text: The longest journey of Marigold's life was four flights of stairs and a corridor. She came home early from work one morning due to a neighbourhood electricity failure. Marigold, a psychology student, was glad of it, because it gave her extra time to progress with her thesis, "Creative Repression as a Mechanism Against Trauma". She knew that she'd probably have a nap first though. Maybe watch a movie. Marigold's mother liked to say that the psychology of procrastination would have been a more appropriate subject for her to cover. Home was apartment 7 on the second floor of a three-storey private building, too large to be a house and too small to be a block of flats. Marigold liked the place very much. Mr. Bailey, the landlord, kept the front garden well-kept and she particular liked the thick vines of ivy growing up the front of the building, passing her bedroom window. For some reason it made her happy every time she saw it. She'd only been there a couple of months, but those neighbours she'd met were friendly, and Mr. Bailey, a small, busy old man who always wore four shiny medals on the lapel of a spotless blazer, lived in a unit on the ground floor himself. Marigold pushed through the front doors and was looking down into her handbag, rooting for her buried keys, as she arrived at the first flight of stairs. A polished shoe entered her vision. Marigold looked up saw Mr. Bailey and gave an in-motion smile/hi as she passed. The phrase "boys and their footballs" popped into her head from nowhere, which was random enough to puzzle her for a second. Up the stairs went Marigold, trainers sinking slightly in the light-green carpet. The carpet was another thing she liked, it made the place feel homely. But she didn't look down at it today. Instead, she looked forward, feeling a strong determination to have a productive afternoon on her project. Specifically, she had a new case study to work in. Winter, 1983, a shoeless teenager found wandering through the streets of Paris with no memory of where he'd come from. After a year of in-patient treatment Christian X had begun to build a life in the community and was becoming a cheerful and gregarious young man. But his continuing therapy pushed him to retrieve his memories. Turned out he was an orphan and former child soldier, and upon remembering this he promptly had a severe nervous breakdown. The question the case highlighted was, should some memories stay repressed? If you see something unthinkable, is it not better to not think about it? Maybe sometimes, when the brain blocks something, it's for our own good. Marigold reached the top of the first flight of stairs, a small landing with a framed photograph on each three walls. All three were black and white and botanical in nature - a daylit jungle scene at ground level, a closeup of a strange flower, and the last was a jungle landscape seen from above. It looked like a thick green rug over the land. As Marigold's shoe pressed into the carpet of the first step of the next flight of stairs and she wondered what it was like below that canopy, what dangers would lurk. A snake slithering behind, a panther pouncing from a shadow. What would happen if she were suddenly transported there, as is? How could she defend herself? Marigold's hand tried to instinctively squeeze the heavy bottle opener on her keychain and she realized that her hand was empty. She hadn't taken it out of her bag. Strange. Marigold reached the first floor and looked left as she passed. There were two flats on either side of the corridor - more like a long landing really - and more framed photographs of a similar nature. Apartment 2 held Tomasz, an accountant of some sort who had helped Marigold carry a bookshelf up to her flat once. In apartment 4 lived Sam, a writer with a cat named Wednesday. Marigold had shared a glass of wine with Sam shortly after moving in and liked her very much. Shame she was moving out soon. When Marigold turned her head back to focus on flight number three, a picture snapped into her mind, a memory clear as a photograph. Strands of Sam's wavy blonde hair venturing into her glass of red wine, the tips floating on the surface before being rescued with a giggle. It was a pleasant moment. So why did icy fear and sadness stab through Marigold's stomach, powerful enough that her next step had a little more of a thud? Her brows furrowed in confusion at the completely unprovoked panic response. Her next step was normal though. And the next. Something strange was happening inside her, her brain fighting something, her body somehow moving smoothly, relaxed and unhurried, an autopilot she'd never felt before, yet her heart thumped violently in her chest. Fourth step, fifth. Looking up she saw the next three photographs waiting for her at the next landing. Marigold had never given them any thought despite seeing daily. She knew they were all pictures taken by Mr. Bailey during his military service long ago, as he'd proudly told her when first she had met him. Now, she really saw for the first time. A twenty-something Mr. Bailey, sweaty and handsome in his dirty army fatigues, posing with a friend beside a table set up outside a tent. On the table were indigenous items: a spear, an axe, some jewellery, an arrangement of fruits, a shrunken head. Flight number four and the pictures were behind her. Her eyes locked on the top step above, a summit beyond which was the safety of her door. Her calm was protected by a wall and something was violently battering at that wall in time with the bashing of her heart, and it was screaming something, four words over and over and over. But she knew that to hear them was death. Step. Step. Step. Finally Marigold achieved the landing and before her was a mirror of the four doors below. She saw the shining silver "7" on her door, second on the left. Ten paces away. Her legs felt like jelly but they walked, and her eyes, her existence, locked onto that blessed number. Marigold's right arm knew that her keys were still in her bag and went inside, the hand the head of a hungry snake rooting for a mouse. It found the object, gripped, removed it, the left arm coming around the body to aid in manipulating the point of the key forward, so in the last three steps to the door Marigold's posture was of one carrying a holy offering. She arrived at her door at an angle too shallow, and knew that she needed to turn to face the door directly, but she couldn't because her body refused, and as her sweaty hands betrayed her and dropped the key, the barrier broke and the screams became clear. They were screaming “don’t look behind you". And as Marigold finally understood, a much calmer voice, real and close to her ear, said: "You’re home early, young lady.