head of her, struggling up the stairs strugglingly was a mother and pushchair, laden with bags and a screaming kid. Homebound workers salmoned past without offering a hand, blinkered by visions of supper or respite.

The comatose staff of London Underground didn’t think of helping the mother. She wouldn’t be helping either. Ten years ago when she had moved to London, she would have. Imperceptibly but perceptibly the city toxified you. Parking across strangers’ driveways, not saying thank you when a door was held open for you, murder. Somehow it got you.

London informed you that you got nothing for a lifetime of decency; not a free glass of water. Not that behaving badly necessarily got you anywhere, but it was generally easier and more fun; and finally any career criminal from Albania or genocidist from Rwanda passing through London got the same medical treatment as you and better housing rights.

You didn’t want to become the sort of person who didn’t help an entoiled mother, but you became one. No one had helped her when she had needed it. And now her help muscles had withered away. Single mothers were especially annoying because of their dishonesty. Very few of them could hack it. They either leeched off friends and family, sucking in services and cash, or they botched it up, while maintaining how coping they were.

Outside, on the pavement, a Portuguese junkie was kneeling while a buxom exorcist wielding a Bible intoned with two backup entreaters and sprinkled him with holy water.

Sidestepping the adjuration she threaded her way through the clumps of beggars, drug dealers, thugs, and seething commuters that made up Brixton. She ran walking. To get home was all she wanted. The strength of the desire was almost alarming.

She had thought about getting out. She had been thinking about little else. And she hadn’t just thought about it. Job applications. She was convinced she had sent more job applications than any other human being. They had failed. She had written more. They had failed.

Then, while she would have been happy leaving London, her boyfriend couldn’t. Harun worked as a junior information officer at the Turkish Embassy, and just as he was coming to the end of his tour of duty, after three years, when she had been counting on escape, teaching English and getting a tan and a family, they had split up. She knew you couldn’t have everything. Harun farted a lot and always had to be infallible on international affairs, but had a sense of humor and was punctual. Now she was again at the mercy of London’s nightlife.

What was a night out in London? Pleading your way into a club, past an earpiece which had grown a moron. Once inside you had to fight to get served, and then your money went as if you were surrendering it to bandits. She had only managed to get the deposit on her flat because of her inheritance from her grandmother. Her grandmother hadn’t been well off, but she hadn’t been one for drinking, smoking, eating much, buying much, going to the cinema or indeed anywhere. She played bridge with old friends and was of a generation that worked or starved.

Everywhere she went, on holiday or on business, was better. Dublin, Copenhagen, Istanbul, St. Ives, St. Petersburg, Palermo. You name it, it was an improvement. You’d walk into a shop and the proprietor would say hello instead of assessing how much you would be attempting to steal. Everyone she knew talked of leaving London. Somewhere calmer. Somewhere greener. Somewhere sunnier. Somewhere else.

As she approached her house, she could see the lights on in the ground-floor flat that belonged to Gloria. Gloria, who had a doctorate on the subject of slums in poor countries, and whose flat reflected that. Her parents paid the bills, and Gloria had sex, noisily, with embarrassed men who were never seen more than twice.

In the basement flat were the Cooks. An elderly couple who had been living there for forty years; they effortlessly annihilated all the myths about the nobility of the white working class. They were sullen, smelly, fans of any manifestation of ugliness. Living in shit was evidently no problem for them, since they did nothing about the rubbish amassed, shin-high, in front of their door. For the first year she had greeted them, and been ignored. Twice, clandestinely, disgusted by the filth, she had gathered up the debris around their door. But then she gave up. Londoned.

The first floor was Rolf. An old, failed actor who lived on his own, he never had friends dropping by, because he was a bedridden inconsiderate miserabilist: A bedridden inconsiderate miserabilist, however, who had been an inconsiderate miserabilist long before he was bedridden. Yet he would never be one of those pensioners discovered long after the arrival of decomposition, because he was too unpleasant. A file of social workers shambled up to his flat, grimacing but reliable.

When she had moved in she had listened politely to Rolf’s stories of being stranded in Ethiopia, playing third lackey in a film that had run out of finance, and explaining why he had to keep a pool table in the hallway, a full-size one that made it difficult for the other residents to get past.

In his favor Rolf was at least under her flat. His bathroom regularly flooded Gloria’s flat, but he wouldn’t do anything effective about it. It was fascinating how you could not care at all about others and still be cared for. One summer when she had worked at a giant campsite in Normandy she had noticed how the decent customers got the nightmarish reps and how the decent reps got the nightmarish customers. Invariably the nightmarish reps never got the nightmarish customers any more than the decent reps got the decent customers.

Then, up on the second floor, she saw traces of light in her flat. Even though she assumed she must have left a light on in the morning when she left, she couldn’t suppress a creep of anxiety. This was a city where everything was done to guarantee the liberty of burglars.

Although no one was watching her, or would be able to make her out in the dark, she felt ridiculous as she fumbled with the key in the top lock. The lock had never given her grief before, but no matter how many times she slipped the key in, it refused to turn. After several minutes of failure, it occurred to her that the locks must have been changed, so persistent was the lack of turning. Had there been a burglary during the day? If the locks had been changed why wasn’t there a note? She chose to ring Gloria’s bell to see what was going on.

Over the intercom, a male voice answered.

“Good evening,” she asked. “Is Gloria there, please?”

“No Gloria here.”

Had Gloria moved out? Gloria had been in the house when she moved in, but they had never got on. She had first met Gloria 15 minutes after she had magazined one unbelievably large hairy spider and given another unbelievably large hairy spider a taste of the 966 pages of the telephone directory. She had been agitated, because they were too big to be London spiders.

“I’m Gloria. You haven’t seen two largish spiders have you?” Gloria, it transpired, bred spiders. She had always thought it was blank males who collected exotic or venomous creatures to make themselves more interesting or to feel powerful because they had one of the only five Armored Mist frogs in the world stashed under their bed, as one suitor in a pub had recounted to her.

She had directed Gloria to the spider paste. “Kelvin. Melvin,” Gloria had obituarized. “I let them out for exercise,” she explained when asked how they had escaped. The hatred that Gloria had launched had been quite unjustified and unbalanced and relations hadn’t much improved.

“Have the locks been changed?’ she asked. “I’m in the second-floor flat and I can’t get in.”

“No one’s changed the locks.” The male voice insisted.

“Could you let me in please?”

“I don’t know who you are.” There was a receiver-replacing conversation-terminating clack on the intercom. She pressed the other buttons, but no one responded. In the darkness she could just perceive that the names by the buzzers on the intercom looked different, but she couldn’t make out the letters. She wondered what to do. Wait for someone to go in or come out? Call for a locksmith? It was cold.

As she wandered out into the driveway, she looked back up at her flat and she saw a woman at the window looking down at her. Shocked, she didn’t quite know how to react. The interloper was a woman at the wrong end of middle age, unlikely to be a burglar, but very possibly mentally ill. The interloper was unfazed, observing her for a few moments before slowly retreating to the inner reaches of the flat.

She hit her own buzzer: “Who are you?”

“Sorry?”

“What are you doing in my flat?”

“I don’t know who you’re looking for, but this is the second-floor flat.’

“I know. I’ve lived in it for seven years.”

“No. I’ve lived here for seven years.”

“If you don’t let me in, I’ll call the police.”

“If you don’t go away, I’ll call the police.”

“This has gone far enough.”

“This has gone far enough. If it’s your flat why is it that I’m in here and you’re out there?” Another conversation-terminating clack.

Was this some elaborate practical joke? Television chicanery? She looked around for concealed chucklers. If it were a joke, she would exact terrible revenge. She retrieved her phone from her bag, but, to top it all, it wouldn’t work. Gagging with rage she strode over to the nearest pay phone and called the police. After hanging on for several minutes, she explained that someone was in her flat. She then paced up and down in the driveway for 20 minutes, past the orange bathtub that had been there for months and which, certainly, would be there for months to come. Eventually the police shot past with the sirens going. A few minutes later, they drove back and stopped in her driveway.

Two police officers emerged from the car with that caution police officers exhibit in case someone starts shooting at them. One was a policewoman who must have been the result of some equal-opportunity mania, almost a dwarf, tubby, and with a look that said she couldn’t believe she had been accepted for the job. The other was a towering, wall-wide veteran to whom she re-explained her predicament.

The police drew down the woman in her flat. Her name was Mrs. Gardiner. Her name was inscribed by the bell. Mrs. Gardiner swiftly produced correspondence from utility companies that enthroned her as the rightful occupant. The mystery man from the ground-floor flat maintained Mrs. Gardiner had been living there for years. They went upstairs to the flat—Rolf’s pool table vanished—where her claim that the curtains in the back bedroom were red was proved wrong. All her belongings were gone. The flat had been totally redecorated, refurnished.

She was asked to provide any evidence that she lived there. She could have sworn she had a letter from her bank in her bag, but it was gone. Mrs. Gardiner now studied her with the compassion reserved for the mentally ill who have just done something awful to themselves. The policeman couldn’t have been more sympathetic as tears bunched in her eyes.

‘I’d like to help,” said the policeman. “But you see how it looks. This lady has proof of residence. You don’t. Your keys don’t fit any of the locks. The neighbors say they’ve never seen you before. Are you on some medication?”

Mrs. Gardiner commented, “She needs help.”

The rage and the weariness made her leave. She couldn’t bear to see how they looked at her. She didn’t know what to do. She walked over to the nearby newsagent run by a barely counter-high Asian woman who greeted her.

“You know me, don’t you?”

“Of course,” the newsagent replied, but as soon as she replied she realized that she would have said the same thing to a complete stranger.

“Do you know what’s going on over the road?”

“What’s going on over the road? Something’s always going on over there.”

Mechanically she started walking toward the underground. She’d deal with this tomorrow. Stay with someone tonight and get on the case tomorrow, but none of her friends lived in the area. She tried her phone again: Still not working. Stopping at the only working payphone, she tried her friends. The first attempts produced no reply. Then when she phoned Don, who was almost the last person on whose sofa she’d consider sleeping, a non-Don voice answered.

“Could I speak to Don?”

“You’ve got a wrong number.”

She punched the number again, extremely slowly to make sure she got it right, but only got the non-Don voice.

She took the tube back into Victoria and went into the first OK-looking cheap hotel. All she wanted to do was curl up. The receptionist ran her credit card and then announced it was no good. With only a few pounds in cash, she went out to the cashpoint on the corner, and after she had tapped in her number three times, the machine ate her card.

It was now gone 11 and she took stock of how badly she stank. She made another round of phone calls. The numbers were unavailable, no one was there, or an unfriendly voice would deny the person she was looking for. Finally, she returned to her office hoping to spend the night there, but when her key froze in the lock of the front door she wasn’t surprised.

There was one last call to make, the one she dreaded most of all. When a strange voice answered her parents’ number, she knew they were gone as well.

She caught the last train back to Brixton, and in the passageway between the two platforms, she sank down and gave way to tears.

TIBOR FISCHER