The Lock In Read online

  Phoebe Luckhurst

  * * *

  THE LOCK IN

  Contents

  1. Ellen

  2. Ellen

  3. Alexa

  4. Jack

  5. Ellen

  6. Alexa

  7. Ellen

  8. Jack

  9. Ellen

  10. Jack

  11. Ellen

  12. Alexa

  13. Ellen

  14. Ellen

  15. Ellen

  16. Alexa

  17. Jack

  18. Ellen

  19. Alexa

  20. Jack

  21. Alexa

  22. Jack

  23. Alexa

  24. Ellen

  25. Ellen

  Chapter 26

  27. Ben

  28. Alexa

  29. Jack

  30. Ellen

  31. Jack

  Acknowledgements

  Read More

  About the Author

  Phoebe Luckhurst was born in London and brought up in Glasgow. She is the Features Editor of the Evening Standard and appears regularly on their podcast, The Leader. She has written for the Guardian, Sunday Times Style, ELLE, ES Magazine, Grazia, The Telegraph and Vogue. She has had the theme tune to The OC stuck in her head since 2003 and once almost spent her student loan on a micro-pig. She no longer shops online when drunk.

  To Samuel

  Our story will always be my favourite house-sharing anecdote

  1. Ellen

  Ellen was a bit rusty on what their tenancy agreement said about flooding the entire ground floor of their house. But she suspected that Elias, the balding, barrel-chested sociopath who owned their property in Lewisham, would have prepared for the eventuality. This would most likely involve damages being pillaged from their security deposit. The prospect of explaining the flooding to him was about as appealing as walking into moving traffic.

  There was never any arguing with Elias. True, Ellen had never known a sympathetic London landlord, but Elias was a tyrant. He lacked any empathy or humanity, and overreacted at the slightest provocation. His emails were always abrasive and usually written predominantly in caps lock. Last month, when Ellen’s housemate Alexa emailed to ask whether there was a mop in the house, he responded by calling her a ‘FREELOADING C**T’. Then there was the Friday evening before a bank holiday weekend, when the dodgy flush had broken on their only loo. When they asked for Elias’s help with a handyman he baulked at paying the higher call-out fee and suggested they ‘flush it with a bucket until Tuesday’.

  He also had a habit of letting himself in without warning, which was, Ellen was fairly sure, a violation of the terms of their lease. They’d hear the grind of his keys in the door and, quick as a flash, assemble in her room (which was technically the living room) for a crisis meeting to determine the party line on when they’d last hoovered the stairs. Elias always found something to complain about, be it the state of the lawn or a lingering smell in the kitchen. (He didn’t ‘like’ Chinese food. On his last visit his eyes were narrowed and searching, as if expecting to find a chow mein sequestered away in a cupboard.) He once called – called! – to warn them that if they didn’t polish the kitchen surfaces once a month he’d have ‘their bollocks in a vice’. In person, he often eyeballed the docile Jack when he made threats (especially ones about bollocks), fingering his keys. There were two key rings on the chain – a blue bottle opener bearing the name of a casino, and a small plastic busty pin-up girl in a Baywatch-red swimsuit.

  Ellen had lived at 49 Rokeby Close for three years now, which, she occasionally noted sadly, meant she’d known Elias longer than her longest relationship had lasted.

  The three of them did not know what Elias had done to afford this roomy, if rather shabby, house on a nice road in New Cross, south-east London, not to mention his three other properties in the surrounding area. He had something of the used-car salesman about him – it was the brown slip-on shoes and the shiny grey suits, Alexa had once said authoritatively. Google conjured nothing. Sometimes, Elias would bring his lacquered wife, Cynthia, with him on impromptu house inspections and she would stand, wordlessly, drumming her blue shellacked nails along the kitchen counter. Or sit at the MDF table with the wobbly leg, seemingly not listening as he complained that the grass hadn’t been mown this spring (the grass was a real fixation; Ellen would never have pegged him for a gardener). On one visit, Cynthia put her iPhone on the table. When the screen lit up Ellen noticed that the background was a picture of a man in Speedos emerging from the sea, Bond-style. The man was not Elias. Cynthia never said a word to any of them, but she had once forwarded them all an email from a community group calling for a boycott of a local primary school which had been teaching its pupils about LGBTQ+ relationships. Ellen had shared the email on Instagram (#tfw your landlord is a homophobe??). Alexa had sent a curt response requesting that Cynthia refrain from sending them ‘emails of this nature’ in future, Jack and Ellen sitting beside her and nodding wordlessly while she composed the message. Cynthia had replied a few days later, cc’ing them all, stating that while they lived ‘under her roof’, she would send them whatever emails she wished.

  Ellen had woken at 8 a.m. on that April Saturday with the heart-thudding start of a white-wine hangover. For a brief but terrifying moment, her pulse still racing, she barely recognized her own bedroom, until she realized that this was because she had settled – whenever that was – the wrong way around in her bed. Her feet were resting on her pillow and she was, she swiftly ascertained, still wearing her work clothes: a Breton T-shirt under a denim dungaree dress, tights and her left ankle boot. The right one stood smartly in the middle of her bedroom floor, as if waiting to be recommissioned.

  Ellen swivelled round so that her head was on the pillow, noting grimly that when she did so her brain felt like it was bouncing off the inside of her skull. Panting slightly, she manoeuvred the left boot off with her right foot, to expose a big toe that waggled from the end of her holey tights. She exhaled deeply as she heard the boot land on the floor, and lay still again.

  As she stared at the ceiling, eyes gummy with slept-in mascara, she became aware of a roll-call of further physical complaints. Her mouth was sour, and heartburn roared in her throat. Her muscles were sore, and she had a real bruiser of a headache: a dull, thudding twinge burrowing deep into her skull. Sitting up very slowly and supporting herself gingerly on her elbows, she took a swig from the glass of water next to her bed, which turned out to be a tepid yet potent vodka tonic. Gagging, she spat the liquid back into the glass and wiped her mouth with her hand. She rubbed one eye with a balled fist, and struggled to drag a few of the relevant details from her dehydrated brain. She could remember getting the bus home from work drinks and – ah yes – getting off a stop early to go to the corner shop for a 35cl bottle of vodka. Beside the bed, her laptop lay on the floor, its shell half closed, as if cowering in fear. She edged the lid open with her exposed big toe and jabbed at the trackpad. The screen lit up. It was paused on a YouTube tap-dancing tutorial.

  She lay back on the mattress. Her duvet was slumped against the wall alongside her bed, the old clothes that doubled as pyjamas tangled inside. Sighing, she yanked at the pink tracksuit bottoms, her worn grey T-shirt and a pair of odd socks coming with them. Wincing as a bolt of pain coursed through her left temple, she wriggled out of yesterday’s work clothes, tossed them off the end of the bed after the boot, and put the pyjamas on. They could definitely do with a wash. As could her hair: its long, dark brown lengths hung in greasy sections.

  She started again: her things! She must have had things. Phone? It wasn’t on the bedside table, and Ellen was about to panic until she realized it was, in fact, on the floor beside the bed, lying face down but – yes! – completely intact. She jabbed at the side button and the screen lit up: a string of WhatsApps from Kayleigh; an email from a fast-fashion e-tailer whose website she’d sworn never to visit again, advertising a limited-time ‘up to 75 per cent off’ sale; three responses to her Instagram Story (oh God). She opened the phone’s front-facing camera and squinted into it. Mascara crumbled along her eyelids and there was a pustule of a spot erupting on her chin. She pocketed the phone and took another deep sigh.

  Water was the answer. Well, it had been about nine hours ago, but better late than never. Using both hands to launch herself from her mattress, she stood up and plotted her route across the disarray of her bedroom. She took a wobbly step, and then – gaining in confidence – another, until she made it to the bedroom door. Ellen opened it and peered into the hallway, testing the house for signs of Alexa or Jack. All was still. Her keys were lying on the first step of the staircase. She padded down the hall, the ache of Friday night in her bones, and walked into the open-plan kitchen and dining room, then stopped suddenly when it dawned on her that her socks were being lapped by a tide of water.

  Its source was easily locatable: water was cascading from the cupboard under the sink, making the cheap plastic doors flap wildly. She stood there for a minute, mesmerized by the ebb and flow of the shallow lagoon, before her brain clicked into gear.

  ‘Fuck,’ Ellen breathed. The panic started to rise like the tide of heartburn. It hadn’t been like this when she’d got home. It couldn’t have been. Unless she’d missed it? Or … could she have somehow done this? How could she? She’d only made a vodka tonic. Ellen moved tentatively to the sink, as though the whole thing might blow at any second, her socks now squelching at every step. The tap wasn’t open: the water was definitely c
oming from underneath the sink. She crouched in front of the flapping cupboard doors, then recoiled when one almost banged her on the nose.

  She stood up again.

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,’ she moaned. Her voice was higher and more desperate now.

  There must be a mains tap somewhere, which would turn off the water at its source, a big switch that would pause the cascade. She crouched closer again in search of one, but all she could discern was the usual tangle of pipes, and a sodden scouring pad at the bottom of the cupboard. She flinched and leaped back as the sink made a low, juddering moan.

  A light-bulb moment: the attic. This was where they had unearthed the fuse box, eventually, during a sudden and disorientating blackout. Maybe the switch she needed was there too. Startled by her own quick wit and decisiveness, Ellen turned on her soggy heels, made for the stairs and started running up them, two steps at a time, using the banister to yank herself up.

  She paused on the first-floor landing. Jack and Alexa’s bedrooms were on the left. The only bathroom was dead ahead of her. Then there was another staircase that twisted back upon itself and ended in the loft. Ellen ran up the uncarpeted staircase into the attic, taking huge gulps of breath. She yanked the door open and took in the scene. Before she could stop herself, she screamed. About a metre or so from the doorway lay a huge, very dead mouse, lying on its back with its paws pointing straight up. She steadied herself and breathed deeply, placing her hand on her chest to slow her hurtling heartbeat, trying to banish the blackness that was seeping into the corner of her eyes.

  It was warm in there, and smelled faintly of wood chips and school music cupboards. As her pulse slowed, she peered cautiously into the attic’s chaos. She’d only been up here once, and it still had all the ambience of a pound shop on the Old Kent Road: packed to the eaves with plastic crates of DVDs, warped cardboard boxes full of cables, half-full litre bottles of white spirit, and broken dining-room chairs. In one corner, there was an open suitcase of BB guns and next to it a teetering pile of The Guinness Book of Records, most of them from the 1990s. She couldn’t see anything that might be the mains water switch.

  Heart still galloping, Ellen heard a bedroom door open on the landing below, followed by tentative footsteps on the staircase. From the gait, she guessed – correctly, as it turned out – that it was Jack, and rolled her eyes in spite of herself. Jack was not the man you’d pick first in a crisis. Her housemate was about six foot tall and very lanky, with a baby-face and dark hair that was slightly too long. He had the permanent air of an overladen man boarding a train just before it leaves the station and trying to untangle himself from his luggage, carrier bags swinging from every limb. He worked in customer service for a vegetable delivery box start-up, Green Genie, which meant he had access to a bounty of wonky carrots and misshapen strawberries. Occasionally, he would make them extravagant smoothies that always ended up tasting overwhelmingly of grit.

  The footsteps had stopped.

  ‘Hello?’ Jack called hesitantly, from below. ‘Ellen?’

  ‘I’m up here!’

  He didn’t move.

  She pressed her lips together and resisted the urge to snap. ‘Jack, can you come here a second?’ she said, civilly. An afterthought. ‘Please?’

  She heard his footsteps on the stairs again, slow and deliberate. He appeared at last, wearing a pair of blue tracksuit bottoms and a Green Genie T-shirt. The logo was a dancing carrot. He paused on the penultimate stair, watching her warily.

  ‘Sorry, Jack. I didn’t mean to wake you. But –’

  ‘You screamed,’ he interrupted. When he saw the mouse his eyes widened.

  ‘Yes, sorry, the mouse gave me a fright.’ She pointed stupidly at its corpse.

  Jack leaned back slightly.

  ‘Sorry – look, ignore the mouse, that’s not the real problem. I’m here because of the water – downstairs, the sink – there’s water all over the kitchen.’ Jack still looked half asleep, and she resisted gripping him by the shoulders. ‘Jack. Do you know how we turn the water off?’ With a sudden lurch, last night’s (cheap) white wine started roaring in her ears. ‘It’s flooding. Downstairs!’

  That did the trick.

  ‘Shit.’ He swallowed and frowned. ‘Um.’

  ‘I thought maybe the water box might be up here. With the fuse box …?’ She paused, hoping that Jack would reveal himself – against type – to be the practical sort. ‘Do you have any idea?’

  Jack looked stricken. ‘No, I don’t know how we turn anything off,’ he gulped. After a beat, he added, ‘Sorry.’

  She clenched her left fist hard, and turned back to the chaos of the attic.

  ‘OK, in that case can you just help me look, please? Any box that might … control the water.’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’ Jack was slowly revving into action.

  The two of them stepped over the threshold, past the mouse, with Jack’s eyes lingering a second on its rigid body.

  ‘Right. I’ll take this side, you take that one.’ Ellen shoved Jack gently towards a tangle of golf clubs. He crouched down to get a better look at them. ‘Jack!’

  ‘Sorry, yes! Flooding.’ He climbed over the golf clubs and started hunting more purposefully.

  The box would be set into a wall, she thought wildly, casting around her own patch. In the corner was a lawn chair, on which rested a half-deflated pool float in the shape of a slice of pizza, and a decommissioned Slush Puppie machine. A sheaf of broken picture frames leaned against the wall. And there was the fuse box, above the frames. Hopefully, the two would be near each other? She stepped over the thicket of junk, clutching the wall for balance, while scanning its surface for another box that might control the water. In spite of the fairly wide skylight set into the ceiling, the chaos created a gloomy pall. She couldn’t see anything except the fuse box. Frustration rising like bile, Ellen leaned backwards and called out to Jack.

  ‘Have you found anything yet?’ she asked sharply.

  Jack was still standing near the golf clubs. ‘He’s got a SEGA up here,’ he said, with some envy, pointing at a grey plastic shell in another corner of the attic.

  ‘Jack!’

  Catching her tone, his face dropped, and then – was that a light-bulb moment of his own she was witnessing? – he spoke solemnly. ‘We should go and get Alexa.’

  Besides being Ellen’s best friend of almost a decade, Alexa – bright and considerate, with shoulder-length blonde hair that fell just so – was also the de facto leader of the house. She had three younger siblings, four dogs and three cats, not to mention nearly twenty years’ experience handling two parents who could not be in the same room together. Consequently, she was good in a crisis.

  ‘Yes, we should.’ Alexa would know what to do. She would also, effortlessly, take charge, relieving Ellen of the burden of doing so. ‘I’m going to go get her.’ Ellen negotiated her way through the obstacle course of boxes again. ‘I’ll be two seconds. While I’m down there, can you have a look for the water box, please? It must be here somewhere,’ she added, uncertainly.

  As Ellen hurtled down the stairs, she recalled an occasion when she had watched with fascination as Jack, slowly and methodically, devoured an entire 300ml tub of crème fraîche after dinner. When she asked him why he’d eaten it, he looked nonplussed and said he’d thought it was a yoghurt. Still, perhaps he’d unearth the right box by mistake, Ellen thought, like that theory about a witless monkey with a typewriter eventually writing the complete works of Shakespeare.

  Feeling the tingle of adrenaline in her limbs, Ellen rapped loudly and insistently on Alexa’s door. Alexa, like most people who didn’t come home and make themselves a vodka tonic nightcap, probably wouldn’t mind being woken up. Ellen didn’t think she’d gone out last night – and 8.16 a.m. was fairly late for Alexa. This different approach to things like lie-ins (see also: tidying up) was probably why Alexa was a civil servant and Ellen worked in communications for a CBD tampon company.

  There was no answer on her first go. Ellen rapped again, even more insistently. She leaned her head forward, listening for sounds of movement. On the third try, she heard the murmur of voices. Plural?! Last night’s white wine quickened her pulse again. She noticed that she was now holding her breath.