Chapter 8 （Nika）
Nika
The apartment door creaked open.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, one hand on the handle, and listened.
Silence. No television. No movement.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
The relief hit me so fast I had to put my hand on my chest. I exhaled slowly, let my shoulders drop from where they’d been sitting somewhere around my ears since the Tube, and stepped inside.
Shoes off. On the mat. Jacket on the hook. Muscle memory, same as always—except nothing else was the same as always and I was starting to feel that more clearly with every breath.
I rolled my suitcase down the hall and stopped at the kitchen doorway.
The counters were covered in empty Tupperware boxes—my labelled, portioned, colour-coded Tupperware boxes, pulled out of the freezer and emptied and left where they fell.
Cereal boxes. An open peanut butter jar with the knife still in it.
The sink was piled high with dishes that hadn’t even made a passing attempt at being rinsed.
My eyes dropped to the floor.
I wished, briefly and sincerely, for my old eyesight back. Ignorance had been a gift I hadn’t appreciated.
The living room was worse in a different way.
Empty cans. Bottles. Snack wrappers that hadn’t quite made it to the bin, distributed across the coffee table and the floor around it like the aftermath of a very sad one-man festival.
The throw I’d bought was bunched on the floor.
The cushions were somewhere they shouldn’t be.
Five days.
He’d done all of this in five days.
The bathroom wasn’t so bad. I’d steeled myself. I managed fine until I looked inside the toilet and then I had to close the lid and take a moment.
I walked to the bedroom.
There was a folded sheet of A4 on my pillow. Lined paper, biro. His handwriting.
We need to talk. I’ll be living at my mum’s for a few days.
Finley.
I read it twice.
Then I set it back down on the pillow and stood very still while my mind quietly, efficiently began to move ahead.
His name wasn’t on the lease. It had never been on the lease—that had always been mine, my name, my responsibility, my credit check. At the time I’d told myself it was just practical. Now it felt like the first sensible thing I’d ever accidentally done.
All I needed was bin bags. A conversation with the landlord. A locksmith.
I thought about the rent—his half, the portion I’d been supplementing and covering and rearranging my own finances around.
I ran the numbers in my head and found that it was tight but manageable.
More manageable than it had any right to be, actually, if I stopped spending money on someone else’s groceries and delivery fees and Chinese food I never got to eat hot.
And Andy.
I thought about Andy and his coffee order and three years of saying sure to all my managers when I meant ask someone else. I needed to have a conversation about my performance, my progression, my pay. An actual conversation, not the vague hopeful kind I’d been having with myself for years.
I could do that.
I looked around the bedroom. At the note. At the life I’d been living in this flat that had slowly, quietly stopped feeling like mine.
First things first.
I needed bin bags.
Lots of them.
??
??
??
“You’re a tester, Nika. What do you expect?”
Andy said it while sipping the coffee I’d made him. Didn’t even look up from his screen.
I kept my voice level.
“You know I do more than test. I compare data, identify patterns, compile reports that drive the early amendments. Without that work the client doesn’t get a system they can actually rely on at go-live.
That’s not testing. That’s quality assurance at a level that sits above my current grade and pay. ”
“That’s your job, Nika.”
He said it like I’d suggested something embarrassing. Like I’d asked for something unreasonable. Like three years of early mornings and late drinks runs and covering gaps that nobody else wanted to fill had been exactly what was advertised and I should be grateful for the opportunity.
“That’s. Your. Job,” Andy repeated.
I felt something shift behind my sternum. Slow and hot and very, very focused.
Slice his gut open. Navel to sternum. Let everything hang.
I blinked.
You’d clip a few ribs on the way up but I could make it work. I’d like to see how long they actually are. People always underestimate how much is in there.
My eyes dropped to Andy’s shirt. The stripe of it. The neat little knot of his tie. The soft spot just below it where the fabric pulled slightly when he breathed.
I was measuring the distance.
I stood up so fast my chair scraped back.
“Right,” I said, to no one in particular. “Okay.”
I turned and walked away at a pace that was almost but not quite normal, my heart hammering against my ribs, my hands very deliberately at my sides.
Part of me—a significant, sweating part—was genuinely terrified that if I stayed in that conversation one more second I would somehow locate a knife and follow the instructions to the letter.
I pushed through the kitchen door and stood between the fruit bowl and the cupboard.
What was happening to me?
The voice had been getting louder since Croatia. Since the hospital room, since the cackle in the dark, since we. I’d been filing it under concussion and stress and the general psychological fallout of binbagging a two-year relationship in an afternoon.
But concussion didn’t give you detailed working knowledge of where a man’s intestines started.
I grabbed a mug from the cupboard and set it on the little tray beneath the nozzle.
Stood up straight.
Looked at my own reflection in the dark window of the drinks machine.
What are you?
I didn’t have an answer.
I glanced down, pressed the button to fill my mug with hot water, and began to plan instead.