I merited.
I looked for my belongings. I was still in my trousers and socks, but my shoes - or rather, not my shoes, merely the shoes I’d been wearing - had been put at the end of the bed along with my coat. My jumper and shirt were nowhere to be seen, nor was my satchel. I staggered from the bedroom into the blinding light of the living room next door, where Vera sat on a dust-covered sofa, eating prawn crackers from a plastic bag and watching TV. She didn’t hear me enter, and as I tried to think of something to say I watched a dozen faces that the audience seemed to think I ought to know, learning how to sing and dance operatic numbers on ice while judges, who again I was supposed to recognise, hurled abuse at the weeping celebrities.
When I spoke, I was as surprised as Vera. I said, “Thank you.”
She jumped, spilling prawn crackers across the sofa, then stood up, pretending it hadn’t happened and glaring as if she dared me to say a word. “Yeah, sure. Hi. You’re up, then.”
“Thank you,” I repeated.
“Gotcha. And you’re welcome, I think. You look sorta crap.” She’d been trying to find something nicer to say.
“Is there a bathroom?”
“Yeah. You need fingers like a safe-breaker to get the hot water to work, and there’s no soap, but there’s a bathroom.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I know. Thank you for that too.”
“Get on before I get all slushy. You want food?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Dr Seah said you were to drink at least two litres of water when you got up, to make up for the stuff you lost when you were attacked . . . Matthew?”
“Yes?”
“About being attacked. We should probably talk. Get cleaned up first. I’ll stick something in the microwave.”
Vera had told no lies about the bathroom. The tap was sensitive to the lightest touch; a breath was the difference between arctic death and fiery combustion. When the neighbour two doors down turned on their shower, the water pressure dropped to a sulky trickle; when they turned it off, it exploded in scalding steam.
I struggled to clean myself with my left hand while keeping both my right hand and most of the bandaging out of harm’s way. I dressed in suspiciously stained towels that smelt of fresh detergent and, poking my head round the door, said, “What happened to my clothes?”
“Disgusting,” Vera’s voice floated back. “A few more days and they’d have started talking. Men have no idea how hard it is to get blood out of clothes, and frankly, it’s not worth my time.”
“Say, no clothes?”
“I left some stuff under the counter. It’s too big for you, but so’s your shoes.”
It wasn’t yet the right time to explain about the shoes. I thanked her and rummaged around until I found the clothes she was talking about. In them I felt like an escapee from a children’s cartoon, all cuff and trailing trouser leg, but at least they were clean.
Food was reheated Chinese takeaway. It was a meal designed to cause stomach cramps. We had never tasted such divinity and, when we thought Vera wasn’t looking, ran our finger round the edge of the plate and licked sauce off our fingers. Vera was silent throughout the meal. She waited until a second after my plate had touched the table to say: “So. Attacked.”
I rolled my shoulder and felt the tightness of my stitches as the muscles stretched beneath my collarbone; I flexed my fingers and felt the taut hotness of that bright red cross carved into my skin, burning beneath the bandages. Not an unpleasant burning. Drugs and fire kept it interesting, alive, rather than the pure pain that dumbs all else.
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
She went straight in with the priorities. “Will your attacker come here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think they’re capable of coming here?”
“Maybe.”
“Do they know about your connection with me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Am I or any of my people at risk for helping you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“All right. What do you know?”
I thought about it long and hard. “Nothing,” I said finally. “Absolutely nothing.”
“I think I deserve more than that.”
“I swear - nothing. I don’t know who, I don’t know why, I don’t even know how. I know that a phone rang, I answered, and the next thing the sky was doing backflips. I know that some time after that, a pack of spectres came hunting and will probably not come looking for me again.”
“Why