liquid chemicals as an answer instead. She thought about how this was the most they had spoken in months. She thought about what she had missed in Laura’s life. She thought about her resolve all those months before, after her Christmas party, to not spoil Laura’s moment of perfect happiness at secretly buying property. She thought that resolve should have carried over to Laura’s happiness at domesticity, to Laura’s happiness at her upcoming marriage. She thought about how she had known last Christmas that spoiling these moments, if she did spoil them, was something Laura would carry with her for the rest of her life, and that even if she didn’t want to, she would rearrange the hierarchy of her life, placing Áine in a different position to before. Even if they loved each other. How you had to make sacrifices and build up the blocks of your life carefully, again and again. That was what being a grown-up was. It was coming to rescue your friend when they were sick, but also going home afterwards and having someone stable and loving to hold you and say It’s okay, that’s all over now, you’re safe here, there’s no chaos here.

Laura picked at the sheets. ‘You should update that, you know,’ she said. ‘Your emergency contact. Or, like, next of kin or whatever. That’s the reason why they called me when you fainted. Because it’s still me.’

‘Oh,’ said Áine. ‘Yeah.’

They’d had to fill it out when they’d signed up for the doctor, five houses ago. Until today, Áine had forgotten they’d even done so. There was, luckily, no need to think about it. She had not been unwell. Not the kind of unwell that required paramedics, anyway. But then, she realized, neither had Laura. Yet Laura had still thought to update hers, to restructure her life, to make her emergency contact, Áine presumed, Alex, not her. It felt weird to think about that. She imagined them shifting, the second-hand bed they were both sitting on rolling to the side like someone had suddenly collapsed the foundations of the flat.

‘I should probably make it Elliott,’ she said. And as if saying his name was some sort of spell, the magic words to wake her from a supernatural slumber, she suddenly lurched to the side of the bed to where a plastic bag on the small table next to her held her mobile phone and Elliott’s hoodie, stained from where she’d fallen on the pavement.

‘Don’t worry,’ Laura said. ‘I rang him.’

For a second Áine couldn’t think who Laura meant. Then she remembered: Elliott, my boyfriend. That’s who she would have rung. Of course. Who else would it be? Elliott, it transpired, had also left the flat when Áine went on her odyssey. He’d gone to play five-a-side on the other side of the city, and it had just made more sense, Laura said, unconvincingly, that she would come instead of him. She was already on her way, Laura said, when she’d finally got through to him, in the car. It was just quicker. Sure, Áine agreed. She felt like they were both constructing a weirdly flimsy lie, that it was easier for her, an old friend with whom Áine had a blatantly tense current relationship, to come get her from the ambulance and take her home and unlock her door and put her in bed, rather than her boyfriend, the person she lived with, the person who, Laura said, they would put down as Áine’s emergency contact, just for in future, just in case. He was really worried, Laura said. He was coming back and he was going to look after her. This, she thought later, was the flimsiest part of the lie. She didn’t need a wheelchair. She wasn’t returning with a newborn in her arms, a little thing that was half Elliott and half her and needed to be nurtured and protected. It was just her, making him worry.

‘Sorry,’ she said again. Laura said it was fine. Áine thought about apologizing again, for wasting Laura’s time, for ruining the end of her holiday. For being so insane, such a liability that she couldn’t even go on the holiday. She didn’t want to labour the point or annoy Laura either, but it came out anyway. ‘I am really sorry,’ she said. This time Laura nodded more slowly, wrapping up the comically large chocolate with some discarded foil.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ Áine said again, for good measure.

Once she’d eaten enough of the Toblerone to feel sick and flood her blood with enough sugar to stand up, Áine insisted on paying for Laura’s Uber as further apology. Laura hugged her very tightly and promised to text when she got home, and made Áine promise to text in the morning, to not get out of bed all day, to sleep and eat and drink water. Áine nodded and agreed to all of this, unconvincingly. She thought Laura was unconvinced by it but she got into the Uber anyway and waved when it sped off. She was setting boundaries, Áine thought, like the painstaking text message essay had promised. She was grateful for Laura but also ashamed. At some point their friendship had slotted itself into some sort of convoluted burden, for her or for both of them, and that was embarrassing.

After Laura had gone she got back into bed as prescribed, eating the last, softest, mouldiest of the grapes and waiting for Elliott to come back. Her phone had cracked when she dropped it on the pavement. She found the charger under the bed and plugged it in and waited for it to return to life, and when it did she had several frantic texts from Elliott and opened the last one which said Home soon, I’m just leaving. I know Laura’s with you, I saw her text just now. I didn’t see any of the messages until now. I’m coming soon. Áine stared at the message for a long time, typing and then deleting, fighting with an urge to be angry with him. Her emails kept popping up in the middle of the drafts, reminding her to look back at the houses she’d looked at before, the ones she couldn’t afford to live in, the ones that made her feel depressed to think about living in alone, living in with strangers. What was the point? She deleted what she was typing. Then she wrote Okay, love you and turned the phone off again and obeyed Laura by falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

October

Alex wanted his stag to be literal – they didn’t call them stags in America, it was a bit of a novelty – and so they were going to hunt a stag. Or hunt something, anyway, somewhere up in Scotland. Áine had been surprised when Elliott was invited, immediately after Laura and Alex announced their engagement on the boat where Moon was being held hostage. And she was more surprised that he had kept the invite, even after she had been unceremoniously dumped from Laura’s Mamma Mia-themed, Greek island hen party.

‘I don’t think he has many people here, though,’ Elliott said, when she mentioned this to him. ‘And you don’t even like that movie anyway. And you get sunburned.’

Which wasn’t the point. The temperature had yet to drop in London. The city looked visually autumnal but the afternoons still felt balmy. People worried about it online in a vocal and sanctimonious way, talking about the end of the world. But presumably hunting trips in Scotland were very cold. Áine was helping Elliott to shove cable-knit jumpers and woolly hats into a holdall before one of the groomsmen drove over to pick him up. He would be gone for three days. A length of time which, Áine thought, was far too long to impose on a maybe-ex-best-friend’s-boyfriend who you weren’t even that close to.

‘He has loads of friends here,’ she said as Elliott looked around for a pair of hiking boots she had never seen him use. ‘He posts them on his fucking Instagram every other day.’

She knew she sounded bratty and jealous and bitter. Elliott was facing away from her but even from the back of his head as he rummaged around in the borrowed wardrobe she could tell he was making a face. ‘And anyway,’ she said, changing tack, ‘it’s not very vegan to kill an animal for fun.’

‘For sport,’ Elliott said, emerging victorious with the vile-looking boots in question. ‘And he’s not vegan. He’s plant-based.’

Afterwards, when he left, kissing her stiffly on the cheek before rushing out the front door (she heard a distant ‘Maaaaaaaaaate’ from the car parked outside, along with obnoxious horn beeping, in the kind of accent that made her think she could feel every single metal filling inside her own mouth), Áine didn’t even know why she’d made such a fuss. It wasn’t as if she wanted him to cancel, to throw all the disgusting outdoor clothes out of the holdall and embrace her and put his head in her lap and say I’m not going, I’ll never go, I love you and I’ll never leave you again, and I think they’re all wrong to be angry with you and please let’s never fight again, let’s move to Paris or something and throw our phones in the Seine and have millions of children, and rob a bank so neither of us ever have to work again, and use the paint-stained money to buy a dilapidated country house in cash, outright, and just so you know, I think Alex and Laura are annoying and you are cool and fun and right and thin and beautiful. Not exactly, anyway. The short conversation they’d had while she made a show of helping him to pack had been the most they’d spoken in days, actually. That realization made Áine uncomfortable and after the car sped off she got back into bed even though it was the middle of the morning on a Thursday and she was technically meant to be working. She pulled the covers over her head like a child and lay there listening to the traffic and thinking about the dead eyes of the stag and where they would find space to mount its head on the stupid little houseboat.

It wasn’t the fact Elliott was going that bothered her, she realized later, emerging from the duvet, parched, to hang her head under the kitchen tap, and finding it was afternoon. The water squealed and the taps banged and she could hear it in the radiators, and the wind whistled around the door frame on the basement and she could see it in her peripherals as she drank, and she shut her eyes. It wasn’t that Elliott was going, it was that she was here, on her own. Here on her own for three days. It was only when Elliott had begun to pack that Áine realized this would be the first time she’d be alone in the flat for this long, the first time she would spend nights here alone. The weekend stretched out impossibly in front of her. Here alone. She swallowed and shivered and ran back to hide under the duvet, childishly, for no reason. There was nothing to be frightened of. The flat was empty. When she was still for too long it felt like it was sitting on her chest, breathing on her, drooling.

She didn’t check her phone and didn’t keep track of the time, but intermittently she heard the front door swing open and shut, open and shut, and the echo of footsteps up and down the stairs. Elliott would have said it must be more viewings for the flat upstairs, that the tenants were really finally being kicked out. Every time she heard noises from above he said this, in a bored, offhand way. Viewings. Normal noises. Not something she should be worrying about, thinking about. Oh, Áine said. She couldn’t hear talking on any of the viewings, which was odd. She usually heard the low rumble of the man’s voice, the soft mewling of the woman crying through their thin floorboards and walls. She felt sorry for them, but she was also glad they were going. Elliott wondered who would move in, already thinking of the current set-up as a thing of the past, an inconvenient relic, and whether he and Áine would get along with them, and whether they’d be fun and young and rich. When she tried to think about it, the sorry feeling came back again, the sadness. As Elliott had become more dismissive of them, the people from upstairs, after what happened with Puca – what he thought had happened at least, their telling The Landlord on them – she had become more sympathetic, even though they still scared her just the same. She thought about the next year of her life, because this was how she’d become used to thinking of eras of her life, imagining them in terms of contracts and tenancies. She found it was grey and imageless. She couldn’t imagine making friends with the next people who moved in. She couldn’t imagine being here. But then that was stupid. There wasn’t anywhere else for her to be.

At 4 p.m. she knew it was 4 p.m. Her phone buzzed to remind her she had a meeting. She had, in the past few weeks, received several emails from her boss about missed meetings and missed deadlines and missed reports that must have been glaringly obvious for her boss to notice or to care about. In response, Áine had sent several grovelling replies and set up a long chain of alarms on her phone and set out a preselection of outfits that looked, on the top half, interesting and put together. She put one on now, a white shirt with a ridiculous Peter Pan collar, and found her laptop under the bed and sat in Elliott’s desk chair, feeling alien and unimportant and talking about video metrics and search engine optimization for at least fifteen minutes, speaking on autopilot and watching the other little windows on the chat as everyone else glazed over. ‘Thank you, Áine,’ her line manager said when she had finished. ‘That was very illuminating.’

After the meeting she shut the computer down and stared at the black empty screen for a few moments. In the blackness, screen Áine twitched and fidgeted even though real Áine wasn’t moving. Something in the background of screen blackness Áine flashed like a camera and she turned in the chair but there was nobody there. Now, in the perfect silence of the flat, she could hear the man and the woman upstairs, murmuring to each other as though they were standing right behind her, right over her shoulder. If she thought about it too much she had the feeling again that something, someone, was breathing on her. She was in her own flat but she felt like a visitor, as though she’d just walked into someone else’s private discussion and they were waiting for her to leave so they could get back to it. She heard peals of laughter that sounded almost like squealing or crying from the woman and rumbling nothingness from the man. His voice was too deep to make out any of the words. The floorboards creaked overhead when they walked around and one of them went to the toilet and she heard the flush so close she expected to feel wet. She felt observed although there was nobody in the room. The feeling was overpowering enough that she got up suddenly from the desk and closed all of the curtains in the entire flat. In the darkness, the cellar made the kitchen feel cavernous and ominous, and the grimy metal of the bed glinted even in the gloom of the bedroom, so she decided the living room was the safest place to be. Without Elliott to judge her for doing so, Áine retrieved her phone charger and duvet and pillows from the bedroom and put the TV on loud and lay on the floor, scrolling, watching cartoons meant for adults, inside the same style of fort she’d lived in with Laura. There was something pleasurable in the nothingness of it and in being unseen and unperceived. She lay inside the warmth and thought about not having a body, about not having a personality.

The weekend ahead felt impossibly long. She wondered what Laura was doing and if she was alone too. Maybe she’d gone home, or to her sister’s. The houseboat probably didn’t feel observed or cavernous or scary, Áine thought. She imagined Laura jogging along the canal, or drinking an electric-blue milkshake that she thought would make her live forever, or buying peonies and filling Moon with filtered water and arranging them, snapping a photo for Instagram and then not posting it in case Áine saw. She thought about it so hard that the urge to text Laura withered and finally passed. Which was a good thing. Maybe. They were speaking now, in a kind of laboured, normal way. They were nicer to each other than they ever had been. But there was a self-conscious quality to their conversations which convinced Áine that the friendship would never be the same as it had been. Laura spoke to her as though she was a teacher and Áine a child whose parents hadn’t bothered picking her up at the end of the school day. She expected in every conversation that Laura would kneel down to her eye level and ask if everything was all right at home, if she had someone to talk to, if she knew the importance of brushing her teeth before bed. Laura pitied her, she thought. And she didn’t know why. She was doing the very things you were supposed to do to avoid pity. So what was the problem? She didn’t text Laura.

Instead she fell asleep watching the cartoons and when she woke up the light behind the curtains was paler and greyer than it had been and her phone said it was early on Friday morning. The TV was asking her if anyone was still watching and Áine hit yes and then flipped the pillow over to a cleaner, cooler side. She watched one episode of a show where men had to plan their own weddings. The men were always overgrown children and the women clucked at them and cried when they left their shared, newly built square homes at the beginning of the show. Áine thought about whether she should have cried when Elliott left and if he would have found it sweet or annoying. The woman in this episode had a star chart in her kitchen where she tracked her fiancé’s good behaviour with gold stickers.

After that she fell asleep again because Friday was basically the weekend and woke up because it was afternoon and the grey light was streaked with pale yellow weak sunshine and her stomach was making noises. She sat through half an episode of the show everyone watched where the incredibly rich woman looked to camera to indicate she was sometimes depressed, then her stomach got too loud. She hadn’t eaten since before Elliott had left and hadn’t drunk anything since she’d held her head under the kitchen tap. Her mouth felt dry but she didn’t feel hungry. It was as though the house itself was hungry. The walls felt hollow and the building groaned and her stomach groaned and she got up and the room spun and went briefly black. She found bread in the freezer and toasted six slices of it, one after the other, and ate it dry, sitting alone at the table. In the fridge she found two eggs and fried them but then found them too disgusting to eat and threw the pan in the sink, adding to a pile of dishes she’d told Elliott she would sort over the weekend, part of a growing mess she promised to have cleaned for his return as some sort of peace offering for nothing. She watched herself from above doing this, eating the toast, chewing it, swallowing it, cooking the eggs, discarding them. She was both inside and outside herself. The bread tasted like freezer burn and raw dog meat and she didn’t feel full afterwards, but then again, she hadn’t felt hungry before.

Guilt, rather than hunger, rather than fullness, twisted in her gut. She looked at the mess and the crumbs on her unwashed shirt and the dishes in the sink and felt guilty and embarrassed. She remembered against her will the conversation at their dinner party, at the table she was sitting at now. How Laura had joked about her new, healthy, wholesome way of life and Cian had asked Elliott if he had fixed her. It made Áine squirm to think about it now. She went to the toilet and put her fingers down her throat and regurgitated the food. Her eyes watered. Chunks of half-digested bread and vomit coated the inside of her sinuses.

Her phone pinged and it was Cian and she felt observed again then, even more observed than she had already. They had been speaking, a lot actually, since he came back, since the birthday detente, but hadn’t seen each other in real life since the party. She’d been following all his nights out since his glorious return on Instagram, feeling like a voyeur, living vicariously through his fun. Sometimes he would message late at night and she’d pretend she was too drunk to reply, or that she was just about to go out, or just about to come home from being out, even though she was invariably lying awake in bed. She felt boring. She was boring. She wished she was more nihilistic, but also didn’t. The coincidence of Cian messaging now felt magical and ominous. The house was watching her and making things happen. Her ears were ringing distantly.

Happy samhain

How’s the ghosts

I was thinking Elliott should write about the ghosts

It’s probably the only interesting thing that’s ever happened to him

Sorry that was mean

Haha

Sorry

It’s fine dw

How are u

Yeah same

Same

What u doing

U sound sad

Supposed to be working. But not working

Yeah?

We should go out

Let me take u out

What like with a rifle?

Haha

I’m broke

That’s this city for you

Paying all that money just to share the place with ghosts

U poor thing

Haha

I’ll pay

Obviously not I’d feel bad

Ok well lets hang out anyway

I can provide food/drink

U can still pay rent

Everyones happy

She didn’t open the message right away because that way he’d see that she’d read it. She held her thumb over his name and brought up the little preview window and the phone pinged again.

Unless ur still annoyed with me

Or are we friends again now

Obviously we’re friends

Come over its fine

When he arrived at the front door, though, Áine was surprised to find she’d largely forgotten she’d invited him. After putting down her phone she’d suddenly got stressed about the state of the kitchen if guests were coming over, and while technically Cian didn’t factor in her mind as a guest, it would have to be tackled nonetheless. She’d been avoiding the pile of dishes in the sink, avoiding the kitchen altogether, and with it her daily losing fight against the mould wall. It had now begun to spread across the tops of the kitchen curtains, bleeding into the fabric. There was food stuck to the plates and cold sudsy water floating in the sink and cleaning it made her feel sick. There was a lot of retching and coughing and her hands were pruned by the time the buzzer rang; her fingers had the texture of brain matter. Despite the horror of the dinner party sitting quite close to the front of her mind at all times, she’d also briefly forgotten Cian knew the address already. It felt too soon for him to be there.

‘I got an Uber,’ he said, moving past her, brandishing a bottle of wine and striding back to the kitchen as if drawn there. She didn’t mind, though, because despite the demonstrably horrible vibes of the room, it was the only one currently even somewhat clean. The fight against the dishes had been intense. She sniffed and finished a fit of hacking cough. Cian reached for the cupboards himself and removed two glasses. It was evening by then. The closed curtains didn’t look weird. She finished her glass in two gulps. It tasted vinegary.

‘God, you look like shit,’ Cian said, without looking at her. ‘Can I smoke in here?’

‘No.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No, seriously, you have to smoke in the garden.’

‘Is that actually in your contract or is it just Elliott being a fascist?’

‘We’re both fascists, actually,’ she said, unlocking the back door.

It was darkening outside now and the air was finally crisp, which always meant to her that it might have been cold but it also felt clean. October was Áine’s favourite month of the year, essentially for this reason. She also usually liked Halloween, but this year she’d refused to mark the occasion, carve a pumpkin, decorate. It felt a bit too on the nose. Cian stepped over the decking and stood amongst the mulch of weeds and plants and peered over the fence, smoking and craning his neck to see how big the neighbours’ house was (very big). When he handed her a cigarette, she took it without complaint and he made a low, sarcastic whistle.

‘What happened to your health kick?’ he said. ‘I thought you gave up smoking in pursuit of wellness.’

‘Yeah, well.’

It occurred to Áine absently that tonight was Halloween, and she was glad that Cian was here, for childish reasons. For a while they smoked in silence, listening to the distant sounds of the neighbourhood’s intolerable Montessori children screeching as they went door to door. They often did this when they were together, which was to maintain silence in a kind of game of chicken, trying to make the other person say something funny or piercing or mean or all three. Neither of them asked what had happened in the months when they didn’t bother seeing each other, nor anything productive or wholesome about the other person’s life. It wasn’t really that kind of friendship. They treated each other like black holes to pour thoughts into. Deciding why they did that was too intense to think about, so it was best left unexamined.

‘Do you remember the banshee?’ Cian said suddenly, which won the game.

She’d grown up with the story of the banshee, the story of when the banshee had visited the first time around. It had been just before Áine’s grandfather died, so her mother had been too young to remember whether she’d seen the banshee or not, but every wedding and funeral and christening all the aunties and uncles would recall it anyway. Áine had been deeply fascinated with it for a long time. She would beg them to tell the story, even though her mother would hiss at her to whisht because it wasn’t polite to ask. It fed her to hear about how her grandmother was washing dishes by the window when she saw the young woman sitting on the low stone wall in front of the house, keening softly, brushing a silver comb through her long ash-blonde hair. How she had disappeared by the time her grandmother had gone to investigate. How less than a week later, she’d got a call from the factory about the accident, and her husband was dead.

Áine exhaled and lightly touched the ash end of her cigarette with her fingertip. It burned dully. She nodded. It had been a big deal, the whole banshee thing, while they were at university. Her granny was getting old then. She had always been the head of the family because her mother’s daddy had died so young. Her granny had raised her mother and her aunties and uncles all alone. She went to Mass every day and was deeply respected in their community, even though she did things which Áine found personally quite unconscionable. Like, she said prayers every night before bed for aborted babies. She named them in the prayers, she said, so they could get into heaven. She’d cried a lot during the abortion referendum, which deeply bothered Áine. For some months after the result came through she’d refused to visit her grandmother or speak to her on the phone.

But then Áine’s mother called in the middle of exams to say that her granny had taken a turn for the worse and on the phone she could hear the old woman in the background, wailing, sounding terrified and in pain. By the time Áine had emailed her tutors and booked a train home, she was already dead. She missed two days of the wake but got back in time for the funeral. Laura had been on Erasmus then, she remembered. She FaceTimed several times a day to check everything was all right and every time Áine said she was fine. That’s what grandparents were inevitably going to do, she felt like telling Laura. They’re going to die. People like Laura and Elliott could sometimes be a bit strange around the concept of death. They were more frightened of it than was normal, she thought. They didn’t think about it enough and so when they did it was terrifying and alien to them.

Because Laura had been on Erasmus, Cian had travelled home with her on the train for the funeral. He didn’t live in that part of the country but he’d come anyway and stayed in an Airbnb because there was no room at her house, and suddenly everywhere, every house and apartment and spare bedroom, was an Airbnb. They never talked about it after. He’d been very polite to her mother and said that her granny looked very peaceful in the coffin, that they’d done a good job with her. Her mother had been very pleased with that. Áine thought about how neither Laura nor Elliott had ever seen a corpse, and how that probably contributed to the irrational fear of death they moved through the world with.

At the wake all anyone could talk about was the banshee. The banshee was the reason for the wailing and the fear her granny had struggled with in the end in spite of being for many years vocally ready to die. The banshee had come back to get her. She’d seen it again, one of the uncles told Áine at the bar after the funeral. She saw her in the garden again.

Her grandmother was deeply religious before this experience and even more so after, something that Elliott had struggled with when the story was recounted to him years later, as a kind of rite of familial passage, on that awkward weekend in Dublin.

‘I didn’t think witches were a big thing for Roman Catholics,’ he’d said later that night in the hotel, after they’d waved her parents off. He was flipping through the room service menu, looking underwhelmed by the selection (it was the cheapest hotel they could find). He said this like it was something very funny, rather than controversial. He wasn’t a deliberately cruel person. Áine smiled without showing any of her teeth.

‘Banshees aren’t witches,’ she said, ‘they’re something else.’

‘Still, though, don’t you think it’s a bit contradictory?’

She’d shrugged. They’d ordered pizza in the end, with waffle fries, and ate it in bed while watching a TV programme about air ambulances. Later when they had sex she found she couldn’t relax properly because of a Twitter thread she’d read about a bed-bug infestation hitting hotels.

‘I think that was in America,’ Elliott said impatiently, when she stopped him to ask about this. ‘If you don’t want to do it you can just say that.’

The banshee had gone unmentioned since then. Somehow she knew Cian wasn’t bringing it up to be facetious or cruel, even though they both understood there were no banshees in the flat. It was because he was thinking about the general hauntedness probably. Áine wasn’t sure banshees travelled out of the country, and they certainly didn’t exist over here. It must have just come into his head, she thought, and then she thought about the train down to the funeral. She didn’t bring up the funeral or the train or the banshee. Instead she said, randomly, in an attempt to win back the game:

‘Laura thinks there’s something going on between me and you. We had a big fight about it, actually.’

He looked at her steadily. ‘Obviously.’

‘What’s obvious? Obvious that she thinks that?’

Cian rolled his eyes. She saw the whites of them in the gloom, moving in a tiny little circle.

‘Come on, Áine.’ He sounded amused but also tired.

Quite often Áine found the emotions of other people were not obvious to her. They needed to be spelled out, and then she was too busy thinking about why they weren’t obvious in the first place, how she had missed something that obvious, to have time to consider how she felt about it herself.

She stubbed her cigarette out on the wall and shivered even though it wasn’t cold enough to warrant it. They were speaking more quietly than they usually did and she found it deeply unnerving, which was probably the real reason behind the shiver. His voice sounded weirdly soft and earnest, the way he’d spoken to her at the wake and told her mother that the corpse looked well. They had not used that tone of voice with each other again in the intermittent periods during the years since they’d randomly decided to be friends again. Perhaps that’s why it felt so weird. Other-worldly. It didn’t feel right to be thinking about the banshee right now, or her grandmother or her mother, Áine thought, but then she wasn’t the one who had brought it up.

In the distance someone let off a firework and they heard the low whistle and the bang without seeing any of the lights. They both followed the noise into the sky but there was nothing there. Cian was standing quite close to her. Her face was still tipped up looking for the fireworks that followed the noise. The sky was darkening. Someone said: ‘When you’re not here I sometimes think I made you up inside my head.’ Up close, Cian looked tense and almost a bit nauseous. She thought about asking him if he’d felt sick since arriving at the flat, because it was evidence that there was some kind of gas leak in the house, or the mould contained deadly spores, or something that made everyone feel a bit off-colour, and that perhaps that was why she’d been so sick, but there was no time. He kissed her like it was a dare that he didn’t imagine himself going through with. She could feel that he was holding himself very stiff and still. He tasted like cigarettes but in a not unpleasant way.

Áine kept her eyes open and above them the red velvet curtain twitched from the upstairs room that overlooked the garden. Behind the curtain someone moved away quickly. Had they been watching? She felt angry and embarrassed but disinclined to leave and investigate. ‘Let’s go inside,’ she said. She took his hand. The only room that didn’t have windows was the basement, so they went there. They were both a little drunk. Áine was drunk enough not to mind the wet walls that they brushed against as she opened the door. Cian was kissing her neck. She thought about that instead of the furry muck that rubbed off on her. She took his hand in her clean one, the one that hadn’t touched the sweaty door handle. She laughed because her neck tickled and the booze made her trip on the stairs and also because laughing in the place made it feel less grotesque, both the setting and what they were doing, about to do. Her voice sounded reedy and high and unfamiliar. It echoed. Cian put a hand on her waist to steady himself. It was cold and damp. The curtains were closed already. But the basement seemed to suggest itself as a solution. It was the first time she’d been down there since they’d moved into the flat. Somehow it felt familiar, though. Afterwards, when she thought about that night – always against her will – she couldn’t remember which of them had actually suggested going down there, or whether they just moved towards it silently, hand in hand, like zombies. It was very dark down there and in a way that made it easier. She felt Cian relax once they couldn’t properly see each other. When they kissed again he was more confident about it and she closed her eyes. The cigarette taste had gone and instead there was just sourness and the stale air of the cellar. When she opened her eyes again it was still blackness. It felt weird that this was happening, but also not.

At the bottom of the steps Cian moved his hand from her waist, higher under her shirt. She let him press her back against the concrete slabs that made up the uncovered wall. She didn’t move it. If they weren’t touching it would feel more real that she was down here, down here for the first time, down here with him. She didn’t want to think about how it was real. She let him push against her. The floor was wet and they slid down on to it, the momentum and booze sucking them lower. When they had sex she got on top and braced her hands on the wall behind him and felt them get slick with wet sludgy moss. When he groaned it was intolerable to listen to and she put her palm over his mouth, even though there was no way they could possibly be overheard, and the green-black muck came off on his pale skin. She could feel the grit when she touched him. He bit her finger and it stung, hard enough that she knew he’d drawn blood. His extra incisors. Then this wasn’t enough so they flipped over and she took off her shirt for no reason other than to feel the grimy floor, cold and rough against her bare shoulders. Something hard and wooden and pointy was digging into the small of her back. She wouldn’t let him go down on her but made him sit up to give him head and at one point he put pressure on her and she choked, but then he apologized and the effect of being debased was subsequently ruined. She said it was fine and wiped her mouth, and what tasted like blood from her fingers and the muck from the walls came off on her lips. She was shivering throughout. Her body felt like an exposed plug socket. Afterwards, he just threw the used condom into the corner of the room, somewhere in the darkness, and left it there. She couldn’t be bothered saying anything about the fact he had it with him.

It was impossible to say whether the sex was good. There was an intensity to it that was neither good nor bad. It felt mainly inevitable, like doing it put a full stop where there had before been a years-and-years-long question mark. It felt more like completing a task, ticking a box, exorcising something, moving on each other as if on autopilot, or possessed. Áine knew they wouldn’t speak again after that. They didn’t really know anything about each other’s lives any more. They weren’t really friends, maybe. It felt good to make a decision and good to feel like something had ended. She couldn’t remember what they talked about afterwards but there were stains on the back of all his clothes when he left. She watched him go without saying anything about the stains and after the door was shut she archived all of their chats on every social media platform. That way she couldn’t see if he’d messaged her but she knew he wouldn’t anyway. Elliott had messaged several times. She opened them and swallowed. Her mouth was dry and tasted disgusting. Elliott had sent a picture of the dead stag. Its eyes stared up at her through the screen. Alex was in the picture, flushed and grinning.

We got her!!!!

Hours later there were more.

Sorry if the stag made you sad

I dnt think it wuld but just in casem

Ivjh had too much to dirnk

Just thinking of u

Love u so much

The stag was still looking at her. Just thinking of u. Love u so much. Are you thinking of me? The basement door was still ajar and she shut it while covering her hand with her sleeve and then stood in the shower with the hard water on the hottest setting until her skin turned red and sore. She was moving robotically, like a person medicated or possessed. Something in her, demonic, making her breathe and swallow and think and walk around. The numbness of it lasted until the next morning when she woke up alone in bed, having slept soundly, long and dreamlessly, finding it had settled into the kind of daily morning nausea she always felt here, and underneath that a tremendous guilt, heavy enough to make her hunch.

The guilt was so palpable it had turned from a feeling into a noise. She couldn’t focus on anything, the dishes, the TV, her phone, couldn’t think and couldn’t be left alone with her own thoughts if she turned off the noise. She tried to read a book but the words spat at her and laughed at her pastiche of wholesomeness and self-improvement, and she put it down again and bit all her nails so rabidly they peeled and bled. Occasionally the noise inside her own head would come out, an audible humiliated groan of ahhheeehhh that erupted spontaneously and made her hide her head in her hands. She was filled with nervous energy. It was twelve hours until Elliott would be home. She put her phone in the freezer, next to the abandoned meat, so she wouldn’t have to think about it, and went out, walking fast like she had somewhere to be when really she was just pacing around the neighbourhood, feeling like she’d done something ugly and amoral and that everyone knew. She walked past the organic 24/7 food shop, its kombucha and produce blinding in its goodness, telling herself she didn’t deserve it. Her body was a detached and defiled thing that didn’t deserve to be fed or watered or cared for, and under that or behind that or inside that her soul was gone or ruined or both. She thought again about the research she’d done on the internet about possession and wondered if that’s what it was and if it was whether she would be absolved of guilt by the same logic.

Her feet moved quickly and independently. Soon they delivered her to the little church that people in the neighbourhood often had weddings in. There were weddings in the little church every weekend, it felt like. When she walked past it Áine often got home to find forgotten confetti stuck to the soles of her trainers. Thinking about weddings made her think of Laura and Alex. Thinking of Laura and Alex made her think of the dinner party. The thought of the dinner party and of monogamy made Áine think of Cian and the horrible groan of embarrassment bubbled up in her throat again and she ducked inside to run from it.

She was not a religious person. Even in childhood, even alongside the banshees and the little white coffins, the cemetery Sundays and communions and spectacles of first confessions and long, drawn-out ceremonies where she confirmed her faith and promised in front of friends and family not to drink or smoke or be drawn into the ways of Satan, even then there was a part of her that found it all over the top and unrealistic and mortifying. A bigger part of her, of course, felt guilty for thinking that, and of course the concept of guilt was part of the brand of spirituality that she was brought up with, so perhaps that was wrong, actually, maybe she was a religious person, and had always been, and maybe her religion was guilt itself. Fear was tied in with the guilt too, the kind of cautious fear that reminded Áine not to totally discount the idea of God, in case it was all real and true, in case she needed salvation one day. A part of her adult subconscious still dwelt there, in the fear and the guilt and the childhood spent in little white dresses with matching shoes and socks and a veil like a tiny bride, and dark confessional booths, telling strangers reverently that she’d said the word fuck or lied to her mum about doing her homework as though any of it was bad enough to send her to hell for eternity. Nowadays, if anyone ever brought up religion, she made fun of it. In the pub she would joke about how all she needed to do was tell a priest right before she died that she was sorry for it all, and mean it, and she’d still get into heaven anyway. That as long as she didn’t kill herself, which was the ultimate cardinal sin and the only one that cancelled out the ‘get out of jail free’ card that was the sacrament of the Last Rites, she was fine. Sometimes people didn’t like jokes about suicide in pubs. Sometimes Elliott would say: ‘Could you not joke about killing yourself all the time, please?’

Áine wasn’t totally convinced she was looking for some sort of subconscious salvation today, or any way to assuage her guilt. It was just a coincidence, maybe, that the church had been there at the precipice of her panic attack and now she was inside it, sitting in a cool empty pew, staring at an empty altar, thinking about how the church was not as pretty as it could be and the one near her house, her proper house but not her proper house any more, her parents’ house, that that one was more gothic, more Latin, more ostentatious. People in this country had a hard time expressing themselves through architecture, she thought, or at all. It was her type of church, though, at least. They had confessional booths here, although there was probably nobody in them right now. You had to go at set times, she thought. And even if she’d managed to get in at the right time, what would she say? What could she possibly say? Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been too many years since my last confession. These are my sins. I am loved and I don’t think I deserve to be loved. I am a betrayer. I am a bad friend. I am pretending to be someone else. I am tired all the time from the pretence. There are ten commandments and I am steadily making my way through violating all of them. There’s something inside my house and I think it wants to kill me. Does the Church still believe in exorcism? Can you exorcise my house? It’s not really my house anyway. Can you exorcise me?

No. It would be ridiculous. Instead she sat in the pew and thought again about the night before, the first time she had done so deliberately, which was enough contrition as anyone could order her to do. She knelt on the floor and leaned her head on the wooden pew in front of her and thought about it hard. He’d said her name oddly, when he was inside her, like it was a prayer. She kept hearing it against her will, every few minutes, randomly. The noise repeated on her like bad food and the intensity of the memory washed over her in waves until she felt like she would vomit. Normal, ordinary things had become intolerable to her. She thought for a long time about how people shortened her first name even though it was not a name that was difficult to say in the first place. Previously it felt good to have a nickname. It felt warm, it meant she was an insider. It made her believe people thought about her and that she was known and loved. Now those things felt crushing.

When the light inside the empty church darkened enough that Áine thought maybe she would be locked inside and maybe that would be a good thing, she forced herself to get up and leave. Her kneecaps ached. When she returned to the flat Elliott was already there, looking windswept and pink-cheeked and alive. She looked at his collar and his shoes and his hairline and his earlobes and avoided his eyes. How could he look at her and not know? But he didn’t know. He just asked if she was okay and why the duvet was in the living room on the floor and what happened in the shower because there was dirt all over in the bathroom, but he couldn’t piece anything together and Áine thought, well why would he? Why would anyone think that she had done what she had done to him? Why would anyone betray someone they loved and then pretend to keep living normally? She kept her eyes focused on Elliott’s lips and he was saying how knackered he was from the trip and how much fun it had been. Everything he said was tinged with goodness and life and she went to him and clung to him and said: ‘I’m sorry, I love you so much.’

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. It’s just dirt. We can clean it.’

‘I love you so fucking much.’

November

Áine didn’t want to see or speak to anyone. She didn’t want to be perceived by anyone who would instantly understand that she was a bad, cruel and amoral person, a person possessed and haunted and ruined. She wanted to find refuge somewhere but there was nowhere to go and no one to find refuge in, and so instead she wanted nothingness. She kept her phone in the freezer for as long as she could stand. Afterwards it didn’t work properly, shutting itself off randomly. She used this as an excuse not to reply to texts. She pretended that she’d dropped it by accident, that it had fallen out of her bag on a mental health walk and now it was damaged. Elliott said, ‘Oh, Ain,’ clucking like typical you. She emailed her mother so she wouldn’t worry, because she was the only person who would have messaged on the phone; Cian wouldn’t – his life had always been chaotic, which she had always enjoyed vicariously. She enjoyed his wild stories about women and drinking and bad mistakes, but they seemed less funny now she had become one of these episodes of what she and Laura had once called ‘the Cian shitshow’ when they were being mean about him, Áine with hidden affection, Laura with hidden venom.

Laura wouldn’t message either. Their texting was sporadic. Laura checked in, Áine checked in, they both said they were good and fine. It made her sad to look at the chat, so she made a note not to very often. Laura also had an uncanny ability to tell when Áine was lying or hiding something from her, especially if it was something bad or self-destructive or disgusting. She always managed to weasel it out of her – a recurrent UTI because she couldn’t stay away from a boy at university who obviously disliked her, a nasty comment she’d made to her mother when her mother had complained she hadn’t called home enough – and Áine would find herself filled with shame, begging Laura to forgive her and to think she was a good person again, and to still want to be her friend. If Áine were to have messaged Laura, she thought Laura would know, on an almost psychic level, what had happened with Cian, and she couldn’t face it. The thought was too humiliating to bear. She kept thinking about their argument at the gym, Laura saying Now this thing with Cian. All of us ignoring the fact something’s clearly going on.

There was nobody else really who would text her, not that she could think of, and she was glad of that. Her phone was silent. It felt lighter and less important. It was just a piece of electronics now. She said to her mother the phone was broken but that she could drop her an email if she needed her and that everything was fine. Her parents were bad at email and they typed the way they spoke to her, with great difficulty. Her mother replied later saying awk Áine very silly ok we will speak soon daddys leg giving trouble but dont be worrying speak soon. She thought fleetingly about quitting her job and giving away all her possessions.

She had for the first time in a long time complete clarity about what she wanted: for her body to become totally detached from the self, to live as a phantom in the walls of the flat. To exist constantly in an out-of-body experience, in a dream. To commit complete and irrevocable soul murder. Of course, this was impossible. It was impossible to be truly unperceived. She could make herself small at work and isolate herself from her friends and her parents, but Elliott was always here. Elliott lived here too.

Elliott didn’t have space to live here though, alongside Áine and her stuff and his stuff and her guilt, which took up more and more room, which became bigger and more frightening with the passing days and weeks. Or perhaps it was wrong to call it guilt. More likely it was fear that she was living with. It felt inevitable that Elliott would find out what she did, because, as her mother often said, everything comes out in the wash, doesn’t it? And when – not if, when – when he found out, he would hate her, obviously, and he also wouldn’t be surprised, because she was a bad person deep down and she was always going to do something like this as confirmation of her badness. The house might have brought out that inherent wrongness. It might have brought it to light, unlocked some energy within her, but it had to exist in the first place to be unlocked, right? And anyway, yes, Elliott would find out and he would tell all their friends and they would hate her, and none of them would ever want to speak to her again. She’d have to run away, to ostracize herself, to become a social pariah. And therein lay the issue. Where to go? In the shower or lying awake at night, Elliott softly snoring beside her, Áine thought about this. Where would she go? She imagined Elliott throwing her wheelie suitcases and rucksacks and holdalls, all full of her stuff, out in the street and telling her to go and her saying But where? Occasionally she got emails from the property websites, their cookies reminding her she had once visited as a way of looking for a way out of the haunted house and the haunted situation and how there had been nothing. Look again? the cartoon houses asked her email inbox. Still searching? Yes, Áine thought. But there isn’t anything to search for.

It was Elliott’s birthday soon. He thought they should have a party. Áine couldn’t think of anything worse. A party in the house, as though the house wasn’t haunted and damp and foul-smelling and filled with bad things, both supernatural and natural bad feelings. But Elliott, of course, didn’t notice these things. They had infected him briefly, sure. It was too impossible to escape totally unscathed. But Elliott had recovered from the infection and he was better, bigger, stronger for it. He was able to exist both in the flat and outside it, in the world, with an ease and an enjoyment that she alternately envied and pitied, depending on the hour. He had never taken his birthday seriously before, and never had a party. But once he settled on the idea of having one this year he was reluctant to let go of it. He set up a WhatsApp group and picked a date, a Saturday at the end of the month, just in time to avoid the festive rush that usually ruined his celebrations. It would be a shame not to have the party, he kept saying to Áine, scrolling through his own messages in the WhatsApp group, counting the people who had enthusiastically RSVP’d, with emojis or Yes mate! He had never got a chance to have one before because it was too awkward to organize them with housemates. But now they had all this space and they should use it, he said. Áine did not think the flat was particularly spacious. She sometimes felt as though Elliott saw their world differently to how it actually was. Or maybe his universe was the real one and she was the one seeing it warped and haunted. The idea of inviting strangers into the haunted space was vaguely interesting if only because then she’d be able to see who was right about the place: her or Elliott.

But openly, at least, she was patently and totally uninterested in the concept of the party. She was recalcitrant about all discussion of his birthday, in fact, and she could see how hurt and confused it made him. And when she saw the hurt, she thought, good. She thought, I’ve hurt you already and now I’m hurting you more, and I’ll keep doing it until you realize that it will just keep happening and that you’re making a mistake. She thought he was thinking she was angry at him maybe. Maybe for not believing in the ghosts. Or for not eating her pancakes. But really she wasn’t angry at all. Or if she was, it was not at Elliott. It was not at Cian or Laura or The Landlord or Alex or her parents or her boss or all the people she usually blamed her anger on. She was angry at herself and, more than that, she was scared. Really, she just felt scared all the time. It was exhausting, actually.

She was scared to look Elliott in the eye because she was convinced he would know what she’d done. She was scared to sleep in case the nightmares came back, or in case in some sort of fugue state she’d admit to something and not realize it, talking in her sleep. She was scared of the man upstairs because she felt sure that the neighbours knew what she had done too, somehow. Either they’d seen her in the garden or they’d seen Cian leaving in his ruined clothes and they knew. She was avoiding them, making sure they didn’t leave the building at the same time, cowering by the front door and ignoring Elliott when he asked why. She was scared of the basement, which seemed to taunt her about what she’d done by blooming in horribleness, the door becoming darker, furrier, damper. The damp crawled back into her lungs again and she was scared of that too. Elliott said the door was bad because the house was colder, that it was just the time of year and the fact it was now extortionately expensive to adequately heat any building. He made sure the dehumidifier was constantly on and constantly emptied, and wiped down the basement door occasionally, but it remained cold and ugly and mouldy and wet, and every time Elliott went anywhere near it to clean or to empty the dehumidifier, the panic intensified and she practically jumped in front of him to block his path. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said, although she never did.

She was so scared that she was convinced death was imminent and certain. She was waiting to be caught out, waiting for something to break, and half hoping it did because the pressure was so immense, the waiting torturous. It felt like everything was ending and whether that was a good or bad thing was unconfirmed. The flat had never felt like a home but now it felt even more unreal, a liminal space, transient, unsettled. It pressed in on them, willing the break to come.

The feeling of something ending was compounded by several emails from Jack S that, in a reversal of circumstances to their usual correspondence, Áine and Elliott were both studiously ignoring. The emails were all about the end of their tenancy and whether they planned to apply to renew it, and that if they did not apply to renew, viewings would soon commence. Áine deleted the emails as soon as they came, ignoring their relevance to herself and to Elliott and to Jack S and to their anonymous gombeen. Elliott, kindly perhaps, ignored them too. But with uncharacteristic diligence, no sooner would they delete the email than another would come through, following the exact same lazy template as all the others, as if Jack S knew they were being deleted. The panic rose every time the email arrived, repeating on them like electronic norovirus.

Dear TENANTS,

By now you are coming to the end of your 12 MONTH tenancy at INSERT ADDRESS HERE and you are required contractually to let us know if you will be seeking to renew your lease, subject to landlord approval. If you do wish to apply for lease renewal we will contact THE LANDLORD and will return to you with terms. It is possibly subject to market fluctuations that YOUR RENT may change or increase. If you do not wish to renew your lease you are required to confirm this with ESTATE AGENT so that we may begin to organize viewings of potential tenants in THE PROPERTY. Please make sure you are amenable to viewings and that the living quarters are in neat and tidy conditions for prospective new tenants. Please note that failure to confirm your intentions could result in a renewal rejection and may also affect the speed and completion of your deposit return. Thank you and have a good day.

If the emails came through when they were in the same room, both Áine and Elliott would suddenly busy themselves with another task as though this would make them go away again, as though you just had to ignore things and they would eventually resolve themselves. Áine scrubbed the stains off their cracked formica countertops and mopped, badly, sloshing dirty grey water over the uneven PVC floor. Elliott went to the shop to buy disposable party cups or cheap vodka. He kept asking if she wanted to invite anyone to the party, kept saying that so far it was all his friends. He asked it in a vague, non-committal way, like he didn’t really want any of her friends there, like he didn’t think they would mix well in the hallowed, monstrous space they were existing in. He deliberately didn’t place names on the people she should maybe invite either, and Áine was glad of it. She thought that if she heard him say Laura’s name, or worse, Cian’s, she would disintegrate totally or burst into flames and he’d have to cancel the party and tell Jack S they could not possibly renew the lease anyway as the flat had just experienced the first recorded proven case of spontaneous human combustion in the world.

Since Halloween she had been convinced that if Elliott touched her, her skin would melt and blister. They had not had sex since. She could barely allow him to come anywhere near her. If they brushed past each other in the kitchen or if he rolled over closer to her in bed, she’d lie prone or freeze, every muscle in her body screaming and stiffening. This was not her intention: it was the opposite of her intention. In fact, the night he’d returned from the stag, when Áine had clung to him and apologized for everything and nothing and told him how much she cared for him, she’d been determined to love the bad thing away. She’d kissed him and held him and pulled him down on to the bed with her and tried to have sex with him, but it was painful, physically painful, and she kept convincing him to go on anyway but he said it felt weird to do that when she was so clearly not enjoying it and they stopped. This had never happened to her before; not that sex was painful but that it was the type of painful a man had found off-putting. Her body had betrayed her, she felt, for the second time that weekend. She had tried to will things to continue on as normal and expel the bad thing but her body had rebelled against her, perhaps, she thought, because her body knew on a cellular level that the bad thing was in fact her.

But just as trying to let the house swallow her up hadn’t worked, ignoring it didn’t work either. Emails continued to come. And just as trying to swallow him up hadn’t worked, ignoring Elliott wasn’t working out much better. Áine kept expecting him to realize how bad and weird things had become inside the house and inside them and to cancel the party spontaneously, but of course he didn’t do this. He laboured on with it until the situation became ridiculously, obviously untenable.

When it finally happened it was the night before the party and, Áine thought afterwards, she had been waiting for it, expecting it. She hadn’t bought him a present. She’d recently got into the habit of running very hot showers and then standing under the scalding water until she found the heat or the shape of her body intolerable. She emerged from one of these to find the basement door open. She was wearing a big towelling robe and her skin was pruned and red and sore. She was both sweating and freezing cold, standing at the open mouth of the cellar. The steps were covered with a thick film of dust that had recently been disturbed. There were lots of footprints in the dust, up and down the staircase. Some of them were Elliott’s but most of them were not. Panic flooded every cell of her body. She shouted Elliott’s name into the darkness and he shouted back up with terrible casualness, ‘Yeah? I’m just down here,’ and then – ‘Just a minute.’

His voice echoed on the wet walls. Áine stood on the first step into the darkness. She was shaking. Her naked foot found the print left by her foot before.

‘I know there’s fairy lights down here somewhere,’ said echo Elliott. ‘Have you seen them? For the party tomorrow. I know they’re here somewhere. I just need to –’ He trailed off and there was the sound of movement in the depths below, of boxes being shoved aside and more being ripped open. She heard her travelling home suitcase roll into a corner and then Elliott swear absently, stubbing his toe on something on the stairs.

Áine gripped the banister and the flat cackled at her; wet splinters dug themselves into her soft, pruned palms. She thought about Cian and about the condom he’d thrown into the darkness of the cellar and the way she couldn’t be bothered to retrieve it because she was a fundamentally weak and bad person. Her legs shook. Images rushed at her. She saw Cian’s back as he walked out of the room in front of her. She saw her hand holding his as they descended into the basement. She saw the mould on her wet fingers as she pressed the front door shut behind him. She saw the wooden object digging into her back while they had sex, as though she was watching them from above, and in her memory the room was somehow bright. She saw that the object was the planchette from Elliott’s ill-advised birthday present. She hadn’t realized that before.

In reality, of course, the inside of the room was pure black. How could Elliott see where he was going? How did he have the mystical ability to find his way in the darkness? What else could he see that she couldn’t? Her mind felt like a cinema. She didn’t want to think about this or see this. She didn’t want to be here. The thought presented itself amidst the panic of the situation, an adrenaline shot of white, hot clarity: I don’t want to be here any more. She descended to the bottom of the steps quickly, like a spider or a poltergeist, trying to expel the thought and the images that accompanied it and the fact Elliott was in the basement, the dark heart of the bad place, the place that would prove to them both she was bad. Her hands were in her hair and she thought about the ouija board that was down there, the planchette that poked into her back when she was underneath Cian, how it dug into her coccyx and how the planchette on her birthday had told them to go get out get out get OUT

‘Get out get out get out get out –’

And then she realized she was saying it out loud because Elliott had appeared looking terrified and blue, lit by the light of his phone (that was how he was seeing in the darkness, of course it was, it was nothing supernatural or special), and she grabbed him by the front of his jumper just in time, as he reached the bottom step, and she was shaking him and they struggled back up the stairs together, smashing into each other and pushing each other away, stumbling, almost falling down the stairs and then not falling, and at the top he gripped her tightly and kept saying what’s wrong what’s happening and she was saying you can’t go down there please don’t go down there please I’m begging you and his eyes were wide and her cheeks were wet and he was saying this is stupid there’s nothing down there and she was saying yes there is there is and then he tried to go back down and she gripped him again and they struggled and she fell hard on the stairs, falling again like a possessed person into the darkness, her back and towel and wet skin stripping all the footprints and dust off every step. There was a series of bangs and shouts and chaos and dust clouded in the air, her dead skin cells and Elliott’s and Cian’s mixing together, along with other skin, the skin of all the people who had lived here before that they would never know. Maybe The Landlord’s skin too, maybe the neighbours’. It dissolved in the air and soaked into her lungs and she hyperventilated, panting, looking up at Elliott from the wet floor, her clean body dirty again, Elliott silhouetted against the light of the kitchen in the darkness of the basement. Her body was wet but it was wet down here too, Áine realized. She was lying in a rising pool of dank, stale water. A pipe had burst. She propped herself up on her elbows and her back hurt. She had fallen against the pipe. It must have been leaking and now it was pouring. Nothing here worked properly. Everything was half done. Everything was ready to collapse at the slightest provocation. She would be angry about it if she wasn’t so busy feeling panicked. It smelled like the mulch that leaked between graves when they buried anyone back home, because they weren’t supposed to be cremated if they wanted to go to Heaven but what this meant was there were too many corpses in the ground, all seeping into each other. Someone was crying, the same family of banshee crying she’d heard her mother do after her grandmother’s funeral, the same kind of banshee crying her grandmother had heard before she died as a warning, the same keening crying Áine kept hearing from upstairs, the woman who was being kicked out of their leaking, rotting, dying building. Áine realized the person crying was her. Elliott descended the stairs and splashed towards her and he was saying what the fuck and he was wading in the suddenly everywhere water, gagging, feeling along the stone walls. What the fuck, Elliott was saying, his voice roaring above the sloshing of the grey corpse water. His hands stretched out behind her. She stood up and her naked body was slick from the dead water and freezing and she realized she was shaking. Áine watched him in the gloom and thought of whether it had been dry down here when she was here with Cian. She thought about bracing her hands against the wall. Would there be handprints? It felt like there should be. It’s coming from over here, this pipe, Elliott was saying. He was in the corner where Cian had thrown the condom after they finished. The warped cardboard of the ouija board was lolling around in between them. What the fuck he kept saying, what the fuck happened in here. Áine said I think it was me that did it. I did it. Look at me. I did it.

He was far away and he was up and she was down but they were looking at each other squarely and openly for the first time in a long time. After the initial gushing, the pipe slowed to a trickle at ankle-depth. It felt anticlimactic. For a second she imagined they would both have drowned. Someone said: ‘I can’t do this any more. I’m sorry, I really can’t do this any more.’

After they had decided it was over, things moved quickly. The party didn’t happen, of course. It felt good to decide something, Áine realized, good to make a choice, even if the choice was one that made her feel sick and, underneath that – which was worse – relief. After she climbed out of the basement and covered her nakedness again, they’d sat side by side at the top of the stairs, her wrapped in a beach towel, smelling like damp, looking down into the sploshing, dripping darkness and the small stagnant pond of water and talking about what it was they couldn’t do any more, which was: all of it. The flat and the dog and the family and the future and the hurtling towards something that was simultaneously massive and oppressive and tiny and tedious. They looked ahead and not at each other. They would have to report this to The Landlord. Previously this would have filled Áine with panic, infected Elliott with annoyance. It hardly seemed important now. They talked little and cried a lot. Áine knew that Elliott thought she was pushing him out of the basement because she was really possessed by a ghost or some sort of demon, that maybe he’d finally been convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong at the heart of the place they lived. Or that she was having some sort of psychotic break that had been a long time overdue. She was telling him to get out of the basement but Elliott thought, clearly, that she was saying he needed to get out of her own head, or that he was about to be chased by a malevolent presence. Really, she was worried he would find the condom. Afterwards, not right afterwards but in the days and weeks afterwards, when they packed up the flat, Áine realized that the whole scenario was almost laughably stupid. Even if Elliott had found it, he might have just thought it was a weird left-behind talisman of whoever had lived there before. That, she thought, he would find more believable and easier to swallow over the truth: which is that she was haunted and she had betrayed him. Still, though, there was no point in telling him that now, the ridiculous truth of it all. It was kinder to let him think she was totally insane.

Elliott said he would take the PlayStation because he’d bought it, and she was like, fine, and he said he would deal with Jack S and tell him that they’d be leaving next month and she was like, thanks, and he asked if she would like to take any of the furniture she had scrounged off homeowners from Facebook Marketplace and Freecycle and she was like, no, that’s okay, you can have it.

‘Won’t you need it?’ he asked. ‘For your new place?’

Áine shrugged. ‘It’ll be fine.’

Elliott mirrored her shrug and started putting bubble wrap around mirrors and coffee tables and said nothing about her ambivalence to the whole scenario. When he uncovered some of Puca’s forgotten things, little toys and blankets, while packing, Áine made a gag about the bite, something half-hearted about them both going feral, but Elliott ignored it. She supposed that now they were exes – that still felt odd, to be exes – he didn’t have to laugh at her strange jokes any more. The idea he had pretended to enjoy them in the first place simply because he was her boyfriend gave her pause, but didn’t feel as bad as she expected. He anticipated she would be more stressed, perhaps, given the inherent stressfulness of the situation and the fact that she was inherently a deeply stressed-out person. Actually, Áine felt like their roles had been reversed for the first time. She felt demonstrably breezy, even faced with the looming threat of homelessness. It would be Christmas soon. It was over. Nothing could be as bad as being inside the haunted liminal space that they’d enjoyed together over the past year.

Even when he descended into the basement to rescue the few empty boxes that remained unwaterlogged and would soon house his PlayStation and the kettle again (she was like, no it’s fine you take it) and all the other detritus of a shared life that was now making up Elliott’s personal life detritus, Áine felt unmoved and unfrightened. If he found anything now and confronted her, it wouldn’t matter. It was over. She was even a little curious to find out what would happen if he did accuse her, if his mind finally strayed into a place dark enough to let him think she would do that. She wondered whether it would be easier to lie to him now or whether she would have always found it easy to lie to him anyway, and if she did, what that meant about her. What it meant about the kind of person she was.

‘I’ll sort it out,’ she said, and as soon as she said it she knew that it was true, even if she didn’t know yet how she would make it so.

They were too old and too self-conscious and annoyingly post-ironic to have bothered with making their relationship Facebook official, so instead they had to deal with the indignity of divulging the news to their loved ones one by one, to construct a narrative of why the relationship had failed and tell it over and over again to their friends and families, believing it a little more until by the time everyone knew it wasn’t a story any more, it was just the truth and what really happened. Well, Elliott had to deal with this indignity. She was putting it off because it felt both humiliating and fundamentally unimportant. She could tell her parents when she went home for her annual flying festive visit. She would eventually have to text Laura and tell her, which she was also putting off, if only because it felt like something Laura, new Laura, wild-swimming, Ottolenghi-cooking, wedding-planning Laura, would be unsurprised and judgemental about. Laura sent two incredibly long messages extending her emotional support from afar and saying she would be okay and that she was strong and independent. When Áine saw the notifications she on instinct put the phone back in the freezer so she wouldn’t have to look at them or think about them. She only remembered it was still in there when Elliott went to defrost it ahead of moving out and said, ‘Did you know your phone was in the freezer?’ and she had to pretend she had no idea, that she must have had a moment of madness and left it in there. Elliott handed it to her and nodded, like this story confirmed something about Áine that he already knew.

She’d heard from Alex, Áine imagined, who’d heard from Elliott. She was more grateful to not have to tell Laura herself than annoyed that the gossip had got ahead of her. There were several drunk messages from Cian, despite her archiving of the chat. She knew they were drunk messages because they’d come through at 3 a.m. the weekend after Halloween and she couldn’t see what he’d said because they’d all been deleted already, probably the morning after. She thought absently about blocking him but then decided she couldn’t be bothered. It felt revealing to block someone, as though it was indicative that they’d done something to affect you so much, too much. Áine wondered if Elliott would block her after they moved out or just delete her. He hadn’t done either yet and they were technically already exes. But then maybe it was just because they were still forced to live here, in a weird half-relationship.

What made it weirder was that it was remarkably harmonious. They continued to speak, politely, deferentially, organizing times when other people would come and view the flat and when they would leave the keys and who would deal with the return of their inevitably decimated deposit (Elliott, of course). The flat, over the course of days and weeks, got emptier as items randomly disappeared. Áine assumed Elliott was stowing them at friends’ houses in preparation for the move. Or perhaps he’d found somewhere already. Or perhaps he’d bought somewhere even. In the spirit of polite deference Áine didn’t ask, and Elliott didn’t offer the information unprompted. She realized they didn’t really have any obligation to tell each other this sort of stuff any more. They were not together. Not being together made it easier to be polite and deferential to Elliott because Áine found herself less crippled by guilt and self-loathing. It was still there, of course, but it felt easier to manage. Now she wasn’t someone’s awful girlfriend, who would maybe be someone’s awful wife one day. She was simply someone’s awful ex-girlfriend. She was insane and had broken a man’s heart and betrayed him horribly. These sorts of things all ex-girlfriends did, or were claimed to have done. It felt ordinary, garden variety, reassuring in its commonality.

Their WhatsApp chat had dwindled down to almost nothing, which was the main difference. And it was one of the things Áine missed the most, the thing she was grieving for already, which was perhaps stupid. Now they only used the chat to tell each other when people were coming to view the flat. Áine thought about how that was all relationships boiled down to, really, both platonic and non-platonic. You met, you swapped numbers, you embarked upon an open-ended joint thread of textual conversations that lasted, if you were lucky, several years, or forever, or suddenly, randomly, ended. Of course, maybe it was more than that for some people. But it wasn’t as if she and Elliott had shared anything concrete, or anything more concrete than feelings, at least. They didn’t have children. They weren’t married. They didn’t own anything – nothing proper – together. Who cares which of them gets the kettle, Áine thought. The water here was so hard the fucking thing was destroyed by limescale anyway. The tea it produced had a film of swamp on the top of every cup. Fuck it. She missed having the WhatsApp chat as a place where they would share their every waking thought or photos of her naked or unbearable-to-read-back sexts about what they were going to do to each other later, even if they never actually did it, or incredibly mean-spirited gossip (on her part, not Elliott’s) about all the people they had ever met. But since they’d moved in together it had stopped being like that anyway. It was, like the flat, dead, cursed. Looking at it made her sad. When Elliott posted there to tell her what time people were coming to look around their flat she would reply with thumbs-up emojis or green ticks.

The couples came to look at the flat in a constant stream of Áine and Elliott doppelgängers. They wandered from room to room. The basement was still off-limits until The Landlord could fix the broken pipe (Elliott in the meantime had stuffed it with foaming paste from the overpriced hardware shop nearby), which Áine thought was lucky, because they weren’t seeing the true dark heart of the place. She didn’t truly believe The Landlord would ever fix it, because in her experience nothing was ever fixed by a landlord who promised otherwise via intermediaries. Elliott had mopped up all the water too, but Áine thought it still smelled terrible, like damp towels. None of the prospective tenant couples seemed to notice.

The couples looked at their art and their books and the way they arranged their pillows. It made Áine scared and a bit sad to look at them. Not scared and sad for herself but scared and sad for them. None of them seemed particularly enthused by the flat and she didn’t blame them for it. But they didn’t look particularly repelled, even by the off-limits, foul-smelling mouldy basement door, and she didn’t blame them for that either. It was cold, it was winter, a flat was a flat and nobody wanted to spend their evenings and weekends trawling through other people’s houses, strangers’ houses, and deciding if they could bear to live there even if it was only for twelve months. Áine remembered how depressing it had been with Elliott and she felt sorry for them all. Elliott tried to make conversation with some of the couples as they stomped through their rooms.

The couple upstairs remained unnervingly quiet throughout these visits. Elliott asked the visiting couples what they did and how they’d found Jack S, but nobody knew who he was, which Elliott seemed perturbed by. They just looked at him blankly and said, ‘Who?’ Elliott described him and they attributed his features to other estate agents they’d contacted, who were also all named Jack or Josh or James or Matt. But not Jack S. Nobody knew him or where he’d gone. Elliott got himself into a real fuss about it. ‘He obviously exists,’ he told one couple, bug-eyed, and they looked at each other uneasily. Áine wanted to tell Elliott that was the least weird thing about the flat, and that also it was a bit late for him to start deciding things were weird, but she didn’t bother.

Instead, when the doppelgänger couples left in the evening, the two of them sat on opposite ends of their rotting sofa and scrolled independently through Tinderified housing apps (and maybe also Tinder, she thought, and the thought was detached and novel to her, and she found she didn’t mind it). Áine looked at tiny studios that were so far away they could not conceivably be defined as being ‘in London’ (and yet of course were) because that was all she could afford. It was a depressing thought but it was caveated and made digestible by the idea that they were finally escaping the haunted place. In the horror movie of the past year this was the point where the family fled barefoot in the middle of the night, jumping into the car and speeding off into the distance with no thought as to where they were going so long as it wasn’t here. Of course, she did not have a car and it was just her. In horror movies with just a single woman there was never a fleeing-at-midnight-to-safety scene. There were mainly scenes of death or institution. Or they escaped but then there was that post-credits insinuation that the bad thing had followed them somehow, that it was still feeding off them. The fleeing-to-safety trope was only for families. Or for blushing brides, who managed to escape the burning houses and the madwomen in the attic and the ghosts in the cellar when their true love swept them off and moved them into their own castle and cured them with love’s first kiss. But still, even without a husband or children or a hatchback, she felt like the comparison applied, digitally speaking at least. Sometimes when she got too fatigued she changed the budget filters just to feel bad on purpose. One night she found the flat they were currently living in, where the rent had been raised by another £300 per month. Áine looked at the pictures on the little screen, zooming in until they pixelated, imagining who’d taken them, who’d lived here when they were taken, what they were doing now, if they were happy. She hoped they were. But not obnoxiously so.

December (the next December)

They had left the house in December, and she had always thought that this was objectively the worst time to move. Certainly it had always been the worst time to look for a new place to live, December and January, the era of grey days and endless darkness and cold that chilled the bones. But when it came to leaving, December was unexpectedly easy. People left the city in big, fantastical, over-the-top dramatic ways, even if they were just leaving to go travelling or to live somewhere else temporarily, for a matter of months or weeks. As a result, in the time before she had left herself, Áine found herself constantly going to ‘going away’ parties for one person or another, people she didn’t even know that well, or people she had known well but hadn’t ever seen when they still lived here, because social calendars and social hierarchies were so needlessly complicated. She couldn’t bear the thought, after everything else that had happened, of having to endure a ‘going away’ event for herself. For a start, Elliott would have been the one to organize it, or Laura, and it was the kind of thing that suited Cian better than her, he had the most experience of all of them with going away and coming back. But thinking about any and all of them hurt so she stopped. And aside from that, it wouldn’t have the same celebratory mood as ‘going away’ festivities usually had. She wasn’t leaving for a job or to buy some MDF-filled disaster of a help-to-buy in the suburbs. She was going because she’d played the game and lost. She was going because she’d been chased by something. She was going because she’d been haunted and got spooked. It wasn’t the sort of thing that justified cocktails.

Luckily December was the month when you could slip away. Laura had always disappeared for two full weeks every year, back home to her family, returning in the New Year looking full and revived and well cared for and relaxed. The year before they’d moved out, she’d come home a day earlier than usual for a warehouse party Alex was helping to host and found Áine and Elliott entangled together on the sofa and they’d apologized profusely but laughed a lot. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back,’ Laura had said, smirking, and they’d told her that they’d been back for days, weeks nearly, and Áine had told Elliot about Laura’s usual two-week holiday to the home counties and Elliott had asked innocently if she wasn’t knackered by it all. ‘No,’ Laura had said, looking genuinely bemused, but adding, Áine thought, in a snide way, ‘I love my family.’

Of course, Áine loved her family too. But getting fatigued with them, especially at Christmas, because they worked more than usual and struggled to celebrate properly because of this, and also because her mother fundamentally disliked the holiday, found it melancholy, none of that was a cardinal sin. It was just a random day. On Boxing Day every year her father would take all the tinsel off the tree and her mother would say, ‘Well, that’s it all over for another year,’ even though they would keep the crib up until the sixth of January. By that time Áine would have been long gone. Not this year, though. This year it was different. And thinking about Laura and Elliott and even Alex hurt again, so she stopped.

Elliott had left first. He’d done so in dribs and drabs, coming back for a box here and there, to collect the TV, to return some of her things that he’d accidentally transported with him. He’d hired the same app-driven by-the-hour van that they’d used to move in less than a year earlier, and he couldn’t find a space to park it when he had to come back for any of these tasks. He’d leave it running in the middle of the street and dash back, deliberately, obviously, not able to stay and talk. Áine was grateful for this charade. She thought it was a quintessentially Elliot-esque act of kindness; to not force either of them to perform an autopsy on their failure at domesticity. She was glad of it. He was a good person and he had loved her, is what she thought, when she was feeling nostalgic or generous. When she thought about it more deeply than that, she thought: Elliott had loved her the way you love TV programmes you watched when hung-over, picture books from your childhood or small animals in bandanas. He wanted to look at her constantly and say he adored her. He wanted her to be safe and warm and soft around the edges. But she also worried that one day he would hold her so tightly her skeleton would snap like bird bones. When she tried to think about the way she had loved him she found it hard to conceptualize, which either meant it was too true to be defined or that it had never been true in the first place.

She’d arrived home that December, the first December, with two suitcases instead of one and all the rest of her stuff either dumped outside charity shops as donations or simply abandoned and left in the flat for whoever took it after them (Elliott was dealing with it all, and Áine hadn’t asked who, if anyone, had signed the new lease, because it made her feel a little bit sorry for them that they’d done so), and on the doorstep her mother looked at the two suitcases instead of one and frowned and said, ‘Awk, Áine, I did think to myself …’ and Áine had shrugged and said in a placating way, because both her parents looked alarmed: ‘Don’t worry, I won’t stay long.’

And she didn’t. They had a Christmas that was unnervingly almost normal in both its length and its mood. Áine had worried and expected that she’d miss Elliott so much and be so worried about her imminent and very real homelessness that the days she spent with her parents, eating dry turkey and watching EastEnders omnibuses, would be intolerably miserable. But instead she extended the holiday out to a week and when her parents went back to work after Boxing Day she said she would help strip the place of the decorations, the same ones they’d had since before she was born, and found that it was cathartic and therapeutic to be useful. She kept the television on in the background and listened to the familiar accents of the local news broadcasts and put tinsel into rotting cardboard boxes and climbed into the loft and shoved them away, right at the back, feeling purposeful and less worried about her father having to try to do it with his bad leg and back and hip.

When the decorations were gone she lay on the sofa feeling the complete stillness of her childhood home, feeling it settle around her. It was both familiar and unfamiliar. Previously that had unnerved her, the familiarity and unfamiliarity of the place that had once been her home and wasn’t any more. Now that felt secondary to the place she’d just fled, barefoot, in the middle of the night (except that it was in the middle of the afternoon on a Ryanair flight and she was wearing trainers). In her parents’ house Áine felt unperceived, unwatched. Their front door was cracked uPVC and it needed to be wiped down – pollution had stuck itself to the crevices in the white pattern on the front, she would clean it before she left again – but it was their own. The rooms all smelled faintly of damp and years of cigarette smoke, but it also smelled of them and home. Nobody else had lived here, nobody else would probably want to live here. Nothing could haunt them that they hadn’t brought in themselves. Maybe her mother thought there were ghosts here, or banshees, but there were no gombeens and nothing lurking underneath the floorboards, deep in the maw of the cramped house, waiting to get them and eat them. She felt certain that whatever had been in the flat, guarded over by the spectre of the man upstairs and secured by an endless stream of ripe young things waiting to be eaten up by the city, it had not followed her.

That thought made it easier for her to transfer the heavily diminished deposit Elliott repaid into her account, two days before her flight was due to take off back to the city, to another, even more anonymous estate agent (also named Jack) for one of the depressing studios miles away from life. It made it easier for her to take it and to accept it as her sometime home, her for now home, even though it was cramped and depressing, based on tiny videos and pictures inside her phone. There was an element of ‘fuck it’ to the proceedings, the old temptation to lie in the dirt and see how weird things could get. She signed a lease that was twice as long as normal but with a break clause, on the anonymous estate agent’s suggestion. This decision too had the frightening and unreal feeling of ‘fuck it, how bad could it get, how weird could it really truly get’. She had never lived in a place longer than one year at a time. Maybe that meant the landlord was ‘nice’, to whatever extent landlords could really be nice. But also none of that mattered anyway because she needed a place to live.

‘Are you sure you won’t stay?’ said her mother, looking alarmed and unconvinced when Áine showed her the studio on her phone. ‘You could save up, you could maybe buy a place.’

‘No, I’m fine,’ Áine said, putting her phone away. It wasn’t working the best since she’d hidden it in the freezer. She’d have to get a new one at some point. ‘Sure, I have work.’ She deliberately left out the fact her work could be done from anywhere, because to get into a discussion about her bad credit and the fact there were no homes to buy, not on her own, not now, not here or there, not unless you had the home already in the family or the money and capital to secure the home already in the family, all of that would be too depressing. She thought her parents would take it as some sort of personal attack, maybe. Besides, this was fine for now. Things didn’t go perfectly. They were never perfect. Her parents understood this sentiment at least.

‘Will you not be lonely without –’ Her mother stopped herself. She didn’t need to say anyone’s name, Áine thought. It was a catch-all question.

‘No,’ said Áine, and meant it.

And then she came back with the two wheelie suitcases and went to the end of the train line where the studio lived, on the fourth floor of a building that had clearly been once just a normal family home, and she took the keys and struggled up the stairs with her luggage and she stood in the middle of the space feeling sweaty and accomplished. There was no room to move. The square box was womb-like. But the windows opened up on to a green square of space where just now snow was beginning to melt and lights from all the windows opposite were twinkling with the possibility of anonymous life. Maybe she would put something up on the wall, make it more homely. Maybe not. On the top floor you couldn’t hear anything from the street below, nothing from the other sides either. She was too far up, too isolated. There was very little storage space, which was fine because it meant no basement. She put her suitcases in the middle of the room. Her parents had given her money for Christmas and she’d wasted it on purpose and wholesomely this year on buying herself a new bed. When it arrived, delivered by a pair of disgruntled men who hadn’t anticipated the stairs, she waited until they left and rolled the suitcases underneath the bed and sat on the plastic. It smelled of chemicals and nothing else. It was new. It would have only her skin cells on it, only her history. It was a small and expensive thing but it felt important and grown-up, after years of existing on other people’s furniture, soaking in their histories and anxieties, haunted by their experiences. She’d left herself little money to fill the fridge, a tiny thing within arm’s reach of the bed she was currently sitting on, but that was fine. The first night in the place, she slept soundly, an exhausted and dreamless sleep.

And then December all over again. Another December. It announced itself not with Christmas, not with a birth, but with a marriage. Laura had wanted to wait until their boat ‘renovations’ were done. She couldn’t possibly think of the wedding while fixing up the boat. This, at least, was what Laura told Áine, via the bridesmaids’ group chat. Áine got the sense that this was not the entire story, but that Laura was trying to downplay the organizational turmoil of planning a transatlantic wedding with strategically placed emojis and an unwavering commitment to creating an impression that she was a chill bride, an anti-Bridezilla. She didn’t put this theory to Laura herself. They still didn’t talk much one on one, not any more. At the wedding, one of the bridesmaids told Áine that the real reason for the delay was Alex’s family, waiting for them all to have time to fly over, that Laura was secretly pissed off about it. Áine thought, there was once a time when Laura would have told me this herself. But she smiled and said nothing.

The wedding was beautiful. You were supposed to say these things about weddings, and Áine kept hearing people saying it to each other at the wedding, about the wedding they were at presently but also about other weddings they’d been to in the past, or speculating about the beauty of imminent weddings in the future, taking place on coming weekends or on random Thursdays and Mondays because that was a little bit cheaper. But still, it was true. It was beautiful. Alex had called in some food-delivery meal-kit favours with a local chef he knew and they had hired out the top-floor function area of a very tasteful pub. The fact it was the pub she and Elliott had gone to all those months before, the day they viewed the flat together and saw their home that wasn’t really a home for the first time, that, admittedly, felt ominous at first. Áine hadn’t wanted to ask Laura why they’d chosen it; she felt like it was bad manners, probably, to ask ominous questions of a bride-to-be, and their relationship, while improved, was still not what it was. It wasn’t a friendship built for those kinds of questions, not any more, maybe ever.

But then Alex had explained drunkenly at the reception that they chose the place deliberately. That they’d fallen so in love with the little church, just like all those other couples had done, every weekend, the year Áine and Elliott had lived here. They discovered it, Alex said, on the way to Áine and Elliott’s awful dinner party. He said it like that: awful dinner party. ‘My god that was awkward,’ he slurred into Áine’s ear, sloshing champagne over the front of her bridesmaid dress and shaking his head. ‘But still, at least we can laugh about it now, eh?’ They just knew they had to get married there one day. And so they had. And the chef had been working in the pub and so all of the proceedings had opened themselves out to the happy couple so organically it seemed a shame to work against the magic of the universe. Áine thought again about how golden people were like magnets for each other. She drank carefully, alternating champagne with sparkling water. Neither Alex nor Laura were religious people, but they’d booked it anyway. They wanted to cosplay religion in the tiny church, even though they’d got legally married at a registry office a week earlier (Áine had not been invited to this smaller, more legally binding ceremony). At the end of the second ostentatious, less legally binding ceremony everyone cheered when Alex and Laura kissed, and when they made their way out and across to the pub a little crowd had gathered. Someone had given the local Montessori children and Veja-enthusiast onlookers some of the biodegradable confetti Laura and Alex had made themselves and they threw it over them all and cooed and wished them well while a food photographer from Alex’s work snapped photographs of the couple dancing in the petals. They’d threaded pagan-looking macramé in the exposed brickwork of the pub’s upper floor and lined the bar with free booze, and waiters circled with vegan tartare and impossibly tiny cakes on gold trays that were too vulgar to not be ironic, and Áine kept looking for the girl who had spilled their drinks that one time but couldn’t find her. Maybe if she had she wouldn’t recognize her anyway, even if she was there.

Someone working there, though, that girl or someone else, had been tasked with setting up long low tables for all the guests and they sat in two lines, like schoolchildren, enjoying speeches from Alex’s friend from college (a gargantuan blond who made Alex look and sound and act positively European in comparison to his own Americana, and kept making jokes about how much British people drank) and Laura’s sister (who cried and at one point held up a photograph of the two of them as little girls with a dead grandparent, who, she said, would have been so proud of her today), and Alex himself (a very short, sweet speech about how he had found and defined the concept of ‘home’ through his relationship with Laura, and how he couldn’t wait for their next adventure, for a house filled with the sound of children’s laughter, you get the point, that kind of thing).

Laura herself had not spoken, something that annoyed Áine, in a remote way. She sat there and beamed throughout the proceedings, looking somehow both cherubic and regal in a plain silk gown of brilliant white with matching fur stole. It was bad luck to speak at your own wedding if you’re the bride. Áine learned that when she complained about it to her mother on the phone after the fact. ‘Oh,’ she’d said. ‘Doesn’t that feel a bit sad, though? Not even getting to speak, after paying all that money?’ And her mother had laughed and said that it wasn’t a day about money, that that wasn’t what it was about, but Áine wasn’t so sure.

It was a beautiful day, basically. Made more beautiful by the fact she’d been so scared of it before it had happened. Terror and anxiety had built up inside her for weeks and tied itself into a knot in her stomach so visceral she thought maybe it was a tumour and maybe she was dying, really dying, maybe she would die and not have to go after all, by virtue of her being dead, but then the day came and Áine put on the dress Laura had chosen and picked up the flowers Laura had chosen and stood next to her on the altar and looked into the crowd and saw him and realized that it wasn’t a tumour and it wasn’t so bad after all and she would live, they would both live, it was fine. It wasn’t pain any more. A nurse would have called it discomfort. Elliott had smiled at her from the pew, looking golden even by the grey light of December churches. He was sitting next to two of Laura’s elderly relatives, one on either side, so she knew he had come alone. Maybe that helped the pain a little bit. It would have been less comfortable if he was with someone, she thought later. But even the thought of that pain seemed remote and vaguely unthreatening, a happy-ever-after she was watching through a pane of plexiglass. She returned the smile. He looked good. He looked good in a suit. She thought about all the time she’d spent hating his suits and ties and his long, ominous coat, a coat he didn’t appear to have brought with him today despite the chill in the air, and she suddenly wanted to laugh.

‘It suits you,’ she told him instead, later.

They were standing outside the pub, in one of the pockets of smokers loitering after Laura and Alex’s first dance (to an Ed Sheeran song that Áine had literally never heard Laura say she liked before, not once, not in her life). Elliott was standing very close to her and she lit the end of his cigarette with her lighter and neither of them chose to acknowledge the fact they were smoking. He laughed then and exhaled up into the sky so the fumes wouldn’t go in her face. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Weddings?’

‘Sure, why not.’

‘Now she decides this,’ he said, like they were on a TV show and he was doing a bit, a little aside to the audience, maybe sarcastically rolling his eyes at how impossible it all was. Áine did laugh then.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘I forgive you.’

The comment settled in the air like smoke, tendrils of its meaning dissipating before either of them could grab hold. Áine opened her mouth and closed it again. One of the groomsmen stumbled out of a side door and pushed in between them suddenly and vomited on to the pavement.

‘Maybe the NFL player was right about our alcoholism,’ Elliott said, and she laughed again, unselfconsciously, snorting a little.

They moved out of the way of the sick and prone groomsman and wandered a little, perhaps without realizing. Conversation flowed easily between them now, helped by the fact they were walking, both facing ahead. He was a little drunk, Áine thought, a good amount of drunk. He told her he was doing that thing where you owned a new-build flat in a high-rise building in the middle of nowhere but you didn’t really own it. Shared ownership. You had to pick from the flats they gave you. Áine congratulated him. They were being kind to each other and it was more natural than she expected. Not forced. She felt as though she had lost an old friend and then found him again, that someone else had briefly been acting as a stand-in in his place, a less funny, more monotonous, weirder stand-in for him, a doppelgänger that nobody would believe wasn’t the real Elliott despite how much she tried to tell them otherwise. Neither of them talked about the past but it hung between them and made the conversation sparkier, in a way. They were both dancing around talking about it, daring the other person to do it first, hoping they wouldn’t. Áine thought if he tried to kiss her she would let him, but at the same time she hoped he wouldn’t try. It might break the spell.

She hadn’t realized they were making their way towards the old flat until they were standing in front of the place that used to be their home, or pretended to be their home for a while. It took her by surprise. In the middle of a sentence, something dull and bitchy she was saying about Alex’s tie, he stopped walking and turned and Áine followed his eyeline and said, ‘Oh,’ like someone had just then pressed into the small of her back, temporarily winding her.

‘Yeah,’ said Elliott, his voice low and sombre and reverent, as though they were back in the church.

The overflowing, vile-smelling bins were gone. Upstairs, you could still make out the threadbare red velvet curtains in the gloom, but only just. A narrow walkway snaked to the front door, making way for builders, she presumed. Everything else was covered in one of the property developer facades that littered streets across the city. There was a huge name across the top of the facade – MCGUIGANS, and then a phone number – and at the bottom there was an architectural rendering of what would live here when the crumbling red-brick was gone. It would be split into six modern apartments, said a little A4 explanation next to the rendering, as though it was a piece of modern art in a gallery that needed to be broken down for idiotic viewers. It seemed impossible to Áine that they would manage to fit six modern, open-plan apartments in this space. She thought of how cramped it had been with Elliott.

‘Do you think?’ he said, and she started. The cigarette butt was burning between her fingers. She hadn’t realized that she’d said the last part out loud. ‘I didn’t think it was that cramped, actually.’

‘It felt cramped,’ she repeated, dropping the cigarette and stubbing it out under an uncomfortable heel. Elliott frowned and said nothing.

She would have preferred it if the building had been totally destroyed when they saw it. That’s what she thought, later, when she thought about it, wondering if that really happened. She would have preferred if it was rubble and crushed scraps of brick and fabric and dust and asbestos. It would have felt more poetic, in a way. The fact that they’d gutted it and would repurpose it made her feel cheated of a proper ending to the thing. The soul of the house might have been gone but who was to say whether its shell wouldn’t retain the same cosmic negative energy as before, spewing it on to more and more people in their hutch-like open-plan apartments? Who was to say they wouldn’t be plagued by the same problems, that moisture and cold wouldn’t seep from the exterior brickwork into the walls and on to them and into their lungs? She wanted it to be rubble, again. She wanted the certainty that nobody else would ever live here, to know that the bad thing was gone forever if the place was in the ground, and it wasn’t them, it was never them. Someone would have pulled out all the darkness in that cellar and made it into a basement flat, she thought. Or they would have tried to pull it out. She saw the door now, warped and damp, just visible between the opaque plastic sheets of the property developer’s facade, and shivered. Above them, one of the curtains fluttered in the wintry chill, which was impossible because the windows were shut fast. They were, of course, she could admit, also single-glazed.

‘Where do you think they went?’

Elliott didn’t answer. He had hoisted himself up on the crumbling garden wall in front of the white scaffolding facade, and was straining to look over into the house itself. From where Áine was standing, it didn’t look like they had begun building yet. That seemed strange, she thought, when there was so much money to be made. Why not build right away? It had been a year, hadn’t it, since they’d left? A year since nobody moved in after them, and she thought that was strange, but then again maybe that was to do with money as well. Maybe the developers had run out of money, something as simple as that. She would look them up later on the internet, she thought, that was sensible. Maybe she would do. Maybe not. She chewed on the inside of her lip and tasted blood.

‘Why would they make such a fuss out of kicking them out if they weren’t even going to do anything with it? Why would they bother sending the letter? Do you think they kicked them out right after us? Do you ever wonder where they went? Do you think they had the money to stay here? Do you think they always lived here?’

Elliott’s legs were swinging and he grunted under the strain of holding himself up over the sign and he dropped on to the pavement again, holding his dead fag end between his teeth. Áine thought again about kissing him but didn’t.

‘What?’ he said blankly. ‘Why do you keep saying “them”?’

‘The people from upstairs.’

‘The woman?’

‘The woman and the man.’

‘What man?’

Áine frowned. How could he not remember crashing into the man on the doorstep the night he came home drunk, that night after Laura and Alex’s own awful dinner party? How could he not remember the man watching over, judging them? How could he not remember Áine slamming on the windows? How could he not remember how Áine felt the neighbours had cursed them, bewitched them, sabotaged them? Hadn’t he heard the voices rumbling and screeching through the walls? Could the couple upstairs, the wretched mirror to their own relationship, really have existed so little in his mind that he hadn’t even noticed how many people were actually living there? Elliott was looking at her strangely; the way he’d looked at her when they lived together, towards the end. She looked again at the empty house and back at him. His brows were knitted. She forced herself to smile. It was cold. It hurt her face.

She thought about Jack S’s emails to Elliott, how he’d said that as far as he knew, only a woman lived upstairs. How there had never been any reported problems before. Áine thought of the post that came through their shared front door, how there was never anything addressed to a man that wasn’t Elliott. She took one step back involuntarily.

She felt suddenly cold and a little nauseous, although she had made a promise to herself – and kept it – not to have more than two glasses of champagne. Her Prescription made the alcohol go to her head, something she had only noticed when she began to actually take the pills. As she stepped away from the scaffolding, she felt slightly better. She swallowed and her mouth was dry. Next to her, Elliott swayed. Although Áine was freezing, he looked slightly sweaty. He was more drunk than she’d first thought, maybe. He was searching around in the pocket of his suit jacket to light the dregs of the cigarette, patting at himself absently. Áine was still holding her lighter and she lit it for him. Muscle memory. He inhaled and then realized there was nothing left in the cigarette and stubbed it out and threw it over the scaffolding. For a second they both watched and waited, as though expecting the embers would somehow suddenly ignite and burn the whole place down and they’d stand here watching it crumble. That didn’t happen, obviously. There was only the bones of a building and the quiet of a street like any other street.

‘Was the door always that colour?’

Áine forced herself to look back towards the flat. The door was the same mottled, sludgy green it had always been, as ugly now as it had been the first time she saw it. She didn’t want to think back to the first time she’d seen it, both because it made her uneasy and because it made her sad to think about herself before, herself when she was with Elliott. She looked at the door until her eyes blurred. The single-glazed glass in the middle rattled slightly. There was no wind.

‘I think so.’

‘Oh.’

‘I really loved you, you know.’

‘Yes. I know. I loved you too.’

They didn’t go home together. Áine didn’t go to the flat Elliott owned but didn’t and he didn’t go to the box she didn’t love but didn’t hate or fear either. It felt like there was a time for them to do that and then the time had passed. She still had the box of ‘good morning’ messages in the shoebox under her new bed. She had thought about telling him this, but there was no good moment to bring it up, and then she was already in the taxi alone and the time had passed. You couldn’t recreate a moment, couldn’t go backwards or you’d drive yourself insane trying. You had to keep moving forward, like a shark. Or maybe not moving forward, but growing. You couldn’t lie in the dirt forever or you’d get infected and haunted and possessed. Elliott had taught her that. He’d been good for her, she thought. He was a good person. Not everything needed to be something.

And she took the pills now, every day, when her alarm went off, and she ate her vegetables and drank from a water bottle so large she had to lift it with two hands and read the markings on the side which told her how much she should consume by a certain hour in the day. She went to the gym too, not often, but she still went. She ran on the treadmill and looked at the wall. She found a new job doing the same thing as the old one and found the work as boring but the money was better and the people nicer. Life ticked along and the ticking along of it bothered her somewhat, but not enough to upend the ticking. She felt neither lows nor highs as extremes any more. She didn’t like how she felt about the new regime, but the dislike was an annoyance, not a misery. She had been always a little addicted to suffering, was how her mother had phrased it, but Áine wasn’t sure if that was entirely accurate. Suffering did feel like adrenaline sometimes. It did feel like endorphins, like dopamine. But it also felt like fear. There was something to be said for suffering but there was a time and a place for it too, and Áine suspected she had long outgrown the time and the place, and now she needed her brain chemistry to repair itself.

Not everything could be boiled down to chemistry, though. Even her mother, with her knowledge of medicine and suffering and addiction, even she knew that. There was a spirituality to suffering and a spirituality to fear and a spirituality to love. It didn’t necessarily need to be god-like. Anything could be God for a while, after all. God could be a friendship or a boy or a house or money or time. And all those things could be the devil too. If you believed in that kind of thing.

One day, Áine thought, she might need the spiritual suffering of real life again. But for now she was content with the lanolin world she’d encased herself in. Her phone was a brick, the ones they gave to prisoners after long stretches inside or elderly people with dementia or little children who walked home alone from school, in case of emergencies. It didn’t have Instagram or WhatsApp capabilities. Twice a week she rose early and took a labyrinthian connection of trains to an indiscriminate office where she made small talk in the queue for coffee. In her new job nobody knew Áine before she was this Áine. They didn’t know Elliott either. They didn’t know about her break-up or her relationship history or where she used to live. They knew next to nothing about her. She liked it that way. Without a history she could be whoever she wanted to be. She could be nobody too, if that’s what she wanted.

In the evenings she did deep-breathing exercises, counting in her head in and out until there was no more room to question whether this activity was a stupid one or not. If there was an itch, she didn’t scratch it. She kept her nails short and clean. She trimmed her split ends. She taught her father how to use FaceTime and she spoke to her parents several times a week on an ancient iPad. She went home for birthdays and christenings and Christmases, and she saved enough money to pay for flights and kept the trips short enough to avoid tension and the psychological terror of being at home when it wasn’t home any more, of standing at her mother’s kitchen sink and being taller and adult and disconnected and connected to the place at the same time. She spoke to men in bars and slept with men in their anonymous bedrooms or in hers. She bought cheap art in frames and put the frames on the wall with adhesive that promised to remove itself without markings in twelve months’ time or twenty-four months’ time or thirty-six months’ time. She was used to the idea of splitting up her life into these intervals. She knew it was not sustainable. She knew she was putting off something inevitable. Sometimes it pressed in on her, but not as violently as before. She knew what people thought of her and sometimes it was unpleasant but it was not overwhelming in the way it had been. She knew she was isolating herself so the thing could not get to her, but that just meant the thing could not get to her, and so it was worth it. She thought everyone was basically doing the same thing in different ways, and the thought was dull and comforting. She saved some of her money and spent most of her money. She woke up in the morning and made her way through the day as though it was the first day of many and not potentially the last. In the place she lived there were no doors she was too afraid to open.

Acknowledgements

I am neither big nor clever enough to have brought this book to life alone. I am forever thankful to the team at Fig Tree; to Ella Harold and Helen Garnons-Williams for all their understanding, support and expertise in stewarding my manuscript to publication. I’m also incredibly grateful to my agent, Kat Aitken, who is perhaps as knowledgeable as she is ineffably chic. Most of all I am indebted to my friends for their support from the earliest stages of this process, and for encouraging me to take this book and my own writing seriously at a time when I did neither of those things. I am especially thankful for I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There’s first ever readers, Josh and Bella, both of whom I love very much, and to Nuala for keeping me (relatively) sane and (relatively) without notions about myself for the past twenty years.

And to Jacob, thank you for coming into my life and making it so much better.

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

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First published by Fig Tree in 2025

Copyright © Róisín Lanigan, 2025

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Cover illustration © Unpis Wa

ISBN: 978-0-241-66855-9

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