“I don’t see why not,” Ruth muttered grimly. “It wouldn’t be the first worthless thing I’ve thrown away.”
Mum was always telling her to be more observant, but Ruth’s senses and mind didn’t connect like that. When she wandered out of the stairwell toward her flat, she was too deep in thought to look around, or listen, or anything like that.
So she didn’t notice the courier on her doorstep until she’d almost walked right into him.
Ruth realised, with a sinking heart, that it was far too late to turn and run. After jerking out of her way, the poor man offered her a customer service smile.
“Ruth Ka… I’m sorry.” He winced apologetically. “I’m not sure how to pronounce this.”
“Kabbah,” she said, pulling out her keys. “I was hoping I’d miss you.”
The man blinked uncertainly.
“I even subjected myself to human company. What a waste. Best laid plans, and all that.” She opened the front door and turned to look at him. “What is it? Do you know?”
“Um…” He looked down at the slim package in his hand. “I don’t, I’m afraid. But if you’d just sign for it—”
“Must I?” Ruth asked. She’d never asked that before. It had never occurred to her that she might refuse. But the morning’s events, and Hannah’s reaction, had her trapped in the eye of a rage-guilt-fear hurricane, and she was suddenly and completely sick of this shit.
“You don’t want the package?” the man asked uneasily. “I suppose you could, um, return to sender.”
Ruth stared. “Are you serious?”
The man shifted his weight from foot to foot. He was uncomfortable. She could see the signs. “Yes.”
“I thought that was just a song. I thought it was some old-fashioned, American thing…”
“You can’t do it with the Royal Mail,” he said, “but we at Diamond Services—”
“You don’t need to give me the spiel,” she interrupted. “I don’t send things to people.”
The man’s face fell.
“Can I tip you?” she asked, because she was suddenly incredibly fond of this middle-aged, lanky stranger. “I have, um…” She fumbled through her pockets and found nothing but Parma Violets. “Hang on.” Without waiting for his response, Ruth stepped inside and shut the door.
Then she thought that shutting the door might send the wrong message and opened it again. Then she thought that might send the wrong message, and wondered if she ought to invite him in.
That would probably be weird.
Forgetting about the door, she hurried off to the shoe box in a drawer in her bedroom. She pulled out one of her prized fifty-pound notes—she collected fifty-pound notes—and rushed back to the door, fighting the odd worry that the man might have left. Of course, he wouldn’t have left. Why would he leave?
He hadn’t left.
She gave him the note and said, “Return to sender. Thank you.”
“I’m not really supposed to accept tips…”
“Oh,” she said, and held out her hand to take it back.
He stared at her for a moment. She realised he was doing the thing people did, where they protested, but didn’t truly mean it. She put her hand in her pocket and smiled. “Goodbye!”
“Ah… Bye?”
Ruth shut the door.
Good Lord, what an exhausting morning this had been. She tore off her hoodie and the T-shirt beneath, right there in the hall. The fabric had been slowly suffocating her for hours. She weaved through her stacks of comic books as she wandered back to her bedroom, peeling off more clothes as she went.
While she changed, she heard her neighbour, Aly, moving around through the thin connecting wall. At least, she assumed it was Aly—but those heavy footsteps weren’t the ones her neighbour usually made.
Perhaps Aly had a man. That didn’t bode well for Ruth. She’d almost certainly overhear them going at it.
4
Evan hadn’t planned to waste Saturday morning in bed, but somehow, that’s what had happened. After moving in last weekend and working like a dog all week, his typically efficient body had had enough.
The series of mysterious bangs and indecipherable voices coming from the outside corridor served a double purpose. First, they woke Evan up before midday—thank God. He had shit to do. And second, they reminded him that he still hadn’t met the—suddenly quite noisy—guy next door.
After a week of hearing loud, stamping footsteps at all hours of the night, and never meeting their owner in the corridor or stairwell, Evan had developed a mental image of his next-door neighbour. He imagined a curmudgeonly, older fellow who rarely left the house, referred to mobile phones and laptops as ‘new-fangled contraptions’,