The Woman in Cabin 10(3)

I had a jolting flash of myself battering at the lock with a nail file and a pair of scissors. Judah was always teasing about using the proper tools for the job—you know, not undoing a screw with the tip of a dinner knife, or prizing off a bike tire using a garden trowel. Only last weekend he’d laughed at my attempt to fix my showerhead with duct tape, and spent a whole afternoon painstakingly mending it with epoxy resin. He was away in Ukraine and I couldn’t think about him right now. If I did, I’d cry, and if I cried now, I might never stop.

“Oh, you poor love.”

I swallowed.

“Mrs. Johnson, thank you for the tea—but I really came to ask, can I use your phone? He took my mobile, so I’ve got no way of calling the police.”

“Of course, of course. Drink your tea, and then it’s over there.” She indicated a doily-covered side table, with what was probably the last turn-dial phone in London outside an Islington vintage-retro boutique. Obediently I finished my tea and then I picked up the phone. For a moment my finger hovered over the nine, but then I sighed. He was gone. What could they reasonably do now? It was no longer an emergency, after all.

Instead, I dialed 101 for nonemergency response and waited to be put through.

And I sat and thought about the insurance I didn’t have, and the reinforced lock I hadn’t installed, and the mess tonight had become.


I was still thinking about that, hours later, as I watched the emergency locksmith replace the crappy bolt-on latch of my front door with a proper deadlock, and listened to his lecture on home security and the joke that was my back door.

“That panel’s nuffing but MDF, love. It’d take one kick to bash it in. Want me to show you?”

“No,” I said hastily. “No, thanks. I’ll get it fixed. You don’t do doors, do you?”

“Nah, but I got a mate who does. I’ll give you his number before I go. Meantime, you get your hubby to whack a good piece of eighteen-mil plywood over that panel. You don’t want a repeat of last night.”

“No,” I agreed. Understatement of the century.

“Mate in the police says a quarter of all burglaries are repeats. Same guys come back for more.”

“Great,” I said thinly. Just what I needed to hear.

“Eighteen-mil. Want me to write it down for your husband?”

“No, thanks. I’m not married.” And even in spite of my ovaries, I can remember a simple two-digit number.

“Aaaah, right, gotcha. Well, there you go, then,” he said, as if that proved something. “This doorframe ain’t nothing to write home about, neither. You want one of them London bars to reinforce it. Otherwise you can have the best lock in the business, but if they kick it out the frame you’re back in the same place as before. I got one in the van that might fit. Do you know them things I’m talking about?”

“I know what they are,” I said wearily. “A piece of metal that goes over the lock, right?” I suspected he was milking me for all the business he could get, but I didn’t care at this point.

“Tell you what”—he stood up, shoving his chisel in his back pocket—“I’ll do the London bar, and I’ll chuck in a piece of ply over the back door for free. I got a bit in the van about the right size. Chin up, love. He ain’t getting back in this way, at any rate.”

For some reason the words weren’t reassuring.


After he’d gone, I made myself a tea and paced the flat. I felt like Delilah after a tomcat broke in through the cat flap and pissed in the hallway—she had prowled every room for hours, rubbing herself up against bits of furniture, peeing into corners, reclaiming her space.

I didn’t go as far as peeing on the bed, but I felt the same sense of space invaded, a need to reclaim what had been violated. Violated? said a sarcastic little voice in my head. Puh-lease, you drama queen.

But I did feel violated. My little flat felt ruined—soiled and unsafe. Even describing it to the police had felt like an ordeal—yes, I saw the intruder; no, I can’t describe him. What was in the bag? Oh, just, you know, my life: money, mobile phone, driver’s license, medication, pretty much everything of use from my mascara right through to my travel card.

The brisk impersonal tone of the police operator’s voice still echoed in my head.

“What kind of phone?”

“Nothing valuable,” I said wearily. “Just an old iPhone. I can’t remember the model, but I can find out.”

“Thanks. Anything you can remember in terms of the exact make and serial number might help. And you mentioned medication—what kind, if you don’t mind me asking?”

I was instantly on the defensive.

“What’s my medical history got to do with this?”

“Nothing.” The operator was patient, irritatingly so. “It’s just some pills have got a street value.”

I knew the anger that flooded through me at his questions was unreasonable—he was only doing his job. But the burglar was the person who’d committed the crime. So why did I feel like I was the one being interrogated?

I was halfway to the living room with my tea when there was a banging at the door—so loud in the silent, echoing flat that I tripped and then froze, half standing, half crouching in the doorway.

I had a horrible jarring flash of a hooded face, of hands in latex gloves.