City Girl in Training. Liz Fielding

was beginning to realise that I’d seriously underrated my mother—there would have been a torch handily placed on top of the fuse-box, along with spare fuse wire.

      ‘Mum,’ I said, lifting my face in the darkness so that she could hear me better. ‘I swear I’ll never call you a fussy old bat ever again.’ Not that I ever had—well, not to her face. ‘I’ll wear warm underwear without being nagged, replace my attack alarm first thing tomorrow and never, ever go out without a clean handkerchief…just, please, please, let there be a torch with the fuse box.’ I groped in the darkness.

      There was no torch.

      I was released from the warm underwear promise—not that it mattered because the way my life was going no one was ever going to see it in situ—but I was still in the dark. Fortunately, the cloak cupboard was right by the front door and it occurred to me that, since I was now living in a luxury apartment, I could borrow some light from the well-lit communal hallway.

      Pleased with myself, I opened the door and screamed again—this time with no holds barred—as a tall figure, silhouetted in black against the light, reached out for me.

      Sound-blasted back by my scream, he retreated into the light and I belatedly recognised the neighbour I least wanted to meet. And he hadn’t been reaching out to grab my throat as my lurid imagination had suggested, but to ring the doorbell.

      It was the first time I’d seen him in full light and there was nothing about him to suggest that my earlier assessment of him had been wrong. He was tall, he was dark. And the way my heart was pumping confirmed that he was, without doubt, dangerous. To my equilibrium, if nothing else.

      But what really held my attention was the large flat carton balanced on the palm of his hand. He might be dangerous but he’d got pizza and my stomach—anticipating the promised cheese on toast—responded with an excited gurgle.

      ‘Yes?’ I demanded, to cover my embarrassment.

      ‘You screamed,’ he said.

      ‘You scared me,’ I snapped back as, for the second time in as many minutes, I waited for my heart to steady. Then, ‘What do you want?’

      ‘Not just now when you opened the door,’ he said, with the careful speech of a man who believed he was dealing with an idiot. ‘You screamed a minute or two ago—’

      A minute or two? It seemed as if I’d been in the dark for hours…

      ‘—and since I saw your friends go out, I thought I’d better make sure you’re not just watching a scary video alone in the dark.’

      ‘Oh,’ I said. It was just as well I wasn’t trying to impress this man. He clearly thought I was a total ditz. ‘Sorry. I didn’t realise the walls were so thin.’

      ‘They’re not.’ He said this with the authority of a man who knew. ‘I was at my door when you—’

      He seemed reluctant to use the word again and I could scarcely blame him. ‘Screamed,’ I said, rescuing him. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. The fuses blew. That’s all.’ All! ‘I was just going to fix them.’

      ‘You know how?’ he said, without bothering to disguise his disbelief.

      I tried to remember that he was being kind. A good neighbour. That he could have just shut his door. ‘They teach girls stuff like that in school these days,’ I assured him.

      ‘Really?’ He seemed unimpressed but he didn’t argue. Didn’t do that ‘I’m a big clever man and you’re just a girl’ thing that most men did. Instead he said, ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’ Which should have been more gratifying than it was. He took a step in the direction of his own front door, then hesitated, turned back. ‘You’ve got spare fuse wire?’

      There had been none where I’d have expected it to be and it occurred to me that I might yet be grateful for his ‘good neighbour’ act.

      ‘I shouldn’t think so for a minute,’ I said. Keeping my smile to myself.

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve only seen your flatmates from a distance. Very decorative, but they didn’t strike me as the practical type.’

      I considered the fragile beauty of Sophie, the cool sophistication of Kate. ‘You may be right,’ I said. Women who looked like that would never need to be practical.

      ‘Why don’t you see if you can find the blown fuse while I fetch some wire?’ he suggested.