My first Saturday in the flat, a man (Greg) and a woman (Sophie) invited me to watch television. I had to accept the offer, or they’d think I was hostile. I couldn’t focus on their show, so I sat between them on the couch and mentally talked myself through what I would have to do to murder Seán, as in the process before/ during/after. There were timeless methods and modern ones. In this fantasy, Seán hadn’t done anything to me. I wanted nothing that might invite people to sympathise with me, the killer. I didn’t want them judging me, whatever they concluded.

‘How are you finding London?’ said Sophie in an ad break.

‘It’s’, I said – and then the break ended. I wasn’t sure if she still wanted me to finish my sentence now the show had resumed, so I said nothing.

That night I lay in bed and couldn’t sleep. On my phone I looked up Victorian female serial killers. The historical distance provided escapism, also logistical clarity. It was easier to kill back then. You could imagine yourself doing it, if so inclined.

I imagined being as bad as those women. I wanted to deserve so little that any mistreatment would make sense. The killers’ names – the Ogress of Reading, Jill the Ripper – placed them outside compassion. I didn’t like to have my circumstances and beliefs at odds. I couldn’t change anything that Seán had done to me, not now and not while it had been happening. But I could picture myself as someone who’d asked for it.

*

My London job was in data entry. The ideal candidate description had read: Experience entering data. I interviewed for it three weeks after arriving, when I’d exhausted my savings. The first question was: Describe yourself. I told them I was precise.

‘Precise about what?’ the interviewer said.

‘Everything,’ I said. For instance, ‘Describe yourself ’ was a prompt, not a question.

‘Tell me, Theresa,’ the interviewer said, ‘how do you do on teams?’

‘I love working with people.’ I contracted the relevant muscles to make a smile. ‘I love bouncing ideas off them.’

The interviewer looked wary that I might have an idea presently in hand, and fearful that I’d launch it at his head.

They gave me the job and I started three days later. The office was in a dark basement just south of the Thames. There were no assigned desks, but I chose a wobbly one in the corner on the first day, and came early every morning after to claim it. I didn’t know what might happen if I sat somewhere else, but nor did I want to find out. In the training they’d warned that ‘some’ workers came to find data entry tedious, but I liked the repetition. I got to know the carpet, a murky navy paisley thing, and the feel of it rubbing against my shoe. The computer smelled of plastic, and the hall of disinfectant. My keyboard had big clacky keys that were smooth and shiny in the middle.

I rarely understood the data. I didn’t ask my boss. I wouldn’t degrade myself like that. He was twice my age, late forties or so. On my third day on the job, he touched my knee. I let him – or I sat there and said nothing, so I supposed I was letting him. He did it again a few days later, and then again at similar intervals until I came to expect it. Like my grimly claimable desk, my boss’s hands were an ongoing reality that I accepted as routine, knowing it was better than many of the contingencies that might replace the known event.

I needed a job or I’d die. That meant it wasn’t worth stating this about any job in particular. I went to the basement every day and was nice to my boss, and so were my colleagues. We all acted like we weren’t working to stay alive. At 1 pm we ate lunch at our desks, and we all said things to the person next to us.

‘Lovely day,’ my colleagues said when there was a hint of sun.

‘Miserable day,’ they said when it drizzled.

Day, I wanted to say. Day and day and day. Days for days, if you’ll permit a wag her frippery. I knew more words than I could pull off saying aloud.

During these days, the office environment – distant male voices, dropped pens for some reason – made me smell Seán’s cologne or hear his footsteps. When that happened, I listed next steps. There was the desk, and then turning on the computer, and then my lunch break and then more data. These were tasks. My activities after work were tasks as well, because I put them on a list. Replying to a text was work, and watching TV with my flatmates was work, and work itself was really the easiest part of the day because at least I could call it work.

*

Seán and I first met as engineering students in Dublin. We started dating when I was twenty-one, and I left at twenty-four. He graduated with a masters and a job in industry, while I acquired a third class degree and just enough maths to compete with automation – until the robots caught up. When we started dating his friends told me he had his troubles, which in practice meant that I was expected to make him one of mine. He was impatient when I interfered with us having sex by e.g. not wanting to. I don’t know why I stayed with him. I supposed his contempt for me seemed to commend his judgement. The worse men thought of me back then, the more I respected their opinion. If he had told me I was useless and I should kill myself, I would have thought he was a hero. I know because he did say that, and I did think that.

Besides ‘useless’ he called me ‘pedantic’, including in contexts where ‘stickler’ would have been a better word. I couldn’t tell him so without proving that he’d been right to deem me a stickler, albeit through the semantically flawed avenue of calling me pedantic.

The week before he pushed me down the stairs back in Dublin, he called me both useless and pedantic in the same conversation. I thought about both words, and he asked what I was thinking.

I said: ‘Bees.’

He said: ‘You what?’

‘The bees are dying, and that’s one reason we’re fucked.’

‘What are you on about, we’re fucked?’

‘Landlords,’ I said. ‘The climate.’

‘The fuck’s that got to do with bees?’

During our last few weeks together in Dublin, there’d also been a secret: He hadn’t known I was pregnant. Now, when I stood too still in one place on the streets of London, I started thinking I should have told him about the foetus and he wouldn’t have pushed me downstairs. Then I thought: Maybe if I’d told him, he’d have pushed me harder.

When I looked at anything for too long, I thought of him snatching my phone off me, or him kneeing my legs apart, or actually just him. Once he was in mind, I knew if I looked around he’d be there. I kept walking and kept moving my gaze.

London helped me distract myself. The Tube was fast, or slow in a way where the delay seemed like the most pressing difficulty in my life. One Monday morning, a man on the train nudged me until I took out my headphones.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I said cheer up.’

I was puzzled.

He expanded: ‘It might not happen.’

‘Okay,’ I said. I put my headphones back in.

Sameness helped me cope. There was a stationary shop near my flatshare. I never bought anything, but I liked that it didn’t change from day to day. It stocked patterned and plain and textured paper, notebooks in the corner and a display of pens in the middle. The first time I went in, I said hello, but neither staff member acknowledged me. I preferred it like that. If people saw me, then they’d notice if I moved the wrong parts of my face, or held my body wrong, or used wrong intonation or said wrong words. I wanted to pass through London without thinking about how to position myself and how my voice should sound. The stationery shop accommodated my wish to be ignored, probably because I didn’t look as though I could afford anything there with my lank hair and my grubby coat.

Work usually finished too late to go to the stationary shop afterwards, but I went when I could. When the place was closed, I looked in the window. They left the lights on in the display. This seemed a further commitment to sameness.

*

I’d deleted my social media. I tried to make a new Facebook under ‘fdsahjkafds sadjlhasf ’, which the security bot did not believe was a real person’s name, so then I called her Grace Molloy. I used her to check if Seán was still in Dublin. Then he came up in Grace’s suggested friends, so I deactivated that account, too.

When the doorbell rang, I thought it was him. When the phone rang: him, too. I dealt with this by never answering either, explaining it to my flatmates as a quirk. ‘I don’t answer the door,’ I said. ‘I don’t answer my phone.’ I was practically Sally Bowles.

It took time slash money to feed and wash myself, and for what? I entered data in the basement to pay for a bed and supplies, which I used to take care of myself so that I could return to the office and do more work.

My boss was still touching my knee. There was no mounting drama to it. It was what he did.

‘I’d compliment your lipstick,’ he said one Friday, ‘but of course in this climate. . .’

The next Tuesday: ‘If times hadn’t changed so much, I’d say that skirt is rather short.’

A week later: ‘Of course you can’t say this nowadays, but those trousers – .’

There was a great deal that men couldn’t say anymore, and an abundance of phrases that allowed them to say it anyway.

A few weeks into the job, a coworker asked me about my day and I mentioned I had a contagious skin infection. I said it loudly so my boss would hear. He still touched my knee later that day while I was sitting at my desk, though. He leaned in and asked me how I’d gotten on with a new type of spreadsheet.

‘Fine,’ I said.

Until he’d left, I imagined how I might steer a plane to make cloud shapes in the sky. Would I visually map my route while I steered the plane, I wondered, or would I plan the coordinates in advance, and then mechanically follow them while doing the actual flying. Would it feel, basically, like a creative project. I knew if I looked it up later then I’d remember my boss touching me. This seemed a shame, because I was curious.

*

If someone was always in the apartment when my flatmates were, then the flatmates concluded that this person never left. This was unfair, because maybe that person only arrived home two minutes before the flatmates, and left two later than them the next morning, falsely suggesting their omnipresence in the flat. They could actually be spending a lot of time outside, and no one would give them the credit.

I went and sat in a pub nearby, the Friday night after I moved in. I felt the usual resignation when I did something that I wasn’t enjoying, but that I would still do henceforth whenever the first event triggered it. I didn’t always cling to routine in terms of each day being the exact same, but I had my domino effects, where if I did a particular thing then I also did whatever followed. I knew that the next time I needed to get out of the flat, I’d go back to this rancid pub.

My coaster had an etching of Winston Churchill on it. The beer ring around him looked like a target.

A woman nearby was showing a man something on her phone. She laughed and slapped his arm while he spoke. He looked puzzled by the mix of physical reproach and verbal encouragement, and settled on patting her thigh like a lump of clay he was testing to see whether it had dried.

‘Girls in London,’ he said. He and the woman both looked at least thirty. ‘Girls in London will say they don’t want anything serious, but they’ve plans for you.’

I couldn’t hear the woman’s response. This probably meant that the man was talking too loudly for her, and she was trying to let him know by lowering her own volume.

‘But I have plans for you,’ he said, still loudly. ‘So we’re even.’

She did not look interested to hear his plans, or at any rate seemed uncertain that her eardrums were equal to absorbing the attendant reverberations.

I decided to walk home. Outside it was dark and cold. I knew statistically that men in your home were more dangerous than on the street. In my head I argued back that this only made sense as a consideration if I were choosing between men in one location versus another. Really the statistics said it was best to avoid all men, including by taking a taxi instead of walking. But what about the man in the taxi, I said back, and what about the men on the Tube, if that’s your next question.

I looked up Victorian female killers on my phone while I walked. Many were baby farmers, women who adopted unwanted infants in exchange for money. Out of malice or staunch business sense, they gave the babies drugs and alcohol to suppress their appetites and their cries. Godfrey’s Cordial, or ‘Mother’s Friend’, was popular: an opium syrup. High on narcotics, the children didn’t feel hungry. They starved in a stupor. The officials recorded it as ‘failure to thrive’.

I imagined someone who’d drug infants, and I thought of what else that person could do. I thought about why someone might want to kill you, and why they mightn’t care what happened in your head until you died.

*

My second month in the flat, the shower broke. The flatmates and I had a roundtable evening discussion about what to tell the landlord. I’d moved in last, which they seemed to find relevant in terms of whose fault it was. Also, just to note, the man who’d had my room previously had entered more fully into the house spirit. He’d been up for Bake-Off and a glass or two. I wanted to say I couldn’t drink alcohol because the smell reminded me of my boyfriend raping me, but I felt this would do little to lighten the mood. It would set Greg off about how he’d said all along they should find a bloke for the room to keep the balance.

‘Ilya hates me,’ I said. Ilya was the landlord.

‘Ilya doesn’t hate you,’ Sophie said.

‘I sent him my rent on PayPal and I forgot they’d charge him a transaction fee, and now he thinks I scammed him,’ I said. ‘He yelled at me in Russian.’

‘You shouldn’t worry what people think of you,’ Greg said.

I felt faulty; company didn’t heal me. My own mind was a hellscape, and I knew I should have been grateful to step outside of it. But I still had to use my brain to interact. This meant I risked leaning on the wrong nerve cells in such a way that I’d remember Dublin. It was like having an indeterminate ache, and being afraid to move in case doing so specified and intensified the pain. Every time I contorted myself to make the right expressions, or fished for the right phraseology, I knew I might hit on memories.

*

The skin infection I’d mentioned near my boss was really there. Red stings spread in crevices – the crook of my arm and the inside of my thighs. When I scratched the red areas, scales came off. On my scalp, the flakes buried themselves in the knots and matted clumps of my hair. I never used a hairbrush. You just had to brush again the next day.