Masters And Lovers 1-4

*****

They’re coming….

How many has he got out there…?

She shifts, opens the door a crack, peers out. She can see…. five…. No, six…. Drinking, eating curry and pizza, laughing and farting and cracking crude jokes she doesn’t understand but knows she doesn’t want to hear….

“There she is!” A finger points to her.

“I’m…. I’m just going to the bathroom.”

“You do that, then come in here.” Adam looks at her, the threat in his eye.

She slips around the back of the couch, staying as far away from them all as possible, opens the bathroom door then locks it behind her. The lock is flimsy a tiny thing perhaps two inches long in a cheap gilded alloy. The door even flimsier, a cardboard honeycomb type that wouldn’t stand a minute against a determined man.

She opens the window, looking down at the two-storey drop. There’s a fine brick outcrop just below her, barely a ledge. Just a toehold.

She looks left and right. And up.

Left: nothing but thirty feet of brick wall.

Right: a window, a few feet away, open by the barest of cracks.

Cracked and splinter plastic, leaking green

bang on the

out

I’m washing my face.” She

are still there. Abandoning the ridiculous high heels, she slips her feet inside, looping the laces around her feet to compensate for the shoes being several sizes too large. Then, climbing up onto the toilet seat, she opens the window wide, twists and turns and, clinging to the frame, backs out,

her purloined trainer. Her body askew, the right leg at an angle she increases her grip

her chest and at her temples, but again she reaches, and the right foot finds

time. Harder. And the door rattles under it. “You done in

window, she shouts. “Just coming.” And she pulls back out again,

and a thousand miles away. The gutter is just above her, but to reach it, she must let

“You! Out!

through her veins, pounding inside her skull and battering against her fingertips. Weeping and trembling she releases her right hand, revolves on the

…. and holds….

over her. She doesn’t care. Her hold is firm. Gripping tight, she lets go of the window frame with her left hand, this time stable as her weight

a toe as she clings with both

“Fuck!” Adam’s voice again.

carpet in an ill-lit hallway and

*****

limping slightly in trainers made for someone built to