Chapter 6.1

 

The slamming of the front door woke her the next morning. Her phone told her it was only 5:40 AM, but she was grateful to be jolted from a dream in which she watched people die in a thousand different ways. Hyperbole, perhaps, but when even one was too many, a night of constant deaths was both traumatic and wearing. There had been perhaps twenty. each one experienced through her own eyes as if it were her own body being deprived of life. Some of them had been natural deaths and felt like falling asleep after a long day; two were the sweet embrace of solitude after months or years of living with the pain of cancer. One was filled with terror as the car he was driving plunged off a cliff into the ravine below and one was the muted surprise of the huge and sudden bloom of an orange flower twice her height.

All these and more were fleeting memories as the first light of the day crept between the gap in her curtains, the top and bottom already a highlighted movie curtain from the window behind. Her heartbeat slowed as the images left her with nothing but a uneasy state of disquiet, until she remembered none of the details and kept just an overall impression of surprise and, in some cases, relief.

She was rarely awake this early, before even the neighbours downstairs had started their day. The flat was hushed in a way she hadn't seen it before. No footsteps in the hallway, no doors opening or closing, no muffled laughter or arguments bleeding through thin walls, no blaring television coming through the shared wall or the kitchen floor. The silence was not absolute—it carried the faint hum of the refrigerator, the occasional groan of pipes—but compared to the usual chorus of low voices and vibrating floorboards, it felt expansive, almost startling in its blank-canvas freedom of expression.

Roisin rose, since her bladder insisted that now she was awake its own needs were a priority. The stream of urine seemed too loud in the silent air, almost deafening, and her had a small insight into how those with acute hearing felt all the time. A lad at St. Pity's High had been born with the condition and had been teased and bullied constantly for his habit of wearing headphones even while in class. She regretted lifting them from his head one day in autumn and laughing as he fell to the damp tarmac of the playground among the wet leaves of the surrounding conker trees, his hands pressed against his ears and his eyes tightly closed. It had taken the stern warning of a week's detention for her to surrender them to a teacher. She wiped and left the toilet unflushed, since there was nobody else at home. This had been a hard habit to rid herself of, since her mam's house had a smart meter fitted and every flush cost her mother money. "If it's yellow," her mam used to say, omitting the well-known ending of 'let it mellow.' She washed her cands, causing a mild cacophony of gurgles in the hot water pipe. Not that she got any hot water. You had to run the tap for several minutes before the water heater even kicked into life, never mind heated anything with the constant whirling of the electricity meter.

Drying her hands on one of the paper towels Paul got free from work (and she was certain 'free' meant 'five-finger-discount') she padded down the corridor to the kitchen and stood in the doorway, listening. The air seemed heavier without Paul in the flat, as though the rooms themselves were holding their breath. She could hear her own movements with unusual clarity: the scrape of a chair against the floor, the rustle of her sleeve as she reached for the kettle, the squeak of the cold-water tap, the soft splash of water filling it. Each sound belonged entirely to her, unshared, unchallenged.

Coffee in her hand, she wandered into the living room, where the cushions still bore the impressions of their bodies from earlier in the week. The absence of her co‑tenant was palpable, like a shadow that had been lifted. She felt both liberated and unsettled. Without his presence, the flat seemed larger, its walls stretching outward, its silence echoing.

She sat in what she thought of as Pauls' chair, feeling his shape around her frame as the quiet settled around her. It was not the same as the solitude of her bedroom, where her privacy was always tainted with the awareness of others nearby. This was different: the whole flat was hers, every room open, every corridor unclaimed. She could walk naked across the hallway without worrying about him emerging suddenly. She could hum to herself, or speak aloud, and know that no one would overhear.

The quiet carried a strange intimacy. It revealed the flat’s bones—the creak of the floorboards, the faint draft through the window, the way light shifted across the walls without interruption. How much of her life was defined by the presence of others, by the constant negotiation of space and sound? In their absence, she felt both exposed and free, as though the flat itself were showing her its true face.

She closed her eyes, listening to the silence. It was not empty. It was layered, textured, alive with the faintest sounds of the building breathing. And in that moment, she understood that the quiet was not simply the absence of her co‑tenant. It was a gift, a pause, a rare chance to inhabit the flat fully, to let it belong to her alone—even if only for a little while.