The Room

Liv caught the guesthouse bell with her sleeve. As she pulled away, it rang again. A woman rose from behind the counter, holding a roll of bin bags.

‘Once is enough,’ she said. ‘It won't make me any quicker.’

‘That was my coat.’

The woman looked at the wet sleeve, then at the bell. ‘Mine does that too. Here, give it to me.’

Liv put down her holdall and took off her coat. Outside, under the little awning, she'd been searching for her booking confirmation while water dripped from the gutter straight onto her left hand. Now the message came up at once. The woman barely glanced at the screen.

‘Liv. Room seven. I'm Els.’

She hung the coat on a hook behind the door. A footprint on the tiled floor was almost dry. Beside a wicker basket of leaflets lay a loose screw, which Liv had first taken for an earring.

‘Is there somewhere I can leave my bike?’

‘Round the back. Not in front of the grey door. That needs to open.’

Liv looked through the narrow window beside the entrance. Her bike leaned against the wall, two bags hanging from its handlebars. The wind tugged at a card listing breakfast prices, but the clothes peg held. She'd walked the last stretch from the station. With the holdall across her shoulder and the laptop in her other hand, even meeting another cyclist on the empty cycle path would have been more than she could manage.

Els took a key from a row of hooks. ‘Put your things upstairs first. Then I'll show you the back door.’

The stairs smelled of fried onions. Liv lifted her holdall over a lip sticking out from the second step. At the end of the landing, two doors faced each other: seven on one, eight on the other. Els pushed open seven and stayed outside while Liv went in.

There was a bed, a desk and a wardrobe with a mirror that only came up to her shoulders. The window overlooked the street. Beyond the low houses opposite, the wind held a flag so taut she couldn't make out its design.

‘The desk's clear,’ said Els. ‘I've taken the vase away.’

‘That's good.’

‘Not that you need to be frightened of a vase. But you said you were coming to work.’

Liv put down the laptop. Two usable sockets, a chair without arms. She opened the drawer. A tourist map, three elastic bands and nothing else. It would do. At home, her worktable and windowsill had disappeared under plastic sheeting. The roofers would be finished on Tuesday, weather permitting. They'd said that on Friday too.

‘How quiet is it here in the evenings?’

‘Usually very. The downpipe rattles when there's a westerly. That's on the street side.’ Els pointed towards the window. ‘Someone came to look at it. He couldn't hear anything.’

Outside, metal tapped intermittently.

‘He picked a good day,’ said Liv.

‘For him.’

Els showed her how to turn on the radiator. Not all the way round, or the knob came off. Breakfast started at seven, though the man downstairs would have his earlier. Els was awake anyway. She could leave coffee for Liv if she wanted to come down later.

‘Eight will be fine.’

‘I'll put that down. And if you need bread tonight, the shop on the corner shuts at six. We don't do evening meals.’

Downstairs, Els took her to the back door. Getting the bike through meant a narrow passage past a cupboard, then out into a paved courtyard. A wheelie bin stood with its lid towards the wall. Beside it there was just enough room for her handlebars. Els moved an empty flowerpot.

‘Here will do. If you lock it to anything, don't use the downpipe. Your bike's stronger than that is.’

A window above the courtyard stood open. A thin curtain had blown out and caught on the edge. Els looked up, but someone called from the hall. She raised a hand and went inside before Liv could ask whether she should shut the window.

Once she'd parked the bike, Liv went for bread and a tub of salad. The woman ahead of her in the shop was paying for six loose lemons. She wanted four, the cashier had counted five, and the net had contained six. It took long enough for Liv to remember her fridge at home, which she hadn't emptied in the rush. She messaged the roofer to ask whether Tuesday was still possible and put away her phone.

In the breakfast room, Els was laying a table for one. Liv stopped in the doorway with her shopping bag.

‘Can I eat here?’

‘If you put your plate in the kitchen afterwards. I'm going out for a bit.’

‘You haven't got many guests.’

‘Two, counting you. Six of the eight rooms are empty this week.’

Els laid a knife beside the plate. A narrow scratch crossed her hand, edged with something dry and white.

‘Paint,’ she said, catching Liv's glance. ‘Nothing infectious.’

Liv laughed. She hadn't meant to stare. Els asked whether she needed anything else, but didn't quite wait for the answer; her phone was vibrating on the counter. Liv ate her bread by the window. Something scraped behind a downstairs door. Later, a pair of brown shoes stood outside it, their toes neatly aligned.

At seven, Liv sat at the desk upstairs. Her portable drive was to the right of the laptop, its cable clear of the table edge. At home she'd copied the complete digital transfers of twelve old interview tapes. The cassettes themselves had stayed with the collection. She wouldn't have to coax some machine into life here that looked pre-war and had apparently been working perfectly last month.

The fishermen on the tapes talked about the old harbour, when the channel was still navigable and the new quay hadn't been built. Her commission covered twelve tapes, though sometimes several people talked over one another. Someone by a door kept adding to one man's account. Another began by asking whether he could call the interviewer by his first name, then hardly stopped using it.

Liv opened tape two. Willem Kooij was describing the morning he'd seen a boat run aground in the mud. He began to identify a place, a chair scraped across the floor, and he went on with his sentence. Liv had marked the passage on Friday. The hiss beneath his voice was fairly steady; the chair was much louder.

She lowered the volume and listened to the whole question. The interviewer wanted to know whether the harbour had already become unusable. Willem said no. Then there was a brief silence and something that sounded like yes, but belonged with the words that followed. Taking only the section after the chair would turn it into a much firmer answer to a different question.

She moved the start of the listening copy back. The question stayed. She left the original transfer untouched. Anouk, her client, had asked for short extracts that made sense without fifteen minutes of explanation. Short could still be longer than thirty seconds.

A door closed downstairs. Liv looked up. She had one earcup pushed back, so she wasn't entirely cut off from the house. Willem waited on the screen, halfway through a word. She let him finish, added her chosen start and end points to her notes, and exported a trial version.

The passage no longer smelled of onions. Going down for water, she found a bowl of mandarins on the counter. Els was back, still in her coat, trying to fit a large envelope into a pocket in a folder that was too small for it.

‘Would you like one?’

‘Please.’

Liv took a mandarin. Els laid the envelope on top of the folder.

‘Got anything done?’

‘Yes. Nearly three minutes finished.’

Els looked at the clock. ‘In two hours?’

‘They weren't all difficult minutes.’

‘That's something.’

Liv peeled the mandarin into her palm. A piece of peel flicked onto the counter; she picked it up. Els said the man downstairs was a travelling salesman and wanted breakfast at half six. He'd offered to leave without coffee if it was too much trouble.

‘But then I'd only lie there wondering why I couldn't make him a coffee.’

‘You'd rather lose a quarter of an hour's sleep.’

‘You say that. I'd rather sleep longer, and I make the coffee anyway.’

Upstairs, Liv put her phone beside the laptop. The roofer had said the work would be finished on Tuesday. No qualifications. She read the message again, then opened the bill that had been waiting since Thursday. There were more labour hours on it than in the quote. She didn't yet know which part of the work had needed them. She closed the window. Payment for the interviews would cover some of it. First she had to finish the interviews.

She worked until she was hungry, only then remembering the other half of her bread downstairs. She fetched it, put her toothbrush in a glass and slid the bag under the desk. Her pillow lay halfway down the gap beside the wall. The bed stood a hand's breadth away from it. She pushed it back, but the pillow caught behind the edge.

When she pulled the head of the bed forwards again, she saw the grille.

It was round and brass, smaller than a beer mat. Layers of paint had joined its edge to the wallpaper. Liv bent down. Cold air came through, smelling of damp coats. She thought of the curtain above the courtyard. Perhaps an old ventilation shaft ran between the rooms. She straightened her pillow and sat down again.

Willem had given way to the hiss at the end of the recording. Liv closed the session and checked her chosen extract once more in the list. She didn't need to hear it again now. Tomorrow she could ring Anouk about its length.

At 00:17 she took off her headphones.

Three taps came from the wall. They weren't the loose tapping of the downpipe outside. They sounded directly behind her.

Then a woman said, ‘Leave the light on a little longer.’

Liv turned towards the door. The gap beneath it was dark. Nothing moved past. The voice had sounded close, as though someone had their mouth against the other side of the wallpaper. She thought of the man downstairs, a phone on speaker, the sounds that travelled up through her radiator at home.

She bent towards the brass.

‘You've got the wrong room.’

A short breath. Then nothing.

Liv stood with her hand on the headboard. She looked at the other bedside lamp, which was off, and felt foolish for switching it on anyway. Below the grille was a narrow slide. It wouldn't move until she pushed harder. The paint crackled; the metal gave a little. Behind the holes, a smooth tube ran steeply downwards, not a broad shaft.

She took her phone and recorded a minute. Rain on the window. The quiet hum of the laptop. In the last few seconds, her thumb brushed the case. The woman said nothing else.

Liv draped a towel over the grille. She moved the bed to hold the fabric in place, closed her laptop and got under the duvet. She left the bedside lamp on. The main switch was by the door, and she was already lying down again. She turned away from the wall and felt with her foot for the cold end of the bed.