SEVEN DAYS by Silence Welder

was tense, especially as she didn't know what to expect at the other end. She was relying on her neighbour Lisa to be home and to be alone; otherwise she didn't know where she would go.
    She hadn't made much effort to make friends since she'd moved to Walthamstow. Rather, she had thrown herself into her work and let all other things slide, particularly herself and her needs. On reflection, it was an odd thing to have made herself subservient to faxes and figures and phone calls and filing. She knew the part numbers of over three hundred products off by heart, but she could count her friends on one hand. Four fingers, in fact, if it turned out that she had also ruined her friendship with Peter.
    Exhausted, she shut her eyes, but she was too cold and too hungry to sleep, so she counted the stops until she was home.
    * * * *
    She passed under scaffolding as she exited the new Walthamstow Central station exit, which was open but as yet unfinished. Rather than the unnerving sense of something about to fall on her head that she normally felt, she now succumbed to a wave of excitement as she remembered her experiences in the gallery. She bit them back, however, partly because she didn't want to feel like this in a public place and partly because Mark had turned out to be the worm in the apple.
    Her flat was upstairs in a row of houses that were exactly the same except for the colour of their doors. She thought that it would be better if people were allowed to express themselves more freely. Why shouldn't they paint the façades of their houses pink or green or yellow or blue, with stripes or stars, or stencils like Banksy?
    She didn't approve of graffiti, but she had to admit that she had glanced at some inside the gallery and their simplicity and even their recalcitrance had appealed to something in her, had called out to that new thing that Mark had not so much discovered as uncovered.
    She snorted at the thought that she might try to be rebellious. She had never been rebellious. That kind of behaviour, that level of bravery, had always been for others.
    Until now?
    She tried the mental trick of mustering a smile even though she didn't feel like it, but she could not. Her smiles over the dinner table had been acts of contrition, negotiation, suggestion and acceptance. They had been carefully controlled. The last true smile to surface, whether she liked it or not, had been at the gallery, in the bookshop, as Mark told her that he was jealous of Peter.
    He was right to be jealous. Though they had had a good time together, he was nothing on Peter. Honesty counted for a lot in her book, even if it hurt to hear the truth.
    Across the road from her, three council houses were undergoing window and roof repairs. Builders had erected scaffolding and now the metal frame stood in front of the houses like the beginnings of a cage.
    Was that her meeting it halfway? Was that really what she saw? What she felt?
    The soles of her feet, bruised and black, dragged on the pavement.
    As she approached her flat, she admitted that she did feel trapped at home, but it was still where she wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world. It was the only place that was safe, except she didn't even have the key to let herself in.
    The light was on in her neighbour's window and Judy was heading past her own flat, towards her neighbour's door, when she noticed movement in the small yard of her property.
    A man who had been sitting on her step stood now and stretched, yawning loudly.
    It was ‘Mark’.
    “I didn't mean to scare you,” he said.
    He had her leather wallet and held it up in front of her like a prize at a carnival.
    “Give me that,” she said and snatched it from him.
    She opened it up to check that its contents were still there.
    “I think you’re looking for the words ‘thank you’,” said Mark, ”And they’re not in your wallet.”
    “If it wasn't for you,” Judy informed him, “I wouldn't have forgotten my wallet in the first