Into the Darkest Corner Read Free

smiling and laughing at people with my new best friend, dancing in that red dress until I caught the eye of someone, anyone, and best of all finding some dark corner of the club and being fucked against a wall.

Thursday 1 November 2007
    It took me a long, long time to get out of the flat this morning. It wasn’t the cold, although the heating in the flat seems to take an age to have any effect. Nor was it the dark. I’m up every day before five; it’s been dark at that time since September.
    Getting up isn’t my problem, getting out of the house is. Once I’m showered and dressed, have had something to eat, I start the process of checking that the flat is secure before I go to work. It’s like a reverse of the process I go through in the evening, but worse somehow, because I know that time is against me. I can spend all night checking if I want to, but I know I have to get to work, so in the mornings I can only do it so many times. I have to leave the curtains in the lounge and in the dining room, by the balcony, open to exactly the right width every day or I can’t come back in the flat again. There are sixteen panes in each of the patio doors; the curtains have to be open so that I can see just eight panes of each door if I look up to the flat from the path at the back of the house. If I can see a sliver of the dining room through the other panes, or if the curtains aren’t hanging straight, then I’ll have to go back up to the flat and start again.
    I’ve gotten quite good at getting this right, but it still takes a long time. The more thorough I am, the less likely I’ll find myself on the path behind the house cursing my carelessness and checking my watch.
    The door is particularly bad. At least in the last place, that poky basement in Kilburn, I had my own front door. Here I have to check and recheck the flat door properly six or twelve times, and then the communal front door as well.
    The flat in Kilburn did have a front door but nothing at all at the back, no back door, no windows. It was like living in a cave. I didn’t have an escape route, which meant that I never felt really safe in there. Here, things are much better: I have French doors that lead onto a small balcony. Just below that is the roof of the shed that is shared with the other flats, although I don’t know if anyone else uses it. I can get out of the French doors, jump down to the shed roof, and from there down onto the grass. Through the yard and out the gate into the alleyway at the back. I can do it in less than half a minute.
    Sometimes I have to go back and check the flat door again. If one of the other tenants has left the front door unlocked again I definitely have to check the flat door. Anyone could have been in.
    This morning, for example, was one of the worst.
    Not only was the front door unlocked, it was actually slightly ajar. As I reached for it, a man in a suit pushed it open toward me, which made me jump. Behind him, another man, younger, tall, wearing jeans and a hooded top. Dark hair cropped close to his head, unshaven, tired green eyes. He gave me a smile, and mouthed “Sorry,” which helped.
    Suits still freak me out. I tried not to look at the suit at all, but I heard it say as it went up the stairs, “. . . this one’s only just become available, you’ll have to move fast if you want it.”
    A rental agent, then.
    The Chinese students who’d been on the top floor must have finally decided to move on. They weren’t students anymore, they graduated in the summer—the party they’d had had gone on all night, while I lay in my bed underneath listening to the sound of feet marching up and down the stairs. The front door had been unlocked all night. I’d barricaded myself in by pushing the dining table against the flat door, but the noise had kept me awake and anxious.
    I watched the second man following the suit up the stairs.
    To my horror the man in jeans turned halfway up the first flight and gave me another