The police were at the door, a baggie of weed sat in plain view on the coffee table, and the only person in the flat who could still think was the one with a broken wrist.
Georgia had been dancing. That was the worst part, in retrospect. A moment earlier the music had been throbbing through the floorboards and through her sternum, smoke hung in the air of the flat, mostly vape, with a distinct herbal undertone, and Jasper had been dancing on the rug with a glass of wine in his hand, moving with a surprising fluidity for a man built like a wardrobe. He had been singing along, head thrown back, arm flung wide.
“I FEEL LOVE… I FEEL LOVE…”
BANG. BANG. BANG. It was not a neighbour’s knock. It was heavy, even, patient, the knock of authority, and it went through her like a cold wire. The music cut out instantly, and silence dropped onto the room like a trapdoor.
Jasper froze mid-dance move, one arm still in the air.
“POLICE! OPEN UP!”
All the colour went out of Jasper’s face. He looked at the small baggie of weed on the coffee table, and Georgia watched him look at it, the whole vast bulk of him seeming to shrink around his own terror.
“No, no, no, G,” Jasper said, panic rising in his voice. “Daddy’s running for Parliament. He’ll skin me.”
Georgia looked at the bag. Then at the door. And she felt it happen inside her, the same cold, bright, clicking thing that had happened in the hallway, in the surgery, in every room in which she had ever been cornered: her eyes hardened, her pulse slowed, and the old Percy machine, the one her mother had built in her over twenty-two years of drawing rooms, rolled quietly into gear.
Him. It was him. The knowledge came in a flash and lodged under her ribs. Of course it was him. Sunday morning, music for twelve minutes, and the police arrive in less than the time it takes to boil a kettle.
She grabbed a heavy coat and threw it over the back of a chair to look casual. She smoothed her hair with her good hand.
“Sit down,” she told Jasper. “Shut up. Let me talk.”
She opened the door.
Two constables stood on the threshold, a man and a woman, in their stab vests and their rain-flecked hi-vis, unimpressed. They had the faces of people who had been woken, fed and sent out on a Sunday to deal with exactly this, and who had already decided what they thought of it.
“We’ve had reports of a disturbance,” said the female constable. “And the smell of cannabis is quite strong, Miss.”
Behind her, Jasper sat on the sofa and looked like a terrified gargoyle.
“It’s incense!” His voice cracked an octave higher. “We’re Buddhists!”
Georgia shot him a glare that could have peeled paint. She stepped forward, blocking their view of him with her body, and when she spoke her voice was calm and professional, the voice of a girl who had been taught to address the staff of a very large house.
“Officer, the music was excessive. I apologise. We got carried away moving in.”
The male constable’s eyes slid past her shoulder. They found the coffee table.
“Is that cannabis on the table?”
Here we go. Georgia did not flinch. She did not step in front of it, either, which would have been an admission. She let him look.
“It is,” she said. “A small amount for personal use. Less than two grams.”
“Right. I’ll need you both to come down to the station for…”
“With respect, Officer,” Georgia said, cutting in, polite and firm as a closed door, “that won’t be necessary. Under the ACPO guidelines for a first-time offence involving simple possession of a Class B substance, this qualifies for a Community Resolution Order.”
The constable paused. He looked at her. She watched the thought cross his face: she knows the script better than I do. And she did. It was a peculiar skill, and she had learned it the way she had learned most things, early, alone, and in order to survive a room.
“We admit possession,” Georgia went on. “We take responsibility for the noise. Processing an arrest will take you three hours of paperwork on a Sunday.” She held his gaze and did not let it go. “Issue a Cannabis Warning or a Fixed Penalty. Assign me Community Payback. I’ll do eighty hours. Local.”
The female constable exchanged a look with her partner. It was a long, weary look that said everything about forms in triplicate and cold tea. They hated paperwork. Everyone hated paperwork. That was, Georgia had learned, the single most reliable law of the universe.
“Eighty hours,” the woman sighed. “And we confiscate the drugs.”
“Done,” said Georgia.
The police were gone. The baggie was gone. On the coffee table, a pink slip of paper: the Fixed Penalty Notice.
Jasper slumped back against the sofa and let out a lungful of air that seemed to have been in him for ten minutes. “Jesus Christ, G. You were… terrifying. Like, actual Legally Blonde genius.”
Georgia did not answer. She sank, for a moment, onto the arm of the sofa and listened to the flat go quiet around her, the ticking of cooling speakers, the creak of a joist, a plastic sack stirring in a corner, and she thought of the policeman’s face, the way his eyes had dropped from her to the splint. Eighty hours. She had offered it herself, like a girl laying down a card she did not own. She had not even paused to ask what it might cost.
She picked up the slip. Community Service. Report to Local Council Liaison. The black type blurred slightly, and she realised her hand was trembling, the right one inside its splint, the left one holding the paper. It was the adrenaline leaving, that was all. It was only the adrenaline leaving.
She walked to the window and looked down at the patio below. The garden lantern was off. The sliding door was shut. The curtains were drawn in the bright Sunday morning, as if the house below had closed its eyes.
She knew exactly who had made that call. The timing was far too surgical.
“He didn’t just want the noise to stop,” she said to herself, icily. “He wanted to humiliate me.”
“Who?” Jasper said. “The neighbour?”
Georgia crunched the pink paper in her fist. The sound it made was very small, and very satisfying, and it did nothing at all for the heat in her face.
“The enemy,” she said.
The Council Offices waiting room was a place where hope went to die.
The walls were beige. The carpet was beige. A flickering fluorescent strip buzzed overhead like a dying fly, and the air was so dry and dead that it seemed to have been recycled since the nineteen-eighties. Georgia sat on a moulded plastic chair, sandwiched between a tattooed man in his forties, who was picking his teeth with a bus ticket, and an old woman in her sixties, who smelled faintly of gin and cat food.
She stared at the peeling safety poster on the wall opposite. Community Payback: Paying It Back, Moving Forward.
Moving forward. She wanted to laugh. She wanted, quite badly, to lay her head on her knees and not lift it again.
She looked down at her wrist instead. The black Velcro splint was stark against her pale skin, ugly and efficient. She adjusted it, and winced as the strap bit. Scaphoid tenderness, said a voice in her head, dry as a bone. Just as I forecasted. She tightened her jaw until the voice went away.
Mrs. Bumble looked as though she had been knitted out of grey wool. She was in her fifties, sat behind a vast, scarred desk, and stared at her computer screen through thick bifocals, typing with two fingers. Clack. Clack. She did not look up when Georgia came in. She did not look up when Georgia sat, and the silence was so complete that Georgia could hear the hum of the strip light and the soft, wet sound of the old woman’s breathing from the next room. She was a woman who had mastered the art of making a person feel like a rumour.
“Eighty hours,” she said, without looking up. “Environmental Cleanup Team.”
She slid a laminated sheet across the desk. It showed a group of people in high-vis vests wrestling with a muddy mattress on a verge.
“Report to the depot at 06:00 tomorrow. You’ll be litter-picking the A59 bypass.”
Georgia looked at the photograph. She looked at the mattress. Then she looked at Mrs. Bumble.
“The A59?” she said. “As in… the dual carriageway?”
“Wear steel-toe boots,” Mrs. Bumble said, bored. “It gets muddy on the verges.”
Georgia lifted her right arm. She rested the heavy black splint on the desk, deliberately, with a THUD that rattled the stapler.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mrs. Bumble.”
Mrs. Bumble stopped typing. She looked at the splint. Then at Georgia. It took a very long time for her eyes to travel that short distance.
“Scaphoid fracture,” Georgia said. “Doctor’s orders: no lifting, no gripping, no repetitive manual labour for at least two weeks.” She smiled sweetly. It was not a nice smile, and she was not a nice girl in that moment, and she was rather proud of both facts. “Unless you want me to pick up crisp packets with my teeth?”
Mrs. Bumble sighed. It was a long, weary exhalation that deflated her entire body, like a bagpipe being quietly put away. She took the laminated sheet back.
“Right. ‘Light Duties.’”
She turned back to her computer. Clack. Clack. “Library is full. Charity Shop… no, they don’t take violent offenders.”
“It was a noise complaint,” Georgia said. “I’m not a hooligan.”
“Soup kitchen needs a dishwasher,” Mrs. Bumble went on, ignoring her. “Requires two hands.”
The computer made a cheerful PING.
Mrs. Bumble squinted. “Oh. Here we are. Just came in this morning. Town Surgery.”
Georgia perked up. Something stirred in her, a small, warm, outrageous hope, like a candle lit in a cellar.
“General Practice support,” Mrs. Bumble read. “Filing, sanitising surfaces, tea making.” She looked up, over her bifocals, for the first time. “Indoors.”
A wave of relief washed over Georgia so hard she almost swayed in her seat. No mud. No high-vis vests. No steel-toe boots on the verge of a dual carriageway while lorries thundered past and the rain came sideways. Just a quiet, sterile room, a desk, a kettle, a place to be safe and busy and invisible. It sounded like heaven.
Quiet. Sterile. No one to look at me. She did not stop to wonder why that was precisely what she wanted.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
Mrs. Bumble stamped a form. THUD. She handed it across the desk, and Georgia took it between two fingers like a winning ticket.
“Report to the Head Nurse, Janice, at 08:30,” Mrs. Bumble said. “Don’t be late.”
Georgia took the paper. She beamed.
“Don’t worry.”
She stood up, tucked the paper into her pocket, and walked out with a spring in her step. In the corridor, she passed the tattooed man and gave him a sympathetic nod, like a general passing a soldier on the wrong side of the line, and pushed open the exit door. Sunlight hit her face, thin and watery, but sunlight nonetheless.
She took a deep breath of fresh air. It smelled of wet pavement and diesel and freedom.
Doctor’s orders, she thought, and her smile widened. Filing. Tea making. A sterile room, and a kettle, and nobody shouting at me about load-bearing walls. She could not remember when she had last felt so light, and she walked towards the bus stop in the thin sunshine, wrist aching, form in her pocket, believing every word of it.