‘I had no idea,’ she says.
‘When cottages like these were built, people didn’t need their lofts,’ he says. ‘They didn’t have enough stuff to worry about storage. The roof void is just an empty space at the top of the house that nobody bothered about. It’s only in the last few decades that people have started cutting access doors and building dividing walls.’
‘Anyone can get into my house,’ she says.
‘Come on,’ he tells her. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
* * *
‘Were you a boy scout?’ she asks, a half-hour later.
He has found several empty cans in her recycling basket and using a screwdriver from the tool kit in his car, punched a hole in each. They hang now, on string, from the loft door like a cut-price Christmas decoration.
‘Anyone tries to open that hatch tonight, the racket will wake you up in an instant and scare the crap out of them,’ he says. ‘You dial 999 and leave via your bedroom window, waiting in your car for the police to arrive. Tomorrow, I’ll put a heavy-duty bolt on that door and you need to get on the phone to some local builders. I doubt your insurance policy is valid without solid dividing walls on both sides. You also need to ask some hard questions about whatever survey was done when you bought the place.’
‘I can do that. The bolt I mean. You’ve done enough.’
‘When I’m gone, I want you to lock and bolt front and back doors and check all the window locks. Tomorrow, changing the locks would be a very good idea.’
‘You really think someone is coming into my house? When I’m out and when I’m asleep?’
He is saddened by the look of hope on her face. ‘No, Felicity, I don’t. I think you’re suffering temporary bouts of amnesia that have either a physical or a psychological cause. Whatever the cause is, though, we’ll find it and we’ll treat it. All this stuff’ – he gestures up at the swaying cans, ‘We’re just ruling out all other possibilities and making sure you can sleep at night.’
He says good night shortly afterwards and drives home, wondering if he’s done the right thing by drawing her attention to the communal loft. He may have fed her anxiety, put ideas into her head about intruders and made her condition worse.
30
Felicity
No sooner than Joe has driven away, Felicity goes back to the loft, letting the cans clatter against the wall as she lowers the hatch. Once inside, she ignores the cord that would turn on the light and turns away from the still-collapsed plyboard wall that Joe discovered. She has no interest in that. She has come for a better look at something else. Something she spotted earlier as she climbed up to join Joe. Something that has appeared, as if by magic, in her loft.
She is carrying a more powerful torch than the one Joe used, but for the moment she doesn’t switch it on. There is something about what she is doing that feels shameful, better suited to darkness, and so she crawls carefully along the boarded loft floor towards the opposite wall.
Only when her fingers touch the old curtains does she switch on the torch. She lets her hands rest on the fabric that she can see now is a deep maroon.
The trunk beneath is black, heavy-duty plastic. It has a military look about it, as though it is holding weapons, or explosives, or something that needs a solid casing. There are two locks, neither of which she could force open. The trunk is something she has never seen before, and had no idea was in her house.
She knows that this is impossible and yet the evidence is right before her eyes.
31
Joe
Joe goes back the next evening, as promised, with a drill and two heavy duty bolts.
‘How’ve you been today?’ he asks, as he follows her into the downstairs hall.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘The hanging tins were very reassuring.’
He isn’t sure he believes her, Felicity doesn’t look like someone who has slept well. In her own home, he has noticed, she is less relaxed than when she comes to his consulting room. In her own house, she starts at sounds that he can’t hear, and seems constantly on edge.
When the bolts are fixed to the loft hatch, the tin cans retired to the recycling bin, and Felicity has vacuumed the dust, she offers him a glass of wine and with a twinge of discomfort, because he knows it is probably unwise, he accepts. They sit at the island in her kitchen.
‘You mentioned a diary,’ he says. ‘Not the one you brought me last week. The other one.’
‘The one written by someone who hates me?’ she says. ‘It’s upstairs. Do you want to see it?’
He tells her that he does and she goes to find it. When she comes back, he notices that her hair is different. Loose before, it’s scraped back behind her head and tucked into a scrunchie.
‘It’s not pleasant,’ she says, when the fold of black leather is on the counter in front of him.
‘So you said. Can you read it to me?’ He pushes it back towards her.
‘Do I have to?’
‘It will help.’
He waits. She begins to read.
“‘Twenty-eighth of March. I can’t stand Felicity’s hair. I can’t stand the time she spends on it, washing, conditioning, combing, plaiting, weaving, twisting it this way and that. It’s only fucking hair.’”
Joe isn’t sure what he expected. Not this.
‘“I hate the greasy mat it makes in the shower drain, catching scum and soap and pubes and toenail clippings. I hate finding it on clothes and even food. Felicity’s hair is disgusting.”’
She glances up and meets his eyes. He motions for her to go on.
‘“One morning, I swear, she’ll wake up, lift her head off the pillow and – this is the good bit – her hair won’t come with her. She’ll leave it behind like sheared wool around a sheep.”’
Joe is familiar with how Felicity speaks. In the few hours they have spent together, he has absorbed many of the rhythms and inflexions that are peculiar to her. He’d thought that if he heard her read the diary aloud, he would know whether or not she was its author.
‘“No, better than that, I’ll have taken it all away, and she won’t have a clue anything’s wrong until she sees the scissors on the bedroom carpet. She’ll realise then, maybe feel a draft on her neck and she’ll run into the bathroom and – hello, skinhead!”’
Joe has never heard Felicity swear. Her vocabulary is more sophisticated than he is hearing now, but he isn’t sure.
‘You have absolutely no memory of writing this?’ he asks.
She shakes her head.
‘Is the handwriting yours?’
‘Hard to say.’ She meets his eyes and shrugs. ‘I’m – not ambidextrous exactly – but my left hand is quite agile. I can write with it if I have to. This is a bit like when I do that, but I can’t say for certain.’
Joe thinks about this for a second. Handwriting can be analysed. It will be possible to find out for sure if Felicity has written the hostile journal.
‘And there’s more?’ he asks.
‘You want me to read it?’