Eyrie

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So.

Here was this stain on the carpet, a wet patch big as a coffee table. He had no idea what it was or how it got there. But the sight of it put the wind right up him.

Until now Thursday hadn’t seemed quite so threatening.

It was a simple enough thing, waking late and at liberty to the peals of the town hall clock below. Eight, nine, maybe ten in the a.m. — Keely lacked the will to count. All that stern, Calvinist tolling gave him the yips. Even closed, his eyes felt wine-sapped. He hung on a while delaying the inevitable, wondering just how much grief lay in wait. The tiny flat was hot already. Thick and heady with the fags and showers and fry-ups and dish-suds of others. The smells of his good neighbours. Which is to say the stench of strangers, for his fellow tower-dwellers were alien to him in the most satisfying way imaginable, anonymous and reassuringly disconnected, mere thuds and throat-clearings behind bare brick walls, laugh tracks and pongs he needn’t put a face to. Least of all — and strangest of any — the madwoman next door. In all these months he’d never seen her. All he knew was that she invested a good portion of each day fending off the wiles of Satan. Which was honest work, granted, but hard on the nerves. Especially his. For the moment she was mercifully silent, asleep or maybe holding Beelzebub to a nil-all draw between breakfast and lunch, and God bless her for that. Also for keeping it down while the poisonous afterglow of all that Barossa shiraz had its wicked way with him.

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