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out of and forgotten about. An old black Remington typewriter stood on a desk in the corner, and all around it were piledtextbooks and papers and bulging ring binders, almost covering up the telephone, an old-fashioned model with a metal winder on the side for connecting up to the operator. There was a cup there, too, containing the dried and cracked dregs of coffee that even yet gave off a faint, bitter aroma. April was a coffee addict and drank it all day long, half the night, too, if she was on a late shift. Phoebe stood and looked about. She felt she must not touch anything, convinced that if she did, the thing she touched would crumble under her fingers; suddenly everything was breakable here. The smell of the week-old coffee, and of other things— face powder, dust, slept-in bed-clothes—that mingled, stale smell that bedrooms always have, made her feel nauseous.
     
Strangely, the bed was made, and to a hospital standard of neatness, the blanket and the sheets tucked in all round and the pillow as flat and smooth as a bank of snow.
     
Jimmy spoke behind her. “Look at this.” A narrow plywood door with louvered panels led into the tiny, windowless bathroom. He was in there, bending over the hand basin. He looked over his shoulder at her, and even as she came forward she felt herself wanting to hang back. The hand basin was yellowed with age and had stains the color of verdigris under each of the two taps. Jimmy was pointing to a faint, narrow, brownish streak that ran from the overflow slot at the back almost to the plug hole. “That,” he said, “is blood.”
     
They stood and stared, hardly breathing. But was it so remarkable, after all, a tiny bit of blood, in a bathroom? Yet to Phoebe it was as if an innocuously smiling person had turned to her and opened a palm to show her something dreadful. She was feeling definitely sick now. Images from the past teemed in her mind, flickering as in an old newsreel. A car on a snowy headland and a young man with a knife. An old man, mute and furious, lying on a narrow bed between two tall windows. A silver-haired figure impaled, still twitching, on black railings. She would have tosit down, but where, on what? Anything she leaned her weight on might open under her and release horrors. She felt as if her innards were turning to liquid, and suddenly she had a piercing headache and seemed to be staring into an impenetrable red fog. Then, unaccountably, she was half sitting, half lying in the bathroom doorway with the louvered door at her back, and one of her shoes had come off, and Jimmy was squatting beside her, holding her hand.
     
“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.
     
Was she? She still had that piercing headache, as if a red-hot wire had been pushed in through the center of her forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said, or tried to say. “I must have—I must—”
     
“You fainted,” Jimmy said. He was looking at her closely, with what seemed to her a faintly skeptical light, as if he half suspected her swoon had been a pretense, a bit of attention-seeking histrionics.
     
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
     
She struggled up and stumbled forward on her knees and huddled over the lavatory bowl with her hands braced on the seat. Her stomach heaved, but nothing happened save a dry retching. When had she eaten last? For a moment she could not remember. She drew back and sat down suddenly on the floor, her legs folding themselves awkwardly under her.
     
Jimmy went out to make tea in the alcove next to the living room that passed for a kitchen, from where she heard him filling the kettle and taking crockery out of the cupboard. She wanted to lie down on the bed but could not bring herself to do it— it was April’s bed, after all, and besides, the severity with which it had been made up was forbidding— and instead sat on the chair in front of the piled-high desk, shaking a little still, with a hand to her face. The pain behind her forehead had