Seventy-Two Hours

The lights go at six, and the noise of the whole block going with them is the strangest part: a hundred extractor fans stopping at once, then a car alarm, then nothing but the heat coming in through the open windows.

Forty-one degrees at six in the evening. The flat is a brick oven with the door shut. The fridge hums down into silence. By half past seven the stairwell smells of hot concrete and the pipes are groaning.

At nine there is knocking, and it is not a knock so much as a shoulder against the door, three times.

Vera is on the landing with a wet towel round her neck and her keys in her fist, dark hair stuck flat to her forehead, and she does not say hello.

"Sixth floor's an oven. It's forty-four up there, I've had a thermometer on it." She wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist. "Your tank's on this roof and the key's on your hook and the pipes still run cold, so we're coming in. All three of us. Argue in a minute."

Noor is behind her, smaller, red to the ears, holding a fan with both hands and a folded sheet under one arm. "Sorry," she says. "Sorry, this is sorry."

Cass comes up the last of the stairs backwards, dragging a mattress by one corner, and grins at the doorway like a woman arriving at a festival. "Hi. Nice building. Great aircon you've got going."

Vera has already stepped past into the hallway and is looking at the kitchen, at the sink, at the bath, doing sums.

"Bath first, before the pressure drops," she says. "Then we're filling the bottles. Nobody opens the fridge, it's a cupboard now. And the roof " she turns round, and holds out her hand for the key "is at eleven, when the concrete's given up some of it."

Cass drops the mattress flat in the middle of the living room and looks up at you, entirely unbothered. "Where do you want us?"

Half past ten and the living room is a camp: three mattresses at angles, a sheet over the window, bottles filled and lined up along the skirting, the fan pointed at nobody because the fan is useless and everyone knows it.

Vera has the thermometer out again and is squinting at it. "Thirty-eight. Inside. It's dropped four degrees, that's the windows being open."

"It's still thirty-eight," Noor says, from the floor.

"It was forty-two. Four degrees is four degrees."

Cass, flat on her back on the middle mattress with her arms out, says, "This is the worst holiday I've ever been on," and then, without moving: "Roof at eleven?"

Vera looks at the clock, then at you. "Roof at eleven. You've got the key."

Midnight and the roof is the only cool thing in the city.

Tarmac and tank and a low parapet, and the whole district below with no lights in it at all, just a black grid of streets and the sky enormous above it. Somewhere six streets over, somebody else is on their own roof and a radio is playing.

Cass is up on the parapet with her feet over the edge and her head back. Noor is sat on an upturned bucket with the sheet round her shoulders. Vera is standing, arms folded, looking down at the street like it has personally offended her.

"Forty-one again tomorrow," she says. "The news said Thursday. Three days of it, they said Thursday." She rubs her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I've got a shift on Friday. If the power's not back, I've got a shift on Friday anyway."

Noor shifts on the bucket. "It's nice up here. Sorry. It's just it's nice."

Cass turns round, grinning in the dark. "It's the nicest place in the whole city tonight and it's ours, because we know the man with the key." She pats the parapet beside her. "Come and sit down, both of you. Vera, sit down. You look like a police sketch."

Half past two in the afternoon on the second day and the bath has been used so many times the water is blood-warm and there is nothing left to do but lie in it.

Vera has her forearm over her eyes. Noor is sat on the floor beside the tub with her back against the porcelain, hair up, a wet flannel on the back of her neck. Cass is in the bath with her knees up and her head tipped back against the rim, and she has been talking for eleven minutes without stopping, because it is too hot to be quiet.

"—and I said, well, if it's not there by Thursday then it's not my problem, and he said Noor, are you listening? Noor's not listening."

"I'm listening," Noor says, without opening her eyes.

"You're not." Cass turns her head. "You're not listening either, are you." A pause, and her grin changes. "You've gone a bit glassy. Is it the heat or is it the bath?"

Vera lifts her arm off her eyes and looks at you properly, and something in her face shifts from tired to assessing. "Both," she says. "It's both. It's the second day, that's when it gets to people." She sits up. "How bad is it?"

Three in the morning on the third night, and nobody is asleep and nobody is pretending to be.

The window is open on nothing. The fan turns. Somewhere below, a dog is barking at the dark and has been for an hour. The sheets are all on the floor. Cass is on her side facing the wall with her knees drawn up. Noor is sat against the sofa with her arms round them, awake, watching the ceiling. Vera is flat on her back with one arm thrown over her head, and she is the one who says it, because she always is.

"Seventy hours," she says, to the ceiling. "Seventy hours and no sleep. I'm not even hot any more. That's the worst part, I've gone past hot."

"Mmn," Cass says, into the wall.

Noor, quietly, without looking away from the ceiling: "I keep thinking about my flat. Up there. All my things in the dark."

Vera turns her head on the floor and looks at you across the room, and the look is long and steady and slightly unfocused with tiredness. "Say something," she says. "Anything. It's too quiet."

Six o'clock on the third evening and the fridge starts humming.

It is such a small sound. Everyone stops dead. Then the extractor fan in the kitchen kicks in, and the lights come back all at once and the television says something cheerful to an empty room, and the whole block comes back up around you with a hundred fans and two car alarms and somebody shouting, delighted, two floors down.

Vera stands in the middle of the living room with a bottle in her hand, looking at the lamp.

"That's it, then," she says. Flat. Then, after a second, and not quite as flat: "That's it."

Noor is already folding the sheet off the window, and she has gone quiet in the way that means she is working out how to say something.

Cass does not move from the mattress at all. She looks up at the ceiling, at the light, and then at the stairs through the open door, and says, "Six flights."

The stairwell door is standing open. Up is a flat with all their things in it, dark for three days, and no water tank on the roof.

Day one, ten past nine, and Vera has the sink running into the bath and her sleeves pushed up and she is doing sums out loud.

"Bath, then the bottles, then the bucket. Pressure'll go by tomorrow, it always does. Nobody opens the fridge." She turns the tap off and looks at the level and then at the three of you standing about uselessly in the hallway. "Right. Beds. Living room, all of us, on the floor, near the window. Nobody sleeps in a bedroom, it's a sauna."

Noor, holding her fan, says, "I've got a sheet, if it's clean, I brought it."

"Good. Window." Vera wipes her hands on her shorts and finally looks up. "Cass, mattress. You're on the far side, you kick."

Cass, who has been leaning in the doorway enjoying the whole thing, says, "I do not kick," and then, cheerfully, to you: "I kick."