The caretaker handed me a saucepan, a set of keys and a piece of advice. Keep the curtains closed upstairs. The road brought in dust, he said. He had washed the curtains himself and did not want to do them again.
I had rented the back room for three weeks while the council repaired my flat. The boarding house had three floors. Six windows on each floor, eighteen in all. I noticed this while waiting for the caretaker to open the gate. I count things when I am anxious: tiles, fence posts, the steps between a bus stop and my door. Usually it helps.
On my second morning I opened the curtains. Behind the glass was a narrow courtyard. Across it stood the back of another building, close enough that I could have passed a cup between the windows. A man in a brown cardigan sat at a table. His breakfast was one slice of bread. He was using a spoon to cut it into squares.
I went downstairs to ask the caretaker where the other building entered the street. He said there was no other building. I showed him the back of the house from the yard. We stood on gravel under my window. Beyond the fence was the abandoned bowling green. He watched me looking from the green to the window and back again.
"Keep the curtains closed," he said. "I thought I'd asked you."
I kept them closed until Friday. Then the man knocked on his glass. It was a polite knock, two taps. I could hear it over the shower. When I looked, he held a scrap of paper up to the window. On it he had written: HOW MANY ON YOUR SIDE?
I counted the panes in my room. Four. The hallway had two. The bathroom had one. The door of the linen cupboard was painted white, but when I touched it, the paint was cold and smooth. I scraped it with my thumbnail. There was glass underneath. Behind the glass, someone moved a finger to meet mine.
I shut the cupboard and went down to the yard. I counted the windows on the house. There were seven on the top floor now. The new one stood above the gate. A white rectangle, painted shut.
The caretaker found me packing. He sat on my bed and asked what I had touched. When I told him, he rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands. He said I could leave, but I should leave everything in the room. "It needs something to fill the spaces," he said. "If you carry your things out, it might choose something else."
I asked what he meant by something else. He took off his left shoe. His sock was neatly folded into the empty toe. He did not show me his foot. He said he had been moving out in 1986.
I left my clothes, my book and the photograph of my mother. In the street I felt so relieved that I laughed. Then I looked back to make certain I had shut the gate.
There were eighteen windows. In the top left one, the man in the cardigan was having breakfast. In the next sat a woman holding my book. My mother stood at the third. She was still alive, living a hundred miles away. I had called her the previous evening. In the window beside her, someone who looked like me was folding my clothes.
I could have walked away then. The station was at the bottom of the road. I began to count the windows again, because there had to be eighteen, because numbers do not change just because you are frightened.
I got as far as seventeen. The eighteenth window was open. A bare foot rested on its sill. I recognised the small crooked nail on the second toe.
The caretaker unlocked the gate. He was carrying the saucepan. "You'll need this," he said. He would not look at my feet.
