“Who can name ten films with letters in them?” he said.

“Morris!” I said furiously.

“Letter from an Unknown Woman,” said Graham.

“Letters from Three Women,” said Duncan.

“The Letter,” said Fred.

“This is too easy,” said Morris. “Ten films with letters in them that don’t have ‘letter’ in the title.”

“Like what?”

“Well… like Casablanca, for example.”

“There aren’t letters in Casablanca.”

“There are.”

“There aren’t.”

The serious conversation was over.

After that I stopped even reading them. Some I could recognize just by the writing on the envelope, so I didn’t even bother to open them. Others I glanced at cursorily and chucked into the cardboard box with the rest. They weren’t even funny anymore. A few were sad, a few obscene, and most were simply tedious.

If I wanted a reminder of the derangement around me I only needed to look out of the window, the frame of which was rotting, incidentally. Young men in beat-up cars, leaning on their horns, faces red with rage. Solitary old women with their baskets on wheels, stumbling through the crowds, muttering to themselves. The winos who sat in the doorway of the boarded-up shop a few doors down from me, smelling of piss and whiskey, with their unbuttoned trousers and their skewed leers.

Madness was coming through the door as well, in the shape of prospective buyers of the flat. There was one man, about fifty perhaps, very small with cauliflower ears and a dragging limp, who insisted on kneeling on the floor and knocking against the skirting boards, like a doctor checking a patient for a chest infection. I stood ineffectually beside him, wincing at the music pounding into the flat from the pub. Or the young woman, probably about my age, with dozens of silver studs around the rims of her ears in a bumpy ridge, who brought her three huge smelly dogs into the flat while she looked round. The thought of what the flat would be like after a week with them in residence made my stomach heave. There was hardly room for a person. One of them ate my vitamin tablets off the table and another lay by the front door, making horrible smells.

Most of the visitors stayed only a few minutes, just long enough not to seem rude, before beating a retreat. A few didn’t mind being rude. Couples sometimes talked loudly to each other about what they thought.

Perhaps on superficial, casual acquaintance, Guy was more like a normal member of the human race. But due to his failure to sell my flat, we were becoming long-term associates. He was always smartly dressed in a variety of suits and colorful ties, some of which had cartoon characters on them. However hot the weather became, he didn’t sweat. Or rather he sweated very discreetly. There would be just one single drop running down the side of his face. He smelled of shaving lotion and mouthwash. I would have assumed my flat had become a symbol of failure that he would have avoided. It wasn’t as if it needed an expert guide. But he kept accompanying viewers, even at awkward times, in the evening or on weekends.

So maybe it should have been less of a surprise when, after a thin, anxious-looking woman had scuttled out, he looked me deep in the eyes and said:

“We must get together for a drink one evening, Zoe.”

I should have come up with some monumentally savage put-down reflecting the deep hatred I had for him and his fake tan and his infuriating euphemisms, but I couldn’t think of anything, so instead I blurted out:

“I think we should lower the price.”

The man who had come to look round on the evening of my not-moving party returned with a tape measure, a notepad, and a camera. It was early evening and Fred was away on some strange regional TV assignment in the Yorkshire Dales, spending thirty-six hours transforming a large and overgrown garden for a program to be shown in about a year’s time. He’d rung me from a pub, his voice thickened by alcohol and lust, and told me how he was imagining the things he would do to me when he returned. Not what I needed to hear: I was struggling with the literacy hour report on the computer. I was trying to produce a pie chart. It had seemed so easy when Duncan, or was it Morris, had done it. The sentence “A type 19 error has occurred” kept flashing on my screen. So I smoked and cursed while the man who might or might not buy my flat poked around. He measured floor space, pulled open cupboards, lifted up the tatty rug, lifted Fred’s ghastly wall hanging and inspected the damp patch that seemed to be spreading in spite of the hot, dry weather, turned on the tap in the bathroom and stood for a minute or so watching the wretched splatter of water. When he went into the bedroom and I heard the sound of drawers being opened, I followed him.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking things out,” he replied, quite unconcerned, gazing into my jumble of knickers and bras and laddered tights.

I slammed the drawer shut and went into the kitchen. I was hungry but when I opened the fridge all I found there was one bag of ancient spring onions, one white roll with mold growing on it, an empty brown bag with a cherry pit in it, and a can of Coke. In the freezer compartment was a bag of prawns, probably well past their sell-by date, and a small bag of peas. So I drank the Coke, standing by the fridge, then returned to the computer and wrote: “We aim to produce not just competent readers, but interested readers. A carefully considered Whole School Curriculum Plan ensures that all pupils reinforce…” Oh fuck. This wasn’t what I became a teacher for. Soon I’d be writing words like “satisfactory attainment levels” and “inputting.”

I put three multivitamin tablets in my mouth and crunched them crossly. Then I picked up the homework-if that’s not too grand a word for it-that I had set the class to and brought home that evening. I had asked them all to draw one of their favorite stories. Some of the pictures were pretty incomprehensible. Benjamin’s zigzag pattern in green and black was “The Big Bad Wolf.” Abstract art, I supposed. Jordane had drawn a round pea-green circle, nothing else, for “The Princess and the Pea.” Lots of them had done pictures of Disney films: Bambi and Snow White and things like that. I went through them and wrote encouraging remarks on them and then put them all in a folder under the table.

“I’m going now.”

The man stood in the doorway, camera round his neck. He was tapping his pen against his teeth and gazing at me. I saw that the bald spot in the center of his head was a cruel pink, and his hairy wrists were sunburned as well. Good.

“Oh, right.”

Not a word about coming back. Bastard.

I left a few minutes after him, to go and see a film with Louise and a few of her friends I had never met before. It was lovely sitting in the dark with a group of women, eating popcorn and giggling. It was so safe.

I came back quite late. It was dark, starless. I pushed open the door and there was a letter on my doormat; someone must have pushed it through the letterbox. Neat italic writing, black ink. It didn’t look like another nutter. Standing in the doorway, I opened the letter.

Dear Zoe, When does someone like you, young and pretty and healthy, become frightened of dying, I wonder. You smoke (there’s a nicotine stain on your finger by the way). Sometimes you take drugs. You eat bad food. You stay up late and the next morning you don’t get hangovers. Probably you think that you will live forever, that you will be young for a long while yet.

Zoe, with your white teeth and your one small dimple when you smile, you will not be young for much longer. You have been warned.

Are you scared, Zoe? I am watching you. I am not going to go away.