The Flute-Player [antikvár]

The light switch did not work. The grumbling old janitor had had to be woken up to turn on the water and the heating; she dare not disturb him again. 11 was still cold; she kept her coat on. She looked around the bleak room, filling with dusk, and couid not imagine it ever seeming like home. Yet she was glad of shelter, glad to be alive. She was hungry, and ate one of the apples she had bought at the stall, and a piece of bread. There was a tune going round her head and she was annoyed be-cause she could not place it. The girl lay in bed listening to the quarrel in the room next to hers. The argument of the man and the woman got louder, she could hear occasional scuffles. It was hard to teli whether the creaking of their bed was lovemaking or murder. Was that the cry of a woman s orgasm or a knife in the breast? She lay wide-eyed, imagining. The baby had been crying for hours, with neither of them bothering to comfort the poor lamb. She thought of ringing the police; but in these times there was no one to bother himself with such trivialities as a baby crying for hours, cold or hungry or wet. The noises settled, and she tried to sleep. She started to pray, but the maddening tune came back, interrupting her prayer and carrying her into sleep. She was jolted awake by a man s scream, so near it might have been the same pillow. The girfs heart pounded. The baby started howling, she heard a door slam and rapid feet pass with the crying baby and hurry with it downstairs. There was silence for a time, and she began to wonder if she had dreamt it. Then she heard an engine, a siren. It stopped outside. Heavy feet ran up the stairs. A short while later, through a window so grimy it hardly separated night from dawn, she saw the ambulance men manoeuvring a stretcher into the ambulance. A week later there was a knock on her door. She opened it to a bearded young man. He was her next-door neighbour, he said, and wondered if she had seen or heard anything of his wife and child. She invited him in. He looked ill, and she made him rest on the sofa