Mothtown by Caroline Hardaker

Author:Caroline Hardaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781915202772
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

10.

Outside the block of flats, a row of black skips overflowed with plastic packets and ripped up cardboard. By a fence, someone had abandoned a cream armchair with little black circles burnt into the arms. It had been there a long time.

Sam jabbed on the lift button a few times with his knuckle. The button made a little rattling noise when he pressed it, as if it wasn’t connected to anything.

“Broken,” he muttered under his breath, then he led me through a side-door and up six flights of stairs to a landing with glass doors in the style of an old porch. The only light was from a fading yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling, and the walls were lined with a carpet I could hardly resist digging my nails into to hear the sound it made.

Sam led me to his front door, number 662. It looked more like a door to a shed or garage than a door to a flat. He fussed with his keys, jamming the wrong one in so many times that I wondered if they’d finally kicked him out after all the threats. I hoped not. I didn’t want to be on my own. Eventually he found the magic combination and stumbled inside, leaving the door ajar. I stood in the doorway for a minute, acclimatising to the smoke and musk before heading inside.

All along the hallway floor were empty plastic bags, tipped-over glass bottles, and little crumples of paper. Two empty cigarette packets, still half-wrapped in film, were wedged in a pair of dirty trainers. The walls had probably been white at some point, but now they were streaked with dirt, as if someone with oily fingers had spread his arms and dragged his hands along each wall. The air smelled like too many people, as if lots of bodies had been too close to each other for too long. Body on body on body. Skin and hair. There was something else, too, this time, a smell I knew from late trips home on the bus. It came from the back seats, where the floor was gritty and the poles made your hands black.

My mouth started to fill up with saliva, so I swallowed it down. This was a place where people never came out the same. But I knew that. I could just tell.

I followed Sam into a small kitchen-living room littered with more plastic wrappers, bottles, and takeaway cartons. But unlike the hallway, there was something more artful about it here. There was a window at the far side of the room with a blind pulled almost down to the windowsill. Along the shelf were twenty or so glass bottles, all crowded together, some perched right on the edge. The stormy light shone through them like stained glass, and someone had even dropped some cut grasses and flowers in one of them. It must have been a long time ago though, because the stalks were sticks, the blooms dried up like used tissue.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.